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Fischer’s gical Voice
O F F T H E S H E L F
Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice . Michael M J Fischer. Durham: Duke University
Press. 2004. 477 pp.
Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations . Eds. John Clammer, Sylvie Poirier and
Eric Schwimmer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2004. 299 pp.
Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy . Amy Shuman. Champaign:
University of Illinois Press. 2005. 200 pp.
Power and the Self . Ed. Jeannette Mageo. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. 234 pp.
W ILLIAM G ARRIOTT
P
RINCETON
U
Today there is “a pervasive claim” that, as Michael
Fischer puts it, “traditional concepts and ways of doing things no longer work, that life is outrunning the pedagogies in which we were trained” (9). The volumes considered here attest to the pervasiveness of this predicament, suggesting that it is time, once again, to ask some fundamental questions of the discipline: What is the object of anthropology? How should it be studied? And to what ends? The strength of these volumes comes with their resistance to any neat solutions, preferring, rather, to be guided by the “emergent forms of life” themselves. analytically useful term through which competing ontologies might find common ground.
John Clammer, for instance, shows how discourses about animism remain a concern in Japan, where the term is used to discuss relations between cultural and national identity. Clammer chides anthropologists for not paying more attention to such discussions, further suggesting that the largescale disregard for animism in contemporary anthropology indicates an unwillingness to consider alternative ontologies. In this way Clammer, like others in the volume, shows how anthropologists are themselves implicated in such negotiations.
Confronting New Social Realities
Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropoloprovides a roadmap to the contemporary and the place anthropology might occupy within it. Here it is not so much that the task of anthropology has changed, but that the confrontation with new social realities requires new forms of analysis. The simple juxtaposition of
“their” culture with “ours” is no longer sufficient.
Instead, anthropologists must take up a kind of
“third space” amidst the various milieus in which they work. Fischer describes this space, with a nod both to Deleuze and Guattari and Gregory
Bateson, as an “ethical plateau,” an unfinished zone between individual and society where moral systems and personal responsibility engage in mutual interrogation. In this way Fischer re-asserts the need for a reflexive anthropology that does more than simply direct attention back towards the conditions of its own knowledge-making.
Negotiating Cultural Difference
A potent site for such reflexivity can be found in the negotiation of cultural difference. The contributors to Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural
Relations explore this site with a range of essays on relations between states, anthropologists and indigenous populations. Particular attention is given to differing views of human-nature relations, and how such views constitute competing ontologies within a shared territory. A case is made for the recovery of “animism” as an empirically valid and
Storytelling and Empathy
Like cultures, however, ontologies are only revealed piecemeal through ordinary activities such as storytelling. Amy Shuman takes up this standard ethnographic axiom and theorizes its wider significance in Other People’s Stories:
Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy .
Shuman is interested in the “promise” of storytelling: the ability to establish connections between tellers and listeners, persons and experiences. Unlike other scholars of narrative, Shuman begins with the assumption that storytelling largely fails to live up to its own promise, especially when pushed to its limits. This failure, however, is itself a source of meaning-making in everyday life worthy of attention.
The contexts Shuman explores range from
Holocaust narratives to junior high “fight stories” to the solicitations contained in “junk mail” to ethnography itself. In each case, she traces issues pertaining to “entitlement” (Who may lay claim to a story?), “tellability” (How do available categories “fit” a particular experience?), and “empathy” (How is the experience of suffering made available to others?). Shuman’s analysis does much to suggest that if “authority” was a site of critique in the 1980s, “empathy” stands to assume that position today, as part of a larger concern with the “ethics of narrative.”
Ethical Struggles
A concern with ethics must inevitably confront the question of subjectivity. The essays contained in Power and the Self approach this task ethnographically. In his foreword to the collection,
Gananath Obeyesekere comments that the significance of “power” in the contemporary human sciences has come to resemble that of
“sexuality” in Freudian thinking. The implication here is that the proliferation of power as an explanatory principle may have introduced a kind of determinism into social analysis that masks as much as it reveals of subjectivity.
The contributors to this volume avoid this trap by allowing the “work of subjectivity” to reveal power’s effects. They take the classic sites of psychological anthropology such as family complexes, mental illness, childhood play, religion, sexuality and self-formation, and locate them within a wider field of power relations, such as nursing homes, psychiatric clinics, capitalism, secrecy, migration, colonialism and state-formation. In this way they reveal that there is more to subjectivity than deep motivation, and more to power than domination. There is also ethical struggle, an agonistic engagement with and for the real. And it is towards this struggle that the contributors to Power and the Self , as well as the other volumes, ultimately draw our attention.
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Gray Areas: Ethnographic Encounters with Nursing Home Care . Ed. Philip B Stafford. Santa Fe: SAR Press.
2003. 317 pp.
Death, Mourning, and Burial . Ed. Antonius C G M Robben. Boston: Blackwell. 2005. 322 pp.
P AMELA S TERN
U W ATERLOO O NTARIO
In the US approximately 1.7 million people are spending the last years of their lives in nursing homes. The average length of stay for current residents is just under two and a half years.
Nursing homes, as a normalized setting for the end of life, proliferated rapidly in the 1960s and
1970s, driven by several factors including an expanded proportion of women who had been the traditional caregivers to the elderly in the paid workforce, creation of Medicaid and
Medicare systems for funding medicalized care for the elderly, and the simple increase in the number of Americans living to advanced ages.
Today, 18% of the oldest old (those 85 years and older) live and die in nursing homes. If the proportion of elderly in nursing homes strikes us as
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high, it is useful to observe that the figure is actually down from the nearly 26% of people over 85 living in nursing homes a quarter of a century ago. Canada, where I live, has a similar proportion of elderly in the population, but nearly 29% of those over 85 here are nursing home residents. I can suggest cultural and institutional processes which might account for this difference, but in the absence of comparative ethnographic and policy research it would be largely speculation.
Nursing Homes as Institutions
A collection of ethnographic studies conducted in the 1990s illuminates some of the institutional and cultural processes at work in American nursing homes. Gray Areas: Ethnographic Encounters with
Nursing Home Care grew out of a 1995 School of
American Research advanced seminar on nursing home ethnography. While only one of the nine case studies examines the nursing home experience from the perspective of patients or residents, the individual chapters consider a range of issues related to the cultures of nursing homes, the institutional underpinnings for certain kinds of medicalized care, the attitudes and practices of paid nursing assistants and the involvement of family members.
Two related issues are repeatedly raised in these case studies: Americans have a commonplace understanding that nursing homes are appropriate settings to house the frail elderly, especially those experiencing mild to severe dementia. At the same time we have no cultural models, rites of passage or shared knowledge about how to act in these settings. Consequently the decision to institutionalize a parent or a spouse is a source of enormous ambivalence which may surface in struggles against institutional practices and its employees and caregivers.
Staving Off Death
Both matters are elucidated by Renée Rose Shield who is uniquely situated as an ethnographer of nursing homes and the daughter of a nursing home resident. “As a daughter in the nursing home setting, I am increasingly cognizant of myself as an aging self. As a daughter, I have felt vulnerable for my mother to the routines of the nursing home. As a daughter, I have felt auto-
matically ‘on the other side’ from staff members.
As a daughter, I am automatically ‘not old’ because she is my contrast—but I see my children viewing me as potentially ‘her.’ I see their reflected concern about me as I bustle about for her.
Their concern implicates me, and as I think about it, I turn it back to them” (p 230).
Dying and death, it seems, are the unacknowledged elephants in the room, and the practices of both nursing home staff and family members are frequently geared toward staving off death rather than easing it. Perhaps it is not surprising then that so few of the contributors to this volume discuss nursing homes as places for people to die. The patient and resident contradiction embodied in the label “nursing home” ignores death. Is this avoidance of death universally human? It is likely not unique to American nursing homes. Even hospices, specifically created for and identified with dying, now accept patients undergoing treatments intended to prevent death.
Subjecting Death to Analysis
Can anthropology help us recognize the nursing home as an American form of death? Unlike kinship or politics or religion, anthropologists have never produced anything like an anthropology of death. Individual ethnographers have considered death and its cultural and social corollaries— images of the afterlife, the social ruptures and repairs necessitated by a death, mourning and burial practices, memorials—in specific places and at specific moments in history.
Less commonly, and only in the older literature, have anthropologists subjected death and dying to cross-cultural analysis. A number of classic and contemporary ethnographic studies of death and dying have been assembled in the reader Death, Mourning and Burial . Reading the two anthologies together produces resonances. I quickly recognized the headhunter’s rage in the frustrations vented by institutionalized elders and their guilt-ridden children, but the favela mother’s seeming indifference is also present.
Several contributors to Gray Areas likened nursing home residence to the first stage of the double burial described by Robert Hertz in 1907.
There is a twist, however. In Hertz’s ethnographic examples physical death preceded social death by some weeks or months. For nursing home residents the social death comes first.
The contributors to Gray Areas are critical of some aspects of nursing home culture, but are not critical of nursing homes per se. Reading both volumes led me to revisit my own experiences with the deaths of kin in and out of nursing homes. I can no longer regard nursing homes as a common sense response to the problems poised by the existence of frail elderly. For me nursing homes have become analogous to the live burial of the fishing-spear master reportedly once practiced by Dinka.
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Tools of Progress: A German Merchant Family in Mexico City, 1865-Present . Jürgen Buchenau.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2004. 256 pp.
The Politics of the Past in an Argentine Working-Class Neighborhood . Lindsay DuBois. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press. 2005. 283 pp.
Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro . Zephyr L Frank. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press. 2004. 256 pp.
W ALTER E L ITTLE
U A LBANY , SUNY
Socioeconomic class remains an inadequately studied topic. For more than two decades, a critique of class-oriented explanations for economic, political, social and human rights has taken precedence. The books by Buchenau, DuBois and Frank, however, focus on detailed portrayals of particular social classes. Only DuBois is an anthropologist. By contrast, Buchenau and Frank are historians. Each author provides insight into their subjects, but the combined cultural and political-economic approach the authors share provides means for anthropologists and historians to rethink historical representation and the productivity of linking cultural with historical approaches. These books are well-written hybrids of anthropology and history.
The authors challenge one to think about how history is interpreted and how politics shapes history. Compared to traditional history, the subjects of these books are not great people and the events chronicled are not great events. Each scholar takes the reader into the daily lives and
See Social Class on page 24
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