A similar issue has arisen in anthropological research on Muslims in North America. In the conclusion to Katherine Pratt Ewing’s edited volume, Being and Belonging (2008), Andrew Shryock called for greater attention to “the immediate and mediated worlds…articulated in everyday life” (206). So, how should one strike a balance between studying media and the everyday? One could study the everyday dimensions of production practices, or how the reception of media is incorporated into people’s everyday lives, or how and why media producers construct the everyday in certain ways.

This issue is especially relevant to many members of the Muslim community in North America and those who conduct research on/with them. Last year I attended two large conferences: The American Academy of Religion (San Francisco, November 2011) and the Islamic Society of North America (Chicago, July 2011). Religious adherents, spokespersons and academics all converged on the notion that engaging with media (news, entertainment, and social media) was the most vital means to influence public opinion about Muslims. I heard numerous panels where professors, journalists, filmmakers, writers, students, etc. discussed the benefits and pitfalls of media activism. Such a large degree of interest solidified my focus on the anthropology of media and Islam by generating more questions than answers. But what about the everyday?

I share Shryock’s view that ethnographies of the everyday lives of Muslims in North America could add texture to our understanding of post-9/11 Muslim identity formations, while also humanizing the Muslim ‘Other’. Yet, television shows about everyday Muslim lives have reached more Muslim and non-Muslim American homes than any ethnography could dream of. Even though an ethnography of actual lives could provide a much needed point of comparison with televisual representations, it seems just as pressing to ethnographically research the construction and reception of the everyday in tv programs.

An ideal approach would analyze the relationship between the everyday in televisual media and lived realities. But, there is no guarantee that such moments would arise during fieldwork and would probably have to be one dimension of a larger study. For this reason, internet sites could prove useful for analyzing how Muslims discuss such shows and apply them to life situations (more on this in the next post), as well as understanding how non-Muslims make sense of them. Another possibility would be to approach the relationship between the everyday and media in a sideways manner (see my last post). This would entail interpreting one in light of the other without positing an underlying unity.

How do you perceive the relationship between media and the everyday? What are some other fruitful directions to pursue?

This is a true labor of love, rendered mostly in Adobe Flash, by the artist and cartoonist Nina Paley. Paley has made the complete feature available for free under a Creative Commons license. Now that the music rights have cleared for Annette Hanshaw’s soundtrack the film is also available on DVD and if you like what you see there’s merchandise for sale so appreciative audiences can support the artist.

The story unfolds in multiple layers, each taking place at divergent moments in history and represented with its own animated style. We begin in present-day San Francisco, portrayed here in squigglevision, with the couple, Nina and Dave, in domestic bliss. Dave’s sudden departure for a new job in India foreshadows the impending end of their relationship. Paley juxtaposes this with the epic myth of Sita and Rama, presented as gouache paintings come alive. Interrupting or narrating the story is a third form, a trio of shadow puppets commenting on the myth. These characters exist out of time. Finally the signature sequences are done with computer animation as a cartoonish Rama and Sita act out their story with Sita singing the words of Annete Hanshaw’s blues. Although visually set in the myth the audience is experiencing creative expressions from the early twentieth century America and encouraged to note the similarities between the two.

“I never knew how good it was to be a slave to one who means the world to me,” she sings.

We learn from the mythic segments that Rama is noble and good, the embodiement of righteousness. The ideal man. The shadow puppets explain to us that Rama’s father, Dasharatha, had planned on crowning him king until one of his scheming wives, Keikeyi, invokes an old debt to force him to banish Rama to the forest instead. Sita, his devoted and beautiful wife follows him. Meanwhile the evil king of Lanka, Ravana, is persuaded by his sister, Suruphanaka, to steal Sita away.

Even with her husband gone Ravana cannot violate Sita’s chastity. Later, aided by his half monkey sidekick Hanuman, Rama finally discovers Ravana’s castle, slaughters his demons and wins Sita back. However Sita has now lived in another man’s house and Rama, having avenged the insult of having his wife stolen, no longer desires her. She must prove her purity to him first in a trial by fire, but before the pyre can harm her gods descend and spirit her away.

With her purity beyond dispute Rama returns to his kingdom to accept his rightful position as king. Then in a chance encounter, Rama observes one of his subjects, a laundryman beating his unfaithful wife. He scolds her: “Do you think I am like Rama?” Now the king feels his wife’s reputation is costing him the loyalty of his subjects, so he banishes her even while she is pregnant with his sons.

Back in the real world Nina follows Dave to India, but the passion of their romance is gone. When she receives an invitation to attend a conference in New York City Dave dumps her by email. In an utterly humiliating scene Nina tearfully begs Dave to take her back when obvious he’s the one doing her wrong.

As Wynton Marsalis describes it, the blues is down home sophistication and it shows in Hanshaw’s numbers. This is a truly adult musical form. “What wouldn’t I do for that man,” she croons as the cartoon Rama literally walks on Sita or sits on her back to drink tea so devoted she is to him. While held captive by Ravana she sings, “Daddy won’t you please come home.” And when Rama rejects Sita after the rescue its, “You love to see me cryin’. I’m left alone singing the blues and sighin’.”

Annette Hanshaw in her vocal performances is really like another character in the story, one which shares with Sita certain idealized qualities of womanhood – a point hammered home by the Betty Boop like proportions of Sita the blues singer with huge bosoms, a tiny waist, and flirty eyelashes. They are both women who define themselves through their romantic relationships with men, in particular men who are blameless. Through all the hardships Rama puts Sita through her devotion to him remains unwavering just as the woman portrayed by Hanshaw’s lyrics continues to love her man no matter how mean he might treat her. Paley clearly identifies with both of these characters. Even as Dave treats her like dirt, she can’t bare to let him go. “Am I blue? You’d be too.”

It is only through the shadow puppets that Paley can bring herself to criticize her own behavior. These characters are really my favorite part of the movie. Depicted in royal or mythological garb the shadow puppets are voiced to sound like modern South Asian Americans and they comment on the myth of Rama and Sita from an alienated, “born confused” perspective. Throughout the feature they interrupt the proceedings to explain the myth but just as often they bicker among themselves, offer competing versions of the story, screw up, questioning the characters’ motivations and cracking jokes at the authority of myths and the powers they hold over our lives.

Late in the movie, Nina calls Dave to beg him, “Please take me back.” This time the puppets stop the action in the modern world outside of mythic time. They explain how as unfair as it might seem that Rama is remembered as a benevolent king while he treats Sita so badly it cannot be that Sita is without fault. After all she’s the one who keeps putting up with his behavior. They make her unquestioning devotion, a virtue under patriarchy, into a character flaw. “Listen he doesn’t like you! You’ve got to move on. C’mon!” That’s her mistake. You shouldn’t love someone who treats you so badly. As Hanshaw sings, “Love had its day. That day has passed. You’ve gone away,” Sita the cartoon character literally cries a river.

Sita Sings the Blues makes clever use of irony, crossing over between multiple timelines to give us a portrait of women – across cultures and through time – being mistreated by men and not having the sense to do anything but put up with it. While the patriarchy of ancient Hindu myth may be readily apparent to us and their congruence with early American popular culture unsettling, Paley urges women to be cognizant of its unconscious internalization. Our romantic proclivities are part of tacit culture.

In the fairy tales we all know so well and which Disney re-presents for our children time and again the man comes to the rescue of the fair maidens whose only aspirations, like Sita, is to be the perfect mother and wife. Such stories contribute to our socialization and enculturation, reflecting the values of the societies that reproduce and repeat them like a broken record playing the blues. This time around, Paley seems to be saying, women need to save themselves.

Why is this statement so hard to write? Well, for one thing, I think it makes us painfully aware of the gap between our teaching ideals and our actual classroom practices. We can talk all we want about various teaching philosophies, but much of what most teachers do in the classroom is essentially the same. Even Mike Wesch, who wrote here about his theory of anti-teaching, has more recently written about “why good classes fail“:

In fact, the few truly fantastic classes I have stumbled into were just as likely to be “sage on the stage” lectures as they were to be based on more participatory methods. And the disheartening reality has been that a really bad lecture doesn’t fail as badly as a really poorly executed participatory class. Many of these professors seem to do everything “right.” They ask their students questions, pause and let them discuss with their neighbors, show YouTube videos that relate to their own experience, and invite discussion. But disinterest and disengagement still reign. Why?

I appreciate Wesch’s thoughts on this, and I strongly recommend reading the whole piece. (And look forward to his forthcoming book on teaching.) There is also an article about his re-think in the Chronicle. I mention it because it gives me comfort in the more modest approach I’ve taken in my own statement of teaching philosophy. I talk, for instance, about making my goals explicit. This may not seem like much, but in practice I’ve found that it is very difficult to do well and also very helpful to students when done properly. It isn’t the kind of thing that gets one written up in the Chronicle, but it is something I’ve thought long and hard about. It isn’t just about writing a good syllabus, but about spending time in class teaching one’s expectations and the reasons behind them. (In my case we actually created a whole new course to accomplish this goal.)

I hope my document is useful for others working on articulating their own teaching philosophy. I also think it highlights some of the unique challenges I face teaching here in Taiwan and might be interesting even for those not planning on writing such a statement anytime soon.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Throughout my teaching career, whether as an adjunct professor at Temple University, a visiting professor at Haverford College, or as an assistant professor at Dong Hwa University’s College of Indigenous Studies, I have sought to develop my teaching skills in such a way so as to keep students with divergent backgrounds and skill levels engaged and challenged by the same class. One way I’ve found to do that is to articulate a range of goals I wish students to acquire, and to articulate those goals clearly to students. Not only does this give the less well trained students something to work towards, but because goals are not necessarily acquired sequentially, even the more advanced students are able to discover gaps in their training which they should focus upon. This approach has two advantages. First of all, being explicit about one’s goals helps compensate for the way educational institutions tend to unfairly advantage students from privileged backgrounds. As Bourdieu and Passeron famously noted, educational institutions often indirectly reward practices which the privileged members of society have already inculcated in the home: language, self-presentation, literacy practices, etc. By clearly defining expectations, and by breaking these skills down into their component parts, I believe I am able to create a more equitable classroom environment. Because a single class is insufficient to compensate for the marked differences , I also worked with my colleagues at Dong Hwa to develop a class in “Basic Study Skills” which is now required for all first year students in my department.

The second advantage to defining a broad range of goals for student performance is that it allows for students to engage with the material in different ways. While I strongly believe in the central importance of reading and writing in developing critical thinking, I have found that many students who have difficulty engaging with the written word can perform very well in other kinds of exercises: oral presentations, oral exams, group discussions, and even producing short plays or films for class. Inspired by Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences,” I try to ensure that students who might otherwise feel shut-out have a chance to engage with the class material in ways best suited to their own style of learning. Many of our students at the College of Indigenous Studies come from rural areas where they lacked access to the cram schools so common in Taiwanese urban environments. Many have spent a lot of time engaged in church activities, where there is often a more performative approach to learning. By valuing orality and performativity within the classroom , these students are at less of a disadvantage. Having a wide-range of goals can be just as important for Ph.D. students as it is for undergrads, albeit for different reasons. Graduate students tend to have strong reading and writing skills, but can often lack the performative skills which make for an effective teacher or communicator. Working on these skills is an essential part of their professional training.

As a foreigner in Taiwan, I’ve faced some unique challenges. The poor English ability of many of our students has meant that I’ve had to become an effective lecturer in Chinese. I’ve long prided myself on my ability to explain complex concept in simple, direct, language, but I’ve had to complement that by working hard at creating visual presentations which help illustrate my ideas so as to avoid any chance of confusion. I’ve also had to become a keen student of popular culture so as to find examples students can relate to. But lecturing has been only part of the challenge. Classroom practices which had been effective in American classrooms did not work as expected with Taiwanese students. Students here are often far more reluctant to express strong views or ask questions in class. I’ve dealt with this in several ways: I assign groups to come up with questions collectively, so no one student is put on the spot, I ask students to talk about the topic in terms of their own experience, so that they don’t feel there is a chance that they will make a mistake in public, and I’ve created online discussion groups for all my classes so that students can say things in writing that they might not feel comfortable saying in the classroom.

Social science requires learning how to see one’s own society as an outsider might see it, and to attempt to think about other societies as a local might think about them. For students who have little experience traveling outside their own country this can be a difficult challenge, but the best ethnographies and documentary films are designed to accomplish just such a task. Unfortunately, much of this work is produced with an American or European audience in mind. I have worked hard over the past five years, constantly revising my syllabi so as to select the materials which accomplish this goal while remaining accessible to my students. I’ve discovered that a well written English text can sometimes be more useful than a poor Chinese translation. And I’ve learned where students need some historical or ethnographic context in order to be able to meaningful engage with the material. Following my emphasis on clearly articulated goals, I also work hard to break down the process of reading an academic text into a series of smaller steps by asking students to identify the main themes of a text, the nature of the data and the methodology used. At the same time, especially when using English texts, I try to move students away from doing word-by-word translations by teaching them how to approach the text as an organic whole. I firmly believe that there is a direct correlation between the skills developed by doing close critical readings of texts, and the ability to think critically about society.

Anyway, I’m hard at work on this again, so here’s a roundup of the previous posts on the topic: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, as well as a more general post on my decision to teach in Taiwan.

Looking back at my previous posts, I realize there is much I never wrote about. So in a series of future posts I hope to write more about (1) my thoughts about language learning in general, (2) specific thoughts on strategies for learning an endangered language, (3) iOS tools for language study and (4) some of the themes of my research relating to the role that language preservation efforts play in the construction of indigenous identity in Taiwan. I hope that this time I get a little further than I did in 2009. In the meantime, leave a comment if you have any thoughts of your own, or specific questions you’d like me to address in future posts.

Since the rise of the movement for indigenous rights a half-century ago, many indigenous activists and scholars have worked within a paradigm defined in large part by nationalism and primordialism. Indigenous claims to justice are rooted to primordial autocthony for several reasons: an interest in revitalizing indigenous lifeways; the political efficacy of primordiality in public debate; and legal frameworks which require proof of primordiality.

It’s a wide and broad field, but its fair to say that there is a lot of disenchantment setting in: it makes cultural innovation (which is healthy and necessary) look like deculturation, it overlooks the role of legal regimes in eliciting the ‘ancient’ land tenure and kinship systems they use to make native title claims, and some indigenous scholars find the western national form a limiting and constrictive way of organizing their communities.

Nowhere is this more a problem than the Pacific, where long-standing tropes of isolated islands, missionized natives, and dying cultures have made finding positive self-understanding elusive.

Voyaging and Recovery

I think it’s in this light that Diaz takes us the task of thinking through voyaging. Pacific navigation has had a renaissance — people have sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti, and practically everywhere else (google it if you’re not familiar with this stuff, since it’s totally incredible). Instead of rolling this activity into a politics of patrimony and primordiality, Diaz seems to be saying, what if we used it as the raw material for a project of modernist, indigenous self-forging?

The key here is Diaz’s absolutely lovely inversion of traditional tropes about Pacific culture: for him, the heart and soul of Pacific culture is not the island, it’s the canoe: the expansive impulse of travel and innovation. It’s a wonderfully playful reversal.

By putting the canoe rather than the island front and center, Diaz is doing more than invoking, dude-like, the truism that culture is “about the journey, not the destination”. Once you catch the wave of this metaphorical reversal you can ride it for quite some time.

I think this is what he is trying to do in his discussion of etak. What sort of analytic horizons open up if we feel free to play with the concepts we’ve inherited? Maybe islands ‘move’ in the sense that their populations live in diaspora – so what happens if we make that circulation central to our understanding of island cultures rather than peripheral to authentic ‘life in the village’? And if this riffing on the concept insists that we find examples of islands literally moving then suddenly climate change (descending beneath the waves), mining (disassembling islands) and volcanoes and lava (volcanic growth). It’s not like people haven’t thought about these things before, but it puts the spotlight on them in a new way, enables novel configurations, and justifies scholarly focus in new moral terms.

Wisdom and Postmodernism

One of the things I like most about Diaz’s project is the way that it connects with something that anthropologists have often felt but rarely expressed — that fieldwork changes one in a way, leading not just to data, but to a fuller self and even a sort of wisdom about the contours that life can take. In the context of indigenous anthropology, I see scholars like Diaz actively using this insight and yoking it to an explicit project of — as they put it — (re)membering.

I do have one gripe with this approach, however, which is the debt that it owe to postmodernism. Much of the work done by scholars like Diaz emerges out of Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program and James Clifford. This upsets me a great deal because I wish that my brand of anthropology had been responsible for authors of this calibre. In the 80s authors like Marshall Sahlins and Greg Dening did a great job encouraging major Pacific scholars like Epeli Hau’ofa (Dening kept on encouraging right until the end, in fact). But somehow their message of the vitality of indigenous culture, the importance of innovation, the empowering nature of mixing orthodox Western and Pacific modes of knowing somehow burned itself, perhaps in the culture wars of the 90s? At any rate, we are left in a situation where there isn’t a base of collegiality and friendship to reconnect mainstream anthropology and Native cultural studies.

Even worse, Clifford’s work on indigenous articulation, so influential to Diaz, reads to me as a derivative, less well-written version of Sahlins’s article “Good Bye To Tristes Tropes”, which was published eight years earlier. How is it that Clifford gets credit for coming up with the ideas that have influenced Diaz? I want to blame postmodernism for denouncing a straw man version of anthropology while quietly poaching our insights. But on reflection I think we have not done enough to welcome the scholarly projects of Native scholars into our intellectual conversations.

This is one reason why I wanted to read the Diaz right after the introduction to HAU — I see strong overlap between the two projects. Both seek to mine concepts for new meaning, using them to stretch existing understandings. Both seek these concepts in what the layperson would consider ‘exotic’ cultures. Both are focused on ethnography, but also veer off wildly in inventive new directions. Both Diaz and Wagner see their scholarship to be about remaking the subjectivity of the scholar — in Wagner’s case this is almost a sort of gnostic mysticism.

But Diaz’s project is also so clearly one which is totally uninterested in ‘exoticism’ — it is about cultural heritage and finding the way in which one’s own personality has been shaped by tradition, and the using that understanding to shape the future of tradition. It would be like the editorial board of HAU immersing themselves deeply in Catholic theology in order to make a New Anthropological Humanism featuring reworked Patristic philosophy and huge, postmodern mitres ostentatiously worn in the lobbies of academic conferences as signs of connection with one’s cultural past. In this respect HAU, which claims not to be but I suspect paradigmatically rooted in the exotic, and Diaz, who is self-consciously decolonizing himself of unsavory foreign powers, differ.

My dream AAA panel is a huge, star-studded affair of in which we get Native Cultural Studies and Ethnographic Theory together to forge anthropology’s future. But sadly, I think the personal differences between the people involved would prevent the intellectual commonalities from emerging.

Further Reading

One thing is for sure: Pacific studies has done a killer job making their work available open access — mostly because the editors of The Contemporary Pacific have made sure their journal is the home of so much energy surrounding these issues, and that it is free to download. This includes Hau’ofa’s seminal essay Our Sea of Islands and Diaz and Kauanui’s programmatic introduction to a special number of that journal entitled Native Pacific Cultural Studies On The Edge. There is a lot more as well if you just google around.

Conclusion

I am a bit late getting this out, but I will try to follow the usual schedule of letting it run until Wednesday, when I’ll post a new reading. As always, try to be polite and collegial to the authors featured in the reading circle.

I want to say more but I’ve been putting off posting this long enough, so I’ll hit ‘publish’ and see what happens — I hope we have a good discussion, everyone!

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.

My ultimate goal for my WoW (as World of Warcraft is known) research is a book — now in its third draft. Along the way, however, I am ‘mining’ my research by producing several other publications. The two I want to discuss here are Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (full text is OA — the publisher forget to get me to sign a CTA so I can release the work as I like. They are OK with this). The second is a draft paper I recently gave at a theater studies conference entitled Feeling Powerful and Being Powerful: Virtuosity and Expressive Individualism in World of Warcraft.

If you read these papers, you can see that there are a lot of similarities between them. Both chronicle my work with my guild. Because WoW is way more exotic to Americans then Papua New Guinea (“Black people in a forest? Got it. People killing monsters online? What now?”) I spend a lot of time describing what goes on online. But there are important differences in them as well.

Each paper was written for a different occasion. “Being in WoW” was written for a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly dedicated to ‘knowledge production’. As a result, I felt like I had to shoehorn my piece into that category. “Feeling Powerful” was written for a panel on “Economies of Showing” and so it had to be fit into that category.  Ironically, the panel organizers just wanted to do something on ‘showing’ but the conference theme was ‘economics’ so they changed to title to make sure they’d be included.

I think this is a good example of a general phenomena in the life of the mind: you are always thinking, thinking thoughts that are very abstract and in flux. Then particular occasions arise and they act like molds that you pour your molten thoughts into.

The papers address their occasion, but they don’t pander to it. They both reach through their occasions to address wider points in the literature I’m addressing.

“Being in WoW” made two and half points: first, it argued against the idea that virtual worlds were compelling because they looked ‘real’. Rather, I argued that they were compelling because they were places where people could socialize. Second, I took issue with the idea that we ought study virtual worlds ‘on their own terms’ and do ‘the culture’ of ‘a world’. Rather, I argued that virtual ethnography should study communities of people and how those communities used multiple spaces, some real and some virtual, to create themselves. My half point was that Coming of Age in Second Life legitimated ‘the culture’ of ‘a world’ ethnography by comparing it to ethnography of the Pacific, and as a Pacifcist I pointed out that this was a lousy description of how Pacific Islanders and Pacificists actually thought of themselves and their cultures.

“Feeling Powerful” made a series of related, but different points: that success in WoW affirm’s player’s ego ideals, that a virtual space affects actual personalities, and that this is what we should expect given that American WoW players have a western culture of ‘expressive individualism’. One reason WoW is so popular is because it is a place where this dynamic is powerfully performed. Once we realize this, we can see it is more compelling a virtual world than Second Life: Second Life was built around Western presumptions that all human beings want to be creative artists, which I argue is not true — romantic creation is just one species of expressivity. For this reason we should expect to see SL fascinate Americans because it speaks to their culturally-laden perceptions about what people want out of life, but more Americans to actually play WoW, which actually gives it to them. And this is in fact exactly what we see.

Basically, both of these papers make the same broad claims, but they differ in the specific points they make, the audiences they address, and the concrete data they use. In the final book version a lot of this material will be incorporated. The ethnographic exposition will be all the better for having been written and revised mutliple times, and I’ll be better able to make my points better because I’ve already made them in ‘rough draft’ form in the published articles. Best of all, the length of the book will allow me to connect them together and to add a broader overview since details on these arguments can just be cited in the book, rather than made there.

There are some people who feel you should ‘never present the same paper twice’ and I think that this is true. There is also reason to be cynical of the culture of ‘minimally significant differences’ used by people who make minor tweaks to present the same basic paper at different conferences over and over again. However, taking the same project and turning it over and over again to fit the situation and as part of creating a larger and more integral work is good academic practice — as well as good for the CV — if you can take different bits of data from your fieldwork and slot it in to whatever intellectual preoccupation you have that fits the occasion.

The human consequences of the bitification of atoms go far beyond my bourgeois consumption. This shift, or what is could simply be called digitalization, when paired with their very material transportation systems or networked communication technologies, combines to form a powerful force that impacts local and global democracies and economies.

What are the local and political economics of granularity in the space shared between the fiduciary and the communicative? To understand the emergent political economy of the practices and discourses unifying around mobile media and digital money we need a shared language around the issue of granularity.

Granularity

Granularity is the reduction of symbols to binary-type simplicity such as lines of computer code or small economic integers. Granularity means to break down money or media into symbolic and quantitative units for digital delivery and reconstitution. Granularity and networks are what gives bit-based media and money its mobile advantage over its cousins–film stock that needs to be “bicycled” to theaters and precious metals that need to be stored in fortified treasuries. Granularity is the physical principle that allows the discourses of money and media to meet. With granularity come two conflicting social worlds –the financialization as well as the democratization of media and money.

More philosophically, the media/money verisimilitude reveals the already tenuous analytical separation of thought and action, discourse and practice, and rationalities and tactics.

Financialization and Democratization of Money/Media

Digital money and mobile media, in a state of fine granularity, are symbolically opened for innovative as well as manipulative financialization and potentially wide democratization. Granularity, by refining things into ever-smaller units, increases the opportunities for access to previously closed systems. On the one hand, this can be empowering as peer-to-peer media and financial transactions can increase and, for a time, transpire under the radar of regulators and speculators. On the other hand, media/money granularity can also result in “flexible accumulation,” the post-nation manufacturing of information/financial/mathematical tools such as seen in the derivatives market that is increasingly difficult to regulate, litigate, or access if you are a citizen.

Digital Money as Democratizing

The granularity of digital money can create opportunities for access by materially poor people to small investment-able capital. This form of capital democratization is dependent upon new technologies and networks. Digital money, largely a numerical system within ornate cultural contexts, is easily made granular and digitally shared via phone or internet from person to person, micro-lender to person, and employer to person. Such transactions on unregulated communication networks has democratized new forms of money sharing, saving, and transfer.

While it isn’t popular in the United States, mobile granular financing has exploded in Kenya. For instance, Vodaphone affiliate Safaricom started m-Pesa, a mobile money transfer in Kenya in 2003. M-Pesa has 12 million users out of 17 million mobile phone users representing 70% of the mobile market in Kenya and 21% of the Kenyan GDP flows through the system, wrote mPay Connect founder Menekse Gencer in 2011. It works and it’s profitable for Vodaphone shareholders. And yet its commercialization balances any breathless optimism about m-Pesa’s democratizing impact.

This democratization of capital provides an opportunity to re-acquaint ourselves with the overbearing symbology that is money. It also invites us to reconsider basic issues of financial autonomy and agency. How will mobile money challenge, magnify, or articulate with local customs? As digital currencies evolve will they be pegged to national or international banks? How will they be regulated and by whom? How are they insured and what backs their legitimacy? As these pragmatic questions are answered and applied digital money will likely move further from democratization and nearer to financialization.

Financialization of Digital Money

Few have bank accounts but the 1.7 billion materially poor people will have a cell phone in 2012. This phone can be used to make calls, many can take photos and videos, upload them to the internet, and, increasingly, receive and give money. Even before this form of digital money there were banks micro-lending. Following CK Prahalad’s claim that the collective material wealth at the bottom of pyramid can make development profitable, a number of microfinance organizations went into non-profit “business.” Kiva, who started in 2005, the same year as YouTube, is the most recognizable microlender for Westerners. Kiva founders were inspired by a talk by Muhammad Yunus at Stanford. Yunus, of course, started Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the first microfinance organization. Kiva, Grameen, Yunus and the following, Banco Compartamos, are all vigorously successful and have all claimed to alleviate poverty. Such philanthrocapitalism is rich with contradictions. The World Bank, for instance, is the largest micro-lender in the world. The problematic financialization of granular money is evident in Banco Compartamos that started as a non-profit micro-lending bank to materially poor Oaxacans, took a shot at becoming private in an IPO, raised a billion dollars, and made its shareholders wealthy. Yunus was outraged by the high interest rates and simple bald privatization of the now profitable banco.

While the granularity of digital money can create capital access and capital democratization, it can also create access for corporate financialization. By financialization I refer basically to commercial or market tactics and discourses; of tacking profit generating financial instruments onto each grain of digital money and a charge onto each node it its circuitous pathway through the technological and social network. This is an important facet of “flexible accumulation” which refers both to the global mobility of capital as well as the instrumentalization of social life.

Mobile Media Democratization

The democratization of digital money is spiritually linked to the tactical and discursive interventions of local entrepreneurs who “hacked” into public systems –satellite television, electricity, water– that had been privatized. My research into the history of cable and satellite “guerrilla television” producers reveals how techniques and rationalities are mobilized by marginalized producers to gain access to systems of media power closed by economic or political power. The process goes something like this. A disruptive network communication technology evolves out of tinkerer communities (radio, cable television) or large-scale federal investment (satellite, internet). The indigenous or local innovators are either responsible for the technology, as in the case of radio and cable television, or adapt to exploit it like early internet hackers, public access television producers, and phone phreaks. Examples include TVTV, a psychedelic television producer community who created an opening on cable television in the 1970s and Deep Dish TV, a progressive producer collective who exploited inexpensive satellite rents to distribute their anti-war message. They used their policy discourse and interventionary practices to exploit an opening in an otherwise closed system. These opening can provide the context for the democratization of (capital) production. These examples of media democratization are from the pre-digital phase, how does granularity impact media democracy as well as the financialization of media?

Mobile Media Financialization

Granularity impacts two forms of media financialization: personalization and fragmentation. The obsession the Google founders Page and Brin have with artificial intelligence is dutifully documented by Nick Carr in The Big Switch. They hope to know enough about each of us through recording our search records to be able to recommend consumer solutions to life. This they call personalization, the individualization of search. This ‘give-them-what-they-appear-to-like’ mentality includes searches we do on politics as Eli Pariser explains, keeping us in homogenous “filter bubbles.” Just yesterday it was reported that Google’s personalization ambition has been branded as “Search,  Plus Your World” to honor how they merge their search data with the person data we freely give them on their fledgling social network Google+. The point is that every granular piece of personal data has a price. It is on these grains of identity that Google and Facebook hang their future business plans.

Google is financializing another stream of granular data, the video clip. Beginning back in 2007, I began documenting the transformation of amateur to professional YouTubers. By the end of 2011, this transformation is now complete and YouTube is fully prepared for the convergence of broadband home entertainment by creating the Partner program, buying Next New Networks, and recently enshrining 100 top video producers. Many of the professionalized channels are vloggers whose work is not granular in the traditional sense of the term (micro-payments or lines of code) but it is granular in reference to the lengthy documentaries, over-cooked television talk shows, and studio call in shows of the past. They are short and often include ever more granular clips. Ray William Johnson, the most subscribed and viewed YouTube celebrity built his business around making fun of little clips. Kind of like America’s Funniest Home Videos for tweens. Taken as a whole, from the semi-famous vloggers making almost a million dollars a year from revenue sharing with Google to the one-hit wonder who uploads an addictively watchable cat video and who make a few thousand dollars for Google and herself, granularity is part of the financialization as well as democratization of visual media.

Possible Social Consequences

What are the possible global and local impacts of the theory that granularity is turning money and media into objects easily interchangeable, financialized, and democratized? In essence I am concerned with the manufacturing and exploitation of desire, the commercialization of bio-politics, and the death of democracy. I worry about the emergence of a corporation capable of exploiting the verisimilitude of money/media and developing financial/media instruments that can control and monetized the smallest units of both symbolic systems. I worry about the capacities of these money/media corporations to manufacture ubiquitous entertainment environments that can extract financial rewards based on phenomenologically inconsequential but altogether quantifiable granular units of sensual attention. I worry about the media, which includes journalism, being colonized by financial interests to such a degree that there is no media (and no journalism) without a financial product immediately inscribed in its metadata. That would negate any democratization granularity would produce.

And yet, I have faith in the rationalities and techniques of the indigenous innovators, phone phreakers, “guerrilla television” producers, and hacktivists to intervene in this worrisome future.

This post is largely inspired by Anke Schwittay’s excellent 2011 article, “The financial inclusion assemblages: Subjects, technics, rationalities” in Critique of Anthropology 31[4]:381-401.

]]> http://savageminds.org/2012/01/11/digital-money-mobile-media-and-the-consequences-of-granularity/feed/ 1 http://savageminds.org/2012/01/04/seediq-bale-as-history/ http://savageminds.org/2012/01/04/seediq-bale-as-history/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:00:05 +0000 darryl http://savageminds.org/?p=6788 A favorite topic on the blogosphere is whether or not Seediq Bale is an historically accurate take on the Wushe Incident. Some details, at least, are inaccurate, and people have some questions for the director Wei Te-sheng. For instance: Why is Mona Rudao at events in the early 1900s he didn’t attend (人止關 in 1902 and 姊妹原 in 1903)? Why does Mona Rudao shoot at Seediq women when there’s no historical evidence for it and when it goes against gaya - tribal tradition or teaching? Where does the child warrior Pawan Nawi come from? And so forth.

In assessing Seediq Bale’s historical accuracy it’s helpful to distinguish between subjective and objective: between 1) immediate, indigenous perspectives on history as it unfolds as current event on the one hand, and 2) distantiated, contextualized interpretations of historians on the other hand.

At a promotional event I attended, the director Wei Te-sheng said he wanted the audience to forget everything that has happened since 1930. I take him to mean that he wants to transport us back in time and give us subjective perspectives, mostly indigenous perspectives, on the Wushe Incident. This subjective history includes a knowledge of tribal politics and more basically of the Seediq worldview, of Seediq belief.

First, what I’m calling “tribal politics,” with no disrespect or evaluation whatsoever intended in the use of the term “tribal.” It’s true that Mona Rudao and other indigenous characters in the film have a concept of the Japanese as an “alien race” or “foreign tribe.” Yet primarily Mona Rudao’s political world in the film remains one of territorial tribal alliances and antagonisms, involving in particular Toda and Tkdaya Seediq and to a lesser extent the Truku. Mona Rudao hates the Toda chief Temu Walis more than he hates the Japanese, and his hatred is more enduring.

Would the film’s take on tribal politics satisfy a historian? A historian would probably be impressed without being able to accept the film as history. It seems to me that, the film’s alliances and antagonisms don’t shift. They kind of freeze. This makes it easier for the audience to understand. There’s even a poster for the benefit of the audience that lays out the different agents and their relations.

A historian would have a sense of an evolving not a static political system. More problematically, the film reduces the number of historical agents and simplifies their relationships in order to produce good drama. Too many characters and groups would confuse the audience, and make it harder to determine who to identify with. A film needs a hero, or at least a single or a couple of main characters to pay attention to. That’s why Wei Te-sheng put Mona Rudao at incidents he never attended (人止關 and 姊妹原), to keep him in the spotlight. He has to be in the spotlight, because he’s the main character in the main plot.

Main and supporting characters and main plots and sub plots are how we structure our works of narrative art and to some extent how we think about our lives. Historians can use these same tropes to produce narrative history, but historical narratives are always more complicated in history books than in novels or films. The narrative models a historian would build of the Wushe incident would regard individual motivations in the evolving system of tribal relations. People today don’t understand the system; they don’t have too much patience to learn about it. It’s much easier for Wei Te-sheng to present “interpersonal” relations not in the context of the system, but rather in terms of “love” and “hate.” In the film Mona Rudao hates the Toda leader Temu Walis. The audience gets it: Mona Rudao really doesn’t like the guy. The feeling becomes mutual, and that’s why Temu Walis agrees to go after Tkdaya warriors during the reprisal like a bounty hunter or a gun for hire. The actual relationship between the two men could not have been so simple. They went to Japan together several decades before 1930 (meaning that Temu Walis was not quite as young as he is portrayed in the film – see the promotional poster below)!

Second, the Seediq worldview. In his review of the film in the Taipei Times, Pastor Michael Stainton, who has worked with the Seediq people for decades, claims that the account of Seediq belief in the film is compelling. As Mona Rudao reminds us over and over again in the film, and as he was taught by his father, a seediq bale – a real man – has headhunted. If he arrives at the rainbow bridge of the afterlife with blood on his hands he can cross to the happy hunting ground on the other side. A woman can be a seediq bale as well, by mastering weaving and presenting her callused hands for inspection on this side of the rainbow bridge. Both men and women have the right to receive facial tattoos when they become seediq bale. (I should note that Professor Stainton and Professor Guo Pei-yi have both reminded me that the practice of gaya was more than just headhunting and weaving). In the film this seediq bale belief is presented as the most significant cause of the incident. Mona Rudao wants to give the young men of the tribe a chance to become Seediq bale by driving out the foreign race that has occupied and exploited the ancestral hunting ground. It is the desire to become a real man more than hatred of the Japanese that motivates the decision of each individual warriors. After all, in the happy hunting ground of the afterlife, the headhunters and their victims will be reunited as friends.

How compelling would this explanation be for a historian or an anthropologist? I’m not sure. It’s plausible. But where’s the evidence? Check out this picture of Mona Rudao:

Can you tell if he has scars? You sure can’t tell whether he believes in a rainbow bridge to the afterlife. I am ignorant, but if anyone promised to vouchsafe me certain knowledge on Mona’s motivations, I would have epistemological reservations. The only records we could have of Mona Rudao’s beliefs are from Japanese hands. We could interview very old Seediq people and ask them what they grew up believing or what Mona Rudao believed if they knew him, but their statements would be contaminated by the eight intervening decades. Japanese anthropological records would have to be used carefully. So a historian could consider the role of traditional belief in the incident, but would not be able to use belief to advance a certain explanation of the incident.

A historian’s lack of certainty or even ignorance about many things is the result of historical distance. No historian would write history about a current event. If he did he’d be a reporter. History can be written only with historical distance. This distance in theory allows for objectivity, but it also creates ignorance. When all you have is documents there will be many things you don’t know. Oral history can be problematic, our faith in the horse’s mouth notwithstanding. Historical distance must inspire a sense of humility. It might seem disappointing or embarrassing to admit that we just don’t know, but it’s the uncertainty, the room for discussion and provisional interpretation that makes history interesting.

Seediq Bale displays no such humility and narratively it’s kind of boring. The way Seediq Bale tells the story, everything is presented as truth, as how it happened not how it might have happened. In the first scene, Mona Rudao takes down a mountain boar. There is one major flashback in the film, when Mona Rudao remembers his father telling him about the Seediq worldview. Otherwise it’s just one damn thing after another. Sometimes there are twin narrative strands proceeding together in time; otherwise not much besides endurance is demanded of the audience. There is no objective perspective from a standpoint of historical distance.

By contrast, other literary adaptations of Wushe have begun in the present and reimagined the past. Dana Sakura, the miniseries about Wushe that played on public television in 2003, presented the frame story of a young Taiwanese man, a graduate student in history, who goes to Wushe and to the village of Qingliu, where the survivors of Wushe were moved in 1931, to try to understand the role of a relative in the incident. In A History of Pain Michael Berry sees this as a Taiwanese appropriation of the incident and that may be so. But it also introduces the historical distance of a frame story. That’s what frame stories do, create distance. The miniseries presents a reimagining of Wushe based on interviews the graduate student conducts. We get a sense of what it might have been like, of what might have happened. The same is true in the recent indigenous film Finding Sayun, which reimagines the story of Sayun’s Bell while reminding the audience: this might be how it happened. In another notable presentation of Wushe, Wuhe’s novel Remains of Life, which Professor Michael Berry is translating, all we have is the frame story; Wuhe refuses to reenact history in his imagination; his concern is the contemporary village of Qingliu.

Contemporary perspectives on Wushe are not necessarily objective. There’s a fuzzy boundary between subjective and objective. We try to be objective about the subjective. And being objective is really hard. Chinese and Taiwanese historians have interpreted Wushe according to their own worldviews, and in some sense it’s impossible not to, as we always write from a limited perspective; that’s what Gadamer was on about with the fusion of horizons (though alas it’s so often the confusion of horizons). I don’t think contemporary indigenous ideas about Wushe are necessarily more objective. Indigenous peoples have historical distance but might not like the humility that has to go along with it. At the same time, indigenous people’s views deserve special respect. It’s more their history than anyone else’s. I’ll try to critically discuss three indigenous perspectives on Seediq Bale in the context of my discussion of subjective and objective history in Seediq Bale.

Indigenous Perspectives on Seediq Bale

First, Seediq people argue that Mona Rudao would never have shot at his womenfolk because it goes against Gaya. I’m a bit skeptical. What Gaya was in 1930 was not written in stone. From my limited experience reading Taiwan aboriginal fiction, people are not always in agreement about what their tradition is. In Rimui Aki 里慕伊．阿紀’s stories, for instance, women don’t always agree with male interpretations of Gaya. Also, even if Mona’s act was against Gaya, the relationship between social rules and contact is complicated. People in Taiwan joke about how a red traffic light is for reference purposes only when they don’t want to wait for the light to change. People take the rules into consideration, but as Bourdieu argued behavior is constrained not determined by rules. What’s more objectionable about the scene in question is, again, that we don’t know whether it happened, and Wei Te-sheng presents it as if it actually did happen.

Second, in the aftermath of Wushe, the Japanese paid Toda warriors to slaughter the Tkdaya rebels. This is historical fact. I’ve already noted that the fact has to be understood in the context of intertribal relations not in terms of interpersonal animosity. Also, there are still Toda and Tkdaya people alive today and some of them are not pleased that the historical conflict between them has been dragged out and displayed in the light of day. I know where they’re coming from. But I don’t think that the Toda leader Temu Walis is portrayed negatively in the film. He’s played by the heartthrob actor Ma Zhixiang (Umin Boya). Umin Boya is himself a Toda Seediq. He’s one of the most interesting characters in the film; he’s very tormented by the fact that his traditional belief has been commodified by the Japanese. He’s not presented as an evil character.

Third, a related matter is the presentation of the “hero” of the film, Mona Rudao. In Seediq Bale he’s, well, heroic. He conceives an irrational hatred of Temu Walis, but heroes don’t have to be nice according to some small minded concept of how people should behave. In the film Mona Rudao is larger than life. But not all contemporary Seediq see him that way. The Toda especially have their own views of chief Mona, and not all of them are positive. Not all of them are all that heroic, either. Hero-worship does not make for a good historian, because heroes belong in myths and legends not in history. Individual achievements may seem heroic, but the glory fades when you understand them in context. Mona Rudao was taken on a tour of Japan. He remained chief for so long because he had Japanese support, because he was a pawn in a complicated field of power. The Toda historian Kumu Tapas has, by compiling oral history, been gathering materials by which a more balanced picture of Mona Rudao might emerge.

For eighty years, Wushe has been represented from Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese perspectives. Now that indigenous people have started expressing their own perspectives, non-indigenous writers, filmmakers, or novelists have to be more careful. They can’t just make things up. And hopefully someday soon, we will have an indigenous fictional narrative version of the Wushe Incident.

Seediq Bale is often described as a shi3shi1 史詩 – an “historical poem” – the typical Chinese translation of “epic.” The original epics were oral historical poetry, but orality and poetry are no longer essential features of epic. Maybe history isn’t essential either; epic is sometimes used with the simple meaning of “grand.” But I’ll be assuming a more complicated and interesting definition “a grand, repetitive mytho-historical narrative of conflict that begins in the middle (in medias res) captures the imagination of posterity because it bears on identity, both individual and collective.” It seems to me that Seediq Bale articulates an epic identity at odds with our modern notion of personal identity.

The most obvious meaning of epic is simply very long, and Seediq Bale is indeed very long. At four and a half hours, it is the longest Taiwan feature film by about half an hour. (Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer’s Day, to my knowledge the second longest, was a very different kind of film!). At a budget of 25 million USD it is the largest Taiwan production ever. The director Wei Te-sheng has plans for a three part epic treatment of Taiwan’s Dutch era (1624-1661), from Dutch, Chinese and Siraya plains aboriginal points of view. This would be another eight hours of epic filmmaking. After the theatres take their share of the gross, Seediq Bale is likely to remain in the red by a few million USD, so it’s not clear whether Wei Te-sheng will get the chance to make another epic film.

Seediq Bale also has many large battle scenes, involving large numbers of actors. The large battle scene is one of the defining features of the film epic. The way the battle scenes are filmed reflects an epic contrast of perspectives. Now we see the scene as a whole, from an objective perspective, now we switch to a close up in the heat of the action, from the perspectives of an individual hero.

Epics involve “epic machinery,” the world of gods above the world of men. In oral epic, the spirit world can be powerfully evoked, but film deals in images, and images of the numinous can be fantastical or just plain silly. It is usually better to suggest, not directly represent, the otherworld in a film. Seediq Bale tends to represent the spirits directly. Sometimes this works, as in the duet between Mona Rudao and the spirit of his father at the waterfall. Sometimes it does not work, as when the host of dead warriors appear walking on a rainbow cloud near the end of the film, first in profile, then head on. The CGI in the film, especially the animals, is generally pretty good, but the awfulness of the cloudborn warriors scene is universally acknowledged. The world of the gods in Seediq Bale is inhabited by the ancestors, which provides a justification for all seemingly objective shots, which is to say shots that do not represent the subjective POV of some character or other.

Like an oral epic, in which the same epithets are applied ad infinitum to fill out the metrical form, Seediq Bale is extremely repetitive. The violence of the film is repetitive, as in Homer’s Iliad. One could also complain about the repetitiveness of the (excellent) score and of the imagery. Mona Rudao’s CGI bird familiar appears half a dozen times, for instance. I don’t know how many times Mona Rudao mentions the rainbow bridge across which true men, men who have headhunted, can cross to reach the rich hunting ground of the afterlife – a dozen times at least. Repetitiveness is not necessarily a flaw in a work of art; it is arguably a feature of the epic form, especially since epic tends to be oral. Films are more oral than novels, and we tend to tolerate oral repetition more than we do in writing.

Starting in medias res is one of the defining features of the narrative structure of an epic. The Iliad starts not with the beginning of the war or the causes of the war but with the theme of Achilles’s wrath in the final year of the story. Seediq Bale starts in medias res with a scene in which Mona Rudao hunts a wild boar. But this scene is near the beginning; the only flashback is when Mona Rudao remembers his father teaching him about the traditional beliefs. Otherwise, the narrative structure of Seediq Bale is temporally straightforward. The action sometimes divides into several strands, but these strands proceed together in time and are linked by crosscutting.

Epics are stories of conflict that seem significant to posterity because of the role they play in identity construction. Conflict is after all a wonderful catalyst for identity, because it forces one to take sides. Some war stories are no longer significant for identity construction, because they seem somehow too far away, yet they still capture the imagination. The Spartan resistance to the Persian advance at Thermopylae, the story of 300 defending a pass against an army of thousands, is a good example. The most recent retelling of this story is the film 300. This film seems to have a lot in common with Seediq Bale. Like 300, Seediq Bale is a film that aestheticizes violence (by juxtaposing the breathtakingly beautiful sakura bloom with images of gore, for instance) and which was adapted from a comic book (see the cover of the comic book which inspired Seediq Bale below). I think Seediq Bale even alludes to the Spartan resistance. The Japanese general who leads the reprisal is stunned that three hundred indigenous warriors could resist thousands of highly trained troops of a modern army with planes, Howitzers, and poison gas.

But like an oral epic, and unlike a purely commercial film like 300, Seediq Bale seems to have a contemporary meaning. That contemporary meaning has to do with identity construction, both individual and collective.

First, what does the film say about individual identity? Mona Rudao’s concept of identity has a wonderful simplicity: he has an unambiguous external marker of his individuality. Like Odysseus, Mona Rudao bears a scar, a scar on his cheek as a result of a hunting accident. This serves as visual proof of his identity for everyone he meets. It allows the audience to identify Mona Rudao as a young man and a middle aged man – he’s played by two actors. His scar reminds me of Erich Auerbach’s great essay “Odysseus’s Scar.” Auerbach argued that identity in Homeric epic is externalized, in contrast to the internalized identity of Biblical narrative. Odysseus returned home after years of wandering and was recognized by his wet nurse because of the unambiguous mark on his thigh. Classicists and biblical scholars debate Auerbach’s interpretation; but it seems to me that “an unambiguous externalized identity” applies to Mona Rudao.

For Mona Rudao does not just have a single scar. He also has the scars of the tattoos on his chin and forehead. These scars attest to his status as a “real man,” a seediq bale, a person qualified to cross the rainbow bridge into the happy hunting grounds of the afterlife. These scars mark his status as an adult male, a warrior. How easy it is to tell a real man from a child, in Mona Rudao’s world!

In this respect Mona Rudao is an impressive but ultimately rather uninteresting character. His concept of identity is more status than identity. It’s either/or, and it’s externally marked. In Seediq Bale Mona Rudao relates to the child warrior Bawan Nawi that he visited Japan in the 1900s. He seems to have returned to Taiwan with only a technological concept of modernity. He knew the Japanese had powerful weapons, but didn’t get any idea of psychological modernity. His sense of himself remained ancient. According to Wei Te-sheng, he lauched the attack on Wushe as a headhunting ritual for a generation of young Seediq men who had not had the chance to become bale.

Mona Rudao’s concept of identity as externalized status is juxtaposed in the film with a more modern concept of personal identity. The most interesting example of a modern identity in the film is the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers, especially the elder brother Dakis Nobin or Hanaoka Ichiro. The brothers suffer from a more modern complicated idea of self. Born Seediq, they were educated to be Japanese. They were caught between Japanese modernity and Seediq tradition. In the film they are bullied by their Japanese colleagues and rejected by their own people. In this scene at the waterfall, Mona Rudao asks the elder brother to choose: are you going to the Shinto shrine when you die, or will you walk across the rainbow bridge?

Conflict catalyzes identity because it forces a person to choose, as if who you are is which side you’re on. The brothers want to claim both Seediq and Japanese identities. Nobody lets them. For them, the conflict becomes psychological, internal. In the end brothers can’t choose which side they are on. The brothers let Mona Rudao launch the attack against the Japanese at Wushe but don’t participate in it. They commit suicide together, one by seppuku, the other by hanging, the one according to Japanese, the other according to Seediq tradition.

Together they embody a modern psychological conflict. Alongside Mona Rudao’s unambiguous, lofty, epic concept of identity is a more confused, conflicted, contextualized idea of identity. The psychological conflicts of the brothers, which are conflicts of identity, enrich Seediq Bale. Yet they are not typical of epic. Epic conflicts are between sides or within a side, not within the individual. In the Iliad the Greek side spends most of the time fighting amongst themselves before they finally get their act together and defeat the Trojans by stealth. This might be called epic identity construction.

The notion of epic identity construction brings me back to the issue of Taiwan identity. The reader will recall that The Economist linked the film to Taiwan identity. It’s indisputable that the film is about identity. It even advertises itself as a comment on identity. The preview released at the end of August tells us right off the bat that we’ll be transported back to “an era of confused identities” (認同混淆的年代). People who know the story will think of the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers. They each had a confused identity. It’s clear that the film is commenting on individual identity. Is it also commenting on group identity, in particular Taiwan identity?

I think so, but in this respect Wei Te-sheng deserves credit for some degree of subtlety. Previous filmic or fictional treatments of Wushe have often overtly linked Wushe to Chinese and Taiwanese national identity. In his A History of Pain, the scholar Michael Berry has shown how Chinese nationalists saw Mona Rudao as participating in the national Chinese resistance against Japan (抗日), while Taiwanese nationalists viewed Mona Rudao as symbolically willing to defend Taiwan’s territory at the cost of his own life. Both kinds of nationalists identified with Mona Rudao and often inserted a Chinese or Taiwanese character who serves as Mona Rudao’s big brother or trusted adviser. In other words, in these works, there is Chinese or Taiwanese identification or close association with Mona Rudao and the Seediq rebels. This may remind students of American popular culture of the Mohawks at the Boston Tea Party and of James Fenimore Cooper’s oft-retold tale Last of the Mohicans. Americans also identified or closely associated with indigenous peoples, at an early stage of settler nation building.

There were Americans pretending to be ungovernable “revolting” Mohican Indians at the Boston Tea Party, and Leatherstocking, the main character in the works of Fenimore Cooper, America’s first national novelist, is bosom buddies with Chinggachgook. As the last of the Mohicans, Chinggachgook rather conveniently leaves the country to Leatherstocking’s people, the “Americans.” Seediq Bale, by contrast, is less overtly nationalistic. There are no Chinese or Taiwanese characters in Seediq Bale pretending to be Seediq or associating with the Seediq. In fact, there aren’t any significant Chinese or Taiwanese characters in the film at all.

That doesn’t mean that Seediq Bale doesn’t have anything to do with Taiwan identity. In the past two decades there has been an Wushe comic book and, inevitably, an album by the black metal band CthtoniC that went on to tour the States with Ozzy Ozborne. Both works come out of Taiwan nationalism, but in neither case is the link between Wushe and Taiwan identity made overtly within the work.

So what would a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation of Seediq Bale be like? The simplest nationalist interpretation of the film would be to identify Mona Rudao with a future Taiwanese leader and the Seediq rebels with this leader’s supporters. The Japanese would represent a potential invader. Let’s assume this invader is the PRC. To put it crudely or bluntly (and this is a crude and blunt interpretation) from a Taiwanese perspective, the film is, on this interpretation, saying that the Taiwanese people will defend their territory. They’d rather die than submit.

There are some problems with this interpretation. To begin with, if the Seediq in Seediq Bale represent the Taiwanese people, then the film seems to be saying that the Taiwanese public is hopelessly fragmented, because the Seediq in the film are hopelessly fragmented. Not everyone would rather die than submit. Mona Rudao was Seediq, but he didn’t lead a united Seediq resistance against the Japanese. Rather, he arranged a coalition of six Tkdaya Seediq tribal villages. Tkdaya is the name of a subgroup of the Seediq linguistic or cultural group. Mona Rudao was a leader of a Tkdaya village called Mahebo in alliance with other Tkdaya villages. Not all the Tkdaya villages participated in the Wushe Incident, only six of twelve. Other Seediq groups were antagonistic to the Tkdaya. The Toda Seediq, for instance, led in the film by Temu Walis, cooperated with the Japanese during the reprisal that followed the Wushe Incident. Not all of the Toda villages participated. The Japanese promised the participating Toda warriors so much money per Tkdaya Seediq head, and so the Toda went after the Tkdaya. In other words, Seediq Bale is a story about internal divisions more than an epic tale of anticolonial resistance.

Maybe the fragmentation in the Seediq body politic is not really an interpretive problem, because Taiwan’s body politic is hopelessly fragmented (which country’s isn’t?). At this point in the argument, some knowledge of Taiwan’s political scene is necessary. Identity, as opposed to social justice or the environment, has been the main political issue in Taiwan for decades, arguably since the Japanese period. After 1937 the Japanese implemented a policy of imperialization: everyone was taught to be an imperial subject. The KMT Chinese nationalist policy was similar: everyone in Taiwan was taught he or she was Chinese; the national myth was the reconquest of mainland China. Since the rise of a vocal Taiwan nationalism in the 1980s, identity confusion has become overt. There are some who feel they are Taiwanese and Chinese, some insist they are Taiwanese not Chinese. And with the missiles pointed at Taiwan, militant mainland Chinese rhetoric, and American vacillation, it’s not hard to see why identity is the main issue in local politics. If cross-Strait relations heated up, there would be a corresponding political polarization. At that time, through a process of “epic identity construction,” Mona Rudao’s either/or statement of status (“I am Seediq!) would come to seem even more compelling, and the Dakis/Hanaoka both/and idea of identity (“We’re both Seediq and Japanese…”) even more wishy washy.

Unfortunately, the ending of Seediq Bale does not give Taiwan nationalists cause for comfort. That’s the problem with choosing this particular historical incident as a nationalist myth, because the ending is predetermined by the history of Wushe: the Seediq lose. If we’re applying a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation to the film, whatever would this ending mean? In the film the warriors of the rainbow reunite in the afterlife; we see them striding on the clouds. This is hardly going to satisfy people for whom Seediq traditional belief is not a living religion. The fact is that almost everyone dies. Maybe like Achilles they die gloriously, but maybe it would be better not to die. Unlike Homer’s Iliad, Seediq Bale does not have a happy ending from the protagonist’s persective. And we can’t argue that Wei Te-sheng is telling the Taiwan people: this is what will happen to you if you don’t unite. If the Seediq in the film – all 12 Tkdaya tribes plus the Toda tribal villages - had united against the Japanese, the result would have ultimately been the same.

At the end of the film, four hours and twenty minutes in, we are reassured that the Seediq people have not been wiped out; they will recover. They will have Seediq children and those children will have children. But when you think about this, it’s not all that comforting. Those children would grow up under the Japanese and those grandchildren would grow up under the Chinese. Last time I checked Taiwan was not postcolonial from a Seediq perspective, because the Taiwanese people who like to identify with the Seediq – like the Americans who identified with the revolting Mohawks in 1775 – are running the island. So ultimately I still resist a Taiwan nationalist interpretation of the film. The Wushe Incident has to be understood in terms of 1930. I don’t think it has much to teach us about Taiwan identity today. The collective identity the film seems to express does not seem, as The Economist puts, empowering, certainly not in a contemporary context. There is a collective action in the film, but the action is doomed to failure and only half of the collective participates in it. Epic identity is impressive, but the modern, wishy-washy identity also has its place. Epic requires conflict; I pray for peace.

Maybe Wei Te-sheng does too. On a talk show Wei Te-sheng said he realized the film was about a conflict of belief, the people who believe in the rising sun and the people who believe in the rainbow bridge. What if the Japanese and Seediq, Wei naively wonders, had realized that the sun and the rainbow hang in the same sky, in the same heaven? Maybe it took the Wushe Incident for them to realize it. I hope it doesn’t take another incident for us to realize the same thing today.

The screenplay of Seediq Bale was translated into Seediq. Eleven years ago, the director Wei Te-sheng won an award for the screenplay:

The original Chinese language screenplay was translated was translated into Seediq by Dakis Pawan (Guo Mingzheng).The same kind of situation applies to films like Dances With Wolves and Apocalypto where a director of a dominant language – in both these cases English – wants to present the illusion of linguistic authenticity by having part or all of the screenplay translated into an indigenous language. Guo Mingzheng is a Tkdaya Seediq, belonging to the same group as Mona Rudao, the hero of the film; he has written a Chinese language book about his experience as translator and adviser to the director.

There are two basic ways to consider what Seediq Bale means: in Seediq and in foreign languages like Chinese or English.

There’s a lot to say about what seediq bale means in Seediq. Seediq is what anthropologists call an endonym; it’s a designation the Seediq applied to themselves. It means, “we, the Seediq people.” Traditionally it did not cover all humanity, as does the term “people.” Bale means real or true. It also means “authentically local.” Sama bale means “authentic, local vegetables.” Rodux bale means locally raised chicken. Bnga bale means locally grown yams. The scholar I discussed the meaning of Seediq bale with, Iwan Pering 伊婉.貝林, provided the following notes on what a seediq bale is:

1. An insider, someone belonging to the group. Seediq bale is boundary between in group and out group.

2. A local person, born and bred.

3. Headhunting was not the whole of the meaning of Seediq bale, but if a man headhunted while defended his territory he would automatically be considered a Seediq bale.

4. A person who follows Gaya is a Seediq bale. Gaya is the ancestral teachings, the social norms, the ritual practices, the “laws of life” (Stainton), the “moral tradition” (Guo Peiyi) which maintains the relationship between man and cosmos. That’s something that is said of someone with the highest ethical standards. This is an ideal towards which Seediq people aspire and may only achieve in old age, which is why young people learn from their elders.

In mythology, when a Seediq person dies, he or she must walk over the rainbow bridge, but guarding the bridge is a crab spirit (Utux karan) who will inspect to see whether men and women have red marks on their hands, indicating that they were able to protect their families as men and clothe their families as women. People who can cross the bridge are Seediq bale.

Now I want to consider different ways of translating seediq bale into Chinese or English.

In Chinese there are two translations of seediq bale, one a Chinese transliteration: 賽德克巴萊 sai-de-ke ba-lai. People in Taiwan are familiar with sai-de-ke (Seediq); they just have to learn “ba-lai” or bale. The other translation explains what “ba-lai” means: 真正的人 zhen-zheng-de-ren, or true/real person. To my ear, zhenzheng de ren has a strange, slightly off quality. zhen-ren 真人 is better, or less odd sounding, but then it’s not exactly common parlance. It means a Daoist master, someone who has achieved the way or the son of heaven. In English, I think “real person” and Prof. Stainton’s suggestion of “true human” both sound odd. I’m responding as a translator; to me, these translations seem literal, as if something’s been lost in translation. In both English and Chinese people say “a real man” (真正的男人) or “a good person” (好人) or “a good man,” but not “a real person” (真正的人). That’s not to say that zhenzheng de ren or “real person” are meaningless. They kind of make sense, or one can try to make sense of them. But they’re odd. If you’re a Chinese person, try casually slipping it into conversation, and not in reference to the film Seediq Bale. It’s not easy to do. It’s even harder to do this with “true human.”

The strange, slightly off quality of literal translations is part of a translation strategy called foreignization. A foreignized translation is not a bad translation or a mistranslation. A foreignized translation tries to draw the reader towards an alien culture, to get the reader to understand a strange culture on its own terms. A nativized translation, on the other hand, draws a concept in a foreign linguistic culture towards the reader, normalizing it. My own preference as a translator is for a foreignized translation; as a translator, I find foreign linguistic cultures fascinating and want to share my fascination with the reader. I originally assumed that seediq bale might simply mean “adult” or 成人, that this might be a nativized translation of the term. That’s not the case. Seediq bale is not one of the stages in the regular progression of life: infant (rabu), child (laqi), a young person who has come of age (riso), and an elder (rudan or baki). Seediq bale is an objective of fulfillment of the whole person, a concept with a spiritual, religious or philosophical meaning. Prof. Pei-yi Guo (in the comment below) suggests “ideal person,” which sounds like a term from abstract philosophical discourse to me, and would also not make a good title for a movie. “Seediq hero” (賽德克英雄) would be a nativized translation, familiarizing a foreign concept, and indeed in the short promotional film Wei Te-sheng made in 2003 to raise money for Seediq Bale he uses the term hero. In the English poster for the film, the problem of what seediq bale means is avoided entirely: Seediq Bale: Warriors of the Rainbow, implying that seediq bale means “warriors of the rainbow.” When Wei Te-sheng had the chance to go back to Seediq Bale he opted for the more literal, foreignizing translation of zhenzheng de ren or “real person.” But whether a foreignizing translation is effective depends on the reader, who has to do the work of understanding. Wei Te-sheng does not provide the kind of detailed analysis a person would need for a “true understanding,” and it seems to me that most people will come away from Seediq Bale with a romantic image of what a seediq bale is: Mona Rudao on the mountaintop, shot from below.

A dose of linguistic reality is therefore in order. Seediq is now spoken by a few thousand people. I’ve read that the excitement of Seediq Bale has gotten people interested in learning Seediq. This is heartening. But learning a language is a long haul. Despite Seediq Bale it’s not likely to be spoken by as many people fifty years hence. We need linguistic Seediq bale, heroes and heroines of the Seediq language, but there aren’t too many of those around and don’t expect an epic film about one anytime soon. Linguistic seediq bale are people who prefer foreignized translations, who try to think things anew through a sustained encounter with the linguistic other. Taking a class isn’t enough to do that, much less going to see a movie. Few can see the glory in becoming a linguistic seediq bale, including I imagine Wei Te-sheng himself. If he had he would have learned Seediq instead writing a Chinese language screenplay about the Wushe incident and turning it into a movie. But in making the movie he has offered us the opportunity to remind ourselves of the imperiled state of Seediq and Taiwan’s aboriginal languages in general.

NOTE: as this blog post seems to be the only treatment of the issue in English, I’ve rewritten it after consultation with a native speaker and after receiving Guo Pei-yi’s feedback below. It just goes to show that when you go out on a limb sometimes the limb breaks. Having written and revised this blog post I feel anew the need to begin learning one of Taiwan’s aboriginal languages. I have not fully explained the issue of tattooing and will do so when I sort that out.

Seediq Bale is the biggest Taiwan film ever and the story of an indigenous resistance (against the Japanese in central Taiwan in 1930). As such, it reminds one of Avatar. Having spent many childhood nights reading Call of the Wild to the light of the moon, and many days in early adulthood reading Joseph Campbell – the great Primitivist and Orientalist – I’m embarrassed to admit that I came out of Avatar starry-eyed; Avatar is calculated to appeal to people like me with a “primitivist” tendency. It speaks, in a highly commercialized, packaged, unthreatening and, on second and third viewings, irritating way to longings in the wayward heart of modern man. Seediq Bale, for everything else that one might say about it, speaks to those same longings.

Primitivism was originally a current in Modernist art. It’s been accused of complicity with colonialism. Gauguin painted girls in the South Pacific. Part of primitivism was western artists looking at indigenous girls. If that’s all there was to Primitivism one could dismiss it as colonialist decadence, but there’s more to it than that. There’s primitivism in D. H. Lawrence and Yeats, neither one a colonialist. According to Marianna Togorovnick, there’s primitivism in lots of seminal thinkers and interesting lives, from Carl Gustav Jung to Diane Fossey. Intellectually, primitivism can be a critique of individualist rationalism, while emotionally it’s a longing for a more natural and vital existence.

While we wait in line, chew our nails, fill out forms, surf the internet, we think that the actual jungle would be a more exciting place to live than the concrete jungle. We imagine that “primitives” were closer to their bodies, to one another, to animals, to nature, and to the cosmos than we are. Not just closer, but at one with; Togorovnick writes of ecstasy, not of sexual pleasure but of “standing outside” oneself, of mystic participation. Togorovnick connects ecstasy to the Freudian death wish, which from another perspective is a life wish: the monad dies and is reborn as part of the whole. Maybe in some sense all films, and all fiction, through the suspension of disbelief, give us a kind of ecstasy. At their best, Seediq Bale and other primitivist films allow us ecstasy through an idea of the aborigine. Avatar degenerates into a love story, but the group yoga sessions are ecstatic communion, the gamer premise of the “avatar” is ecstatic, and true love is potentially ecstatic as well. Neither anthropologists nor mystics will be terribly impressed by the film-going primitivist, who only has to fork over 10 bucks and a few hours of his or her time. But for most people that’s as close as we get.

Maybe the director of Seediq Bale hasn’t really gotten all that much closer, but he’s at least more imaginative than most people. At least based on his published writings, the director, Wei Te-sheng, seems to be a primitivist. Long before he was famous, Wei Te-sheng released a book about being an out of work director. In it he whines about being out of work. He’s just as good as other directors; why has success passed him by? In and among the whining is some first rate complaint about modern urban life, about the noise, the boredom, the monotony, the waste, the ugliness, the rationalized insanity of Taipei. Wei complains about the people too. The modern city is supposed to be democratic but is actually full of drones. Wei Te-sheng sounds like a romantic, but anyone who takes a trip into the Taiwan countryside will see that it has a lot of the same qualities of the city. To get away from the city Wei Te-sheng had to go into the mountains and into the past. There he found people he wanted to identify with, men like giants, seediq bale, the “true people” of the title of his film.

So how do the larger-than-life Seediq aborigines in Seediq Bale seem closer to their bodies, one another, animals, nature, and the cosmos? First of all, the Seediq in the film have wonderful bodies, all the more impressive given that they are real people not the CGI creations of Avatar. These are about the most impressive film aborigines I’ve seen. They don’t run around the mountains barefoot at several thousand meters above sea level like the Seediq aborigines used to do, but they’re in pretty good shape. They cover their bodies in clothing that would once have been made by hand by members of the local community. They look better in my eyes than any urbanite, from the guy who wears mass produced polyester to the metrosexual. They don’t have body image issues, and they don’t follow fashion.

Second, they’re closer to one another. I don’t want to resort to the cliche of communal life, but it seems apt. In the film the Seediq live in small houses in small villages. The door’s not locked, and it’s not even closed most of the time. Though fiercely territorial they don’t have private property. They hold goods in common. They drink together very lustily out of the same cup. They feast together. They dance together. They live with ancestors and enemies, literally. Each household has got a collection of skulls, of family members and victims of the headhunt. This sounds morbid, but also strangely intimate. Family members appear as visual or auditory hallucinations. The Seediq are never alone.

Third, to animals, on whom they depend for food and company. The opening scene is of a boar hunt, and it’s just like the beginning of Apocalypto. The hero of the film Mona Rudao has a CGI bird familiar that appears a half dozen times in the course of the film, to say nothing of his pet dog.

Fourth, to nature. To begin with, almost all Seediq production and consumption in the film is local, dependent on the familiar environment. They buy salt from the local Chinese trader, but the salt probably came from somewhere in Taiwan. The landscapes in Seediq Bale are sublime. The sublime, since the 18th c., has been in poetry and painting a safe opportunity for ecstasy. Kant analyzed the sublime into static and moving, but the idea was basically that your rational mind was overwhelmed. Rationality sometimes seems overrated, or at least it can’t be the whole of experience. Less than a century after Kant approached the issue analytically, Nietzsche celebrated the Dionysiac over and above the Apollonian. The closest I get to the Dionysiac is the sense of “shudder” I get from literature once in a while, and now and then the nature scenes in Seediq Bale afford a similar thrill: when Mona Rudao’s up on the mountaintop singing to his ancestors, or when he sings a duet with his father by the waterfall as a rainbow appears. Those familiar with the Japanese aesthetic tradition may find the scenes with the sakura blossoms, so reminiscent of the color of blood, similarly sublime.

Fifth, to the cosmos. I write as an atheist who’s occasionally had a sense of awe at the heaventree of stars or the Dao but is usually too busy translating and tending my garden. The aborigines in Seediq Bale have a living religion, and as I understand it one of the purposes of religion is to give a sense of the cosmos. The Seediq believe there’s a rainbow bridge, and if you cross it with the tattoos that prove adulthood you’ll reach a happy hunting ground. In his unemployed director book, Wei Te-sheng is in awe of the power of Seediq belief. It’s “the power of belief” that gives the warriors the courage to go on the headhunt and to slaughter the Japanese. This makes the Seediq aborigines sound a lot like terrorists…I suppose I don’t know enough about terrorists to comment further, but my almost completely ignorant hypothesis would be that terrorists don’t usually imagine that they’ll be on friendly terms with, or at one with, their enemies after they blow them up. The Seediq did. They performed atonement rituals after the headhunt and the former enemy became an intimate friend.

The Western intellectual’s typical response (i.e. my own typical response) is to analyze, and that’s what I’ve done above, providing an analysis of ecstasy. I could try to sum up discursively, but the power of Seediq Bale is in images. So, in lieu of a conclusion, I’ll finish with two of my favorite visual moments in the film. One of the problems with Avatar according to Slavoj Zizek was that visually and narratively it borrowed too much from other films, that it was a pastiche not a work of art. I can tell that Wei Te-sheng’s watched Apocalypto, but the following two scenes seemed original.

Mona Rudao, the future leader of the resistance and already a legend, is in front of a huge pit filled with skulls. When ordered to throw the skulls from his own collection in with the rest, Mona attacks a Japanese soldier and falls with him onto the pile of skulls, and other Japanese soldiers fall on top of them to restrain Mona, whose face is placed up against the skull of an ancestor. This was the beginning of the subjugation of Mona and the Seediq people. The Japanese forced modernity, in the form of prostitution and wage labor, upon them. As the film very obviously tells us, after Mona’s resistance, the Japanese reprisal, involving poison gas, was more savage than savage, that there’s savagery in the iron heart of industrial modernity.

You couldn’t blame the Seediq aborigines for not wanting to enter this brave new world in which everything and everyone is, through the global division of labor and the modern spatial regime, alienated. As presented in Seediq Bale, the Seediq worldview was not one of spatial and temporal separation, but of communion in space and time. The Seediq women, also true people, seediq bale, chose communion over separation. Their fate has been forced upon them by the Seediq warriors, but they love their fates. The beleaguered Seediq have nearly run out of food, and so the women decide not to be a burden. They hang themselves en masse, according to Seediq custom, hoping to join the ancestors. They’ll soon be joined by the warriors. They hang themselves from branches in a secluded grove, in a scene that blends horror with beauty.

In its combination of the lyrical and the terrible Seediq Bale is not simply entertainment, a break from the tedium of modern life. At its worst, Seediq Bale, at four and a half hours, half the time battle scenes, is another kind of tedium; but at its best it draws the individual viewer outside of himself, however fleetingly, in the manner of primitivist art.

(AF) What is New Edge and how did you conduct your fieldwork?

(DZ) The term New Edge fuses the notions ‘New Age’ and ‘edgy’, as in ‘edgy technologies’. In the late 1980s, founder of the ‘cyberpunk’ magazine Mondo 2000, Ken Goffman, used the term to refer both to the overlaps and the incompatibilities between the spiritual worldview of ‘New Agers’ and the ‘geeky’ worldview of the scientists and hackers of the San Francisco Bay Area. Such interactions were articulated in the overlapping scenes of Virtual Reality development, electronic dance, computer hacking and cyberpunk fiction. I borrowed the term New Edge to study the genealogy of cultural cross-overs between – simply put – the ‘hippies’ and the ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area, beginning with the 1960s and tracing it to the current (2008) moment.

The overlaps that I traced are related to one general idea popular within New Age as well as within hacker circles and relating to current transhumanist notions. This is the idea that humanity is involved in a process of ‘self-evolution’, leading to a future moment when all ‘intelligence’ in the world fuses into one holistic entity. Among others, this notion translates into practices whereby people seek to sensitize their bodies, making it ‘all-sensing’ and ‘all-knowing’ by means of high-tech and/or by practices such as meditation or ecstatic-dance. This idea is also married to a neoliberal image of the autonomous, individual self, who needs to ‘realize’ its true natural self by escaping social conditioning.

There are quite a few moments and places constituted both by hippies and hackers, where they celebrate a kind of common adherence to these ideas and practices. Examples are Virtual Worlds conferences, the Mondo 2000 magazine, the electronic dance scene of the late 1980s/early 1990s, psychedelic events such as the Mindstates conferences and the contemporary Burning Man festival. These ‘New Edge environments’ are perfect places where it can be studied how secular thinking is both a modern ideology as well as a social fact: here we can see how the secularist idea that technology and science are inherently incompatible with spirituality, mysticism or magic is contested. At the same time we can witness here how notions of secularization are still informing modes of distinction-making: the very ways in which hippies and hackers identify themselves to be different from each other, occurs in large part in reference to the alleged incompatibility between the spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘technoscience’. While enchanted by the open-ended ways of thinking of New Age, geeks here are just as much distancing themselves from the “wishy-washyness”, the alleged vagueness of New Age. Similarly, those identifying with the New Age discourse, distance themselves from the images of disembodiment, celebration of technological superiority and over-rationality attached to geek-hood.

In my dissertation, I explore such kinds of compatibilities and tensions at various levels. My research for this comprised a period of 12 months, spent in between 2005 and 2008, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while going from scene to scene, place to place and tracing overlaps in people, metaphors, ideas, practices, objects and styles in between the ‘hippie’ and the ‘hacker’ spheres that I here identified.

So, why is New Edge so prevalent in California?

This is a kind of question that has bugged me for a long time and I am open to all kinds of suggestions into the answer. What I am finding the most plausible answer at the moment – and this turns your question a bit on its head – is that New Edge may in fact be a celebration of California.

I can only say this granting that what makes New Edge unique is not necessarily the fact that it allies the ‘rational’ world of science and technology development with the mystical spheres of spirituality and religion. Such alliances can be found all over the globe. Instead, what is characteristic about New Edge, I believe, is the way that it manifests this alliance through its radical performative style and this may be what makes New Edge characteristically Californian. If you have been to Burning Man, and if we take Burning Man as one of the homelands of New Edge, you probably understand what I mean. The clothes, the art-cars, the music, the buildings, the rituals at Burning Man are all aspects of a performance of a way of being that is ‘authentic’, ‘flexible’, deliberately confusing and unconcerned with hegemonic cultural norms. In a larger sense, we can here see the performance of a radical notion of ‘open-endedness’ in terms of what we can do with our bodies, with our minds, with other people, with our material environment and with technology. In my dissertation there are some examples of this celebration of ‘multiplicit style’. Ironic language; the deliberate contrasting of colors, ideas and ways of being; and the celebration of confusion and chaos are all part of it.

In terms of ideas, this performance associates with neoliberalism, which is prevalent in many other places of the world. Yet, in terms of style, it self-consciously identifies, I believe, with (the image of) California. This observation is partially informed by the fact that my New Edge interviewees were manifesting a strong self-consciousness about being Californian, or being located in California, and particularly about knowing what this means in terms of lifestyle, aesthetics and ‘ways of being’ – cacophonous, optimistic, stylistically ‘loose’ – which was often juxtaposed against ways of being in other parts of the world and of the USA in particular. For instance, Jane Metcalfe, co-founder of Wired Magazine, when she arrived in California in the early 1990s, read the alleged open-mindedness of Californians into the colorful, bright, and crazy style of the buildings and the clothes of the people. And so did Mitch Kapor – developer of Lotus 1-2-3 and associated with many other organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation – explain to me the difference between the corporate worlds on the East and the West Coast by pointing to people in Californian offices wearing Hawaiian shirts. I believe that New Edge culture is firmly rooting itself in, and celebrating as such, California by exploiting this association between California and stylistic cacophony to its extremes. Just as the 1960s hippies of California used a particular style of being, of building, of dressing and talking to distinguish themselves from their notion of mainstream America, so are New Edge Californians embracing this style still to distinguish themselves from the ‘conditioned rest of the world’. Of course, this style is also strongly global in its aspirations and has gone global in many ways, which complicates your question yet again.

Your anthropological project is about the confluence of technological and spiritual imaginations. There is little discussion of political and economic power as part of the equation. Why is that and what would your theory look like if you had included power?

I see New Edge as a discourse that travels through and across different kinds of socio-economic and political niches. And being a discourse, New Edge is not something that defines, in any fixed sense, someone’s identity. Just bringing this back to Burning Man, for instance, people go there from different kinds of backgrounds. This is so in economic sense: some participants are millionaires and are funding for entire camps while others save up all year to be able to “come home”. For one camp leader that I met, going to Burning Man was a tremendous financial sacrifice – that she was more than happy to make – since she was in such debt that she had started living in a shed in her backyard while renting out her own house. Within the larger New Edge sphere, there is also relative diversity in terms of political philosophy. Some of my interviewees were quite outspokenly libertarians, others were very much opposed to libertarianism and celebrating social democratic values. The New Edge discourse has the capacity to unite such differences. It does so in its explicit rejection of political debate and its outward refusal to validate formal status roles and in its emphasis on the body, on style and on human consciousness. As such – just as the 1960s hippies did – New Edge quite deliberately manifests itself in non-political terms.

Perhaps because the core of my dissertation is concerned with a discussion of New Edge contested understandings of consciousness, nature, evolution, style, and the body, it may seem not to involve a discussion of politics and socio-economics. It would be good to make this more explicit in further work, but there is quite a lot of implicit attention in my work for the power-politics underneath this New Edge negation of politics. For instance, I give the a-historical self-imaginary of New Edge a history; I root the transcendental aspirations of New Edge in actual physical bodies; I show the material conditions that enable a place like Burning Man to be experienced in non-political, naturalistic ways and I am critical of self-narratives that are explicitly dismissing discussions of socio-economics. For instance, in a newspaper article published after Burning Man 2005, when Hurricane Katrina had hit and some burners had set off to the East Coast to help clear up the mess, the writer was arguing that burners were specifically predisposed to being able to do this work, where official government failed. This was so, he wrote, because burners had understood the “bedrock value of water, diesel, and serviceable tools.” He argued that Burning Man was all about learning such values and becoming self-reliant beings, making burners predisposed to “lead” when the larger socio-economic system collapses. Of course, “water, diesel and serviceable tools” are not values but material goods. Along with the free time that these burners had at their disposal to go to the disaster area, and with the technologies and kinds of jobs that allowed them to work from a distance, these material goods are quite characteristic of the privileged position that these burners are having within the socio-economic system they seek to replace. I have been similarly critical towards the New Edge ideology of radical open-endedness, its celebration of fluidity and of boundary-crossing, arguing how these notions of flexibility are quite gendered and exclusive of people who are socio-economically ‘stuck’ in the bodies and in their material circumstances.

So, in these ways I did bring in discussions of power into the equation, yet, I didn’t feel the need to extend this into a critique of New Edge. This is so in the first place because I have been mainly concerned with understanding New Edge living, and secondly because there is much of this type of self-criticism within New Edge circles as well. To draw a parallel, there is much critique, both from the political right and the left, regarding the alleged ‘hypocrisy’ of Occupy protesters since the system they are trying to transcend is simultaneously giving them the resources to protest. Occupiers are often aware of this paradox themselves, yet it is not stopping them to try and change the system. Similarly, there is a lot of such ‘double-consciousness’ going on within New Edge circles and rather than critique it, I see it as something that is so characteristic of reflexive societies today that it is extremely worth-while to study it ethnographically – in non-normative ways.

Some of your key interviewees are cultural writers just like you. Some anthropologists have discussed the lateral, horizontal, or interface ethnography when the anthropologist and informant share an equal power-field, discursive community, and skill set. What do your methods or research tell us about the ethnographic project not studying up or down but sideways?

Yes, all my interviewees were in fact habitually thinking with me, interested in meta-perspectives, in connections between different kinds of ideas, and some of them – Erik Davis and Ken Goffman most notably – are, indeed professional writers. Furthermore, most of my interviewees had also formally studied, read or been implicitly informed by anthropological literature and anthropological concepts. This was testified by the off-hand way in which the notion of ‘liminality’, or the concept of the ‘homo ludens’ was used to describe the nature of the Burning Man festival and of how people were here behaving. Also, documentaries and books were constantly produced within this cultural environment that dealt with the exact same convergences that I was seeking to study. At one point, I began to take photographs of the many impressively filled bookshelves of my interviewees as a way of visualizing this self-reflexivity.

One of the ways that I dealt with my ‘schizophrenic position’ being a researcher in a highly self-reflexive field, was by becoming alert to the differences in the ways that we handled theoretic, reflexive concepts. I saw it as one of my tasks to make these distinctions explicit. For instance, I noticed that when using the idea of liminality when talking about a place like Burning Man, my interviewees did not so much use it in the Turnerian sense of going through a period of chaos to become part of the structures of society afterwards. Instead, they were striving for a sense of permanent liminality, for a permanent detachment from structure. Anthropology, in this way, in fact became a kind of ‘New Age science’ (Hanegraaff 1996) – i.e. a scientific legitimation for quite mystical ideas.

In general, what my research tells me about the ethnographic project of ‘studying sideways’, first, is that the types of questions one asks as an ethnographer, as well as the types of relationships one builds and the type of insights one gains are quite different from what ‘classical anthropology’ is generally considered to be. Secondly, I believe that there is by far not enough attention to this in the larger academic anthropological sphere, nor for the ethnographic phenomenon of self-reflexivity in general. Most anthropological studies still take for granted that it is the anthropologist who is reflective and that the ‘respondents’ are not at all aware of what they do. This implicit notion, for instance, has led some ethnographers to conceptualize Burning Man as a religious space, where people experience true authenticity – through dance for instance – and where they are genuinely free from the consumer-oriented, artificial, rationalistic larger western society. Yet, what is not accounted for in such studies is not only that there is much consumption, artificiality and rationalistic ideology going on in and around Burning Man, but also that many burners are quite self-conscious about this. For instance, burners generally realize quite well that Burning Man is an artificial environment that may quite well enable the experience of extraordinary things that have a mystical, natural feel to it. This ‘double consciousness’, I believe, requires not so much a “willing suspense of disbelief”, but as Michael Saler (2004) recently wrote about the ironic imagination, a habit of mind that allows people to “willingly believe with the double-minded awareness that they are engaging in pretence.” When, as a researcher, you take into account also such kinds of reflexivity, and the ironic imagination in particular, you ask different – and in my opinion more interesting – questions about the cultural complexity of today’s post-industrial societies – about how people negotiate different kinds of frameworks and perspectives that are logically and knowingly incompatible.

A final comment I would like to make about ‘studying sideways’ is that this notion runs the risk of covering up the cultural complexity of today’s world. The notion suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs. Yet, much of my research in reflexive communities – both in California as well as in the hacker scenes of the Netherlands – still felt like treading on unfamiliar territory. At times it was clear that I shared much socio-economic and intellectual background with my interviewees. At other moments such similarities appeared only superficial and much interpretative and translative work needed to be done to bridge the many subtle ways in which we experienced and conceptualized the world differently.

A number of anthropologists studying digital culture, Biella Coleman and Chris Kelty among them, argue that many manifestations of computer culture can be traced back to classical liberal theory and an emphasis on individuality, freedom of expression, etc. Can you square your research with this ontogenesis?

Yes certainly. In fact, I believe it is this liberal aspect through which computer culture and New Age are related. The emphasis on ‘freedom’ and particularly on ‘liberation’, as well as on the expressive self and the self-evolving and self-realizing human individual, are themes that account in large part for the sympathies between the ‘hippies’ and ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area. These notions translate, for instance, into the celebration of technology as art, of technology creators as artists and into rituals that seek to ‘decondition’ human beings (as well as technology).

Yet, this understanding that New Edge has liberal grounding is only anthropologically meaningful if we understand liberalism here in a broad sense, as similarly understood also by Coleman (and no doubt also by Kelty). Whereas Steven Levy’s notion of the Hacker Ethic, as defined in his 1984 book Hackers, suggests for instance that hacker culture is liberal, this ethic rarely translates into one uniform mode of behavior or political attitude among hackers. As I learned from my research, and as Peter Samson, one of the hackers that Levy wrote about, told me, some hackers translate the notion of freedom into a radical libertarian ideology, whereas for others their engagement with computer technology ties in with their sense of social responsibility. This may be related to the experience of being the creator of a system that users don’t understand the technicalities of. Or it may come from having to agree, socially, on a set of ethics and rules of conduct within computer systems. I think ‘computer culture’, if there is such a thing, is characterized by an interesting tension between these two aspects – a sense of individual freedom and expression and of social responsibility. Such tensions most certainly characterize debates within this New Edge cultural sphere.

One of my observations, for instance, regarded the implementation of the ideal of Doing It Yourself at Burning Man. In self-reflective narratives, Burning Man seems to be all about Doing It Yourself, about creating your own reality ‘from scratch’, quite independent from the cultural notions and social constraints of the larger society. Yet, alongside this fantasy of individual autonomy, both in hacker culture and in New Age scenes, there is also a kind of opposite longing – a longing to fuse, to become one with some kind of larger environment. To put it bluntly, for hackers this is the intelligence of computer networks and for New Agers this is the wisdom of the universe. Yet, this longing for self-transcendence and fusion is often frustrated in the context of everyday life: the people I studied don’t generally find themselves living in systems that they trust. This may be due to the understanding that computer networks are controlled by (opaque) corporations and government agencies and that corporate and ideological hegemonic interests conspire with contemporary media technologies to ‘distort’ people’s ideas about reality and about who is to be trusted. This is why and how an environment such as Burning Man is important for my interviewees. It offers an environment of trust. Here one can give oneself over to a larger environment – to the hallucinogenic substances, the artworks, the food offered, the dances, the light-shows – that is created by people that are known or that can be known potentially. A sense of paranoia, experienced in the context of everyday life, is here transformed into a sense of ‘pronoia’. This term was first coined in the context of raves and refers to the notion that the universe conspires to give you exactly that what you need. Both paranoia and pronoia are rooted in the awareness of being part of and controlled by a larger system, yet, paranoia comes from having to depend on a system that cannot be trusted and pronoia comes from giving oneself over to a system that is trusted. This divide informs much of the social embeddedness of the liberal belief in individual autonomy. This is the case at least in the context of New Edge but I think also in the context of hacker culture more generally.

Your work is mainly about a period of time between 2005-2008. This culture moves fast. If you were to continue this specific project where would you go and what would you do?

While you are right in the sense that technocultural development moves fast, I am quite interested in studying certain continuities within the technocultural landscape of post-industrial societies since the 1960s. What I’d love to continue doing, for instance, is to focus on the historically developed cultural tensions that I observed in this New Edge environment, and to see how these tensions intersect with the kind of technocultural negotiations that are taking place in the Netherlands today – and probably in other places as well.

For instance, one tension that I find characteristic of the New Edge environment is what I just discussed: on the one hand, there is a lot of commentary and experiential testimony of the notion that people today are becoming more and more part of opaque, complex, incomprehensible corporate and technological networks. At the same time, what remains firmly standing in this environment is the ideal of the autonomous self-possessed human individual – expressed in the ideologies of Doing It Yourself, Creating Your Own Reality and the notion that it is possible to use these otherwise complex technologies to have some kind of transparent access to Reality. I think you could say that two different notions of what technology is, are here converging: on the one hand technology is conceived of as an enveloping system. On the other hand it is seen as a tool that one can use to realize one’s individual desires.

This is one tension that I am now seeking to study in the context of technocultural negotiations in the Netherlands today: within New Edge, as well as in the larger context of technology innovation in the Netherlands, the artistic sphere has played a large role in fostering the notion of technology being inherently and ultimately flexible, complex and unexpected in its outcomes. Various tech-art institutions in the Netherlands have been wedded to this notion, and have co-operated with hackers and artists to study the flexibility of technology, to push it to its limits and to solicit unexpected results – the ideals of multiplicity, open-endedness and emergence, are quite important here, and wedded also to the idea that, ultimately, what it means to be human is open-ended. Some of these artistic institutions have received government subsidies for their explorations, sometimes in combination with corporate or private investment. Yet, recently in the Netherlands, a cultural atmosphere has emerged that is extremely hostile towards art, and towards any kind of practice that does not straightforwardly produce a tangible profit-making product. This negative atmosphere is intensified by parties now in parliament that have successfully pushed for extreme budget-cuts, targeting specifically art institutions. So, currently, only institutions that are capable of producing concrete, profit-making products as part of their technological explorations, paradoxically, remain eligible for subsidy.

In this context, the institutions that I am seeking to study are having to intensify their negotiation of two technological frameworks that are different and conflicting in the ontological sense: on the one hand, the notion that technology is open-ended, and on the other hand, the notion that technology is a tool, used to solve identifiable problems, catering to the demands of the markets and able, in this way, to generate profit and to justify its own existence. An overarching question that I have, while seeking to study these ontological and institutional negotiations between different understandings of technology, is regarding the political, material and socio-economic bases for the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous, DIY individual – since I believe it is this ideal that is present in both ontological frameworks and that may reveal their common basis – and that may reveal what both accounts leave out of the equation.

And yes, this research does not involve a study of Virtual Reality software but addresses any kind of technology that is now attracting the attention of artists, hackers and corporations – most significantly being new forms of energy-generation tools, new kinds of sensor-based mobile technologies, and bio-nanotechnologies.

In December 2010 Zandbergen finished her PhD dissertation, “New Edge: Technology and Spirituality in the San Francisco Bay Area,” on the dynamic relationship between new forms of spirituality and politics on the one hand, and digital technologies on the other, as shaped in the past 30 years in Silicon Valley, California. A book chapter was recently published, “Silicon Valley New Age: the co-constitution of the digital and the sacred” in Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital. She elaborated on her dissertation in a recent post, “Combining Extreme Distrust and Spastic Bursts of Blind Faith… What New Edge Culture has to say about Today’s Schizophrenic Information Society.” Previously she has taught the course “Anthropology of the Information Society” at the University of Leiden. She is presently a Postdoctoral scholar at the University of Leiden in “The Future is Elsewhere” program. 

It seems to me that rather than declare the mainland Chinese presence in Finding Sayun irrelevant we should try and make sense of it.

So what does the Chinese presence in Finding Sayun mean? Yukan, the “star” of the film, hopes to go to university, perhaps in Taipei, but if he is a good enough soccer player he might end up in China. There are a roughly million Taiwanese people in China – about 3-4% of the population – and Yukan might eventually join them. China’s part of the lives of Taiwanese people, including aborigines. Or Yukan might end up somewhere he’s never heard of. At the same time, Taiwan’s aborigines have become part of the lives of the people of the PRC, initially through broadcasts of Teresa Teng’s rendition of the song “Gaoshanqing” (High Mountains Green):

高山青 High mountains green

澗水藍 Blue rivers rill

阿里山的姑娘美如水 Maiden of Alishan, lovely as a stream

阿里山的少年壯如山 Young man of Alishan, solid as a hill

The mainlanders go to Alishan, and why shouldn’t they go to Nan-ao? Chinese tourists will tend not to be very sympathetic to indigenous causes in Taiwan. According to the PRC, Taiwanese indigenous peoples are not indigenous peoples at all; they are collectively the smallest of China’s fifty-five official minorities, the gaoshanzu. The PRC can happily approve the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples because the PRC calls its indigenous peoples “national minorities.” The claim that Finding Sayun is Taiwan’s first film by an indigenous director could only be made on the Taiwan poster.

But I don’t wish to drag cross-Strait politics into this discussion of Finding Sayun. The point being made in this film is that things Taiwanese, including Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, are on Chinese people’s radar, and vice versa. The film “builds bridges” as the cliche has it, represents Taiwan’s indigenous people (or more specifically the residents of the village in Nan-ao in which the film was made), to themselves and to outsiders in Taiwan, China and possibly the rest of the world. Better for curious outsiders to learn about Taiwan’s indigenous people by watching a film like Finding Sayun than a film like Waiting for the Flying Fish. Tourism is part of the marketing strategy of the former; the latter seemed like feature length tourist brochure.

If Laha Mebow seems to be wearing rose colored glasses in Finding Sayun, she put them on herself. There is unhappiness in the movie, but it’s focused on the young widow and mother whose husband dies at the beginning of the film in a work-related accident. She becomes a symbol of indigenous suffering. (Indigenous peoples tend to work in DDD (dangerous, dirty, degrading) jobs, if they can get jobs at all; indigenous unemployment has risen as a result of the “guest workers” policy.) Finding Sayun is otherwise a generally upbeat, positive film. It’s described as a 溫馨片, a “heartwarming film,” which seems to be a film genre. But given the incredible variety of indigenous experience, negativity can’t be one of the criteria for the determination of where a film is on the indigenous continuum or whether it’s authentically indigenous. Rather than arguing that Finding Sayun is heartwarming out of generic conformity, it’s just as convincing to argue that it’s upbeat because Laha Mebow wanted to share a positive vision of her own people.

In the end the Chinese director’s film, the film within the film, does not get made. Finding Sayun, the indigenous director Laha Mebow’s film, is a work of which the director and her community can be proud.

In an article on the recent Orchid Island film Waiting for the Flying Fish, which is about but not by Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, Prof. Anita Wen-hsin Chang called for funding for local films by indigenous directors. Finding Sayun, directed by the indigenous woman Laha Mebow, claims (on the film poster) to be the kind of film Prof. Chang has been waiting for: a local film with an indigenous director. Therehas been significant indigenous involvement in other films, including this year’s “epic” about the Wushe uprising in 1930, Seediq Bale. A better example is The Sage Hunter, starring the Taiwan indigenous writer Sakinu and based on his writings.

If Finding Sayun is Taiwan’s first indigenous film, it is Taiwan’s first contribution to the growing corpus of global indigenous film. According to Houston Wood, the author of Native Features: Indigenous Film from Around the World, the first indigenous film was Richardson Morse’s 1972 adaptation M. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn. The first feature by an indigenous woman was the Australian Tracey Moffat’s beDevil in 1993. A Chinese/Atayal language indigenous film with limited distribution (even in Taiwan) like Finding Sayun is not likely to make it onto the radar of a scholar like Wood. This is not a criticism of Wood, who had his work cut out for him trying to cover indigenous films in English speaking countries.

But what does it mean to claim that a film is indigenous?

It seems to me we have two ways of determining whether a film is indigenous, by a continuum and making an either or determination. There is a kind of continuum from non-indigenous representations of indigenous peoples to indigenous representations of indigenous peoples. Features such as screenwriting, cast (are the actors indigenous?), crew (especially whether the film used a “community production” model, involving local people in production), direction, production, the language of the film, and the content – whether it conforms to Hollywood expectations, whether it is an authentic presentation of local people – place any given film somewhere along the continuum.

At the same time it’s still meaningful to claim that a certain film either is or isn’t indigenous. The boundary separating indigenous film from non-indigenous film is fuzzy; in most cases the determination will seem straightforward, while in others the film will seem to sit on the fuzzy boundary and there will be more room for debate. When push comes to shove, the either or decision is usually made based on the identity of the director: if the director has an indigenous identity that is accepted by an indigenous community, then it’s an indigenous film.

This approach assumes an auteur theory, spotlights the role of the director in the making of the film and leaving the rest of the production in the shadows. Some auteurs might be able to do everything they want, but most directors aren’t in this position. They have to negotiate their visions with writers, actors, investors and distributors, and of course with the public as well. An indigenous director would have to negotiate with the local people and with the indigenous community. As a result of this hidden complexity, we must be careful interpreting films we accept as indigenous in the either or sense because they have indigenous directors. Wood argues that the producers of the first “indigenous hit” Smoke Signals, as well as Mirimax, the distributor, put pressure on the director Chris Eyre to provide a feel good ending resulting from the positive attributes of the main characters. In other words, they pushed for conformity to Hollywood expectations. This puts the authenticity of the film into question. This makes one wonder about Finding Sayun, especially because of the unexplained mainland Chinese presence in the film. I’ll address this issue in a separate post.