The Comparative Austronesian Project at the Australian National Universe has released a whole series of its books online as open access resources at the ANU’s cutting-edge Epress. Those of you up to your neck in All Things Austronesian know that there are viewpoints on Austronesia other than those of Peter Bellwood, one of the main people involved in the project. That said, it is hard to turn down volumes edited by people like Bellwood, James Fox, and Cliff Sather. My favorite, Sharing The Earth, Dividing The Land is particularly relevant for my own work on indigenous land tenure and features artices on the concepty of honua fonua in Tonga and a piece by Mark Chaos Theory Mosko on Mekeo.

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For those who are interesting in learning more about Geertz or did not get a chance to meet him or see him speak in person, I’d like to recommend Alan Macfarlane’s video interview with Geertz. It is part of Macfarlane’s Interviews With Ancestors websire, which I’ve mentioned in the past but which I’ll link to again since it is such an incredible and wonderful resource. Macfarlane has also made the audio of Geertz’s 2004 lecture available as well as the full video taped interview for people who would like to watch the whole thing.

There are also some other links that we have mentioned here on SM in the past that will help people who are interested in learning more about Geertz, including his memoir A Life In Learning and the exhaustive HyperGeertz Catalog. Many of his essays appear on the web as well.

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(UPDATE: the official release is here from the IAS website)
(UPDATE UPDATE: here are obituaries from the Washington Post and New York Times)

This from a grad student of mine—I’ve no independent confirmation yet but it seems unlikely to be a hoax. It seems like one of our best-known and best-loved scholars has passed. Here’s the email I was forwarded:

To the Institute Community, I am very sorry to have to tell you of the sad news of the passing early this morning of Professor Emeritus Clifford Geertz. Cliff was founding professor of the School of Social Science, who joined the Faculty in September 1970. He was the Harold F. Linder Professor from 1982 until 2000, when he obtained emeritus status. His work spanned the fields of cultural anthropology, religion and social theory, and his most recent research concerned the question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world. Among his many honors, in 2002 he received the Award of Meritorious Achievements from the Indonesian government and in 1992 was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prize. Prior to joining the Institute, Cliff was Professor of Social Anthropology and Chairman of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University from 1975-2000, Eastman Professor at Oxford University from 1978-1979, and in 1984 a Fellow of the International Interchange Program of the Japan Society. Cliff will be greatly missed, and we extend our deep sympathy to his wife, Dr. Karen Blu, and to his children, Erika and Benjamin. Peter Goddard

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Thanks to Anthropology.net’s Kambiz Kamrani for the first-ever Anthropology Blog Carnival! We look forward to many more.

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I spent this weekend on the mainland at a friend’s wedding where I had the chance to run into David Andrews. I last saw Dave a few years ago where I saw him give a fascinating lecture on softcore pornography. His talk impressed me for a couple of reasons: first, he is one of the first Nabokov scholar I’ve met to admit that his interest in Lolita was really about the porn and not the literature and that his next project was going to be Debby Does Dallas rather than Pale Fire. Second, his point in the lecture (if I remember correctly) was that the literature on softcore tended to treat it as peripheral to the main form of porn, which was hardcore, and which was easily understood by feminist theory as part of the misogynistic power structure in the US that keeps women down. He argued that softcore was it’s own sort of thing and that the messages it sent about men and women were much more ambiguous and deeply rooted in America. Softcore is much more widespread in the US—you can get it at Blockbuster, apparently—and so understanding gender in the US means making sense of softcore as it’s own unique phenomenon. I thought it was a fascinating talk and that Andrews was a guy who had 1) buckets of brain-power and 2) watched a truly mind-boggling amount of softcore pornography.

When I ran into Dave this weekend he told me his new book on this topic was finally out. Soft In The Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature In Its Contexts is now out from Ohio State University Press (which also has a long list of open access titles on their site. OHP++!!). I haven’t had a chance to look at it, but based on hanging out with Dave I really do reccomend the book. OHP has made the first chapter available on their website (warning: this is the front and end matter as well, so it’s like a 100 page download). Give it a read and tell me what you think.

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As I am not teaching this year my engagement with ideas is coming largely through the things I am reading , rather than through dialogue with students. Its actually the need to understand something in order to explain it to another person which provides me with a good starting point for an ongoing engagement with a topic or theme, an engagement which generally goes way beyond whatever the original class topic was about. My tendency to drift along avenues of interest now runs relatively unchecked without the discipline of having to refocus on the core issues which I would have to address in a course. There are losses from this, a certain fragmentation in reading and thinking which may seem to jeopardize the likelihood of having any coherent thoughts about anything. But there have been enormous gains in the sense of freedom from the constraints of normative connections which one usually makes, enmeshed within the silos of what have come to count as discrete topics and issues in anthropology which have become entrapped within particular discursive frameworks and literatures.

I have written here before about the problem of witchcraft, the way in which anthropology has construed this as primarily an intellectual problem, as a problem of interpretation. Partially escaping the closed circuits of anthropological approaches to the phenomenon is enabling me to embark on some different thinking in relation to witchcraft, different at least in terms of my own approaches to it. I gave a paper last week looking at witchcraft as an instance of moral re-categorization- so far so usual. But by comparing the social effects of this reordering of obligations and households with social policies in nineteenth century Britain and France a clear parallel emerges in relation to transformations in the kinds and content of social relations which go into making up, literally, modern economies. So witchcraft appears (or is made to appear) not so much as a critique of capitalist reordering, as a modality for its achievement.

My freedom to think outside the box comes by making my boxes bigger, and situating them in different stacks of other kinds of boxes. Interestingly, this expansionary capacity is what anthropology seemed to have once effected for other disciplines, particularly, and perhaps paradoxically, at the very time when anthropology was at its most insular and when its representation of the Other was most totalising. Perhaps this was because it seemed to offer such solid alternative propositions of different cultural worlds. In the current context of course these multiple worlds are invoked within and outside anthropology. Given the increasing singularity of anthropology today it may be that its only outside of it that we can get different takes on how these may be perceived and apprehended.

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My colleague Richard Senghas, an anthropologist at Sonoma State University, sent me this email in regard to the New Yorker article mentioned by Kerim last week. His take on Grafton’s “The Nutty Professors” is rather less forgiving than Kerim’s, but I think he makes some very important points that are worth considering, so I asked him if I could post it here. The text is slightly edited to remove the “emaily” parts (and he’s approved the changes). (more…)

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Via Lifehacker I discovered that Google has a new “roll your own search engine” service. I played with Rollyo before, but that was Yahoo, not Google. Also, Google’s search has a the wiki-like ability to allow other people to edit the search engine. (I hope this doesn’t mean that spammers will be adding their own sites to the list.)

Anyway, I’ve created a search engine for all the anthropology blogs listed in the Authoritarian Academic Blog Wiki (AABW – see here for some background). If you want to add your own blog to the mix feel free to do so (as long as its anthropology related).

I’ve also created a search engine for the “Anthropology web” which is for non-blog sites (or should it include all the blogs as well?). Right now it only includes the AAA web site and AnthroSource, but feel free to add other sites here as well.

Anthropology Blog Search

Anthropology Web Search

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Two more poems to complement Kerim’s recent post about Adrian Rich’s poem which so eloquently explains why we should all be reading more Derrida Gadamer. These, however, come from Some Of Our Favorite Melanesianists:

Men black as birds perch
aslant the light
on the soaked grey platform house,
over them blows
a white gleam of rain,
their eyes tight with a fear
that needs no gods, with the merchandising
of death, they pull the sharp stink
of woodsmoke through their guts; being
men, they are not often brave, they kill
seldom and sloppily, but hold their lives firm
against the horror man makes
to try his own heart; beyond
the sprawling forms
vines and leaf-furze blots the late
afternoon, cloud boils through the humped ranges
seeding the land with myths.

-Roy Wagner, Curse of Souw

Chilling.
A word for now: I could have sworn we never talked
     that way.
	
It was Home Office (for everything not foreign
     or specialist), not Homeland Office;

Home not Homeland Guard (local defense in WWII).
	
It must have existed before --

My Collins dictionary has two short notes.
	
homeland 1. the country in which one lives or was born; 2. the official name for Bantustan
	
There you have it! From the occupation of Poland
     to ethnic cleansing!
	
Today, Homeland Security. Birthrights.

The dictionary also lies, then. Homeland is not where
      you live if you've travelled there.
	
An unsafe place, barbed

-Marilyn Strathern, Shock and Awe: War on Words

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One of the big problems I encounter when providing potted histories of anthropological theory is to figure out what has gone on since the late 1980s. Sherry Ortner’s article Theory in Anthropology Since The 1960s is now ubiquitous on theory syllabi and has had a weirdly hegemonic effect on our imagination of anthropology’s landscape. The other thing the late 80s were good for were strong statements in the field of political economy (Europe and The People Without History) and of course the ‘Writing Culture’ moment which was easy to clearly clustered around Writing Culture, Interpretation of Culture, and Anthropology As Cultural Critique. But since then… what? I’d like to nominate a couple of contenders for the potted-theory shortlist.

First, for a more British and less potted collection there is always Blackwell’s new Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology edited by Moore and Sanders which came out in 2005 and is more or less brand spanking new.

Second, there is Webb Keane’s article Self-interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy which is, as far as I can tell, available on-line free of charge (as are many of his other excellent papers) which reflects on the ‘Gupta and Ferguson’ moment of 1997 featured both Anthropological Locations and Culture Power Place as well as Abu-Lughod’s Writing Against Culture which has certainly become representative of a certain approach to anthropology.

Third, there is Sherry Ortner herself, who has attempted to update her famous article in the first chapter of her book Making Gender in 1997 and it looks like her upcoming volume Anthropology and Social Theory will do the same.

Finally, there is Robert Brightman’s 1995 article Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification which presents a sort of conservative counter-thrust to authors—Abu-Lughod chief among them—who want us to ‘forget culture.’

So there it is—from 2006 to 1995, some good places to continue the potted history of anthropological theory. What would you add to this list?

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One article I like to use when teaching about colonialism is Ann Stoler’s “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power” from di Leonardo’s Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge. There is a book length version of the argument as well, but the article does the job. (It works very nicely together with Claire Denis’ film Chocolat)

Central to Stoler’s argument is the claim that colonial policy towards marriages between colonial officers and native wives changed when the mixed-race children began to blur the color line that legitimated European rule. She looks at how in Indonesia, India, and elsewhere, the colonial governments began a policy of encouraging officers to bring wives from home, and how the presence of these wives then created new tensions as a result of the perceived need to protect these women from sexual assault. (The number of people executed for attempted rape does not match any changes in the number of such assaults actually reported.)

It was with this discussion in mind that the following account of changes in Indian colonial rule from William Dalrymple caught my eye:

During the 18th century it was almost as common for westerners to take on the customs, and even the religions, of India, as the reverse. These white Mughals had responded to their travels in India by shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin, adopting Indian dress, studying Indian philo sophy, taking harems and copying the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace – what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculturalism, has called “chutnification”. By the end of the 18th century one-third of the British men in India were leaving their possessions to Indian wives.

In Delhi, the period was symbolised by Sir David Ochterlony, the British Resident, who arrived in the city in 1803: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went around Delhi in a procession behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. For all the humour of this image, in such mixed households, Islamic customs and sensitivities were clearly understood and respected. One letter, for example, recorded that “Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca”. Indeed, Ochterlony strongly considered bringing up his children as Muslims, and when his children by his chief wife, Mubarak Begum, had grown up, he adopted a child from one of the leading Delhi Muslim families.

Dalrymple’s account of the reasons for this change are not at odds with those of Stoler, but the emphasis is different. On the one hand he attributes it to the “rise of British power” which “quickly led to undisguised imperial arrogance,” but he also attributes it to the “ascendancy of evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social, sexual and racial attitudes that this brought about”:

The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly declined: they turn up in one in three wills between 1780 and 1785, but are present in only one in four between 1805 and 1810. By the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared. In half a century, a vibrantly multicultural world refracted back into its component parts; children of mixed race were corralled into what became in effect a new Indian caste – the Anglo-Indians – who were left to run the railways, posts and mines.

The focus of Dalrymple’s article is actually on the 1857 mutiny and the parallels to the current situation in Iraq. It is a taste of his new book The Last Mughal.

(via Arts and Letters Daily)

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Over at Language Log there has been an ongoing fascination with a particularly anthropological topic: taboos. Specifically, avoidance of taboo words and how the media handles it. For instance: @#$%, f**k, or f_ck, or, even just the letter “f” as in WT_? Not that we have any such fucking compunctions here at Savage Minds.

This post by Arnold Zwicky archives all of the related Language Log posts on the topic.

Anybody interested in this particular taboo word is well advised to read Fairman’s amazing essay on “the legal implications of the word fuck.” Or this motion to dismiss an actual court case based on the constitutionality of the word.

Linguistic taboos are an important part of Chinese speaking societies, although they are usually motivated by concerns about luck rather than politeness (although that too), as is explained by Taiwan’s Government Information Office:

Chinese folk beliefs abound with special do’s and don’ts. Most of these involve special ceremonies and events, and many taboos have to do with puns in the Chinese language. For instance, both the word for “happiness” and the word for “fish” are pronounced yu. On Chinese New Year day, a fish is cooked and set on the table, but not eaten – so that the family will enjoy a full year of fortune.

The web site lists a few examples, but the only major academic treatment of the subject that I’ve managed to find so far is an article written in 1979 which I’ll have to track down in the library since it isn’t available online:

Sung, Margaret. 1979. “Chinese language and culture: a study of homonyms, lucky words and taboos.” Journal of Chinese Linguistics 7.1:15-28.

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Here is a different take on the legacy of what we write as scholars, and what kind of knowledge is produced as a result, a topic I’ve been exploring in some recent posts (here and here). This is from a poem by Adrienne Rich entitled “North American Time,” and posted (some time ago) to the blog Language Hat.

II Everything we write will be used against us or against those we love. These are the terms, take them or leave them. Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside history. One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege.

I can’t think of a much better way to explain why anthropologists should read Derrida, without making everyone feel all iterable.

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An interview with David Graeber on Charlie Rose:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uajHCIU876I

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It has been a long time since I enjoyed reading anything by Clifford Geertz, so I was gratified last night to discover A Life In Learning, the biographical reminiscences that Geertz gave the American Council of Learned Socities for their 1999 Charles Homer Haskins lecture (I guess it also appears in Available Light as well). It’s not the first autobiographical piece by him that I’ve read, but it is relatively more front-loaded than some of the other ones and I was able to find some pleasure in his prose that I just can’t locate in Balinese Cockfight or Thick Description any more. His description of the energy of Harvard’s Social Relations Department when it first got rolling—“stand back, the science is starting!”—is, for instance, very charming indeed.

Like many academic celebrities (I think here of the differently-fated Althusser) Geertz portrays his rise to hegemony as a series of accidents perpetuated on an man who just happened to stumble onto his vocation. When some people pull this trick it seems like a lousy attempt to cover up their blatant careerism, for others this sort of thing just reaffirms your faith that their work is just smoke and mirrors, while for yet others is successfully reinforces their appearence of effortless domination of their field. In this essay I get the feeling that Geertz manages to do all three of these things at once.

But compare this to a very different biographical statement—Paul Rabinow’s Steps Towards An Anthropological Laboratory. It’s not that Rabinow’s spare, almost noir prose style—“just the facts biopower, ma’am”—doesn’t ramify out into clauses in the same way Geertz’s does, but it manages to do so in a compeltely different key. And most interestingly, Rabinow’s own take on Geertz is quite a bit different from that of Geertz himself.

Or is it? Rabinow is quite blunt in accusing Geertz of bowing out of the Interpretive Turn and retreating into feuilletonism, but I suspect Geertz would be surprised that anyone expected him to do otherwise. At any rate they’re two great—and greatly different—pieces to read and think about.

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