In my experience, the people who are older and wiser than me don’t ever have to _tell_ me that they are older and wiser than me because their actions make this manifest pretty quickly and, as I get older and wiser, I figure it out on my own.

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And Rex is right. I do play the seniority card in almost every thread….got to think about that. Could be something to do with reaching an age when “What’s it all about?” becomes “What was that all about?” and hoping something of value was learned in the process.

And a note to Ckelty: Your observations about the similarity of Tsing’s writing to apocalyptic science fiction struck me as right on. Made me wonder if we aren’t just totally off the wall framing the debate over Tsing in terms of the science instead of the fiction. Instead of belaboring the old, “Is it theory?” chestnut, perhaps we’d be better off comparing her to other people who attempt similar projects, e.g., the winners of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s annual Victor Turner Prize.

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Paul Harvey? Ouch! Where did that Freudian twitch come from?

Ckelty,

Let’s keep that elephant on the table.The reflexive turn of the 1980s had a good side. Recognizing that anthropologists are, at the end of the day, writers and paying attention to the ways in which they represent their observations and the people they write about is, IMHO, an entirely good thing. Noticing a writer’s biases is sound critical practice. Still, I would argue, the “crisis of representation” was (and is here) hugely overblown. Problems with biased observations, patchy data, the need to be constantly cross-checking, all of these are familiar problems that historians, for example, have been discussing for about as long as there has been history. They are also familiar to anyone who reads classic English murder mysteries. They had even penetrated anthropology in the classic debates over Sol Tax’s and Oscar Lewis’ divergent accounts of Tepotzlan long before I was a graduate school.

So why the moral panic? Why the sloppy habit of dismissing predecessors’ work because, surprise, surprise, they were men of their time preoccupied with what they took to be the issues of their times? (Which isn’t to say that we can’t improve on what they did.)

It has more than once crossed my mind that the author of something I once read in Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry the reference slips my mind) is right. In the publish-or-perish, junkyard dog competitive world of contemporary academia, sloppy critique and wordplay are popular because, when you’ve got to get some work out the door, they are a far sight easier than the grind of classic scholarship. So for pretty straightforward reasons, the signal-to-noise ratio in academic writing declines.

What do you think? Is this unfair?

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bq. let alone a better theory than the ones we take her to be criticizing (Paul Harvey, etc.).

It might be that you mean David Harvey here…or are you suggesting that what we want from Tsing is (pause) THE REST OF THE STORY…

Sorry John, that was hard to resist. But I don’t mean any disrespect either to you or to Tsing’s book (which I find to be at once usefully thought-provoking and frustrating). I will try to pull together some of my thoughts on it in a non funny post soon. I do want to say that the debate thus far has been really interesting.

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The big books are filled with detail and the observations are cleanly separated from Malinowski’s interpretations of them. The result is books that serious readers can return to over and over again, developing their own theories and finding data pertinent to them. Rereading Malinowski can and should be an industry. In contrast, a Tsing is a flash in the pan. In a year or two we will have gone on to the next trendy author.

John. This is the elephant I was referring to… the critique of Malinowskian ethnography from the 1980s on, as I understand it, is not that he was a bad ethnographer… oh no… it is that fieldwork is the scene itself of epistemological and methodological work, and that one cannot take Malinowski’s descriptions, however shrewd and detailed, as the data for more theorizing (this is also, in a more familar vein Derek Freeman’s point in his critique of Mead). The critique of Malinowski is that he constructs his people through his fieldwork and that we therefore have a crisis of representation, in the precise sense that we are trying to work on shared theories that do not issue from data that we all agree to be objective, in any sense. This is not a rejection of objectivity, it is a recognition of its difficulty in ethnography.

This is the context within which Tsing is working. Also “Flash in the pan” is a bit juvenile. We should be finding ways to judge these works according to some other criteria than the “work of genius” or the “blockbuster”.

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My apologies. Playing the seniority card was a thoughtless bit of tit-for-tat.

That said, allow me to address two points in what you went on to say. First, you offer as an example of Tsing’s theorizing the statement that,

Attention to friction opens the possibility of an ethnographic account of global interconnection. Abstract claims about the globe can be studied as they operate in the world. We might thus ask about universals not as truths of lies but as sticky engagements.

Given my old-fashioned, positivist scientific way of thinking about things, I would regard this as Step 1 in theory building, identifying a problem not adequately addressed by previous theories. In this case, I would begin by taking “sticky engagements” to point to local considerations that affect the operation of what have been taken to be global principles. I would not, however, immediately decide that the principles in question had been rendered invalid by something unaccounted for. (The law of gravity, for instance, is not rendered invalid by the fact that feathers appear to fall more slowly than stones. The friction of the air must be added to the law of gravity to explain the difference; but the law of gravity still stands.) What would seem to me a genuine advance in theory would be a set of revised general principles that accounted more elegantly for more of the observed variation. (Kepler’s theory of elliptical orbits was, in precisely this sense, an advance on Copernicus’ theory that orbits are perfect circles, a theory which still required epicycles, i.e., circles within circles, to account for planetary motion.)

I do understand the impact of finding new words to focus attention in previously unexpected ways. I recall, for instance, the revelation it was when I first encountered Heinrich Wolflinn’s Principles of Art History and learned the distinction between painterly and linear styles in painting. Suddenly I could see paintings in a way I never had before.

Also, in my day to day work as an advertising copywriter, this was, more often than not, my business, trying to find new words and images to communicate what were at bottom old ideas. New words and a fresh angle can stimulate fresh thinking. I noted as much in an earlier message praising Tsing’s writing skills.

But, returning to the point at hand, it isn’t just that back in the late 1980s, I heard Marshall Sahlins give a talk in which he observed that the same principles of trade produced radically different effects depending on where goods were sold (Northwest Indians preferring uniform blankets that made counting score in potlatch simpler, while Hawaiian royalty wanted unique garments, in effect, haute couture). It’s that having been fairly intensely involved in both business and politics, I have lived in worlds where the notion that things never go as planned because people and circumstances are never quite what we thought them to be is widely shared. So Tsing’s proposition strikes me more as an affirmation of what I take to be common sense than an application of theory, let alone a better theory than the ones we take her to be criticizing (Paul Harvey, etc.).

Finally, turning to my second point, a word about Malinowski, whom you seem to be fond of using as a straw man. Had I stopped reading Malinowski with what I read in graduate school (some chapters from Argonauts of the Western Pacific and his Malinowski-made-simple Magic, Science, and Religion) I would probably let your comments pass. Oddly enough, in the course of writing that article I mentioned in my last message, I sat down and read the whole of Coral Gardens and Their Magic and The Sexual Life of Savages, where I finally realized what an insanely great ethnographer Malinowski actually was. The big books are filled with detail and the observations are cleanly separated from Malinowski’s interpretations of them. The result is books that serious readers can return to over and over again, developing their own theories and finding data pertinent to them. Rereading Malinowski can and should be an industry. In contrast, a Tsing is a flash in the pan. In a year or two we will have gone on to the next trendy author.

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Theory as I see it is a toolkit. One uses different and rotating sets of tools to align X and Y (global economy and forests, let’s say) and from those alignments the emergence of a way of articulating relation (in its many guises) arises (of course this is not in a vacuum, either political or cultural or otherwise).

I think this is a good articulation of the current view of “theory” in the discipline. The problem I have with this conception of “theory” is that I don’t think it is describing theory at all. Rather, it seems to be describing a set of positionalities. In practice it often seems to amount to a statement of which theorists one has read, rather than critical engagement with their theories. So we are now trained to string together a necklace of statements of the following sort: I read Foucault, but understand that his theory of power didn’t allow for agency. I read Harvey, but reject his teleology. I read Bourdieu, but avoid the pitfalls of his ahistoricism. In other words, I have these “tools” and I know the strengths and limitations of each of them for the work at hand. Or (more cynically), I have this cultural capital, and so you should accept the legitimacy of my interpretations.

Cynical or generous, I think this approach lets the anthropologist off the hook all too easily. It ultimately amounts to a claim that we don’t need to do the hard theoretical work of understanding how different and often incompatible theoretical frameworks might actually fit together. It is the reason, I believe, anthropological theory continues to be borrowed from other disciplines and not generated by anthropologists themselves.

Do we need one Grand Unified Theory of anthropology? No. There is some truth to the claim that we need different theories for different tasks, but this is an excuse which shouldn’t be used too lightly. Often the reason for needing different (and incompatible) theoretical toolkits has to do with scale. Micro-theoretical models are not necessarily compatible with macro-ones. And I think this is what upset me so much about Tsing’s theory chapter. She seeks to avoid this problem by fiat, simply declaring that scale is important. I personally think that if she had thought through some of the difficulties inherent in actually producing a theory capable of spanning such different scales she would have been better able to conceptualize how to go about such a project.

The problem with the “theory as toolkit” metaphor is that it ignores the important ways in which theories shape the very object that they are supposed to be applied to. Rather than claiming that a commitment to intellectual rigor blinds us to seeing the reality we wish to observe, I would argue that it is the theory as toolkit metaphor which assumes we already know what we will observe (and can therefore pick and choose the appropriate tools).

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John,
I’m not sure I buy into your game metaphor, but here goes:

1) How is your assumption of our relative ages relevant to the discussion? In the gender politics of the academy (and elsewhere) this type of revelation serves to dismiss or discredit the younger, female scholar as naïve, not serious, misinformed etc.

2) I did not accuse you of being elitist and masculinist, but instead diagnosed the tone of the posts as longing for the “good ‘ol days” of Malinowski style ethnography when we all (women, native and others…to borrow from Trinh Min- Ha) knew our place.

3) I’m not sure what “fashionable jargon” you are referring to?

4) Theory as I see it is a toolkit. One uses different and rotating sets of tools to align X and Y (global economy and forests, let’s say) and from those alignments the emergence of a way of articulating relation (in its many guises) arises (of course this is not in a vacuum, either political or cultural or otherwise). Theory is dynamic by definition and so not something to apply the same in every situation over and over again. Kinship looks different now than it did 20, 25,10 years ago. The continuities are there for sure and so is the newness…the insight arises out of the tension between the two. The “work” theory does for me is that it allows the tensions to be seen, reanimated and rearticulated in the present. Workable theories do not tell us “how things are,” but rather, give us a way to see differently.

Tsing gives us some tools to work with. She asks that we reimagine different “projects of scale-making” within the very material “zones of awkward engagement where words mean something different across a divide as people agree to speak.” She asks us to see the range of connections that make up not a simply local/global relation, but a more unpredictable set of alliances that disallow any easy stop at one of these two points.

Tsing suggests, “Attention to friction opens the possibility of an ethnographic account of global interconnection. Abstract claims about the globe can be studied as they operate in the world. We might thus ask about universals not as truths of lies but as sticky engagements.”

Now maybe the “sticky engagements” amounts to “fashionable jargon” to some eyes and ears. For me it describes a way of seeing a range of global connections forged, sought after, unexpected emerging etc, within and between very diverse sets of actors (including the forests themselves).

Further Tsing argues that, “Ten years ago social analysts were impressed by the size and power of newly emergent global circulations, so they focused on global coherence, for better or worse. Now it is time to turn our attention, instead, to discontinuity and awkward connection, as this proves key to emergent sources of fear and hope”

Now, Rex asked that I “help” him or others “see” where Tsing engages us to see differently (I’m not sure I can since I will undoubtedly see something different, but for the sake of argument…) For me these beginning passages set the stage for seeing connections, alliances, allegiances…differently. She asks that we turn our attention to these awkward, sticky engagements and situations not to force them into a top-down narrative of global pillage, or a celebratory global village….but somewhere in between where people make choices, are forced, coerced, deny and often agree with those who may or may not be oppressing or exploiting them. She wants us to see the hope and the fear in the same place at the same time from the same people, and then make sense of this within a set of complex and oftentimes seemingly contradictory set of narratives. But the contradiction comes from the models of global connection where these engagements are refused…where “alternatives disappear.”

Taking this up, (hitching my wagon….for Kelty) I am given a way to set side by side the wishes of the Aboriginal people I work with in Australia to both preserve and remix their “traditions” in a digital archive (and other digital formats) alongside the rhetoric of the commons and the free culture movement to see how information, knowledge, the public domain, etc are reanimated, limited, exploited etc. I gain much from Tsing’s image of global connection as opposed to say much of the digital divide theory that demands victims, winners, losers…or more technologically determinist theory that can only see technology driving people….

I think I said this before, but it bears repeating here, I don’t think Tsing makes any claims to originality in the sense that she is the only or first one saying these things. I don’t know why that would be a benchmark in any case.

This is already far too long, so I end here.

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s/melanesia/indonesia/g

In any case, I don’t think multi-sitedness is at issue here– and only naive anthropologists like me would suggest that multisited means just “more than one site,” even if it includes sites in the Internets. Smarter people like Rex know that the initial impetus for that was precisely what Tsing claims her book is about: namely alternative forms of mapping connections that are visible in a social world. It might be that for Tsing Globalization means only fieldwork in Kalimantan and Jakarta–but that’s because whatever global connections are, they are happening there too. I’d be quite happy in the end if that was the only place she did her fieldwork, because I’m confident that one doesn’t need to do fieldwork in every node of a graph in order to have properly understood the nature and meaning of the connections… I remain optimistic at the threshold of chapter two.

I’m not at all in sympathy, however, with the demand that Tsing become an activist because her fieldsite is so fucked up. If she thinks her work is equivalent to activism, or is going to stop that big island from being so fucked up, well that’s a different issue, but I don’t like the idea that we can’t be both activists in the field and experimentalists at home… I plan to resist the draft.

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That said, I think we get a much clearer sense of the factions and conflict in New Crobuzon than I do in Kalimantan. Will there be interviews with the ministers (both Japanese and Indonesian) who created this carnage? Will it, in other words, ‘study up’ effectively? Now THAT would be interesting.

Thought #2: Kim urges us to see that “Tsing’s ethnography asks us to see theory differently. In order to do this you may need to ask differernt questions and be open to seeing how theoretical insights emerge within narrative.” I don’t see that at all from her work so far, but if Kim could spell it out for me I’d greatly appreciate it. I take it that this is the main ambition for the book, and so if an exponent could help me see how this is happening in our stuff thus far I’d be grateful. Can you help Kim?

There are many works which claim that ‘multi-sited’ ethnography is needed to capture globalization. But in practice I find that this often boils down to 1) ‘my village’ 2) the metropole where the international airport is where I get off the plane from LA and take the bus/boat to my fieldsite 3) I found this cool forum on the Internet where people talk about stuff in my village. I am extremely unimpressed with this sort of approach and if by ‘globalization’ Tsing ends up meaning ‘fieldwork in Kalimantan and Jakarta’ I’ll be very disappointed. Perhaps I am particularly stuck on this point because this is exactly what I ended up doing for my dissertation and I’m not happy with the result!

Its strikes me that Tsing’s ambitions to explore alternative forms of ethnography and approaches to globalization are really not suited to her ethnography, which seems to be a straight-up plunder of the periphery in pretty uncomplicated terms theoretically. The seriousness of what is being described as well makes the stakes, for me at least, to be (as Radcliffe-Brown once put it in an entirely different situation) “too high to allow of experiment.” Clearly people are being killed and dispossesed of their land and left with NOTHING. My personal inclination in this sort of situation would be to steer out of ethnography and into concrete activism rather than out of ethnography and into experimental literary forms.

And this is really the final question (and it is a QUESTION) I have about Tsing. Is her work really that experimental? I mean this is simply not Tuhami (sp?) or Shadows and Lights of Waco. So in some sense my admitted old-fogeyism (which is a _slightly_ different sort of thing than ‘blunt masculinist and elitist’) instincts feel that she hasn’t gone far ENOUGH in that direction. Of course all genres have their pitfalls. If we are unhappy with the book, might we describe our disenchantment with it as a result of middle-brow experimentalism?

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Tsing’s patchwork strikes me as absolutely necessary: in order to get out of the careful mode of “here is a problem, here is why it is a problem, and here is what means (and maybe here is how to fix it)” she needs to draw attention to the state of affairs within which multiple and diverse kinds of actors are trying to solve intersecting anc complex problems for a variety of different reasons… and to find a way to characterize it as such.

Nice. An elegant framework within which to assess the value of what Tsing is trying to do. Which takes me back to Taussig and that business of trying to lift the veil while retaining the hallucinatory quality of what is going on. Perhaps instead of trying to evaluate Tsing in terms of positivistic science or instrumental rationality, we should, in a serious scholarly way comparing what she achieves to what others writing experimentally in similar ways achieve. Besides Taussig, my bookshelf holds, for example, Robert Desjarlais’s Shelter Blues and Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman. A good place to find other candidates might be the past winners of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Victor Turner Prize.

Also found the evocation of SF dystopias very much on the mark. My really, really scary favorite, which has many of the same characteristics being ascribed to Tsing, is C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen. Perhaps one might say of ethnography a la Tsing what this review says about this novel.

One of the advantages of science fiction is that it can be a “literature of ideas”. Unlike modern literary fiction, which denies the veracity of reality and says that emotions are the only thing that’s “true”, science fiction can explore difficult issues in the Real World. In this case, Cherryh tackles the “nature versus nurture” debate in developmental psychology circles, scientific ethics vs. the needs of society, and and even skips around the edges of one of the most difficult questions around: what is Man? And that’s only the beginning… this is one of the most idea-chocked pieces of science fiction to hit the presses since the Golden Age came and went.

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