I think people will see interesting parallels with the ‘ethnographic theory’ I discussed last time, but the piece is coming from a very different subject position and intellectual heritage position. And best of all, it’s only seven pages long. Seven pages – surely you can manage to read seven pages and then drop by the site to talk about it. So download Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Seafaring, Archipelagic Rethinking and the Re-Mapping of Indigeneity

As usual, I’m posting this on Wednesday. I’ll write up my thoughts on Friday and open it up for comments after that. We can run through the weekend and then by next Wednesday we’ll be ready to move on to the next piece to discuss.

A quick look at the bios of the contributors and editors to HAU will reveal that it is in many ways a Chicago-Oxbridge production, but with a continental twist. In many ways, HAU represents what people at some of the most prestigious institutions of anthropology have been thinking for some time, but the journal ‘opens up’ that thought to the public by making their work open access. The result is something unique: a journal with a strong, almost parochial character which is also transparent to a fault.

As someone in this network (but not really involved in the production of HAU) I recognize this take on ‘ethnographic theory’ as a species of what they call in France the ‘sciences humaines’: an approach to knowing the human that is rigorous, humanistic, and often places anthropology in conversation with philosophy rather than, say, evolutionary biology. At least this is how it seems to me.

What Ethnographic Theory Is, afaik

So what is ethnographic theory? According to da Col and Graeber “a conversion of stranger-concepts [that entails]… the destruction of any firm sense of place that can only be resolved by the imaginative forumulation of novel worldviews” (vii-viii).

The goal of anthropology on this account (afaik) is to take alien concepts, understand them, and then see the way they sort of make sense from our point of view, but don’t quite. Another kind of anthropology might try to slot alien concepts into a broader conceptual system, to say “this is a variety of exchange” or “this is a kind of taboo”. Ethnographic theory, on the other hand, wants to resist this easy assimilation. It wants to find the part of a concept which is untranslatable and use it as a jumping-off point for our own theoretical innovation. Instead of asking “how can we best translate this concept into our own system” it asks “how can we change our system so that it can understand this concept which resists classification”.

That’s why the journal is called HAU — Mauss’s analysis of the Maori concept of the ‘spirit of the gift’ is the paradigmatic example of this sort of ethnographic theory. And the reason that they called the ‘HAU’ instead of ‘SPIRIT OF THE GIFT’ is that the original Maori word includes meaning and resonances that the English translation doesn’t. And those resonances and meanings are what are productive, what produce innovation in us. Or better, what elicit it or pull it out of us by their foreigness.

It’s an interesting idea, no? To me the idea is very attractive, and as a Chicago-trained anthropologist I will now do the greatest honor I can to something I appreciate and enjoy: attempt to destroy it. Sorry Giovanni — it’s what they trained me to do!

Some Questions and Concerns

Part of what is appealing about the notion of ethnographic theory is the way that it cunningly reverses what many anthropologists think our discipline is supposed to do: make the strange familiar. Instead, the goal is to make the strange as strange as possible — to honor, welcome, embrace, and perhaps even emphasize its strangeness. In America, this smacks of ‘orientalism’ which we all automatically know is ‘bad’. But here, intriguingly, othering involves moral validation.

This stance is familiar to those of us who remember the bad old days of the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate. That debate was basically about how best to honor indigenous people: Sahlins argued we should do it by emphasizing and validating their legitimate difference, while Obeyesekere argued this task was best accomplished by emphasizing our common humanity.

Both, in other words, represented the two moments of recognition that Charles Taylor talks about in his essay on “The Politics of Recognition”. Contrary to what you might expect from the subject positions of the two authors (Obeyesekere the third world elite, Sahlins the first world working-class intellectual) it is Sahlins who pursues a politics of difference and Obeyesekere who pursues a politics of universalism.

In many ways, this emphasis on recognizing otherness is akin to certain flavors of poststructural politics, such as a politics of performance a la Judith Butler, where the goal is to destablize hegemonic norms by revealing the excess which they must elide in order to make themselves taken for granted. It is for this reason that I — and probably I alone — see Butler and Sahlins as kindred spirits. But that is a topic for another day.

Many influences by Sahlins (such as Ira Bashkow and Rupert Stasch) have continued to pursue a way to recuperate a morally positive recognition of difference, and I see HAU as operating within this genealogy, even if it lacks the Yankee obsession with politics and relevance.

Looking ethnographic theory with Manoa eyes (eyes keenly focused on the politics of Pacific and Indigenous scholarship) I have my doubts as well. In an extremely obvious way, this is a project that engages indigenous ideas, not actual indigenous people (much less indigenous scholars). Some might object that the authors clearly state that they are “speaking of alien concepts, which are by no means limited to those drawn from strange and romantic places” (vii). But, to be frank, does anybody actually buy this?

I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all. Nor do I see — as one would expect if the program was committed to ethnography everywhere and not just ‘exotic’ spaces — any account of how one could do ethnography of their own first-world location. Here again HAU’s title is telling: cultural difference seems necessary, not incidental, to the program. When we see a piece on standard average european concepts made strange, maybe I will change my tune — if, that is, that piece doesn’t fall into the familiar trap of making the first-world working class ‘the other’. An essay on how the concept of ‘monster trucks’ expands our anthropological imagination will not cut it.

I feel clichéd saying this, but the concept of ethnographic theory also seems to ignore the real and enduring fact of colonialism, and the political economic processes that make the kinds of subjects like ‘ethnographers’ and ‘informants’ who in fact are commensurable with each other because of shared (colonial) world-historical experience. Just how alien are we from one another? And if the political effects of eliding the colonialism inside of white anthropologists are palatable, what do we think of an approach that, in some variations, decries Pacific islanders as inauthentic for not conforming to the lifeways described in books written a century ago?

The negative stereotype is this: ‘Ethnographic theory’ as a parlor game in which elite academic weave ever more obscurantist essays for each other inspired by their brush with ‘the exotic’ in the name of a project of getting intellectually high. I don’t think ethnographic theory does this all the time, or necessarily will do this (although frankly, sometimes at conferences I can’t help but get this feeling as people invoke white holes, quantum physics, and Papuan longhouses). Indeed, one of the best parts about HAU is that it might broaden the horizons of those who are used to doing ethnographic theory inside the ivory tower, thus opening it up not only to ‘us’ but opening ‘them’ up by exposure to ‘us’.

What Ethnographic Theory Doesn’t Do

The authors of HAU are not interested in many things that social scientists could do or aspire to do — indeed, some of their project was formulated specifically in reaction to these aspirations. For the sake of giving Michael E. Smith the opportunity to remind us once again that he has resigned from the AAA, I offer a list of some things Ethnographic theory can’t or doesn’t want to do:

Generalize in the Name of Science: This is not generalizing social science. It doesn’t seek to explain anything.

Intervene: Ethnographic theory does not aim to be ‘useful’ in either the lefty applied/emancipatory fight the power kind of way, or the right-wing Project Camelot/HTS kind of way. It doesn’t seem to be ‘good’ for anything except possibly expanding your consciousness, which some may claim has some sort of broad effect.

Be Public: Let’s face it, the style of much of this writing can be off-putting even for academics. This is not something intended for a general audience.

Collaborate: Fieldwork may involve a deep appreciation of local communities, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of cowriting with them.

Of course, few people want an anthropology that does all of these things, and there’s nothing wrong with not doing them. I include this list only to describe some of the desiderata that people might want in anthropology and how they are situated in relation to the project of ethnographic theory.

Further Reading

The foreward to HAU is very, very short and I chose it to publicize the journal as well as provide something that is a bite-sized chunk of this school of thought. Fuller treatments are abound, and many of them are open access. Tony Crook and Justin Schaffner’s article in HAU “Roy Wagner’s ‘Chess of Kinship’: An Opening Gambit” is a great overview of this school of thought (I thought about assigning it), especially if you know anything about Melanesia. Frankly, you will probably get more out of it than Roy’s article itself. Over at Tipití, another great open access journal, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation” is a great over view of VdC’s thought, which directly influenced the forward to HAU. Let’s face it — although open access anthropology can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look, some of the best and most cutting-edge stuff is out there, as HAU well demonstrates.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, I think the idea of ethnographic theory is exciting, coherent, and offers a way forward for anthropology — and when was the last time you said that about something published in American Ethnologist? But at the same time I feel a little ambivalent, and I’m not completely sold. I’d be interested in hearing your comments and feedback. I’ve tried to be critical but gracious, and I hope that I’ve been successful. So please do the same and keep the tone constructive — remember, the authors are listening, and even well-meaning criticism can come across the wrong way on Teh Internetz, so let’s try to encourage some collegiality here.

I’ll keep this post up until Wednesday, when I’ll make another reading suggestion based on how the conversation in the comments goes. Thanks for reading and thanks for discussing!

Where is our discipline going? The good news is that because we can’t currently answer this question, we have a chance to try to do so in open and transparent forums.

In other words, we need to not just notice open access publications, and just resolve to cite them, we need to read them and talk about them: the key activity that comes between these two moments. The key to publicizing open access scholarship is to make it part of the conversation.

I’d like to get the ball rolling by trying an experiment. Every week for the foreseeable future I will (if all goes well) point to a piece of open access scholarship and suggest that everyone read it, say on Wednesday. On Friday I’ll post an entry saying what I think of it, and ask you all to comment. I’ll let the comments run until Wednesday, when I’ll post another piece. Sound easy enough, eh?

There’s no better place to start than HAU, which as come out of the gate so strongly. In particular, David Graeber and Giovanni Da Col’s introduction to the first volume is well worth reading for the vivid prose and possibly-groundbreaking paradigm of ‘ethnographic theory’. Best of all, the presentation is very brief, only three pages long. Are you telling me you can’t read three pages before Friday? So come on and grab an OA PDF of the introduction, read the first three pages (and of course as much of the rest as you want) and stop by the blog on Friday afternoon (Honolulu time) to tell me what you think. Who knows, it could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

For instance, the issue of how “communal land tenure” became the basis for racialized dispossession. Moore does a nice job of giving a potted history of the classic debates about African political systems initiated by Radcliffe-Brown and carried out as part of the structure-functional program of Evans-Pritchard and Fortes, among others. The disputes over the nature of evolutionary versus structure-function accounts are obviously complicated and for any student of the history of the discipline, fascinating in that they seem so much more sophisticated that the current mode of denunciation that greets evolutionary psychology by anthropologists (not that I don’t agree that it needs to be denounced, but only that the sophistication of argument is absent because it has become a war for ears and eyes, instead of an actual argument).

Regardless of the sophistication, however, the key question was not “should anthropologists study Africa” — it was “which version of anthropological knowledge is going to be used by colonial administrators, and how?” As in the case of anthropology in Iraq or the war on terror, the question of ‘whether or not’ is a red herring if one has no political guide to understanding ‘which and how.’ As the ruckus over the supposed use of Patai’s book on The Arab Mind shows, there is always plenty of anthropological knowledge out there to fit the schemes and plans of military and political exploiters — but why Patai? Can anyone actually say how this book instead of some other came up in discussion with Seymour Hersh (a point McNamara made in her short piece in AT (23(2) APRIL 2007, p. 20). Likewise, in the case of Zimbabwe, it was not the most sophisticated ideas of Radcliffe-Brown or Evans-Pritchard that guided colonial administrators, but evolutionary accounts like L.H. Morgan’s:

By placing African subjects in an earlier evolutionary moment, administrators could subject them to collective rather than individual regimes of rights. Communal tenure offered an effective instrument used to dispossess Africans of individual rights that government could then claim to grant in Native Reserves.”

Commitment to theory plays a central role here: if Morgan and evolutionary explanation are your bag (as an administrator) there is plenty of warrant and lots of useful books available for treating the native Africans as racially and evolutionarily separate from the colonizers–despite the vigourous critique of this position by some of the most famous anthropologists of the 20th century. (As an aside, it is also a remarkable echo of the claims Strong posted recently by Andrew Sullivan (give that man a rifle and a pith helmet!). The commitment to theory is not simply wrong, however– it creates new problems that need to be dealt with, such as the competing forms of sovereignty that are necessary if one places the natives in a separate evolutionary role. If Africans cannot simply be equal subjects of the crown, then they must be both subjects of crown and tribe, resulting in exactly the kinds of complex allegiances and “triads-in-motion” of sovereignty and discipline and government that Moore reveals.

What this reveals for anthropology is that it is not simply the question of doing research for, with or against the military, or trying to somehow keep planners and torturers away from our research while still making it available so we can have tenure– no, the key problem is making the key questions under debate highly visible so that disputed theory cannot be treated as incontrovertible evidence. What Moore’s book is good at showing, furthermore, is not that knowledge simply resulted in colonial immiseration, but that planning guided by knowledge creates new conditions and new problems, and that as such the task of anthropological knowledge is renewed. What I haven’t yet managed to figure out is whether Moore’s book would be (or wants to be) of use to anyone in Zimbabwe today.

Chapter 2 runs through the long history of government schemes of
dispossession, repossession, resettlement and new dispossessions. It’s
pretty clear that this chapter alone could be a book, what with the
complicated schemes of colonial, late colonial, post-independence,
post-colonial, and current schemes of displacement and
re-organization. Obviously the very idea of feeling secure about
one’s land in any sense (not least a Lockean, possessive individualist
sense of ownership) has been the exception, not the rule. The action
of the book takes place just before the 1993 passage of the Land
Acquisition act, which overturned the “Lancaster House” negotiations,
brokered by the British, between Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and Mugabe’s
Zimbabwe in 1979-80. The Land Acquisition act started the ball
rolling towards the highly publicized dispossession of land owned by
white farmers in the 2000s, and the current economic chaos in the
country.

It is thus easy to see why of the systems for redistributing and
organizing land in this democracy-cum-dictatorship are complex,
combined as they are with the overlapping histories of colonial rule,
chiefdom and local everyday practices. Moore spends a lot of time
focusing on the government attempts to plan and control of abstract
space: villagization, agricultural grids divided by function, roads
and water supplies, in short a lot of attention on the effects of 19th
century modernist planning carried out iin 1980s-90s, globalizing
Zimbabwe. I return again here to my sense that Moore treats planning
a little too much as if there were planning on the one side
(government) and the practices of people on the other
(governmentality), when it is clear that planning takes all kinds of
forms, and are a central feature of the politics he reveals. Clearly
Moore knows this when it becomes evident (pages 91-92) that Moore was
actively involved in “community based resource management” that would
propose alternatives to the official land-use plans. I was
disappointed therefore not to see more reflection on the question of
where planning ends and execution begins given this kind of
negotiating and intervention. There is an easy story in which
anthropologists discover what “the people” really do, and then go tell
the officials and the government how to best and most humanely plan
around them… but this is not the story Moore is telling.
Nonetheless, it’s still clear to me that there is no way out of
planning and its rationalities, and the real heart of the matter is in
how those rationalities are aligned with differing claims on and
demands for, justice.

Chapter 3 extends this question into the “micropractices” (again, why
micro? I don’t get it) of Karezi residents and how those practices
conflict with the resettlement schemes and regulations of government.
I found this chapter rich and enjoyable… filled with great
storytelling (although frequently Moore fails to finish his stories,
or return to them when it would make sense) of the “cattle dips” and
the cultivation of tsenza. It is here that the ecological sensibility
of people who occupy a place and understand the relation of space and
place is so obvious to the anthropologist, and so ignored by planners
and officials. Latour would be useful here, if only as a straw man–
the clear desire to control the practices of people from a “center of
calculation” seems to fail in Zimbabwe precisely because Moore is
probably the only person doing really quality research into the
political ecology of Zimbabwe– but he certainly isn’t trying to help
Mugabe govern better.

The three chapters of part one have not on balance delivered on the
theoretical promises of the introduction (or if they have, it has been
in ways far too subtle for me to catch); assemblages, articulated or
not, remain little more than a gesture so far, and there is no
conceptual scaffolding that would make me confident that the two
remaining parts will fill it all out… but I look forward to finding
out.

Zimbabwe is to start circulating a new 200,000 Zimbabwe dollar note, in a bid to tackle the country’s inflation, the highest in the world. The new note, issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe from Wednesday, can buy 1kg (2.2lb) of sugar. Food and fuel shortages have become common as the government relies more heavily on imports, pushing prices to new heights. The official annual rate of inflation in Zimbabwe is nearing 5,000%. In practice, this means the price of a loaf of bread costs 50 times more in cash than it did a year ago.

Chapter 1 almost achieves both, but I wouldn’t call it a complete success. It has a clever general structure and a lot of great detail (perhaps too much, indulging in places in obviously interesting but marginally relevant details of things like witchcraft or the rhetorical stylings of incompetent lesser headmen). There are two ways into the chapter, at least. One is through the author’s own “ethnographic emplacement” — the fact that as an anthropologist he had to find a (good) place to live, secure permission to live there, build his own hut and then, at the end of it all, found himself threatened with expulsion from that hut by the District Administrator — which in turn is the second way in, through the event of the District Administrator’s letter threatening residents with expulsion from Nyamatsupa if they do not conform to the plans for “villagization.” These two entry points–the author’s own experience with wattle, and the event of the DA’s disciplining letter–are explored in great detail, and are used to great effect as occasions to start laying out the complexity ethnographically. They do not explain, but they do start to map out settings, characters, events in history, and other crucial components of the story. Yet to emerge is a sense of how inquiry into this story has proceeded (what problems animate Moore’s search, other than his threatened hut) and a conceptual clarity (of the sort we hope will be provided via articulated assemblages and sovereignty-discipline-government).

I think this is one of the best ways to draw the reader into the ethnography–the same way the anthropologist was drawn in. As an ethnographic technique it is without peer, it sets up the tension which the author will resolve for the reader. However, as an analytic introduction, it doesn’t always help. One might wonder why this tiny event–significant to the victims to be sure, but seemingly insignificant beyond that–needs explaining, or where in our overcrowded, youtube-addled brains we are going to store it. Will we be needing all this detail? The Tsanga valley, the Dazi and Nyamatsupa regions, Nyanga (thanks to Strong for finding us a visual!). The overlapping powers of chief and headman, raimakers and DA, histories of the colonial and post-colonial regimes.

I’ll be interested to hear what readers got from the first chapter. Does the story of the meeting between DA and chief make sense, and does it motivate the kinds of questions raised in the intro? Is the detail overwhelming or helpful and where? I have to admit that I’m still fuzzy on a few of the characters and their roles, and if asked to display my knowledge of the various parts of Kaerezi or its inhabitants, I would dissemble. But it seems to be mostly all there in chapter 1, and so I can consult…

I wrote a long section about assemblages, but I think our server ate it because it Internal Server Errored on me. I will try to return to the issue in the next post…

P.S. Mobility continues to be present throughout, though not yet quite a theme: Trucks open the chapter– movement through the territory. the issue of mobility on foot emerges repeatedly, 1 hour walks, jogging behind oxen for 3K, security routes constantly improved by trucks and graders. Cattle allow people greater mobility than agriculture. since fixing capital in place was risky given the history of evictions. Indeed, the nature of mobility in this place is quite obviously tied to the constant evictions, resettlements and displacements, making the very idea of a permanent home risky, if not seemingly impossible.

P.P.S. There is a another subtheme here: ecological farming. The Kaerezi ecological approach to farming (mentioned briefly on p.50, reappearing in chapter 2) reminded me of Michael Pollan’s story of Polyface farms in Swope Virginia in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wherein he describes the practices of rotation of crop, grazing and fertilizing animals, the arrangement of forest field, stream and home, and the fact that all of this is information-intesive (the farmer even insists that it is something like a post-information technology approach to farmin’). The point being that ecological arrangements are not natural, nor primitive as figured by the planners or to some extent hippies and conservationists–rather that it is a kind of post-human rationality of planning a farm. Naturally, it is easy to see the failures created by the simplistic, ad hoc and frankly retro planning techniques of the Mugabe government when they demand that land be disciplined into urban/rural grids and used according to function instead of managed ecologically. The fact is, however, that the option is not between planning and no planning or between discipline from above and government from below, but between competing rationalities of planning and care. This is something I don’t yet see in Moore. Sensitive as he is to avoiding claims of natural agricultural practices, there is still, to me, a sense that this is about planning all the way down, so to speak, which may also be why the sovereignty-discipline-government triad in motion doesn’t seem sufficiently precise to some readers.

A few good blogs (1| 2| 3) seem to be out there as well… please post others if you know of them.

“I elaborate entanglements with their gnarly knots that defy orderly undoing.” (Donald Moore, Suffering for Territory, p. 9)

The first thing I noticed about Donald Moore’s Suffering for Territory is that the preface and the flap-copy both describe events in Zimbabwe since 2000– the globally significant displacement of white landowners by the Mugabe government– but the research conducted in the book occurred in the early 1990s. At first sight this looks like a way to sell the book (it’s not out of date, it’s background!), but in reality I think there is something much more complex about this book that isn’t articulated until one gets well into the intro: that this is a book for understanding why the events of the last few years make sense. Whereas the news media and the fast-paced world of journalism are excellent at covering and tracking unfolding events, especially in places with dramatic political conditions like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, ethnography is after something that journalists (insofar as they are not really participating in what they observe) cannot articulate.

Unfortunately, that same sense-making skill that anthropologists develop is also the reason why it is so often hard for people (including authors themselves) to say what an ethnography is “about.” Certainly Donald Moore’s book is “about” Zimbabwe, and in particular, a little district in the north east called Kaerezi, and in particular a little village in that district. But to relegate the book to being merely about this village would miss the fact that it is actually (also?) about how power, sovereignty and discipline make space and place look, and happen, the way they do. But to say that it is merely a theorization of governmentality would miss the fact that it (also?) is about race, colonialism, African histories of liberation, resistance, genocide and suffering… and so on.

Fortunately for Moore, and for me, one of the perquisites of anthropology is that one can address novice and expert at the same time. I, for instance, had to look at a map to know where Zimbabwe is exactly, so I am very much a novice when it comes to one thing the book is about. But when it comes to the parade of familiar theorists (Foucault, Gramsci, Dolce and Gabanna, Appadurai, Lefbvre, James C. Scott, Chakrabarty, etc), I’m an expert whose own classes, syllabi and work have struggled to makes sense of things like governmentality, sovereignty, assemblages, articulations, situated ethnographies, space and place. The real challenge, for Moore’s book, is to integrate novice and expert– to make sense of something that is inevitably highly specific and particular, in terms that make it make sense at a global and historical level (and not only in terms of “governmentality”, but generally, as an ethnographic explanation of a situation, not just a particular place or set of people).

Of course, if you are looking for that elusive thing called fieldwork or ethnography (you know what I’m talking about, that thing that you can’t name but that when it is missing makes people say “where’s the ethnography”) then Moore’s book promises to be as rich a monograph of a specific locale as one could want: during fieldwork, Moore was detained by government officials at the airport, subjected to ruthless and pointless bureaucracy, had successive meetings with people in power overseeing his ability to work, was the subject of a public meeting deciding his fate, lived in a tent in the village, built his own mud and wattle hut, worked the fields, visited the archives, and spent on the order of ten years thinking through the experience. If this isn’t ethnography, then I’d be hard-pressed to say what is. More important however, might be trying to precisely articulate what this ethnography does that others (or other accounts that do not employ this kind of fieldwork) cannot do.

The Introduction

I find that the best way into many ethnographies today is through the last few pages of an introduction… and not the first. My theory is confirmed here in that the most illuminating part for me was the “Ethnographic Positioning” section, followed by the standard map of the text. I needed this first, before I could dive into the details of governmentality and racialized space and so forth. There is no doubt a sense of unhipness (at least) to repeating the classic “arrival narrative” whether consciously or unconsciously, and so many ethnographies today would rather bury this somewhat essential component of the story, than praise it. Regardless of its ideological underpinnings or its putative narrative effect on readers, the arrival narrative is the equivalent of scene-setting in a novel: you almost always need it. And when it is done well it gives the reader an almost instant sense of the possibilities in a story, it motivates and structures to be sure, but that’s exactly why one should take care with it rather than sequestering it in the back end of an introduction.

Moore misses a certain opportunity in this respect. He’s chosen to introduce his own debilitating car accident, which formed a kind of enforced departure from fieldwork, as part of his narrative, but it comes at the end of the story when it should come at the beginning. Because the book is so intensely about a specific location, spatialization, groundedness and situatedness are emphasized at the clear expense of mobility (a concept frequently hailed as a central feature of the contemporary world). Thus the narrative irony of a car accident (a hiatus of mobility, an enforced groundedness, an occasion for suffering) is in many ways the perfect introduction to a story of grounded, entangled, situated production of territory and suffering. Cars and trucks play an important part in the brief introduction, and I’ll be curious how mobility figures in the rest of the text. Given Moore’s concern primarily with the relation of territory to political technologies, and not only mechanical and bio-technical technologies, it has already made me reflect on the ways automobiles and automobile accidents are also sites of government-sovereignty-discipline (see e.g. Injury by Sarah L. Jain, whose more recent work has been about automobile injuries).

Rather than go on at length about the Introduction, let me do this seminar-style, and provide a series of what I think are the key concepts that readers should read for, and invite discussion about how well they are handled here and how to think about comparative work in tracking these concepts.

“Micropractices matter” is a refrain that is threaded through the introduction. To what exactly is never clear, but the implication seems to be that they matter as much as non-micropractices such as the more obvious “legitimate monopoly on the use of force” of Weber, or the bureaucratic, military and economic power of governments generally. What makes them micro, or practices, is also up for discussion. Are they micro in terms of territorial reach, temporal lastingness or some other scalar dimension? Are they practices because they are not ideologies or are they also imaginaries?

In the section on “Provicializing Governmentality” Moore reviews some of the literature on governmentality and its origin in Foucault’s study of governance in Europe. I sense already that this could spark a relatively endless discussion about what Foucault really meant (less likely would be what Chakrabarty really meant by “Provinicalizing Europe”) so let me make a feeble attempt to focus attention on what Moore calls the “triad-in-motion” of “sovereignty-discipline-government”. (Note mobility!) Moore is “grounding governmentality in Kaerezi”. The triad includes not only government (which for Foucault was always larger than the state) but also the concepts of sovereignty and discipline. Questions you might want to ask: Why is it, or must it be in motion? For extra credit, look up the original triangle in Foucault’s works and provide us with a precise distinction.

Moore should be especially appealing to geographers (to say nothing of Savage Minds contributors on the subject) given his emphasis on the spatialization of politics, the production of place through governmentality and the twin concepts of “Racialized space, spatialized race” he offers in the sections on “Racialized Rule” and “Spatiality and Power”. The focus on space and place is “antihumanist” (p. 19), even as it is concerned with classic humanist themes of race and culture, from Soyinka and Cesaire to Mandela. Focus here also on the “geo-body” and the governance of spatial relations over abstract space.

If your assemblage needs some juice, look no further. in “Entangled Landscapes” Moore promises not only to look at the “striated” entanglement of place, history, technology and power, but to combine assemblages and articulations into, you guessed it, “articulated assemblages.”. Pay special attention to the way assemblage “displace humans as the sovereign makes of history” (p. 23)and Moore’s claim (do you buy it? I don’t yet) that “scholarly invocations of assemblage…occlude power relations, historical sedimentations and their forceful effects” which necessitates a supplement of articulation.” (p. 24)

Finally, the section “Ethnographic positioning” promises some good old-fashioned (it’s old-fashioned now isn’t it?) reflexivity or “ethnographic emergence” . I actually think this is really important, insofar as the kind of reflexivity that is useful is the kind in which the ethnographer uses him/herself as a human tool of observation to make sense of things (I mentioned this in connection with my review of Xiang Biao’s recent book). If Moore’s particular situation as a white, first world anthropologist can be used as a tool for revealing social structure and cultural meaning, then I say bring on the reflexivity. If however, it becomes a way to claim that everything is situated, or what’s worse, complex… then I’ll pass.

Next up: “Governing space,” Chapters 1 and 2 (maybe 3, depending on how the discussion goes)…

The book is substantial, 400 pages, 3 sections. I will try to post something by July 15th on the introduction, and then shoot for 1-2 chapters per week until mid-late August. I hope all the Savage Minds will chime in, and if anyone else wants to write anything substantial about a section of the book, I will happily post it here on your behalf. Let the suffering begin!

As a forum we have (and love) our diverse interests, so no one book is going to please everyone. But we also have an interest in broadening discussion of anthropology and the application of anthropology to contemporary problems, so it should be a book that reflects that, and one that is accessible (monographs on the migratory kinship politics of fricatives are not really what this is about… unless terrorists or Paris Hilton is involved).

There have been a handful of suggestions (listed below), but I’m opening it up to everyone for suggestions. If you’ve got a good idea, suggest it with a reason why you think people should be interested in it. Voting will be conducted in a totally unjust, ad hoc and informal manner, but you can trust that your voice will be heard.

Some starter suggestions:
Typecasting: On the Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality by Ewen and Ewen (All about sterotypes and othering by an American Studies and Film Studies duo).
The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics by Charles Hirshkind (Timely ethnography of Egyptian religious politics and practice).
Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order by James Ferguson (A suggestion from last year’s list, Africa, globalisation and neoliberalism).
Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe by Donald S. Moore (a historical and ethnographic account of the land questions in Zimbabwe).
Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy by Sarah Franklin (All about clones, sheep, geneaology).

Ranchers were Muir’s most explicit enemies; ranchers used the wilderness rather than experiencing or studying it. They were cut off from the universal; they destroyed it through inattention.

That passange had stuck in my mind, and so when I heard this NPR story about contemporary conflict between naturalists and ranchers it caught my attention. Here is the same story as written up in the Washington Post:

A conservationist group is asking a federal court to block new grazing regulations that it contends would give ranchers more water rights and control over public lands.

The Bureau of Land Management announced the final rules Wednesday, and they are to go into effect next month. First proposed in December 2003, the regulations would increase collaboration between the agency and ranchers whose livestock graze on 160 million acres of the nation’s public lands.

John Muir would roll over in his grave!

Despite — or perhaps because? — I am the kind of guy who blogs about anthropology textbooks from 1937 I find myself a little unsatisfied with Tsing’s penchant of intermingling experimental bits of writing with other unbroken sections of more or less traditional ethnography. This seems to me less a ‘new craft of anthropology’ (quoting the back of the book) and more a combination of two relatively distinct authorial styles. Of course, Tsing as an author isn’t responsible for fulfilling the promises made on the back of her book! But I think Friction would be more interesting if “Nature Loving” (from last week) was more like “This Earth, This Island Borneo” and vice versa.

In his last entry on Friction Kelty says he’s not interested in playing the “Tsing doesn’t cite this/that game” we’ve been having (and then goes on to point out some things she doesn’t cite!) but I really want to dig in here and emphasize that this is more than a game — how an author treats the voices of their interlocutors is serious business. It is true that the modes in which we talk about the heteroglossia of our ethnography differs depending on whether the voices we are triliquating are ‘colleagues’ or ‘informants’, but in an ethnography where people are trying to probe the boundary between these two categories of interlocutors it really does matter how you approach things like literature reviews.

I like this chapter because it is the bomb eel literature review. And it also comes closest to having a sustained method of grappling with both academic interlocutors (the call-and-response style italicized and non-italicized paragraphs) as well as Tsing’s informant(s) (the funky list). It deals with late-80s issues of representation (“see, here are my fieldnotes… except of course they’re not really my fieldnotes”) and pays particular attention to the liasion of anthropology and ecologically-knowledgeable local peoples.

TEK (traditional ecological knowledge) and the White People Who Write About It is a complex and fraught subject, and it is clear here that one of the things that Tsing is trying to do is find some way to talk about it despite the way that certain left-academic discourses surrounding this subject have almost talked themselves into paralysis. I think that Tsing’s way out — speaking in terms of her concrete, individual relationship with a friend and admitting that it was fun to make the list with her.

I must admit that this also struck home with me since on slow days during my fieldwork I would often sit around with people and make lists of local animal species using “Mammals of New Guinea” and “Birds of New Guinea”. It was enormous fun, especially since the photos and drawings often captured the animals with a clarity that people never got to see in real life. And of course the various taxonomies used by people — forget what it looks like, what kind of sound does it make? Does this one Goes Underneath The Earth? — blew my mind away, since I was, after all, not actually there to study any of that stuff.

So while I’m still not clear how what Uma Adang does is ‘globalism’ I will be interested to see how the next chapter, which builds off of this one, will turn out.

This chapter is markedly different from the others, as I’m sure readers have noticed. My first instinct is to say, contra Rex and because I’m at the mic: here’s that ethnography, baby… but that’s only part of what makes this chapter interesting. Aside from being the most detailed in that classic descriptive mode of ethnography, it’s also quite conventional in the claims it makes: namely that “environmentalism” or environmental activism is tied to “nature loving” which is in turn constituted out of four strong currents that lead into it (National Anti-politics, middle class distinction, domestic adventure tourism, consumer culture p. 131). These claims are specific, and they form a conventional argument–unlike her “snapshot” theory in Chapter 2, as we discussed.

Each of these four currents encapsulate the kinds of “scale-making” she has explored in earlier chapters, and especially here the twin relations of local culture (in this case student nature lover [pencinta alam] groups) to indonesian nationalism and in turn to a cosmopolitanism represented in different ways in each of these currents.

The chapter also works especially well in that old “making the famliar strange” manner by implicitly drawing connections to, and distinctions from, US (especially) environmental roots in Hippie nature-loving culture. I liked contemplating the connections here, mostly because of the vast and powerful mainstreaming of that culture that has occured since i was an undergraduate at the University of California Summer Camp (Santa Cruz): Whole Foods and eco-tourism and alternative medicine and so on. The Indonesian case by contrast brings out a variety of interesting differences.

For instance I like the focus on the the identification with wild nature as such as opposed to a list of particular places conquered visited. And though Tsing doesn’t make too much of it, the fact of the ever-present villagers; in the US context, the presense of other people can ruin your adventure in the desolate wilderness (especially when they pull out their mobile phones and ask “guess where I am?”), but in Indonesia (and my experience was similar in India), other people are always around, whether because they live there, or as in the stories at the end of the chapter, they are there for their own reasons. The fact of this density is, or should I think, also be a source of reflection on the location of “encounters across difference” that make up shared commitments to universals like nature. If the Indonesian Nature lover Sri can connect with a Javanese villager, sharing a sense of the romance and moral authority of nature, and then in turn connect with NGOs or environmental activists later (were that to happen, it doesn’t in this case), then that’s an excellent example of how people practically make Nature into a universal–something “we” all obviously care about.

I’m not much for the “Tsing doesn’t cite this/that” game that we’ve been having here, but I do think there is an interesting missed opportunity here, a link to be made with contemporary work in the history of science. In particular, the work of Lorraine Daston, who has shown how the recognition that scientific work (that universal of universals) is in fact enabled by certain forms of “moral economy” (e.g. “The Moral Economy of Nature” and the The Moral Authority of Nature).

It is in this work that historians of science have found ways of investigating how scientific work requires ways of feeling, as well as ways of seeing, saying, understanding etc. The term “nature lover” should have the emphasis on “lovers” — because it is about the ways in which affect is organized in a cultural system whereby invididuals can learn to experience nature as something capricious, spirtual, authoritative, threatened, shocking, etc. I raise this connection because I think it strengthens Tsing’s plan to do ethnography of universals: because this is what many historians and anthropologists of science are also seeking ways of doing.

Finally, the term “cosmopolitan” stands out here as an uninvestigated synonym for “global”– certainly it is or should not be this, but Tsing doesn’t quite specify how cosmopolitanism should be distinguished from Globali/sm/ization/ty/etc. The “cosmos” part should appeal to anthropologists–is this an attempt to reconstruct cosmology outside of the classic constraints of bounded society anthropology? Is it “cosmopolitics: thinking and feeling beyond the nation” and if so, do we need to specify the political economy within which it makes sense? Tsing’s student nature lovers seem to be pretty straightforwardly nationalist in her telling, and the cosmopolitanism is really more like its 19th century meaning of “not rural, peasant, uncivilized”–but is this really the case in the era of indiginized Marlboro Men and International Adventure Sport?

Oh (and I don’t know what to say about it, but) “Dark Rays” rocks. I wish it was more than just an impressionistic inter-section.

As we enter the second section of the book I feel like Tsing’s plan is starting to unfold and ideas that were originally left sort of vague (like ‘universals’) receive fuller treatment. At the same time the in-betweeness of the work as neither a nuts and bolts ethnography nor a more experimental piece continues to appear to me not to be an example of a new kind of ethnographic writing as a way of approaching really interesting topics in a manner that makes understanding them easier rather than harder.

The ‘science studies’ or ‘Latourian’ approach is particularly evident in this chapter although I hesitate to go into it in details since this is an area that is really not my area of speciality — especially compared with Kelty. However, I _have_ been reading J.Z. Smith lately — every essay is like an enormously baroque choclate candy with five layers and ridiculous and edible decorations — and I thought that Tsing’s discussion of generalization and comparison resonated with his writings on this topic. I particularly like Smith’s idea of the power of ‘distortion’ that comes from oversimplyfing reality (his interest in the ‘map’ rather than the ‘territory’) and thought it would be interesting to compare to the beginning of this chapter. Perhaps others see connections here?

I haven’t been that impressed with the way that Tsing approaches her ethnographic material in previous chapters, but I did like the way she worked through it this time, using a number of examples that were linked by the concept of nature but were all quite different to examine the concept of the universal. At this level of resolution, and using a central theme to drive analysis, the brevity of the accounts — seven pages on two centuries of botanical activity, for instance — makes much more sense, as does the work they serve in terms of the chapter’s trajectory.

In terms of nature itself, I appreciate the double movement that Tsing (like so many (uncited) others) has described — objects such as ‘Nature’ are constituted by networks of people and things which must efface their efficacy if the product of their work is to be fulyl disclosed. I had never really thought about this in terms of the American experience of wilderness, but as a central Californian who visited Yosemite more than once during his youth this part of the chapter did remind me of home.

So I appreciate the theoretical moves that Tsing is making in this chapter. However I do wonder how they will play out in the rest of the book. Her use of the ‘universal’ does seem to me to cover a couple of different things which might well be distinguished. Is Muir’s aura-making exercise in the wilderness really the same sort of ‘scale-making’ exercise as the creation of ‘global climate’ as a scientific object? Is the PR of ‘sustainable’ timber harvesting really the same as the progressive decontextualization of indigenous knowledge as botanical samples move from colony to metropole? All of them have a genetic relationship via the western concept of ‘Nature’ but they seem to be importantly different in other ways. I Muir’s work really ‘globalizing’ or simply about divine transcendence?

I think that the connection between these examples gets even more tenuous when you shift to Tsing’s discussion of bridges and doves. Here the ‘universals’ in question are about reworking certain world-historical narratives in the context of decolonization — is this really ‘global’ in the same way that climate change models are? And how is this realted to the adoption on Tsing’s part of some pretty unreconstructed Englightenment values like Truth and Freedom? And in what sense are these values ‘universal’? That people who hold them believe all human beings must also assent to them due to their inherent constitution as humans? Or that they are part of a world historical narrative of progress developed in the West and coopted by ‘the South’? I am not saying the connections are not there — see for instance _Provincializing Europe_ and _Other Modernities_ (the last not cited or engaged with despite the fact that Roeffels is, iirc, a student of Tsing’s). I’m not saying that these connections are not there, but much of the book’s success will depend, I think, on how they are elucidated in the next couple of chapters.