Australian National University
Anthropology Series
Room A, Coombs Building
Wednesday 9.30am-11am
Semester 2, 2010
July, 21st 2010
GARDNER, Don (ANU)
The Scope of “Meaning” and the Avoidance of Sylleptical Reason
Syllepsis 1. Gram. and Rhet. A figure by which a word, or a particular form or
inflexion of a word, is made to refer to two or more other words in the same sentence,
while properly applying to or agreeing with only one of them …or applying to them in
different senses (e.g. literal and metaphorical). Cf. ZEUGMA. (Oxford English
Dictionary, 1989)
PIANO, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by
depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience. (Ambrose Bierce:
The Devils Dictionary, 1911)
She exercised her right to vote in the meeting and the muscles in her arm.
He successfully got on to the committee and the Dean’s nerves.
He expressed his anger and his class origins.
"Syllepsis" may be an obscure term, but it denotes a rather common phenomenon,
especially in anthropology and other social science; on almost any reasonable notion
of explanation, though, sylleptical formulations are problematic. Syllepsis, for
example, is the hole in the heart of most species of anthropological functionalism. In
this talk, I will argue that conceptions of "meaning" that thematise current
anthropology are no less beset by the problems syllepsis causes; especially significant
here are formulations of "the problem of meaning" evoked in the anthropology of
religion since Geertz.
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July 28th 2010
MORPHY, Howard (ANU)
The Culture of Protocols
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August, 4th 2010
KEANE, Webb (University of Michigan)
Anthropologies of Ethics
This talk concerns some empirical approaches to the ways morality is
embedded in the activities and habits of ordinary life. It starts from one distinctive
mandate of anthropology, to encounter people in the midst of interactions with others.
Those relations with others are so saturated with evaluations that ethical experience is
an irreducible component of the politics and pragmatics of ordinary life. What
follows from these claims, however is far from settled. To say that morality is
inseparable from the very nature of people’s lives with one another should not, for
example, lead to the conclusion that ethics or morality must be pure social
constructions. The individual’s encounter with the moral universe is neither created
tabula rasa nor scripted in advance, but works with the materials at hand. These
materials have diverse sources. Lacking the view from nowhere, people are likely to
find themselves responding to the surfaces of things, to their forms or semiotic
modalities. The rest of the talk is a look at several modalities of ethical practice.
Ethics takes a variety of semiotic modalities and that these interact with one another.
Morality and ethics are not all of one order. I will argue that interaction can itself
become a process of moral self-discovery and formation, and stress the importance of
difference and conflict for the production of moral consciousness.
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August, 11th 2010
MOISSEEFF, Marika (LAS, EHESS)
What is behind the Violent Images of Procreation in Science Fiction Films?
In Brave New World, children are created in test tubes and “civilized” human
beings are freed from the burden of natural reproduction; viviparity is held to be a
disgraceful remnant of the past that only subsists in a few reservations for “savages”.
As Huxley repeatedly observes: “Civilization is sterilization”. To be true, fully
“civilized” human beings, one must be able to have a pleasure-filled life, freed from
the reproductive yoke. Eroticism, the privilege of humanity, is part of culture, whereas
natural procreation reduces one to nature and thus to an animal state. Contemporary
science fiction tends to portray ‘viviparity’ as a form of animal-like parasitism.
Underlying its representations is the idea that more a species is “evolved”, that is,
technologically or biologically advanced, the less it procreates, thereby becoming
dependant upon other, less evolved species for its own reproduction. The fact is that
the demography of modern Western societies, which conceive of themselves as the
height of evolution and civilization, owe a great deal to other, presumably lessevolved societies, notably through migration and through the adoption of foreign
children by sterile couples. These same societies are also those that are most
preoccupied with fears of over-population which they portray as a major risk for
humanity as a whole. The parasitical and swarming nature of insects make them
favored bad-guy characters in Hollywood science fiction. The war of culture against
nature is portrayed as an endless battle between (a pointedly Americanized) humanity
and insect-like extraterrestrial species who tend to parasitize human beings in order to
reproduce. The link between sexuality and procreation is described as potentially
lethal for humans.
This way of conceiving of motherhood as animal-like is of course linked with
representations of womanhood and of relations between the sexes. From this
standpoint, science fiction can be seen as a true contemporary mythology – largely
created in Hollywood studios – capable of shedding light on both male-female and
cross-cultural relations. This is why I propose to comment upon a montage of excerpts
from science fiction movies (Starship Troopers, Alien 1, 2, 3 and 4, Xtro, Species 1
and 2). Sex and gore await…
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August 18th 2010
IQBAL, Farida (University of Western Australia)
Same Sex Domestic Violence and its Implications for Anthropology.
Domestic violence happens in same sex relationships as well as in opposite sex
relationships. Yet homophobic pressure has meant that a silence has developed around
the topic within the LGBTI* community in Australia, as well as in academic research.
This silence exacerbates the suffering of victims and it may have also led to distortion
in anthropological thought.
The ethnographic literature on domestic violence primarily discusses domestic
violence in heterosexual relationships. Yet same sex domestic violence potentially has
much to teach us about gender relations. It challenges popularly held assumptions that
perpetrators are inevitably men and victims are inevitably women. This complicates,
but does not necessarily prove false, an analysis of domestic violence as a
phenomenon of patriarchy.
I draw from my field work among LGBTI youth in Sydney to discuss same sex
domestic violence and what it might mean for anthropology.
*The acronym "LGBTI" stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex.
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August, 25th 2010
MCALLISTER, Patrick (University of Canterbury)
Connecting places, constructing Tết : Home, city and the making of the lunar
New Year in urban Vietnam.’
Drawing on practice and phenomenological approaches in Anthropology, this paper
argues that insights into the nature of the Vietnamese lunar New Year (Tet) in Ho Chi
Minh City can be obtained not so much from the identification of a symbolic structure
in terms of which Tet is acted out, but rather from an examination of how people
create their own experience of Tet through place-making activities. Since Tet takes
place at a number of sites in the urban landscape, this requires an understanding not
only of the place-making activities that occur at these sites, but also of how these
different places are connected through social practice. One outcome of the analysis is
that certain conventionally accepted binaries in the analysis of social life may be
questioned and possibly made redundant; the sacred/profane distinction, the contrast
between private and public space, and the notion that one can distinguish between the
production and the construction of place.
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September 1st 2010
CAIRNS, Michael and Harold BROOKFIELD (ANU)
Coping with a contradiction: a cautionary tale from Nagaland
Former Anthropology student Malcolm Cairns (PhD 2009) worked in Nagaland,
northeast India, from 1999 to 2002. His thesis, entitled ‘The Alder Managers: the
Cultural Ecology of a Village in Nagaland, NE India’ was completed in 2007, but he
was required to make minor changes after examiners’ reports were received. Before
these changes had been completed he suffered a major stroke, from which he is still
recovering, living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Harold Brookfield was one of Cairns’
supervisors (together principally with Nicholas Tapp). After visiting Cairns in 2009
Brookfield has worked with him to write a paper which is now under editorial
consideration by Asia-Pacific Viewpoint. The paper draws principally on the final
substantive chapter of the thesis. The seminar will speak to the paper, and will discuss
a problem that can arise when data on a changing situation rapidly become historical.
Presentation will be illustrated by diagrams and photographs.
The paper, by Cairns and Brookfield, is entitled ‘Composite farming systems in an era
of change: Nagaland, NE India’. The following is its abstract.
Composite farming systems, first clearly identified by Rambo, are those in which
radically different technologies are found together in a single farming complex.
Diaries kept by groups of farming families in two Angami Naga villages, detailing
inputs into and outputs from wet-rice terraces and jhum (swidden) fields in the years
2000 and 2001, made it possible for Cairns to quantify the workings of composite
systems differing in intensity. This was a period of rapid change following years of
turmoil due to Nagaland’s unsuccessful attempt to secede from the Indian union.
Although returns to labour from the first-year jhums were much higher than those
from the wet-rice terraces in 2000-01, jhums have almost ceased to be made in the
subsequent decade. The story is told in the context of recent writing on the ‘demise’
of swidden in the larger Southeast Asian region.
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September 8th 2010
DENNIS, Simone (ANU)
Ambivalence, Ambiguity and Polarity: possibilities for human-rodent
relationships in the modern lab
This paper is drawn from my forthcoming book, which is concerned with exploring rodent-human
relationships, particularly in the modern scientific research laboratory. In it, I am particularly interested
in the ways in which mice and rats are involved in the expression of opposites, and the ways in which
they equally express vagueness, uncertainty or mixing or reconciliation of meanings, or, in other words,
the ways in which they are expressive of polarities, ambiguities and ambivalences. Rats and mice
occupy opposing reaches of our imaginations in the west; as like us as they are in the terms of their
sociality, their habits of domestic occupation and food consumption, and in that they serve as
homologies for our minds and our genes in laboratory settings, they are also feared, demonised, and
separated from us as destroyers of human bodies and of material and technological worlds. Both
animals occur simultaneously in western contexts as house pests and house pets; they are t!
he filthy bearers of diseases harmful to people and, when they are located in the modern research
laboratory, they occupy positions as weapons in the fight against human diseases.
Their capacity to occur simultaneously in more than one category of meaning means that mice and rats
occur not only at the polar reaches of our imaginations, but can also be loci of slippages and
indistinction between many polar categories. Polarity, ambiguity and ambivalence set up a number of
possibilities for rat/mouse-human relations generally, and also mark the relationships between scientists
and rodent research animals that occur within the confines of the research laboratory, where they
embody directly opposing positions and meanings, and present the simultaneous and conflicting
meanings, which are sometimes reconciled. This is an ethnographically based examination of some of
the possibilities that arise for rodent-human relationships in the laboratory context.
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September, 15th 2010
CROSS, Jamie (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Sweatshop Apprentices: Knowledge, Technology and Masculinity in
India’s Offshore Economy
Abstract:
This paper explores how young men acquire a practical mastery of machines, tools
and raw materials at a site of global mass production in India. Based on the author’s
apprenticeship inside a large offshore diamond factory it follows the immersion of
new workers as they learn to carry out repetitive manual tasks on a global assembly
line. In factories like this one, I show, market oriented systems of control hinge on
corporeal forms of knowledge transmission and creative bodily performances in
relationships with machines.
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September, 22nd 2010
STREET, Alice Street (University of Sussex)
Research in the Clinic: Scientific Emplacement and Medical Failure
Alice Street, University of Sussex, UK
This paper explores the social politics of scientific research when it is
conducted in institutional spaces that are defined by the failure of medical knowledge.
It charts the transformation of a hospital in Papua New Guinea into a place of science,
starting with the arrival of a young Australian physician in 2003 and concluding in
2009, when the hospital was well on the way to becoming a fully fledged ‘research
hospital’ with numerous concurrently running trials and genetic studies involving
multiple foreign and national research institutions. The medical challenges
encountered in this hospital contributed to its authenticity as a field site and the
validity of the knowledge produced. But inequalities between research and medical
capacities made the epistemological gap between the specificity of a place and
universal knowledge intensely political.
Material and semiotic distinctions between research and clinic in Madang
Hospital were not only ‘about knowledge’, but simultaneously forged distinctions
between places and persons and reproduced historically embedded differentiations of
race and power. Against the scientists’ attempts to control their ‘emplacement’ in
Madang Hospital, their experiments became entangled with the institution in
unpredictable and productive ways that reveal the ongoing co-production of
historically situated postcolonial socialities and universally valid scientific
knowledges.
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October, 13th 2010
CARRUTHERS, Ashley and Dang Dinh TRUNG (ANU)
The Social and Spatial Constellation of a Vietnamese Village and its
Emigrants
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October 20th 2010
DRAGOJLOVIC, Ana (ANU)
‘Tracing Genealogies, Making Connections: Indo Dutch ‘Homing’ Desires and
Knowledge of/about Relatedness’.
An increasing number of individuals of Indisch decent are researching their
genealogical roots by exploring various sources ranging from family
memorabilia, Internet genealogy sources and archives, to travel to Indonesia in
order to explore places from family narratives. Simultaneously, many engage in
the consumption and production of novels, fiction films, theatre plays and pop
music with Indisch themes that value bonds based on kinship and genealogy.
This paper takes as its starting point the view that genealogies are politically
contingent and have to be historically situated. Drawing on Marilyn Strathern’s
(1999, 2005) illuminating work on the manifold significance of different levels of
kinship knowledge, this paper examines how people deal with new information
about their ancestors and ancestral places and what consequences this might
have for their future relationships and claims to belonging.
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October 27th 2010
AHMAD, Irfan (Monash University)
Writing Anthropology of India: Preliminary Notes on Methodological Nationalism
My presentation is about how Indian anthropology has minoritized and theorized the
figure of Muslim. I analytically show how anthropological discourse on Indian
Muslims and the dominant discourse on Indian nation verily dovetail into each other.
There are three main catalogues through which Indian anthropology has dealt with the
figure called Muslim: alienness, silence, and erasure. In a preliminary way, this essay,
then, attempts to lay bare the theory behind this methodological nationalism to discuss
the (im)possibility of writing a different anthropology of India.
For further inquiries contact:
Doreen Montag
Lecturer/Convener
Master of Culture, Health and Medicine
School of Archaeology and Anthropology
A.D. Hope Building #14
Australian National University
Canberra
ACT, 2602
Australia
Tel: +61-2-61253558
Mob: +61-412522086
Email: Doreen.Montag@anu.edu.au