First I should say that there’s just plain some very good work being done there and I’m going to have to spend more time with it to do it justice.

The Introduction is of a type. For one thing, it’s a manifesto for a new movement, with all the rhetorical strengths and weaknesses of such. There’s lots of buzzwording and not a lot of substantive content, which is fine for the form and the content is amply supplied by the articles.

The intro is doing another thing that intros often do, which is to try to wedge out a distinct space for the content to follow. The general format is: here’s the state of the field, here are the problems with that, here’s what we offer to fix them. It’s entirely common in my experience for the lit review to be highly selective and caricatured, in order to set up a straw man that plainly needs knocking over. The novelty of what follows is mostly rhetorical since the lit actually contains the things it’s been accused of missing. This intro is so buzzy it’s hard to tell if that’s what’s happening, but on balance I’d say yes; but I could be wrong and I don’t assume I’m right in this particular case. I just had me some thoughts.

The first thought concerned how much this sort of academic writing is like contemporary art in Europe and North America. Art is in perpetual crisis because at some point in the modernity process the slow evolution of styles was transformed into a frantic seeking of novelty. At this point, the only way you know if something is high art (as opposed to mere decorative arts) is if you’ve never seen anything like it before. Even the names of genres have become suspect in the avant-garde stampede, since if you’re in a named genre you’re obviously not entirely new.

Exploring beauty has been so done to death; so has exploring ugliness. Everything you could represent has been represented. The fear is that there’s nothing new to say, and a big sigh of relief goes up anytime someone pops up with a new-looking thing and a new line of patter about it. Then it’s parsed for how it’s really not new after all, and soon it’s passe’ already.

What I’m saying by dubious analogy is that there’s a real danger in requiring our intellectual efforts to be new and different in order to be worthy. For artists this creative refashioning may become unproblematically second nature. But in fields like ours, for thoughtful people of any origin to feel forced to perform this rhetorical newness or even to distort their perceptions and practices to create these distinctions in order to be noteworthy is itself notable and perhaps sad.

My second thought came from thinking about this thread in relation to another here by Fred and Deborah on “cargo cults”:http://savageminds.org/2005/09/05/214/ in PNG. They discuss cargo in ritual and relational terms as the focus of PNGuineans “preoccupied with gaining long denied respect from Europeans. In discussing their contemporary cargo activities… they described a history of their efforts to compel Europeans to recognize mutual human-ness.” This is compelling stuff in its own right, but it made me think more broadly about the ways we bring cargo to our relationships and use it to win mutual recognition of human-ness.

It seems clear to me that this thread is about cargo, and in that frame obviously we would simply want to exchange these gifts and recognize this human-ness. But it gets a little more tricky for me with another analogy which I’m afraid is even more blundering than these last two. But if you’ve stuck with me this far, why not stick just a little further.

See, my wife and I have cats. They get to go outside and as a result, they bring us cargo with some regularity, in the form of various dead, nearly dead, or disturbingly not yet dead animals. Their favorite cargo is a small rodent that inhabits our yard. They’re shrews, but because we prefer our references “Monty Python”:http://books.google.com/books?id=JpdHiOnYgrEC&pg=PA229&lpg=PA229&dq=saviors+for+seminars+dyke&source=web&ots=MKvZGR2z5j&sig=rGdZlGNKA35mMXuAxCLYQYtnzsU&hl=en rather than “Shakespeare”:http://books.google.com/books?id=OdjaJiyDKH8C&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=shakespeare+cultural+spinach&source=web&ots=Gubewqx2y1&sig=LhJQRKJfbV2OreNigA6H-US1C6s&hl=en#PPA11,M1 we call them voles.

As a result of this attempted gift exchange we have developed what we call the “dead vole theory.” Anytime someone offers you something they clearly think is of great value but which you honestly find impertinent or repugnant, they are offering a ‘dead vole’. Dead voles may be recommendations of tv shows, music, food; they may be advice about how to live your life; or they may be suggestions about what to read. The thing about the vole is that it’s just totally fabulous to them, it really is. But it’s not to you, and this creates a bind, because you want to accept this generous gift in the spirit of giving, but gosh dude, it’s a dead vole.

Obviously if I really respected the mutual critter-ness of my cats I would yummy up the vole, crunch crunch tasty vole here, and slurp the tale appreciatively. Nah. When I reserve the right not to accept gifts of dead voles I am not in any way commenting on their or their givers’ value. Rock on with that, kitties. I am saying that this is not for me.

The traffic and comment-feed on SavageMinds is a sign that things are going rather well. This group’s blog is probably one of the most visible sites for English-speaking anthro online.
Hadn’t been observing this here thoughtful conversation about diverse anthropologies. But it sounds like I should have.
Yet, the drive ethnographic disciplines (and journalism) have of periodically trying to look at themselves critically probably doesn’t need my input. And I should learn to hold my peace and place.

Thanks, Strong, this is a very helpful clarification and a beautiful short analysis of conversational dynamics. You’re quite right about all the things you mention and it’s true that in that range of tone, I might well be someone who chooses to or not to participate in a blog for reasons having little to do with power asymmetries. Which is funny and alarming, because I like to think of myself as a content guy.

I think this kind of discussion about how we talk is increasingly likely to come up as Kerim’s project of diverse cross-linking comes to fruition. I’ve recently seen this question of interactive style and etiquette addressed with clarity and vigor in “Alexandre’s blog”:http://enkerli.wordpress.com/, for example.

I agree wholeheartedly with Zachary’s point, especially since Italian intellection tends to be subaltern within the European frame, as he suggests. Which raises another familiar issue, about whether Europe and the United States can properly be said to be centers as such when they are so internally diverse, fragmented and contentious. As I recall, Cornel West has a nice book about this but there are many from our ‘internal others’ and their fellow travellers.

I do not, by the way, assume that my knowledge about the world is superior; it’s just mine. Here I stand, here’s how things look to me. I do know how power/knowledge systems work, but that does not exempt me from them. Assuming my morals are humanistic I can learn other ways of knowing by asking people and listening when they speak, by attending to what they write, or by trying to figure out the logic of their conduct. In each case I use my own basic cultural input-output system to frame my new understanding, nor can I possibly do otherwise.

George Herbert Mead suggests that ‘taking the perspective of the other’ is a fundamental process of self-formation. Of course this can be a sinister process distorted by power, as illuminated by Hegel and DuBois, but it’s also just basically how we figure out who we are and who we’re not. I’m not everybody, nor does it make sense for me to try to be – any more than it would make sense, to use one of Mead’s examples, for me to try to play first base and shortstop at once, although playing each well requires understanding of the other. So I’m grateful to my significant others who step up and join the conversation as we learn to see each other as part of ever-broader networks of diverse humans.

I’ve never objected to Dylan’s suggestion that there is much to learn from Latin American and Caribbean theorizing. And African, and Southeast Asian, and South Asian, northern European, southern European, urban and rural, women’s and men’s, lesbian, gay, straight, sex/gender transgressive, and so on. Of course there is. The question is how we would learn that, and how much. I already know how ignorant I am. I’m advocating conversation, not recrimination.

And now a moment of self-irony, as I reflect on how those of us who are the heirs of ‘the center’s’ hegemonic claims to universal knowledge are being made to pay by being held to the standard of a truer omniscience….

I recently moved to Italy to marry an anthropologist who was born and trained here, and it’s embarrassing to me as a US trained anthro that so few of us seem able to read the anthropological products from other parts of the world. It looks like most everyone else is reading ours (and usually not in translation).

English has emerged as the twenty-first century lingua franca for business and academia. But if anyone should be able to step off the stage (metaphorically or even at that next conference) and talk with the locals in their own way, shouldn’t it be us anthros? And if we can access the anthropological products of other non-Anglophone/Francophone intellectual traditions and incorporate that into our ‘dominant’ discourses, won’t that go a long way towards de-centering the implicit and assumed superiority of ourselves and our knowledge about the world? Just a thought.

Just sayin’ kid gloves is usually what right-thinking progressive intellectuals mean when they talk about ‘tone’ in the context of diffident excluded others. Or rather what they mean after lots of bubblings about discourse and subalternity and hegemony and whatnot boil down to that in the end.

(I’ve seen it boil down to ’shut up’ a time or two. I get the feeling that I’ve been around a little longer than many of you; maybe my triggers are out of date.)

Anyhoo, this is all so inexorably familiar that I can’t actually figure out what you did mean. Little help?

I agree that SM is pretty much fine, and share the hope that as such it will be attractive to a wide variety of thoughtful folks looking for a place where we can speak our savage minds about topics of general interest.

Been hearing this one all my life. It’s very true, there’s a sort of confident, assertive tone born of privilege that comes across as aggressive, attacking, or patronizing, i.e. off-putting, to those whose life-strategies and emotional responses have been programmed in more problematic environments.

My personal approach to this is equal parts Marcus Aurelius and Nietzsche. The way to serenity and power (in the positive, affirming sense) is not to indulge resentment in oneself or others but to practice and encourage serenity and power. I yam what I yam and I does what I does.

In those situations where I’m one-down, and there are many, it would horribly embarrass me to be treated like a delicate thing who couldn’t carry my own water. So I completely agree with what Rex just said about agency.

I realize that we do not always start in the same place on this trajectory, and that rules of courtesy vary. I’m far more careful with the delicate feelings of my students than I am with colleagues who lay claim to be my equal and who I happily accept as such. Like the people on this blog.

First, I claimed we had done a marvelous job of creating a civil society, not that that civil society we’ve created is marvelous — an important difference. More to the point, however, is that I’d like to know what, specifically, you think I and the other members of SM owe you, Dylan. You say that we should be held to some kind of account, but could you please specify what, specifically, you think that account is?

Do you believe that we have a moral obligation to include other people who request occasional contributor status? Do we have an obligation to actively solicit material from ‘non Euro-American’ people? Is there something inherently morally culpable about the fact that the contributors at SM do in fact share a common background? Is it the existence of a community that you find problematic, or merely the fact that it is so privileged?

Frankly, I feel there is a danger that your argument tips into a sort of paternalism where helpless ‘non Euro-Americans’ must be represented and helped in on and by white bloggers. I think that this does a real disservice to the agency which (I imagine) non-Euro-American-Carribean people have to speak in a world where a blog is just a click away.

Alternately if your argument is that you just don’t like our style, or think we should loosen up a bit, then the apparatus of racial and class critique that you employ here is overkill!

Anyhoo thanks for your post.

Ultimately, I think SM is pretty much just fine. I’m glad to have been included here, even if I constantly feel lame for not writing very much. I repeat what Oneman has said: we just need more content! The ever pressing need to produce content runs up against the idea that the blog represents ‘expert’ knowledge of a sort. In fact, anthro blogging seems to be structured by a tension between the core values of the discipline (slow research, deliberative thought, complex answers to even simple questions) and the formal properties of blogging as a genre of discourse (quick, easy, snarky). Given this tension, I think the only solution is MORE contributors, to ease the burden on any particular one. The occasional contributors thing is a great idea in this regard.

I agree! Yet the twinge this thoughtful passage gives me is that humanism and science as such are both historically products of European modernism – as it developed in interaction with the various new worlds (to them) they encountered in their global expansion. Not to say that other parts of the world have not developed their analogs or alternatives. But the frame of the critique of Euro-American anthropology here is a Euro-American frame.

Of course, this is a culture (if I can be so lumpy for a moment) that has been devoted for at least the last 500 years to anxious self-reflection. Easy pickins, really.

But i would maybe suggest a slant on that point of view – this being that if you make the claim about your marvellous civil society should you not be held to some kind of account of what that ‘marvellous civil society’ should include and be about?

The other equally valid point made is i should get out there like others and get a blog going so there can be a network of blogs across spaces.

To that i dont disagree, but would point out as a regular reader of SM and not other anthro blogs as such i felt SM like ‘anthropology’ more generally stresses a world view that could give more volume to other voices.

Its not a responsibility of SM of course but more a wishful thinking sentiment on my part…