Comments on: Summer Reading Epicircle: A Frictiony overview (II.1rc2)

By: ckelty

ckelty — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 13:31:24 +0000

any new comments, please post them here.

By: itsalljustaride

itsalljustaride — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 13:32:04 +0000

This has been very helpful. I was intrigued at the beginning of the book when she alluded to discussing the role different “universals” play in these processes, but have not as of yet been able to parse out exactly where that was coming into play in the rest of the book. The chapter on Nature as a universal was all well and good but I just couldn’t see where she was going with it for some reason. Nice job.

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By: ckelty

ckelty — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 01:55:35 +0000

John,

Yes, I said Concpets, which is exactly what I meant.
Kidding. Obviously, it is a typo in more than one sense. I neither wish to suggest that friction is a concept, nor that it is a concpet… and so please replace concpet with trope, as I will…

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By: Kerim

Kerim — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 01:38:15 +0000

Jokes work because we share a set of common assumptions. Polish jokes are funny because, even if we don’t think of Polish people as stupid, we know that this is the underlying assumption of this particular genre. Similarly, I think the problem with avoiding such meta-universal assumptions through “snapshots” is that they depend upon us filling in the meta-narrative behind the snapshot ourselves. In the end, rather than calling those meta-narratives into question, I feel this approach actually depends upon them.

As with experimental film, or fiction, I judge the success of such experiments in terms of the ability to do the opposite. If we “get” the joke in an experimental work it should be because we see something about our own assumptions that is funny, something which challenges them. I forget who said it, but my feeling so far (and I’m still working through the book) is that perhaps it isn’t experimental enough.

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By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 01:05:32 +0000

Well done. Just let me be sure that I understand the logic of the argument.

Midway you raise the question, is “friction” a concept? You answer, no. “Friction,” you say, is a trope, a “tool for distinguishing figure from ground.” I’m with you so far. You then conclude by asserting that Tsing has successfully answered the question, “Why is global capitalism so messy?” by

using the concpets [sic] of friction, and explaining the creation and resistance to a particular universalism

Since you have explicitly denied that friction is a concept, I sense a contradiction here. I am then reminded that there is a difference between asserting that an explanation exists and demonstrating that there is one.

Perhaps you wanted to say that Tsing successfully uses friction as a trope to highlight the messiness of global capitalism and provides a series of compelling examples pointing to a serious issue for anthropological theory. She shows us that we must not only explain why global elites promote global capitalism and local resisters resist it but also why local embracers embrace it and how people with different backgrounds, operating on different local, national and international scales cope with the social and ecological changes its spread sets in motion.

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By: orange.

orange. — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 16:37:34 +0000

thx. I probably come back to this post once I ve finished the book. What I from my student perspective find difficult about Rex’ branch is that they do not really discuss details of contents there but much of sort of in-advance judgement. This may be because people have read more ethnographies than I and find it unnecessary to really get into it, or so. Also, summarizing gives great insight to what people read in there, though I know it means “work”.

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