In this installment of Illustrated Man, we turn our attention to Burma Chronicles, Delisle’s most recent foray into the graphic representation of a westerner’s encounter with an Asian culture. Why Burma Chronicles you ask? They shuttered our local Borders Books and I got it on clearance, that’s why. I for one am not thrilled at that company’s implosion (unlike some snarky others). Shit man! I live in a city of 180,000 and now we have one bookstore left, a Barnes and Nobles. Okay, two if you count the used store that specializes in romance novels.

Back to the comic. Guy’s wife, Nadege, is an admin for Medecins Sans Frontières, and she brings them to Rangoon while MSF attempts to reach a remote and stigmatized ethnic group who reside along the border with Thailand. While Nadege is away Guy spends a lot of time caring for their infant son Louis, socializing with the NGO crowd, trying to squeeze in a little work on the side, and making wry observations about everyday life under the military junta.

Delisle’s art is highly skilled and alternates between a deceptively simply cartoony style (usually reserved for facial expressions and people in motion) and awesomely detailed (used sparingly to depict architecture and military uniforms, for instance). In an interesting pseudo-anthropological move, Delisle inserts occasional self-reflections on his artistic process, as when his ink supplies run out and he has to venture into the city markets or when a local artist warns him to change materials during the monsoon season and, after ignoring him, he concludes the story with intentionally smudged and runny pictures.

The author mixes up his narrative techniques too. Some vignettes are propelled mostly by dialogue among characters, while some others consist entirely of boxed narration. There are even a few wordless strips. This combined with the artistic variation helps to keep the reader engaged in the book, which is far from being a profound exegesis on Burmese history and culture. It’s light reading, but thoughtful.

There are a lot of warm, fatherly moments interspersed among the observations of a foreign culture and critiques of the military regime. Delisle pushes his son’s stroller through the streets and is everywhere stopped by locals fascinated to see an occidental baby. Then one day when the milk was gone Guy creamed his coffee from the baby’s bottle. Guy really gets to see how the other half lives when he and Louis join a play group for children of UN diplomats. In particular he has his eyes set on landing a membership at the swank and members only Australian club which features squash courts, a pool, swings for the kids, and steaks on the barbie.

The house is huge. I’m the only dad in the group. The group of moms are on one side… the nannies and babies on the other.

GUY: I draw comics.
EXPAT: Ah lovely… what a nice hobby.
GUY: It’s not a hobby. It’s what I do for a living. How about you? What do you do?
EXPAT: We work at the UN.
GUY: “We”?
EXPAT: My husband.
GUY: Ah, I see. And does anybody here have a husband at the Australian Embassy?

Life under the authoritarian military regime in Burma necessitates dealing with any of a number of apparent absurdities like reading censored magazines with the pages missing. The censors must abide by government mandated quotas and have been known to order the presses to run extra copies of the censored pages so they can seize them. On another occasion Deslisle offers to help MSF troubleshoot an email problem, which keep getting bounced back from the office in France. To meet with Burmese IT he has to wait in a fenced yard until he is allowed to enter a “fortress” by escort only. Next we learn that the Burmese drive on the right (a symbolic rejection of their British colonial past) but economic sanctions have limited the availability of cars. The result is that most cars have their steering wheel on the right as well, making it nearly impossible to pass!

Most of the Burmese people Delisle meets are poor and some are almost totally destitute. When his work as animator and cartoonist necessitates the purchase of a PC, Guy must use several huge stacks of cash so devalued is the currency. The bill denominations oddly enough come in 15, 45, and 90, apparently for some numerological reason by decree of the military.

There is also a sense of wonder at the difference Delisle perceives in Burmese culture, often represented in humorous shorts. In one he comes home with Louis from a UN play group to find a fat monk sitting on his porch but his doorman is gone. He knows that monks are not allowed to accept alms after noon, but he pays him anyway. Then moments too late his guard shows up furious, bad monks are to be chased away with a stick! He clucks his tongue. Helping them is bad luck.

Rangoon enjoys an annual water festival, which grew out a tradition of washing away the misdeeds of the past year at the peak of the hot season before the rains come. Today it has become a four day long citywide water gun fight with hoses spraying from the tops of buildings. The festivities are enjoyed by all as this is one of the few times a year when the junta allowed the Burmese people to gather in groups. “In principle you’re not supposed to spray monks and cops,” but he does manage to shoot a police officer from behind anyway. “Ooh! That felt great.”

A pervasive dissonance or irony runs through Burma Chronicles, which arises between the warmth of the Burmese people and the atrociously repressive political system they live with on an everyday basis. Guy has a political conscience, but also leads a privileged life by Burmese standards. In one short he conducts a death bed interview with a very sick and elderly local artist (who apologizes profusely for the state of his country) and the strip concludes with a game of ball between his doorman and little boy. In another a bomb goes off in the central market, 11 dead and 160 injured. Instead of going shopping that day he and his friends go to the Australian club instead.

I am completely infatuated with Burma Chronicles and will pursue Delisle’s other books. This is like the kind of comic book I envision myself making. Who hasn’t come back from the field with a dozen or more stories told and retold at cocktail parties? I probably have close to a hundred pages of these “tales from the field” already typed and even more that went nowhere. As I stated above, Delisle’s art in this book is deceptively simple, I hope others read it and are inspired to share some of their tall tales. After all, look at how much XKCD has accomplished with just stick figures!

Charming and lightweight, this book is imminently re-readable and thought provoking. Comic fans who haven’t explored Guy Delisle’s oeuvre will be delighted by the discovery and those who work with NGOs will no doubt have a chuckle too.

His focus is on Southeast Asia, specifically a region he calls “Zomia” which, to quote Martin Lewis:

denotes the mountainous areas of mainland Southeast Asia, along with adjacent parts of India and China, that have historically resisted incorporation into the states centered in the lowland basins of the larger region.

In chapter after chapter he lays out his argument, showing how virtually every aspect of Zomia hill society exists as a means of resisting state authority: If states like the flat plains, people move to the hills to avoid the state. If states like cultivating rice because it concentrates much needed manpower where it can easily be tapped, people adopt shifting cultivation for the very same reason. If states employ writing as a way of keeping track of who’s who, people ditch their books and rely upon easily modified oral genealogies instead. If states like organized religion, people engage in heterodox traditions that defy centralized control. And, perhaps most strikingly, if the state wishes to impose a shared ethnic identity upon its subjects, people choose “tribal” identities as a way of avoiding such ethnic ties.

This last one is likely to draw the most attention (although I personally found the brief section on orality the most provocative – perhaps I’ll write more about that later), although few anthropologists will have a problem with his view of ethnicity as socially constructed. Still, it is worth quoting him at length:

There is, clearly, no such thing as a “tribe” in the strong sense of the word — no objective genealogical, genetic, linguistic, or cultural formula that will unambiguously distinguish one “tribe” from another. But, we might well ask, who is confused? The historian and the colonial ethnographer might be mystified. The mixed villages in northern Burma were “anathema to the tidy bureaucratic officials” who, until, the last moment of imperial rule, were still trying in vain to draw administrative lines between the Kachins and Shans. But hill people were not confused; they were in no doubt who they were and who they were not! Not sharing the researcher’s or administrator’s mania for mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories, hill people were not paralyzed by identities that were plural and variable over time. On the contrary, as we shall see, the ambiguity and porosity of identities was and is, for them, a political resource.

Nor does Scott wish to limit his argument to Zomia. Throughout the book he makes comparisons to indigenous people in Latin America, Gypsies, Cossacks, Afghans, and other tribal and semi-nomadic populations. In an interview with the Boston Globe Scott “cheerfully” conceded “the possibility that he may have overgeneralized in the pursuit of a cohesive argument.” Yet he is careful to restrict his argument to the pre-modern era, saying “if my analysis does not apply to late-twentieth-century Southeast Asia, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” It would be interesting to compare this book with Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject which discusses the role of Colonialism in constructing African ethnic identities. Whereas Scott treats all “states” as essentially the same, Mamdani draws interesting distinctions between French and English strategies of rule, arguing that they led to very different dynamics of ethnic formation.

Of course, much of what Scott says is not new. Anthropologists will be especially aware of the tremendous debt to Edmund Leach and Pierre Clastres, both of whom are cited at length throughout the book. Here’s what he says about Clastres:

The French anthropologist Pierre Clastres was the first to argue that many of the hunting-and-gathering “tribes” of South America, far from being left behind, had previously lived in state formations and practiced fixed-field agriculture. They had purposely given it up to evade subordination. They were, he argued, quite capable of producing a larger economic surplus and a larger-scale political order, but they had chosen not to so as to remain outside state structures.

And Regarding Leach’s classic text, he writes:

Nothing in this distinguished critical literature, however, questions the fact that there are important differences in the relative openness and egalitarianism of various Kachin social systems or that there was, near the close of the past century, something like a movement to assassinate, depose, or desert the more autocratic chiefs. At its core, Leach’s ethnography is an analysis of escape social structure—a form of social organization designed to thwart capture and appropriation either by Shan statelets or by the petty Kachin chiefs (duwa) who attempt to mimic Shan power and hierarchy.

What Scott has done is woven together a huge literature on Southeast Asia and the Chinese border regions into a sweeping (if occasionally repetitive) narrative about the strategies hill people use to resist state power. If I have any reservations about his argument it is that, as someone who spends a lot of time looking at how specific state formations have led to the development of specific ethnic formations, it is more than a little disconcerting to take such a “long view” of history where these details seem so unimportant.

The article starts with a heart-pounding chase. Cockfights are illegal and the sudden appearance of the police during one of the first fights Geertz and his wife witnessed sent everyone scurrying home:

On the established anthropological principle, When in Rome, my wife and I decided, only slightly less instantaneously than everyone else, that the thing to do was run too. We ran down the main village street, northward, away from where we were living, for we were on that side of the ring. About half-way down another fugitive ducked suddenly into a compound-his own, it turned out-and we, seeing nothing ahead of us but rice fields, open country, and a very high volcano, followed him. As the three of us came tumbling into the courtyard, his wife, who had apparently been through this sort of thing before, whipped out a table, a tablecloth, three chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without any explicit communication whatsoever, sat down, commenced to sip tea, and sought to compose ourselves.

This story serves two purposes: The first is to draw the audience into the society along with the anthropologist. Just as this event led to Geertz making the transition from “outsider” to “participant,” so too does it make the audience feel as if they are active participants in the drama. The other purpose is to establish the subjective authority of Geertz’s account. Geertz can tell us what this ritual “really means” because he was there. Not only was he there, but he was embraced by the members of the society who loved his clumsy ways.

Does Geertz’s effective prose lull us into a false sense of interpretive complacency?

William Roseberry thinks so. In his article, “Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology,” (ProQuest link – thanks to Rex), Roseberry draws from Geertz’s own footnotes to suggest that Geertz overlooks the importance of women (“traditional markets [where the fights were held] were ‘staffed almost entirely by women’”), political economy (“the sport has been one of the main agencies of the island’s monetization”), and post-colonial nationalism (“Balinese regard the island as taking the shape of ‘a small, proud cock, poised, neck extended, back taut, tail raised, in eternal challenge to large, feckless, Java.’”) Nor do we ever really learn the social origins of status in Balinese society – crucial information if these fights are symbolic battles over status.

Roseberry is not simply saying that Geertz’ thick description isn’t thick enough. Rather, he is arguing that there is a limitation to the whole culture-as-text approach advocated by Geertz’s interpretive anthropology. Roseberry argues that Geertz’s treatment of culture-as-text ignores the crucial questions of how texts are created?

To ask of any cultural text, be it a cockfight or a folktale, who is talking, who is being talked to, what is being talked about, and what form of action is being called for, is to move cultural analysis to a new level that renders the old antinomies of materialism and idealism irrelevant.

In some ways Geertz is one of the most well known anthropologists outside of the discipline, but my sense is that his influence within the discipline itself has waned. Still, Geertz’s essay is of more than purely historical interest. His excellent writing and the way in which he captures the spirit of the anthropological process ensures that “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” remains one of the most widely used texts in introductory anthropology courses.

More Geertz online at HyperGeertz.

Works cited in this post:

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. In The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, NY: Basic Books.

Roseberry, William. 1982. Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology. Social Research 49 1013-28.

But when I in fact did become a Ph.D. student, some of those books were required reading for my core classes. I should have kept those books, I told myself (all those margin notes and underlines!), but decided against buying them again. Except for the classics in anthro theory, I thought it was foolish to make the same purchase twice. Especially ethnographies.

But there were a few exceptions, and one was Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, a work that takes you right into the Bornean rain forests of South Kalimantan. I read this ethnography in 1994 and I remember falling in love it. At the time I didn’t quite understand her arguments, but I enjoyed the way she wrote about her encounter with Uma Adang, a shamaness, a local leader, and her main “informant” in the book. The photo of this Meratus Dayak woman, smiling while cradling a white doll, was for me what Tsing described as “a disorienting caricature of motherhood.”

That image of Uma Adang came to me when I read Tsing’s latest book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Prompted by a comment by Savage Minds regular Colin Danby, I thought I might post something on Tsing’s nuanced perspective on the way globalization is interpreted in South Kalimantan (The book is an on-the-ground look at the way different groups, such as conservationists, logging companies, and local communities, talk with and past one another in their relationship to the rain forest). But when I opened the book, all I could do was to recall the powerful image of Uma Adang holding a white doll.

Like her earlier book, Friction also presents Uma Adang as a marginal voice that embodies Tsing’s critique of the global political and economic network of power. Although the Meratus Dayak shamaness has a much less prominent role in the new book than in Diamond Queen, I could not help but fixate on this figure.

For one, the way I imagined Uma Adang has now changed. The younger image of her now evokes a different set of emotions for me when juxtaposed against the photograph of her in the new book: she is sitting in what looks like a bar and her expression is solemn — broken but defiant. Behind her is a cigarette ad that has the word “BOMB” in huge letters. The caption reads “Better you had brought me a bomb…” Her explosive anger is directed against the deforestation of the jungle by the logging companies, which by her account is stripping away Meratak culture itself. The smiling figure in the first book now looks to me as one of naivete, expressing truimphant exuberance in carving out a political space for herself and other Meratus Dayak.

But Uma Adang and Tsing also retain their playfulness in the new book, especially in the chapter on biodiversity. And it makes for a nice comparison with a chapter in her earlier book.

In “The History of the World” chapter of Diamond Queen, Tsing writes about her friend’s version of global history, all in fragments, in different narrative forms and temporal registers, and full of parodic mimicry of the dominant discourse. This history, which Tsing treats as an “official” history, is to be read for its coherent unity and political message. But rather than celebrating it wholesale as a moment of political resistance, the anthropologist also recognizes aspects of the shamaness’s historiography that ends up serving the national interest of the Indonesian state. At the end of the chapter this nuanced examination of a local story leads the author to reflect upon the state of identity politics in the U.S., and writes that “the cutting edge of political organizing often is the simultaneously dissociating and validating effect of parroting dominant discourse out of context.”

In the new book Friction, she examines the concept “biodiversity” in a chapter titled ““This earth, this island Borneo” [Biodiversity assessment as a multicultural exercise].” In it she relies on a similar move of parody as a critical endeavor in which she too takes part. Citing both proponents and critics of the promotion of “biodiversity,” Tsing brings to this discussion an ethnographic account of what it means to make a list. Here Uma Adang lists all the flowers and mushrooms and the fish and lizards, in disregard of Linnaean nomenclature and full of strange and non-scientific markers of identification. This, however, is not a simple case of a local critique of Western discourse. Instead, they both acknowledge the pleasure of listing, of writing down and numbering, and hence, of having that very power to picture the world course through their veins.

Uma Adang loved the idea that I was writing down the list and enumerating each item. [...] The list took on all the pleasures of writing, counting, and classifying: Uma Adang and I were pretending to be bureaucrats with the authority of state and international codification. We were ordering the world by naming it. As Uma Adang explained to me, “Everyone knows these names; but not everyone knows how to organize them properly.” (168)

Tsing’s virtuosity as a writer shines forth — a partial list of fauna and flora runs down the page margins — and it reminds me of the discipline’s excitement over “the poetics and politics” of experimental ethnographic writing (and readers of Levi-Strauss and Derrida will perhaps recall here “The Writing Lesson” in Tristes Tropique). There are some risks, in my opinion and acknowledged by Tsing herself, of investing in a figure such as Uma Adang a certain subjectivity that by virtue of representing her in an ethnography domesticates the marginal within our own political agenda [footnote 1]. Yet this issue is repeatedly taken up in the book, not only in Borneo but also in other parts of the world. And this moment of parody — playful but also serious — is at least a partial answer to the question surrounding the politics of representation.

I am sure there are other compelling “informants” who span multiple books (I invite readers to comment on who might be other such figures in the annals of anthropology), but for some reason Uma Adang has made an impression on me. There are, I think, many possibilities in writing about the same person in different books over time. At the end of the first book there was a sense of a closure for my understanding of Uma Adang; when the new books takes her up again, it for me opened up new avenues of thought. This opening and closing of someone’s character is a rhetorical strategy I think might warrant some further discussion.

Postscript: As I work on my dissertation, I am finding myself increasingly drawn to good ethnographic writing as models for my own work. So in hindsight, I really wish I hadn’t given away my ethnographies!

[footnote 1: I am thinking here Vicente Rafael's comments on Tsing's earlier writings, but I think it equally applies to Friction.]