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

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

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

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

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

There is much think and say about this event and these documents. Apropos recent conversations at SM, I’d like to point out that there are probably better places to say some of these things.

One thing that strikes me as relevant for comment here is the way that ‘facticity’ and authority based in being there are at the heart of some discussions.

Take for example this interview from NPR’s All Things Considered between co-host Robert Segal and Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange.

Here are the most relevant bits:

Julian Assange: The full story is only going to emerge over the coming weeks as that material is correlated to the witnesses who are on the ground, both the US soldiers and Afghanis

Robert Segal: [Challenging Assange’s comparison of The Afghan War Diaries to the Pentagon Papers] These are raw reports that are not confirmed and edited

JA: This material has its strength in that it is not an analysis, not written at the higher levels so it can be publicly massaged, it is in fact the raw facts of the war

RS: Some people would dispute your use of the word ‘facts,’ or indeed there might be something oxymoronic in ‘raw facts’

JA: The majority of reports are immediate reporting from the field from US military operations

What I see emerging here is an interesting conversation about textual authority, and one that resonates with our own disciplinary claims to authority based on ethnographic experience (see Clifford, Marcus, Gupta and Ferguson, etc. for some classic wailing on that old chestnut).

Assange begins by saying that these raw facts will only be fully cooked into a truthy pie once they are compared to the testimony of “witnesses who are on the ground.” And yet, when Segal notes the criticism that these raw facts are, in fact, too raw to be facts—that they need a little correlation before they can be safely consumed—Assange suggests that it is their very rawness that makes them good: Instead of truthy pie, he changes his order to sashimi.

The thing is, be they raw or cooked, pie or sashimi, these documents are not unadulterated. They are not like snapshots of the war, with all the claims to verisimilitude that visual medium implies (it’s worth mentioning that this connection between verisimilitude and the visual is also one way that witnessing stakes its authoritative claims). So, they are not like photographs. They are documents written within the generic constraints of military field reporting for a particular intended audience of surveilling authorities as official archival records.

Drop weapons are a concrete example of the things that are written out of these kinds of documents. Drop weapons are enemy weapons (like AK 47s) that US forces carry with them so that if they accidentally kill a civilian, they can ‘drop’ them by the body and have documentable proof that the civilian was actually an insurgent.

Drop weapons are useful because they alibi omissions (of the killing of civilians) from the After Action Report (AAR) which is part of the official record. But they are also useful because they enable the inscription of other things (the killing of insurgents) in the official record.

For a different and very interesting example directly from the Wikileaks docs, check out this corrective by Noah Shachtman, one of those on the ground witnesses.

The point is, however we choose to digest these documents, we need to consider them within the institutional and social context of their production, and whatever they are, they are not a diary.

This is an easy post to write, as Keith Hart has an article on the anthropology of money which nicely summarizes the article and provides some trenchant critique. I’ve pasted the relevant section after the jump.

This obsolete anti-market mentality (Cook 1966) flourishes among the disciples of Polanyi (1944) of whom the doyen was Paul Bohannan (1955, 1959). His articles remain the main reference for anthropological discussion of money economy and its presumed antithesis. Before being colonised by the British around 1900, the Tiv maintained a mixed farming economy on the fringe of trade routes linking the Islamic civilisation of the North with the rapidly Westernising society of the coast. Bohannan argues that the Tiv pre-colonial economy was organised through three spheres of exchange, arranged in a hierarchy; and like could normally only be exchanged with like within each sphere. At the bottom were subsistence items like foodstuffs and household goods traded in small amounts at local markets. Then came a limited range of prestige goods linked to long-distance trade and largely controlled by Tiv elders. These included cloth, cattle, slaves and copper bars, the last sometimes serving as a standard of value and means of exchange within its sphere. The highest category was rights in persons, above all women, ideally sisters, exchanged in marriage between male-dominated kin groups.

The norm of exchanging only within each sphere was sometimes breached. Conversion upward was emulated and its opposite was disgraceful. The absence of general-purpose money made both difficult. Subsistence goods are high in bulk and low in value; they do not transport easily and their storage is problematic (food rots). Prestige goods are the opposite on all counts. How many peas would it take to buy a slave? Moreover, the content of the spheres had changed: sister exchange had been largely replaced with bridewealth; slavery was abolished and the supply of metal rods had dried up. Bohannan still insists that Tiv culture was traditionally maintained through this separation of compartments of value.

The introduction of modern money was a disaster, according to him. Anyone could sell anything in small amounts, accumulate the money, buy prestige goods and enter the marriage circuit on their own terms, regardless of the elders. This amounted to the destruction of traditional culture. It is as if the technical properties of modern money alone were sufficient to undermine a way of life. Now this argument has come under sustained criticism; for example, that it is idealist and should pay more attention to the organisation of production (Dupr and Rey 1978), and that money is just a symbol of a whole complex of economic relations we might summarise as capitalism (Parry and Bloch 1990). But even these critics tend to ignore the political dimension of the colonial transformation.

The contributors to Parry and Bloch (1990) share the view that indigenous societies around the world take modern money in their stride, turning it to their own social purposes rather than being subject to its impersonal logic. The underlying theory is familiar from Durkheim (1965 [1912]). There are two circuits of social life: one, the everyday, is short-term, individuated and materialistic; the other, the social, is long-term, collective and idealised, even spiritual. Market transactions fall into the first category and all societies seek to subordinate them to the conditions of their own reproduction, which is the realm of the second category. For some reason, which they do not investigate, money has acquired in Western economies a social force all of its own, whereas the rest of the world retains the ability to keep it in its place.

So here too we have a hierarchy of value where modern money comes second to the institutions that secure society’s continuity. The picture becomes clearer if we apply the spheres of exchange concept to Western societies. As Alfred Marshall (1979 [1890]) wrote, it is not uncommon for modern consumers to rank commodities according to a scale of cultural value. Other things being equal, we would prefer not to have to sell expensive consumer durables in order to pay the grocery bills. And we would like to acquire the symbols of elite status, such as a first-rate education. If you asked a British person how many toilet rolls a BMW is worth or how many oranges buys an Eton education, they would think you were crazy. Yet all these things have been bought with money for longer than we can remember. So the universal exchange introduced by modern money is compatible with cultural values denying that all goods are commensurate. Nor is this just a matter of ideas; there are real social barriers involved. It does not matter how many oranges a street trader sells, he will not get his son accepted for Eton. And the gatekeepers of the ancient universities insist that access to what they portray as an aristocracy of intelligence cannot be bought.

This gives us a clue to the logic of spheres of exchange. The aristocracy everywhere claims that you cannot buy class. Money and secular power are supposed to be subordinate to inherited position and spiritual leadership. In practice, we know that money and power have long gained entry into ruling elites. De Tocqueville (1955 [1856]) praised the flexibility of the English aristocracy, unlike the French, for readily admitting successful merchants and soldiers to their ranks. One class above all others still resists this knowledge, the academic intellectuals. And so we line up with Tiv elders in bemoaning the corrosive power of modern money and vainly insist that traditional culture should prevail.

Also see this Annual Review article [PDF] on the Anthropology of Money.

When I was in graduate school at MIT, I remember hearing a talk about a project to digitize newspapers, shortly before this became a widespread reality. An important part of this demo, or talk, or whatever it was, was the claim that what digital newspapers would allow would be the customization of news–an early intimation of the RSS feed–allowing individuals to tailor the kind of news that made up their newspaper so that they could ignore all that other arbitrary stuff cluttering up their world and focus only on the things they really cared about. I also remember that
people in the room were genuinely troubled by this; the argument went something like… maybe it is a good thing that people are confronted with news they don’t necessarily want to see, news that is important but that might be excluded by an algorithm whose purpose is to weed out anything unfamiliar.

I remember being unconvinced by these anxieties, but also unable to put my finger on why, exactly, they seemed so unconvincing. Reading Anderson this time round triggered this memory because of his focus on how newspapers, as part of print-capitalism, contribute to the imagined community that is a nation. What makes newspapers central to nationalism is twofold: first, the arbitrary juxtaposition of stories (famine in Mali one day, sports in the US the next, an inauguration the third) creates the imagination of a community united in “homogenous empty time” such that “if Mali disappears from the pages of the New York Times after two days of famine reportage, this does not mean that Mali has disappeared or that famine has wiped out all its citizens. The novelistic format of the newspaper assures them that somewhere out there the ‘character’ Mali moves along quietly, awaiting its next reappearance in the plot”(33). Second, the production of newspapers as a reliable commodity whose form is familiar (“one-day bestsellers” he calls them) means that large numbers of people “imagine” the same world, and expect others to be imagining it with them.

What makes the digitization of news significant then, and the advent of personalized news feeds and RSS readers troubling, is that it is now possible to imagine that my version of the New York Times is not the same as your version. Or more generally, that my sources for news are giving me an entirely different picture of the same phenomena or events or issues than yours. As such what is troubling is not that I fail to be confronted with things I don’t necessarily want to see (as the critiques of personalized news suggested), but that we can no longer imagine ourselves to all (“all” in the sense of a national public) be reading (or not reading) the same newspaper. Instead, we have introduced the possibility for a very large number of partially overlapping imagined communities. Pluralism? Perhaps. Certainly a successor to the mass consciousness of high-nationalism in the late 19th, early 20th century.

***

A similar issue was raised for me concerning Anderson’s analysis of language and its role in the constitution of modern nationalism. Capitalism and print created “monoglot mass reading publics.” The “fatality” (a confusing term, I think) of linguistic diversity seems to suggest that Anderson thinks these monoglot publics centralized around sovereign states; which is to say, the familiar story of the rise of official languages (High German, the Academie Francaise) is intimately tied to the power of these nationalist imaginary communities. This fact is buttressed by a strange footnote (no. 19 in Chapter 3): “We still have no giant multinationals in the world of publishing.” The point of which seems to be that monoglot reading publics are so important to national power that a multinational *publishing* corporation is an impossibility, unlike, say a multinational *oil* company.

Remember that this is published in 1983; the claim seems a strange one, since corporations like Springer, Elsevier and others clearly have been multinationals for at least as long as they have been publishing, simply setting up shop in many nations and working in many languages. But it also seems odd given Anderson’s careful attention to “Creole Pioneers” as part of the foundation of nationalism. What is strange is Anderson’s seeming failure to recognize English as a global creole. Multinational publishers are, perhaps, the harbingers and laboratories of post-nationalism, giving form to Englishes and Spanishes whose power is not tied to any particular sovereign entity… not even a colonial one in the terms of Anderson’s theory. Perhaps I’m a poor reader of Anderson, or perhaps this is all old news, but it’s made me wonder if there isn’t a way to get at post-nationalism… which is to say, new forms of imagined communities (and I naturally care about such things *cough* recursive publics *cough*) that are not nationalisms of the 19th century variety.

***

One last thing I found fascinating on re-reading Anderson, was his use of the term “piracy” to describe how the “model” of independent national states (typified by France and America) was ported around the globe. Naturally the language of piracy, remixing, re-using or porting has renewed salience today. Anderson’s concern with the “modulation” of practices that make up nationalism is one that I think could bear further abstraction and specification. Even if nations and nationalism are no longer a goal, the creation of imagined communities through practices that give form to shared time (a periodicity of interaction) and meaning to shared stories and narratives is something that continues, and continues to create forms for adoption and modification. All this on the day that a new president is inaugurated who speaks a pragmatic idiom of nationalism that is both a call for a change and an appeal to ‘timeless’ truths.

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

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

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

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

— Charles Baudelaire”, see also

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

Epigraph, Structural Anthropology

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

The Savage Mind, see also, cf.

Kardiner was a sort of well-known psychoanalyst who wrote about anthropology and psychoanalysis. Preble was at the time “studying first law, and then philosophy and anthropology. During this same period he was also a high school science teacher and worked as a professional tennis player during the summers.” Who does that any more? Along with the passing of the golden age of anthropology (and I note the book refers to anthropology as a science throughout without batting an eye, thank you very much), I guess the golden age of part-time professional sports is over too. Sigh.

There is his famous “cinetrance” Les tambours d’avant Tourou et Bitti, as well as Hippopotamus Hunt : Battle on the Great River and Graveyards in the cliff. There are also some scenes from Petit à petit, and various interviews and discussions as well. Some of these are subtitled some are not. Who knows how long all this will be up there, so watch them while you can!

There are also a bunch of documentaries about Rouch (mostly from DER), like Rouch’s Gang which can be viewed for a small fee.

UPDATE: DER has a Jean Rouch tribute website.

(Disclaimer: DER also distributes a film I made.)

In all of his films, Rouch collaborated significantly with African friends and colleagues. Through this active collaboration, which involved all aspects of shooting and production, Jean Rouch used the camera to participate fully in the lives of the people he filmed as well as to provoke them and, eventually, the viewers into experiencing new dimensions of sociocultural experience. Many of the films of this period cut to the flesh and blood of European colonialism, compelling us to reflect on our latent racism, our repressed sexuality, and the taken-for-granted assumptions of our intellectual heritage. They also highlight the significance of substantive collaboration, a research tactic that Rouch called ‘anthropologie partagée,’ in the construction of scholarly knowledge. Through these provocatively complex films, Jean Rouch unveiled how relations of power shape our dreams, thoughts and actions.

The film invites the (putatively European) viewer to understand ostensibly ‘savage’ rituals as psychically ameliorative. At the same time, it records a remarkable practice of resignification of colonial powers — impersonation in the genre of ‘madness’. {In Papua New Guinea today, under very different cultural and historical circumstances than those recorded here, popular forms of dance [singsing] include so-called ‘police bands,’ in which young men (or women) dress up in colonial costume, including sometimes white-face, and enact military order as a way to impress audiences at festivals of various sorts, especially school fetes.}  Anyway, there is much to discuss in a ‘text’ like this.  I would just add that YouTube continues to grow into a stunning cultural archive.

The short version — for people who didn’t get the memo — is that the Eskimo do _not_ have 100/354/1,000 words for snow.

“Language”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00853469&id=klwKAAAAIAAJ&dq=sapir&as_brr=1 by Edward Sapir

“Primitive Society”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00928466&id=DdgKAAAAIAAJ&dq=paul+radin&as_brr=1 by Robert Lowie

“Mind of Primitive Man”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC01171659&id=4tUKAAAAIAAJ&dq=franz+boas&as_brr=1 (thanks Oneman!)

“Principles of Sociology”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC70253400&id=lywpqdwukdwC&dq=franz+boas&as_brr=1 Herbert Spencer

“Myth, Ritual, and Religion”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00715867&id=PvBD6iPUaZYC&dq=franz+boas&as_brr=1 Andrew Lang

“Suicide”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC26104723&id=SQ0FAAAAMAAJ&dq=durkheim&as_brr=1 by Durkheim (in French)

“Head-Hunters Black, White, and Brown”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00635247&id=dG8cAAAAMAAJ&dq=Alfred+Haddon

These are just the ones with PDF downloads. Many more are available full-text. They even have copies of old issues of American Anthropologist on there (sssshh — Don’t tell the AnthroSource business model!)

It is almost impossible to make a savage in the lower stages of culture understand why the questions are asked, and from the limited range of his vocabulary or of ideas it is often nearly as difficult to put the question before him in such a way as he can comprehend it. The result often is that from timidity, or the desire to please, or from weariness of the questioning, he will give an answer that he thinks will satisfy the inquirer. If time serve, these difficulties can easily be overcome by friendly intercourse, and a careful checking of answers through different individuals (87 – 88).

Needless to say, this work is of historical interest more than practical interest. Still, it\’s good to see this history preserved and available; I also downloaded a copy of Franz Boas\’ The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), which is of rather more interest to me.

There is no \”master list\” of downloadable texts, or search flag that will return only results that have pdf\’s attached. The trick is to click the \”Full View Books\” radio button under the search form, and then hope. In \”Advanced Book Search\”, you can set a date range — I\’d think that limiting the publication date to years before 1925 would be a good idea, as current copyright law only covers back to 1926 or so. But, of course, there is public domain work published after 1926 — anything published by the US government, for example — and there is still some material that was published earlier that may not be public domain (e.g. works in translation, where the rights are/were held by various parties and now nobody\’s quite sure who owns what).

Imagine if we had some sort of reasonable copyright laws — we could access much more recent scholarly work, most of which is locked up in the storerooms of university libraries where nobody will ever see it.

It’s unsurprising then that one of my very favorite books in the history of anthropology is Andrew and Marilyn Strathern’s amazing Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen (1971). I have had to purchase my own copy because too often, library-held editions have been brutalized by people cutting out the full-color plates in the back. To my mind, if one wanted to get a feel for social life in highland New Guinea — for the vibe which animates it — this volume is a stellar guide. It is one of the most serious and comprehensive studies of adornment that I know of. It carefully records ways in which social form is encoded in structured relations between, for example, colors or bush materials. I recall myself seeing a koi wal (feather plaque from Hagen) for sale once in Goroka market and knowing something about it (for example, its name) precisely because of this text.

The color plates of throngs of greased and shining bodies, or spectacularly feathered warriors and wig-wearers, are simply dazzling.

I allude to Marilyn Strathern’s later reflections on ‘the ethnographic moment,’ that encounter that lives on as an image in your mind, guiding your analysis because it is so phenomonally real or present long-after the fact. She writes: “It is worth remarking… that special knowledge which inheres, say, in theological or scientific expertise has never held quite the place in anthropological accounts as materials which appear esoteric *because* they require revealing (beg immediate interpretation). An initial surprise becomes a suspension, a dazzle, and some kinds of ‘special knowledge’ are more likely to dazzle than others” (Property, Substance, and Effect, pp. 10-11).

One can see, reflecting on a text like Self-Decoration, how Hageners might indeed have that effect. The language feels appropriate, and Strathern narrates an interruption: of her pursuit of rudimentary research in gardens and on genealogies by her first sight of mounted pearl shells. Star-struck: the glimmering white center of the ruddy mounting board dazzles also Hageners.

For me, what begged interpreting was the emotional quality of a ceremonial exchange I witnessed. The occasion was a gift of cash in the name of an elderly man to his mother’s kin, and in particular to her brother. The gift giver clutched the recipient to him in a submissive gesture and cried sorrowfully, wailing the word ‘mother’ over and over. It is one image I cannot remove from memory, and I return to it again and again when I think about highlands sociality.

Dazzled and mesmerized. Thought it was a tremendously demanding experience, I am frequently grateful that my research in New Guinea yielded the sort of encounter that animates and moves one’s thought, even years later.

We have also visited, among other things, Trautmann’s work, especially his recent article on “The Whole History of Kinship Terminology…” There, Trautmann criticizes contemporary models of transformations in kinship terminology, and in doing so suggests that comparative kinship studies might be one avenue into studying the very longue duree of human history. A broadly regional and deeply historical comparative framework may yield advances in ethnological history: “…the deep history that lies between, say, the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Victorian era, is not thickly populated by anthropologists, especially cultural anthropologists… For all the contemporary commitment of cultural anthropology to history, the deeper past is greatly neglected.” Trautmann suggests that attention to this sort of history would help correct biases built into certain functionalist or synchronic accounts.

So that is one call to give kinship studies a contemporary cast: give kinship a deeper history.

Even so, there are other languages or rhetorics that might make kinship terminologies a hot topic. (I leave aside, for the time being, the sexy and important topics of ‘biotech’ and ‘body’ in contemporary kinship studies.) If, for example, anthropologists of contemporary governments wished to sample of forms of interpellation that precede and exceed the normative force of state power (recalling here the policeman yelling at you on the street), they could do little better than to track the distributions of kin designations in everday practice and in legal discourse. This is precisely what the earlier SM discussion on adoption and ICWA points us toward: divided sovereignties (competing regulations of forms of life) along several axes — the indigenous and liberal, the minority and the majority, ‘kindred’ versus ‘citizens,’ to say nothing of men and women. Beyond the discourse of experts that is a focus of the current analytics of governmentality (whether neo/liberal, totalitarian, or whatever), anthropologists have rich and varied models for how populations are regulated in extra-state circumstances: precisely through the interpellation of subjects in self-perpetuating systems of signification we call kinship terminologies.

It is true that citizens of Melanesian states, for example, are ‘produced’ to some extent by the legacy of foreign rule in the form of the postcolonial state (such as it is in some places). Far more consequential, however, for how people conduct themselves in everyday life and for how they sustain themselves materially are the identities iterated and reiterated in daily, habitual, commonplace encounters with each other. In places like Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) eastern highlands, title to land, for example, is secured only in and through one’s affiliation with a clan that holds in a coprorate fashion the land. ‘Membership’ in a clan is manifest, is elicited, is ‘performed’ through the eventful (ceremonial exchange, committments in battle), but also, and more thoroughly, through the everday modes of address through which people interact (the relatively uneventful). Though I *lived* in a village, built a house there, ate food there, for my adoptive family, the most important thing I did was to call my kin by their proper terms (e.g., mama, papa, etc. or “ieno” and “ahono” in the local language). Doing so locked me into a structure of social relations that was both utterly constraining, inaugurating all kinds of obligations and protocols pertaining to moral conduct, and enabling. I could engage in action of a *consequential* sort only by being called into being by ‘reciprocal’ (I mean this in a nontechnical way) address. Kinship terminologies provide examples for two varied interpretations of the productive power of discourses: either the ‘subjection’ favored by Judith Butler and others or the ‘subjectivation’ favored by James Faubion and others. (See their brilliant work in Antigone’s Claim or The Ethics of Kinship.)

Perhaps its a stretch to tie these observations to a previous discussion, but I do wonder sometimes when anthropologists struggle to find languages for thinking about social regulation in the contemporary period (as for example ‘governmentality’) why ‘the market’ springs to mind quite readily while that old workhorse of anthropology — kinship — doesn’t (so often). There are, I imagine, either intricate and important reasons why not, or perhaps simpler ones.