Let’s start with two of the more famous songs which have been given misheard Chinese lyrics. The first is “Golimar” from the Telugu movie “Donga“:

To give you a sense of how this goes, the word “golimar” is translated as “幹你媽“ which is pronounced “gan ni ma” and literally means “fuck your mother.” The rest isn’t much more sophisticated than that.

Just to show how popular this song is in Taiwan, remember our guest post by Futuru Tsai about traditional Amis song and dance? Well, here’s footage I took of Futuru and his adopted Amis age set performing Golimar during last year’s Amis Harvest Festival:

(I highly recommend Futuru’s film “Amis Hip Hop” about the role of contemporary song and dance in the festival.)

A second, equally popular video for misheard lyrics is Daler Mehndi’s Tunak Tunak Tun, which is a popular internet meme in it’s own right.

OK. Enough context. Here’s the music video I wanted to talk about. I’ll let you watch it first:

What I like about this video is that it is buffalaxing in reverse. The song was written, in part, with the kind of fake lyrics one would come to expect from a buffalaxed movie, except those are actually the original lyrics of the song. Although, as a mainstream song the lyrics are not dirty, they are often just nonsensical (represented in the subtitles with the use of simplified and gibberish characters). Even better, the video comes with Hindi subtitles which I’ve been told look as if the original song lyrics were run through Google Translate.

Finally, a word about Bollywood movies in Taiwan. Unlike Indonesians or Russians, Taiwanese don’t watch Bollywood. Most of my students here would only have seen Bollywood movie songs as buffalaxed YouTube videos. However, there is one notable exception. Everyone I know in Taiwan and, as far as I can tell, the rest of East Asia as well, seems to have seen the comedy “3 Idiots.” I think the criticism of the education system in that film is felt even more strongly in East Asia than it is in India.

1. Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson

2. The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

3. 1491 by Charles Mann

4. Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna

Bateson’s was the only book I saw that was written by an actual anthropologist.  How it is that only one anthropologist happens to be in the anthropology section is beyond me.  This was a particularly skewed sample, I’ll admit–usually there’s at least a Wade Davis, Margaret Mead, or even Sir James Frazier in the mix.  Not this time.  The rest of the section was incredibly eclectic, and included everything from books by Drew Pinsky to one by Maira Kalman (which does look pretty cool, though not what I would define as anthropology).  Some of this eclectic-ness had to be due to some restocking malfunctions, undoubtedly, but overall the section on anthropology was, as is often the case, a strange and somewhat askew reflection of the discipline.  Yes, that is an opinion.  And now, it’s time for some questions:

1. What’s the situation in your anthropological neck of the woods?  Do I have bad data here, or is this a consistent trend in bookstores?  Is your local anthro section pretty good, or is it stuck somewhere between 1890 and, well, the History Channel?

2. If you could choose five books that best represent contemporary anthropology, what would they be?  What five books would you be proud to see gracing the shelves of your local independent and/or mega-bookstore?

3. Who cares?  What do the contents of local bookstores *really* tell us about public understanding of and access to contemporary anthropology anyway?  In these days of e-books and Kindles, is this all just a red herring?  When it comes to discussions about “public anthropology”, should we be looking in different directions (and places) altogether?  What counts as “the public” anyway?

It is highly possible that using a bookstore as a gauge for measuring public anthropology is hopelessly outdated.  It might make more sense to start tracking Google, Bing, and Amazon.com searches instead.  Or maybe we should think about the public in a completely different way–less about access to popular or mass culture and more about communication with certain pockets, segments, and key components of society.  Still, even if less and less people are going to bookstores these days, this residual evidence has to mean something.  If anthropology isn’t even well represented all that well in the old paradigm (print-based), what does this mean for newer modes of dissemination (e-books and so on)?

Harry Wolcott, in his book The Art of Fieldwork, recounts the words of publisher Mitch Allen: “The writers of qualitative research are also the buyers of qualitative research.  It is a closed system” (2005: 134).  Does this statement still ring true?  Anthropologists produce a massive amount of information each year.  So where does it all go?  Where should it go?  More importantly, if anthropological information dissemination is caught in a closed loop, why is this the case?  Is it because everyone is simply too busy–and stressed out–to worry about these kinds of issues?  Is it because the structural powers that be completely determine the situation?  Do the demands and regulations of tenure limit how and where anthropologists publish?  Is that the main issue?

Maybe, in the end, engaging with wider audiences isn’t worth the risk and effort in the current political economy of academia.  Maybe it’s impossible to rework the system at this point.  Or maybe it’s just not a priority.  But if there’s one thing that I have learned from anthropology, it’s this: social systems, even the most apparently entrenched, are anything but immune to change.  And the direction of that change may be heavily influenced by wider “structural conditions,” but the actions, decisions, and choices of the actors themselves can, in the end, play a crucial role in shaping the systems in which we participate.  Right?  Or is that just a bunch of nonsense that we all promulgate in lectures and seminars but don’t really buy into on a day to day basis?

Here in Taiwan it’s time for the annual Dragon Boat Festival (Duānwǔ Jié 端午節), which also happens to be a school holiday. The traditional story of this festival is well summarized by Wikipedia:

The best-known traditional story holds that the festival commemorates the death of poet Qu Yuan (Chinese: 屈原) (c. 340 BCE – 278 BCE) of the ancient state of Chu, in the Warring States Period of the Zhou Dynasty. A descendant of the Chu royal house, Qu served in high offices. However, when the king decided to ally with the increasingly powerful state of Qin, Qu was banished for opposing the alliance. Qu Yuan was accused of treason. During his exile, Qu Yuan wrote a great deal of poetry, for which he is now remembered. Twenty-eight years later, Qin conquered the capital of Chu. In despair, Qu Yuan committed suicide by drowning himself in the Miluo River on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.

It is said that the local people, who admired him, threw lumps of rice into the river to feed the fish so that they would not eat Qu Yuan’s body. This is said to be the origin of zongzi [a kind of glutinous rice snack eaten at this time]. The local people were also said to have paddled out on boats, either to scare the fish away or to retrieve his body. This is said to be the origin of dragon boat racing.

This is the version of the story which most Taiwanese learn in school, but the truth is much more interesting. I recently discovered that there is some nice work on the sociology of sports being done at National Taiwan Sport University 國立體育大學, where I found Li-Ke Chan’s paper “Post-colonial Dragon Boat Races: Some Preliminary Thoughts” [PDF]. Here’s what I learned from Chan’s paper:

First of all, it points out that dragon boat racing’s origins are probably much older than the official story suggests, having been carried out by Southern Chinese clans as part of shamanistic rituals viewed as barbaric by the Han Chinese. Moreover, conflicts between “Confucian orthodoxy with the popular ritual” frequently led to the rituals being banned. It was also banned as one of the “Four Olds” during the early Communist period.

Second, it also seems this ritual was also common in Qing-era Taiwan, such as 18th and 19th century rituals practiced by Plains Aborigines (Pingpu zu 平埔族) in what is now Ilan county (宜蘭縣). This was not a competitive event, and the author suggests that the dragon motif was absent as well, nonetheless they are sometimes talked about as “dragon boat” races in the archive. When the Japanese colonized Taiwan they tried to control these local rituals by limiting the number of days, or forcing them to adopt more Chinese-style Dragon Boat races. The Japanese were also trying to organize and control the Chinese Dragon Boat races, sometimes having them scheduled on Japanese Navy Day (which fell close to the Chinese holiday).

Finally, when the KMT took control of Taiwan after the war, they saw the Dragon Boat Festival as a means to promote their legitimacy as the true heirs to China’s traditional culture. Chan points out that this traditionalism also included an implicit modernization as the focus shifted from ritual to sports. The “race was officially organized first time under the name of ‘Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Cup.”

The article goes on to discuss the modern significance of the ritual in Hong Kong and China, but I’ll let you read that for yourself. If you can, find your local Chinatown and buy some zongzi!

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?

About a week later, as the scale of suffering in Japan became clearer, I became less concerned with everybody else’s questionable investments in the pain of others and more suspicious of my own hesitancy to engage emotionally.

Although I frowned and cried as solicited upon seeing the unavoidable photos of people staggering through muddy ruins, I wasn’t sure how to feel the rest of the time.  Brian Massumi’s claim that

“power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms—it’s affective”

suggests that stories and images circulate and infiltrate strategically. Even though, as de Certeau reminds us, readers aren’t fools and we employ tactics with which to play and navigate the web of discourse, we’re still stuck inside of it—and it inside of us.  Our critique of media, savvy avoidance of manipulation, and resistance to being told how to feel are themselves already the threads of discourses that have been woven into us.

Part of me wants to believe that some basic feeling for the suffering of others arises before all of this, that there’s a relational web prior and in excess to the discursive one—and that it’s woven more tightly.

But if the mass mediated means through which we gain access to others is always already shaping how we feel for those others, how can we feel without capitulating to the powers that traffic in affect? In the case of catastrophes, which seem to (fairly regularly) punctuate the passage of ordinary life with significance, how do we resist the meaning-making machines while still engaging meaningfully?

I’ll explore these questions here and in a series of posts to follow by looking into the ways various media structure our experiences of disaster and construe “eventfulness.” Considering the political and social interests at stake in Japan and the US, I’m curious about how this particular disaster is being positioned in historical time, and what such placements obscure, or displace.  But mostly, as I meditate on my own relationship with Japan and reaction to the unfolding news, I wonder how to engage responsibly with media and the “real” event.   Helpful to this project is Diana Taylor’s model of the witness who, reflecting Louis Althusser’s model of dialectic spectatorship and Augusto Boal’s “spect-actor”, serves as a

“guarantor of the link between the I and the you, the inside and the outside”and “accepts the dangers and responsibilities of seeing and of acting on what one has seen.”

This task is not easy considering how often we are bombarded with images and news of disaster.  People tell me that they either feel distant and numb to the repeating images, or else they connect to the images through identification: imagining the people in the images are one’s own mother, brother, etc.  The problem with the latter approach is that it brings the other into one’s own ideological universe and blinds one to the political, cultural, and other factors that structure the experience of the event.

These modes of spectatorship are not unlike those of hegemony and identification criticized by Althusser in relationship to theater.  However, when we are dealing with the theater of the real, and its tendency towards catastrophe, the ideological agendas organizing devastation into spectacle elicit modes of relating, as well as detaching, that register in the body.

Quoting the work of Hal Foster regarding shock and subjectivity in America, anthropologist Allen Feldman points to the double nature of the subject’s pleasure:

“in its guise as witness the mass subject reveals its sadomasochistic aspect, for this subject is split in relation to a disaster; even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled sadistically by the victims of whom he or she is not one.”

Feldman raises the stakes when he explicitly links the creation of the “mass subject” in modernity to catastrophe and the visual technologies through which the catastrophic is ideologically produced and distributed.  Developing a theory of the “actuarial gaze,” which he describes as

“the visual organization and institutionalization of threat perception and prophylaxis,” Feldman asserts that “the visual culture of risk reportage circulates catastrophic images as a psychosocial and, ultimately, political desire and currency.”

The visceral intensities ignited and snuffed in these visual images constitute the subjectivity from which we establish ourselves as a public, and how we, as a public, are going to relate or not.

I’d like to say that my reluctance to participate in the disaster drama stemmed solely from a refusal to let this awful thing give me any sort pleasure, masochistic or otherwise.  Or that I harbored sophisticated political suspicions of risk reportage.

But I was primarily loathe to identify with the community of spectators I imagined excitedly rallying their concern on the receiving end of the mediated image.  It was the thrill of the social—the heightened sense of occasion—that I couldn’t stand.  Nothing, it seemed, would make me feel so far away, so alienated from the thing in itself than positioning myself from this A-frame cottage in Iowa somewhere inside the Big Deal Event.  As for approaching the thing in itself, I knew of no other means than those used by the community of spectators themselves: disaster footage.  But did I really want to go there?  As elaborated by Zizek, the “passion for penetrating the Real Thing” spirals into an increasingly violent pursuit of the Real within the images that structure our reality.  I did not want to experience the tsunami as the “thrill of the Real,” the ultimate special effect.

An internet search brought me to a video of the tsunami swallowing the coastal town of Kuji where I had stayed with a family nearly 10 years ago.   The dreadful thrill of the footage did indeed flood my body darkly, excessively, like the tsunami itself.  Feeling my own footing give way, despite sitting down, I braced myself.  Had someone been next to me, however, I would have reached out to them, without thinking, to steady myself.

I wonder now about that instinct.  Why, when something awful or awesome is about to happen, or has just happened, do we tend to grab on to the people next to us?  Surely, the support sought by such a gesture isn’t merely that of balance, but of affiliation.   I hadn’t wanted to get on the drama bandwagon, but here I was: wanting to connect.

The public I imagined gaping from a safe distance was probably not the public into which my friend had been calling me when she sent me that facebook message.   Rather than use the event to elevate the drama in our lives, she may have been reaching out to me in order to ground the drama in a shared reality. This is not to say she was trying to reduce the significance of the event; the ordinary world has its own sort of eventfulness.  As Kathleen Stewart describes it,

“modes of attending to scenes and events spawn socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states and public feelings of all kinds.”

The everyday eventfulness “resonating in bodies, scenes, and forms of sociality,” spreads in whispers and flourishes in indeterminacy.  Something is happening, is going to happen, to us.  The mode is one of suspension that fastens potential significance onto the tiniest of things.  The effect isn’t of elevating reality into ungraspable proportions, but of charging reality with limitless points of connection.

While the looming risk perception propagated in the “actuarial gaze” may make and mask the ways in which we always feel vulnerable to invisible, ever-present and threatening powers, maybe it fails to displace the ways we feel vulnerable to each other.   The witness, unlike the spectator, creates a zone of proximity in the “link between the I and the you”.   Amidst the spectacular scenes of ruin, my old friend took the risk of writing me after all this time, took the risk of hearing bad news and having to respond, and took the risk of being criticized or blogged about.  In doing so she offered me the first clue for thinking about mediated models for responsible action.

In his seminal work Playing Indian, Philip Deloria describes the history of white performance in Indian disguise, exploring the role of the Indian in the American national imaginary. Mainstream American perceptions of Indians are defined by a dialectic of repulsion and desire. The Indian, he writes, is at once “Us” and “Not-Us.”

In this ambivalent relationship, Indians as savages serve as “oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self” (Deloria 1998:3). Yet just as frequently Indians were trotted out as symbols of freedom for they were in possession of “barbarian virtues,” to borrow a phrase from Matthew Frye Jacobson, that deserved to be emulated especially as an antidote to the supposed ills of modernity and city life with its changing gender norms.

This was a uniquely American nationalism: one that saw itself as civilized, yet not European, native born of a society rooted in ancient history and of the natural American landscape. This history shows that Indian play has always “[clung] tightly to the contours of power” (Deloria 1998:7) within U.S. national subjectivity. Indian play, Deloria argues, came to serve a function in the ongoing search for an authentic and meaningful social identity in the face of modernity’s uncertainties. This tradition of playing Indian in the U.S. has wrought a slue of stereotypes in U.S. popular culture including: the Indian as environmentalist, spiritual messenger or guide, team mascot, filmic protagonist, and tourist destination.

Turning now from Deloria’s critical analysis of practices American cultural and literary expression, we can see how Indian play has served a prominent role in helping Americans make sense of war. As a polysemous and highly flexible trope of the U.S. military, Indian imagery in representations of American military conflict constitutes a veritable genre unto itself. Broadly speaking it boils down to two general types that mirror Deloria’s dialectic of desire and repulsion: the Indian as martial ally and the Indian as worthy opponent.

To wit – the Indian is Us and Not-Us:
 
Osama Bin Laden, “Geronimo”

Geronimo, an Apache

An Apache


 
Making Bin Laden into an Indian elevates him. The Washington Post isolates Geronimo’s elusiveness, “[he] was rumored to be able to walk without leaving any tracks,” as the key trait that links him to Bin Laden. This is meant to illustrate some degree of respect the American military leaders have for their foe. It also serves to cast the United States in a better light. We are, after all, magnanimous in victory. By heaping praise upon one’s enemy, likening them to such a worthy opponent as Geronimo, the American military bestows prestige upon themselves. They won the fight by besting a legend.

A little excess social capital couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Playing Indian is a dynamic practice, changing with time as American anxieties change from one generation to the next. Giving Bin Laden the code name “Geronimo” rises out of the need to address the ambivalence Americans have over the value of the current war. By imbuing it with Indians the war is legitimated but it is also made comprehensible. The current war is made legible in terms of previous wars. In fact, the ideology of American/ Indian martial conflict and the contradictory imagery of Indians as Us and Not-Us plays itself out, over and over again, in every American military conflict. This is part of American culture and shows how we make war make sense.

A defining element of the War on Terror has been the theme of “civilization,” the role of the US military in combating “barbarians” and reform efforts to save foreign populations from their backwards cultures. For example when, in April 2004, four Blackwater private security contractors were lynched in Fallujah, Iraq, the following day Paul Bremer, then chief of the Coalition Occupation, addressed a cohort of Iraqi men and women graduating from the police academy. “The men and women who are standing before us today are the line between civilization and barbarism,” he said, “Yesterday’s events in Fallujah are a dramatic example of the ongoing struggle between human dignity and barbarism” (Updike 2004:20).

In June 2004 National Public Radio reporter Nancy Updike aired a collection of stories on the program This American Life centering on the lives of private contractors in Iraq. Most of Updike’s stories center on the aptly named security company Custer Battles, a group she worked with despite having been warned to stay away from. One of her key informants, Hank, admitted, “We got a bad reputation, probably as gunslingers,” (Updike 2004:9).

She shares a rumor that the Custer Battles team had engaged in a gunfight at their hotel, “and when the smoke cleared, it turned out they had been firing at each other the whole time” (Updike 2004:9). Hank clarified that something like that did happen, their hotel was hit by a rocket powered grenade and Custer Battles retaliated by expending 3000 rounds of ammunition out the hotel windows and into the surrounding neighborhood. With no clear consequences for private contractors acting recklessly because of their ambiguous legal status, Hank was prompted to address the issue from his own worldview.

People shooting people and not being held accountable for shooting people? Oh, I suppose there’s a lot of that going on. And I think in this brief period of time just like in the Wild West, you control your own company. You assert a little bit of control in your own little world. (Updike 2004:9).

Hank has found a way to make sense of the chaos of the situation by reckoning the current war through a common myth of the American past that is informed by the representation of war in popular culture.

We can learn more about this notion of the “wild west” by considering Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and its legacy in U.S. popular culture. In order to elevate the story of the American west into something on the scale of a Barthesian myth, Buffalo Bill Cody’s hero needed an enemy worth his mettle: the cowboy needed an Indian as his foil and Cody found his greatest financial success when he employed real Indians (including such luminaries as Sitting Bull and Black Elk) to play the part. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West made an enduring impact on popular memory and popular culture through its shaping of the Western genre as a nationalist narrative by which Americans could imagine their relationship to a world of non-American others.

Joy Kasson argues in her Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory and Popular History, that over its lifetime the Wild West show changed in relation to the development of modernity. Thus in the early days of the 1880s when the frontier was “open” and war with the tribes was raging,

Audiences understood that its spectacle was fiction but approved its claims to authenticity… Buffalo Bill’s frontier was contemporaneous but spatially distant; it existed right now on the Great Plains, and Buffalo Bill had just arrived to tell his audience all about it (Kasson 2000:221).

After the Massacre at Wounded Knee brought armed Indian resistance to an end and railroads expedited commerce and travel to the Pacific coast, it became increasingly difficult to maintain that the “wild west” still existed and whereas Buffalo Bill’s performances had once been imagined as coeval with its audience, his later days are best described as fomenting a nostalgic denial of coevalness. Kasson writes, “In the early days, the claim to ‘realism’ rested on physical remoteness, but after 1890, the Wild West made its best case for authenticity by invoking temporal remoteness” (Kasson 2000:222).

When Cody’s narratives shifted from reportage to historical reenactment he also began to imagine future wars as repetitions of the Indian wars. For example with the advent of the Spanish-American war, Cody proposed a unique strategy for dealing with the Spanish in a newspaper piece titled, “How I Could Drive the Spaniards from Cuba with 30,000 Indian Braves.” Indians, those malleable national symbols, were here fashioned into bellicose warriors, a stereotype his show had helped to create, in order to re-imagine the same as a secret weapon for the U.S. military. Kasson offers a compelling interpretation, “Cody projected the capture of Havana as if it were already an act in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West; he imagined war imitating the re-enactment of war and, in particular, modern war replaying the Indian wars” (Kasson 2000:249).

In the early twentieth century Buffalo Bill’s success gradually gave way to cinema and the birth of the genre of Western films. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick’s Celluloid Indians identifies an important filmic device of Westerns: our white hero is somehow able to out Indian the Indians, “becoming a superior form of native fighter and supplanting the ‘vanishing’ Indian” (1999:43). Beginning with the silent films themselves drawing on Buffalo Bill, Indians were represented as icons of conflict and violence.

Then during World War II, an interesting thing happened. Indians, who fifty years earlier were still at war with the U.S., were now enlisting in the military in droves and a complicated nationalist mythos emerged to claim these definitively American soldiers —think Ira Hayes and the Navajo codetalkers. In 1944 Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described the advantages of having Indians among the U.S. soldiers. Thanks to their “inherited talents,” Indians have,

…endurance, rhythm, a feeling for timing, co-ordination, sense perception, an uncanny ability to get over any sort of terrain at night, and, better than all else, an enthusiasm for fighting. He takes a rough job and makes a game of it. Rigors of combat hold no terrors for him; severe discipline and hard duties do not deter him (Finger 1991:108).

It would seem that Secretary Ickes had seen a great many Westerns because these qualities are more frequently displayed by fictional characters than real people. And this fictional role of Indians as fighters in the American national imaginary had consequences for soldiers who happened to be Indian.

In his oral history of Native American Vietnam veterans, Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls (1996), one of Tom Holm’s informants, a Creek and Cherokee man describes his experience:

I went into the army and to Vietnam because I’d seen the same John Wayne movies as everyone else and thought I was doing an honorable thing, that war was the ‘Indian way’… But when I got to Vietnam, I found that my job was to run missions into what everybody called ‘Indian country.’ That’s what they called enemy territory… I woke up one morning fairly early in my tour and realized that instead of being a warrior like Crazy Horse, I was a scout used by the army to track him down. I was on the wrong side of everything I want to believe I was about (Holm 1996:175).

Upon reflecting on his decision to go to war, this man points to his experience of seeing Indians represented in cinema as an important motivator. He and “everyone else” saw John Wayne in the Westerns. Popular culture helped him envision his enlistment in the tradition of Indian warriors, yet during the war he no longer thought of his participation so romantically.

Over the course of his research, Holm found that the vast majority of Indian vets believe that they were singled out for especially dangerous jobs because they were Indian. This included being assigned to the “point” position or being first in line as a platoon traversed the jungle. A Navajo vet explains:

[I was] stereotyped by the cowboys and Indian movies. Nicknamed ‘Chief’ right away. Non-Indians claimed Indians could see through trees and hear the unhearable. Bullshit, they even believed Indians could walk on water (Holm 1996:152).

Many Indian vets reported being exclusively committed to scouting activities called Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols or Lurps. These were teams of six men that would explore enemy areas and then report back by radio. In 1968 many of these Lurp teams were consolidated and assigned even more dangerous missions as “hunter-killer” teams that would dress as Vietnamese peasants and attempt to execute counter-guerilla operations. American Indians who could “pass” for Asian were frequently used on such missions.

These Indian experiences of war get re-inscribed into popular culture too, for example in the movie Predator (1987), staring Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Dutch” and featuring an Indian character named Billy, played by Sonny Landham. In Predator Dutch leads a team of six men into the Columbian jungle to disrupt Communist guerilla activity, naturally he has an Indian for a scout. Billy’s powers of observation are almost magical: he is able to count the number of Columbian guerillas by their boot prints. Billy walks point. He is first to find new clues and first to leave the group after receiving his orders. Frequently Billy will sense something, he will pause, and the music will tense. He carries a medicine bag around his neck and when he senses the Predator nearby we see him fondle that bag. Billy is a sign that the rest of the commando team reads, they can tell that he is “spooked” and acting “squirrelly” which sets them all on guard.

At the end of the movie Billy is the last fighting character to die before Dutch and the alien go one-on-one. Following Billy’s demise, at the movie’s climax Dutch is only able to defeat the monster by covering his body with mud, to protect against the alien’s infrared vision, and relying on a bow and arrow instead of his machine gun. Thus, with the death of the Indian, Dutch is able to become an Indian with a painted body and primitive weapon. By playing Indian, Dutch is able to become more Indian than Billy because he is able to defeat the alien, something the real Indian could not accomplish.

The myth of “the Indian” and the American frontier should inform our critique of the ongoing war on terror. And I’m not just talking about George W. Bush being called a “cowboy” – although Playing Cowboy opens up whole new fora of analysis to serve as a foil to Playing Indian.

During the Western Indian Wars, White-Indian conflict got represented in popular culture by means of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The Wild West show gave way to cinema, the Western genre, and modern forms of popular culture. The Western genre becomes very popular, such that during the Vietnam era, some Indians claim to have been motivated by the representations of Indians in the movies to join the military. While in Vietnam these Indian soldiers experience racism at the hands of non-Indians that, to their eyes, drew upon the Westerns. Then in the 1980s using generic tropes of the Western, Predator re-inscribes the Vietnam War experiences of Indians into popular culture. Now in Iraq and Afghanistan, we find that private security contractors and the US government are using tropes from the Western genre, that of gunslingers, the wildness of the “Wild” West, and indomitable foes such as Geronimo to make sense of and legitimate their experience of war. A war often rendered in terms of “civilization.”

Maybe Buffalo Bill Cody was onto something when he imagined war imitating the re-enactment of war because narrative devices originating in the Western Indian wars continue to be used in the construction of the meaning of war.
 
Bibliography

Deloria, Philip Joseph
1998 Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Finger, John R.
1991 Cherokee Americans : the eastern band of Cherokees in the twentieth century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Holm, Tom
1996 Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Kasson, Joy S.
2000 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West : Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History. New York: Hill and Wang.

Updike, Nancy
2004 “I’m From the Private Sector and I’m Here to Help” : Private contractors in Iraq. In This American Life: NPR.

How to represent foreign speech? Many filmmakers are content to shoot against a painted backdrop, toss in a few bonjours, and call it France, while others go to great lengths to have characters look and speak as authentically as possible. There are no hard and fast rules, but it’s a tricky business—directors must balance the expectations of realism with ease of viewing. They want dialogue to be convincing, but they don’t want to alienate their audiences with accents or subtitles that aren’t essential to the story.

And if you enjoyed that you will probably also enjoy the discussion about “fake translations” which took place on the linguistic anthropology listserv. Over at the SLA blog (scroll down) Alexandre Enkerli took the time to embed all the videos from that discussion in a single post.

Kapah (Young Men) /Lyrics & Music: Suming

Are there any young men who can sing out there? Are there any men who can dance? Are there any men who are good in school? Are there any men who are good at making money? Are there any men who are good at planting crops? Are there any men who are good at gathering? Are there any men who are good at spearing fish? Are there any men who are good at cooking? Are there any fun men out there? Are there any strong men? Are there any hard workers? Are there any men that work together? Yes, there are the young men from A’tolan!

A brand new music album with complete Amis lyrics by the Amis artist, Suming, was released in May 2010. It is not the first Amis music album but is the first one attempting to crossover into popular music market in Taiwan, combining indigenous melodies such as Amis polyphony and flutes together with techno-trance, hip-hop, and Taiwanese folk music. Among these songs, “Kapah,” which means “young men” in the Amis language, is the theme song. Lungnan Isak Fangas, a documentary filmmaker, who is also an Amis, made two music videos for this album, one of them is Kapah. Both the song and the music video not only represent aspects of local A’tolan Amis culture but also attempt to make this culture appealing to Taiwanese society at large.

There are currently 14 indigenous ethnic groups (referred to as “Aborigines”) officially recognized by the Taiwan government. The Amis is the largest of these austronesian speaking ethnic groups in Taiwan. There are two conspicuous characters of Amis society and culture relevant to understanding this video: One is that it is widely considered a matriarchal society, although its status as such is still under debate. Nonetheless, the image of the mother holds a central place in Amis society. The other one is the age-grade system with its rigid regulations. Age sets are organized around males who have passed the coming of age rites in the village within a given time period. Each age set (kapot) will include men born within a few years of each other. It is the main political unit, handling the affairs of both outsiders and insiders.

The song Kapah differs from earlier indigenous music in its depiction of indigenous modernity. Previous music portrayed indigenous peoples as being close to nature (with lyrics about the sun, wind, ocean, or grasslands) and the accompanying visuals focused on the authenticity of their traditional culture. In both the style of this music video and the song’s lyrics, Kapah seeks to present the Amis as not only modern, but fashionable as well. Suming often says to his audiences: “We indigenous peoples in Taiwan are living in modern times. In the future, I don’t want to have to visit a museum to learn about our culture.” Suming does not want to follow the stereotype of indigenous peoples as living in the past, but tries to connect the past to the present in a uniquely Amis way. His music and art seeks to create a fashion-conscious modern Amis lifestyle.

The music video for Kapah is produced with the same goal of creating a unique Amis-fashion as we find in the song. The music video is a representation of the key concept makapahay, which generally would be translated as beautiful; however the quality of “beautiful” implies many other values: shining, dazzlingly, and vitality. This is because the word is based on the root “kapah” (i.e. “young men”). Therefore, makapahay also can be translated “to be as young men.” The music video adopts feathers as a metaphor for the concept of makapahay. Feathers are the main part of the traditional headdress worn by Amis young men. The flying rhythm of these feathers as the men dance is a way of being makapahay. As for the dance steps, they combine not only the Amis styles but also steps from Korean songs popular in Taiwan, such as “Sorry Sorry” and “Nobody but You.”  And the use of the umbrellas while dancing is regarded as a traditional dance of A’tolan Amis, called kulakur – a guardian dance performed by the young men. Traditionally spears were used, not umbrellas, but it is said that Japanese colonial authorities banned spears, afraid that the Amis would use the weapons to resist Japanese rule. While this story is unverified, one thing can be confirmed is that it must be decorated with colorful ribbons to express makapahay not only because of the brightness of the ribbons but also the flying movement made when the dancers jump and fall.

The feathers are the headdress’s decoration of kapah.

Another noticeable way in which the music video tries to package the Amis traditions in modern fashion, are the depictions of the male age-grade system (kapot) and the of mothers. In the music video, Suming invited his mother and all his mother’s sisters to join the performance to dance the steps borrowing from “Nobody but You”, and to present a plot that how they exhort Suming just like the Amis mothers do in daily life. The Amis age set system is rather unique, especially with regard to the hierarchical relation between the upper and the lower age sets, which is very strict: the lower age set should always obey and respect the older one, and the upper age set should always take care of the lower one. In the music video, a teenage boy is shown about to serve a cup of alcohol to his elder brother in the Amis way, but when another elder brother appears behind him the seated brother stands up and himself serves the alcohol to the newly arrived elder brother. Finally, the eldest brother (portrayed by me in the music video) comes in and the preceding person has to stop drinking and serve the alcohol to him. This sequence eloquently epitomizes the relationship between the age sets. In Suming’s home village, A’tolan (Dulan 都蘭 in Mandarin), on the east coast of Taiwan, such age set practices are still an important part of both daily and ritual life. [Editor's note: Although he is not from A'tolan, Futuru was adopted into the local age set system.]

Without a doubt, the song Kapah and its music video mark a seminal moment in the history of indigenous music in Taiwan. Mainstream music here is heavily dominated by Mandarin, Taiwanese, American, Japanese, and Korean popular music. When Suming proposed a pure Amis music album to his record company, the boss was just afraid of the Amis music would be unable to compete. Suming argued that there was at least as much of a market for Amis music as their was for French music. Taiwanese don’t understand French, yet French albums are still successful here. Moreover, Suming argued that it was possible to create a fashion trend for things Amis just as there exists for things Japanese, Korean and American. Perhaps it could even find an audience outside Taiwan, on the world stage. (The lyrics of each song has Chinese, Japanese, and English translation in this album). Suming’s hope is that by making Amis culture fashionable, young Amis would be drawn back to their own culture, and take up learning the language and traditions.

The English translation of each song in Suming’s new album.

Indigenous languages in Taiwan are endangered languages; most members of the younger generation cannot speak or understand their mother tongues. Most young and middle aged Amis must migrate far away from their home villages in search of work and more and more young Amis are losing the ability of speaking Amis. The reasons are complicated, including official language policies which suppressed  indigenous languages as well as the rapid industrialization of Taiwan. If Suming can make Amis culture fashionable, the fans will be eager to learn Amis language just like fans of Japanese, American, and Korean fashions do.

I believe that Suming and Lungnan Isak Fangas are engaged in an alternative form of cultural activism, trying to break the rigid stereotypes of indigenous cultures in Taiwan in order to revitalize Amis language and music. But popular culture is not just about fashion, it is also about sales, and in the end capital. Unfortunately,  these artists have yet to make a significant profit for their work. Still, I still admire what they are doing and I also believe that as long as they keep showing their talents either on music or film, the drops of water will one day wear down the stone.

I hope so, because, I consider myself a “fan” of Amis culture.

Another music video by Suming, Tangfur (Bells), also made by Lungnan Isak Fangas, using a documentary style.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the original text.

You might have noticed the strong militarized thread running through this year’s list of Oscar nominated films. A not necessarily exhaustive list includes: The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, The Messenger, District 9, The Most Dangerous Man in America, Burma VJ, and Star Trek.

As a couple of anthropologists who study American soldiers, we’ve been struck by the much-ballyhoed showdown between Avatar and The Hurt Locker, particularly because there’s been relatively little said about the fact that the protagonists of both films are soldiers (Avatar’s Jake Sully is of course a marine of some fictitious and unspecified variety, but we’re going to take a leap and dispense with the service jargon).

After several years of largely unwatched and un-lauded contemporary American war films (Lions for Lambs, In The Valley of Ellah, Stop Loss, Dear John, Redacted, The Kingdom), it is worth taking a moment to ponder the significance of fictionalized American soldiers being at the center of such dramatically different films at a moment when actual American soldiers and Marines have, until just recently, largely vanished from the headlines. Soldiers are a key figure and symbol mediating public assumptions about, and relationships to, war violence. We wondered what the competing images in Avatar and The Hurt Locker suggest about those assumptions and relationships.

The two films are a study in contrasts on a number of levels. Avatar is a $400 million blockbuster that shattered director James Cameron’s own previous box office world record. The Hurt Locker had a budget of $16 million, and writer Mark Boals and director Katherine Bigelow self-produced it with funds from European backers because they were unsure if it would ever see a full theatrical release in the U.S.

Avatar was filmed mainly in front of green screens with its actors in motion-capture suits, a curious parallel to the film’s body-trading premise. Its incandescent alien flora and fauna serve as the backdrop for a moralizing tale drenched in liberal sentiment. The Hurt Locker was filmed on location in Amman, Jordan, less than 200 miles from the Iraqi border. Its palette is essentially sepia-tone, rounded out with blood and the black smoke of bomb detonations, and it’s an essentially plotless examination of war detached from political narrative.

James Cameron wrote the script for Avatar more than ten years ago, so its parallels with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—insurgent locals, resource exploitation driven by corporate interests, and well-meaning “anthropologists” trying to forestall bloodshed (can you say HTS?)—arguably say as much about the abiding features of counterinsurgency war in general as about the current wars in particular. Mark Boals’ Hurt Locker script is based on his time as an embedded reporter with a U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team in Iraq, and yet the film is less ‘about’ the Iraq War than it is about the pleasures and pathologies of making and being exposed to violence.

Above all, the films depict radically different relationships between their protagonists, the violence they make and endure, and the greater logic of that violence. Avatar is a redemptive tale. In Jake Sully, the film gives us a curious blend of wronged veteran and cynical mercenary who transforms into pure-hearted revolutionary. The details of Jake’s tragic biography, his exceptional biometrics, and his mix of defeated nihilism and warrior’s code contextualize his decision first to do some things that are really bad (like helping to decimate a population and a planet to extract natural resources for profit) and then some that are really good (like coming to understand that this kind of exploitation should be stopped at all costs). The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, provides little context for its three EOD team protagonists beyond their dedication to, and enthusiasm for, their job. A few jumbled bits of background suggest that they are bound only tenuously to anyone or anything outside of the claustrophobic masculinity of military life. But this closed-off immediacy is a kind of ethical commentary in itself, as the film invites its audience to imagine the human-scale experience of a narratively overdetermined event—like war—that must be lived without the luxury of the kind of measured, meaningful and redemptive context that Avatar provides.

In Avatar, the combat violence is both the evidence and the means of evil deeds and the mechanism for righting wrongs. The humans fight to destroy and exploit, or even for the (clearly unwholesome) pleasure of killing. Cameron depicts the film’s mercenary grunts with an abundance of quasi-realistic contemporary detail—from their uniforms and hairstyles to their technical jargon and slang—but he also shows them as vulgar, sadistic, abelist, and racist, the dark side to Jake’s human vulnerability and empathy and his soldierly discipline and determination. For the Na’vi, on the other hand, violence against living things is imbued with righteousness and spiritual and existential significance. In both its thematic connotations and in its action, the film’s violence is utterly transparent. Good violence and bad violence are clearly meant to be distinguishable. And Sully’s perhaps accidental quotation of an Airborne slogan “death from above” to describe Na’vi aerial hunting suggests that good violence can safely blend militaristic and mystical attitudes. The bad guys strike first and leave destruction where there was peace and plenty. The ballet of arrows and rockets and soaring beasts and hovering aircraft that articulate and allegorize just and unjust violences is presented in excruciatingly elaborate technical detail, making it clear exactly how each act of destruction contributes to the morally freighted conflict. Violence always has a meaning and a message, its ramifications in the material world mapping point for point onto a moral one.

If Avatar is orderly and transparent, The Hurt Locker is unruly and opaque, both thematically and aesthetically, refusing the anchored of ethical certainty. The sense of devastation is generalized, and the temporality of before, during, and after doesn’t necessarily apply: violence happens and it’s happening now, arbitrarily bookended by the last days of these soldiers’ deployment. Even the seemingly orderly unfolding of the calendar—signposted throughout the film with periodic title cards showing number of days remaining—becomes disordered as the time of passing days is effaced by the racing seconds of a detonation device. Sergeant First Class James’ arrival in the unit at the beginning of the film finds an uncanny echo at its end when he arrives again. Time simultaneously loops back on itself and also counts down at the pace of a calendar and of a time bomb and of a rotation. The unfolding of time that can give violence a redemptive logic in Avatar is, in The Hurt Locker, shattered and fragmented.

It is this fragmentation, rather than any solid explanatory framework that characterizes the violence in The Hurt Locker. There are threats everywhere, but the only identifiable enemies are at a distance—seen through a scope from hundreds of meters away—or utterly absent—the bombmakers who leave their creations for the soldiers to find. When James and his fellow soldiers Sanborn and Eldridge return fire on a shooter they cannot see, the script, camerawork and editing keep the shooter obscured for several minutes—an eternity by action movie standards. When a bomb detonates on the ground next to an unsuspecting soldier, he literally disappears in a cloud of smoke. Just as scenes of violence are deliberately evacuated of all but a physical intelligibility, The Hurt Locker makes no direct reference to the larger political and strategic logic of the war. In contrast to Avatar’s sweeping scale and redemptive violence, The Hurt Locker’s visual and moral universe is one in which violence resolves little, but is its own dilemma and its own reward.

None of this even begins to touch on some of the other themes that cross these films: the gendering of violence; the place of capitalism and entrepreneurship; the competing modes of bodily discipline and decay; notions of “cultural difference”; or countless aspects of technical execution and visual style. Clearly the contrasts of these two films, and the soldiers in them are good to think with. Our thinking has left us with a few questions about these portrayals of soldiers and war violence and what they might mean.  We submit them here for your consideration:

• Is there any way of squaring the fragmentary and contingent quality of violence in The Hurt Locker and the ethics of grand ideas displayed in Avatar? And in either case, what does this mean for how we think about soldiers who carry out violence?
• What can we glean from both films’ portrayal of a deeply ambivalent relationship between the soldier and the military institution that he or she serves?
• What is the relationship between the very bodily solder and other inanimate or semi-animate instruments of war? In what circumstances does the soldier’s bodilyness dispose him to be read as just a body, and in what circumstances does it round out his humanity and heroism by serving as a sign of his discipline and prowess?
• Can soldiers ever also be seen as regular folks, and do they ever get to “be normal”? Or do they always have to choose between the chaos of war and a home that is (in one way or another) made strange?

UPDATE: Updated post to include Zoë H. Wool’s bio and byline.

How can we explain this epidemic of food allergies? The radical shift from hunting and gathering finally catching up with us? Radical advances in medical technology that allow us to identify conditions that went unnoticed a generation ago? A build-up of environmental toxins in common foods? Interaction of foods with strange new food-like products like high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors?

Or maybe we’re imagining the whole thing.

That’s the conclusion suggested by a recent study in the UK that found that only 2% of people who claimed to suffer from food allergies were actually allergic. The rest are suffering from something else, namely, the belief that they suffer from food allergies.

Now, I don’t know much about medicine and physiology, but I do know a thing or two about belief, and when millions of people believe something that isn’t empirically verifiable (1 in 5 Britons, according to the article above), we’ve got some ‘splaining to do.

Now, my first reaction is what I think many food allergy sufferers will share: that the study is flawed, not in its procedure, but in its very medical-ness. That is, there’s a strain of anti-modernism in the recent explosion of food allergy awareness that simply doesn’t trust the mainstream medical industry to  recognize and treat food allergies. So when you get a bunch of mainstream medical researchers to study the issue, it’s no surprise that they don’t find anything.

I doubt that’s true, but here’s the thing: the belief that it’s true is part and parcel of the food allergy… can I call it a “movement”? In their rejection of modern medical knowledge and modern food processing technologies, as well as their yearning for a more “natural” diet and a greater connection to their bodily functions, food allergy advocates (if not food allergy sufferers) certainly have at least some of the hallmarks of a social movement. And they’ve certainly created social change, as well – modern supermarket shelves are packed with (ironically) high-tech allergen-free foods: gluten-free beer, bread made of spelt, soy milk and ice cream, and so on.

But leave aside the political aspects of today’s food allergies; what intrigues me is the almost religious asceticism imposed by many food allergies. A vast number of foods are made containing wheat, for instance, so the wheat allergy sufferer is constrained to a diet that eliminates a great many common foods – much like a Jew during Passover, when most wheat-containing foods must be avoided as “leavened”.

The author of the Telegraph piece above notes the similarities between food allergies and food taboos, drawing on Mary Douglas’ understanding of the way boundaries create meaning and order:

[W]hat we eat not only defines us as people but also helps us to feel control and mastery over an otherwise chaotic and random world. She argued that by ordering foods into those we can consume and those that we can’t, we create meaning, and the boundaries provide order in our lives.

As a set of dietary restrictions, rather than a medical phenomenon, it seems reasonable to see food allergies – along with vegetarianism/veganism, the Slow Food movement, the “buy local” movement, and the $30 billion-plus diet market (in the US) – as an attempt to wrest back control over an aspect of our lives that we are increasingly and maybe irretrievable disconnected with. Few of us have any connection with the food cycle except as consumers at the end of a very long and complicated food production cycle. Food allergies allow us to assert control – on pain of death – over what we ingest, and demands an attentiveness – again, on pain of death – to what’s in the foods that we buy.

But this fussiness is part of a larger yearning for control altogether, which is where the anti-modernism comes in. Food has long been not only a means of forging and asserting cultural identity but of resisting the onslaught of a homogenizing, enervating modernity that threatens to dissolve not just cultural identities but individual identities. From the health spa/retreats of the Kellogg brothers and their peers (that gave us corn flakes and granola) to the popularity of Sweet-n-Low in the ‘50s and ‘60s to the communes of the hippie era to the herbal remedies of today, food has been seen as a way to “get back” to a more “natural” way of life – as opposed to the high-stress,  low-community, detached and distracted way of life that is modernity.

None of this is to suggest that there are not very real food allergies – it’s hard to argue with anaphylactic shock. Nor, more importantly, is it to say that the 98% of food allergy sufferers in the study with no medically detectable food allergies do not, in a very real way, suffer. The bodily manifestations of the most obviously social disorders can still drastically limit a person’s quality of life.

What it does suggest is that treatment of food allergies needs to go much further than antihistamines and food avoidance to encompass the cultural psychological. If control is a central issue – as it is already recognized to be in anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders, which strike bright, ambitious young women with overbearing parents hardest precisely because they are the least in control of their lives and the most aware of it – then a) developing non-food strategies for regaining control, and b) developing a realistic relationship with the demands and pressures of daily life are also important to individual adjustment.

On a social level, food allergies and other dietary restrictions join a range of other control-seeking phenomena – pop psychology, personal productivity, conspiracy theorism, and religious fundamentalism, all of which attempt to throw a lasso around the neck of our stampeding lives. As a critique of modernity, there’s nothing original here; Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life addressed similar concerns about the loss of autonomy in 1903, and Emile Durkheim addressed similar concerns a decade earlier, noting the anomie inherent in industrial/commercial society in The Division of Labor in Society.

But over a century of social critique has done little to alleviate the real suffering of real people. The question is, do we have the resources and will to take on these challenges at a social level today? Or are food allergies, in fact, an adequate collective response to dehumanizing social conditions? Do food allergies, like, say, spirit possession on Chinese factory floors, provide the relief people need to cope with the impacts of modernity, even as they suffer?

I have to admit I’m a little ambivalent about the book — on one hand, it is an ethnography. Of Burning Man. On the other hand Chen’s area of specialty is organizational sociology, a field that I’ve always somehow found vaguely dissatisfying (as one sociologist dryly put it to me: “Organizational sociology? The sound of me not caring can be heard from space.”). While I don’t doubt the validity of approaches in this area (they are doubtlessly taken far more seriously by Important People than anthropologists are) I find the approach ethnographically thin, with a tendency to render social reality somewhat diagrammatically, with abstracted authorial voices.

Chen’s book is definitely written in this genre — the book takes as a case study the maturation of Burning Man from its inception to its current state. She treats the event as exemplary of a successful organization that has ‘grown up’ successfully. What she is particularly interested in is the way that Burning Man has blended collectivist practices and bureaucratic ones to find a ‘sweet spot’ which allows the organization to flourish: neither an underorganized anarchy that cannot carry out the complex logistics of the event, nor a soulless machine that kills its corporatizes it to death, Chen paints the Burning Man organizers successful in their search to build an institution that will ‘serve us rather than rule us’, and recommends it as a model to others.

The tone of the book is extremely sober, and the ethnography very careful and, as far as I can tell, competently executed — so although I’m not a fan of the genre (and can’t really appreciate the volume’s significance to scholarship in that are) I can’t take anything away from the book. Given the possible salaciousness of the topic Chen is remarkably restrained (something I’m not sure an anthropologist could manage). The story Chen tells is of organizers wrangling volunteers and planning meetings, not people rolling around naked in the desert. Given the way that she quotes — extensively — real people and uses their real names, it makes sense for Chen to adopt this prudent tone.

The meat of the book on the event’s organization is nice for the counterbalance it provides to ideas that Burning Man is a purely spontaneous event where stuff just happens (an idea that I think has become less and less common over the past ten years that I, at least, have known about the event) but it’s not exactly the sort of thing you’d give to undergraduates to read about ‘the culture of burningman’. I can, however, see it serving as the core of what could be a semester long exploration of the event that relied on other readings, videos, etc.

So if you are interested in how organizations and social movements work, or if you are into Burning Man, Chen’s book is definitely for you. If you’re interested in a ‘way of life of a people’ ethnography you might be a bit disappointed. Still, given the topic and competence with which the book is written I think this is a book anthropologists ought to know about and take a look at.

Fabian wrote to me recently concerned about the future of this archive, highlighting several issues that I think we will all face in the near future:

As you may have noticed in my email signature below the address of our LPCA archive has changed (because of some reorganization at the University of Amsterdam). The old address that appeared in publications so far will get you there for a while but probably not forever. One of the vagaries of presence on the net. Also I say “our” archive because it has been a truly collaborative effort with Vincent de Rooij, a former student and a linguist-cum-anthropologists whose dissertation was about Katanga Swahili. He designed, maintained, and edited the website meticulously. And he did this for almost 10 years without any institutional funding or even academic credit, on his own time. This has become untenable for me but, more importantly, he has turned to other subjects and interests, which is of course entirely legitimate. So the sad news is that LPCA, though it can run, as it were, on autopilot for years as long as it keeps its space on the server, is, if not dead, in suspended animation.

I think such projects are the very lifeblood of anthropology today–far more so than the increasingly sterile walled gardens of the academic journals run by the Publishing Borg and its scholarly society minions. So what should we do to keep them alive:

1. Volunteers? Is there anyone out there with an interest in and focus on popular culture in Africa, african linguistics or swahili who wants to help? This could be an editorial opportunity as well, since there is both the archive and a Journal associated with the project.
2. How can we improve it, or make it more 2.0-y and social interneterrific without sacrificing what is already there? What’s the right back-end? The journal (Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa) could obviously be ported to Open Journal Systems, if someone wanted to do that, whereas the archive materials might be appropriate for Omeka.
3. How can we make it more “official”– perhaps by assigning DOI numbers (what would a suitable registration agency be?) and so forth to make it findable as a library resource?
4. Can we leverage the new “open anthropology cooperative” to find people who are interested and committed?
5. Other suggestions for Johannes and Vincent as to how to make this project survive and grow?

Image via Wikipedia

The library at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln has posted a collection of digitized government comics and related material. There are about 180 freely-downloadable PDFs available, on topics ranging from health and human services to military training and recruitment.

Among my favorite is a 1951 AIr Force publication explaining psychological warfare entitled “Bullets? Or Words?” and illustrated by Milton Caniff, a comic-strip artist who gave us the syndicated comic strips “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon”.

In fashioning new psychological weapons, it is necessary to base them on sound scientific principles and an understanding of psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology and other allied fields of knowledge.

Indeed.

I’m also a fan of "Bert the Turtle Says Duck and Cover", which offers immensely useful and reassuring advice on what to do in case of a nuclear bomb explosion. “There is always something to shelter you – indoors, a schol desk, a chair, a table.” Funny how they left out lead-lined iceboxes, but perhaps the authors felt that went without saying.

Related material includes briefs for the artists and authors, as well as government reports on the impact of comics, such as the US Senate’s 1955 “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency: Interim Report”. If you remember your history (or have read Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay) you’ll remember that the mid-‘50s saw a witch-hunt launched against comic book publishers and authors every bit as intense as the one launched against Hollywood, with comic books accused of promoting delinquent and violent behavior as well as homosexuality and anti-Americanism.

Although my interest is more sparked by the Cold War-era material, the collection dates up to the last decade, offering an interesting lens through which to view the last 6 decades or so of US culture and of the US government’s relations with its subjects.

I just wonder how it is that Apple finds an application in which people can throw shoes at a virtual Bush unacceptable, but find the virtual torture of Pacific Islanders perfectly OK? And how is it that after weeks of being one of the bestselling iPhone games, hardly anyone has commented upon the game’s racism? Just imagine, for instance, a game in which one were presented with a virtual shtetle filled with Jews one could torture, or a plantation full of African slaves? How is it that such applications would certainly be rejected by the Apple Store, and yet Pocket God does not even provoke controversy?

I suppose that most people who play this game think of the island’s inhabitants as fictitious primitives, rather than representatives of a particular ethnic group. I doubt people playing the game bear any hatred towards Pacific Islanders. And yet, I can’t help but see our inability to view cartoonish depictions of indigenous peoples, such as sports mascots, as representations of living peoples as problematic. In particular, I feel it ties in with the myth of a vanishing race, of a people who, defined in terms or their primitivism must have already given way to the forces of modernity, their very existence denied.

UPDATE: I don’t personally think Apple should be in the business of censoring applications based on content, but here is another story that is relevant to the current discussion:

The release (and subsequent removal) of an iPhone app called Baby Shaker this week has Apple in hot water with angry parents and children’s groups, who are demanding answers from Apple.

UPDATE: Seems that Canterbury University Lecturer Malakai Koloamatangi is now raising a stink about the game. See here and here (via Indigeneity)

UPDATE: Looks like the developers are going to make some changes in response to criticisms. (They are also hiring a PR firm.)