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I look forward to reading further. I’ve just finished Chapter one which I enjoyed …

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We have different ideas about what constitutes analysis. In your approach, the adequacy of a term is judged in terms of how accurately it captures the essence of a given phenomenon being described.

I however, see analytic terms as being useful not just in terms of description/interpretation, but also in terms of their linkages to the particular system of thought under discussion. In this latter view a change in the definition of a term has consequences for the conceptual framework as a whole.

Conceptual frameworks must be adapted to the specificity of the ethnographic encounter – but if they are not articulated clearly then we run the risk of seeing those frameworks as much more powerful and all encompassing than they really are. When I say we should be capable of being wrong, I mean that we should be able to learn from our inevitable failure to match theory to reality, rather than a more empiricist notion of failure as simply failing to describe something adequately.

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My sense of what Moore meant by articulation was not that different assemblages connect up, but rather that assemblages work or have effect in consequential ways because of unequal power relations (see page 25).

I re-read the intro after having read further into the book. In retrospect, Moore anticipates many of my worries, not least of which is that culture in this account will be reduced to politics. He even invokes the spectre of a Foucaultian functionalism, suggesting that perhaps he is sensitive to the sort of worry that Sahlins and others have articulated about viewing social and cultural life primarily through the lens of power. He rejects notions of singular interest. His theorist of choice, I note, for this opening up of politics to culture is Gramsci. He refers to ‘Geertzian’ without bothering to cite Geertz.

Pace TimElf, my concern about what I see as the ambition of this text to convey a kind of complete picture of Kaerezi in pointillistic detail stems not from knee-jerk criticism, but from my own present concern with my own writing. Anthropology has opened up the terrain of its object of study, rightly so. For those of us writing now, this nonetheless can be worrisome or intimidating: just how ‘big’ are these assemblages that move history and how much of them, as an anthropologist, am I required to be familiar with? Do anthropologists portray the garden (assemblage) in its growing state? Or do we dig up the tubers so that we can eat them?

Like some other Minds, I suspect that anthropology as way of analyzing things is being eclipsed by ethnography as a genre of writing. I suspect that the discipline as a whole is mistaking the sense of ethnographic writing for the logic of inquiry itself. As Chris noted, the play between the particular and the general is a key question dogging all of us these days. I think this all pertains to perennial battles between the nomothetic and the idiographic, between the scientistic and humanistic, between rival inheritances of western epistemology (see Toulmin, Cosmopolis, for a neat account of some of these tendencies). Anthropology’s great strength, to my mind, has been its ‘balancing’ of these impulses, a balance achieved through various hermeneutics, including circular ones. What’s interesting to me, perhaps, as I write, is that relational constructs like ‘articulated assemblage’ perhaps cut the loop between near and distant in anthropological ways of knowing… it is almost as though there just different ‘nears’ hovering next to each other. Perhaps this is what Kerim is also worried about… that the concept work enabled by such categories short-circuits meaningful comparative thinking about social life.

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It seems to me that such an analytic frame develops a way of talking about how processes of change and of power draw on “culture:” essentially an assemblage is drawn from what we generally term culture, but it implies a partiality and a mutability that is difficult to convey with the concept of culture.

I don’t see anything inherently overburdened by the concept itself. I don’t think he suggests that an assemblage represents everything all the time, and I do think that the concept can be open to criticism if one uses it as one should, which is to be explicit about what constitutes any given assemblage that one is discussing/analysing. If Moore says that rainmakers and war heroes are important factors in land claims, that is a statement that can be wrong. If he terms this an “assemblage” because there isn’t any link between rainmakers and war heroes, I don’t see an inherent problem with this. If he is right, then assemblage nicely connotes that the connection is in the invocation of these two things as the basis for claims, and if he is wrong then we can see exactly what we need to do: show that there is some logic or connection that links rainmakers and war heroes into a single category independently of their relevance to land claims.

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You are correct to point out that Moore claims that the concepts are only useful in terms of the specific context of his own ethnographic fieldwork and should only be judged in that regard. I call BS on this. The same has been said of Foucault’s concepts and Gramsci’s concepts, and yet Moore is perfectly happy to apply them to his work. If analytic concepts have no utility beyond the specificity of an authors own fieldwork they are not analytic concepts. It is specifically this rhetorical move which I object to as a way to deflect critique.

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On the other hand, you are right to decry the empty (or overstuffed) invocations of analytic terms (although, following West, analytic concepts may indeed be a kind of sorcery that you are quick to dismiss). The question is whether ‘articulated assemblage’ acts in Moore’s text like a shield, preventing his readers from challenging him, or if it is an analytic concept that does useful work. You believe it is the former. As yet, I’m not sure. But I am less disturbed by statements like:

“I use articulated assemblages to emphasize mixtures of livelihoods, landcape, and environmental resources as well as ancestral spirits, rainmaking territory, and political rule.”

Just as I don’t read Moore as attempting his own brand of Total Ethnography, this assemblage does not contain anything and everything. These specific entities, practices, processes, and scales are specific to his ethnographic project. The promise is that the concept ‘articulated assemblage’ will be able to relate specific phenomena into a particular formation in a way that more familiar analytics such as class, kinship, or gender on there own cannot do. Will the promise be fulfilled?

In using this analytic concept, is Moore marking a difference that makes a difference? For me, yes. Can Moore carry off his project with it? Don’t know yet. Perhaps his attempt will demonstrate the concepts inadequecies.

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While you reply to Strong here, my own point about complexity was with relation to the meaning given to individual analytic terms. I don’t see the point of having analytic terms which are meant to mean anything we want them to mean. It seems that such terms are meant to create a protective shield around the author’s work such that nobody can criticize them. They are magical invocations, not analytic terms. It seems to me that we are now training graduate students the art of such invocations rather than encouraging them to say things which might be wrong and which might be criticized.

In short, I think one can be meandering and performative in a way that is still capable of being wrong, which is a good thing.

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Why? It seems to me that Moore understands his analytic concepts such as ‘entanglement’, ‘emergence’, and ‘assemblage’ to apply as much to his own work as an anthropologist as to the phenomena he describes. The arrival narrative illustrates his own entanglement, and his elaborations of this concept guides my reading of his textual strategy:

“Entanglements suggests knots, gnarls, and adhesions rather than smooth surfaces; an inextricable interweave that ensnares; a compromising relationship that challenges while making withdrawal difficult if not impossible. Attempts to pull apart such formations may unwittingly tighten them.” (p. 4)

If Moore’s goal is to represent (and embody in his text) entangled practices, spaces, materials, and historical traces without reducing them, what is an appropriate writing strategy? To arrive at a parsimonious (smooth) explanation of the underlying principles (logics, structures, etc.) makes little sense here. The imperial optics of ‘tribe’ and ‘territory’ adopted this strategy, believing they had discovered the principles. How can Moore take into account the recursive performative effects of modern knowledge practices without replicating them? They seem to be examples of knowledges attempting to untangle the knot only to tighten it. Parsimony, in this case, might be an attempt to withdraw from the entangled situation.

It seems that with these observations I am stuck in the land of ethnographic poetics. Undoubtably. But I also sense that we are finally realizing some tangible results from all the fevered debates of the 80s. Harry West’s book is a great example the productive results, one which has a different set of strategies than Moore’s. The clarity or parsimony of the analytic-ethnographic interface in West’s book is appropriate for to the point of the book (which is not complexity but the performative effects of explanatory analytics, in anthropology or sorcery.) Moore’s writing style to me is similarly performative of the point of the book.

We may not be primarily interested in evaluating the ethnographic poetics of Suffering For Territory. No problem. But if we don’t consider them at all we have no way of evaluating the writing. We can no longer use parsimony as an unproblematic criteria of good anthropological writing. (My meandering posts demonstrate that I’ve taken this to heart.)

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Anthropologists who use governmentality have pointed out that the three forms of power described by sovereignty-discipline-government usually exist simultaneously to some degree; in governmental societies discipline and sovereignty often control the boundaries, the subjects that do not conform to governmental power. Mbembe pointed out that the simultaneous nature of these different powers is particularly evident in colonial Africa, because although the colonial government was confronted with a population that they had to control (conduct) from afar, they did not consider Africans to have the fundamental ability to form the civil society necessary for true governmental power. Thus they resorted to many of the techniques and some of the mentalities of sovereignty or discipline (in particular violence).

It seems to me that Moore is assuming the simultaneity of sovereignty-discipline-government and then pushing it even farther by suggesting each locus in the field of power has its own triangle that reflects the mentalities, justifications techniques, and projects of that locus. These triangles are in motion because of struggles with other triangles for domination, and because of their articulations with material conditions and the effects produced by other loci of power (both contemporarily and historically).

The thing I’d really like to pick apart about assemblages is the statement that they “displace humans as the sovereign makers of history” (23). I feel like I’m willing to give this idea some consideration, but I’m not entirely sure what it implies. Is he using sovereign here to imply sovereign power in the Foucauldian sense? How does this link to notions of action and consciousness?

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TimElf, for the sake of argument, :-), I °disagree° that “ethnographic description and anthropological theorizing is a knotted affair.” They certainly *can* be, and they usually are these days. But I think such endeavours can also be parsimonious: elegant, concise. (Compare, for example, the ethnographic-analytic interface in Bashkow’s book on Orokaiva ideas about whiteness, a book also about race, colonialism, modernity, etc.) If it wasn’t clear from my initial response, I actually really like this book so far and think that I will learn a lot from it. I just don’t think ‘complexity’ (self-troped as gnarly!) is its own self-evident virtue.

My feeling about the ambitious goal of this text stems from sentences like the one that Kerim cites above. ‘Articulated assemblages,’ as he appositely notes, seem to be just about everything… religion, space, moisture in the ground. I know that Moore will make this all work (or I hope that he does).

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I don’t much mind, since I don’t have high expectations for introductions, but I think there is something else going on here. I think that anthropologists are struggling with how to handle complexity. We feel our language has to mirror the full complexity of the lived experience we attempt to describe. For instance, he writes:

For this reason, I use articulated assemblages to emphasize mixtures of livelihoods, landcape, and environmental resources as well as ancestral spirits, rainmaking territory, and political rule.

Do we really need our terminology to carry such a heavy burden? What use are terms which mean so much? It strikes me that in the end they end up meaning very little.

Finally, one sentence really drove me up the wall:

A single vowel switches simbi, steel rod, into simba, power.

So what? A single vowel switches duck; into dick, but this fact is rarely commented upon.

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First, Moore is not promising an ethnography of everything. He will look at spatial practices as they are mixed with practices of government or ‘rule’ (hopefully he will explicate ‘rule’ further). Here he is indeed ambitious in inquiring into a wide variety of phenomena, but his analytic helps determine what will require ethnographic attention. Without recourse to structures or logics, Moore’s job of bundling experience together into meaningful bunches (for us readers) is going to be less parsimonious. But, from what we’ve read so far, that seems to reflect the kind of reality that Moore is trying to describe. I tip my hat to Moore for maintaining, and finding a way of describing, the complexity of the situation.

Second, we have no reason to believe that Moore wrote the outline of the introduction before going off to the field. At this point know very little about the intellectual journey Moore travelled to arrive at the analytic he presents in the intro. The arrival narrative is a great devise for positioning the ethnographer in the field, and here, because it comes towards the end of the introduction, we already read it through the lense of the analytic. Was it experienced as such? It doesn’t really matter, because it is now a wonderful, engaging illustration.

The larger issue here is the (dialectical, dialogical, imperial?) relationship of an interpretive/explanatory appartus and ethnographic/archival experience. Chicken or egg? Moore does give us his idea of this relationship early in the intro:

“I use the term situated spatially, culturally, and politically, emphasizing the salience of contingent constellations of practice, milieu, and materiality. In doing so I also advance an analytic of ethnographic emergence wherein Kaerezian spacial struggles informed my emplaced acts of fieldwork. In turn, my understanding of Kaerezi’s territorial struggles as constitutive of cultural identity–woven into the fabric of the the community, politics, and rights–oriented my subsequent analytical engagements with power, spatiality, and racialized dispossession. Ethnographic representation thus emerges across multiple moments and sites through recursive relations among my practices, those of Kaerezians, and analytics–producing sediments and traces contingently assembled in texts.” (p. 4)

Like the tangled knot of spaciality and rule in Kaerezi, it seems that ethnographic description and anthropological theorizing is a knotted affair. If Moore is not crystal clear in his discussion of the process of assembling a text (he needs to include publishing and other pressures, as ckelty mentions), to me this signals that he is perserving some of the complexity of the situation. Ethnography according to Moore is emergent, just like the ethnographic situation he is a part of and attempts to describe. Emergence is messy, on the ground (as it were) and ultimately on the page. For this reason I will cut him a little slack (at least for now).

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I like Bill Maurer’s quip about ethnographic authority: “I’ve got no problem with ethnographic authority, I only wish I had more of it!”

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