Issue #5: student anthropology journal: spring 2013
◆
get involved!
◆
Would you like to edit, write, illustrate, design or peer review for Issue 6?
We are looking for a new team of enthusiastic students to take on
Imponderabilia. If you are interested, please contact:
journal.imponderabilia@gmail.com.
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If you would like to donate to enable future
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Thank you, and we hope you enjoy reading this issue!
Imponderabilia Team
Editors
Olivia Smith & Daniel HernándezHalpern
Treasurer
Kate McKenzie
Design and
Illustration
Nina Hemmings & Eren
McEwen
Publicity Officer
Amelia Rowan
Section Editors
Thanks To
Diaspora &
Development:
Jenny Haigh & Alex Loktionov
University of Cambridge Department
of Social Anthropology
Resistance &
Inequality:
Gloria Viedma Navarro & Clint
Shoemake
Sensory Anthropology:
Madeleine Lawson
Student Ethnography:
Cristina Golomoz & Lisa Farier
Theories & Methods:
Sara Smith & Alessio Carli
CUSAS (Cambridge
University Social
Anthropology Society)
The Reprographics Centre, University
of Cambridge
◆
Editorial
◆
Imponderabilia:
‘a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or
computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality’
Malinowski, B. ([1992] 2002) “Argonauts of the Western Pacific”
Routledge: London
Bronislaw Malinowski seated with Tobriand Islanders1
Olivia Smith and Daniel Hernández-Halpern
“Putting together this issue of Imponderabilia was an ongoing learning curve, from the initial
stages of publicizing the journal to making the final selections. Should we look for articles about a
specific topic? Will enough people care? Do we choose articles we think are the most important to
current anthropological dialogues, or articles our non-specialist friends can appreciate and engage
with? Through navigating each question, we came a little closer to understanding the potential for
Imponderabilia to showcase the work of students actively engaging with the discipline, and found this
to be the most important motivation for producing the journal.
In this the fifth issue, we continue the fine work of the previous editions in compiling a broad range
of themes and levels of accessibility in the articles selected. We hope that in doing so, the journal goes
some way in representing the diverse array of issues relevant to the students who contributed and the
discipline more generally.
Every person involved in Imponderabilia is a volunteer- editors, peer reviewers, designers and authors
alike; each and every person chose to produce and present new anthropological material for a wider
audience. We thank everyone who contributed to the journal in any way, and hope that this issue becomes one of many that gives voice to student-sourced anthropological discussions”
1 Special Collections, Yale University Library, Item #7, http://oscar.library.yale.edu/omeka/items/show/7
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CONTENTS
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Diaspora and Development
1. Construction of a Threat
by Marie-Louise Hermann & Louisa Hayman, University of Roskilde, Denmark
5. Disparity and Diaspora: Vladimir Nabokov’s Distance, Delusion and
Synthesia
by Masha Goncharova, Georgetown University
9. The Embodiment of Africanness in the United States
by Chelsea Hayman, London School of Economics
12. American Wonderland
by Victoria Fomina, Central European University
Resistance and Inequality
15. ‘Can You Spare a Word’ - A Different Narrative About Begging
by Johannes Lenhard, University of Cambridge
17. 21st Century Protest: A Comparison of Forms of Resistance in #Occupy (US) and in Contemporary Estonia
by Priyanka Hutschenreiter, Durham University
21. A Talk About Marriage: the Lives of People from the LGBTI
Community in Nepal
by Stinne Otte, Aarhus University
24. “Sweat” and the Black Female Voice: Zora Neale Hurston and the
African American Woman’s Perspective
by Marion C. Burke, Rutgers University
Sensory Anthropology
27. The Object Analysis of the Future: “Penrose3.stl”
by Calum Bowden, University College London
30. Transcending the Five Senses: Synesthesia as a Posthuman Sensory
Action
by Emily Daina Šaras, Central European University
Student Ethnography
33. Venerating the Dead: Bisayaship in Contemporary Borneo
by Alice Cottle, University of St Andrews
36. London, Unscripted: The Phenomenon of Liminality in Contemporary
British Society
by Katherine Relle, London School of Economics
39. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Israeli Arab
by Eli Philip, Brandeis University
41. On Marriage and Mutton: the difficulties of the first field
experience
by Hedwig Waters, Free University of Berlin
Theories and Methods
44. Anthropocentric perspective and “uniqueness” as the underlying
principles in the human origins research
by Ana Majkic, University of Belgrade
47. Violent Rationality: a post-structuralist re-visiting of
incommensurable thought
by James Burnett, School of Oriental and African Studies
50. How Do You Solve a Problem Like Economics?
by Stanley Ellerby-English, University of Cambridge
53. It’s a Man’s World: Power and Gender Inequality in Anthropology
by Cherry Jackson, University of Oxford
55. Preliminary Materials for a Radically Negative Anthropology
by Toby Austin Locke, Goldsmiths
DisD
Construction of a Threat
by Marie-Louise Hermann & Louisa Hayman,
University of Roskilde, Denmark
Introduction
Since the end of the 90s,
immigration policies have become
an issue of increased focus to the
member states of the European
Union and a field of still closer
cooperation. At the same time,
there has been a significant tightening of immigration policies and
a brutalisation of methods used to
conduct them. Yet, there has been
little public debate on the change
of policies, let alone the legal and
humanitarian implications of
them. In all probability, this is because the policy switch was made
possible through a skilful and
cunning use of rhetoric means,
most notable in the speeches by
the European Commissioners.
This article uncovers the change of
discourse that spurred the momentum for drastic changes in the
immigration policy of the EU.
1
non-member state countries.
While the official EU is
keen on the use of readmission
agreements, various critics have
declared them to be controversial. Scholars and NGOs consider
◆
“If an issue is successfully
constructed as a threat, it
will be legitimate for
policymakers to apply
extraordinary measures to
them”
(Buzan et al 1998:23)
◆
readmission agreements to have
vast implications for the lives of
immigrants and for the stability of
the non-member states signing the
readmission agreements. Moreover, there are many indications
that implications of readmission
agreements seriously violate huCompromising Union
man rights (Kruse 2006:135). Values
These facts are disturbing in their own right, but they
also seem to represent a paradox
The immigration policies
when considering the ideational
of the European Union have unfoundations of the EU. The respect
dergone a number of remarkable
for human freedom, democrachanges since the 1990’s. Most
cy, equality, the rule of law and
notable, the return of irregular
respect for human rights have
immigrants and rejected asylum
had a central place in the integraseeker has been facilitated, ention process of the EU and it has
abling EU member states to swiftly been an aim of EU policy making
disperse unwanted persons from
to promote these values (Bilgin
their territory. This process re2011:10). Thus, it seems contralies on readmission agreements,
dictory that the EU applies policonducted between the EU and
cies evidently compromising these
values and it seems puzzling that
the population of the EU appears
to accept them.
Construction of a
threat
The discipline of discourse
analysis provides an interesting
outset to answer these questions.
In line with Constructivism,
some discourse analysts state that
issues are only threatening when
constructed to be so and that the
construction of threats is highly
depended on discursive performances. If an issue is successfully
constructed as a threat, it will be
legitimate for policymakers to
apply extraordinary measures to
them (Buzan et al1998:23).
Acknowledging these
theoretical assumptions, we find it
reasonable to propose that the discourse of central EU policymakers
has had an important role in shaping decisions. Therefore, we have
examined the discourse of EU
Commissioners. More specifically,
we have examined all the public
speeches of EU Commissioners
with responsibility of Justice and
Home Affairs from 1995-2007:
Commissioner Anita Gradin,
Commissioner António Vitorino
and Commissioner Franco Frattini.
We found that the Commissioners repeatedly associated
immigration with threats, spoke
about the borders of the EU as if
they provided safety to its citi-
Diaspora and Development
the need for more efficient police
cooperation”. (Gradin, Strasbourg,
20th November 1997)
#Fig 1
zens, and in general provoked a
sense of urgency and danger when
speaking about immigration. Using various rhetoric means, they
presented immigration as an issue
that poses a major security threat
to the population of the EU. In the
following, we will present some of
our findings.
Expanding understanding of immigration
The first Commissioner
examined, Commissioner Gradin,
held office from 1995 to 1999.
We found that in a number of her
speeches, Gradin discursively constructed a setting of danger and
urgency when speaking of immigration and framed immigration
to pose a threat.
Especially, we found that
Gradin frequently used the rhetorical mean of association. By
associating a particular term with
other terms, the meaning of the
term can be expanded to cover
new meanings. Gradin’s choice
of words, syntactic structure and
connection between the sentences
were arguably ways of expanding
the meaning of immigration
to also cover the maladies of
organized crime. Thus, Gradin’s
speeches contributed to an understanding of immigration and organized crime as closely connected.
As the meaning of organized
crime is one of danger and uncertainty, this association can be seen
as a move seeking to construct
immigration as a threat.
The means of association
was especially evident in a quote
from a speech given at an E.P.
Plenary Debate in Strasbourg
the 20th November 1997. In her
speech, Gradin described the
forthcoming Amsterdam Treaty
and various cooperation projects, but she set of by pointing
to refugees and crime. She made
a correlation between refugees,
organized crime, drug-dealing,
trafficking in women and children and fraud and corruption as
she mentioned them in the same
sentence. This correlation was not
further elaborated and it does not
seem to have an apparent reason:
“It is only by working together
that we shall be better able to
address the problems that will
confront us in the future. I am
thinking more specifically of refugees as well as of organized crime,
drug-dealing, trafficking in wom
en and children and fraud and
corruption, I am also thinking of
Arguably, the correlation
that Gradin posed between refugees and the various types of
crime has no patent explanation.
In a discourse analytic optical,
it can thus be seen as a way of
expanding the meaning of “refugees” to also encompass the
negative characteristics of crime.
In a speech given at The European
Parliament’s annual debate on the
Third Pillar, in Strasbourg, the
16th December 1997, the same
pattern was evident. The speech
was focused on enlargement and
the Amsterdam Treaty, but Gradin
opened by pointing to the difficulties of creating free movement of
people within the EU. She stated:
“If we are to achieve freedom of
movement of people, we must
also be able to tackle the problems
arising from the migration, organised crime, drug trafficking, fraud
and corruption and trafficking in
women and children. We must
create effective cooperation between our countries in the judicial
area.”(Gradin, Strasbourg, 16th
December 1997)
Again, by referring to
various types of crime just after
migration, Gradin can be said
to create an association between
them and contribute to the perception, that they are integrated.
Clearly, the general associations
connected to the criminal activities mentioned are negative and
widely accepted as representing
danger and misery. Due to the
construction of the sentence, these
negative associations are likely to
filter through to the associations
connected to refugees. Therefore,
the quote can be seen as a way for
Gradin to use the mean of association in order to construct immi-
2
DisD
gration as threatening.
Creating a sense of
urgency
and the management of migration
flows are the main, current priorities.” (Frattini 27 September 2006
Strasbourg)
In a speech in Brussels the
11th September 2007, the association between terror and immigration was repeated. Frattini stated:
The second Commissioner
“… the attacks in New York
we examined, Commissioner Vi[11/9/2001] shocked the entire
torino, held office from 1999-2004.
world. They also changed forever
He was found to be less dramatic
our understanding of security.
in his rhetoric than his predecesSince then security threats, espesor, yet a number of his speeches
cially those posed by terrorists,
showed that issues of immigration
have remained constant. (…)
was linked with danger.
Terrorism is therefore a constant
One example was found
threat. (…) There is much long
in a speech held in London, the
term work we are carrying out at
9th of July 2001. In presenting the
European level: from initiatives
issue of abolishing the internal
on radicalisation to bioterrorism.
borders of the EU, Vitorino creates
However, we must ensure that our
a sense of danger and uncertainty.
work is underpinned by the best
In this way, he contributes to the
security research we can have.
understanding that abolishing of
This is vital for us.” (Frattini 11th
internal borders will be aggravatSeptember 2007 Brussels)
ing:
It is noteworthy how Frat“Opening up legal immigration
tini sets of by describing the threat
channels must be accompanied
of terror and then subsequently
by a strengthening of the fight
points to immigration. Later in the
against illegal immigration which
speech, he states:
is the subject, rightly, of increasing
concern in all Member States.”
(Vitorino, London, 9th July 2001)
“This enhanced freedom of
movement goes hand in hand
with better securing the EU's
Succeeding Vitorino,
common external borders. The
Commissioner Frattini held office
External Borders Fund provides
from 2004-2007. In the same manmoney to improve surveillance
ner as Commissioner Gradin, he
systems; gather relevant informaused the rhetoric mean of association around the external border
tion in order to expand the underand provide state of the art techstanding of immigration. The way
nology to strengthen controls of
he describes immigration and terpeople on entry and exit. In order
ror creates the understanding that
to reduce illegal immigration, we
they are closely related and poses
are working on a maritime surthe same threat. Arguably, Frattini
veillance system to be deployed in
seeks to make the audience of his
the Mediterranean but also in the
speeches perceive immigration as
Black Sea.” (Frattini Brussels, 11th
a threat in line with terror. A very
September 2007)
conspicuous example of this was
found in a speech held the 27th
September 2006 in Strasbourg:
3
“It is clear that for the European
Union the fight against terrorism
In this way, the threat of
terror was associated with the
issue of immigration and border
control. It can thus be seen as an
attempt to expand the meaning of
immigration. As the connection
between the three is presented
with an imperceptible link, the
audience was likely to accept it
without noticing. What is also
notable in the speech, is the way
it constructed as sense of uncertainty and priority to the situation,
as Frattini emphasised the danger
to be constant and emphasised
that “security threats (…) have
remained constant” and “Terrorism is therefore a constant threat”.
By presenting the situation as
extraordinary and dangerous, it
arguably appeared obvious that
extraordinary measures where
needed.
Conclusion
From our examination
of the speeches of the EU Commissioners with responsibility of
Justice and Home Affairs we can
thus conclude that in the period
form 1995-2007,immigration
was discursively constructed as a
threat. As stated previously, this is
interesting as it can be supposed
that the successful construction of
a threat will allow policymakers to
apply extraordinary measures to
an issue. Following, we conclude
that the reason why the change of
immigration policies of the EU
were accepted by the population
of the EU, is likely to be related to
the perception of immigrants that
was constructed in the years from
1995-2007.
This insight is important,
as it allows us to question whether
the new policies are desirable and
whether the urgent and dangerous situation, for which they were
intended to handle, exists as more
than a discourse
Diaspora and Development
#Fig 1 - courtesy of Icars 2006 http://www.
flickr.com/photos/lcars/334464741/
References
Buzan, Barry; Wæver, Ole & de Wilde,
Jaap (1998). “Security: A New Framework of
Analysis” Boulder US and London UK, Lynne
Rienner Publishers.
Billet, Carole (2010). “EC Readmission Agreements: A Prime Instrument of the External
Dimension of the EU’s Fight against Irregular
Immigration. An Assessment after Ten Years of
Practice” European Journal of Migration and
Law 12 (2010) 45–79
Kruse, Imke (2006) “EU Readmission Policy
and its Effects on Transit Countries – The
Case of Albania” European Journal of Migration and Law 8: 115–142,2006.
Kruse, Imke & Trauner, Florian (2008) “EC
Visa Facilitation and Readmission Agreements. Implementing a New EU Security
Approach in the Neighboorhood” A CASE
Network Studies and Analyses publication.
Warsaw, Poland. Publisher CASE-Centerfor
Social and Economic Research on behalf of
CASE Network.
Speeches quoted in the Analysis
Frattini, Franco. Brussels, 11 September
2007 “The changing nature of security threats
requires a strong Public-Private Dialogue in
Security Research and Innovation” European
Security Research and Innovation Forum
Frattini, Franco. Vilnius, 2nd September,
2005. “The fight against terrorism” Mykolas
Romeris University Frattini, Franco. Berlin,
14 February 2005 “The Commission’s policy
priorities in the area of Freedom, Security and
Justice”
Frattini, Franco. Vienna, 4 May 2006 “Relations between the EU and its neighbours”
Ministerial Conference
Frattini, Franco, Brussels, 3 November 2005
“Recent developments of immigration and
integration in the EU and on recent events
in the Spanish enclave in Morocco” Konrad
Adenauer Foundation
Frattini, Franco. Warsaw, 30 June 2005 “Inauguration speech of the the Frontex Agency
2nd meeting of the Management Board of
the European Agency for the Management of
Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States” Frattini, Franco.
Wiesbaden, 16 November 2006 “Chances
and Risks of Migration and its Significance for
the Security of the EuropeanUnion” German
Bundeskriminalamt Autumn Conference
Frattini, Franco. Hague, 20 June 2006
“Internal Security in the EU - The fight against
terrorism and the role of National parliaments”
Dutch Senate
Frattini, Franco. Graz, 28 July 2005 ”The implementation of “The Hague Programme – the
relevance for the security in Central Europe”
Frattini, Franco. Strasbourg, 27 September
2006 “Management of Migration flows” Joint
debate – Freedom, Security and Justice –Immigration in the European Parliament
Gradin, Anita (Summary of Speech), Helsinki,
28th February 1997 “European Year against
Racism and Xenophobia”
Gradin, Anita. Strasbourg, 20th November
1997 “Speaking Note Third Pillar Priorities E.P.
Plenary Debate”
Gradin, Anita. Rome, 28-29 November 1997
“Trafficking in Women Conference - The International Association of Women Judges The
International Women Judges Foundation”
Gradin, Anita. Strasbourg, 16th December
1997 “The European Parliament’s annual debate on the Third Pillar European Parliament”
Gradin, Anita. Bangkok, 13th November 1997
“Drug policies in Europe Round table - EC-Office of the Narcotics ControlBoard (ONCB)”
Vitorino, António, Hague, 6 April 2000 “European Common European Asylum System
Conference on a new Aliens Act”
Vitorino, António. Paris, 20 July 2000 “Conference on the Fight against the Channels of
Illegal Immigration”
Vitorino, António Lisbon, 13 May 2000 “The
Charter of Fundamental Rights as a foundation
for the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
General Assembly of the Association Amnesty
International”
Vitorino, António, Rome, 12 July 2000 “Towards a common migration policy for the European Union Conference Migrations. Scenarios
for the 21 century”
Vitorino, António, Puglia Regional Council
19 June 2001 “The European Dimension of
Immigration, Policing and Crime”
Vitorino, António, London, 9 July 2001 “Migratory flows and the European labour market:
towards a Community immigration policy Seminar on Community Immigration Policy”
Vitorino, António, Brussels, 16 October 2001
“On the immigration policy European Conference on Migration.”
4
DisD
Disparity and Diaspora: Vladimir Nabokov's
Distance, Delusion and Synthesia
by Masha Goncharova, Georgetown University
“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a
sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness,
kindness, ecstasy) is the norm”–Vladimir Nabokov.
A towering literary collection within the Russian émigré
wave that hit Europe in the early
1900s, the works of Vladimir
Nabokov present a fascinating
convergence of disparity and diaspora within the author’s literary
identity.
I understand ‘disparity’
as a great distinguishing factor
between cultures, and ‘diaspora’
as the movement away from an
established or ancestral homeland. Nabokov knew two, if not
three, cultures in his experience of
political exile. He fled his beloved
Russian motherland under persecution by the Bolsheviks at age
18 and settled with his parents in
England. Detachment from Russia
and loss of political and social
identity contributed to Nabokov’s
distinct, isolated literary identity. Lack of grounding in self or
setting takes hold of his characters
and forms the foundation for his
plots. A study of distance, delusion
and synesthesia explores these
formative elements of Nabokov’s
personal life as windows into his
famed Lolita.
Distance
5
On the first pages of Lolita
Nabokov’s narrator Humbert
Humbert recalls his childhood
in a French hotel, where “ruined
Russian princesses who could not
pay my father [the hotel owner],
bought me expensive bonbons.”
What began as a small insert
of nostalgia mixed with pity at
the author’s Russian past soon
becomes a causal factor in the
narrator’s decline. Before moving to America and sealing his
dirty fate with Lolita, Humbert
Humbert settles down into a life
of moderation with a Polish wife
in Paris. He married the “conventions of marriage, the prophylactic
routine of its bedroom activities,
and… the eventual flowering of
moral values…to help me, if not
purge myself of my degrading
and dangerous desires, at least to
keep them under pacific control”
(Nabokov, Lolita, 26). A Russian
émigré crushes Humbert’s virtuous life path and sets him tumbling towards moral degradation.
Humbert, wholly European and
unrelated to Russia, is aghast to
learn he has been made cuckold by an émigré taxi driver (the
profession of most émigré men
in Paris) named Maximovich.
Crudely, Nabokov describes the
awkward hours when Maximovich
and Valeria lunch with Humbert
and then pack her things out of his
Paris apartment: “the taxi-colonel,
stopping Valeria with a possessive
smile, began to unfold his views
and plans…he actually consulted
me on such things as her diet,
her periods, her wardrobe…”
(Nabokov, Lolita, 30). Even more
grotesque and absurd, “that former Counselor of the Tsar, after
thoroughly easing his bladder, had
not flushed the toilet. That solemn
pool of alien urine with a soggy,
tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning
insult.” Of course, Nabokov goes
on to explain (although Humbert
would have no way of knowing)
that Maximovich’s rudeness was
in actuality “but middle-class
Russian courtesy…to muffle his
private need in decorous silence so
as not to underscore the small size
of his host’s domicile” (Nabokov,
Lolita, 32). That very émigré Russian identity, personified in Maximovich, led the European Humbert Humbert to distance himself
further from stability or sense of
belonging and normalcy that he
could have had with Valeria. Is
Nabokov resentful of his blemished Russian past as the source of
his instability? Is he exerting his
personal bitterness onto the fate
of poor Humbert, who could have
never met Lolita had it not been
for Maximovich?
Like many émigrés who
fled in the wake of Bolshevik persecution, Nabokov felt dislocated
from the physical location that
served as his spiritual bedrock. He
recalls his first return to Russia –
Diaspora and Development
now a dictatorial Bolshevik land
that he and fellow émigrés found
impossible to view as the grand
empire they once knew: “my first
conscious return seems to me
now, sixty years later, a rehearsal—not of the grand homecoming
that will never take place, but of its
constant dream in my long years
of exile” (Nabokov, Speak Memory, 296). Distance from his homeland surfaces in Nabokov’s writing
more so in the mental than the
physical sense. The Russian rodina
and very Russian spirit simply did
not exist in the West, and after
1917, no longer did it occupy
the land where once stood the
◆
“Is the character of
Lolita, then, the
imposition of Nabokov’s
delusion?”
◆
Russian empire. “My old quarrel
with the Soviet dictatorship is
wholly unrelated to any question
of property…. The nostalgia I
have been cherishing all these
years is a hypertrophied sense of
lost childhood, not sorrow for
lost banknotes” (Nabokov, Speak
Memory, 73).
From an early age,
Nabokov learned to ground
himself not as much in residences as much as he did in ideas. “I
inherited an exquisite simulacrum—the beauty of intangible
property, un-real estate—and
this proved a splendid training
for the endurance of later losses”
(Nabokov, Speak Memory, 40).
Humbert finds shelter and home
in his imaginary love affair with
Lolita, meanwhile in reality he
deracinates a small girl from small
town USA – just as he himself was
uprooted from his birthplace of
Russia. From America’s East Coast
to its West, Humbert semi-legally
takes Lolita away from her homeand reality into “the odd sense of
living in a brand new, mad new
dream world,” (Nabokov, Lolita,
133). As they hopscotch the USA,
Humbert is convinced that they
are followed “at a discrete distance” (Nabokov, Lolita,186) by
a spy. A pervading sense off light
and a looming paranoia tinge the
plot of a bitter-tasting Russian
emigration-style novel.
It will surprise the reader
familiar with Nabokov’s biography that he actually claimed that
Lolita’s theme “was so distant,
so remote from [his] own life”
(Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 15).
But this defense is not necessarily
against the characters and their
personal tales so much as it was
against the American backlash
against Lolita’s theme child molestation. Largely because of these
surface interpretations, Lolita
enjoyed a succès de scandal and
became a national bestseller for
over a year. (Alexandrov 305).
While this catapulted Nabokov’s
literary career, it led him perhaps
to misrepresent the amount of
influence his own life had on the
novel’s characterizations. In 1955
he defensively wrote a letter to
Maurice Girodias, proprietor of
the Olympia Press, which published Lolita along with other
avant garde literature and pornography in English, insisting
that the theme of such a perverse
novel does not reside in his own
reality. Humbert and Lolita, both
isolated from whatever ‘normalcy’
their lives could have offered, leave
the novel with as little internal
grounding as they began. The time
they spent together losing them-
selves in the heart of America will
forever distance them from the
lives they lead in the future – just
as the time Nabokov spent in a
doomed pre-1917 Russia that
perished with the onward march
of history, would forever prevent
him from finding a true sense of
“home” anywhere else.
Delusion
Nabokov cannot stand
moments when he is not in control of his thoughts. He says of
sleep: “I simply cannot get used
to the nightly betrayal of reason,
humanity, genius. No matter how
great my weariness, the wrench
of parting with consciousness
is unspeakably repulsive to me”
(Nabokov, Speak Memory, 109). Instead of adjusting to
concrete reality, Nabokov is
trapped in his mind and feels a
need to control it. He can control
his imagination, and thus uses
imaginary sketches to control his
perception of the world. However
close this might be to Freud’s interpretation of delusions and personal neuroses, Nabokov begrudgingly labels Freud a “Viennese
quack” (Nabokov, Speak Memory,
300) and dismisses his theories as
“grotesque” and “deceitful” (Alexandrov 413). Freud posited that
those who wish to escape a personal neurosis, such as the lifelong
inability to find grounding, find
shelter in their imaginations. For
Nabokov, imagination in the form
of fiction not only helped him
overcome the personal neurosis of
his past, but it too helped him use
works as Lolita as outlets for the
personal stories and experience of
exile he needed to tell.
6
DisD
Is the character of Lolita,
then, the imposition of Nabokov’s
delusion? Humbert’ simposition of
a make-believe life onto the barely
adolescent girl would suggest
the depth of Nabokov’s personal
attachment. At first Lolita is too
young to fight back the delusion.
She, like a young Nabokov, takes
in the pain of losing her mother, her home, and her virginity
to a foreigner. Nabokov forces
the reader to watch her become
subsumed by this new delusion,
which seems at once to parallel
Nabokov’s own delusional world
in the West and his refusal to form
new memories away from the 18year old Russia of his past. As an authorial audience, we may step back and view
Nabokov’s imagination destroying
Humbert’s delusion of joy with
Lolita. Reality kicks in when Lolita
finally prevails over Humbert’s
delusional world and shatters it by
refusing to participate any longer.
“Ironically, however (as Nabokov
is acutely aware), this very
realm—the real of imagination, of
memory and desire—is precisely
that of psychoanalytic discourse;
the chosen domain of Nabokov’s
fiction overlaps, enormously, a region already colonized by Vienna,”
(Alexandrov 415).
The base of psychoanalysis, like the foundations of the
protagonists in Lolita, aligns in
the notion of formative childhood
experiences. Nabokov’s delusions
from his personal childhood neurosis escaped through the tip of
his pen, using imagination as their
outlet. He performs the maneuver
to consciously distance himself
from reality into his imagination.
Synesthesia
7
“Through the darkness
and the tender trees we could see
the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the
colored inks of sensitive memory”
(Nabokov, Lolita, 12). Such was
the childhood home in the Hotel
Mirada of Humbert Humbert –
strikingly similar to the colorful
memories Nabokov recalls in
his childhood country house in
Russia: “The garden when viewed
through these magic glasses grew
strangely still…if one looked
through the blue, the sand turned
so well in fiction what Nabokov
knows in reality stems from an
acute sensory perception, particularly sight and touch. His interest
in synesthesia began at an early
age as he found deeper meaning
in his childhood colored pencils.
Nabokov thrilled not in actually
coloring, but in imagining the
possibilities of the colors: “the
green one, by a mere whirl of the
wrist, could be made to produce
a ruffled tree.” Likewise he finds
a deeper meaning to colors: “the
white one alone, that lanky albino
to cinders…the yellow created
an amber world…the red made
the foliage drip ruby” (Nabokov,
Speak Memory).
The symmetry between
personal and fictional settings
goes far beyond the house, from
everything to descriptions of
people, actions, or mannerisms:
all are within the realm of what
Nabokov has known throughout
his lifetime. His ability to describe
among pencils…. was the ideal
implement since I could imagine whatever I wished while I
scrawled” (Nabokov, Speak Memory, 101).
Nabokov’s distinguishing
quality as a writer is considered
his ability to hone in on the conscious “manifold awareness” or
“cosmic synchronization” of the
five senses throughout his novels
(Alexandrov 608). In Lolita, la-
Diaspora and Development
borious yet beautiful descriptions
of scenery, characters, and – petrifyingly – adultery intensify the
reader’s experience of the novel.
The sensory, very real feeling of
action produced by Nabokov’s
prose overtake the moral or
sensible reactions readers feel they
“ought to have” when reading Lolita. Nabokov’s lack of grounding
and virile imagination certainly
contributed to his keen ability to
perceive and describe his experiences through the senses.
#Fig 1 Courtesy Scrappy Annie 2007
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14903992@
N08/4386050592/
References
Alexandrov, Vladimir E. 1995. The Garland
Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. New York:
Garland.
Boyd, Brian. 1990. Vladimir Nabokov: the
Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. 1997.
Lolita. New York: Vintage.Nabokov, Vladimir
Vladimirovich. 1966. Speak, Memory; an
Autobiography Revisited, New York: Putnam.
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich; Nabokov,
Dmitri, and Bruccoli, Matthew J. 1989.
Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 19401977. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. 1990.
Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage International.
Conclusion
An uprooted wanderer,
Nabokov’s transfers his feeling of
homelessness and loneliness into
creativity. The apex of his prose,
Lolita, is at once a reflection of
Nabokov’s inner world and an
outlet to escape the painful memories of emigration. His Lolita
may certainly be historicized as
a representation of the émigré
experience, one that the author refused to acknowledge perhaps for
the very real-ness of his distance,
delusion and synesthesia that such
an admission might expose.
“The ghetto of emigration
was actually an environment imbued with a greater concentration
of culture and a deeper freedom
of thought that we saw in this
or that country around us. Who
would want to leave this inner
freedom in order to enter the outer unfamiliar world?” –Vladimir
Nabokov.
#Fig 1
8
DisD
The Embodiment of Africanness in the
United States
by Chelsea Hayman, London School of Economics
Among African-descended peoples in the United States,
‘Africa’ is part of a multilayered
imagined community consisting
of traditions, knowledge, and performances that invoke unique ideations of the continent. As Palmié
highlights, “…notions of ‘African
origins’ had informed perceptions
of African American behavior
since the beginnings of racial
slavery in the New World, but they
took shape within a complex field
of knowledge” (Palmié 2008:8).
African-descended Americans work to bring out, embody,
and cultivate what they perceive
as their own essential Africanness.
Through embracing practices such
as African dance, drumming, and
other cultural ceremonies, these
individuals learn what Africanness is and habituate themselves
to take it on not just as an identity
but an authentic natural-feeling
way of being (Lindholm 2008).
‘Africa’ represents a habitus that is
occupied through subscription to
African cultural forms (Csordas
1990).
This is made apparent
in the experiences and cultural
practices of Michelle Miller1, who
appropriates different ideas about
what it means to be African and
American. In the United States, an
‘African’ habitus is adapted from
African cultural traditions to develop a sense of unity with Africa
to make sense of the divisions created as a result of the slave trade
(Bourdieu 1977).
Case Study
As a student at Sankofa
Dance Theater, 26-year-old Haitian and Dominican American
Michelle Miller’s ‘Africanness’ was
instilled with an element of “Black
pride” from a young age. Born
and raised in New York, Michelle
remembers her pro-Africanist
elementary school teacher, who
not only initially introduced her
◆
“Rather than
understanding where one
stands in space, African
dance allows you to focus
on how the drum makes
your body move”
◆
to African dance, but also created
what she describes as a “militant” kind of classroom setting.
Michelle elaborated, stating,
“Throughout the class, throughout
the year, she’d tell us about all the
wonderful things about African
history.” By the middle of the year,
the teacher established a group of
girls called African Womanhood
Is Mine that was explicitly aimed
at learning about oneself and one’s
culture asan African-American
1 Name has been changed to protect identity
9
woman through African dance
classes. The group was established
to prepare the girls to go through
a rite of passage ceremony in an
Ivory Coast village.
Michelle’s trip to Ghana
and the Ivory Coast was a memorable “bit” in between all the
stories her teacher told her and
the pride she instilled in her and
her peers. Being able to dance and
“drive the drummers” “moved”
Michelle, representing something
she loved so much so that every
time she got the chance to take
classes later on, she simply kept
doing it. She liked Ghana slightly more than the village because
Ghana was “westernized,” whereas
in the village, they were “totally
immersed,” having to go to the
village mother and perform the
dance in front of the tribe to be
blessed into womanhood by the
village sage, an older woman. The
girls were then instructed to do a
“fancy little dance” down an aisle
with combs and feathers, which
culminated in the sage putting a
marking on each girl’s forehead
to affirm their arrival to womanhood. Michelle claimed that Ghana was similar to any island in the
Caribbean, noting that you can see
a correlation in architecture from
slavery times, claiming, “It's any
island in the Caribbean put in Africa with a different dialect.” Today, Michelle says, “I
need to immerse myself wholeheartedly in all black everything,”
a sentiment underlying her Afri-
Diaspora and Development
can and hip-hop dance choreography, which integrates the two
styles. Despite having tried other
dance styles such as jazz and modern, Michelle claims that African
dance makes her feel different.
Rather than understanding where
one stands in space, African dance
allows you to focus on how the
drum makes your body move.
African dance is about learning to
feed off the music, the rhythms,
and the energy around you to
embrace and project bodily movements.
These moves are choreographed to a certain extent and
although most dancing is very
structured, you have to “let it
go” in African dance. Michelle
clarified this reality through
stating,“[In African dance], you
can literally allow yourself to be
moved by the drums and it sounds
so cheesy when I say it, but they
truly move through you. When
the drums are playing versus when
they’re not playing, I can feel my
legs lifting a little higher, I can
feel my arms behind me because
there’s that extra oomph.” Michelle
feels that her dedication to African
dance has grown over the years
and that when she moved to Baltimore, she started finding classes
that met on a certain day as to not
lose her “fluidity” and make sure
that her body is “used to moving
the same way.”
When Michelle herself
does African dance, she feels that
“it’s invigorating especially if you
let it go and let those drums go
and you’re going so hard that you
don’t realize you are sweating profusely, that your heart is beating
a mile a minute and then when it
comes down, you are just like, I
was moving, but I was moving for
real.” Instead of feeling like you’re
about to pass out, your heart
beating so fast makes you feel so
“good” and “energized.” In the
dance styles of African-descended peoples, Michelle sees certain
affinities that are crucial to her
vision of ‘Africa.’ She cites the link
between break dancing and African dance as demonstrative of a
central Africanness that she hopes
to convey to her daughter.
Michelle manifests these
#Fig 1
kinds of connections in other
artistic forms inscribed upon her
body. Through her mostly African-inspired tattoos, Michelle uses
her body as another medium to
convey her Africanness, featuring tattoos ranging from Hausa
proverbs to the feathers of Ma’at,
the Egyptian goddess of truth
and justice. Her tattoos are based
upon the Egyptian and African
mythology she learned from her
elementary school teacher. While
Michelle claims that she is not
absorbed by a strong sense of
Africanness, her deep connection
to African traditions have been
integral to the feelings of invigoration, naturalness, and pride in her
life (Falola 2003).
As Michelle’s experiences
demonstrate, ‘Africa’ is manifested
through both dance and memory.
Her comments are in line with
most Afrocentric approaches to
preserving ‘Africa.’ Howe (1998)
suggests that early anthropologists like Charles Seligman, who
suggested that divine kingship in
Africa had diffused from Egypt,
are partly responsible for the
10
DisD
amalgamation of African cultures
that later shaped the Afrocentric
vision of ‘Africa.’ Afrocentrists
like Cheikh Anta Diop, John G.
Jackson, and Molefi Asante, all
of whom brought the concept of
‘Africa’ as an all-encompassing
cultural entity to the United States,
later reinterpreted the speculative ideas set forth by these early
scholars. This concept purported
that Egyptians were actually Black
African, therefore, they were perceived as kindred in both phenotype and tradition with Sub-Saharan Africans (Sertima 1994).
Michelle’s personal and
historical anecdotes express an
Africanness that merges multifarious traditions from across the
continent. In the embodiment of
Africanness, possessing extensive
knowledge of African traditions is
valued as a cultural specialization
because it requires a great deal of
cultivation work. The cultivation
of ‘African’ knowledge forms the
linchpin of the African habitus,
a mode of living propagated
through knowing real information
about African customs and keeping to the conventions of Africanness in one’s everyday life in the
United States (Anderson 1983).
The African habitus that
each individual chooses to inhabit
is conditioned by the recollection of one’s origins in Africanity, whether through teachers or
memories of village life, creating
an impact upon them is felt and
internalized. As Michelle, one of
the African dance students profiled in the last chapter, states, “I
started [African dance] in the fifth
grade. It was my teacher, Mrs.
Gathers, I remember she was this
super pro-Black teacher and now
I realize it was kind of a militant
classroom setting…Throughout the year, she’d tell us about
11
all the wonderful things about
African history. In the middle
of the year, she set up this group
called African Womanhood is
Mine and the goal of the group
was to learn about yourself as an
African-American woman and
then we started taking African
dance classes just to start to learn
the culture and all of this was in
preparation to go through rites of
passage in a village in Cote D’Ivoire.” To this day, Michelle retains
the traditions that directly relate to
the stories of African mythology
from elementary school. She possesses a heightened awareness of
her origins in Africanity and the
influence of this teacher mimics
a tribal or cultural tradition from
which her Africanity was borne
(Anderson 1983).
history comes a strong avenue for
creative expression to construct a
transcendent idea of ‘Africa’ that
represents a form of imagined
community. Michelle’s ‘Africa’ is a
complex one, unbound by country
or continental divides and inclusive of the vast cultural symbols
implemented by different African
peoples. Her case proves that anything can be classed as authentic
through its origins and content,
making authentic objects, persons,
and collectives original and real,
representative of what they claim
to be.
#Fig 1 - courtesy Allison Nesis 2008
http://www.flickr.com/photos/allyart/3043395876/
Conclusion
References
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Com-
Michelle maintains a
meaningful ‘African’ habitus that
she is able to draw upon as a
source of strength, diasporic identity, and specialized knowledge.
This creates paradigms of naturalness and authenticity that mystify
Africa as a source of wisdom,
wellbeing, and holism. Multiple
definitions of ‘Africa’ have been
forged over the years. Notable
diasporic figures, including Egyptians, have been subsumed under
this trope. While some academics
have suggested that Cleopatra may
have been black, others have challenged this idea in later literature
(Lefkowitz 1996).
However, for contemporary Afrocentrists like Michelle,
these historical connections
whether legitimate or not to some,
possess meaning and relevance
to her life. Through an elaborate
munities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. London, England: Verso.
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977). Outline of A Theory
of Practice. New York, NY: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Csordas, Thomas. (1990). “Embodiment as
a Paradigm for Anthropology”. Ethos, 18(1),
5-47.
Falola, Toyin. 2003. The Power of African Cultures. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press.
Howe, Stephen. 1998. Afrocentrism: Mythical
Pasts and Imagined Homes. London, UK:
Verso.
Lefkowitz, Mary. 1996. Not Out of Africa: How
Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach
Myth as History. New York, NY: BasicBooks.
Lindholm, Charles. 2008. Culture and Authenticity. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Palmié, Stephan. (Ed.). 2008. Africas of the
Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in
the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions. Boston,
MA: Brill.
Sertima, Ivan Van. (Ed.). 1994. Egypt: Child
of Africa. New Brunswick, NJ: TransactionPublishers.
Diaspora and Development
American Wonderland
by Victoria Fomina,
Central European University
The debates about possible
devastating effects of globalization
on cultural diversity have been
occupying scholarly minds and
works for the last several decades.
Thanks to the diligent efforts of
mass media globalization became
the new bogeymen of the twenty
- first century. It rolls around the
world sweeping away self-sustainable local communities, destroying diversity, erasing cultural and
national identities, modernizing,
homogenizing, and westernizing
the world. Technological development, increasing interconnection
and interaction between different
cultures result in a uniform world
hooked on the needle of capitalistic consumerism – eating at
McDonalds, wearing jeans, listening to Madonna and Lady Gaga
and watching popular Hollywood
productions. Modern means of
communication make travel to
other parts of the world a matter
of several hours and a couple of
cups of coffee courteously offered
by an obliging flight attendant –
the huge, complex, and incomprehensible world shrinks to the size
of a GPS navigator.
The accessibility and
increasing frequency of travel,
intensive intercultural interaction
and integration are believed to
undermine a person’s cultural and
national identity making us all
cosmopolitans free of any territorial, ethnic or cultural bounds.
Just six months ago being thousands miles away from Minnesota, my current place of studying,
sitting in a fast food restaurant in
Komsomolsk-na-Amure – a small
town in the backwoods of Russia,
chatting gaily with my friends and
finishing my Americano under the
sounds of Lady Gaga’s latest hit
I would probably agree with this
theory. It’s not like the elements of
Russian culture were not part of
my life at all, completely supplanted by the new global mass culture,
but their presence was unnoticed
- just a part of everyday routine,
taken for granted and therefore
not emphasized as part of my
identity. I was Russian but I did
not feel it and, to be honest, did
not think much of it. Paradoxically, it was not till I came to America
– a country where one’s origin and
background are said to be irrelevant, that I became so conscious of
my Russian identity.
Through the looking
glass
In 1902 Charles Horton
Cooley introduced a concept of
the looking-glass self establishing
interconnection between the way
a person believes he is seen by
others and his or her perception
of self. The theory suggests that
one’s vision of self largely depends
on the way a person believes
others see him or her (Cooley
1902). Lisa Mclntyre (2010:152)
developing Cooley’s idea writes:
“in the looking-glass self a person
views himself or herself through
others' perceptions in society and
in turn gains identity”. Often the
factor that singles us out from the
majority of the group becomes the
basis for the lens through which
we are seen by others. When I was
in Russia I was a young female, a
student, a daughter, a journalist.
But when I came to the United
States my nationality, my foreigner
status unexpectedly became the
most notable thing about me. I
am Russian – that is the first thing
people learn about me and that is
how people remember me.
I found that some people enjoy speculating about my
Russian background. My good
friend Charles finds special pleasure in telling people I come from
Siberia every time he introduces
me to somebody. When I try to
disclaim this shameless lie (actually I come from the region called
Far East which is much further
East from Siberia) all I hear in
◆
“you cannot study the
‘Other’ without being
confronted by the
question:
“Who are you?”
◆
response is “Relax, nobody cares
anyway. Siberia sounds cool
though! ” Being on a foreign soil
definitely increased my awareness
about my own national identity. I
came to another country and all
of a sudden everything Russian
became relevant to me personally. I am expected to be an expert
in my country’s history, geography, and culture – depending on
12
DisD
what interests my interlocutors.
Globalization, inter-cultural
communication and accessibility
of travel are believed to destroy
or at least weaken one’s national
identity. Undergoing the process
of acculturation and assimilation
one loses his or her own culture and traditions. But in some
cases globalization can produce
quite the opposite effect – reinforcing one’s national identify.
Confronted by a whole bunch of
cultural differences the awareness
about one’s nationality increases
and becomes accentuated when
abroad. Inadvertently assessing
the overwhelming flow of the new
information through the lenses of
one’s past experience and knowledge, one realizes how profoundly
encultured this knowledge is, and
to what great extent this culture-specific ‘luggage’ is part of
one’s personality. The twenty-first
century amateur explorers inevitably encounter the paradox every
anthropologist has stumbled over
ever since the very emergence of
this discipline: you cannot study
the ‘Other’ without being confronted by the question: “Who are
13
you?” In this sense, the gaze is not
only returned, but it also comes to
be turned around staring in astonishment inside oneself.
A mad tea-party
Shock and disorientation
experienced by a person suddenly
immersed in a culture very different from his or her own is traditionally described by sociologists
and anthropologists as “culture
shock” (Kendall 2010). The cultural globalization and modernization that made the organization of
life relatively similar (it is enough
to compare several big international airports to make sure that
they are as like as two peas in a
pod) smoothing the most radical
differences between some cultures
and typifying life but only on a
shallow, cosmetic level. As soon as
one emerges oneself deeper into
the life of a foreign society the divergences in behavior and worldviews unnoticed at first look begin
to arrest attention. When I just
arrived to America I was shocked
but not by cultural differences – by
their absence. Besides the wide
snow-white American smile and
incredible politeness of people that
I was well familiar with by hearsay
there were few things that would
differ significantly or seem hard to
adjust to.
The awareness of cultural
differences came about later in
the not too pleasant form of an
entrance door slammed just a few
millimeters (or should I say inches) before my face. Carried away
by the conversation with my new
American friend Tim I followed
him into the one of the university
halls, from force of habit expecting him to hold the door for me,
which to my great indignation did
not happen. Actually this was just
a single case and later I discovered that holding a door is also a
common part of American good
manners, but in contrast to Russia
it has little to do with the gender
relations.
When I just arrived to
Minnesota an American representative of the university met me at
the airport. Seeing me struggling
Diaspora and Development
#Fig 1 - Courtesy of Guillaume Pelinski 2012 http://www.flickr.com/photos/peisiqi/9238425267/
with an enormous suitcase twice
heavier and I bet twice bigger than
myself he kindly offered his help.
“Oh, I’m fine, thank you...”I said
planning to continue further: “I
don’t want to bother you, but if
you’ll be so kind and help me...”which would be a completely
appropriate form of accepting
help in my country (bearing in
mind that a man helping a woman
with heavy luggage goes without
saying). However, it was not the
case in America: the very second
I said “no” my attendant promptly
shrug his shoulders and hurried
in the direction of exit showing
respect to my decision and leaving
me to deal with my unmanageable
luggage, perplexed and angry at
myself. “Rule number one: No
means NO in this country, so it is
better to be honest and straightforward with your wishes without
playing false modesty”- that was a
good subject for reflection while
trying to balance the wheels of the
excessively overloaded suitcase to
make my way through the terminal.
On the other side of
the mirror
Visiting any foreign
country is similar to traveling to
the Wonderland: everything is
upside down while you feel like
a poor lost Alice trying to make
some sense out of things that do
not seem to have any. From the
organized conservative English
society, subdued to the laws of
physics, logic and common sense
Alice traveled to a place where
there were no rules and restrictions besides one’s own imagination. However, if I try to speak
about my own experiences the
Alice metaphor would probably
be inaccurate for explaining the
differences between Russian and
American society. I would rather
compare myself to a Hatter suddenly thrown into Alice’s rational
law-abiding world of nineteenth
century England, and I abiding by
the rules if you come from a place
where they exist but are never
followed is not easy at all. Crossing the street only on crosswalks
and strictly on the traffic lights
signal, fastening the seatbelt every
time you drive, actually paying
money for watching new Hollywood blockbusters (Russian video
pirates offer them free on the
web often even before the official
premiere in the U.S.) and the most
frustrating - being unable to enter
the bar unless you are twenty one.
No wonder, sometimes I feel lost
and disoriented in this amazing
but at the same time incomprehensible and mysterious American
Wonderland, where “enemies” and
“allies” switch places, where real
feelings and emotions are hidden
under a happy smile and where
they ask you “how are you?” and
then suddenly vanish smiling like
a Cheshire cat without taking the
trouble to wait for the answer.
References
Cooley, Charles H. 1902. Human Nature and
the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s.
Mcintyre, Lisa J. 2009.The Practical Skeptic:
Core Concepts in Sociology and Reading in
Sociology. U.S.:Mayfield Publishing Company.
Kendall, Diana. 2010. Sociology in Our Times:
The essentials. Belmont: Wadsworth.
14
‘Can You Spare a Word’ - A Different
Narrative About Begging
by Johannes Lenhard, University of Cambridge
Kevin has been begging for
five days a week on London Wall
next to a Pret-a-Manger for over
a year. Suspended from the army
after six months in Afghanistan,
he does not want to depend on
state institutions any more. In fact,
he does not want to depend on
any institution – not even money.
‘Many people think, that if they
give, that keeps me on the street
– but it only makes life bearable.
It’s not all about money. Money is
the root of all evil. What I want is
respect. Respect and understanding make me feel like human.’
Kevin’s life is complicated: attested to be mentally ill,
without money or means of state
support, he is rough-sleeping and
dependent on begging. In what is
sometimes called a ‘street community’, competition, hierarchy and
hostility are more prevailing than
friendship and companionship. In
such a situation of despair, the significance of the social contact that
Kevin has with his ‘givers’ – and
which lies beyond the mere idea
of material subsistence – cannot
be neglected. This contact implies
respect and humanness; it constitutes what I call the other side of
begging.
‘Zones of humanity’
– immaterial gifts to
beggars
Undeniably, the beggars
I encountered are excluded; they
are struggling with drug-addic-
15
tion and homelessness. In such
a situation, money is a necessity,
a means of livelihood and at the
same time perpetuating problems
of substance abuse. But what I
learned is that this is only one
side of ‘their coin’. Panhandlers
similarly desire human relations.
On a limited scale, giving has the
potential to meet this demand.
It is, however, not the easy – especially easily available – gift of
‘change in the pocket’ that does
so. The ‘fleeting’ gift of modern
money (Simmel, 1903) plays an
ambiguous role. Even though it
helps the beggars materially, it
easily reinforces social hierarchy,
distance and prevents change in
the beggar’s situation. Rather, it is
the moment when the passer-by
takes a minute, sits down and talks
to the panhandler that a ‘zone of
humanity’ is opened. The time
and the words the giver literally
‘donates’ have significance beyond
the material necessity of money,
by reminding the beggar of his
self-esteem and most importantly
his status as a human being. It is
those ‘donations’ that I call ‘immaterial gifts’ (Godbout & Caille
2000).
Steve for instance, who
has been begging for a decade
in East London and whom I saw
almost daily, puts the immaterial
gift above money in his scale of
value: ‘Time is worth more than
money – also as a gift from a
stranger. I ain’t get happy being
rich, but talking.’ Pagan, who constantly walks around Shoreditch
‘spot-begging’, claims that ‘ties can
only happen if you have a conver-
sation.’ Jade, sitting in front of the
Tesco on Commercial street after
9 pm, similarly stresses the importance of talk: ‘Only if people talk
to you, they take you in.’ For my
informants, time and talk imply
respect and understanding, which
is a ‘gift’ that the majority of people refuse. Indeed, it is one of the
only means of sociability (Simmel,
1910).
Zelizer (1997, 97) illustrates this difference between
money and talk recalling a conversation between a barber that
has become the owner of his shop
and one of his customers: "Now
that you are proprietor, you and
I are equals, and I do not tip my
◆
‘It’s not all about money.
Money is the root of all
evil. What I want is
respect. Respect and
understanding make me
feel like human.’ – Kevin
◆
equals. Which shall it be in the
future, conversation and no tips,
or tips and no conversation."Conversation implies equality,
whereas money in the form of tips
reproduces hierarchy. In contrast
to money, the gift of time and talk
is an “expression of sentiments”
(Strathern 1992, 130) that can
“create or solidify a relationship of
mutual identification and empathy" (Lee 2002, 99). The instance
when a passer-by sits down and
Resistance and inequality
talks to the panhandler is ‘something special’ for Luzy, more than
just money.
Talking regulars –
more precious than
money?
For the beggars in East
London, ‘connection’ is associated
with a particular kind of giver: the
regular. As the name implies, regulars see ‘their’ beggars frequently
from a couple of times a day to
once a month. They might pass
them by on their way to work,
see them in front of a tube station
they use regularly, or on a construction site opposite the road.
What distinguishes them from the
random giver and even more so
from the majority of non-givers,
is the time they take out. Regulars
step out from the incessant stream
of people on the pavement, talk to
the panhandler for a minute and
in a simultaneous process they
‘learn about each other’s life’.
The mere words, and especially the slowly building up of
mutual knowledge (‘hau’, Mauss,
2001, 15), establish a positive connection. Scot envisions his regulars making ‘conscious decisions’,
possibly even planning ahead in
the morning: ‘They think about
what they’ll do over the day, recall
our last meeting and pocket some
money’. Those conscious thoughts
– as fleeting as they might be –
constitute what Lee (2002, 86)
calls an “empathetic dialogue”.
The repetitive acts support the
formation of an inclusive dyadic relationship based on mutual
understanding. Although the
connection is potentially unstable – the beggar moves to another
location, the giver changes places
– it is often a projectable constant
for the beggar .
It is also in those relationships with regulars where it
is most likely that beggars want
to give something back. Yohn,
for instance, provides some of his
regulars with cigarettes, whereas
Paddy gives away drawings –
without fashioning the exchange
as ‘sale’. Apart from this material
reciprocation, immaterial counter-gifts are the norm. Beggars say
‘Thank you’, ‘God bless’ or ‘Good
man’, share hugs, jokes or bows.
What makes those immaterial
notions more than ‘normal pleasantries’ (Offer, 1997, 454) is their
often particularly religious or
intimate couleur. Steve summarises it as follows (see also Simmel
1908, 158f): ‘No, gifts are not free.
They are giving me and I’m not
giving them nothing moneywise.
But they are getting my happiness.
They see me shining.’ In this way,
doubts of classical anthropological
theory on the gift tying its inclusive power to reciprocity (Gudeman, 2001) can be sidestepped in
the begging context.
Kevin and Scot in particular, made it very explicit that
the bonds that time, talk and the
implied understanding can produce, do not include the beggar
into society. It allows him to form
a dyadic connection to individual
people. Even though exclusion
is undeniable (Dean, 1999), the
immaterial gift is an important
means of creating ‘zones of humanity’, of self-esteem and respect. Even though, the difference
is hardly recognisable from the
viewpoint of the giver, ‘showing
respect’ is a crucial improvement
from what Kevin described to me
as his ‘existence as a parasite’.
#Fig 1- courtesy of the author
Words revisited
The crucial question is
whether ‘zones of humanity’ are
perpetuating a situation of despair
for the beggar. They might render
begging bearable, ‘naturalise’ it,
and can from the beggar’s point
of view be instrumentalised in
order to raise more money. As
a researcher encountering the
beggars’ perspective, I tried to be
aware of those potentially ‘hidden
meanings’ and avoid the literal
production of a solely intellectual
argument.
In response to this, my
paper shows the multi-dimensionality of begging from the ‘natives’
point of view’. By listening to them
I learned that we cannot deny
the dimension of exclusion, but
16
that there are important shades.
Immaterial gifts to beggars can
be the basis of a connection that
makes them feel human. I claim
that this ‘craving for humanness’
might constitute a rational for a
beggar to ‘change’ more profoundly. In making their unpronounced
second appeal audible, I propose a
different dimension of meaning in
begging: ‘Can you spare a word?’
References
Dean, H. (1999). Begging Questions:
Street-Level Economic Activity and Social
Policy Failure . Bristol: Policy Press.
Godbout, J., & Caille, A. (2000). The World
of the Gift (p. 250). London: McGill-Queen’s
University Press.
Gudeman, S. (2001). “Postmodern Gifts”. In S.
Cullenberg, J. Amariglia, & D. F. Ruccio (Eds.),
Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge
(pp. 459–474). New York: Routledge.
Lee, A. F. (2002). Unpacking the Gift. In M.
Osteen (Ed.), The Question of the Gift – Essays across disciplines (pp. 85–101). London:
Routledge.Mauss, M. (2001). The Gift. London: Routledge.
Offer, A. (1997). “Between the Gift and the
Market: The Economy of Regard”. Economic
History Review, 50(3), 450–476.
Simmel, G. (1903). “Metropolis and Mental
Life”. In D. N. Levine (Ed.), On Individuality
and Social Forms: Selected Writings of Georg
Simmel (1971st ed., pp. 324–340). London:
University of Chicago Press.
Simmel, G. (1910). “Sociability”. In D. N.
Levine (Ed.), On Individuality and Social
Forms:Selected Writings of Georg Simmel
(1971st ed., pp. 127–140). London: University
of Chicago Press.
Strathern, M. (1992). “Qualified Value: the
perspective of gift exchange”. In C. Humphrey
& S.Hugh-Jones (Eds.), Barter, Exchange and
Value - An Anthropological Approach (pp.169
–191). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Zelizer, V. A. (1997). The Social Meaning of
Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief,
and Other Currencies. New York: Princeton
University Press.
21st Century Protest: A Comparison of Forms
of Resistance in #Occupy (US) and in
Contemporary Estonia
by Priyanka Hutschenreiter, Durham University
Forms of political and
social resistance have largely been
approached by anthropologists
through James Scott’s theory of
‘everyday resistance’ (1985). Social
movements and social movement
theory generally belong under the
curriculum of sociology. However,
in the wake of the phenomenon of
the #Occupy movement, anthropology is forced to take a stance
on the evolution and importance
of social movements– not just
peasant resistance, as the tradition
has been (see Scott 1985, 1989;
Guha 2000; Joseph 1990; Gibb
2001; Sivaramakrishnan 2005).
This article briefly looks at the
forms of resistance employed by
#Occupy in the US and how these
may have been shaped by the
cultural and historical influence of
American politics.
Furthermore, to illustrate
the more traditional anthropological approach to collective action,
17
a comparison is drawn between
#Occupy in the US and forms of
protest in contemporary Estonia
where collective action is rare
despite poor economic conditions.
I seek to elucidate why a form of
social movement like #Occupy
is unlikely to spread to Estonia. I
will argue that anthropology must
follow Scott’s idea that everyday
resistance is enacted within a
community and thus– though not
cohesively organised– constitutes
a social movement (1985). In order to include more diverse forms
of social resistance, anthropology
must redefine the concept of social
movements.
I first became interested in
#Occupy when writing an academic essay comparing different
contemporary social movements.
The use of digital social media
and the transnational magnitude,
which it has reached in just a year,
is astounding. This fact poses an
intriguing area of study as a new
phenomenon in the evolution of
Western collective action. It also
happens to have been partly initiated by the anthropologist David
Graeber (2011). This paper focuses on the repertories of action
prevalent in both #Occupy and the
Estonian populace.
Action repertoires are
the different forms of resistance
people and movements employ to
express dissatisfaction with dominant political and social norms.
Repertoires reflect the values of
people and movements. Social
movements tend to resort to dramatic and unconventional forms
of resistance (della Porta & Diani
2006), while ‘disorganised’ more
rural groups from the lower echelons of society– not united under
an identifying banner – will employ everyday forms of resistance,
such as sabotage and lagging. The
former aims forlong-term change,
Resistance and inequality
while the latter’s objectives are
minor, immediate changes (Scott
1985).
#Occupy’s repertoire
includes direct forms of action
like sit-ins and public demonstrations. These forms have come to
be considered obsolete since the
development of organised, representative politics such as political parties, elections and voting
(Tormey 2012: 134). But at the
same time this kind of “disorganised” repertoire of direct political
action enables social activists to
be heard quickly (Tormey 2012:
134). #Occupy’s repertoire further
includes organised discussions,
public appeals, and extensive
use of virtual social networking,
including Facebook, Twitter and
Youtube (Juris 2012:266). Indeed,
this last feature has become an integral part of #Occupy’s collective
identity: the ‘#’ in front of ‘Occupy’ refers to Twitter, the social
networking platform (Juris 2012:
266). This signifies the role of digital social networks as an integral
part of its repertoire.
An understanding of the
people involved in #Occupy and
the historical context of the US
help determine what #Occupiers
are protesting against and why
their action repertoire is thus
◆
“In order to include more
diverse forms of social
resistance, anthropology
must redefine the concept
of social movements”
◆
constructed. #Occupy protestors are mostly highly educated
and 64% are under the age of 34,
#Fig 1 - “Occupy Wall Street takes over Washington Square Park” Darwin
Yamamoto 2011 http://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinyamamoto/6226418124/
who believe that they have been
failed by the unregulated American capitalist system (Rutkoff
2011;Cordero-Guzman 2011). In
the words of Kiersey, they are protesting “austerity, collapsed public
services, short-term contracts,
stagnant wages, anti-union legislation, ridiculous bank bailouts
and profiteering…” (2012: 104).
These issues take place within the
American context of a post-industrialised, neo-liberal, democratic
nation-state (Buechler 2000).
Post-industrialisation
implies a drastic decrease in the
industrial workforce (Turl 2007).
In the case of the West, the professional middle-class developed
with the decline of industrial
programmes and has been propagated further due to industrial
off-shoring and education becoming more widespread (della
Porta & Diani 2006;Chomsky
2012). The contemporary Western
middle-class now struggles with
the issues #Occupy addresses,
including very low, often unpaid
internships and jobs, which have
ironically become a prerequisite
to entering the labour market
(della Porta & Diani 2006:38).
Moreover, the capitalist ideology
dominant in the US appears to
further encourage the individual
to struggle for such ‘entitlements’
as equal opportunity (Foner 2003:
27) and success, often perceived
in financial terms (Huber 1971:
3, 10). This is coupled with strong
cultural notions of ‘freedom’ and
‘democracy’, which operate within
the US (Foner 2003: 27). Attention
may be given to these when deconstructing the identity and the
action repertoire of #Occupy protestors because the cultural setting
and the political ethos of the US is
a defining factor of the movement. Furthermore, the US is
defined, in sociological terms, as
a ‘core’ nation, according to the
‘world-capitalist system’ (Buechler 2000). Core nations like the
US enjoy a relative abundance of
resources, which creates among
other things, low mobilization
cost allowing the more privileged
groups of society to use their
resources to aspire to a higher
and ever more comfortable living
standard (Buechler 2000). In light
of this, it seems plausible that
#Occupy protestors have made
use of their intellectual resources
to protest, and to spread their
ideas to different under-privileged
18
groups in American society (Juris
2012). America’s dense history of
social movements, particularly in
the 20th century, may also suggest that these movements have
left traces, or even subcultures,
in American society. These could
be seen as ‘reactivated’ with new
contentious conditions associated
#Occupy. Further research could
reveal that this is one of the key
contextual differences between
#Occupy and Estonian ‘everyday’
resistance.
I became interested in Estonia after a second casual visit to
Paide, Estonia, in September 2012.
By this time I had already chosen
to study the #Occupy movement
and was in the process of reading.
After mentioning it a few times, it
quickly became a topic of discussion amongst some friends. The
comment I heard multiple times
was that something like #Occupy
could not occur in Estonia because of the way public outcry was
oppressed during Soviet rule. I realised that, from an anthropological perspective, this would offer an
interesting socio-cultural comparison. What I consider forms
of resistance in Estonia is quite
theoretical and requires more
ethnographic research. Due to the
lack of ethnographic data most of
this research is inspired by casual
conversations, yet is conducted
within the confines of a university
library. Therefore I can readily be
accused of ‘armchair anthropology.’ I accept this judgement without protest. Yet one should not
let this assertion get in the way of
educated hypothesising.
When considering Estonia as part of the ‘world-capitalist
system,’ it is an interesting comparison to the US as it is not a core
nation, a developing country, nor
a post-colonialist state. Following
19
the responses I got, I would argue
that the difficulties arising from its
transitional economic and political system, as well as the Estonian
experience of resisting Soviet rule,
has influenced the way Estonians
show political and social resistance today.
The condition of Estonia’s
economic system is efficient and
functional for a post-Soviet state
(OECD 2012). However, even with
relatively low living costs, people
struggle to make ends meet with
a minimum wage of 1.80 euros
per hour (Statistics Estonia 2012)
and mismatched, high food prices
(Heinlo et al. 2012). I hypothesise
that informal economies (Djankov
et al. 2003) and tax evasions, (Kriz
et al. 2007) in Estonia can be considered coping mechanisms of the
Estonian populace. Yet they may
also be seen as a way of expressing popular dissatisfaction. Both
suggest that these instances can be
considered forms of resistance to
the state. Public demonstrations
and formal letters– that is, direct
action– are generally unseen. It is
possible that covert ways of deal-
ing with social and political issues
have become the norm like during
the Soviet era when open insubordination or insurrection was met
with militaristic resistance, arrest,
or deportation (Kukk 1993). This
implies that such forms of resistance may have become culturally
inscribed.
This brief discussion of
forms of resistance in #Occupy
US and Estonia delineates that,
at its core, the issue at hand is a
discrepancy in the definition of
social movements by sociology,
and what Scott has left to anthropology. I conclude not with an
answer, but with two assertions.
First, anthropology should broaden its definition of social movements so as not to exclude the
less conspicuous ways that people
resist in everyday life. Second,
#Occupy protestors, local Estonians and their respective causes
can only be done justice through a
more thorough understanding of
their forms of resistance. For this,
a more succinct ethnographic data
set is needed. This paper is a mere
introduction to a fruitful, an-
#Fig 2 - Courtesy of Aaron Bauer 2011 http://www.flickr.com/photosdrtongs/6234950614/
Resistance and inequality
thropological enquiry into social
movements– what they are and
how they are culturally defined.
References
Buechler, S.M. (2000) Social Movements in
Advanced Capitalism: the political economy
and cultural construction of social activism.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Chomsky, N. (2012) Occupy, London: Penguin Books.
Cordero-Guzman, H.R. (2011) ‘Main Stream
Support for a Mainstream Movement: the
99% movement comes from and looks like the
99%’, Occupy Wall Street Online
[http://occupywallst.org/media/pdf/OWS-profile1-10-18-11-sent-v2-HRCG.pdf]
Della Porta, D. & Diani, M. (2006) Social
Movements: An Introduction, Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Djankov, S., Lieberman, I., Mukherjee, J. &
Nenova, T. (2003) ‘Going Informal: Benefits
and Costs’, in Belev, B. (ed.) The Informal
Economy in the EU Accession Countries: size,
scope, trends and challenges to the process of
EU enlargement, Sofia: Center for the Study of
Democracy.
Foner, E. (2004) ‘The Idea of Freedom in
American History’, GHI Bulletin, no. 24, Spring
2004
[http://www.ghidc.org/publications/ghipubs/
bu/034/34.25.pdf]
Gibb, R. (2001) ‘Toward an Anthropology of
Social Movements’, Journal des Anthropologues, vol. 85-86, pp. 233-253.
Graeber, D. (19 October 2011) ‘On Playing by
the Rules: The Strange Success of Occupy
Wall Street’, on Naked Capitalism
[http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/
david-graeberonplayingby-the-rules%e2%80%93-the-strange-success-of-occupywallstreet.html]
Guha, R. (2000) The Unquiet Woods: ecolog-
Surveys the Protestors’, Wall Street Journal
Online
[http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/10/19/
who-is-occupying-wallstreet-a-pollster-surveys-protester/]
Scott, J.C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak:
everyday forms of peasant resistance, New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Scott, J. C. (1989) ‘Everyday Peasant Resistance’, in Colburn, F.D. (ed.) Everyday Forms
of Peasant Resistance, London: Sharpe.
Sivaramakrishnan, K. (2005) ‘Some intellectual genealogies for the concept of everyday
resistance’, American Anthropologist, vol. 107,
no.3, pp. 346-355.
Tormey, S. (2012) ‘Occupy Wall Street: From
Representation to post- Representation’, Journal Of Critical Globalisation Studies, Issue 5
‘Imperialism, Finance, #Occupy’, pp. 134-136.
Turl, A. (2007) ‘The Changing working Class:
Is the U.S. becoming post-industrial?’, International Socialist Review, vol. 52, March-April
[http://www.isreview.org/issues/52/postindustrial.shtml]
ical change and peasant resistance in the Himalayas, 2nd Edition, Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
Heinlo, A., Kerner, R., Krusell, S., Põder, K.,
Rosenberg, T., Servinski, M. & Soiela, M.
(eds.) (2012) Statistical Yearbook of Estonia
2012, Tallinn: Statistics Estonia.
Huber, R.M. (1971) The American Idea of Success, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Joseph, G.M. (1990) ‘On The Trail Of Latin
American Bandits: a reexamination of peasant
resistance’, Latin American Research Review,
vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 7-53.
Kiersey, N.J. (2012) ‘Introduction: #OCCUPYTHEORY?’, Journal Of Critical Globalisation
Studies, Issue 5 ‘Imperialism, Fiannce, #Occupy’, pp. 104-106.
Kriz, K.A., Meriküll, J., Paulus, A. & Staehr,
K. (2007) Why Do Individuals Evade Payroll
and Income Taxation in Estonia?, Estonia:
University of Tartu, Faculty of Economics and
Business Administration
[http://ssrn.com/abstract=968829]
Kukk, M. (1993) ‘Political Opposition in Soviet
Estonia 1940-1987’, Journal of Baltic Studies,
vol. 24, no. 4, Winter, pp. 369-384.
Ledeneva, A. & Seabright, P. (2000) ‘Chapter 4: Barter in post-Soviet societies: what
does it look like and why does it matter?’, in
Seabright, P. (ed.) The Vanishing Rouble: Bar-
ter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions
in Post-Soviet Societies, Cambridge, UK:Cam-
bridge University Press.
OECD (2012) OECD Economic Surveys: Estonia 2012, OECD Publishing
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eco_surveys-est2012-en]
Rutkoff, A. (2011) ‘Who Occupies? A Pollster
20
A Talk About Marriage: the Lives of People
from the LGBTI Community in Nepal
by Stinne Otte, Aarhus University
A perspective on the lives of people from the LGBTI community1in
Nepal; hidden feelings and secret
sexualities.
“My family accepts me for
who I am”, Keshab tells me, “my
father died nine years ago, but he
also accepted me. They had an inter-caste marriage, my parents. My
mother is related to the royal family and my father was a Brahmin2.
In our home everyone was welcome, even Dalits were invited to
eat with us in the house3”. His face
lights up in a big smile: “Sometimes my mother says ‘please my
son, I know that it is your choice
and your body, but maybe one day
you will change your mind and
find a sweet girl to marry’. And
then I say: ‘Please mother, don’t
look for girls for me, you can find
me a handsome man; him I will
marry’.” He laughs at the memory
of the friendly quarrels with his
mother: “I will never change my
mind. I was born male, but my
feelings tells me that I am female,”
he puts his right hand on his chest,
as if to show me that on the inside
he is a woman. “She knows that,
my mother. She understands. But
sometimes she wishes that I will
marry a girl and have children, as
other sons do. She is just a housewife, she isn’t well educated, but
still she accepts me. I love her very
21
much for that”.
In Nepal, family is very
important. There is a complicated
pattern of gestures and acts by
which you respectfully address
different people in both the close
and extended family depending
on your gender, age and family
relation. Most importantly, you
are expected to honor your parents and show them respect in all
aspects of life. That means, among
other things, to marry and have
children, preferably male children,
in order to continue the patriline
and be able to provide for your
parents in old age. By acting badly,
amoral or contrary to tradition,
◆
“Many from the LGBTI
community have a wife
and children because
they did not have the
courage to disappoint
their families or the
possibility to say no to
marriage”
◆
you dishonour your family (Cameron 1998:135-284, Liechy 1996,
Mchuge 2002:79,82, Wilson et.al.
2011:254).
“You cannot talk about
sex with your parents. It is very
impolite and shameful to do that.
So many in the LGBTI community
are not open about their sexuality,
which makes it very difficult to do
social work. Many fear, that their
family will find out about their
sexuality, so they will not tell their
real names or come to the office
to get information and their blood
tested [for AIDS ed.]”.
Keshab is one of the leading drop-in centres in Kathmandu
run by a local LGBTI organisation.
They do outreach work such as
distributing condoms, lubricants
and informational pamphlets at
cruising sights4. In addition, they
also offer help to those who need
it, and want it, through counselling, medical check-ups and
accommodation for those whose
families have rejected them. Keshab himself is third gender5. He
feels neither male nor female, but
something in between. Today he
wears jeans and a t-shirt. His long
hair is tied on the back of his head
in a bun. However, at special occasions he wears women’s clothing
and puts on make-up and jewellery. He feels that wearing women’s
clothing everyday is disrespectful
towards his family because people
would gossip about him if he did,
which would reflect badly upon
1 LGBTI “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersexed,” which is the terminology used by the leading organisation fighting for LGBTI rights in Nepal: Blue Diamond Society.
2 Brahmin is one of the highest castes in Nepal.
3 Dalit is the lowest caste in Nepal, and dalits are traditionally not allowed to eat together with higher castes or from
the same pots and pans, just as they cannot enter the houses of higher castes, since they are perceived as un-clean.
4 Cruising sites are places where LGBTIs ‘cruise’ to meet other LGBTIs, such as public parks, road intersections and
city squares.
Resistance and inequality
his family. Some third genders do,
he tells me. They act and look like
women all the time. Few have had
a sex change operation though. It
is very difficult and very expensive. If he could, he might want
one, he says and seems to consider
the opportunity in his head for a
moment.
He sits in front of me in
his office at the top floor of the
building. From the window you
can see the Himalayan snow-covered peaks behind the green, soft
mountains of the Kathmandu
valley. Some children are playing
with a kite on the flat roof just
beneath the window. You can hear
the rustle of the paper when the
wind catches it. In this city the
buildings stand wall to wall and
the air is filled with dust from
the unpaved roads. The smell of
incense mixed with exhaust fumes
fills the office and you can hear the
shouts of street vendors and the
ringing of bells in shrines.
We talk about the family
pressure to get married. Many
from the LGBTI community
have a wife and children because
they did not have the courage to
disappoint their families or the
possibility to say no to marriage.
It is not just their parents who
need to understand and accept. It
is also their extended family, the
neighbours and the village. This
is something he has experienced
himself. He tells me about one of
his few longer relationships: “Normally, I have many
different partners and I don’t
bring them home to my apartment
where my mother and my two sisters also live. No, I have a separate
room at another place for that. But
this guy met my family and visited
me in my home. He is from the
same village as me. Here in Nepalwe have big extended families, you
know, so actually we were family,
but very distant. When he came
to Kathmandu to work, we lived
together and I really liked him
a lot. Everyone knows about my
sexuality in the village, but no one
#Fig 1
knew about his”.
“So when his father in
the village found out that he was
living with me in Kathmandu, he
called his son and made him come
home. My friend told me that he
had to go home to do some work
for his father, but his family was
actually forcing him to marry a
5 In Nepal, third gender is the general identity category used by transgenders and cross-dressers (Bochenek & Knight
2012)
22
girl and he had to go home and
visit his future bride’s home as
tradition prescribes.” Now he talks
about the experience with ease,
but he tells me, that he became
very sad when he discovered the
truth: “I asked him why he would
get married. He told me, that he
would not disappoint his family
and let them down. I tried to talk
to his father and convince him
that we didn’t have a relationship
and that his son really didn’t like
men so they would let him stay
with me in Kathmandu, but it
didn’t work and he got married in
our village.”
“I was so sad, I didn’t
understand, and I really didn’t
want to go to the wedding. But
my friend said that he needed me
there and convinced me to come.
It was so terrible and I had to
spend the night in the room next
to my friend and his new wife.
I was so depressed,” he puts his
hand on his chest and looks down,
“I was so depressed.” Today he
loves his friend’s wife and son and
they often speak on the phone. But
he was sad for a long time after
the wedding: “He had promised
me that we should be together and
then he got married anyway. So
many broken promises and then
a broken heart. Sometimes when
he comes to Kathmandu we get
together to have sex, but I don’t
invite him to my home anymore.” With a smile he tells me
that his friend’s wife once told
him that she thinks he looks very
beautiful in a sari6, makeup and
wig. “She said, that I look sexy
and she could understand why her
husband was attracted to me. She
understands because she is educated – a teacher - so she knows
about different sexualities”.
According to Keshab this is not a
special story. Many get married,
because of family pressure, especially in the villages and rural
areas where it is difficult to get
information and support.
Kinship is expected to be
more important than the individual (Joseph 2005:30, Mchuge
2002:82). The society is wrapped
up in social collectives related to
families, castes and ethnicities,
for which the social concept of
honour is important (Cameron
1998:135-136). Honour is not
a passive term, but something
which is earned through several
sources and which constitute the
patriline and the family. These
sources include generosity, honesty, modesty, but also sexual discretion and heterosexuality (Cameron 1998:138-140, Liechy 1996).
This honour concept makes it
difficult for members of the LGBTI community to be open about
their sexuality because it is not
only understood as unnatural and
amoral, but also as going against
their kin and dishonouring them.
Even if you are lucky enough to
be accepted by your close family,
as Keshab is, many still hide their
sexual identity in public, as it is
seen as dishonourable and shameful behaviour. A decision to be
open in public will affect both the
close and extended family, and
doing so requires a lot of courage
and self-confidence. It is a major
burden to put on the family; one
too big in the eyes of Keshab.
#Fig 1 - A Traditional Wedding in Kathmandu Courtesy of Sidne Ward, 2011
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidnegail/6597464693/in/photostream/
References
Bochenek, M. & Knight K. (2012): “Establishing a Third Gender Category in Nepal: Process
and Prognosis” in Emory International Law
Review vol. 26:11-44
Cameron, Mary M. (1998): On the Edge of
the Auspicious. Gender and Caste in Nepal.
University of Illinois Press
Joseph, Sherry (2005): Social Work Practice
and Men Who Have Sex With Men. Sage
Publications.Liechty, Mark (1996): “Taking
Liberties: Women’s Freedom and Sexual Harassment in Kathmandu” in Labour Capital and
Society vol. 29, no. 1 & 2
Mchugh, Ernestine (2002): “Encountering the
Forest Man: Feminine Experience, Imaginary
Others, and the Disjunctions of Patriarchy in
Nepal”, in Ethos: Journal of the Society for
Psychological Anthropology vol. 30, no. 1 :
77-94
Wilson, E., Pant, S. BB., Comfort, M. &
Ekstrand, M. (2011): “Stigma and HIV Risk
among Metis in Nepal”, in Culture, Health,
Sexuality vol. 13, no. 3: 253-266
6 Traditional women’s clothing: a long piece of cloth that is wrapped around the body as a dress.
23
Resistance and inequality
"Sweat" and the Black Female Voice: Zora
Neale Hurston and the African American
Woman's Perspective
by Marion C. Burke, Rutgers University
Historically, writing has
been classified as masculine; it is
associated with paternalism, creation and even Godliness. Sandra
M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue
in their essay ‘The Madwoman
in the Attic’ that “a pen is a metaphorical penis” (Gilbert and
Gubar 1986, 64). The ability to
write has historically been seen as
derived from male sexuality and
akin to all things masculine. Just
as maleness is associated with all
things superior and femaleness
associated with all things inferior
as explained in the stark binaries
of logocentric thinking, females
are on the opposite side of the
binary when it comes to writing
(Jones 1986). Writing was something from which women were
long excluded, “If male sexuality
is integrally associated with the
assertive presence of literary power, female sexuality is associated
with the absence of such power”
(Gilbert and Gubar 1986, 67). The
historical dearth of female authors
seemingly confirms this opinion.
However, one must consider the
extreme lack of access to education women were afforded at that
time, the remains of which are
still felt today. As Virginia Woolf
argues in ‘A Room of One’s Own,’
certainly, there were women in the
past with great passion and creativity that were barred from writing due to societal norms (Woolf
1986).
In more recent times,
women have been shattering
stereotypes and breaking into
the literary field. This is true for
Zora Neale Hurston and her 1926
short story, ‘Sweat’. Hurston is an
African American female writer
who was prominent in the Harlem
Renaissance. Born in Florida in
the late Nineteenth Century, Hurston’s writing was influenced by
her early life in a time and place
plagued with sexism and racism
(Boyd 2007).
Hurston’s short story
‘Sweat’ tells the story of protagonist Delia Jones, a washerwoman
in Florida. Delia is married to an
unkind man named Sykes, who
is abusive to Delia both mentally
and physically. One day, Sykes
brings a rattle snake into the
house in an effort to further abuse
his wife. Ironically, the snake ends
up killing Sykes. At the end of the
story, it becomes evident to the
reader that Delia does not make
any attempt to help her husband
as he lay dying from the wounds
inflicted by the snake; as the narrator informs us, “Orlando with
its doctors was too far. She could
scarcely reach the Chinaberry tree,
where she waited in the growing
heat while inside she knew the
cold river was creeping up and up
to extinguish the eye which must
know by now what she knew”
(Hurston 1977, 8). Hurston writes
a poignant description of life as
an African American female in
this time period. But is her writing
different than a man’s?
Though the content of
Hurston’s writing in ‘Sweat’ is
centered on a married woman and
set mostly in the home, the style
and execution of this short story
cannot be classified as “feminine”
in any way. The writing is indistinguishable from that of a man’s.
As Joyce Carol Oates noted in her
piece ‘Is There a Female Voice?
◆
“Hurston writes a
poignant description
of life as an African
American female...But
is her writing different
than a man’s?”
◆
Joyce Carol Oates Replies,’ “content is simply raw material. Women’s problems – women’s insights
– women’s very special adventures: these are material: and what
matters in serious art is ultimately
the skill of execution and the
uniqueness of vision” (Oates 1986,
208). Hurston certainly executed
the writing beautifully and had a
unique story line. Any disregard
of such a story could justifiably be
considered unwarranted marginalization.
Hurston’s works are concentrated in novels and short
stories. According to feminist
scholar Terry Eagleton, novels
were “a form without a long history in male authorities. Because the
novel’s genesis lay partly in forms
of writing familiar to women – the
diary, the journal, letters – the
form could seem more accessible
and approachable In its content,
24
also, the novel was often considered – and still is – an appropriate
form for women” (Eagleton 1986,
88).The short story is, in many
ways, akin to the novel in this
regard. Women could write about
the topics they knew in novels
and short stories and, importantly, could remain in the privacy of
their homes while doing so (Eagleton 1986).
Virginia Woolf addressed
these themes in ‘A Room of One’s
Own’ (Woolf 1986). Woolf lauded
women writers for their skilled
prose despite their many setbacks.
She wrote of the circumstances
of women writers in the 1800s –
writing in the sitting room with
near constant interruptions and a
need to hide their work from people not in their immediate families. Nevertheless, women writers
persevered through the obstacles
and created good, well-written
novels with no hint of the constant disruption they faced (Woolf
1986).
Novels developed in the
Eighteenth Century as a low form
of literature; they were easy to
read and easy to write as compared to other forms. Since the
novel was considered lowly, it
was associated with women in a
slight variance from the binary
previously discussed. At this time,
“To think of a woman as having a
special aptitude for writing novels
was . . . something of a back-handed compliment, given the low
status of [the] product” (Ruthven 1986, 93). In contemporary
times, novels and short stories are
considered legitimate genres of
literature as more and more educated authors, men and women
alike, are expressing themselves in
these forms. Hurston herself was
an intelligent woman educated
at Barnard College and is cele-
25
brated as a talented author (Boyd
2007). Using the form of a short
story, Hurston was able to convey
a strong political message. This
message was made all the more
poignant and meaningful because
of the short story style in which it
was written.
As a skilled female author
writing on the issue of female
inequality in marriage in her
short story ‘Sweat,’ Hurston makes
subtle arguments to advance the
cause of feminism. The protagonist Delia is a strong, independent
woman who finds herself at the
receiving end of a patriarchal society that strongly privileges men
#Fig 1
and denigrates women. There is,
however, another important facet
to the story that deals specifically
with race. Hurston is not only promoting feminism but specifically
black feminism. Like Hurston, Delia is not only underprivileged by
gender but also by race (Hurston
1997).
Joyce Carol Oates’ essay ‘Is
There a Female Voice? Joyce Carol
Oates Replies,’ can be applied
here, though now substituting
“black” for “female.” Perhaps the
content of Hurston’s short story
was shaped by her race; however, her skill and uniqueness were
independent from her race and
Resistance and inequality
are what make her short stories
truly “good” writing. The ability
of African Americans to express
themselves in literary form has
long been prevented and then
marginalized. Slaves in the early
history of the United States were
not allowed to read or write and
long after emancipation African
Americans were barred from receiving a formal education. To this
present day, African Americans
and other people of color continue
to face hurdles that prevent them
from becoming writers (Walker
1986). Just as Woolf argued in ‘A
Room of One’s Own’ (Woolf 1986)
that there are undoubtedly many
groundbreaking works from women that the world will never see
because societal norms prevented
them from being created, Alice
Walker argues a similar point in
regard to African Americans. According to scholar Terry Eagleton,
African American writers who can
succeed despite the many obstacles white society places in front
of them are relegated to a distinct
subcategory (Eagleton 1986). This
is evident looking at the life of
Zora Neale Hurston.
While today Zora Neale
Hurston is a celebrated author, she
is celebrated as a black, female author. She is lumped into a category
with the rest of the black writers of
the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston
was never paid what she deserved
for her works during her lifetime.
Indeed, when she died on January
28, 1960, she did not even leave
enough money for a funeral or a
headstone. (Boyd 2007).
As Delia Jones triumphs
in the end of Zora Neale Hurston’s
short story ‘Sweat,’ so too do Zora
Neale Hurston and all African
American women with her (Hurston 1997). Although Hurston
died without enough money for a
headstone, in 1973, Alice Walker
travelled to her final resting place
and marked her gravesite with
a tombstone after thirteen years
of being unmarked (Boyd 2007).
Perhaps marginalized, Hurston
and her works are being read
and celebrated to the present day.
While much more progress must
be made in the field of literature
for women, for African Americans and, particularly, for African
American women, Hurston is
a success story to serve as a reminder of the progress women
and black women have made in
the field of literature. While the
content of her short story “Sweat”
may have been influenced by her
gender and race, her skill as a
writer transcends both gender and
race. Zora Neale Hurston's fiction
not only represents a strong black
female voice, but also ultimately
creates meaningful, beautiful literature.
#Fig 1 - Zora Neale Hurston - Courtesy of
Bev Sykes, 2011 http://www.flickr.com/photos/
basykes/5334582636/
References
Boyd, Valerie. 2007. “About Zora Neale
Hurston.” Zora Neale Hurston. Estate of Zora
Neale Hurston and Harper Collins. [http://
www.zoranealehurston.com/biography.html]
Eagleton, Terry. 1986. “Introduction.” Feminist
Literary Theory: A Reader. Cambridge:Blackwell. 42-92.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1986.
“The Madwoman in the Attic.” Feminist LiteraryTheory: A Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell.
63-69.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1997. “Sweat”. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP.Jones, Ann
Rosalind.1986. “Writing the Body: Toward an
Understanding of L’Ecriture Feminine.” Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Cambridge:
Blackwell. 228-231.
Oates, Joyce Carol. 1986. “Is There a Female
Voice? Joyce Carol Oates Replies.” Feminist
Literary Theory: A Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell. 208-209.
Ruthven, K.K. 1986. Feminist Literary Theory:
A Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell. 93-94.
Walker, Alice. 1986. “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.” Feminist Literary Theory: A
Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell. 228-231.
Woolf, Virginia. 1986 “A Room of One’s
Own.” Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader.
Cambridge: Blackwell. 47-96.
26
The Object Analysis of the Future:
“Penrose3.stl”
by Calum Bowden, University College London
Introduction
27
The “Third Industrial
Revolution,” announces the cover
of The Economist dated the 21st of
April 2012 – the digital manufacturing revolution, with Additive
Manufacturing at its beating heart.
Additive Manufacturing (AM),
also called 3D printing, rapid
prototyping and rapid manufacturing, is defined by the American
Society for Testing and Materials
as the “process of joining materials
to make objects from 3D model
data, usually layer upon layer, as
opposed to subtractive manufacturing methodologies” (STAM in
Campbell et al, 2011: 2.)
AM is set to alter understandings of the social and material world. In October 2011, the
Atlantic Council published its
six-year Strategic Foresight Initiative investigating the technology,
concluding that AM is on track
to become “truly transformative,”
and will have profound repercussions across our society (Campell
at al, 2011: 13.) AM is changing
our design, prototyping and
manufacturing processes, as well
as the materials we use, geography
of supply chains, transportation of
goods, labour needs, consumption
patterns, and the environmental
impact of production. It is reasonable to suggest that in coming
years, AM will play a key role in
the changing global economy (Buchli, 2010; Campbell et al., 2011;
The Economist, 2012; Hanna,
2012).
AM will also impact the social
sciences, particularly the anthropological study of the material.
Victor Buchli (2010) offers some
insight into the anthropological
impact of this emerging technology, arguing that AM is a manufacturing process produces and presents the immaterial, creating new
and distinct forms of material and
social life (Buchli, 2010: 273.) In
the traditional, subtractive shaping
of materials, the geometric form of
an object is heavily reliant on the
properties of the materials used to
create it. AM represents a radical
change, as the material offers unprecedented geometric freedom.
No solid materials are manipulated, only digital code and formless,
liquid and powdered materials.
The immense freedom of AM has
led to Buchli’s argument that it is
the digital file (suffixed .stl), “the
immaterial digital code,” that is the
most stable aspect of AM” (Buchli, 2010: 279.) Thus, the code,
rather than the physical object, is
the artefact. This object analysis
will study the .stl file “Penrose3.
stl,” formed by Thingverse.com
user Chylld. The 3D digital model
described by the ASCII code was
viewed in the open source programme Replicator G.
The Technique and
Technology
The technology behind
Penrose3.stl allows it to transcend
the traditional constraints of materiality. Penrose3.stl was created
using computer aided design
(CAD) software which ranges
from the free Google SketchUp,
easy to use and explained by a free
instructional video series, to the
expensive and more powerful AutoCAD. Using the software interface, 3D shapes are assembled and
manipulated, symbolizing physical
geometry. The .stl (standard triangulation language) file is native
to CAD software and is used to
translate the three-dimensional
drawingsinto physical objects. The
file represents the surface geometry of a three dimensional object
without colour or texture in both
ASCII and binary codes using
vectors that describe shapes in an
x, y, z plot. “.stl” files are bound
to the constraints of the physical
world as the file is used in AM to
create a solid, physical representation of the digitally conceived
shape using fluid materials such
as plastics, powdered polymers,
metals, glass, ceramics, edible
mediums and even human cells
(Campbell et al., 2011.) The technologies are diverse and include
selective laser sintering andfused
deposition modelling which work
by building up softened material
that hardens, and stereo lithography, which works by curing liquid
material using lasers or UV lights.
The adding of micro-layer upon
micro-layerenables AM to form
complex shapes with very few
geometric limitations compared to
traditional manufacturing.
This technology, which
allows for the bypassing of manual
labour in the production of material objects, has profound implica-
Sensory Anthropology
tions for Lemonnier’s (1996) seminal understanding of the technical
process as a social representation.
AM represents a hyper-automated
neo-liberality that does not succumb to the paradoxes of inefficient technical behaviours and disrupts traditional labour relations
through its reliance on automated
technology and the possibility of
localized production – every city
could have an AM centre where a
variety of commodities could be
produced, radically changing the
current infrastructure (Buchli,
2010: 284.)
Collection History
The impossible shape we
will discuss has a rich history,
spanning from 1932 to the present day. Mathematician Rodger
Penrose popularised the impossi-
ble triangle in the 1950’s – hence
‘Penrose3’ – and artist M. C.
Escher famously used the shape in
his 1961 piece Waterfall. While we
perceive the triangle to be closed,
each two conjoined rows of boxes
appear to be physically separated
such that it would be physically
impossible for a third row of boxes
to meet both of the original two
rows at a 90 degree angle. The
most common representation
of the impossible triangle in the
physical world is a shape that does
not close and only appears to be
closed from two view points. On
9 February 2011, Ulrich Schwanitz uploaded his .stl file for this
impossible triangle toShapeways.
com, an online community and
market place for buying and selling copies of digital objects. His
triangle did not resort to the usual
optical illusions, being closed
but with almost its entire front
face resembling the impossible
#Fig 1
shape. Shapeways.com is distinct
from the open-source and free
Thingverse.com in that its consumers purchase printed copies of
users’ digital objects, with profits
going to the site’sowners and to
the designers. Schawanitz’s images of the first copies of his$70
object were posted on various
design blogs, generating interest
in how he created a closed, impossible triangle (Duann, 2011).
This led several people to post
their solutions online, including
◆
“Value systems are not
shaped by digital
technologies”
◆
Artur Tchoukanovwho posted his
.stl file for a very similar object on
Thingverse.com underthe user-
28
name Arthur83. Chylld then based
his object on Arthur83’s solution,
but made slight structural alterations (the 10-faced reverse faceas
seen above.) This had the effect
of providing an object that was
essentially the same as Schwanitz’s
for free.
On 17 February 2011,
Schwanitz sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
takedown notice, traditionally
used to protect the music, filmand
software industries, to Thingverse.
com. This marked the first time
a DMCA takedown notice was
issued over the alleged copyright
breach of adigital object and the
first time the DMCA affected AM.
Thingverse.com was forced to pull
Arthur83 and Chylld’s .stl files and
update its legal policy to comply with DMCA legislation. The
3D printing online community
attacked Schawanitz for claiming
the copyright of a shape he didn’t
exclusively own and so, under
pressure, he rescinded the DMCA
notice.While Arthur83’s object has
remained offline, Chylld’s structurally different shape was re-allowed onto the site (Duann, 2011.)
This clash represents part
of the drawn out conflict between
two factions of technologists –
‘Free and Open Source Software’
(F/OSS) developers on one side
and licenced (and ‘closed) software developers on the other.
Coleman (2013) argues that the
F/OSS movement is a political
movement which challenges the
neo-liberal commodification of
speech –speech in this definition
including the written word and
source code –through restricting
copyright laws. These activists
reformulate key liberal ideals of
access, free speech, transparency,
equal opportunity and meritocracy, which they articulate through
29
the development and distribution
of their software (Coleman, 2013.)
Kelty (2008) suggests thefree
software movement is a recursive
public and social movement that
mediates a particular relationship
between technology and society.
The movement is part of the ‘geek’
community, a public who advocate
the free building, modifying and
maintaining of software within
which and by which they associate
and create identity.
The F/OSS movement is
embodied in Penrose3.stl, through
its involvement in the first claimed
IP infringement over a .stl, digital
object. The attack on Schawanitz’s
claim for the copyright was arguably based onthe challenge that it
posed to the ideology of the F/OSS
activists on Thingverse. The material code of AM is the same as the
code that is the basis of everything
digital, and is implicated in the
same challenging of traditional
notions of property and copyright
law. As additive manufacturing
becomes increasingly prevalent,
culturally distinct understandings
of property and the Euro-American legal systems that define it
will continue to be forced into
revision by the F/OSS movement.
Additionally, ways of being in and
experiencing digital space are inherently shaped by local practices
(Coleman, 2010; Horst and Miller, 2006.) Value systems are not
shaped by digital technologies, but
instead social norms shape and
mediate the emergence of these
technologies and the use of them.
The way property is understood,
held and passed on forms part of
the different, complex value systems which exist both online and
in the physical world.
Conclusion
“Manufactus,” the Latin
origin of the word “manufacture,”
means “hand-made.” But as AM
becomes increasingly important
for the production of personal,
consumer and industrial goods,
human hands willplay a diminishing role in manufacturing.
AM does what was until recently
impossible; its digital objects are
geometrically free and immaterial, its production de-centralised
and traditional labour structures
transformed. Yet AM cannot be
called an asocial technology; the
software, shared on the internet
in the context of the F/OSS movement, plays a key role information
of community. Not only that, but
the digital object has social and
legal implications through its role
in the fight for different technology practices and property laws
that pervades digital space. This
can be viewed as intertwined with
the geek community’s identity
and ideals. Penrose3.stl embodies
these changes to the relationship
between the technological and
our social lives, and the discourse
around how these changes should
be mediated.
This “Third Industrial
Revolution” is as disruptive and
exciting as the first two for the future of the social sciences. It marks
a change in understanding of the
material and digital worlds, and
in doing so will have wider effects.
AM furthers a “de-fetishisation” of
the commodity from a production
perspective, yet further mystifies it into the complex world of
computer coding. Digital objects
present different ways of consuming and socialising technology
while contributing to the creation
of community identity, and challenge the conventional dichotomy
between the material and immaterial.
Sensory Anthropology
#Fig 1 – Penrose Triangle Illusion – Courtesy
of Chylld, taken from http://www.thingiverse.
com/thing:6513
References
Alexeev, Vlad (2011) “Impossible Triangle”
[http://impossible.info/english/articles/triangle/
triangle.html]
Betancourt, Gaspar (2012) “Legal Battles
Loom As Home 3D Printing Grows”
[http://www.wb-3d.com/2012/01/legal-battlesloomas-home-3d-printing-grows/]
Bradshaw, S et al (2010) “The Intellectual
Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing”,
(2010) 7:1 SCRIPTed 5
[http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol7-1/
bradshaw.asp]
Buchli, Victor (2010) “The prototype: presenting the immaterial”, Visual Communications (9)
pp 273-286. London:SAGE
Campbell, T et al (2011) “Strategic Foresight Report- Could 3D Printing Change the
World?”, Atlantic Council
[http://www.acus.org/files/publication_
pdfs/403/101711_ACUS_3DPrinting.PDF]
Coleman, Gabriella (2013) Coding Freedom
Oxford: Princeton University Press
Coleman, Gabriella (2010) “Ethnographic
Approaches to Digital Media”, Annual Review
of Anthropology 2010 (39):487-505
Duann (2011) “IP, 3D Printing & DMCA”
[http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/747IP,-3D-Printing-DMCA.html]
The Economist (2012) “The Third Industrial
Revolution”
Escher, M.C (1986) “The Impossible” Escher
on Escher pp135-136. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff
International.
Hanna, Peter (2011) “The next Napster?
Copyright questions as 3D printing comes of
age” for Ars Technica
[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/
news/2011/04/the-next-napstercopyright-questions-as-3d-printing-comes-of-age.ars]
Horst and Miller (2006) The Cell Phone: An
Anthropology of Communication. Oxford: Berg
Kelty (2008) Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. USA: Duke University
Press
Lemonnier, Pierre (1996) “Technology” in
A. Barnard et al Encyclopedia of Social and
Cultural Anthropology London: Routledge
McCarthy, Erin (2012) “SXSW: The Looming
Legal Battles Over 3D Printing”
[http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/
blog/sxw-thelooming-legal-battles-over-3dprinting-7333888]
Miller, Daniel (2002) “Consumption” in The
Material Culture Reader. pp 237-241. Oxford:
Berg.
Peels, Joris (2011) “Who Invented the
Penrose Triangle?” [http://i.materialise.com/
blog/entry/who-invented-the-penrosetriangle]
Thingverse.com (2012) “Intellectual property
policy”
[http://www.thingiverse.com/legal/ip-policy/]
Transcending the Five
Senses: synesthesia as a
posthuman sensory action
by Emily Daina Šaras,
Central European University
Synesthesia is a curious
condition in which the boundaries between the five human
sensory abilities – taste, touch,
sight, hearing, and smell – are
bridged and blurred. Occurrences
of synesthesia throughout history
were often dismissed as instances
of poetic expression or artistic hyperbole. Yet the documentation of
sense-mixing, much of it ignored
by the medical community until
recent decades, points to the reality of synesthesia within a small
portion of the human population.
Richard E. Cytowic M.D. argues
that the synesthetic abilities of
sense mixing are an evolutionary
vestige of the ancient past of the
human species (1993:167).Understanding human synesthesia solely
in terms of retrograde, however,
obscures the potential that this
capability has for the posthuman
future. Although the phenomenon of sense-mixing is arguably a
lingering piece of ancient mammalian, prehuman perceptive capabilities, I contend that synesthesia
is a posthuman, emergent sensory
action that reaches beyond socially
constructed sensory categories.
Furthermore, I argue that synesthesia is an important tool for employment by posthumanists, which
allows individuals, either naturally
or with the aid of technology, to
experience and utilize this phenomenon to transcend the constructed category of human. Synesthesia is often understood medically as a subjective
experience, as it is difficult to
pinpoint any physical evidence
or observable manifestations of
sense mixing (Cytowic 1993:34).
Synesthetes, as individuals who
experience synesthetic perception
are termed, experience various
unique forms of perception when
presented with sensory stimuli. Synesthetes may not be able
to distinguish different sensory
aspects from one another, such
that “a stimulus in one modality
can elicit an entire complex of
subjective impressions in another modality” (Stein, Wallace and
Stanford 2005:713). Senses that
mix may include the common five
senses, and also may incorporate
multi-dimensional experiences of
temporal and spatial perception.
As an illustrative example, below I
have provided a thickly-described
ethnographic account of my
sensory experience while listening
composer Bela Bartok’s second
movement of Music for Strings,
Percussion and Celesta.
“Only two short seconds
after I adjust the volume level on
my computer, the top left field of
my vision is pierced with ice-blue
flashes from small sparking balls.
I close my eyes, yet this action
does not stop the impingement of
the music’s sounding colors; while
the sickly-sounding violins slide
between chromatic tones, translucent orange and purple threads
weave together upon the black
backs of my eyelids. My heart rate
accelerates as my breath quickens,
30
and several blue and dark purple
shapes manifest involuntarily
tothe rhythms in which the timpani simultaneously rumbles. White
lines of the violin’s extremely
highpitched octave leaps buzz and
rumble in my ears, leaving translucent trails along the top right
edges of my peripheral vision. Even as I open my eyes, I
can feel waves of orange, red, and
purple washing back and forth
upon one another, in a strange
three-dimensional pseudo-reality
that wraps around my face and
penetrates my skin, into my sinus
cavities. The sixty-sixth measure
of the piece unfailingly brings the
strongest reaction in my vision,
ears, and throat. With my throat
tense enough that I am close to
vomiting, the musical build up
finally releases itself into a car
toonish green and yellow cascade
of bubbles across my left eye,
dancing along to an ornamented
passage played by a light-hearted
celesta. As I continue to experience the music, these sensory experiences take a physical toll upon
my body. My physical discomfort
subsiding, I am left questioning
the intensity of the last few minutes, and I press pause”.
Separate from this music-multisense synesthesia, I also
experience space-time, number-space, and color-grapheme
synesthesia. In my experience,
these sense-mixings appear to
operate in defiance of the way
that greater society presents the
sensory processes of how I should
experience the world around me.
The existence of the
five-sense classification system
obscures the possibility thatadditional perceptive abilities and
cross-sensory capabilities could
occur. The enumeration offive
senses by Aristotle was not simply
31
#Fig 1
a definition of human sensory
capabilities, but those ofall living animals (Keley 2002:8; Hellner-Roazen 2009:163). We now
know this to be a miscount of the
capabilities of many living species
that include echolocation, magnetic sensation, infrared detection
and many other sense modalities
(Keeley 2002:10-11). During the
centuries since, thinkers such as
Tomas Campanella and Rene Descartes questioned the number of
countable, separate senses and the
range of possible human perception – yet, over time, the common
understanding of the number of
human senses has returned to the
original Aristotelian five.
The fascination with the
five human senses has been sustained throughout history in part
because of the imagination of five
distinct sense organs – the eyes,
ears, nose, mouth, and skin –that
functioned to capture and embody
these separate sensory types. Brian
Keeley proposes that a sensory
modality consists of an “appropriately wired-up sense organ that
is historically dedicated to facilitating behavior with respect to an
identifiable physical class of energy”(Keeley 2002:6). The key word
in his definition, historically, hits
a central point in the discussion
of the operation of the senses: the
fact is, many physical parts of the
human body cooperate and work
interactively to synthesize and
process sensory information, yet
society and culture help us to ignore these interactions. There are
many modalities through which
the world could be potentially
perceived by a living being, and
different species of living things
have developed the biological machinery to process these particular
qualitive and quantitative facets of
their surroundings. Allowing ourselves to break with the concept
that senses are discrete categories
of perception operated by specific
sense organs, the potentiality for
sensory cross-talk, synesthesia,
and new modes of perceiving the
world become possible. Synesthetes seem relatively unaware of
their perceptive differences until
confronted by the common or
‘correct’ systems of perception,
those that are taught through
society and reinforced culturally.
It follows that the conceptualization of five senses, which operate
distinctly from one another, is
socially constructed.
The syndrome of synesthesia has been documented medically throughout the last several
centuries (Cytowic 1993:7), yet
scientists still debate the neurology behind this sense-mixing. Is the
synesthetic sensory experience an
access point for synesthetes, and
the individuals that study them,
into a deeper reality of human
cognition – one that is latently
available to humans? If so, a synesthetic experience could be understood primordially, as a relic of an
ancient pre-human existence that
is present in the brain or broader
sensory processing systems of
Sensory Anthropology
synesthetes. Richard E. Cytowic
considers synesthetes to be “cognitive fossils…fortunate to retain
some awareness, however slight, of
something that is so fundamental
to what it means to be human, but
mammalian!” (Cytowic 1993:167).
The occurrence of a rare few
members of the human population who naturally and involuntarily experience mixed sensory
responses remains mysterious.
At this point, a paradox
arises; on the one hand, synesthesia might be a resurfacing vestige
of a biologically pre-human, early
mammalian sensory ability, and
on the other hand, this perceptive
activity with an ancient past can
act as the gateway to a futuristic
posthuman sensory experience.
Posthumanism is an intellectual
movement that seeks to actualize
an empowerment of individuals
beyond the category of humanness. It strives to “enable us to
transcend our physical and biological limitations as embodied
beings, ushering in a new phase
of evolution”(Wolfe 2010). Without any genetic changes, one can
embrace an evolution of humans
into something beyond their
self-definition as cognitive, sensory bodies; humans would be able
to perceive without categorization.
A posthumanist may develop
computer-aided methods through
which it is possible to temporarily
disable their brain’s own barriers
for separating sensory information in a controlled fashion, or
they may take one dose of a drug
such as LSD to achieve the same
monitored, temporally-limited
effect. For a longer-lasting experience, perhaps the segments of the
normal human brain that process
sensory data without categorizing
it by sense type (Stein, Wallace
and Stanford 2005:714) could be
permanently altered through a
technological implant. Such surgery may be enhanced through extended use of targeted drugs that
inhibit the rest of the brain from
typologizing the sense information it receives. Movingbeyond the
classification system of perceptive
potentiality, an altered human
body may be the method through
which human beings can cross
into a posthuman sensory experience, evolving within the span of a
single lifetime.
By understanding the reality of synesthesia for some, and
through exploration of the potentiality to induce it in others, I argue that the boundaries that have
separated the socially constructed
human senses for centuries will
eventually be erased. Sense-mixing – a window on perception’s
operations in the pre-human past
– must be understood as a reality
and a potential for all humans to
experience. Stretching into both
the pre-human past and the posthuman future, the occurrence of
synesthesia links humanity to the
sensory processes of other animals
while simultaneously rendering
the Classical notion of what it
means to be human increasingly
obsolete.
#Fig 1 - “Study for Composition VII” by Wassily
Kandinsky, 1913 - Courtesy of Moedermens,
2010
http://www.flickr.com/photos/heleenmeijer/4378528505/
References
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Sublime and Beautiful. London and New
York: Routeledge, 2008 [1757].
Cytowic, Richard E. The Man Who Tasted
Shapes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press,1993.
De Rosa, Raffaella. Descartes and the Puzzle
of Sensory Representation. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
DeLanda, Manuel. The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011.
Dror, Otinel. “Techniques of the Brain and
the Paradox of Emotions, 1880-1930.” Sci
Context: Dec 2001, Vol 14(4):643-60.
Echo, Umberto “The Aesthetic Idea in Ancient
Greece.” in On Beauty: A History of a Western
Idea. Great Britain: Random House, 2004.
Freud, Sigmund (Strachey, James, trans.).
Civilization and Its Discontents. New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 1961.
Heller-Roazen, Daniel. The Inner Touch:
Archeology of a Sensation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Zone Books, 2009.
Keeley, Brian L. “Making Sense of the Senses: Individuating Modalities in Humans and
Other Animals”. The Journal of Philosophy,
Vol. 99, No. 1. (Jan., 2002), pp. 5-28.
[http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%2
8200201%2999%3A1%3C5%3AMSOTSI%
3E2.0.CO%3B2-M]
Keeley, Brian L. “The role of neurobiology in
differentiating the senses”.Oxford Handbook
of Philosophy and Neuroscience, J. Bickle, ed.
London: Oxford UP, 2009.
Maurer, D., and Maurer, C. The World of the
Newborn. New York: Basic Books. 1988.
Stein, Barry E., Mark T. Wallace, and Terrence R. Stanford. Chapter 22: “Brain Mechanisms for Synthesizing Information From
Different Sensory Modalities”. In Blackwell
Handbook of Sensation & Perception. Edited
by E. Bruce Goldstein. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Pubishing, 2005.
Wolfe, Cary. “What is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press Blog”. 2010
[http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2010/03/
cary-wolfe-what-isposthumanism.html]
32
Venerating the Dead: Bisayaship in
Contemporary Borneo
by Alice Cottle, University of St Andrews
Foreword
A glimpse into one of the events,
recounted in a larger project
(“Venerating the Dead: Bisayaship
in Contemporary Borneo”), this
article aims to employ a sense of
real time spectatorship, for the
reader, of the event as it unfolds.
Born and raised in Limbang,
Borneo, Iok is a bona fide Bisaya.
Her elderly mother, Yadu (“grandmother”), and extended family
remain in Limbang.
“All Bisaya, living and
dead, are cousins. We
are one” - Iok.
33
A gravesite has, for many,
a magical agency: a space that
provides a platform for strengthening social ties between the
living and the dead, on the one
hand, and amongst the living, on
the other. The sense of communality amongst the Bisaya is such
that one cannot exist alone in one’s
grave.
It was time to “go see Yaki”
(“grandfather”). With machetes,
food and alcohol in hand, fourteen of us embarked by canoe,
upstream. Yadu’s (grandmother’s)
lineage was the first gravesite
reached. It is overgrown and desolate: a forbidden place rarely visited. Locals say that the gravesites
are close enough to kampong,
but not too close, for the forest
is believed to be perilous. The
only means of gaining access to
the gravesite was through “group
clearing”. “Clearing” the site is
significant because it requires collective effort. For this reason, the
grave visit is only carried out once
a year and the prohibitive condition is temporarily reversed: the
site is made joyful and welcoming.
There were about 200
1
tombs at the matrilineal site, each
containing up to 20 generations,
but it was difficult to know precisely how many, as names are
not typically recorded. Some of
them had low shelters, and others
marked by tombstone or crucifix.
Aside from honouring the dead,
Bisaya greet other community
members thereto clear the graves.
After locating Yadu’s deceased
husband’s (Yaki) tomb, each family
member began to clear the remnants of last year’s gifts, and other
debris, to be replaced by new gifts
(below).
The women, from each
household, prepare the food offerings. Iok’s eldest sister had cooked
Yaki’s favourite nasi curry the
night before. A small cup of soya
juice was poured and placed at the
foot of Yaki’s tombstone, alongside
some cigarettes, a bottle of whisky
and some Pringles crisps, said to
be some of Yaki’s guilty pleasures.
Once the food was offered, family members grouped around the
tomb and ate the leftover food,
the idea being that the gift must
be shared with Yaki as though he
were still alive. Beer cans were
opened and handed around the
group, for sipping2. What remained was poured onto Yaki’s
grave.
#Fig 1: Group clearing
#Fig 2: Steven and Latipah clearing
grave
#Fig 3: Dayang at the open grave
#Fig 4: Iok, burning fake money at
Yaki’s grave
Student ethnography
Iok and her sister Latipah
lit long candle sticks, sticking
them on top of the tomb with
some Chinese incense sticks. The
group’s children were handed
wads of toy paper money which
were then laid and set alight
beside the tombstone. Several
copper coins had been glued on
to the base of the tombstone. Iok
referred to them as Yaki’s “pocket money”. The paper money is
burnt so that symbolic wealth may
cross over to the spirit world. The
coins, however, represent a wealth
“transfer” to the spirit world. Both
materials are symbolic, but the
pennies have actual, though small,
value and are treated accordingly. Above Yaki’s tomb dangled a
weathered travelling bag. When
he was buried, they dressed him in
his best khaki trousers and Hawaiian t-shirt, as though anticipating
an important journey. To cross
into the afterlife, Yaki needed his
travelling bag: containing clothes,
a passport, two tin openers and
a machete for protection. These
preparatory acts signify a gift or
tribute to the dead person. The
offerings which are made on the
day provide an opportunity for the
living to continue to make gifts to
the dead.
Also, the spirits would
have needed to decipher Yaki’s
identity, since he was buried
with his mother-in-law instead
of his own patrilineal group. It
is believed, therefore, that Yaki
introduced himself to the spirits
on arrival. “When people die,
they mostly die at home...if they
are lucky. If we foresee the death,
those who are far away get sent
for... and the house becomes full!
When Yaki died, he went “somewhere”... he was in a good place.
At school this was called heaven
and hell, I am not sure if that is the
place my ancestors knew. We call
it the ‘spirit world’” (Iok).
The spirit world seems
to set itself apart from Christian
ideals of heaven and hell. Christianised Bisaya remain relatively
indifferent to ideas of heaven.
Perhaps, because the spirit world
is described as “somewhere”
other than “here”, and heaven is
under-emphasised, it not only
suggests the ambiguity of Bisaya
afterlife, but also shows that Bisaya
and non-Bisaya understandings
of death may still be in conflict.
Further, this may suggest a connection to the history of Bisaya
colonialism, from which these
ideas may have come. The Chris-
◆
“This is my uncle,
Frank”. Reaching his
hand inside, John
pulled out a wet skull
covered in black hair,
followed by a femur
and forearm”
◆
tian emphasis of heavenly spaces
does not deny that other cultures
formed similar ideas. Yadu’s generation still characterises death
as either “good” or “bad”. It is
difficult to interpret new concepts
from what existed prior to contact
with missionaries. From Iok’s perspective, the Bisaya spirit world,
an imagined parallel space that
mirrors the living world, is neither
necessarily “up” nor “down”, but
an analogous cosmos.
#Fig 5: Family photo
#Fig 6: Child burns fake money next
to the grave
#Fig 7: Cousin John and the Skull
#Fig 8: Cousin John with skull and
femur
34
35
“Frank... he is with us” his body from “drying up”. Sisters,
Dayang and Latipah, took turns
– John
the Bisaya, remains ajar; my first
steps were to pull up the shades
and let in the light.
The following morning,
the group trekked uphill to the
patrilineal gravesite, repeating
the process of the previous day.
Iok’s great-grandfather’s tomb
was similar to Yaki’s, although the
gravesite was on a higher hilltop.
Since Bisaya are usually buried
with their parents, Iok’s grandfather was buried with several
patriline descendants. Next to the
tomb, however, was a half buried
lid less ceramic pot. Iok’s cousin
John introduced me: “This is my
uncle, Frank”. Reaching his hand
inside, John pulled out a wet skull
covered in black hair, followed
by a femur and forearm. Frank
was buried in the pot nearly 70
years ago (pictured). Rainwater
(hasam), collected over time,
had preserved the bones and the
hair on Frank’s skull. Ceramic
pots were used when coffins were
difficult and expensive to acquire.
Although the pot contains one
individual, it is buried next to a
relative’s tomb and in the same
earth.
Water has a particular
significance to Bisaya. The river is
an invaluable source since Yadu’s home has no access to water
mains. For the most part, tanks
are used to collect hasam. As it
falls, hasam enters the domestic
sphere, and it is collected, filtered
and ingested. Moreover, hasam
falls in its purest form, between
the sky and the house and so is
deemed clean and good for cooking nasi. Further, Limbang River is
still crucial to daily life: for washing, fishing and cooking, “It is our
life-stream”(Joseph).
Frank’s pot opening allows
hasam to enter directly, to prevent
#Figs 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 - courtesy of the author
to pour the water from the pot
onto my face, hands and feet (see
below). As they poured, Iwas instructed to pray for “good fortune”.
In the same way that it preserved
Frank’s skull, hasam had the power to cleanse us from “bad”, allowing us to wish for “good” and,
perhaps, more significantly, to be
at one with the ancestors. Hasam
had passed from Frank’s body to
us, connecting the living agent to
the soul of the dead. The hasam
that preserves the dead is the
hasam that provides for the living.
Frank’s potent hasam was, therefore, charged with life, wisdom
and the possibility of bringing
good fortune. As we left the site,
relatives said goodbye: “Yaki, bring
us good fortune”. The fusion of the
desire for good futures and good
fortunes was strongly articulated.
At the closing of the grave visit,
village space, wilderness and the
restored barrier between the two,
become real and meaningful. The grave visit practice
works in reflecting wider characteristics of Bisaya society, revealing, firstly, conflicting understandings of death between the Bisaya
and non Bisaya, potentially arising
from a history of brutal imperialism. Secondly, it uncovers the
importance and significance of
water to the Bisaya tribe. Finally,
grave-visiting exposes a practice
of active resolution for the restoration of opposites – reconditioning the universality between the
living and the dead, whilst simultaneously repairing and re-facilitating the barrier between village
space and wilderness, the former
encompassing the living, the latter,
the dead. The window for further
exploration, into the world of Animism and burial practice amongst
Student ethnography
London, Unscripted: The Phenomenon of
Liminality in Contemporary British Society
by Katherine Relle, London School of Economics
Introducing Liminality
Liminality. Anthropologists
use the concept of liminality to
describe the stateof being after
undergoing a huge change. Liminality is a transition period. As
such, one might consider graduating from university, moving to a
new city, or undergoing a cultural
rite of passage, such as marriage,
to be a liminal period in his or her
life. These times can be confusing, hard, exciting, or downright
boring—but they are nothing less
than unpredictable.
In the early twentieth
century, the concept of liminality
was introduced into the field of
anthropology by Arnold Van Gennep in his work titled Les Rites de
Passage. Van Gennep describes
rites of passage in terms of coming-of-age rituals which are manifest through a three-part structure:
1) separation, 2) a liminal/middle
period, and 3) re-assimilation.
Years later, Victor Turner expanded on Van Gennep’s
concept of liminality in his work,
“Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period”. Turner focuses entirely
on Van Gennep’s middle stage,
the liminal period, noting that
the status of liminality is socially and structurally ambiguous.
Turner defines liminality to be
the following: “Liminality may
perhaps be regarded as the Nay to
all positive structural assertions,
but as in some sense the source of
them all, and, more than that, as a
realm of pure possibility whence
novel configurations of ideas and
relations may arise” (1967: 97).
For Turner, liminality is neither
here nor there; it is the betwixt
and between defined by structural
invisibility.
Today, we see that the
liminal condition is not one that
is limited to describe individual
human experience. The drama of
liminality can be felt on a much
larger scale at the greater socio-political level. Turner alludes
to this definitional expansion
when he writes about the concept
of comunitas, or human inter-relatedness. Comunitas connotes the
liminal process at a grand level.
Setting the Stage: The
Relationship between
Concept and Society
According to Turner’s
broad definition, Great Britain
seems to have been in its very
own state of liminality over the
past few years. A country does not
undergo small rites of passage, as
do individuals moving through
their own life stages. A country is
a more stable entity. Yet, a country’s stability is, every so often,
rocked by the amalgamation of
individual experiences when such
becomes large enough. The total
sum of liminal experiences owned
by those living in and associating
with Great Britain has affected the
nation in contemporary times.
A country’s spells of liminality are inevitable and incremental for nationhood. In terms of
Great Britain, the nation’s projection is unarguably less certain
than it has been in the recent past
for reasons such as the European
economic condition, rising unemployment rates, and concern
over the institution of a coalition
government. What does the future
hold for Great Britain? What parts
of this projection can be controlled? What parts can onlybe left
to chance? These questions define
the liminal condition.
The Drama Unfolds:
Reflecting on Liminal
London
In the late summer 2011,
London’s streets were littered with
unrest in the London Riots. In the
fall 2011, London’s prestigious St.
Paul’s Cathedral became a campsite for economic dissatisfaction
in the Occupy London Movement.
Throughout the winter 2012,
Prime Minister David Cameron
was pegged by the Euro-zone for
making the UK financially disconnected from the rest of the
European economy. Images in
and around London are constant
reminders that the past few years
have not been easy. “Keep Calm
and Carry On” became more
than a retro ditty to plaster across
t-shirts and mugs. The slogan
became a much-needed reminder
that liminal phases are just that—
phases to be overcome.
Paved by occasions of turbulence, the Diamond Jubilee
36
◆
“The British are often
reluctant to celebrate
their nation until they
see others doing it, then
they all join in - and it
is amazing.”
◆
#Fig 1 (left) - Occupy movement outside St.
Paul’s Cathedral
#Fig 2 (centre page) - Decorations for the
Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee
#Fig 3 (bottom of page) - The mall outside
Buckingham Palace
All courtesy of the author
37
Student ethnography
was welcomed only with feelings
of ambiguity. Even the media was
sceptical about the turnout for
all the planned events. The rainy
weather report did not improve
their forecast. Indeed, an air of
hesitation loomed as I walked
around Central London on Friday
afternoon just before the start of
the extended Jubilee weekend. The
streets were lined with bunting,
but closing-down sales and boarded-up shops filled my mind with
images of austerity. I was left with
little faith that the weekend would
live up to its own worth.
I have since re-evaluated
my thoughts on the impact of the
Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. As a
Sky News correspondent put it,
“The British are often reluctant to
celebrate their nation until they
see others doing it, then they all
join in—and it is amazing.” The
correspondent was correct. On
the days proceeding from Friday,
London expanded like a bubble
gleaming with red, white, and
blue iridescence until it finally
burst with British pride on Tuesday afternoon. The Mall outside
Buckingham Palace was filled with
Britons, Australians, Canadians,
Americans, and so many others
from around the globe. There was
something for everyone to celebrate: Great Britain, the changes
and continued traditions of the
Monarchy, the Queen’s dedication
to her country and the Commonwealth, the start of summer,
history itself…the list goes on.
Walking through Piccadilly Circus on Tuesday afternoon, I
could barely get close to the Mall,
let alone Buckingham Palace, for
the final fly-over event. People
were voluntarily packed together to the point of discomfort—
though, no one cared. Thousands
shared this experience with me
as we inched our ways closer and
closer to a single far-off balcony.
We could not see a thing, but we
made up for lack of sight with
what we felt.
Strangers shared more
than umbrellas. They shared
stories about being present at the
Coronation, about that time they
met the Queen, and about how far
they travelled to experience this
very weekend. Union Jack brollies coloured the sky and hardly
kept people out of the rain. Not
a person was dry by the time the
Royals stepped out onto the Palace
Balcony—and neither were their
eyes.
Even the media commentators broke down, choking up
while crowds erupted in applause
as the Queen graciously waved.
When asked why people were somoved, many simply replied it was
because of what the celebration
itself stood for: community, pride,
and history. The Jubilee meant
something different to everyone.
The common thread was that no
one was forced toturn up on the
Mall this rainy Tuesday. The bonds
of a country embodied inRoyal
symbolism had shone through
in ways no one seemed to have
expected in the midst of Great
Britain’s bout with liminality.
Encore: The Future of
a Nation
Britain might not be completely
out of its liminal phase. Nonetheless, the crowds that turned up in
London for the Diamond Jubilee
were undeniably different than
those plaguing the media over
the past few years. The people
in the crowds were not rioters;
they were fans. The people in the
crowds were not protestors; they
were admirers. The people in the
crowds were not criticisers of the
British way; they were celebrators
of it. The only thing rogue about
these crowds was a single runaway
horse.
I feel honoured to have
witnessed the coming together of
all Britain’s actors—young, old,
Tory, Labour, Royalist, Republican, native, tourist. The list cannot
be exhausted. The Archbishop of
Canterbury spoke in reminiscence
about the “splendour and the drama of the Coronation,” which was
without a doubt recreated on the
great British stage, set in London
2012.
Sixty years after the last
Coronation, the British have a
chance to reflect and understand
that liminality is a real concept,
affecting the growth of every
entity. The liminal phase is not an
easy one to live through as it must
be met with a degree of improvisation, but London’s show-stopping
theatrics continue to remind us
that a heartfelt applause is waiting
at the end of every liminal spell.
As audiences anxiously await the
encore of Great Britain’s future, I
think they should feel comforted
by the impressive sense of nationhood expressed at the Jubilee
and relieved by the certainty that
the condition of liminality can
strengthen and develop entities
larger than individual people. The
phenomenon’s affect on a country
is real, evidenced by the standing
ovation that closed out the Jubilee
weekend. I look forward to seeing
the British continue to pull together to re-assimilate into a stronger
and wiser post-liminal nation.
References
Gennep, Arnold Van. The Rites of Passage.
Chicago: University of Chicago), 1960.
Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal
Period in Rites de Passage”, in The Forest of
Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1967.
38
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Israeli Arab
by Eli Philip,
Brandeis University
An Arab looking man
peered through the window of
the car which has just stopped
next to me along a busy highway.
I nervously glanced at the friend
I was hitchhiking with as the man
announced his destination “Haifa.” My friend’s concerned look
spelled out my thoughts – Haifa is
a mixed city, he could be Arab…
Yet knowing hitching a ride on
this road is not very easy, we decided to take the risk and entered
the car. “You know, it’s a good
thing you’re wearing those kippot
(yarmulkes),” the man started, “I
wouldn’t have stopped otherwise,
you’d never know if it’s not our
cousins looking for a ride.”His
knowing grin immediately dispelled our fears, and the ride
proceeded comfortably. Yet, as we
said our thank yous and exited,
the man’s statement kept reverberating in my head.
The State of Israel is
majority Jewish, with a significant 20% minority Palestinian
Arab population. Two interesting
phenomena exist simultaneously
between the Jewish majority and
the Arab minority, a systematic
‘othering’ of the minority and a
staunch reverberation of their
place as equal citizens. This leads
to varying degrees of subtle (or
quite overt) ‘Jewish privileges.’
The reason for the ‘othering’ can
be attributed to the Israeli control
of the West Bank, where a small
number of Jewish Israeli citizens
occupy a large population of
Palestinian non-citizens, living in
constant tension and competition.
The occupation produces images
of the Palestinians as the Enemy,
39
and these predictably spill over the
border, attaching to the ethnically
identical Israeli Arabs.
The process of ‘othering’
starts with the occupation. A land
contested by those who believe
it their religious duty to go live
there, and those who just do. The
conflict that arises between the
two groups is more than a physical
one, it is a clash of narratives, a
battle in which the sides are truth
and fabrication. “It is not ‘the
middle of the West Bank’,” a reproaching settler quoted me after
I explained to a friend (in English)
our destination, “it is Jewish land.
All of it!” The narrative of the
settlers sees fulfilling the duty of
settling this God-promised land
as utmost important. The land is
uniquely the Jews’ and all else who
lay claim to it are, at best, liars.
This belief excludes the
other population living on the
same land– the Palestinian Arabs
– and the effect is to stigmatize
and side line systematically. In
practice, this is easily done due
to the occupation and thus almost full control over the lives
of the Palestinians – they are
subject to the definition assigned
to them by the occupier. Sarah
Lamb describes this concept in
her work on gender and caste in
India, noting that a lower status is
ascribed to those “lacking control,
marked, disadvantaged” (Lamb,
222). In the West Bank, where the
settlers have almost full control,
the Palestinians are “passive receivers” (Lamb, 222)to be defined
by the dominant culture as it sees
fit. The most common accusation
I heard while hitchhiking through
the West Bank is that “Arabs are
violent, they’ll only learn through
violence.” Violence is inherent
to Palestinians – or as observed
by Lamb “Women are always
impure… Men are always pure”
(Lamb, 221), it is just the way they
are.
As Lamb notes, status is
ascribed based on many different
characteristics. These features,
such as being a Palestinian, are
“linked, in both articulated and
less conscious ways, to a person’s
◆
“but, at the end of
the day, you can’t trust
them, you just can’t
trust Arabs. I only trust
Jews.”
- retired army officer
◆
general stock or character” (Lamb,
223). And just as dark-skin in
India transcends even the strict
designations of caste, so too do the
qualities placed on Palestinians
permeate through the checkpoints
and infect the Palestinian Arab
citizens of Israel. Though the
majority moderate, mainstream
Israeli population does not share
the hard-line views of the settlers,
the notion that the land is ‘ours’
is very much present. This idea
is taught in schools right along
civic classes preaching the equality of all citizens and the values of
democracy. It is no wonder, then,
that the Israeli Arab citizens suffer
Student ethnography
would never consciously mistreat
a Druze or an Arab – that would
be oppression –most “the oppressiveness is unconscious… even
when we don’t see ourselves that
way” (McIntosh, 82).
I find that the Israeli/majority account as it stands now,
influenced by the radical narrative
of the settlers, is paradoxical and
counterintuitive to the democratic
aspect it cherishes. As the population accepts the reality of the
occupied territories as truth for Israel as well, the contention and rivalry over land is infused into the
national character of the majority.
This idea necessitates viewing the
Palestinian citizens as competitors
or aggressors who are not a part of
the collective. It in essence cancels
out the value of equal citizenship
taught in schools and replaces it
with a taken-for-granted ‘othering,’ also taught in schools. The
product is even more profound
than a ‘majority privilege’ found
in many other countries. Here, the
privilege of the Jewish majority is
subconsciously (or by the more
#Fig 1 radical, consciously) embraced as
a service to national continuity.
soldiers.“The Druze, the best fight- went, these aren’t privileges, and
In this society, “the priviers there are,” he praised, “but, at
they’re certainly not viewed as
lege to ignore less powerful peothe end of the day, you can’t trust
impeding anyone else’s rights.
ple [and]distort the humanity of
them, you just can’t trust Arabs. I
When the retired offithe holders as well as the ignored
only trust Jews.” I remember being cer speaks of his mistrust of the
groups”(McIntosh, 83) is seen as
furious at this remark, ‘these are
a great crime, yet the outcome
Druze, he simultaneously breaks
citizens who give up their lives for and reinforces the ‘othering’ begun of this crime –maintaining Jewtheir country!’, I wanted to shout,
ish majority control of the land
in the occupied territories. These
but then again, trying to hitchhike soldiers and their families are
– is celebrated as a victory. In an
on a practically deserted road late recognized as citizens, by praising absurd situation, the majority
at night did not seem like a pleas- their combat he “allows ‘them’ to
population consciously strives to
ant option. After being dropped
achieve full equality of all citizens,
be more like ‘us’” (McIntosh, 82),
off, I kept asking the question:
while subconsciously becoming
thus uniting all as members of a
how does such an amiable old
more accepting of the privileges
join enterprise. Yet, his mistrust
man, a soldier who understands
earned by mere fact of being the
provides a window to the darker
citizenship and camaraderie, beside of this narrative, in a constant ruling majority. Each time violieve such things? lence flares up in the occupied
competition over land you must
I realized, looking back
align only with ‘your’ people– the territories, large sections of the
at much of my education, that
Jewish majority forget their demothers are all different. This man
from the same ‘othering’ as their
Palestinian family living under
occupation. (Even though just the
terms used –by me too - ‘Palestinian’ or ‘Israeli Arab’ implies a
different status).
I once hitchhiked with a
retired career army officer through
northern Israel. He was sharing
with me stories of his childhood
in Argentina and his many battle
tales, when he began talking about
his experience with the Druze
(ethnically Arab, but not Muslim)
we were “taught not to recognize [Jewish/majority] privilege”
(McIntosh, 82).“[Our] schooling
gave [us] no training in seeing
[ourselves] as oppressors, as unfairly advantaged” (McIntosh, 82),
in fact we were often taught the
opposite; we earned these privileges despite being the oppressed. We
have succeeded in fulfilling our
destiny of settling the land, surviving calamity after calamity, and
have finally earned our place. This
is the natural order, the refrain
40
ocratic values and fall back on the
‘us’ vs. ‘them’ aspect of the narrative imported from those same
territories. The fact that ‘us’ should
include all citizens is no longer
relevant.
I was travelling on a bus
going from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv
after a particularly brutal terror attack had just occurred in a
Jewish settlement. The conversation around me was all about the
recent attack, when an Arab man
came on the bus and sat behind
me. Suddenly, the Jewish woman he sat down next to began to
scream, “Help! Get him away! I
don’t trust them!” until a soldier
offered to sit next to the man
instead. This moment defined the
existing situation. At best, in periods of relative calm, there is ‘only’
Jewish privilege. I can be certain
that I’ll have a conversation with
someone who trusts me, I will feel
confident and welcomed wherever
I am, I will be judged by my character and not complexion, and I
will be (almost) certain to successfully hitchhike. At worst, democracy and equality are thrown out
– the majority population doesn’t
only accept privilege, it demands
exclusive domination.
#Fig 1 - “Kippots in Jerusalem”. Courtesy Max
Harris 2012. http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxharrisphotography/7805783872/
References
Lamb, Sarah. 2005. “The Politics of Dirt and
Gender: Body Techniques in Bengali India,”
in Dirt, Undress and Difference: Critical
Perspectives on the Body’s Surface. Adeline
Masquelier, ed. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
University Press.
McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Applying Cultural
Anthropology: An Introductory Reader. McGraw-Hill. NY, 2009.
On Marriage and Mutton: the difficulties
of the first field experience
by Hedwig Waters, Free University of Berlin
41
I hadn’t gone running in
months and keenly felt the itch
for movement. After two months
of living in Mongolian nomadic
households out on the steppe, I
was going to make the most of my
next two weeks in a stable village,
including the bathhouse located
next door. I hadn’t showered in
three weeks and decided that this
morning was prime for me to
take my first jog – and subsequent
shower – since starting my anthropology fieldwork in the countryside.
Knowing full well I
wouldn’t need it, I set my alarm
the preceding evening, but had
been characteristically woken by
the crowing of roosters and a new
unusual sound – the bleating of
sheep. Excited for the run and after a breakfast of milk tea and yak
yogurt, I strapped on my flimsy,
garishly yellow Nike knockoffs
that I had bought at a Chinese
surplus store in the Gobi desert. I
found them pliable enough to stuff
into my giant pack, yet they bore
enough resemblance to sneakers that I didn’t feel totally guilty
about jogging over the rocky
terrain in them. Perfect. I pushed open the door of the
yurt and took a careful step over
the threshold, since stumbling
could forebode a bad start to the
day. I was the guest of a respected family in Arvaikheer, a town
of 25,000 people smack in the
middle of Mongolia. Many Mongolian countryside families who
had renounced nomadism for a
sedentary lifestyle eventually built
a cabin on a small parcel of land.
Thus, Zaya, my research partner,
and I had been granted the usage
of the family’s old yurt, while they
aboded in their cabin next door.
As grateful as we were, nights
in the grasslands could get quite
chilly in an empty yurt sans stove
and furnishings. But we made do.
As I circled the yurt to-
wards the gate to leave the plot, I
found the culprit for my abrupt
wakening. Two beady eyes stared
back at me from behind the yurt,
where a large and robust sheep
had been tethered to a shack.
Always an animal lover, I approached the sheep to pet it, but
the frightened creature shirked
away from my hand. It look terrified. Poor thing, I thought, I’ll feed
it when I return, and left the gate
of the compound.
A young Caucasian
woman aimlessly running across
Mongolian pagoda-dotted grasslands can cause quite a few jaws
to drop. Recently misinterpreting
my attempts to strike a downward
dog on a hilltop as an endeavor to
kill a snake, one of my nomadic
fathers had anxiously implored
Sarnai to run and help me. My
culturally constructed workout
compulsion suddenly seemed silly
to me. I bolted as if to outrun the
swarm of eyes that followed my
Student ethnography
trajectory.
An hour later I skidded
into the compound – cheeks
aflame from my sprint across the
steppe. Instead of a sheep to greet
me, a worried Sarnairan out of the
yurt, flailing her arms and apologizing. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”she
said, “I tried my best to stop it, but
they wouldn’t listen and I tried,
I’m sorry!” Upon my asking what
on earth she was talking about,
she just responded: “I tried to fix
throw up and quickly exited the
yurt. A mixture of disgust, shame,
anger and resignation swelled up
in me. “How dare they do that!” I
thought. They know we have no
stove and no way to heat the yurt
at night. We have to close the flaps
in order to keep the heat in– so
the strong smell of freshly slaughtered sheep carcass was to be our
nightly companion?
I began the march to the
family’s cabin to give them a piece
up for this. I tried to suppress my
fervor and entered the door to the
family’s cabin. My entrance was
ignored by the family and two
guests who had arrived early for
the wedding. They were making
buuz, traditional Mongolian meat
dumplings, and the room was
eerily silent for the number of
occupants present.
I awkwardly removed my
shoes and sat down in the corner,
while the matriarch of the family,
◆
“A young
Caucasian woman
aimlessly running
across Mongolian
pagoda-dotted
grasslands can cause
quite a few jaws to
drop”
◆
it… You’ll see,” and made a beeline
towards our yurt.
My curiosity was peaked.
Heart fluttering, I entered and was
immediately knocked back by an
overwhelming stench. I had found
our lost sheep. Hanging, skinned
and gutted, from the yurt rafters.
The last of the death throes still
released an occasional twitch from
its body as blood seeped onto the
floor.
Now I understood what
Sarnai had meant about ‘fixing’
the problem: She had hung a small
towel in front of the sheep in the
line of view from my sleeping bag.
From that angle, it looked like a
squared piece of cloth with four
legs sticking out. Cute.
I had to repress the urge to
#Fig 1 - Courtesy of Nicolas Mirguet, 2010
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scalino/5654145799/
of my mind when Sarnai literally threw her body in my path. I
was going to tell them to remove
the sheep, but she begged me to
reconsider. The family was marrying off their oldest son in a few
days and several sheep had to be
slaughtered for the occasion, she
explained. The wedding party
must hang the drying mutton
against the rafters of a traditional Mongolian yurt, where it can
assume the crisscrossed, rounded
shape of the timber. And since
my guest family now lived in the
cabin, our yurt was the natural
lodging of the carcasses.
Carcasses? So there were
to be more. Oh god. I didn’t sign
a sovereign 75-year-old woman,
brought me milk tea. I nodded silently and accepted the tea according to tradition with my right arm
supported by my left. Sarnai and I
glanced at each other, and I began
to collect my thoughts. W
We can’t sleep with the
sheep in the yurt, I told the
woman in Mongolian. She didn’t
answer. Nobody answered. Undeterred, I continued. We can’t
sleep there because it gets so cold
and the smell is too strong to not
let air in. I didn’t want to mention
that the smell of freshly slaughtered mutton made me nauseous,
since that would be considered
disrespectful. I was walking on
42
verbal shards of glass.
The matriarch just shook
her head and the crow’s feet
around her eye stightened in chagrin. Her son was getting married
and there was no other way. When
I asked if we could have more
blankets to withstand the cold, she
said that all the blankets were for
the wedding party. When I asked
if we could have a stove, she said
the last stove had been sent to the
local naadam, the yearly midsummer festival. When I asked if the
sheep could be hung in a neighbor’s yurt, she said that would
be disrespectful. The proverbial
cultural landmines exploded all
around me and I could see no way
out.
Sarnai’s eyes entreated me
to stop. I did, internally defeated.
It slowly dawned on me that I had
just witnessed a cultural clash of
magnanimous proportions. Here
I was, a staunchly individualistic,
independent woman, trying to
assert myself in a highly collectivized, traditional society. And I
was not only a guest, but young,
female, and foreign, which left me
with very little power to wield.
It was either me or the sheep.
On occasion, the husband
of the matriarch had caught me
feeding my second breakfast of
sheep stomach to the dog. His
tired eyes would sparkle as he said,
“If you drink the water, you follow
the rules,” a well-known Mongolian adage. Yet suddenly, this
positive memory turned sour as
I sawthe round of downward cast
eyes surrounding me.
I was stuck. My anthropological training felt lacking. Years
of carefully controlled classroom
discussions had merely left me
with a reserve of politically correct refutations. Those discussions
always seemed to digress into the
same postmodern shoulder shrug:
There is no right answer. Context
is everything. Do your best.
I was torn between a desire
to respect another’s culture and a
visceral gag reflex. A cornucopia
of thoughts and feelings started
running through my head as my
body sat still, motionless, betraying none of the activity inside. I
wanted to do what was right by
them, but I felt like I was being
disrespected.
We still believe that cultures are tucked away like tea into
#Fig 2 - Courtesy of Stephane L, 2012 http://www.flickr.com/photos/frenchster/7855808212/
43
teabags –little perfectly isolated
packets that reproduce a specific
taste. Combinations painstakingly
perfected by history and not to be
meddled with. But globalization is
tearing at those seams, creating a
hodgepodge of flavor, sound and
color. And so I wished we didn’t
have to stand on opposite sides of
a chasm of difference. I wished we
could have met each other in the
middle.
Sarnai and I went for a
walk so we could think. And
within a minute of re-entering
the yurt, the matriarch appeared
as if conjured. She sat down and
drank the milk tea we offered her.
The wedding was a busy affair,
she said, and she would need to
offer the yurt as lodging to other
guests during the festivities. So, in
the most polite and indirect way
possible, she kicked us out.
The dead sheep had won.
Theories and Methods
Anthropocentric perspective and
"uniqueness" as the underlying
principles in the human origins research
by Ana Majkic, University of Belgrade
Open minded thinking
about ramifications of evolution
not just scientifically, but also
philosophically, drastically challenged the static view of the world
and anthropocentric perspectives.
However, although challenged,
the anthropocentric perspective
has not yet been fully overcome.
Despite the fact that modern
biology is so deeply connected
with evolutionary perspectives
in biological anthropology, and
the fact that scientific data indicate a close relationship between
ourselves and the great apes, a
legacy of viewing human beings as somehow “special” still
persist. Chapouthier (Šaputije
2012) writes about Cartesian and
post-Cartesian influences on the
view regarding the place of human
beings in nature. He notices how
this 17th century legacy of perceiving animals as “objects” and
automatons still influences modern thought and life styles despite
scientific and especially biological
data. He also notices how anthropocentric assumptions present a
view of the human being as the
center of the world, and absolute
master of it (Šaputije 2012: 24-28).
Anthropocentrism can manifest in
many different ways, but it is especially illustrative to see how this
tendency intertwines with the interpretations in the field of human
evolution, and more specifically,
origins of modern cognition.
Are we unique?
Evolution of the human
beings is an important subject of
research not just for scientists,
but for all humans intellectually interested in questions of
who we are and where we come
from. Paleoanthropology and
Paleolithicarchaeology immensely contributed to the scientific
understanding of our species’
evolutionary history, but is that
sufficient to answer the very old
riddle of what it is, or means, to be
human? Some theories connected supposed human uniqueness
with various phenomena ranging from tool-use, language (or
rather symbolic communication)
and self-consciousness, as well as
bipedalism. Studies in primatology showed that none of these is
completely and utterly specific to
humans, as the great apes (and
even some other animals when it
comes to tool use) are capable of
(or showing dispositions for) it to
some extent (Birx 2010: 596; Tucić
1999: 100-139). Some argue that
these discoveries point toward the
existence of “precultures” among
social animals (Šaputije 2012).
That perspective does not deny the
special character of human culture, but it does challenge the idea
of a deep gulf separating ourselves
from the rest of animals. Similarly,
Sedikides et al. (2006)argue that
the emergence of some human behavioral characteristics was not a
sudden event, but rather a continuous process, implying that traces
of these behavioral characteristics
existed among other species.
Perhaps the whole question on the uniqueness and essence of our species is misplaced,
and in some degree reflects traces
of essentialist perspectives which
dominated Western thought for
centuries. The idea that we are not
unique in an essentialist sense,
but very similar to the great apes,
requires understanding of its
implications. This idea is connected to the conception of species in
modern biology: a species is not
defined by a set of traits (although
similarities and differences between organisms are used as criteria) but rather as a historical entity
(Sober 2006: 189). This conception
fits well with the notion that human uniqueness is actually contained in about 6 millions of years
of evolution (Birx 2010: 596).
There is a hardly noticeable, yet important, difference
between the questions : “what it
is that makes us human”( which
expects some concrete answer in
an essentialist sense) and “what it
means to be human” – which does
not necessarily imply the idea
that the contents of the differences between ourselves and other
animals are unique to us. But even
so, do those differences mean
that we differ from apes in kind,
or in degree? Darwin, as well as
Haeckel and Huxley, believed that
the difference is in degree (Birx
2010: 589, 590). Achievements
in modern science are closer to
demonstrating this empirically.
If the difference that separates us
44
from the great apes is conceived
as merely a difference in degree,
thenwhat are the implications of
this for our understanding of the
minds of hominins from the Middle Paleolithic?
“Neanderthal the
Philosopher”? Apriorisms in the human
origins research
Some researchers think
that a quintessential change in the
behavioral repertoire of modern
humans happened with the onset
of the Upper Paleolithic, implying
a distinction between anatomical
and behavioral modernity (e.g.
Bar-Yosef2002; Mithen 1996).
Others, as Shea (2011) for example, claim that “Homo sapiens Is
as Homo sapiens Was”. Important
questions in the debate are whether the development of modern
cognition and symbolic behavior
was a rapid event, or a gradual
process, and whether symbolic behavior was a “single-” or
“multiple-species” phenomenon.
Evolution of the brain was gradual, with a steady increase in size
(Holloway et al. 2004; Sedikides et
al. 2006). There are however very
large variations in modern human
brain size and many researchers
think that this variation has no
crucial significance for modern
human behavior (Holloway et al.
2004: 12; Klawans 2008). Maybe
the crucial prerequisite besides a
relatively large brain is its internal
wiring (for a detailed overview of
the topic see, e.g. Bennett, Hacker
2003). Unfortunately, the fossil
record can’t tell us as much about
this as is needed.
The archaeological re-
45
cord does not carry self-evident
meanings. We are the ones asking
questions, and interpreting the
data. Pigments documented in the
African Middle Stone Age (see e.g.
Barham 2002; McBrearty, Brooks
2000) are sometimes considered
as indicators of symbolic behavior. The earliest burials, if they are
related to modern humans, are
usually interpreted as evidence
of symbolic thought. The same
goes for objects of personal ornamentation. But there are double
standards employed here: if we
talk about modern humans, then
data are often interpreted as being
symbolic in nature, but if we talk
about pigment use, ornaments,
and burials among Neanderthals,
then a much more critical stance
is adopted. The same tendency
underwrites the debate concerning the interpretations of anatomical data relevant to the origins
of language (for further overview
of these issues see, e.g. d' Errico
2003; d’Errico et al. 2003).
The fact that the same
standards are not used for all
available evidence most likely
has something to do with deeply
entrenched tendencies to preserve
the concept of human uniqueness,
even if it means using double
standards and making the logical
mistake of concluding something
from the lack of evidence (for
good overview of logical fallacies see, e.g. Hemlin2001; Nejgel,
Koen 1979). As we go further
back in time, less is going to be
preserved. This is reason more
for trying to extract as much as
possible evidence from the available record, instead of making
untestable conclusions from the
mere lack of it. We should not
at once acknowledge something
undemonstrated like “Neanderthal the Philosopher”, but neither
should we assume on a priori basis
alone that they were cognitively
inferior from their contemporaries
(modern humans from the Paleolithic). Whether they, or other
hominins, were different from us,
and in what degree, is a matter
that requires further empirical
investigations from many different
angles, and not anthropocentrically based apriorism. As researchers,
we should strive to be conscious of
our own underlying thoughts connected directly, but more often indirectly, with the subject of study.
All this leads us to the remark
that human evolution, as probably
most other fields of inquiries, is
interesting both scientifically and
philosophically.
Conclusion
So where are we between
the idea of “glorious Homo sapiens” (cf. Holliday 2003), latently
advocated by the Upper Paleolithic cultural revolution models
which are an archaeological way of
perpetuating the anthropocentric
legacy, and the idea of “human”
as nothing more than “a bag of
bones”, as Farber put it (Birx
2000)?
Evolutionary processes
made us self-conscious beings
capable of philosophical reflection. Our impressive cognitive
capabilities however do not grant
us the right to dismiss scientific
methodologies and make logical mistakes in order to accommodate elusive ideas about our
superiority and dominance over
the world. Instead of “investing”
our cognitive abilities into finding
“synonyms” to express (and repeat) anthropocentric and closely
connected essentialist notions, we
Theories and Methods
should embrace our capacity for
critical thought in another way.
If the anthropocentrism, as discussed here, which intermingled
with scientific theories regarding
our own evolutionary origins, has
its “roots” in certain philosophical
positions, can philosophy now
somehow help us to overcome this
legacy? Philosophy is a discipline
intimately connected with questioning (Fink 1989): the solution
is in integration, rather than rigid
separation.
We are all products of our
own time and historically created contexts. Recognizing this
fact will allow us to identify our
biases (culturally and historically
acquired, shaped by and shaping
social practices, like Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus exemplifies),
sometimes deeply hidden even
from ourselves, and strive to
overcome them in order to be
more objective. Interdisciplinarity
is also important. Specialization is
perhaps necessary in the modern
world with very diverse possible fields of study and extensive
information in any of them, but if
we stay too narrowly focused, we
might miss the chance to understand “the bigger picture”. Philosophy is of particular importance
in this, as various philosophical
positions help us keep an open
mind. This is not just useful in
solving problems and necessary
in research work, but very fulfilling too. We should strive not to
closed, but open ended view of
things, and that means reminding
ourselves that it is dynamic integrity we want to achieve, and not a
dogmatic and false security which
closes our mind to scientific investigation. Instead of continuously
expressing anthropocentrisms
using different words, but with the
same biased results, embracing
these principles will allow a more
truthful understanding of ourselves and our place in nature.
References:
Barham, L.S. (2002) “Systematic pigment use
in the Middle Pleistocene of south-central Africa”. Current Anthropology Vol.43 (1): 181-190.
Bar-Yosef, O. (2002) “The Upper Palaeolithic
Revolution”. Annual Reviews in Anthropology
31: 363-393.
Bennett, M.R., Hacker, P.M.S. (2003) Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.
Birx, H. J. (2000) “Marvin Farber and Evolution”. New Zealand Association of Rationalists
and Humanists . Vol. 73.
Birx, H. J. (2010) “Evolution – Science, Anthropology, and Philosophy”. In H. J. Birx (Ed.),
21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook (Vol. 2., pp. 586-599). Thousand Oaks,
CA: SAGE Publications. Darwin, C. (2008)
The Voyage of the Beagle. New York: Cosimo
Classics. (Original work published 1839).
d’ Errico, F. (2003) “The Invisible Frontier. A
Multiple Species Model for the Origin of Behavioral Modernity”. Evolutionary Anthropology
12: 188-202.
d’Errico, F., Henshilwood, C., Lawson,
G., Vanhaeren, M., Tillier, A.-M., Soressi,
M., Bresson, F., Maureille, B., Nowell,A.,
Lakarra, J., Backwell, L., Julien, M. (2003)
“Archaeological evidence for the emergence of
language, symbolism, andmusic: an alternative
multidisciplinary perspective”. Journal of World
Prehistory 17: 1–70.
Fink, E. (1989) Uvod u filozofiju. Beograd:
Nolit.
Holliday, T.W. (2003) Comment. In Henshilwood, C. S., Marean, C. W. (2003) “The origin
of modern human behavior: Critique of the
models and their test implications”. Current
Anthropology 44: 639-640.
#Fig 1 - Assortment of Hominin skulls
- courtesy of Brent Danley 2008)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brentdanley/2205021283/
Holloway, R.L., Broadfield, D.C., Yuan, M.S.
(eds.) (2004) The Human Fossil Record, Vol-
ume Three: Brain Endocasts -The Paleoneurological Evidence.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Hemlin, D.
V. (2001) Teorija saznanja. Nikšić: Jasen.
Klawans, H. (2008) Špiljska žena. Priče iz
evolucijske neurologije. Zagreb: Jesenski i
Turk. McBrearty, S., Brooks, A. (2000) “The
revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of
the origin of modern human behavior”. Journal
of Human Evolution 39: 453–563.
Mithen, S. (1996) The Prehistory of the Mind:
the cognitive origins of art, religion and science. London: Thames and Hudson.
Nejgel, E., Koen, M. (1979) Uvod u logiku i
naučni metod. Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike i
nastavna sredstva.
Rasel, B. (1980) Problemi filozofije. Beograd:
Nolit.
Rasel, B. (1998) Istorija zapadne filozofije.
Beograd: Narodna knjiga, Alfa.
Sedikides, C., Skowronski, J.J., Dunbar,
R.I.M. (2006) When and why did the human
self evolve? In M.Schaller, J.Simpson &
D.Kenrick (eds.) (2006) Evolution and Social
Psychology (Frontiers in Social Psychology).
New York:Psychology Press, pp. 55-80.
Shea, J. (2011) “Homo sapiens Is as Homo
sapiens Was. Behavioral Variability versus
“Behavioral Modernity” in Paleolithic Archaeology”. Current Anthropology Vol. 52 (1): 1-35.
Sober, E. (2006) Filozofija biologije. Beograd:
Plato.
Šaputije, Ž. (2012) Kant i šimpanza. Esej o
ljudskom biću, moralu i umetnosti. Beograd:
Dereta.
Tucić, N. (1999) Evolucija, čovek i društvo
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i Alternativna akademska obrazovna mreža.
46
Violent Rationality: a post-structuralist
re-visiting of incommensurable thought
by James Burnett,
School of Oriental and African Studies
Normative dichotomies
between rational and irrational
thought have been proposed in
varying guises (Lévy-Bruhl 1985
[1926]; Evans-Pritchard 1970
[1937]; Tambiah 1990). This paper
takes a critical post-structuralist
stance and challenges ideas of
pre-cultural transcendental reason
and supports the notion of incommensurable rationalities. Human
reasoning, taken as a product
of knowledge power, is treated
as performative, in the sense of
Judith Butler(1999). As scientific
truths undergo revolutions (Kuhn
1996), so does rationality. For
rationality to change, however,
one is required to venture beyond
its limits – that is to say one has
to think irrationally. The debate
of multiple modes of thought was
borne of the work of Lévy-Bruhl,
who drew on the enigmatic example of the north Brazilian Bororo’s
claim to literally be red araras
(parakeets) (Karl Von den Steinen
in Lévy-Bruhl 1985 [1926]: 77).
Such “logical contradictions,”
according to Lévy-Bruhl, were
only made possible by “mystical
participation.” The parlance in
the current paper thus takes up
a dichotomy between rationality
– the principle of human reasoning – and participation, broadly
denoting “irrational/non-empirical thought,” itself, as I will argue,
a discursive and relative concept.
Deconstructing
(ir)rationality
Contrary to his earlier
work, which emphasised the peculiarity of “savage thought,” LévyBruhl (1952) ultimately found
consensus with Evans-Pritchard
in that most fieldworkers agree
“primitive peoples are predominantly interested in practical
economic pursuits” (1970 [1937]:
43). These include: gardening,
manufacturing various things ,
and household life. However, the
surreptitious implication here is
that the “savage” is rational only
to the extent that the “civilised”
man gazes into the “savage” world
and sees himself mirrored therein. Curiously, Evans-Pritchard
himself demonstrated the empiricism employed by Azande oracles
and in the autopsies of suspected
witches. Furthermore , his premise
is a shallow hermeneutical translation. Take, for example, the pursuit of gardening. For the Azande, if the first fruits from a crop
are consumed by an irakörinde
“a possessor of bad teeth”1 then
the season’s subsequent harvests
will fail (Evans-Pritchard 1976:
238-239), which is at odds with
Evans-Pritchard’s other claim that
“gardening” is rational within the
scope of his own rationality.
Azande reasoning is also
explained with respect to the
scenario of a man being killed by a
buffalo (1970 [1937]: 41; 1976: 23).
This is allegorical to the granary
collapses in The Azande (1976);
sometimes a granary would collapse due to termites eating away
at the wooden supports and injure
people sheltering from the sun beneath. In both cases, the “savage”
is well aware of the “literal reality”
– taken to be his “rational” perception. However, the coincidence
◆
“The Azande might ask
“what are these
concepts that we
cannot see or feel? How
do they explain this
death? Which oracle
told you this?”
◆
of timing with the granary’s collapse and the temperament of the
buffalo in the particular encounter
are, underneath, the orchestration of witchcraft (ibid. 22-23).
This duality between rationality
and participation depicts a visible
seam running through human
behaviour; the theory thus appears
cumbersome in describing cultural realities. There need be no
essential difference between science and magic delineated in such
a way (cf. Hogg1961). Azande
reasonings, by my reckoning, must
1 Someone who, as a baby, cut his or her upper teeth first, indistinguishable in adulthood.
47
Theories and Methods
simply be accepted as rational in
their entirety, or else we commit
violence in imposing ethnocentric
notions of what can be deemed
empirical and true.
Taking Karl Von den Steinen’s famous example, in “Western”
rationality, to believe a Bororo
man to be a parakeet would take
some radical venture in participation. In light of the Bororo’s
insistence on this, presumably
some inculcation in Western
rationality would have to occur for
a Bororo man to believe a he is not
a parakeet. Does he undergo the
opposite transition – from participation to rationality? This seems
rather one-sided, could each
culture not be equally perplexing
to the Other (cf. Winch 1970: 87)?
I suggest, for a Bororo to believe
that he is not a parakeet, would
require inculcation in an unfamiliar thought landscape which
would equally involve participation – with this mystical notion
of “scientific logic.” Equally, of the
Azande buffalo’s victim, a western
autopsy might conclude death as a
result of a punctured lung, which
flooded with blood, decreasing
the lung surface area and in turn
diminishing the level of oxygen
in the blood. The Azande might
ask “what are these concepts that
we cannot see or feel? How do
they explain this death? Which
oracle told you this?” It was the
lab-coated oracle of the laboratory, of course! This is evocative of
Bohannon’s enchanting experience
in Shakespeare in the Bush (1968).
To see bodies as the sites of imperceptible biological activity is conceivably equally “mythic.” It surely
was in the initial inculcation of the
most accomplished Western scientist. What is perceived as participative/irrational is only so from
a culturally situated vantage: one’s
participation is another’s rationality.
Mortality and
apparently
irrational behaviour –
in the West
Intercultural understandings of disease and mortality make
for fruitful enquiry into theories of
rationality as they often transmit
fundamental assumptions relating
to existence (cf. Turner 2000). As
is for the Azande, in certain South
African communities, illness – in
this case HIV/AIDS – is attributed to witchcraft, however, while
simultaneously being understood
in biological discourse (Ashforth
2002). Aspects of modern science, allegorical to the Azande’s
termites, have been folded in and
reconciled. What is “science” collapses into what is “magic.” It is in
the West that these issues, perhaps “superstitions,” become most
controversial. A study in1980s
USA revealed one in ten medical physicians attributed HIV/
AIDS to the fulfilment of a biblical
prophecy or “divine retribution”
(Francis 1989). These physicians,
well versed in biological discourse,
similarly have cultivated a rationality all encompassing, including
what an Other might perceive as
irrational. We should take seriously the possibility that what
according to “rational” science is
irrational , is in fact, for its maverick thinker, rationality, in all its
performative capacity.
As Kuhn shows, the great
scientific innovators, in their
perception, had begun to see new
limits to the truth and rationality of science. Their innovations,
however, become only idiosyn-
cratically rational. If a paradigm
shift occurs, the originator becomes retrospectively perceptibly
rational in the new hegemonic
order. Today’s participation can
become tomorrow’s rationality,
contingent on an investment of
knowledge-power. For example,
Shapin (1994) emphasises the
importance of the symbolic capital
of gentlemanliness as a factor in
determining truth in seventeenth
century scientific circles. Are the
non-secular physicians essentially
any different to the great innovators? Both have exercised the
productive power of participation
in creative “irrational” space. By
some chance, adventitious observation (recalling the relativity of
empiricism), the irrational has
congealed into something meaningful for the Self. If we are to
deny these physicians their rationality, we risk denying it to the
Azande and many witchcraft societies. Should they “know better”
because they are Western physicians? This is undoubtedly dangerous, but at its core is this danger
not reflective of a world where
so often violence is bolstered by
someone or Other’s reason?
Rationality, advocacy
and violence
Questions of the relativity
of rationality become most difficult when they unfold beyond
the spatial and temporal frame of
the field, as Shanafelt encountered
during fieldwork amongst the
Amish in Ohio, USA (2002). He
cites the unpleasant experience
of Cathy Small (in ibid. 13), who,
during her fieldwork, experienced
anti-Semitism from her Tongan
research participants.
With the rationality debate
taking such a dark turn, Shanafelt
48
is compelled to submit to transcendental , pre-discursive truth.
The mistake here – and I stress, it
is one to which I am sympathetic
– is a failure of understanding to
which we are all susceptible. Not
of understanding the content of
rationality, we can’t (one would
hope) attain more than a matterof-fact understanding of racism
and soon. Shana felt’s oversight is
a misunderstanding of the mechanism of rationality. Rationality,
with all its positive connotations,
is to be defended, however this
takes a culturally-situated prescription of rationality at face
value. When other rationalities
turn ugly and violent, we are at a
loss. In fear (see e.g. Rutherford
1999: 96), we clamour for realism.
We are impelled into the liminal
participatory space and short-circuit it for our own self-assured
rationality. This is why it is imperative and above all liberating to
eviscerate the concept altogether
and concede that through iterative
performance, a truth effect can
yield in anything. Where Shana
felt draws on the corporal punishment enacted by Amish parents
to “break the will”(2002: 21) of a
child, he fails to see the inculcation of all social reality “which [is]
arbitrary but not recognised as
such” (Bourdieu1979: 80). Subjectification, which informs performativity, universally constitutes
a form of duress through supervision, constraint and punishment (cf. Foucault 1977: 29-30).
Rationality is performed knowledge-power.
Giving up on the realism
of truth and rationality, all we
can do is engage in an ethics of
“matters of concern” as opposed
to “matters of fact” (Latour 2004).
Belief is all we have at the base of
what we claim to “know,” which
49
bears no connection to facts,
but is an “unconditional ethical
commitment” (Zizek 2006: 117).
We are all permitted to make such
commitments, but this is not a
place for rationality. Rationality
after all is violent, it might be the
first violence from which others
derive, for it is a “closed” system
(cf. Horton 1993). Winch suggests
as much in evaluating the disjunctures between Azande reality and
reality as Evans-Pritchard saw it.
“[I]t is the European,
obsessed with pressing Zande
thought where it would not naturally go – to a contradiction – who
isguilty of misunderstanding,
not the Zande. The European is
committing a category-mistake”.
(Winch 1970: 93).
Winch does not consider
the obstinacy of all rationalities to
face their limits. Not only African rationalities are “closed,” as
Horton thought. Rationalities’
“contradictions” are thus relative, they appear most to and are
most interrogated by the Other
whom is interfacing with another’s
rationality which for them is in
discord. There, shines a light that
the Self seldom wields. The askew
perception of one’s own rationality
means it can be thought of then as
a sort of paradox of anamorphosis (Zizek 2010) – the principle
whereby “an entity that has no
substantial consistency, which is
in itself ‘nothing but confusion’”
(ibid. 231) takes on a form when
viewed only in an oblique way,
distorted already by the stand
point of the beholder in the situated landscape. The shifting self-interest of rationality is its fundamental violence, the source of its
incommensurability. Rationality is
fetishistic: might it be the biggest
religion?
References
Ashforth, Adam. 2002. “An Epidemic of
Witchcraft? The Implication of AIDS for
the Post-Apartheid State,” African Studies.
61(1):121-143.
Bohannon, Laura. 1968. Shakespeare in the
Bush. In: Alan Dundes (ed.) Every Man Has
His Way: readings in cultural anthropology.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 477-486.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. “Symbolic Power,”
Critique of Anthropology.4: 77-85.
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. London:
Routledge. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1970
[1937]. “Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality,” Journal of the Anthropological Society
of Oxford.1(2): 39-60.Evans-Pritchard, E. E.
1976. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among
the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. Translated by Alan
Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Francis, Rupert A. 1989. “Moral Beliefs of
Physicians, Medical Students, Clergy, and Lay
Public Concerning AIDS,” Journal of the National Medical Association. 81(11): 1141-1147.
Hogg, Donald W. 1961. “Magic and ‘Science’
in Jamaica,” Caribbean Studies. 1(2): 1-5.
Horton, Robin. (ed.) 1993. “African traditional
thought and Western science”. In: Patterns of
Thought in Africa and the West. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (3rd edition). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run
Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters
of Concern,” Critical Enquiry. 30(2):225-248.
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1952. “A Letter to E. E.
Evans-Pritchard,” The British Journal of Sociology. 3(2): 117-123.Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1985.
How Natives Think. Translated by Lilian A.
Clare. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rutherford, Blair. 1999. “To Find an African
Witch: anthropology, modernity, and witch-finding in north-west Zimbabwe”. Critique of
Anthropology. 19(1): 89-109.
Shanefelt, Robert. 2002. “Idols of Our
Tribes?: relativism, truth and falsity in Ethnographic Fieldwork and cross-cultural interaction,” Critique of Anthropology. 22(1): 7-29.
Shapin, Steven. 1994. A Social History of
Truth: civility and science in seventeenth-century England. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1990. Magic, Sci-
ence, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Bryan S. 2000. “The History of the
Changing Concepts ofHealth and Illness: outline of a general model of illness categories”.
In: Gary L. Albrecht, Ray Fitzpatrick and Susan
C. Scrimshaw (eds.) The Handbook of Social
Studies in Health and Medicine. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 9-23.
Winch, Peter. 1970. “Understanding a
Primitive Society”. In: Bryan R. Wilson (ed.)
Rationality. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 78-111.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2006. How to Read Lacan.
London: Granta Books.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2010. ‘Psychoanalysis and
the Lacanian Real: strange shapes of the
unwarped primal world,’ In: Matthew Beaumont(ed.) A Concise Companion to Realism.
Oxford: Blackwell. 225-241.6 6
Theories and Methods
How Do You Solve a Problem Like
Economics?
by Stanley Ellerby-English, University of Cambridge
Economics has, for a
long time, occupied a position of
authority both within the social
sciences and within the wider
public sphere. The main reason for
this is clear; society has become
progressively more oriented towards and defined by the economy
(Polanyi, 2001). After the collapse
of the Soviet Union in1989 and
the communist project it represented, it seemed clear that the
world would be defined by capitalist ideals and the free market. This
orientation has become particularly apparent with the burst of
the housing bubble in 2008 and
the consequent collapse of financial systems around the world
which has caused suffering for
countless people. Economists are
routinely called upon to explain
the crisis and offer their opinion
on what the right medicine is.
Though some economists raised
concerns about the trajectory of
the world economy economics in
general failed to take account of
these voices (Krugman, 2009),and
has so far failed to provide any
meaningful solution. Is it time to
re-evaluate the primacy given to
economic rationality in conceiving
of people’s relationships and decisions? Is there room for another
voice at the table which does not
deny the complexity of human
existence? To begin to answer this
one must begin by looking at the
nature of the economics discipline, its origins, and its current
dominance in both academia
and public policy. Central to an approach
of economics is the assumption
that there is a rational and logical
structure behind human activity.
Economics is therefore the search
for and study of this structure,
and the development of a ‘general
theory’ of human action (Hodgson, 2001). These theories depend
on simplifying abstractions and
assumptions since they are generalised to theorise the actions
of all people. This general theory
yields two inseparable concepts;
the free market, and the rational maximising individual. The
◆
“economic
understandings rob human action of its complex meaning .... and in
so doing it robs them
of meaningful choices”
◆
rational maximising individual is
presumed to always be working
towards maximising return on
their personal welfare. In classical
economics the system which will
best allow them to accomplish this
is the free market, where individuals are able freely to exchange the
produce of their labour, whether
service or commodity, for the produce of any other persons labour.
In such a system it is argued that
everyone will maximise their own
productive capabilities, in pursuit
of personal welfare maximisation,
and thus all societies welfare will
be maximised. Thus this general theory of human behaviour
limited its scope by explaining
behaviour in terms of market
action explicitly ignoring other
motivations (Hodgson, ibid). Just
as Darwin sought to explain the
process by which different forms
of life developed, early economics
sought to explain the development
of the particular societal organisation within which it developed.
This similarity is not coincidental,
economics was after all a product of the historical social system
which it sought to explain.
Polanyi (2001) makes this
point clearly, tracing the birth of
the discipline at the dawn of the
modern economy, in the crucible of the English industrial
revolution. He argues that with
the growing importance of the
economy within society there
was an understandable desire to
conceptualise this powerful force.
Unsurprisingly the theoretical
framework which was used was
that of the natural sciences, which
had themselves been such a powerful force in the intellectual and
technological developments of the
age. This gave rise to a discipline
of economics which rested heavily
on scientific rationality and the
search for an underlying truth
behind the development of the
market lead society. Just as with
the natural sciences, economics
was not a discipline confined to
academic discussion, but formed
the basis of the grand social projects like those of Jeremy Bentham
(Polanyi, ibid). With economics
human action became both rational and controllable, and it was
possible to lay out a plan for ideal
social organisation. It is from this
basis that we have the works of
50
51
classical economics like Ricardo’s
(2002) On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Even
Marx’s (1981) Capital, the most
prominent critique of capitalism,
adopts a similar conception of
human action and interaction.
These theories carry enormous
power in driving social organisation with Milton Friedman, one of
the most prominent proponents
of the free market, advising on
neo-liberal policies of Ronald
Reagan. Later these same policies
would find their way to the global
south in the form of Structural
Adjustment Programmes pushed
on developing countries by the
World Bank and International
Monetary Fund. Neo-liberal policies dominated the
1980’s and emphasised removing
fetters to the free functioning of
the market and in theory allowing people to act as rational profit
maximisers. This totally simplified version of human interaction
is rejected by many within the
discipline, particularly those who
follow Coase’s(1988) emphasis on
social institutions as integral to the
market. However even amongst
these there is still a tendency to
simplify action into a balancing of
costs and returns. Though there
are varying degrees of simplification within economics the
emphasis on scientific rationality
Bedouins and Bankers - #Fig 1 & 2
is central. It is actually because of
the emphasis that economics has
come to dominate policy debates
(Branco, 2011). However, it has
also been its undoing, and the
financial ruin for many millions. Paul Krugman (2009), in
a piece written in the New York
Times after the effects of the latest
financial crisis started to become clear, argues that it was this
emphasis on scientific rationality
that has stifled debate and prevented practitioners from seeing
the flaws in their predictions. In
short Krugman (ibid)argues that
the mainstream of economics
became fixated on complex mathematical models with which they
presumed to predict the potential
outcomes of present day action.
In a particularly scathing remark
he describes these models as an
“intellectually elegant approach
that also gave economists a chance
to show off their mathematical
prowess.” (ibid). This emphasis on
modelling is borne from the belief
that a scientifically rational general theory was both obtainable
and useful. However as Hodgson
(2001) argues that, “all attempts
to erect and all-embracing general theory in economics have
been highly limited or have led to
failure” (p.16), these models have
similarly failed. It is therefore right
to ask whether there is perhaps a
better way of conceptualising humanity and the human experience.
In answering this question I would
argue that anthropology has a lot
to offer.
The goals of anthropology
and the practice of ethnography
are humble. The aim is to understand, as far as possible, the
complexity of human actions.
Bourdieu (1977) epitomises this
approach with his emphasis on
understanding the complicated
relationship between a person’s
historically and culturally specific frame of reference and their
actions in the world. Within
Bourdieu’s (ibid)theory cultural
frameworks were both conducive
of and produced by human action.
Thus the actions of Bedouin women, as studied by Abu-Lughod
(1999), embody several things
all at once. They are; constructed
by dominant social norms and
values, personal interpretations
of those ideals, also re-representations of them which go towards
reconstructing the social system.
In this conception it is impossible to conceive of any Bedouins’
actions as devoid of social meaning as economics would. However
they also have significant scope for
acting in creative ways in relation
to these structures of meaning.
In developing an argument for anthropologies impor-
Theories and Methods
tance in understanding human
action, it is useful to draw on the
work of Bloch (2011) in cognitive anthropology. He argues
that one can neither understand
humans as simple matter with
easily understood desires, nor as
only the product of specific social
conditions. There is relationship
between the two which must be
accounted for. Thus he argues that
all levels of the human psyche are
both influenced by cultural setting
and are themselves involved in the
creation of that cultural setting.
Thus for Bloch (ibid) Bedouin
culture would be the collection
and interrelation of these ‘blobs’ of
human psychology. Both authors
recognise the framing and guiding role which social structures
play and also the role of humans
in producing and reproducing
them. By focusing on person as
the unit of analysis both authors,
and anthropology more generally,
uncover a rich and often inconsistent mosaic of rationales and
motivations. This emphasis and
what it posits is completely counter to the theories in economics.
It stems from the methodology at
the heart of anthropology, ethnography. Ethnography, practiced
through long term participant
observation, has been central to
anthropology since Malinowski (1922) was stranded by war
amongst the Trobriand Islanders
of New Guinea. It is in the practice
of ethnography that the difference
between economics and anthropology develops, and where it
is most clear. Economists utilise
what is perceived to be objective
knowledge of human rationality
to construct theoretical models into which real world data is
inserted to make predictions. In
contrast the ethnographer is the
explicit creator of ethnographic
knowledge, there is no objective
ethnographic truth beyond what
is created (Holbradd, 2008). An
ethnographer cannot extricate
themselves from their work so
they are therefore forced to write
themselves into it and, like Rosaldo (2004), have discovered this
can actually be a powerful tool for
understanding. Thus, whilst anthropologists are forced to recognise their own subjectivity and the
subjectivity of the knowledge they
create, economics is about uncovering the objective truths about
human action. Anthropology focuses on
the personal human experience
and in doing reveals the complex
social structures within which we
exist. Economics pertains to focus
on general structures guiding human action and believes it uncovers the fundamental rationality of
human action, robbing people of
their complexity. Anthropologists
recognise their own subjectivity
and therefore are forced to embed
this in their work. Economics
aims for objectivity and in doing
rests upon a flawed understanding
a flawed understanding of people
and of the historically embedded
birth of the discipline. Perhaps
most importantly economic understandings rob human action of
its complex meaning beyond market structures and in so doing it
robs them of meaningful choices.
It is because of these flaws
that economics has failed in its
own goals of predicting the actions of rational economic actors.
However it is also because the
certainty, which it pertains to
provide, that it has become the
dominant mode of the theorising
and predicting human action.
However human action cannot
bethought of so simply. Even those
like North (1990) who attempt
to reintroduce social institutions,
have this rationalising tendency. This rational and structured
approach can be a helpful starting
point for thinking about people’s
economic activity. However it does
not tell the whole story about this
activity and certainly cannot be
extrapolated to theorise all human
activity. If we all begin to think a
bit more like anthropologists, and
less like economists, we can counter the polarising tendencies which
hardship brings by recognising the
complex rationalities of all humans, including bankers...maybe.
#Fig 1 - Courtesy of Walt Jabsco 2006 http://
www.flickr.com/photos/waltjabsco/268741615/
#Fig 2 -Courtesy of Craig Stanfill, 2012
http://www.flickr.com/photos/photo_
fiend/7916070474/
References
Abu-Lughod, L. 1999. Veiled Sentiments:
Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bloch, M. 2011, “The Blob”, Anthropology of
this Century, Issue 1
[http://aotcpress.com/articles/blob/]
Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of
Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Branco, M.C. 2012. “Economics Against
Democracy.” Review of Radical Political Economics, 44 (1): 23-39.
Coase, R. H. 1988. The Firm, The Market
and The Law. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Hodgson, G.M. 2001. How Economics Forgot
History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in
Social Science. London: Routledge.
Holbraad, M. 2008. “Definitive Evidence, from
Cuban Gods.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14 (1): S93-S109.
Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the West-
ern Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise
and Adventure in New Guinea. London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul.
Marx, K., & Fernbach, D. 1981. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.
North, D.C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional
Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Polanyi, K. 2001. The Great Transformation:
The Political and Economic Origins of Our
Time. Boston, MA: Beacon.
Ricardo, D., 2002. The Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation. London: Empiricus
Books.
Rosaldo, R. 2004. “Grief and a Headhunter’s
Rage” in Scheper-Hughes, N. & Bourgois,
P.I., Violence in War and Peace. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
52
It’s a Man’s World: Power and Gender
Inequality in Anthropology
by Cherry Jackson, University of Oxford
Anthropology as a discipline emerged in the nineteenth-century, a world dominated even more so by male
power structures, conditioning
anthropology to male bias in a
broader cultural context. During
the 1960s-70s, an ‘anthropology
of women’ was conceptualised to
remove male bias from anthropological literature. Male bias formed
as the most professional anthropologists were male and, whatever
gender, tended to accept and work
within male-centred models of
social organisation and culture.
Anthropologists relied primarily
on male informants during fieldwork, therefore only replicating
the male view. The ‘anthropology
of women’ was created to alleviate
this, focusing on what women said
and did, giving equal or greater
weight to female domains and
spheres of activity, and to the symbolic representation of the categories of female and male (Barnard
and Spencer, 2002: 253). The focus by anthropologists on
religion, ritual, politics and other
realms of cultural thought and
action in which universalistic
statements of spiritual and social
synthesis are made demonstrates
the concentration on male-dominated spheres (Ortner, S. 1974).
This is because typically the people
directly involved in these spheres
are male and the only people questioned, excluding those affected
and involved only at certain times;
therefore women’s views may
remain unheard. That men usually
hold these positions in society is
exemplified in the Bakweri ritual
53
liengu: the doctor in the liengu is
male, though the ritual involves
women [vide infra] (Ardener, S.
1976).
These male-centred models of social organisation and culture have been labelled the ‘dominant’ model (Ardener, E. 1976a).
According to Ardener, those who
create the dominant model generate the social and cultural ideas
that don’t comply with people who
didn’t belong to the same culture
of those who created this model.
This impedes free expression of
alternative models of their world,
which subdominant groups may
possess, or inhibit generating one.
Subdominant groups are thus ‘inarticulate’ when expressing themselves through idioms of dominant
groups, and since their views of
the world were incomprehensible
to dominant groups, there was no
way to express themselves on matters of special concern since no accommodation had been made for
them. Being ‘inarticulate’ rendered
subdominant groups ‘muted’: any
model of the world created a ‘muted’ model (Ardener, E. 1976b).
Since the dominant model is male,
the female models of the world
and of females remain mute. Ortner has argued that
there is an enduring concept in
many societies that men produce
the culture of society (Ortner, S.
1974). Women are typically seen
as closer to nature than men, possibly because women give birth,
thus producing life. Thus female
views may not be as highly regarded or even investigated, as they
wouldn’t be seen to participate in
cultural processes; female models
of society are therefore ‘muted’ in
‘dominant’ male models. However,
female models should be equally
regarded and investigated: women
are equal participants in culture.
For example, women usually
concentrate in the socialisation
of young children (ibid, p.5-31).
Since we learn about our culture
from birth, women are thus vital
to the continuation of culture. To
ignore or discount women would
be to ignore a vital cog in the cultural process of society. Ardener coined ‘inarticulate’ to express the inability for
muted groups to communicate
successfully in the dominant model. This is distinctly shown in the
male and female models: females
are rendered ‘inarticulate’ as males
dominate public discourse and
encode the appropriate language
to use in those contexts (Ardener, S.1976). Moore’s analysis of
the Endo actually supports this
in regards to the Endo’s views on
language and knowledge. Knowledge and language are thought to
be male attributes; to be male by
definition is to be in possession of
these aspects (Moore, H. L.1986).
Thus women’s imperfect control
over language (i.e. ‘inarticulate’)
identifies them as less than complete adults, therefore outside the
decision-making and exercise of
power, whilst their supposed lack
of knowledge renders them ‘ignorant.’ The women are therefore
‘inarticulate’ (in both senses of the
word) in the dominant model of
Endo society. Therefore to extract
different views of the world in that
Theories and Methods
society, an ‘anthropology of women’ is needed to gain insight into
how women perceive the world,
themselves, and each other.
This complements Ortner’s
observation, who suggests that as
human beings mature, the socialisation process is seen to transfer
from male to female, demonstrated by high proportions of females
to males in nursery teaching,
and low proportions of females
to males in university teaching
(Ortner, S. 1974:19). Yet this treats
gender as static categories, which
is unrepresentative of gender’s
true complexity. Gender is a fluid
notion that’s different in every
society, and should be thought as
more of a spectrum than a binary
concept.
However, Moore argued
that it seemed improbable that
there should be separate male
and female models. Moore uses
the example of the Endo society,
citing it is ‘constructed in terms
of a system of symbolic meanings
which are shared by both sexes’
and ‘what they do not share is
the same position vis-à-vis that
order.’ (Moore, H. L.1986:174).
Thus, there is no need for a separate ‘anthropology of women.’
But surely this suggests males and
females do have different models
of the world. Moore agrees there
is ‘a female perspective or point of
view which is an attempt to value
themselves within the cultural
structures which confront them’;
this suggests females adapt their
muted models of the world and of
themselves to fit with the dominant male model of the world and
of females: surely ‘perspective’ is a
synonym for ‘model’? This doesn’t
necessarily entail that when males
are absent, females adapt their
models to suit the dominant model. If an anthropologist, therefore,
was to encounter an alternative
interpretation from female informants when males weren’t around,
the anthropologist should treat
this model with equal consideration. Examples can be seen in
the Bakweri and the Endo. Men
interpret the liengu, an initiation
ceremony that happens to young
females amongst the Bakweri, as
a means to cure a spiritual illness
caused by the liengu (‘mermaid
spirits’), according to Ardener.
The females ‘nod at this sort of
interpretation in male Bakweri
company [my emphasis]’, but
when no male Bakweri people are
◆
“Since the dominant
model is male, the
female models of the
world...remain mute”
◆
present, a different sort of view
becomes apparent. Instead solving
the trouble by ‘curing’ the young
females, it’s ‘solved when a woman
becomes a liengu’ [my emphasis].
(Ardener, S. 1976:12). Thus the
female model of the initiation
is muted by the dominant male
model of it, but as Ardener agrees,
it’s every bit as valid and as equal
in interpretation as the dominant
model. If the anthropologist were
to only take the male perspective,
the anthropologist would exclude
a vital element to what it means
to be a woman in Bakweri society.
Consequentially, there should bea
separate ‘anthropology of women.’ Moore’s analysis on initiation rites amongst the Endo,
despite her argument, complements Ardener’s claims. It’s during
these rites that the female Endo’s
‘representations of themselves and
of their positions in society are
most forcefully and completely expressed.’ (Moore, H. L.1986:184).
This implies females do form alternative models, and that it takes
the process of initiation to express
their views most vocally. Thus
there are definitely other models
created by females, and hints that
these are usually subdued by the
dominant models created by men
since it takes a ritual to be allowed to express these alternative
views. It’s through the decision,
conscious or unconscious, of the
people who hold a muted model
of the world to assert their beliefs
more forcefully and blatantly that
alters or adds to the dominant
model.
Both Endo and Bakweri
society demonstrate this with
specific languages of the initiation
rites. For the liengu, ‘the girl has a
woman sponsor who teaches her
the secret liengu language, and
gives her a liengu name’ (Ardener, S.1976:9). In Endo society,
during the initiation, women
shout obscenities at men, mainly about male sexual organs and
male sexual desire for women and
inability to satisfy women sexually
(Moore, H. L.1986:186). These
involve special speech registers revealing different models about the
world since expressions in other
languages vary, thus disclosing a
different perspective and therefore
different models of the world.
Apparently ‘the only other
occasion, besides initiation, when
female sexuality and solidarity
are expressed overtly and publicly, is when women club together
to chastise a man who has been
mistreating his wife’ (ibid. 188).
The male view might be to ignore
this maltreatment, or even makes
54
excuses for the behaviour of the
man. To take the male’s account
or views only in such a situation,
anthropologists would be missing
an equally valid and important
model of such an event. However, similarly, if only the female
model was taken, again an equally
important, valid model would be
missed.
Despite Moore’s argument, I believe women generate
an alternative model. This needs
to become more prominent since
it still operates in the confines of
a society which privileges male
authority; it is impossible to disconnect anthropology from the
broader cultural context it is enmeshed in. Some of the women’s
models may be so influenced by
the dominant model initially that
it seems ‘women’s models cannot
be understood as independent of
the dominant culture’ (ibid. 179),
but this doesn’t deny an alternative model from forming. It’s the
small differences in perception
and thought that count: differences may be small but significant.
Preliminary Materials for a
Radically
Negative Anthropology
by Toby Austin Locke, Goldsmiths
The body that says
“I,” in truth says “we.”
(Tiqqun 2010: 45).
A clearly
defined theory of the
subject has been the
object of many academic discourses. Being a primary concern
of psychoanalysis,
psychiatry and physiology the nuances
of a definition of the
subject are of great
importance to anthropology. Here, it is
argued that the notion
of the subject should
be understood as a
discursive object implicated in networks
of domination, and
that what anthropology needs is theories
References
of subjectivity. This
Ardener, E. 1976a. Belief and the
may appear a minor
Problem of Women. London: Malaby adjustment, however,
Press.
the notion of a clearly
Ardener, E. 1976b. The ‘Problem’
defined subject is an
Revisited. London: Malaby Press.
Ardener, S. 1976. Perceiving Wom- academic task that
en. London: Malaby Press.
cannot be realised,
Barnard, A. and Spencer, J. 2002.
for the multiplicity of
The Encyclopaedia of Social and
forms-of-life shall enCultural Anthropology. Routledge.
Moore, H. L. 1986. Space, Text and sure its postponement
Gender. London: The Guilford Press. to infinity. As such, we
Ortner, S. 1974. ‘Is Female to Male
suggest that a theory
as Nature is to Culture?’ Feminist
of subjectivity, which
Studies 1 (2): 5-31.
must always be plural,
55
must be the foundation of a “radically
negative anthropology” (Tiqqun 2010: 12),
which no longer seeks
to provide a definition
of humanity as with
“positive anthropology” (ibid: 11) which
seeks to “tell us what
“man” is, what “we”
are, what we are
allowed and want to
be” (ibid). Instead, it
must offer a fluid and
transient framework
capable of examining and giving rise to
new forms of experience and community
without reducing
humanity to delimited discursive objects,
tools for strategies of
domination.
The anthropological conception of
the subject emerges
from long and complex discursive processes. Thus, we shall
not attempt to provide
an archaeology or genealogy of the subject.
However, by means
of contextualisation,
although certainly
not genesis, we may
turn to the academies
of Ancient Greece
as incubators for the
subject’s constitution.
These schools developed a notion of self
intimately tied to selfcare and development,
not least of all due
to the metaphysics
that these academies
purported in which
the realisation of good
and justice came at the
end of a rational process capable of escaping the illusory senses.
As Foucault observes,
these conceptions
of the self sought to
utilise reason in order
to “heal the diseases
of the soul” (2000: 97);
adopting “a whole set
of techniques whose
purpose is to link
together truth and
the subject” (ibid:
101). Here, the subject
emerges as an object1
capable of improvement, as a delimited
entity which must
adopt certain “techniques of self ” (ibid)
in order to adhere
to moral codes and
social expectations.
This conception of the subject,
1 Object is here used with great care in reference to the product of “modes of
objectification of the subject” (Foucault 2000:88) that would produce subjectivity as an
object of discourse, an object capable of
improvement and signification.
Theories and Methods
continuing from classical antiquity
right up to the contemporary, is
distinct from, and in opposition
to, the collective. The subject is
characterised as a delimited entity
from which the existential principle of interiority forbids access. It
leads to the suggestion that “experience of self and the world is
always located within an interior
self ” (Moore 2007:25). The subject
becomes defined as an impenetrable entity that interprets and internalises the external world, as well
as its conception of self, through
conscious and unconscious socialised and immanent categories.
In positing the subject
in such a manner, subjectivity
becomes “a synonym for inner
life” (Biehl & Kleinman 2007: 6).
Interiority demarks for the subject
an impenetrable individuality. By
such an understanding of subjectivity, “psychoanalysis merges with
an existential phenomenology”
(Lacan 2008a: 39) constituting the
subject as a bound, impenetrable
and creative individuality. There
are numerous flaws in such a definition of the subject and we shall
now seek to demonstrate why
anthropology must recognize the
subject as discursive object, whilst
turning its attention to subjectivity.
Our objection to such a
conception of the subject is that
it must always “presuppose the
unity of the person of the ego, of
the subject – a purely institutional
distinction” (Klossowski 2009: 30).
This understanding of the subject individualises to the extent
that conceptions of self must be
entirely individual whilst simultaneously being impenetrable. Each
form-of-life must adhere to the
boundaries of individuality ascribed by the limits of an impenetrable and unique consciousness,
discursively separated from connection to the webs of subjectivity
of which this bound individual
is both affect and affects. Events
must be mediated by an interior
to which they are exterior. What
this fails to acknowledge is that
between subjective apprehension
and objective event, no causal
chain, no sequential order, no
ontologically faithful separation
between schemas can be posited – when open to examination,
that which is called the subject
cannot honestly be separated from
affection. There is nothing allowing us to separate and delimit the
subject from that which surrounds
it for even the very first vectors
of subjectification in children’s
formative periods “tips the whole
of human knowledge into mediatisation through the desire of the
other” (Lacan 2008b: 6); or, put
differently, avoiding the other – I
opposition, human knowledge
spills forth beyond the delimited
bounds of so-called interiority and
necessarily develops as such. ◆
“Some of the best
known ethnographies
...show that
subjectivity extends
beyond any one
subject.
◆
In processes of subjectification what is developing is not
a bound, individual subject but
a shared space of subjectivity, a
space that multiple forms-of-life
engage with and constitute, what
Sloterdijk considers as ‘bubbles’
(2011). These bubbles are not
metaphysical or abstract spaces, “they are the large-scale, well
recognised social institutions […]
such as laws and money, the kind
of things that anthropologists
and historians regularly observe
and study” (Midgley 2009: 191).
In these shared spaces there is
no order of genesis. The space, in
order to be constituted, requires
the simultaneity of that of which
it emerges, for “in the intimate
sharing of subjectivity by a pair
inhabiting a spiritual shared space
open for both, second and first
only appear together.” (Sloterdijk
2011: 42). So, in our consideration
of subjectivity we must acknowledge that subjectivity always occurs between at least two poles of
which there is no sequential order
of genesis nor a clearly identifiable
causal relation. Beyond this, we
must accept that that, which is
considered as the interiority of the
subject rather presents itself as an
intensive locus of material, semiotic and subjective flows extending beyond any one form-of-life
and caught up in complex series
of entanglements constitutive of
subjective shared spaces.
Some of the best-known
ethnographies, from the Kula
(Malinowski 1992) to Potlatch
(Mauss 2009) and The Dreamtime
of the Pintupi (Myers 1991), show
that subjectivity extends beyond
anyone subject. In each of these
ethnographic examples we see that
subjective affection is embedded
in wider semiotic, material and
subjective flows. This extension
of subjectivity and constitution
of subjective shared space in
material items, beyond and between individuals is particularly
well addressed in Nancy Munn’s
notionthat the items of Kula operate according to expansions of
“intersubjective spacetime” (1992:
56
9), but it is equally demonstrated
in the notion of mana in Mauss
(2009) and the convergence of
landscape and subjectivity in Pintupi Dreamtime (1991). Each of
these examples show that subjec-
tive affection is not4delimited to
a subject, but is necessarily produced and affected in movement
between transient points.
A realignment of subjectivity leads us to the consideration
that “the self is only a threshold,
a door, a becoming between two
multiplicities” (Deleuze & Guattari
2005: 249), or more. It allows us
to understand the statement that
“humanity is not comprised of
isolated beings but of communication between them.” (Bataille2008:
198). It is communication between
vectors of subjectification and
flows that is constitutive of these
bubbles of shared space. Subjectivity cannot be considered as a
series of bound and individualised
subjects attempting to communicate with one another via an
external order which forbids one
gaining access to the other, for this
supposed exteriority is as affective
on the constitution and modulation of these shared spaces as is
that which is labelled interiority.
Thus, an anthropology which is to
avoid the objectification of formsof-life by means of static defini-
57
tions must abandon theories of the
subject for theories of subjectivity,
only making reference to the subject as a discursive element which
would seek to delimit and define
forms-of-life according to naturalised morale imperatives. The discourses of the
subject act to minimise the connectivity of subjective shared
spaces in order that each form-oflife is individualised and society’s
shortcomings may be displaced
and installed in this individual.
The subject, through the characteristics of individuality and
existential impenetrability of its
supposedly formative and foundational elements, is caught between
an adherence to its autonomous
self-realisation and adherence
to social expectation. Failure to
adhere to social expectations and
measures of normality is not only
manifest as failure to adhere to
common law, but more a failure
of self: a sickness, a condition, an
uneducated or undeveloped individual, in short, a dehumanisation.
These discourses constitute the subject as an object and
ignores that “all objective recording is nothing more than what has
first been run through and experienced by the observer” (Taussig2004: 313), and thus subjectivity
is “betrayed for the sake of an
illusory science” (ibid: 314). What
such discourse “demands is not
that each conforms to a common
law, but that each conforms to its
own particular identity” (Tiqqun
2010: 23). Through the constituting of each person as an individual
self and subject “power depends
on the adherence of bodies to
their supposed qualities or predicates in order to leverage control
over them” (ibid). Subjectivity is
divided into isolated units to be
managed, organised and have the
failings of modes of social organisation transferred upon them.
This division insists upon the total
individuality of each person, a
complete sense of self, and a series
of techniques that would maintain
this self as healthy. As such, in
order for anthropology to avoid
the reproduction of discursive
and bio-political modes of domination, it must only make reference to the subject as a discursive
object and develop theories of
subjectivity that do not ignore the
multiplicity and vital connectivity
of subjective space.
References
Bataille, Georges (2008) Literature and Evil,
London: Marion Boyars
Biehl, J. Good, B. & A. Kleinman (2007)
‘Introduction: Rethinking subjectivity’ in Subjec-
tivity: Ethnographic Investigations
Biehl, J. Good, B. & A. Kleinman (eds), pp.
1-23, Berkley: University of California Press
Deleuze & Guattari (2005) A Thousand
Plateaus, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota
Press
Foucault, Michel (2000) ‘The Hermeneutics
of the self’ in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, pp.
93-106, Paul Rabinow (eds), London: Penguin
Books
Klossowski, Pierre (2009) Nietzsche and the
Vicious Circle, London: Continuum
Lacan, Jaques (2008a) ‘The Function and
Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in Ecrits: a selection, pp.31-125, London:
Routledge Classics
Lacan, Jaques (2008b) ‘The Mirror Stage’ in
Ecrits: a selection, pp.1-8, London: Routledge
Classics
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1992) Argonauts of
the Western Pacific: an Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of
Melanesian New Guinea, London: Routledge
Mauss, Marcel (2009) The Gift, London:
Routledge Classics
Midgley, Mary (2009) Science and Poetry,
London: Routledge Classics
Moore, Henrietta (2007) The Subject of An-
thropology: Gender, Symbolism and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge: Polity Press
Munn, Nancy (1992) The Fame of Gawa: a
Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a
Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society, London:
Duke University Press
Myers, Fred R (1991) Pintupi Country, Pintupi
Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among
Western Desert Aborigines, Oxford: University
of California Press
Sloterdijk, Peter (2011) Spheres Volume One:
Bubbles, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)
Taussig, Micheal (2004) My Cocaine Museum, London: University of Chicago Press
Tiqqun (2010) Introduction to Civil War, Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e)
www.imponderabilia.socanth.cam.ac.uk