…making connections is essential, and I think the project we’re engaged in here, at some level, is precisely to make some of those connections visible for emergent anthropologies elsewhere.  So let me offer one, in the form of a thought on description.  A Machine to Make a Future, my Celera Diagnostics book, is a kind of writing degree zero.  It is a modernist project where I wanted to be utterly saturated with things I know and to disappear from the text.  But in some ways that form of modernism is now traditional – it is hardly new. On the other hand, the project rejoins anthropology by demanding engagement with the unfamiliar. However, whereas no one would ever say to Marilyn Strathern, ‘The fact that you’re making us learn these terms from New Guinea is illegitimate,’ they will say that about SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism]. I don’t know what to do about that except persevere. Why is there such an investment in refusing to be open to the contemporary world?

–Paul Rabinow in conversation with George Marcus, Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, p 50

…connection and disconnection underpin the comparative maneuver that would contrast what seem(s) (the best way to describe) hegemonic Melanesian and Euro-American conceptions of relations. It is a Euro-American move, of course, to find unity in diversity (common brotherhood overcomes differences), but that is all right. There are many contexts in which that might be a good thing to do, and one I have made my own indeed involves constantly returning to Melanesian materials—not just for inspiration, though that is reward enough, but to keep the anthropological accounts of that region contemporary. What happens there (and what happened there) goes on mattering. They are “us” too.

–Marilyn Strathern, ‘What Politics?,’ Common Knowledge, 17:1 (2011), p 124

Around the beginning of this century Durkheim demonstrated the social factors controlling thought.  He demonstrated it for one portion of humanity only, those tribes whose members were united by mechanical solidarity.  Somehow he managed to be satisfied that his critique did not apply to modern industrial man or to the findings of science.  One may ask why his insights were never fully exploited in philosophical circles… If Durkheim did not push his thoughts on the social determination of knowledge to their full and radical conclusion, the barrier that inhibited him may well have been the same that has stopped others from carrying his programme through.  It seems that he cherished two unquestioned assumptions that blocked him.  One was that he really believed that primitives were utterly different from us.  A week’s fieldwork would have brought correction…[snip] His other assumption allowed him to reserve part of our knowledge from his own sociological theory. This was his belief in objective scientific truth, itself the product of our own kind of society, with its scope for individual diversity of thought. His concern to protect his own cognitive commitment from his own scrutiny prevented him from developing his sociology of knowledge… [snip]

For Durkheim, sacred and profane are the two poles of the religious life on which the relation between individual and society is worked out. The sacred is that which the individual recognises as having ultimate authority, as being other than himself and greater than himself. The dichotomy profane and sacred is not isomorphic with that between individual and society. It is not correct to interpret the indivudal as profane and society as sacred, for each individual recognises in himself something of the sacred. Sacredness inheres in the moral law erected by consensus to which each individual himself subscribes. The sacred is constructed by the efforts of individuals to live together in society and to bind themselves to their agreed rules.  It is characterised by dangers alleged to follow upon breach of rules.  Belief in these dangers acts as a deterrent… Because of the dangers attributed to breach of the rules, the sacred is treated as if it were contagious and can be recognised by the insulating behaviour of its devotees…

The first essential character by which the sacred is recognisable is its dangerousness… The second essential characer of the sacred is that its boundaries are inexplicable, since the reasons for any particular way of defining the sacred are embedded in the social consensus which it protects.  The ultimate explanation of the sacred is that this is how the universe is constituted; it is dangerous because this what reality is like.  The only person who holds nothing sacred is the one who has not internalised the norms of any community… The definition quickly identifies the sacred which in Durkheim’s universe is not to be profaned:  it is scientific truth… It is entirely understandable he should have internalised unquestioningly the categories of nineteenth-century scientific debate since he strove to have an honourable place in that very community from which the standards of conduct emanated.  His blind spot, for all the theoretical weakness it brought him, at least vindicates once and for all the value of his central theory of the sacred.  At that time science itself was unselfconscious about how its edicts were formulated and followed. But science has now diversified. It has moved from the primitive mythological state of a small isolated community to an international body of highly specialised individuals among whom consensus is hard to achieve.  According to his theory, such a new kind of scientific community would be hard put to identify anything we could have recognised as sacred fifty years ago.  So he is vindicated again by the passage of time which has made ‘correspondence-to-reality’ a fuzzier concept than it used to be…

[snip... Foucault... Quine... Hume... Wittgenstein... Bloor...]

When {Durkheim} entered the great debate {on social determinants of knowledge}, he muffed his cue. He could have have thrown upon the screen x-ray pictures just a disturbing as {Marx and Freud}. He could have been telling us that our colonisation of each other’s minds is the price we pay for thought.  He could have been warning us that our home is bugged; that though we try to build our Jerusalem, others must tear up our bridges and run roads through our temple, the paths we use will lead in directions we have not chosen. Woe! he should have cried, to those who never read the small print, who listen only to the spoken word and naively believe its promises. Bane to those who claim that their sacred mysteries are true and that other people’s sacred is false; bane to those who claim that it is within the nature of humans to be free of each other.  Begging us to turn round and listen urgently to ourselves, his speech would have disturbed the complacency of Europe as deeply as the other two.  But instead of showing us the social structuring of our minds, he showed us the minds of feathered Indians and painted aborigines. With unforgivable optimism he declared that his discoveries applied to them only. He taught that we have a more genial destiny. For this mistake our knowledge of ourselves has been delayed by half a century.  Time has passed.  Marx and Freud have been heard. Wittgenstein has had his say.  Surely now it is an anachronism to believe that our world is more securely founded in knowledge than one that is driven by pangolin power.

Below I append the 2008 results for ‘anthropology’ {Cambridge has two results, one for ‘social anthropology,’ the other for ‘biological anthropology’}:

Though I am personally deeply distrustful these sorts of rankings, feeling that that they utterly fail to capture the complex ways in which hierarchies of reputation (which I think are inseperable from putatively objective assessments of quality) are established, they are kind of amusing to talk about.  While the results displayed above roughly comport with my sense of the UK social anthropology scene, one result stood out:  the low ranking at Manchester.  I find it rather shocking that a department with a historical reputation such as Manchester’s should not end up in (even) the top half of the schools being ranked.  What’s up with that?  Meanwhile, this particular ranking of UK departments to me points up the fact that a similar recent assessment of US departments is nowhere to be found (to my knowledge).  The last results from the US National Research Council for anthropology were produced in, when?, 1995?  Anyone care to take a stab at a (purely subjective) Top 10 list of US departments?  What about a Worldwide Top 10?

The need for HTS as a capability was recognized in Phase 4 of Iraq and Afghanistan, when the military identified their lack of socio-cultural knowledge as an operational gap.  Building HTS during the war was expensive and difficult because we were reacting to a crisis rather than planning ‘left of boom’.  Had this capability been developed and implemented during a Phase 0 pre-conflict phase, policy decision-makers and planners in the Pentagon would have had a much richer and more granular baseline knowledge of the societies in which operations were to be conducted, which would have allowed them to develop more effective policies and strategies.  Even more important, these senior officials would have potentially had the opportunity to use this knowledge to deter conflict in the first place.

If HTS wisdom had been incorporated during the ‘Phase 0 pre-conflict phase,’ perhaps the conflicts could have been avoided.  Is McFate here saying that more ethnographic knowledge would have stopped the wars?

And yet, it seems that the diversity of cultures has rarely appeared to men for what it is:  a natural phenomenon, resulting from the direct or indirect relationships between societies.  They rather tended to see in it a sort of monstrosity or scandal…

This mode of thought by which the “savages” (or all those one chooses to qualify as such) are rejected outside mankind, is precisely the most marked and characteristic of these very savages themselves… Mankind stops at the frontiers of the tribe, of the linguistic group, and sometimes even of the village, to the extent that a great many of the peoples called primitive call themselves by a name which means “men” (or sometimes — shall we say with more discretion — the “good ones,” the “excellent ones,” the “complete ones,” thus implying that the other tribes, groups, and villages have no part in human virtues or even human nature, but are at the most made up of “bad people,” “nasty people,” “land monkeys,” or “lice eggs.”  One often goes so far as to deprive the stranger of this last shred of reality by making him a “ghost” or an “apparition.”  Thus curious situations are created in which two interlocutors proceed to cruel exchanges.  In the Greater Antilles, some years after the discovery of America, while the Spaniards sent out investigating commissions to ascertain whether or not the natives had a soul, the latter were engaged in the drowning of white prisoners in order to verify, through prolonged watching, whether or not their corpses were subject to putrefaction.

This anecdote, at once baroque and tragic, illustrates well the paradox of cultural relativism (which we will see elsewhere in other forms).  It is by the very manner in which one attempts to to establish a discrimination between cultures and customs that one identifies most thoroughly with those one tries to refute.  By refusing to see as human those members of humanity who appear as the most “savage” or “barbaric,” one only borrows from them one of their characteristic attitudes.  The barbarian is first of all the man who believes in barbarism.

–Race and History; see also (esp. pg. 475); cf.

In Culture in Practice, Marshall Sahlins proves himself to be one of the most profound and original anthropologists of our time. In the breadth of his perspective, his immense knowledge, his balanced sense of judgment and his refusal to bow to intellectual fashion, Sahlins is without doubt the wise man of contemporary anthropology.

Zone Books blurb

“Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères
Aiment également, dans leur mûre saison,
Les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison,
Qui comme eux sont frileux et comme eux sédentaires.

Amis de la science et de la volupté
Ils cherchent le silence et l’horreur des ténèbres;
L’Erèbe les eût pris pour ses coursiers funèbres,
S’ils pouvaient au servage incliner leur fierté.

Ils prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes
Des grands sphinx allongés au fond des solitudes,
Qui semblent s’endormir dans un rêve sans fin;

Leurs reins féconds sont pleins d’étincelles magiques,
Et des parcelles d’or, ainsi qu’un sable fin,
Etoilent vaguement leurs prunelles mystiques.

— Charles Baudelaire”, see also

I arrived in the late evening so I had missed the news of the day.  I arrived during a downpour, and raced to the TV once at the motor lodge — cause I wanted to know just how large the victory was.  First channel:  Tyra.  Second channel:  Football.  Third Channel:  Football.  Fourth Channel:  Al Jazeera!  Al Jazeera calls the victory ‘convincing,’ and I see a blue Indiana, and a blue Virginia, and a blue Florida, and I think that Chris Matthew’s famous ‘chill up the leg,’ might have been a chill felt round the world, cause I get goosebumps.

People are talking of course, the bartender hands me a Tusker and wonders if Obama can deliver; in the Luo areas of Kenya things are quite ecstatic… Al Jazeera quickly shifts the discussion to what Obama will be able to deliver and who will govern under him (will, e.g., Robert Gates continue on as Secretary of Defense), and emphasizes that while Obama’s statements on Israel have hewed pretty closely to standard US policy, he is, by virtue of his unique background, capable of ‘talking to more people’ than, by implication, Bush was or just about any US politician would be.

I was still at the Starbucks in Dublin airport when Obama’s speech was broadcast live after the election was called.  There was Oprah crying, and Jesse Jackson.  An anthropologist friend and I exchange text messages.  I note the giant glass walls on the stage.  He txts with characteristic brilliance: ‘teardrop guards’.  Yes I’m tearing up, especially when — this truly thrilled me — especially when Obama talked to people ‘listening to radios’ in remote parts of the world.  I thought to myself, who but Obama on this occasion would bother to remember those folks and to *speak to them*?  This man can be a president of a different order altogether.  Perhaps the often jingoist phrase ‘leader of the free world’ might gain new meaning, might be resignified, for a new generation…

(UPDATE:  Radio says it is ‘Obama day’ but most people have actually decided to ignore it and go to work anyway.)

May an inconstant disciple dedicate this book which appears in 1958, the year of Émile Durkheim’s centenary, to the memory of the founder of Année Sociologique:  that famed workshop where modern anthropology fashioned part of its tools and which we have abandoned, not so much out of disloyalty as out of the sad conviction that the task would prove too much for us.

Epigraph, Structural Anthropology

All games are defined by a set of rules which in practice allow the playing of any number of matches.  Ritual, which is also ‘played,’ is on the other hand, like the favoured instance of a game, remembered from among the possible ones becuse it is the only one which results in a particular type of equilibrium between the two sides.  The transposition is readily seen in the case of the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea who have learnt football but who will play, several days running, as many matches as are necessary for both sides to reach the same score (Read, p. 429).  This is treating a game as a ritual.

The Savage Mind, see also, cf.

Of course, the biological family is ubiquitous in human society.  But what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature.  A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals.  It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation.

‘Structural Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology’

Some guys in Iceland have created an online polling booth so that the whole world can ‘vote’ in the US election.  I snapshot the current electoral map above.  Unsurprisingly, Obama is sweeping the vote, although turn out is very low — under 600K have voted so far — and the traditional battleground countries of Venezuela and Albania look tight again this year.  In very bad news for McCain, even Bush strongholds such as Estonia appear to be flipping this year, apparently not having realized that Obama seeks to collectivize state industry and distribute wealth democratically while also ruling via a cult of personality and an authoritarian grip on government… oh wait, that’s Sarah Palin.  Maybe a flash of recognition accounts for the strong showing of the Palin-McCain ticket in Venezuela?  Not sure…

This is the second US election I have spent as a US citizen overseas — the first was in 2000, when I was in the field in Papua New Guinea and far away from cable TV (but Nau FM did broadcast updates on the situation in Florida between songs by the Venga Boys and Connections of Lae).  I have to say that I am routinely surprised at just how much international interest there is in the 2008 election.  I know that I personally am obsessed with the thing:  I woke up early this morning to check HuffPo for response to the Obama 30-minute ad buy (I prefer my news tabloidy:  only Huffington Post or Fox News will really do).  I find myself wanting to talk about the election a lot, yet I worry that others here in Ireland will find this terribly ethnocentric:  “Oh another American who thinks the US is the center of everything.”  In fact, however, I’m finding that pretty much everyone is obsessed with the election.  Back in Finland, people would talk authoritatively about the electoral college — e.g., could Obama hold Pennsylvania?  There are live campaign reports nightly on BBC, France 24, and other Euro news channels.  No doubt the world waits with bated breath for the exit of our dear leader W.  And yet this election is probably special for other reasons as well.  Like, you know, Barack Obama.  Raised by an anthropologist!  Truly part of the global village!  Mainline Eisenhower Republican!  What’s not to love?

At Culture Matters, LL captures my mood:

The Pléiade edition benefits from previously unpublished material from Lévi-Strauss’s recently opened archive at the Bibliothèque nationale, which gives a tantalizing glimpse backstage into his classic work. Tristes Tropiques was written in record time – almost 500 pages in the space of four months – and the original manuscript shows how this extraordinary feat was accomplished. Written on a small German typewriter that Lévi-Strauss had picked up in a bric-a-brac shop in São Paulo, the manuscript was one continuous ream of words, with no breaks for chapters. As if working up a collage, Lévi-Strauss literally cut and pasted sections from old papers and notes onto the page; whole chunks of his “petite thèse”, La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara, were included verbatim, pasted onto blank pages, modified only by replacing the academic “nous” with the more intimate “je”.

Many of the aphorisms which seem to crop up spontaneously in Tristes Tropiques were actually copied directly from a green notebook that Lévi-Strauss used in Brazil, where he had jotted down ideas as they came to him, such as: “the tropics are less exotic, than out of date”, “Napoleon is the Mohammed of the West” and “le moi est haïssable” (“the self is detestable”) to which he wrote over the top in red “pas de moi = il y a un rien et un nous” (“the absence of self = there is a nothingness and an us”)…

Also published for the first time is a brief extract from his field notes. In contrast to the rich evocations in Tristes Tropiques, written fifteen years after the event, the style is businesslike – “Visites indigènes et distribution de menus cadeaux. Dîner à la nuit. Le soir allons rendre visite aux Indiens. Chants et danse”. (“See indigenous people and distribute small gifts. Dinner at night. In the evening we visit the Indians. Songs and dance”) – with frequent references back to France. Certain escarpments in the Brazilian outback were like those found in the haut Languedoc; a wooded area reminded him of forests in central France.

Wilcken’s review in the TLS suggests that this new edition includes important insights into problems of translation, both conceptual and literary, underpinning the reception of Lévi-Strauss in the English speaking world (but cf.), even mentioning certain iconic turns of phrase that inspire the untamed thought of our little  blog.

Anyway, Greg Downey has written up a very nice response to the Brazil story at Culture Matters, including his experience being asked to comment on the story for Australian radio. Downey writes:

I feel a little queasy that we have to sell the drive for cultural autonomy and respect for foraging peoples with the whole ‘never seen a white man’ drivel. The term ‘uncontacted’ is part of the problem; ‘isolated’ would be better, as these groups have seldom ‘never seen a white man.’ They usually have developed a habit of reacting hostilely when they do, perhaps suggesting that it’s not so much lack of contact, but certain kinds of contact that they have experienced.