Here is a twenty four minute ethnographic film that is enjoyable for the way it reveals the messy process of doing ethnography. Discovered on Anthropologi.info, the filmmaker, Johannes Wilm, has his own blog, where he explains why and how he made the film as well as some of the background and terminology necessary to make sense of his interviews.

By coincidence I am visiting my parents right now, when the Danish minority has its annual meeting (in Danish: “Årsmøde”). It lasted for three days, and I was back in Oslo the last day, so I decided to take my sister and shoot a little video of one of the celebrations in a tiny little village called “Ascheffel” (just far enough away for me not to run into old teachers from kindergarten, etc.).

I’m glad to see anthropologists video blogging like this. While such raw reports from the field are bound to be less polished than what we are used to seeing on television, I enjoyed watching it and I think our readers will too.

Share This

The New York Times is running an article on a recent article in Cognitive Science by Nunez and Sweetser which demonstrates that Aymara speakers imagine the past to be in front of them and the future behind them—reversed, in other words, from the spatial metaphors we use in English. The Times article notes “If they are right, this is bigger than anything the 60’s tossed up. Is it possible that human concepts of time can vary this much because of language and culture? And what would it be like to think this way? Do I have the rest of my life behind me? And how can I let bygones be bygones if they’re right in front of me?” Nunez and Sweetser also makes a to-do about the rarity of this pattern, since, it claims that “so far all documented languages appear to share a spatial metaphor mapping future events onto spatial locations in front of Ego and past events onto locations behind Ego.”

Cognitive Science produce attention-grabbing headlines much more frequently than anthropologists, and this article is a prime example of how they manage to do so: ignorance.

Have Nunez and Sweetser actually conducted some sort of exhaustive examination of ‘all documented languages’? No. In fact their citations reveal that they have examined a grand total of seven: English, Wolof, Chagga, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, and American Sign Language (to be fair one of the articles they site has ‘more cross cultural data’).

If Nunez and Sweetser had looked a little bit further—for example to the Pacific—they would have found that these sorts of metaphors are quite common. Consider:

It is interesting to note that in Hawaiian, the past is referred to as ka wa mamua, or “the time in front or before.” Whereas the future, when thought of at all, is Ka wa mahope, or “the time which comes after or behind.” It is as if the Hawaiian stands firmly in the present, with his back to the future, and his eyes fixed upon the past, seeking historical answers for present-day dilemmas. Such an orientation is to the Hawaiian an eminently practical one, for the future is always unknown, whereas the past is rich in glory and knowledge. – Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa, Native Land, Foreign Desires, p. 22-23

Or this one:

Ka wa mamua and ka wa mahope are the Hawaiian terms for the past and future, respectively. But note that ka wa mamua (past) means the time before, in front, or forward. Ka wa mahope (future) means the time after or behind. These terms do not merely describe time, but the Hawaiians’ orientation to it. We face the past, confidently interpreting the present, cautiously backing into the future, guided by what our ancestors knew and did. -Jon Osorio, Dismembering Lahui p.7

which resonate wonderfully with:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. -Walter Benjamin

Thus Hawai’ians, like Benjamin’s Angel of History, also imagine the future behind them and the past ahead of them. A friend who studies Babylonian reports something similar. And of course the English term “before” when used spatially does actually mean ‘in front of’—how many stagings of MacBeth have you seen in which he asks “is this a dagger I see before me, the handle towards my ass?” Timelines typically run from left to right, where the movement from distal to proximal time is analogized to the direction of the motion of the act of writing (in English).

So it would be interesting to see how wide-spread various spatial metaphors of time are both within and across cultures, and I wouldn’t be surprised if—once someone actualy gathered some EVIDENCE—future:past::front:back is a primary and widespread way connecting these dots.

But this article and the coverage of it epitomizes everything that is wrong with cognitive science as a discipline (although, to be fair, there is certainly a lot right with it as well) and how it is received by the press and public. It confirms our popular prejudices by rediscovering Standard Average European cultural categories as ‘universal’ and relegating other cultures to ‘exotic’ and ‘unusual’ status—a move that requires an incredible forgetfulness of human cultural diversity.

Share This

There were like no comments about chapter 3 of Friction (and the fragment before it) despite all the interest that the first two chapters saw. I’m not sure if this was because everyone was busy arguing with OneMan about the future and past of marriage or what, but I will keep it short and sweet this time so hopefully people will have more to say.

As we enter the second section of the book I feel like Tsing’s plan is starting to unfold and ideas that were originally left sort of vague (like ‘universals’) receive fuller treatment. At the same time the in-betweeness of the work as neither a nuts and bolts ethnography nor a more experimental piece continues to appear to me not to be an example of a new kind of ethnographic writing as a way of approaching really interesting topics in a manner that makes understanding them easier rather than harder.

The ‘science studies’ or ‘Latourian’ approach is particularly evident in this chapter although I hesitate to go into it in details since this is an area that is really not my area of speciality—especially compared with Kelty. However, I have been reading J.Z. Smith lately—every essay is like an enormously baroque choclate candy with five layers and ridiculous and edible decorations—and I thought that Tsing’s discussion of generalization and comparison resonated with his writings on this topic. I particularly like Smith’s idea of the power of ‘distortion’ that comes from oversimplyfing reality (his interest in the ‘map’ rather than the ‘territory’) and thought it would be interesting to compare to the beginning of this chapter. Perhaps others see connections here?

I haven’t been that impressed with the way that Tsing approaches her ethnographic material in previous chapters, but I did like the way she worked through it this time, using a number of examples that were linked by the concept of nature but were all quite different to examine the concept of the universal. At this level of resolution, and using a central theme to drive analysis, the brevity of the accounts—seven pages on two centuries of botanical activity, for instance—makes much more sense, as does the work they serve in terms of the chapter’s trajectory.

In terms of nature itself, I appreciate the double movement that Tsing (like so many (uncited) others) has described—objects such as ‘Nature’ are constituted by networks of people and things which must efface their efficacy if the product of their work is to be fulyl disclosed. I had never really thought about this in terms of the American experience of wilderness, but as a central Californian who visited Yosemite more than once during his youth this part of the chapter did remind me of home.

So I appreciate the theoretical moves that Tsing is making in this chapter. However I do wonder how they will play out in the rest of the book. Her use of the ‘universal’ does seem to me to cover a couple of different things which might well be distinguished. Is Muir’s aura-making exercise in the wilderness really the same sort of ‘scale-making’ exercise as the creation of ‘global climate’ as a scientific object? Is the PR of ‘sustainable’ timber harvesting really the same as the progressive decontextualization of indigenous knowledge as botanical samples move from colony to metropole? All of them have a genetic relationship via the western concept of ‘Nature’ but they seem to be importantly different in other ways. I Muir’s work really ‘globalizing’ or simply about divine transcendence?

I think that the connection between these examples gets even more tenuous when you shift to Tsing’s discussion of bridges and doves. Here the ‘universals’ in question are about reworking certain world-historical narratives in the context of decolonization—is this really ‘global’ in the same way that climate change models are? And how is this realted to the adoption on Tsing’s part of some pretty unreconstructed Englightenment values like Truth and Freedom? And in what sense are these values ‘universal’? That people who hold them believe all human beings must also assent to them due to their inherent constitution as humans? Or that they are part of a world historical narrative of progress developed in the West and coopted by ‘the South’? I am not saying the connections are not there—see for instance Provincializing Europe and Other Modernities (the last not cited or engaged with despite the fact that Roeffels is, iirc, a student of Tsing’s). I’m not saying that these connections are not there, but much of the book’s success will depend, I think, on how they are elucidated in the next couple of chapters.

Share This

Big news in Paris. The new, $296 million Musee du Quai Branly has stirred up a bit of controversy.

On the one side is the man whose dream this was, the man who sees himself as representing the common man and the oppressed peoples of the world, French president Jacques Chirac:

“This museum in some way is the recognition of cultural diversity, of what it brings to today’s world and how it is necessary for the respect of mankind and for peace,” Chirac told a television documentary last week.

“Nothing is worse than the disparaging glances sometimes thrown by pseudo intellectuals on the art, production and talent of others.”

On the other, the elite intellectuals, such as Giles Manceron, a historian who writes on French colonialism, who was quoted in the Wall Street Journal:

What we need to do is to put the art in a universal art museum like the Louvre and not put together continents that are not at all related except for the fact that they were all colonized by Europe.

Oh, and then there are the (inevitable?) ethnologists:

Inevitably, ethnologists have decried the décontextualisation of artefacts that were never designed as aesthetic objects, but for practical, mystical or ritual purposes.

Well, at least they can be happy the museum wasn’t called (as originally intended), the museum of “Primitive Art”! In any case, I’m sure the new Claude Lévi-Strauss Theatre will be showing some great ethnographic films! I hear the man himself was on hand for the inauguration.

More coverage in the NY Times.

UPDATE: More from Anthropologi.info.

Share This

Last year I wrote a hint about using Google to search Anthrosource. I’ve found using Google often yields faster and better results if I’m looking for a specific article. However, I find it frustrating that half of the Google results link to the citation page, while the other half link directly to the PDF (all the links say they link to the PDF, but that simply isn’t the case).

Because I want my metadata, I prefer links to the citation page. So, in order to ensure that all the Google results consistently link to the citation page, I’ve whipped up a Greasemonkey script using the greasemonkey-for-dummies tool Platypus.

Geeky stuff, to be sure, but perhaps it will be useful for some of you. If you are running Greasemonkey, you can install the script here. It should be easy enough to change it to make all the links go to the PDF file instead, if you prefer it that way. My hope is that my meager efforts will inspire someone to write a much better script which gives you multiple links for each of the search results: to the citation, the PDF, and the bibtex file …

Share This

One of the things that I wish I got more tutelage on in graduate school was audio recording—it’s actually a pretty major part of what we do in the field and yet hanging mics, recording outdoors, and manging your audio files (or, as we used to call them back in the day, ‘casette tapes’) is an underexplored art in many graduate schools. A lot of this stuff gets discussed in the blogosphere but there’s no central place to keep track of it all, and product reviews of consumer electronics are often written by people who do something very different from what we do.

So when I was Googling around trying to find out what ‘coming across the transom’ literally meant, I was gratified to stumble across transom.org, a web auxillary for the NPR juggernaut. The middlebrow enthusiasm of public radio drives me nuts sometimes—I particularly hate Prarie Home Companion’s WASPy self-satisfaction—but transom.org is actually a wonderful resource for anthropologists. It’s tools section has great, useful reviews of digital recorders and mixers as well as just plain good advice on how to interview someone. While I still think everyone should read Learning How To Ask instead of just assume that interviewing is the same in cultures all over the world, I think that this site reflects a concern with craft that journalists have and which makes them such close cousins of anthropologists in certain respects.

Share This

The idea that marriage is under attack and needs defending is a central tenet of the so-called “culture wars”. The meaning and importance of marriage is central not only to efforts to ban same-sex marriage, but to pro-life politics, father’s rights advocacy, abstinence-only sex education, the “mommy wars”, and pretty much the entirety of contemporary conservative politics. The (wholly imaginary) good old days that conservatives want to conserve is essentially a time when (straight, lifelong, twin-bedded) marriage was the fount of all that is good in society. And everything that is bad about today’s society – teen pregnancy, street violence, welfare dependency, the spread of STDs, sexual predators roaming the Internet, even terrorism, is traced by said conservatives, directly or indirectly, to the decline and degradation of the institution of marriage.

Now, to anthropologists, the way marriage is discussed and deployed in these debates is laughable. We know that marriage as conceptualized by the American religious right at the dawn of the 21st century is neither the only – or even a particularly common – form of marriage in the world, nor the way marriage has always been in our own society. The Biblical marriage that religious conservatives hold up as their example and guiding principle would be (and is) almost universally condemned by today’s Christians. Jacob, the central patriarch of the Biblical Hebrews, would be jailed as a bigamist today; the acceptance of Utah into the Union on the condition that they outlaw polygamy is demonstration enough that we view Biblical marriage norms as literally un-American. Marriage today is drastically different than it was even a century ago, even a half-century ago. A small extremist fringe contingent apart, few Americans would consider the marriage-as-property-arrangement attitude of the 19th century to be truly reflective of our modern notions of freedom and individual fulfillment. And hardly anyone would advocate a return to the way marriage was in the 1950’s, when teen pregnancy was at its peak and fully 1 of 3 marriages involved a pregnant bride. Whatever one thinks of single parenting, I find it unlikely that most Americans would prefer marriage to be thought of primarily as something teenagers do when they get knocked up. (more…)

Share This

While we do not place ads on Savage Minds, we do have a “help out” section on our side bar where we try to highlight worthy causes. In the past we’ve had links to charities helping victims of hurricane Katrina and the Pakistan earthquake. This time we are trying something different.

Our overseas readers my not be aware of the tremendous inequality rampant in American education, but it is not uncommon for schools in poorer neighborhoods to lack the most basic equipment and resources. While they now get tax breaks, teachers must often supply the most basic classroom equipment out of their own pocket. Addressing this is one of the most innovate charity organizations I know of: Donors Choose. Donors Choose allows teachers to suggest projects for their classroom and donors can give as much or as little as they like, tracking the project’s project every step of the way. If a project fails to be fully funded, you are given a chance to reassign your money to another project. It is kind of like eBay for educational giving.

Recently Donors Choose started a new program for bloggers, allowing blogs to set their own fund raising goals. Accordingly, Savage Minds has picked a few worthy projects and we are trying to raise $2,403.54 towards the funding of those projects. You can donate either to the Savage Minds Challenge as a whole, or to the individual project(s) you like best, as you wish. The projects include buying books for a school in Harlem, buying Social Studies books for a rural school, and equipping a video production club at a NY high school with 75% low income students. If we get just $6 a piece from everyone subscribed to our RSS feed we will easily meet our goal. You can track progress in the sidebar on the right.

Thank you!

Share This

A few weeks ago I got an email from the AAA announcing that the fancy new website of the Race and Human Variation Project (tied with AnthroSource and a couple of other things as being a central focus of AAA planning these days) was up. When I visited the site I got a blank page that said “check back here soon.” This sort of exemplifies the emails AAA sends out. Did anyone else get the one whose subject line was “A massage from AAA”? /me sighs. Well at any rate the Race project’s website really is live. It already has a pretty nice collection of papers and I’m really looking forward to watching it take of.

Share This

Much thanks to Kelty for his very helpful post summing up Tsing. It reminds me a bit of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language—like Kripkenstein, Keltsing is much more accessible (although to me not more persuasive) than the original. One quick procedural note: while any mind can post anything they like on the blog about the summer reading circle, can we try to keep the discussion (i.e. the reader comments) attached to the most recent post about Friction such that, for instance, comments on thie post will take up issues raised on all previous posts, including Keltsing’s? I think that will allow for a more focused discussion than for us to have four or five active threads open and people jumping all around to post.

Ok then, chapter three of Friction... (more…)

Share This

One of the hardest things to do when teaching visual anthropology is to get students to understand the constructed nature of reality. Although still difficult, this is easier to do when talking about written texts. Students are inclined to believe what they see with their own eyes. One reason for this might be the fact that students are regularly asked to produce written texts, but rarely asked to manipulate images. Reality TV is not the phenomenon here in Taiwan that it is in the US, but one strategy I often use is to discuss the efforts of reality TV writers to unionize. As one union official put it:

“The secret about reality TV isn’t that it’s scripted, which it is,” Mr. Petrie said in a statement. “The secret is that reality TV is a 21st-century telecommunications industry sweatshop.”

Such scripting doesn’t entail writing dialog so much as fitting existing dialog into a standard three-act narrative arc. Or even creating situations designed to ensure that the narrative moves in a certain direction.

Despite the fact that one of the prime motivations for producing reality TV is saving costs on writers and actors, it does seem to draw heavily from the social sciences. Specifically, experiments in social psychology. Interestingly, while it would now be considered a gross breach of professional ethics to engage in the kind of social experimentation we see regularly on reality TV, it is somehow OK if we do it for the camera. (In much the same way that paying someone to engage in sexual acts is illegal if done privately, but perfectly legal if done for film or TV.) (more…)

Share This

The recent debate around FGC on Savage Minds raised some important questions about the political implications of how we choose to perceive social practice. It also raised the issue of agency in our selection of the analytic positions through which we situate practices relationally, and hence within particular political frames of argument. The key point here is not what the issue is, so much as with what other issues is it represented as being articulated in various ways. This articulation may be represented either within a particular social context, as in for example the relation between forms of practice and social outcomes, for which in the recent example read gender. Or, adopting the kind of argument put forward by Marilyn Strathern in her Partial Connections, it may be about how the issue is related through ethnography to what are represented as equivalent examples of social practice across social contexts, that is within anthropological theory or social theory more generally.

The ways in which issues become relationally articulated within anthropology is fundamental to establishing the legitimacy of what become accepted, or acceptable, responses to social phenomena within the discipline, some of which, despite anthropology’s claims to reflexivity and to the consistent examination of constructivist positions, seem remarkably persistent. The disciplinary representation of witchcraft is a case in point. Not only is witchcraft represented persistently as a problem of knowledge, rather than a problem of power, terror, inequality and violence manifested differently at different times and places. It is commonly represented as related to Zande practices of the late 1920’s as somehow paradigmatic, if not in terms modalities of divination then in terms of the essential logic and systematicity of Zande witchcraft cosmology.

Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic provides an account of the place of witchcraft in Zande society and the interrelationship between the persistence of witchcraft beliefs and oracular authority as mediated by princely rulers themselves subjected to Anglo- Egyptian colonial power. This book, a classic of functionalist ethnography and one which posits as its centre the question of the rationality of belief, continues to be a staple of anthropology reading lists, certainly in the UK. It also remains widely cited within the anthropology of religion, science studies and philosophy. This strikes me as somewhat surprising. What Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic actually describes is not so much the rationality of belief in witchcraft, as a political system in which the powerless are liable to be accused of involuntary murder and then forced to pay compensation for the deaths of alleged victims. To suggest that the comparative value of Evans Pritchard’s text lies in the power play of witchcraft as a weapon of violence working in conjunction with regimes of power is not to underplay the salience of ideas and world views in effecting social practice, merely to question why certain interpretations become established. Some of this has to do with what they are brought into relation to. Can disestablishment follow on then from new juxtapositions and new relations?

Share This

I’m taking advantage of my prerogative as author to post my own introduction and situation of Friction by Anna Tsing. I fully expect Rex to keep on keeping on with his posts, and the discussion should follow his lead, but I’m doing this here because I think a birds-eye view of the book is in order, as much for myself, as I hope for others. One of my pet-peeves in teaching ethnography, is teaching students to read the Whole Book first, then read it page by page, so that one can understand the critieria by which it seeks to be judged as good or bad, successful or no, useful or no. I hope it helps with some of the very good questions people have posed about it. If not, carry on…

Suffer a caricature: the discipline of american anthropology counts as one of its successes, having shown that universals—i.e ideas that are thought to be unassailable, irrefutable, and morally irrepressable—actually arise in particular settings, through the social action of individuals in the symbolic and practical making of their worlds. So, for instance, every tribal cosmology has its own “universal” abstractions that order the action and beliefs of all its members, including by implication, “the West,” whose ideas of freedom, prosperity and knowledge are also particular. Anthropologists have also shown, however, that the West has been exceedingly successful at using this very same idea (that universal ideas are particular) to expand its colonial power by suggesting that all universal ideas are particular, except ours, but that you with your particular universals will not be prohibited from adopting ours and re-entering a path of progress towards the universal [1].

Enter Tsing: Weirdly, even though we have shown that people’s universals are particular, and that colonialism has converted other people’s universals to those of the West—people still appeal to universals. What are they doing, and why exactly? This is the conundrum that sets up the plot of Friction. It may be a weak device, but is a device not an argument.

The plot of the book, therefore looks like this: (more…)

Share This

While I have two posts chock-a-block full of stunning insights and thoughtful interventions into modern theory (not to mention the controversy—oh, the controversy!) simmering on my mental back burner, until they reach maturity I thought I’d pass on Alex Halavais’ instructive epistle to students everywhere, How to Cheat Good (via BoingBoing), a list of 8 rules students looking to cheat successfully really ought to follow. I’ve had students break a good number of these rules, much to their dismay and my entertainment, and I agree with Halavais that if students would just get smarter about how they cheat, the world would be a better place: they’d pass, our egos would be stroked (‘cause we’d think we taught something), and the college community would turn into a decent semblance of a functioning society rather than something out of John Adair’s picture of the post-War pueblos.*

I hate it when I catch a student cheating. I mean, I kinda relish it, but I hate it, too, becuase it means I have to be a dick. I resent cheaters for making me have to be a dick. That said, I am not one to shirk my responsibilities: when being a dick is called for, a dick I shall be. And when the dick-being-ness is all over, I’ve got a solid little nugget of amusement to cradle to my metaphorical chest, to nourish me and help me grow as a teacher.

I’ve had some great cheater-catching moments. (more…)

Share This

Apropos of Rex’s recent post on the so so misguided actions of the AAA, here is an excellent commentary on an experiment in “open peer review” by biologists. The people involved in Biology Direct have started an experiment in completely open peer review—all of the reviewers are named, as are the authors, authors suggest reviewers and the only criteria for submission is that the author find three people willing to review the piece. The people responsible for this experiment are cautiously optimistic about the results (it started only in Jan. of this year), but they have managed to get a number of well known biologists to sign on, and enthusiastically so.

One of the main and most spurious compaints of the recent AAP letter opposing the FFRPA is that it would “adversly affect the peer review system.” I think this experiment is exactly the kind of real-world refutation of such claims that people should be paying attention to in this debate. Even if it only sort of works—i’m pretty sure it will be 100% better to have an open access, open peer review system with drawbacks, than an unsustainable, closed access, anoymous review system with serious and unaddressed flaws…

Share This