As these creased and dog-eared magazines get passed back and forth at our family dinner table I had my brilliant wife (a real scientist) on hand for questioning.

“So is this telomere stuff for real?” I asked her.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said with a shrug. “It looks that way.” So there you have it, from the seat of authority.

Let’s refer to the Science journalist here:

Telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA that prevent the ends of chromosomes from unraveling, much like the plastic tops on the ends of shoelaces. As cells divide and replicate, telomeres get shorter and eventually can no longer prevent the fraying of DNA and the decay of aging. Recent studies have found a link between living to 100 and having a hyperactive version of telomerase, an enyzme that keeps telomeres long.

If you’ve got long telomeres on your chromosomes then genetically speaking this is beneficial and improves your chances at living a long life. But what factors determines telomere length?

The results of some very interesting new research (cf. Science vol.336, pg.539) suggest that telomeres in sperm cells are proportional in length to the age of the man. Thus the older the father is at conception, the longer the telomeres of his offspring. The researchers found that this effect extended to grandfathers as well, passing on their telomeres to their son’s children but not their daughter’s children.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that older dads have great genetic advantages. In fact as we age our gametes are more likely to contain mutations, so there are definitely some benefits to having younger parents. But I couldn’t help but be prompted to reflect how reproductive advantages of older men might have had an impact on the organization of society.

Certainly when it comes to mothers, experience pays serious dividends in terms of reproductive fitness. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes in Mother Nature, among primates first time mothers are generally less successful but since mothering is learned behavior this can improve with time. Thus:

Given a choice between two sexually swollen females, male chimps invariably choose the older one. It is interesting to speculate why men in some societies differ from other primates in this respect, placing so much emphasis on youth. One reason, I suspect is that these men are in a position to monopolize access to their mate and to literally possess her long-term. (186)

So human sexuality, as we can observe it today, is always already in the context of patriarchal relations. This may even extend to the cultural valuation placed the beauty of youth, which is desirable not because young people make better parents but because young women yield long term benefits for older men.

On the theme of “interesting to speculate” we might question whether older men hold some benefits in terms of the reproductive fitness of younger women. There is after all this ubiquitous pattern, seen around the world, of older men shacking up with younger women. This is readily observed in the age difference between spouses, with the male partner typically older than the female partner. What is the basis for this? How far back in human history does this pattern extend?

One outcome of this pattern is that from the beginning of the affinal relationship the male is in a privileged position as the elder. Of course, there are other factors that may be more relevant than the age difference of the spouses when it comes to understanding household micropolitics. For example, there are social and cultural reasons why a woman might choose an older man to be her mate. An older man might have command of more economic resources, or he might have more clout and authority in the community — things that can make a big difference when it comes to raising offspring to reproductive maturity.

Now perhaps we can count another “pro” in the advantages of older male spouses: longer telomeres. Because men and women have different reproductive strategies, a man who can sire children well into his maturity can have additional opportunities to enhance his fitness unavailable to his shorter lived peers. And this trait of longevity may be passed down to his offspring, and his son’s offspring.

Frank’s stated ambition is to use Darwin to critique Adam Smith on the basis of their different understandings of competition. In “The Wealth of Nations” (1776), Smith argued that as an individual pursues his or her own self-interest the outcome, without the individual ever intending to do so, can be beneficial to all of society. For example, as merchants compete with each other in their efforts to win customers the result is technological innovation, a collective good.

As a counterpoint Frank offers an example from the animal kingdom that he argues illustrates how Darwin’s theory better explains market behavior. Bull elk have enormous antlers that they use to compete with other males for access to mates. As the bull with the largest rack of antlers typically wins, competition has encouraged an “arms race” resulting in ever larger racks of antlers. Truthfully, the antlers are much bigger than they need to be. Consequently when bull elk flee from predators such as wolves they often get their racks tangled in trees, slowing them down and making them susceptible to predation. Thus, Frank concludes with Darwin contra Smith, in a competition things that are beneficial to the individual can result in an outcome that is detrimental to the group.

I’ll pause here for you to snort derisively.

Frank continues, if the elk could “vote” they might decide to start growing their antlers to only half their size. They could continue to compete among themselves, in fact the scale of the individual competition would remain exactly the same if everyone’s antlers were 50% smaller. At the same time such a deal would expedite their retreat into the forest when pursued by wolves, an increase in the public good. Simply put, the elk’s antlers are bigger than they need to be so cutting down on excess antler growth would eliminate the waste generated by the arms race of competition.

In turning his attention to the American economy, Frank observes a similar pattern of arms race-like competition in the quest to obtain social status through luxury purchases. As the wealthiest acquire status symbols so too do the middle and lower classes race to keep up by spending money in a never ending competition for prestige. The result is a society living beyond its means. Whereas elk “voting” to change their antler size is a fantasy, we can use policy to alter wasteful spending patterns and increase savings by replacing our progressive income tax with a progressive consumption tax. This is not to be confused with a valued added tax, national sales tax or flat tax endorsed by some libertarians, which he recognizes is rightly decried as regressive. Frank’s formula goes like this:

Taxes Paid = (Adjusted Gross Income – Annual Savings) * (Progressive Rate Structure)

The result of implanting this tax structure, Frank writes, would be that the wealthiest would reign in excessive spending on status goods to avoid the consumption tax. This would relax the pressure to “keep up with the Jones,” prompting the middle and lower classes to follow suit. Of course, there would still be competition for prestige expressed in consumer goods, cars, and real estate, but everything would be scaled back. The progressive consumption tax would generate an economic surplus at the household level. It is the tax structure Charles Darwin would have endorsed and Adam Smith never would have thought of.

Something’s wrong here and it begins with Frank’s misreading of Darwin. The example of elk’s antlers is, properly speaking, one of sexual selection. In “On the Origin of the Species” (1859) Darwin presented his theory of evolution by natural selection, which wonderfully explained why all polar bears have thick coats and all giraffes have long necks. Over time any trait beneficial to the individual will spread through the population if it helps them adapt to selective pressures in their environment. But Darwin struggled to explain things like the ornate patterns of butterfly wings, which don’t seem to have anything to do with the environmental pressures, or the peacock’s tail which, frankly, seems to be detrimental to the individual’s survival.

It wasn’t until “The Descent of Man” (1871) that Darwin hit upon the theory of sexual selection. These things are not to enhance the survival of the individual or help them adapt to the environment but to advertize their fitness as a mate. Frank’s elk example fails because he only considers the male’s point view. Males compete, but females choose. It is female choice that has led to spread of large antlers through the elk population not male competition.

Males and females have different reproductive strategies stemming from the fact that they invest different amounts of energy into the reproductive process. Females have a limited number of eggs, when they are pregnant they cannot take another mate, and after giving birth spend time and energy caring for the young. In terms of reproductive success, females do best when they are choosy and pick a male endowed with the best genes. Males can produce sperm by the millions and after taking one mate can increase their fitness by quickly taking another. Males improve their reproductive success by competing with other males in an effort to increase the quantity of females they mate with.

If you can take that and apply it to economics, great. But that’s not what Frank does. To him Darwin’s theory is just a handy metaphor.

Nowhere does Darwin say that competition among individuals does not always produce results beneficial to the group. That is a conclusion Frank comes to because he’s reading through this lens that forwards agenda for new tax policy. Natural selection doesn’t care about groups, it only ever acts on individuals. It doesn’t really care about survival either, rather “winning” at natural selection means reproductive success. Evolution is the aggregate result of natural selection shaping the frequency of variations within a population. Therefore, no bull elk would have a huge and unwieldy rack of antlers if the benefits of having them did not outweigh the costs.

This is to say nothing of Frank’s weird ideas about social prestige. Maybe this is explained better in the book length work? I’d be interested to see if he sees himself as engaging with Thurston Veblen, another economist who had a misguided understanding of evolution.

The prospect of applying ecological theory to contemporary economic policy is stimulating. That kernel of Frank’s argument is brilliant. Economics, of course, gave rise to modern ecology. After all Darwin had his “Eureka!” moment when he finally got around to reading Thomas Malthus’s “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798). Malthus, an economist, argued that as the human population continues to grow so too will the pool of available laborers, the multitude of unemployed will depress wages resulting in widespread poverty. Existence is a struggle because resources will always be limited and individuals must compete to access them. When populations exceed their available resources the result is famine, disease, and war.

Ecology grew directly out of economics, epitomized in this historic moment when Darwin incorporates Malthus. My wife, a fisheries ecologist, teaches an evolution class for biology majors using a textbook titled, “The Economy of Nature.” At a very fundamental level ecology and economics are about understanding similar things. What if you could take the insights of ecology and formulate them into a critique of economy? I would be excited to see the results! Too bad Frank failed to follow through.

Frank’s usage of Darwin does not go beyond analogy. Essentially it amounts to little more than a rhetorical move whereby the economist seeks to borrow Darwin’s authority to sell his idea of a progressive consumption tax. Incidentally, I had never heard of such a thing before and maybe it’s a worthwhile policy to consider. But it has nothing to do with Darwin or natural selection.

Eco-chic, like many other socio-cultural manifestations of neoliberalism is rife with contradiction. The fundamental contradiction being that it is a social justice movement within consumer capitalism. The producers of eco-chic goods and experiences are structured by capitalism’s profit motive. Likewise consumers of eco-chic goods and experiences are motivated by ideals that try to transcend or correct the ecological or deleterious human impacts of capitalism. Thus both producer and consumer of eco-chic are caught in a contradiction between their social justice drives and their suspension in the logic of neoliberalism. Eco chic events such as Burning Man and television networks such as Al Gore’s Current TV also express the fundamental contradiction between the social and the entrepreneurial in social entrepreneurialism. How do the contradictions within eco-chic represent themselves in American West Coast’s cultural expressions such as Burning Man and Current TV?

I don’t study eco-chic but it is a reoccurring motif. The specific location for my ethnographic encounter with eco-chic is the annual Burning Man festival that I have been attending since 2001. Combining countercultural ideals and Web 2.0 notions of sharing with ecological mindfulness and new primalism, Burning Man is the quintessential event in North America for the eco-chic radical. Following Fred Turner—and I’ve stated this before–that Burning Man is a ‘sociotechnical commons’—the cultural infrastructure for the digital media industries of California. Burning Man is expensive, catering to the Silicon Valley intelligencia who are eco-chic and have the finances to explore themselves along with 50,000 people at Black Rock City, a temporary metropole we construct for a delirious week of personal expression and community celebration on the barren alkaline plains of a Nevada desert a half-days drive from San Francisco. Thus, like most iterations of cultural and community identity in neoliberalism, Burning Man is rich with contradictions. The economic costs and carbon footprint required to freely express oneself and live briefly in alliance with nature and community and supposedly outside of capitalism, being only the most obvious contradiction.

Ethnographic research requires specificity so I have focused on one manifestation of the eco-chic culture of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Burning Man. Since 2006 I have been producing television documentaries and conducting participant observation with the global television network Current TV who has been exclusively covering Burning Man since 2005. Current TV, founded by famed eco-chic Vice President Al Gore, is based on the mission to democratize television production through broadcasting citizen journalism on television screens around the world. Current TV employees, of whom I have interviewed many, express eco-chic values of sustainable coolness as well as a technoutopian idealism about how new media is going to improve democracy and heal cultural and ecological fractions. Thus, like Burning Man, Current TV is full of contradictions, namely the attempt to instigate democratic processes within the most capitalized and hierarchical cultural industry–global television.

How are the contradictions of neoliberalism mediated by an eco-chic culture of media producers, digital designers, and artists spatio-temporally situated between the radically expressive neo-primitive festival Burning Man and Al Gore’s media democratizing global television network Current TV? Both of these sites of cultural production reflect the contradictions that befall the high tech cultural industrial centers of Silicon Valley in the shadow of the countercultural epicenters of San Francisco and the Bay Area. These contradictions can be summed up in the contradiction between doing good and doing well, being ecologically sensitive while being hedonistic, being trendy while being independent, and being a creative producer while also being a conscious consumer. These contradictions don’t fly. As an anthropologist I seek to critically assess these contradictions while exploring the social, historical, economic, and technological affordances that rationalize and valorize eco-chic as a valid cultural identity as well as an impacting consumer movement.

Whether eco-chic, Burning Man, and Current TV are developments of social justice within corporate culture or merely new incarnations of neoliberalism’s sophisticated production of surplus from the social justice energies of people is not an empirical question. Capitalism is fraught with contradictions, the primary one being the drive to enhance life for many while retaining a surplus for the few. The point of this research is to document how these contradictions are mediated at specific times and spaces, namely, early 21st century Silicon Valley and its proxy locations like Hollywood and Burning Man, in accordance with the institutional value sets and technological assemblages of these specific spaces.

On a more meta-level what does it mean for a larger anthropological project when it recognizes these trends in values? Chris Kelty recently talked about how “transhumanism”–that utopian value for immortality through science and technology–continues to appear throughout his research with computer scientists, hackers, and other geeks. He isn’t doing research on “transhumanists” but their values crop up consistently in the course of doing his other work. Eco-chic is like this I assume for many scholars investigating Western liberal elites. It isn’t the focus but the wider socio-cultural context for the research. When I recognize these larger patterns that appear to unify subjects across a field of seemingly disparate scenes I get that rush that I’ve finally found “culture.” Is it, or merely a typification?

The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it.  Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?

In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet.  Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”.  In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks.

Why have we let the situation in Japan recede into the background of other “big news”?  Massumi and others suggest that this “post-shock pre-posturing” increasingly delegates collective response to the national security apparatus, obscures the structural causes of “natural” disaster (Katrina as well as Fukushima illustrate this point well), and feeds the increasingly centralized global economy which capitalizes on the instability created by the very disasters it helps potentiate.

While I discussed responsibility and resistance in relation to mass-mediated affect in my last post, here I want to offer another mode of response: stepping out of the affective loop.  While feeling with others in the context of suffering is perhaps the only appropriate response when faced with the immediacy of another’s pain, undoing the social causes of suffering requires a continuously engaged critical perspective. I’d like to offer that the ongoing events in Japan are terribly important to us right now in an unfolding global context.

What’s perhaps most important about the aftermath of the disaster was not what happened in the first two weeks, but what is happening twelve weeks out.  Not only does the US public need to step out of the media-driven affective whirlpool, but we need to step back into the global conversation about energy sustainability and the political, social, economic, and environmental disasters brought about in the effort to maintain the current levels of profit.

The meltdowns at Fukushima temporarily unmask the social and environmental dangers always present in nuclear power.  Likewise, the uprisings in the Middle East reveal the grave economic disparities and instability generated in oil-based economies.  We mustn’t let these revelatory and revolutionary moments pass away.

As proposed by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis in a letter addressed to Japan, the “international capitalist power-structure” is terrified that the disempowered will seize upon the explosive political potential of these moments.  Their letter suggests that if disaster capitalism runs on an ever-present low-level threat perception, its leading industrial sector—energy—runs on the public’s perception that everything is fine and dandy:

Company men and politicians are aware that the disaster at Fukushima is a tremendous blow to the legitimacy of nuclear power and in a way the legitimacy of capitalist production. A tremendous ideological campaign is under way to make sure that it does not become the occasion for a global revolt against nuclear power and more important for a process of revolutionary change. The fact that the nuclear disaster in Japan is taking place in concomitance with the spreading of insurrectional movements throughout the oil regions of North Africa and the Middle East undoubtedly adds to the determination to establish against all evidence that everything is under control.

Claims like these and others (insert link) about “ideological campaigns” in the name “global revolt” may be motivated by a romantic view of political agency. But the history of nuclear power in the US and Japan suggests that Federici and Caffentzis are right to expose the neoliberal interests that inform the framing of recent events.

Historically, the nuclear-friendly PR machine (with Eisenhower and the “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the helm) played a huge role in Japan’s acceptance of nuclear power.  Of course it did.  How in the world, we might ask, would a country like Japan—the only country ever gutted by a nuclear weapon—come to accept nuclear powered energy at the behest of the very country that dropped the bomb??

Historian Peter Kuznick answers precisely this question and explains the process of propaganda and acceptance in a recent essay.  Putting Japan’s nuclear history Pointo perspective, Kuznick writes: “their nuclear program was born not only in the fantasy of clean, safe power, but also in the willful forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal.”  While the human scale of suffering and loss initiated in northeastern Japan will always remain incomprehensible, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown are being fashioned at this very moment into historically comprehensible events. The social, political and economic stakes in these repertoires of fantasy and forgetting are high.

Most blatantly, perhaps, we find these repertoires rehearsed in mainstream media stories about Fukushima.  Last week President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao visited Japan to speak with Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a tripartite summit in order to discuss Japan’s handling of the nuclear crisis and foster trade relations.  The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s most widely circulated paper, and one with long-held stakes in the nuclear industry…from the time it conspired with the CIA to promote nuclear development in Japan in the 1950s up until the present day) wrote:

Kan was particularly enthusiastic about realizing the visit by the three leaders to a quake-hit area… Some in the government expressed anxiety over security for the leaders. But Kan said: “The sight of us three eating produce from Fukushima Prefecture will definitely be reported overseas. That’d be the best protection we can get against harmful rumors,” and the plan went forward.

Kan links “security” to “protection … against harmful rumors” and asserts that foreign press coverage will provide the protection. One must assume that these “rumors” consist of statements about the ongoing harm by radioactive materials to people in the area of Fukushima and the hazards of all forms of nuclear energy more broadly.  By using the term “rumor” Kan is delegitimizing these claims, while simultaneously taking them seriously enough to situate their threat within the discourse of national security.  Regarding the stakes at play in controlling this information dissemination, Japanese scholar Yoshihiko Ikegami writes:

The government calls the information shared on the internet “rumors” and repeatedly urges the public not to believe them. In addition, a public advertising organization called Advertising Council Japan is airing a TV commercial asking people not to believe rumors and not to buy-up. (The head of the organization is the president of TEPCO.) The commentators in news programs single-mindedly repeat similar messages.

These widespread attempts to dismiss information circulating in the public sphere as “rumors” has led some anti-nuclear activists to re-appropriate the term in explicit calls for revolution.

The linking of rumor and revolution, however, is probably not the most pertinent point about Kan’s statements.  By shifting the role of “security” from that of protecting individual human bodies (Lee and Wen) to that of protecting the nuclear industry—and by exposing these same bodies to potentially poisonous produce—Kan’s statements foregrounds the devaluation of human life that Federici and Caffentzis attribute to capitalism: “What we are witnessing, most dramatically, in the response to the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, especially in the US, is the beginning of an era in which capitalism is dropping any humanitarian pretense and refusing any commitment to the protection of human life.”

If supporting Japan and Fukushima means eating poisoned produce, it is because maintaining current economic trajectories and the continued use of nuclear energy has become more important than the well-being of individual bodies.

At the time of the meeting between the three leaders, the Japanese government had raised acceptable levels of yearly radiation exposure for children from 1 mmSv (the limit set by the WHO) to 20mmSv and was failing to pay for removal of contaminated topsoil at schools.  Children were regularly being exposed to levels of radiation allegedly higher than Chernobyl and traces of radioactive material were being found in the breast milk of women as far away as Chiba and Ibaraki.

Like those displaced by the tsunami, many of the 80,000 evacuees from the 20km radius around Fukushima lacked adequate shelter and provisions.  What’s more, if human life has been undervalued, non-human animal life even more so.   Evacuees were not allowed to take their animal companions with them when they evacuated.  Despite appeals that intensified during the weekend of the summit (and continue thousands of cats and dogs, and ten thousands of farm animals have been starving to death.  Meanwhile, according to prejudices (with historical precedent) about nuclear contamination, people with license plates from Fukushima are being refused service at gas stations and turned away from hotels. Coding discrimination as “reputation damage,” the government is able to claim that supporting the people of Fukushima means ignoring exposure and buying their products rather than worrying over their exposure and accepting them into our communities.  (Japanese Political scientist Chigaya Kinoshita writes about these dual modes of containment in an essay about the uglier aspects of civil society.) In the midst of all this, the three leaders chewed their veggies and posed for the press.

On cue, as if obliging Kan’s earlier statements and this perverse show of solidarity, the first paragraph of the New York Times’ brief coverage of the meeting reads: “The leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea publicly munched on farm produce grown near the stricken Japanese nuclear plant on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Japan’s recovery efforts.”  Nowhere mentioning that this was the fourth in a series of annual meetings since 2008 intended to foster economic relations between the three countries, the article eventually continues, “Before entering the shelter, a converted gymnasium, Mr. Kan steered the group to a table displaying strawberries, cucumbers and other produce grown in Fukushima Prefecture. The leaders, who did not appear to have been surprised by the photo op, smiled and nibbled gamely. “Very delicious,” Mr. Wen said.”

The tone of the Times’ article seems slightly bemused as it acceptingly acknowledges, along with the Chinese and Korean leaders, that this was a highly choreographed theatrical spectacle. What’s troubling in such a tone, however, is the implication that an acknowledgement of posturing somehow exempts the reporting from any responsibility to analyze the scene—both what it stages and obscures.

Why doesn’t the New York Times explain exactly how munching on cucumbers displays solidarity with the people who can’t get the government to clear away debris, rescue their animals, and remove dangerous dirt from children’s playgrounds? Of course these are the very things obscured in the staged scene.  The Times seems to capitulate to the regime of “everything’s fine” that ensures Kan’s “security”.  No matter how ironic the tone, this article portrays solidarity as participating in an anti-panic business-as-usual patriotism, exactly the sort critiqued by Kinoshita in the essay mentioned earlier. While catastrophe and panic were appealing headlines in the initial weeks of the disaster, now in the moment’s fading half-life, they seem to have no place.

Addendum:

Since writing this piece the New York Times has just published an article that exposes the government’s exploitation of poor rural towns and the means through which it makes them financially dependent on nearby reactors.  Although this coverage finally starts uncovering the secrets silence hides, the emphasis on “a lack of widespread grass-roots opposition in the communities around [Japan’s] 54 nuclear reactors” fosters the impression that there isn’t much in the way of anti-nuclear activism taking place in Japan.  Hopefully, the New York Times will start covering the massive demonstrations (of scales rarely seen in contemporary Japan) like the one on April 10^th that brought more that 17,500 people onto the streets of Tokyo.  Cries of protest from the public have brought a halt to development of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant, and forced the government to revoke the change in acceptable radiation levels for children.  Until these stories earn headlines in mainstream media, I ask you to find projects like Japan – Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus which is translating critical essays by Japanese activists and intellectuals about the ongoing situation in Japan.

As the contours of the disaster accrete into what is undoubtedly a pivotal event, the larger frameworks within which meaning hinges are highly contested.  How the disaster, now officially called the Great East Japan Earthquake, gets spun will depend on which historical and political contexts are acknowledged, and which are ignored.

I had never heard of this before I read about it in a news focus piece in the May 6, 2011, issue of the journal Science, “Red in Tooth and Claw Among the Literati,” (Vol.332, p.654). Ordinarily this is something I’d be skeptical about. After all I jumped on the bandwagon bashing evo-psyche in the comments of Dustin’s recent post and I’ve blogged about the overblown promises of Culturenomics. But this so-called Darwinian literary criticism is kind of neat. In parts.

First a word about the news piece itself. The author, Sam Kean, comes across as overtly sympathetic to the cause of Darwinian literary criticism and seems to shares his subject’s – Joseph Carroll, the originator of this school of thought – dim view of contemporary literary scholarship. This unreflective, uncritical approach yields a rather dissatisfying article.

It seems this kind of thing is quite unpopular in some literary circles (shocking!), even getting panned in a recent issue of Critical Inquiry (ouch!). But our journalist takes this to mean that the man is some sort of hero and his brilliant idea is getting squashed by poststructural, postcolonial phonies. These “fashionable” theories, along with Freud and Marx, he writes, have all “dismissed the idea that evolutionary pressures have shaped human nature, attributing all human nature to culture instead.”

Anybody who thinks Marx dismisses Darwin needs to stop reading Wikipedia.

So what is this beast, Darwinian literary criticism? Here are some basics, as best I can tell:

• DLC is interested in how adaptive benefits might have accrued through storytelling.
• Storytelling is a universal human behavior, its just that it is expressed differently by different cultures
• Protagonists in fiction display pro-social and alturistic behaviors, hence why readers identify with them
• Conflict in fiction illustrates competition over resources
• Fiction, ultimately, is a reenactment of social preferences rooted in evolution: cooperation is rewarded, selfishness is devalued
• The ability to create fiction gave our ancestors some evolutionary advantage because it offered a risk-free venue to rehearse or experiment with different social situations
• As an evolved trait, the ability to create fiction can be understood as akin to play in animals
• There would have been social-functional benefits to storytelling as well, promoting cohesion
• Individuals endowed with the ability to create works of art highly valued in their societies might have reaped improved access to preferred mates

 
The field itself is portrayed as quite heterogeneous with internal debates, differing opinions of Carroll, and engaged is multiple ways with anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science.

I came away from the piece aligned with something Steven Pinker said, that DLC might help us learn where the desire to create and consume fiction came from, but that it may be less useful in helping us understand and interpret specific texts. Some proponents of DLC, however, assert that it is a particularly valuable way to understand Hamlet or Jane Austen, for instance.

Also I was brought to question Carroll’s motives. What drove him, on a personal level, to turn to science? I could cite here any of a number of widely circulated blog posts and journalistic accounts of the crisis in the humanities. Among those arguments as to why this is happening I’ve never bought into the notion that the humanities are impractical or frivolous because they don’t produce anything of value or encourage marketable skills in its students.

Carroll, however, is decidedly in this camp. To him, the humanities, “is unable to contribute in any useful way to the serious world of adult knowledge.” Boy, this guy sounds like a barrel of laughs! What’s the matter buddy, get shot down by a feminist?

Unfortunately the news article completely ignores the epistemological issues of introducing new methodologies to the study of literature. The kind of knowledge that science produces is quite different from the knowledge that literary criticism produces. And though “we” know science’s truth claims to be provisional, the authority of science obscures this.

It’s easy to anticipate why some in literature would reject this line of inquiry. Since the 1970s the emphasis in the humanities has been on the study of power — domination, hegemony, emergent subjectivities, the role played by capital. Unless DLC can address this somehow it will be damned to the critique of Science and Technology Studies, namely that it is merely a vehicle for assigning power to the observer.

At times I was struck (somewhat haughtily, I’ll admit) by the sense that DLC, in their dialectic with evo-psche, were really just reinventing the wheel. On the one hand you have the evolutionary psychologists’ focus on biological behaviors. On their other hand you want to talk about how these behaviors are structuring and structured by works of human imagination. It kind of sounds like anthropology by other means, but without the self-reflection.

To me this raises questions about the future of anthropology and what makes us unique. Our territory, if anthropology could ever be said to have one, is not our own. If literary critics can can do human evolution, then what would happen if cutting edge social theory reengaged with it? We can create a new cultural ecology for the war on terror and neoliberalism. We’ll build a Justice League of top anthros from each of the four fields and put them to work together on one project.

Caveats abound. Still, there’s some interesting questions buried here. Why do humans tell stories? How can science improve the humanities? What can science learn from literature? Why aren’t we doing this already?

Saturday evening, after the SANA business meeting and a catfish po-boy, I slinked back to my cheap hotel for a change of clothes and to get the address of The Ironworks studio on Piety Street. It turns out hailing a cab in New Orleans on a Saturday night can take awhile, especially when you’re in the CBD. And when I did get a cabbie, he confessed to not knowing where Piety Street was and his sole map seemed to be a tourist brochure which only listed major intersections. (“Here put these on,” and he gave me his reading glasses as if this would help.) I bargained that waiting to catch another cab would take longer than navigating with a lost cabbie and so we set sail on the streets of New Orleans.

After the confusion, a train, and about six blocks of streets without names we arrived. The Ironworks was an ideal setting for this experiment in art and anthropology. At the end of a city neighborhood, under the comforting glow of the street lamps, the building suggested a past life as a warehouse or place of light industry. Inside a high fence folks gathered around a keg of beer or perched on picnic tables on the edge of a interior yard whose distance brought darkness and a sense of privacy. This is where the robots roamed, clacking and blinking.

Inside I soon found my friends, alums from my alma mater New College – many of us became professional anthropologists – had agreed to swarm the Swarm. Much to my surprise there were even some undergrads who spotted me right away by my tattoo of the school logo and a fellow from my class who became a criminal lawyer and now lived right down the street. Also there were tamales. And a band of noise musicians. It was good crowd to be in, a mix of ages, anthropologists and artists.

Swarm was like a poster session on acid. What narrative there was appeared in sudden snippits and disjointed revelations. There was a clear connection to the human, it remained consistently relevant to anthropology throughout. Then it sent out rhizomes tapping into relationships with other living things: animal, plant, microbe. Themes of interdependence emerged alongside those of dominance. And hidden ecologies, networks of bioculture where history, gender, and trade play out alongside pathogens, evolutionary fitness, and geographic isolation shattered by human behavior.

There were no noble savages to be found in this clearing of naturecutlures. Indeed, romantics were largely absent while the surrealists, with their love of the found object and the psychoanalytic, were embraced with revelry. The moral seemed to be that we all would do well to follow their example and play. Just a little. Play and see where the transgression takes you.

The media present at Swarm was varied. There was painting, sculpture, fashion, architecture, collage, video, photography, and installation art. There was even a irruption of performance art as a troupe of actresses shared a interspecies home pregnancy test: injecting urine into a frog. Anthropologist Eben Kirksey hovered on the stage above them interjecting commentary on the consequences of this practice for the global health of amphibians. At the conclusion of the performance he seemed to mock the commoditization of both art and animals, declaring that his frog pregnancy test was available for sale. Only $120.

Amid the imaginary animals and recycled science of Swarm I thought back to an art installation I curated in “the field” while conducting my dissertation research. For the first time I reflected on how the installation became a part of my ethnographic methodology. Like a lot of fieldwork it was happenstance that I came to curate that installation at all, but it was very productive for me. To have art, video, photography, and props thematically arranged, set aside in a space and made available to the public I was trying to reach. I left Ironworks with a great deal of admiration for the artists and anthropologists involved and a new appreciation of my own work.

Its rare to get that from a text. Rare enough that when you find that special essay or book that speaks to you it soon gets devoured by dog ears, underlines, and manic notes in the margins. We all have those special books. But folks, there’s more to anthropology than the written word. Swarm made this plain like a compulsory fit of deja vu. I remember now. There’s an excess to what we do that doesn’t fit in conventional ethnographic text. Poetry, performance, and art are lurking just beyond our peripheral vision.

Turn your head.

David Beriss

I have never been an especially observant Jew, but when we moved to New Orleans in 1997, we joined a local synagogue.  I was told by a wise Jewish native that good New Orleans Jews observe the Yom Kippur fast and then break the fast with oysters, shrimp or crabs.  Except for the fasting part, I have since subscribed to this rule.  In fact, whenever I have wondered why I am still here, I remind myself that I am unlikely to find such an abundance of affordable seafood anywhere else I might want to live.  I am willing to put up with a great deal when raw oysters can be had for $3/dozen and a pound of fresh shrimp from the Gulf goes for $4 or $5.  I may not be a very observant Jew, but I am having a great time being an observant New Orleanian.

Or I was.  When the BP Gulf oil spew started in April, we all began to worry.  As the oil spread, more and more of the Gulf coast was closed to oyster harvesting and fishing.  Prices at local restaurants rose and some even stopped selling local seafood.  Efforts to stop the flow of oil kept failing and BP, parish, state and federal officials seemed uncertain of the best ways to prevent the spread of destruction.  Scientists suggested that the dispersants being used to prevent the oil from reaching land might be even more dangerous to the environment—and to people working on the cleanup—than the oil itself.  Much of the local seafood economy, from commercial and sport fishing to processors and distributors, ground to a halt.  When P and J Oyster Company, a New Orleans oyster supplier since 1876, announced it would cease shucking operations and lay off workers in early June, it was hard not to think that an era was ending.  Every time I bought shrimp at our local fish market or enjoyed soft shell crabs at a restaurant, I felt lucky.  What would we do without it?

Seafood is a key part of the local cuisine in New Orleans.  It has also been affordable and abundant here, so that crab, oyster, shrimp and fish remain available to people across class lines.  Seafood markets can be found in most neighborhoods and they often accept food stamps.  People know what to do with seafood too.  One of the best ways to start a conversation in New Orleans is to mention that you have some speckled trout or a few pounds of shrimp and you want some ideas about how to prepare them.  The answers you get will be better than anything you can find on epicurious.com.

One of the key complaints of food activists in the U.S. has been that Americans are alienated from the sources of their food.  The burger meat you pick up at the grocery store is hard to trace back to a cow—if, indeed, it actually came from just one cow.  Something like 80% of the seafood you get at your local store is imported.  Much of it is raised or harvested in ways that are not sustainable.  Some of it may not be good for you to eat.

In New Orleans, we generally know where our seafood is from.  Restaurants make a point of serving local seafood.  We can get our shrimp directly from the shrimpers, selling from an ice chest in the back of a pickup at the side of the road.  Or we have a relationship with the folks at the local market and we trust them to know where the seafood comes from.  Often, fish become part of the kinds of informal exchanges that build relationships.  A few days after we first moved to New Orleans, our neighbors showed up at our door with a gift of black drum they had caught.  Since then, we have often benefitted from the fishing success of friends.  From crawfish boils to holiday dressings and gumbos, seafood is not just about food.  We build relationships with seafood.

We have also tried to grow the seafood industry by making it a desirable brand.  Competition from cheap imports has made it increasingly difficult for Louisiana shrimpers, fishers and oyster growers to make a living.  The political environment and fear of pollution and disease—especially the risks associated with raw oysters—have created additional difficulties.  In 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed severely limiting the months when unprocessed oysters from the Gulf could be sold, claiming that oysters posed too much of a health risk to be consumed during warm months (from April to October, in their proposal) even though very few people ever get ill from eating oysters.  Local oystermen suspected lobbyists from West Coast producers were behind this effort, since Louisiana supplies about 40% of all the oysters consumed in the U.S. and West Coast oysters are far more expensive.  Effective lobbying by the state’s congressional delegation succeeded in stopping the FDA’s rule.  One strategy has been to promote the idea that Louisiana seafood is distinctive, a product of terroir, much like a fine wine or an artisanal cheese.  This has been pursued by the White Boot Brigade and by local Slow Food activists, who have taken Louisiana shrimp to New York and Chicago and persuaded famous chefs to put it on their menus.  The BP oil spew makes it much more difficult to suggest that the products of our terroir are especially desirable.

And oil complicates things in other ways.  The economy of south Louisiana is deeply tied to the oil industry.  Offshore oil drilling got its start in Louisiana.  In a state with a poor education system, the industry has paid high wages and provided training and education for workers.  It has contributed enormously to the state’s coffers.  We all know people who work in the oil industry as well.  In fact, many people work in both, sometimes trawling for shrimp, while at other times working on offshore rigs or in a wide range of other capacities.  Our world famous annual Jazz and Heritage Festival is officially “presented by Shell” on all of its advertising.  Morgan City, a town on the Gulf coast, has hosted the annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival for 75 years.  At the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas in downtown New Orleans, one of the main exhibits is the enormous Gulf of Mexico tank, containing a scale version of an offshore oil rig and dozens of the species that thrive on the artificial reefs created by the rigs.

This puts us in a terrible bind.  The federal moratorium on deep water exploration in the Gulf has been the object of much protest here precisely because it puts thousands of jobs at risk.  Some of those are the very jobs that people might seek when they can no longer make a living in the seafood industry.  In addition, we all know—or we should know—that the oil industry has played a key role in the destruction of the Louisiana coast over the last several decades.  We lose roughly a football field of wetlands to coastal erosion every 30 minutes in Louisiana.  Much of that is a consequence of dredging for thousands of miles of canals and pipelines to service the oil industry since the 1940s.  The long-term threat of coastal erosion is much more significant than the BP oil spew.  There are other environmental threats too, like the massive dead zone created by farm runoff where the Mississippi river flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

Last Thursday, I attended a Gulf seafood “eat in” at the Crescent City Farmer’s Market.  Several local chefs made dishes with local seafood.  Food scientist and advocate Gary Nabhan distributed copies of a pamphlet detailing some of the foods and foodways that are at risk in the Gulf.  The pamphlet contains articles by food activists, fishers, food writers, chefs and others from the region and provides a pointed illustration of some of the ways seafood is tied to the culture and economy of this region.  It shows that the BP spew is only the latest episode in a series of ongoing ecological and economic disasters that threaten one of the last successful American fisheries and one of the great food cultures of the world.  Erosion and wetland loss diminish our ability to survive hurricanes, destroy our fisheries and threaten to destroy communities throughout the region.  At the same time, cheap seafood imports are undermining an industry that supports thousands of people and a culture in which seafood plays a central role.  Ecological activists in New Orleans have been working since well before the spew started to promote restoration of the wetlands.  Food activists have struggled to find ways for the seafood of America’s “third coast” to be recognized as a great national resource.  One of the latest initiatives is have New Orleans declared a “UNESCO City of Gastronomy,” in an effort to earn international recognition for the region’s culinary heritage.  The region needs this to be a wake-up call for the rest of the United States.

On Friday, BP finally shut off the well.  As I write this, the oil seems to have stopped flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, although it is uncertain if this is permanent.  Maybe the fisheries will recover over the next few years.  Maybe the damage is not quite as extensive as we feared—the state reopened some areas to sport fishing over the weekend.  Should we be optimistic about the future or has the oil put a permanent stain on our seafood and culture?  People in south Louisiana are resilient, but this is a culture and an economy that often seems to be on the verge of collapse.   But one thing we ask of you: keep eating seafood from the Gulf of Mexico.  If it is in your stores, it is safe to eat.  As local chef and radio personality Poppy Tooker often reminds us, we have to “eat it to save it.”  We hope you will.

I wanted to share some thoughts about a particularly interesting workshop I attended over the weekend. Entitled “Rethinking environment, localisation and indigenisation,” the star guest of the workshop was Anna Tsing, whose work has inspired numerous blog posts here on Savage Minds. Anna Tsing was discussant for all the papers, and presented a talk about her current research as well. David Reid has a nice writeup of the workshop, to which I just wanted to add a couple of observations.

Anna Tsing is an incredibly generous scholar. Her comments on each paper managed to highlight the strengths of those papers while simultaneously suggesting ways in which their arguments could be extended. I say “extended” because her comments were largely internal to the logic of each paper, as opposed to imposing her own framework upon them. I only regretted that I did not have time to update my own paper (hastily scrapped together from a conference I attended two years ago in order to meet the workshop deadline during end-of-the-semester madness) in order to reflect my own recent engagement with her work, and the fieldwork I have done since I wrote that paper. Doing so would certainly have made the weekend all the more valuable.

Anna Tsing’s current research (or at least what she focused on in her talk) is about mushrooms, focusing on the ways in which mushroom cultivation reuses damaged (“blasted”) landscapes. Drawing on the work of Deborah Bird Rose, she emphasized the way in which these practices allow for a kind of “recuperation” for all the species inhabiting the landscape. She also talked about “multi-species anthropology” as an alternative to Actor-Network Theory. She argued that whereas ANT is useful for inanimate technologies which are animated by their interaction with humans, it is less useful for species which are already alive. Obviously, not all living organisms are relevant to every study, so once again the question of scale is important, and must be determined ethnographically. (See Juno’s Savage Minds review of When Species Meet.) In addition to SW China and Japan, one of her field sites for this work is in Oregon. A while back the New Yorker actually had a great article about mushroom hunters in Oregon which is well worth reading. Unfortunately, the full article is only available to subscribers.

The workshop was also notable for it’s location. Located in the middle of Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, the village of Smangus 司馬庫斯 is about 1500 meters above sea level. Since I live around sea level, I really felt the altitude when we went for a hike on the second day. (You can see the rest of my photos from the hike here.) During that hike I was astounded by the depth of Anna Tsing’s ecological knowledge as she engaged a visiting ethnobotanist and a member of the local community in a barrage of penetrating questions about landscape use which they often struggled to answer. Besides its location, Smangus is unique for three reasons: The first are the ancient cyprus trees which are the main attraction for the ecotourism which is the mainstay of their economy (see the picture above). The second is the fact that the community, inspired by a trip to an Israeli kibbutz, is run as a cooperative. And third, because of a high profile court case which pitted local community members against the national Forest Bureau in a battle over who controls the natural resources. Lin Yih-ren’s 林益仁 talk at the workshop gave some important background to this battle, focusing on the planned creation of a new national park, and a group of five authors presented an interesting parallel case from ‘Tolan 都蘭, a coastal Amis community which experienced a similar struggle.

UPDATE: Added some text missing from the end of the post.

The government of Papua New Guinea recently amended the country’s Environment Act to make it illegal to appeal permitting decisions made by the minister. The immediate reason for this change is clear — the national government relies on large, internationally-financed resource developments to fund it budget. The Ramu NiCo mine in Madang province, majority-owned and operated by a Chinese firm, is planning to dispose of tailings by dumping them into the sea — a move that many, many people in Madang oppose. When anti-mining groups got an injunction against the mine, the government responded by making it illegal to oppose their decision to let the mine go ahead.

The issue is actually more general than this. Landowner groups and others who oppose mining and petroleum developments often challenge environmental permitting in order to pressure or halt operations. Mining leases are rarely reviewed and renewal is largely a matter of course, but water use permits (for toilets on site, for instance) more regularly come up for renewal — and miners need toilets. The Ramu case is just one instance of a much broader tactic used by people opposed to mining.

The big picture is that Papua New Guinea is torn — between politicians in Moresby who are want to use mining revenue to enrich and develop the nation, and grassroots Papua New Guineans who don’t see why they should suffer so others can gain the benefits of mining revenue. When Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975, the country inherited the benevolent paternalism and technocratic confidence of its colonizers — the first generation of educated Papua New Guineans were going to lead the country forward and help develop the grassroots in the name of national progress. Now the worm has turned and Papua New Guinea’s leadership seems to see Papua New Guineans as ungrateful and stubborn — after a peaceful protest organized by Transparency International outside parliament, the prime minister called those who participated “satanic and mentally insane”.

In an article I am working on right now, I examine newspaper coverage of these issues in order to understand contemporary transformations of nationalism in Papua New Guinea. My conclusion – which at this rate will not be published until my kids head off to college! — is that Papua New Guinea is torn between two different idioms to express this conflict between grassroots and the political elite. Within the country, the language used is that of the nation: ironically, the nation-making project of the independence period was so successful that many Papua New Guineans now see themselves as uniting against the state in the name of national unity. Externally, however, the language used to describe these conflicts is that of indigeneity. Coverage of recent events by a UN-sponsored website, for instance, describe the problem as one in which “indigenous people lose out on land rights”.

What I do not say in the article — since it is all scholarly and everything — is how incredibly disappointed I am in the government of Papua New Guinea. Democracy is not fun or easy, and the paralysis induced by lawsuits can be a huge pain, but the solution to these problems is not and can never be removing people’s rights to participate in the processes that will affect their lives. This is particularly true in the case of Ramu, where environmental concerns are justified and deeply felt, not simply cynically used as tactics in a political process. Transparency, accountability, and participation are all incredibly stupid and ridiculously ineffective ways to run a government — but we chose them because democracies put people’s rights ahead of convenience or practicality.

Additionally, I am very uncomfortable with labelling this as a conflict featuring ‘indigenous’ people — despite the fact that I know appealing to international forces using the idiom of indigeneity is often yields useful leverage in political contests like the one at Ramu. But in fact Papua New Guineans are indigenous only in the (often oppressive) eco-authentic sense: they are brown, they have ‘exotic’ languages and cultures, and they live in a place full of endangered species of animals. They are not, however, ‘indigenous’ in the much more important political-emancipatory sense: there is (and was) no real settler colonialism in Papua New Guinea, no large scale expropriation of land, and not even an ethnic majority to oppress minority groups. Despite how easy it is for outsiders to shoe horn Papua New Guinea into popular and easy paradigms of indigenous struggle, such a construal of Papua New Guinea’s story does not do the country justice.

Eco-authentic definitions of indigeneity perpetuate stereotypes of Papua New Guinea as savage backward by giving them a positive moral valuation. They obscure from sight the large number of educated Papua New Guineans, and they stigmatize Papua New Guineans’ decisions to take part in urban, cash-based economies as an abandonment of precious indigenous heritage.

Most importantly, however, these idioms tempt Papua New Guineans to give up on their country and its  government. With corruption in the civil servant rampant and elections in Papua New Guinea too-often a mere shadow of genuine democracy (there is video footage of political henchmen unapologetically — and literally — stuffing ballot boxes), it is easy these days for Papua New Guineans to opt out, to declare the government an illegitimate opponent of the grassroots rather than to hold it to account as the voice of the people. Perhaps they do not need the ‘indigenous alternative’s’ help in abandoning any conception of state legitimacy. But I think Papua New Guinea loses something important when it gives up on its dreams of independence and self-government. Even though it may require people to dig deep, I would urge Papua New Guineans not to give up on the light at the end of the tunnel, and to insist that they are citizens, not indigenes, of Papua New Guinea.

To be honest I’ve never gotten very far into _Collapse_ — it isn’t as lucid as _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ and doesn’t feature New Guinea (my area of research) nearly as prominently. Tainter’s analysis of the book, though, seems to jive more or less with what the emerging scholarly consensus on GG&S: as a popularization of other people’s work it is quite good, the bits that are Diamond’s own contribution are flawed and wrong, and Diamond does as much as possible (short of straight up plagiarism) to take credit for the work of other scholars who he popularizes.

I don’t have the strong emotional reaction to Diamond’s work that other people do, so it is refreshing to see an article which can point out the flaws of Diamond’s work in a relatively disinterested way. I highly recommend the article to others — I imagine it is ‘teachable’ as well.

More than just a detector, the NukAlert™ is a patented personal radiation meter and alarm. Small enough to attach to a key chain, the device operates non-stop, 24/7 and will promptly warn you of the presence of unseen, but acutely dangerous levels of radiation.

A little ‘uncanny’ that I encountered the ad for the above product just after having finished reading Joseph Masco’s captivating The Nuclear Borderlands. Masco describes ‘the bomb’ as a ‘national fetish’ — a sort of subject/object that becomes an intense focus of quasi-sacred patriotic awe even as it conceals its own mechanisms of production. Technologies and institutions built to produce nuclear weapons, Masco argues, not only reconfigured American culture, they have literally transformed nature globally (by polluting it with contaminants that will be around for hundreds of thousands of years). And yet, partly because of U.S. government protocols of secrecy (that verge on the hilariously absurd), the actual operations of nuclear weapons research and production have remained largely concealed from public view. Thus, in the national-cultural consciousness, the nuclear, the atomic, the subterranean (literally) plutonium economy leaks into awareness as the uncanny return of the repressed. As for example, in the mobilization of cold war fears in the service of the ‘global war on terror.’ Masco writes:

Many Americans, for example, were gripped by an experience of the nuclear uncanny following the September 11 terrorist strikes, intuitively understanding the attack on New York and Washington, D.C., through a nationalized notion of violence developed during the Cold War nuclear stand off. One of the most powerful effects of the bomb, I believe, has been to nationalize a sense of apocalyptic violence in the United States, unifying the nation through images of its own end. The cultural effects of the Cold War nuclear standoff — the decades of life situated within the thirty-minute temporal frame of a nuclear war that may have always already started — has produced a new kind of psychic intimacy with mass violence. (pg. 334)

One has only to think of ‘ground zero,’ as Masco notes. And not just psychic: these days, you can wear that ‘new kind of intimacy’ in your pocket — with Nukalert.

Masco’s ethnography had me thinking about the forces behind contemporary globalization, and especially about John Kelly’s argument that rhetorics of ‘modernity,’ ‘the nation-state,’ and ‘American empire,’ conceal the unique and historically-specific circumstances that account for the shape of global relations today: viz., American military power deployed in specifically anti-imperial forms to secure access to and remunerative exploitation of global markets. (I hope to initiate a discussion of this argument in future posts.)

In any case. What forms of intimacy with violence does American global hegemony generate? There is the unthinkable (extraordinary rendition, followed by [by what? torture? that's a secret...]), and the mundane (your toothpaste confiscated at a small airport in the Arctic Circle). We are invited to imagine disaster, we are interpellated as subjects of terror, in innumberable and everyday ways. But we have our keychains to protect us.

Rich said a couple of things that made sense to me (and I am, of course, tripping so incredibly hard right now that this might not come through): one was that the research on psychadelics intitially assumed that it was useful for treating madness, but that through experimentation it became clear just how “tunable” psychadelics are–how “dependent on initial rhetorical conditions they are” was how Rich put it. The fact that they figure in ritual and ceremony makes perfect sense: because ritual and ceremony are the context and fuel for the experience induced by the medicine. The fact that people don’t use them, or have bad experiences also makes sense: in a context of paranoia, fear, criminalization and hatred, it’s hard to imagine psychdelics not amplifying that.

Because of this, Rich suggests that they are (not ‘are like’ but ‘are’) information technologies: tools for hooking up the tubes in new ways, to put it in terms Senator Stevens would clearly understand. The claim is a curious one–Rich defends it by pointing to research at UC Berkeley on the “amount” of information in the world: if we’ve produced double the amount of information in the last 4-5 years that we had in the previous 800,000 years, then one might expect there to be, at the very least, some “interesting” effects. One of those interesting effects is precisely, and simply, the effect of enormous amounts of information on consciousness–and that interest somehow… connects to psychadelics… I kind of lost Rich there. But in any case I have to stop here because if I keep talking about how “tunability” is a way of exploring the role of context and language as it shapes the consumption/ingestion/permeation of human bodies with information, then I am in danger of being dismissed as a kooky mystic.

But this made me think: as with so many areas of anthropology, I don’t really know much about the status of research into ritually consumed psychadelics, or whether it even gets much of a hearing in mainstream anthropology, but as Rich also pointed out, psychadelics are an excellent candidate for multi-sited ethnography. But seriously, folks… I’m curious about the line in anthropology between acceptable research into psychadelics, anthropology of conciousness, medical anthropology etc. and the unacceptable associations with mysticism, transcendance etc. that inevitably invoke folks like Eliade and Castaneda? What’s the state of the art in psychadelic anthropology?

… for the knowledge and practices of indigenous people to have standing in court they must be turned into “TEK” by a credentialed representative.

This point can be extended to the application of TEK more generally – TEK studies fuel the consulting industry in places like British Columbia in large part because the government and industry want (require) the outside expert to offer information related to land use and the environment in a non-native idiom. To do so, the outside expert is often expected to ‘translate’ native ways of seeing the world into maps, reports, and databases.

This discussion encourages further critique of the uneven power relations between aboriginal peoples and governments/industry. It raises question about the direction in which information, codified as TEK, flows. As Paul Nadasdy says in his book about the Kluane of the Yukon: “[indigenous knowledge studies focus] on the incorporation of First Nations cultural elements into existing Euro-Canadian institutional contexts without ever questioning the appropriateness of such a project” (Nadasdy 2003:10). To that I’d add: ‘without questioning the possibility of such a project.’

While I feel that discussions of TEK might start conversations, I am concerned about finding ways other than the translation of knowledge to incorporate indigenous views of the world into industrial development, biological studies, land claims agreements, and other cross-cultural projects. In my own work, I aim for this by attending to the speech acts and events associated with discussion about the environment – and that probably falls short when the audience is uninformed or unreceptive to narrative data. Are there other ways to promote the dialogue without favoring one side and its goals so heavily?

(And this is my last post … thanks again to everyone at SM for the opportunity to write here over the past couple of weeks. I have an increased amount of respect for all of you and the astonishing rate of high quality and thought-provoking posts you publish.)

Bibliography

Nadasdy, Paul. 2003. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon . Vancouver: UBC Press.

Also

Cruikshank, Julie. 1998. The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.

Critiques of the TEK concept and its applications are not new. TEK studies can remove ‘data’ about the environment from the contexts in which it is used. TEK is noted to be a bureaucratic buzzword, particularly in places where consultation with aboriginal communities is desired or required; when such situations arise, documenting TEK is sometimes seen as the best way to engage an aboriginal community in conversations about local lands and resources. And, some have looked at the label, questioning what is meant by ‘traditional,’ ecological,’ and knowledge, particularly from the point of view of the community of people identified as users of TEK (see, for example, Nadasdy 2003; Cruikshank 1998).

With questions like these in mind, I was pleased to find Julie Cruikshank’s new book called Do Glacier’s Listen: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (2005). I respect Cruikshank’s experience with Yukon aboriginal people and her sensitive understandings of the place of TEK in relation to oral history. In the book, Cruikshank looks at glaciation in the area where British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska come together geographically. She uses evidence from oral history, traveler’s journals, geological investigations, and bureaucratic reports to develop a picture of the perspectives different cultures bring to climate change in the Western Subarctic. The subjectivities inherent in creating cultural and natural histories are explored and, in doing so, questions are raised about the production of TEK in colonial contexts and in contemporary bureaucratic processes.

Regarding TEK, Cruikshank writes:

In much of the resource management literature, there seems to be a growing consensus that indigenous knowledge exists as a kind of distinct epistemology that can be systematized and incorporated into Western management regimes … Recurring questions concern how knowledge gets identified and authorized in different contexts, and who gets to control it.

…

In [spaces like parks in the Southern Yukon], science and oral history are both kinds of local knowledge that share a common history. That history includes authoritative gains for one kind of formulation – science – at the expense of another (Cruikshank 2005:256-257).

I am wondering, then, about the place of TEK-research within native communities themselves, particularly as one tool in a set of options native people have for talking and interacting with non-native people. TEK studies allow discussion of traditional culture in the idiom of science, or modernization, or bureaucracy, or whatever. They allow affiliation with these processes and they allow for participation in certain kinds of discussions about lands and resources.

Likewise, participation in TEK projects permits distance from ‘traditional culture’ to be created. Communities and individuals may choose to speak ‘in TEK’ in venues where talking about local culture might be taboo, might not be possible, or might be stigmatized. TEK allows one the possibility of speaking authoritatively without sounding ‘traditional.’ Despite the perils of the term, the perils of reducing local knowledge to decontextualized facts, what are the strategically significant reasons for aboriginal groups to engage in TEK-related research?

Bibliography

Berkes, Fikret. 1999. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management. Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis.

Cruikshank, Julie. 1998. The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.

Cruikshank, Julie. 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Nadasdy, Paul. 2003. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon . Vancouver: UBC Press.