Mary Douglas is my all time favorite anthropologist. Sometimes this surprises me. Much of her anthropology was informed by political and social sensibilities much at odds with my own. Douglas liked hierarchy and she liked institutions, as has been noted in some of her recent obituaries. Yet, her analysis of the politics of risk was greatly helpful to me as an undergraduate, when I wrote my B.A. thesis on ways in which the putative purity of the U.S. blood supply and its bureaucratic regulation revealed much more about attitudes towards the socially marginal than they did about the ‘actual’ risks. I have always admired two aspects of her work: its rigorous but clever manner of presentation, and the promiscuousness of the subject matter. It seems there was almost no aspect of social life that she could not subject to a brilliant and punchy little anthropological analysis.

Above I present one of the many diagrams from her essay, ‘Deciphering a Meal.’ Douglas was a prolific diagrammer. Sometimes this created difficulties. Natural Symbols, for example, is a notoriously deceptively clear account of body symbolism. This website presents the different versions of the grid/group diagram published in different editions of Natural Symbols and some of the difficulties engendered by the various versions of the diagrams.

Douglas explains the diagram above:

Obviously the meanings in our food system should be elucidated by [close] observation. I cut it short by drawing conclusions intuitively from the social categories which emerge. Drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, workmen, and family. Meals are for family, close friends, honored guests. The grand operator of the system is the line between intimacy and distance. Those we know at meals we also know at drinks. The meal expresses close friendship. Those we only know at drinks we know less intimately. So long as this boundary matters to us (and there is no reason to suppose it will always matter) the boundary between drinks and meals has meaning. There are smaller thresholds and half-way points. The entirely cold meal (since it omits a major contrast within a meal) would seem to be such a modifier. So those friends who have never had a hot meal in our home have presumably another threshold of intimacy to cross… It would be simplistic to trace the food categories direct to the social categories they embrace and leave it at Figure 16.1 [above]. Evidently the external boundaries are only a small part of the meaning of the meal.

Here Douglas puts an analytic frame around common sense: sharing a meal expresses shared social identity and relationship. The essay of course goes on to decode the sharing of food and food categories through a range of social circumstances. Critics of Douglas have often seized upon her penchant for reducing cultural meaning to statements about social life, where social life is largely understood to be a matter of structuring forms of inclusion and exclusion. (See pages 117-120 in this book.) Critics of Douglas may be right. Nevertheless, her style of analysis can yield groovy results. Even the grid/group analytic, something of a blunt instrument, can be fun to play with. It has been used to understand the cosmological biases informing everything from millenarian movements to marketing strategies.

Below I juxtapose her ‘original’ grid/group diagram and New York magazine’s brilliant ‘approval matrix.’ To me, the approval matrix is like Douglas + Bourdieu for hip New Yorkers. Convince me, in fact, that the particular combination of taste and status (highbrow/lowbrow, brilliant/despicable) diagrammed each week does not in fact describe perfectly Douglas’s understanding of the way that grid and group work.

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I subscribe to a ‘director’ at YouTube called ‘visualanthropology.’ A video popped up in the feed recently of some guys sitting around riffing off Paris Hilton and coming up with the idea that she is a Situationist. I thought the notion rather absurd and for some reason felt motivated to write a comment—and am now having a funny/serious discussion about ‘reading’ pop culture with someone who claims to have claimed that Paris Hilton is an anthropologist. Silly, but it’s Friday.

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Reading Gupta and Ferguson’s article Spatializing States (free PDF from Gupta’s excellent website, where there are many more) what I find so naggingly dissatisfying about it is not the project but the language. “Taking the verticality and encompassment of states not as a taken-for-granted fact, but as a precarious achievement,” they write, “it becomes possible to pose the question of the spatiality of contemporary practices of government as an ethnographic problem.” Exactly. Yet it seems to me the language of ‘spatializing the state’ helps obscure some key analytic points in how we might go about analyzing these practices. Although, to be sure, it is probably a lot sexier than the language that I am about to propose.

At root, ‘spatializing the state’ refers to metaphors for space used by people to describe the state’s relationship to its subjects. Thus the state is ‘above’ the people, it’s agents are ‘everywhere’ watching you, and so forth. These metaphors, when taken as texts which orient people to action, enable the coordination of action across time and space and produce congeries of behavior that eventually are attributed to a ‘state’ in whose name all of this action is attributed. Thus we might want to talk about the two related by distinct meanings of how ‘spatialization’—on the one hand a very familiar symbolic-anthropological (Fernandez or even Geertz) notion that there is a ‘metaphorical space’ of images of the state which can be described and explored on the one hand, and on the other an analysis of action across space carried out in the name of, or at the bequest of, ‘the state.’ The second, clearly, is related by the first

But what is the nature of that relation? That, it seems to me, is the question that an anthropology of the state must post. To do so it would have to work between the crack of these two meanings of ‘spatialization’. We as social scientists can demonstrate that the self-accounts of state agents are actually very poor descriptions of the complex relationship between cultural logics of the state-cum-organizing metaphor and how they are actually instantiated in (as it were) reality. This is most clear in the case of ‘weak states’ where ‘corruption’ blurs the line between actions carried out qua individual and qua office holder. But in ‘strong states’ where the seam between state imagery and state practice is stronger we can still see that, as it were, the glue holding them together might not be what they thing it is. Managing the complex reflexivity of all this is a difficult task, however, and I fear that language like ‘spatializing the state’ may make it harder rather than easier. (more…)

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There seems to be a bit of penchant on Savage Minds for discussing the desire-as-lack that constitutes anthropology as a discipline, which manifests itself in the frequent gnashing of “intro to” syllabi and proposing of essential works. Far be it from me to avoid joining in the fun. In the irony-laden spirit of Found Magazine, my contribution to this comes not from my own vast and enviable experience, but from a not-so-silent partner, Thomas Chivens. Thom and I were undergrads at UCSC when Virginia Dominguez (current editor of American Ethnologist) taught there. For serendipitous and mysterious reasons that cannot be elaborated in the Internets (for reasons of space), Thom recently unearthed this gem of a handout.
What I love almost as much as this hand-scrawled clearly definitive (c. 1989, not clear exactly on the provenance of the Duke letterhead) list of must-read anthropologists, is what Thom has to say about it:

looking at it again this morning i can imagine virginia would have revised it over the years (i recall her passing it out amidst a barrage of caveats on its casually-thrown-together nature for her student heading to graduate school). i can see it moving into some sort of spreadsheet type format, endlessly expanding, etc.. but it’s the sense of completeness arising from apparent spontaneity that gives it a magical aura and suggests contesting or revising it is the wrong way to think about it. hopefully widespread reproduction won’t take that away. in this regard, it carries with it something of what giddens talks about as the formulaic truth of guardians, in contrast to the propositional knowledge of experts. and if we need guardians these days, which anthropology could use, i think virginia’s about as good as they come.

Something about the contrast this handout poses to the technological smorgasbord of information and research tools at our disposal captivates me. Part of it is, as Thom points out, the clear need for certain kind of guardian—not just in anthropology, but in any domain where apprenticeship is an essential component of progress in knowledge. Sometimes it’s better to have a hand-scratched, seat-of-the-pants expression of deep knowledge over a real-time, social software, scale-free, really simple, ajax-enhanced, web 2.0 instant access to scholarship. If you know what I mean. Part of it is the ”*Still alive, as far as I know” note, which is useful for the earnest anthropological grad student seeking out mentors and influences. Part of it is the emphatic national, tiered grid—I wish I had the guts, and the knowledge to organize my stories of scholarship with such gusto. In any case, I though our readers might enjoy a little bit of the old school, both in form and in content….

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I recently ran across the article Remnants of Romanticism: Max Weber in Oklahoma and Indian Territory which is a nice little piece of scholarship on two things that I usually don’t think of together—Max Weber and Native North America. Let he who has ears hear.

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Unlike the Spice Girls, I do not often ask my audience what they want, what they really really want. I think of myself as my students’ personal trainer, except I help them develop minds—rather than buns—of steel. I have many colleagues in Hawai’i and abroad who worry that education is becoming ‘commodified’ and that people increasingly think of paying for an education as being similar to buying a new Camaro. While they worry about students demanding ‘customer satisfaction’ the largest issue in education I’ve run across today is an emphasis on credentialing rather than educating. Students that I encounter at universities across the US are less worried about achieving a state of satisfaction than earning an A, and approach classes more worried about the cultivation of their transcript than their sensibilities. Obviously, trying to get a great grade in a course is not exactly orthogonal to learning anything, but the shift in emphasis does sometimes make my job harder.

This is why I like the image of the personal trainer—it helps people understand what they are getting for their money: an opportunity to undergo a personal transformation which they may or may not take advantage of. It also helps underline another aspect of the teacher-student relationship which I believe quite strongly in despite the prevailing egalitarianism of our times: students do not know what they want or need out of an education—that is why they need us to guide them through it. Like Dante or Luke Skywalker, they need old guys in robes to guide them and unleash their potential.

That’s why I was struck by 37 Signals’s recent blog entry. As designers of websites and other things, they note that

Nobody knows what they really want before they get it. Not consumers, not conference goers, not programmers, and certainly not clients. Delivering greatness requires you to let go of the safety in mediocrity where you just do as you’re told.

For people working in the private sector, this is quite an insight. But my general feeling is: duh. I am reminded of the shift that has occurred in restaurant menus over the past couple of decades. Today menus are elaborate paeons to the food diners are about to consume. But traditionally the menus at America’s great restaurants had menus that read ‘five courses of fish in different sauces.’ They didn’t elaborate, because the chef was clearly more capable of deciding what you ought to eat then you were. The client, after all, waits on the souffle—not the other way around.

The wonderful thing about 37 Signals’s entry is that it helps to remind educators fearful of creeping consumerism that people who Get It—and 37 Signals is an outstanding company that does Get It—come to understand what they do as similar to education. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the trend that educators fear. Contrary to Hannah Arendt’s disparaging remarks about academics’ fear of anything not inherently mediocre (which are, unfortunately, not entirely off the mark), this is a case where people who excel at what they do have come to an understanding that is in line with, not opposed to, the ideals of the academy.

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Below is our last post this time around. It’s been engaging and productive meeting many of you in blogland. Cheers from Fred and Deborah

***

The anthropological view of history we present in Yali’s Question is crucially unlike Diamond’s in its emphasis on what needs to be taken into account. Diamond, less by default than by design, denies significance to cultural differences—to particular, historically located visions of the desirable and the feasible. The dissimilarity in our approaches is clarified by what we make of Diamond’s book cover. This cover reproduces a large oil painting by John Everett Millais (1845) entitled “Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru.”

The painting, hanging in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, is part of a collection (begun in 1852) representing the various, often diverse, aesthetic currents of the Victorian age. In the center, Pizarro, sword in hand, is seizing a darkly handsome, grandly exotic Inca leader from his partially overturned palanquin. On the left are massed Spanish soldiers with a priest holding up a cross for their inspiration. In the right foreground, two Peruvian women and a child are clutching each other in fear. In the right somewhat blurred and darker background, Spanish soldiers are putting Peruvians to the sword. The painting (perhaps anticipating Millais’s later anti-Catholic work) seems directly critical of Spanish conquest. Certainly, this is the perspective of Joseph Kestner, who describes the picture (in the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies) as an “anti-Imperialist canvas during a decade of British expansionism and colonial defense” (1995: 55).

When we look at this painting and think about the place in which it hangs, we reflect on a particular and complex history—on the range of sensibilities and political perspectives that existed within this age dominated by capitalism and empire. However, when we look at this painting as it appears on the cover of Diamond’s book, we find it interesting because of the extent to which it is decontextualized, and we think, misunderstood. Rather than a historically located castigation of Spanish imperialism, it is offered as a synopsis of human history in general—a history of morally neutral conquest through the use of techniques and technologies of physical domination. In other words, from our anthropological perspective, we see Millais’s vision, itself critical of the dominant expansionist perspective of his age, transformed into a model that justifies as well as universalizes expansionism: one used to explain what happened to “everybody for the last 13,000 years” (1997: 9). Such a transformation of Millais’s critique of imperialism strikes us as consistent with Diamond’s position about the irrelevance of cultural and historical contexts in understanding what people do. Indeed, given Diamond’s view of history, the conquest that he (rather mechanistically) entitles “Collision at Cajamarca” (1997: 67), was inevitable. From his perspective, if it wasn’t Pizarro who had seized the Inca of Peru, it would have been some other European at some time. (more…)

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Diamond’s conflation between the necessary and the sufficient grows out of the link between his interest in “history’s broadest pattern” (1997: 420) and his determination to develop “human history as a science, on a par with acknowledged historical sciences such as astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology” (1997: 408). As he says, his book “attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years …. [and searches] for ultimate explanations … [that push] back the chain of historical causation as far as possible” (1997: 9). Crucial to this search for law like explanations that will generate long chains of causation back to first causes (chains of causation that even link mountain range formation to Yali’s quandary) is Diamond’s distinction between ultimate and proximate causes. Ultimate causes are those broadly applicable and pervasive forces, such as guns, germs, and steel. Diamond is interested in these causes because he thinks they are the ones which really drive history – both past and present. These ultimate causes shape derivative and more immediate occurrences, such as particular battles, conquests, economic systems. The effects of these more immediate occurrences, in turn, become proximate causes of yet other events.

Diamond’s view of an inevitable and inexorable course of human history, one driven by the operation of ultimate causes over the span of its 13,000-year course, rests (as some of you suggested in earlier postings) on what seems to us to be an implicit view of human nature. It is this human nature which, in his vision, keeps ultimate causes active and decisive throughout history. This is a view of human beings as necessarily leading lives so as to extract maximum advantage over others: give a guy—any guy—half a chance and he will conquer the world; give a guy a piece of appropriate metal and he will inevitably fashion a sword to cut you down; give a guy a piece of appropriate metal and he will inevitably fashion a chain to enslave you within the hold of a ship bound for a New World sugar plantation. In a way that many in the contemporary West find seemingly self-evident— in a way that does not problematize the way the world works—Diamond suggests that people everywhere and at all times, if they had sufficient power, would necessarily use it in seeking to maximize their own advantage through the domination of others. This implicit view of a trans-historical and trans-cultural human nature is consistent with Diamond’s explicit rendering of both historical context and cultural perspective as irrelevant. In fact, Diamond works hard to exclude such perspective and context from his scientific history.

Correspondingly, Diamond describes the rise of mercantilism and capitalism as only “proximate forces” in the course of world history (1997: 10). From his perspective, mercantilism and capitalism are just epiphenomena—just passing examples of history’s general law. From our perspective, however, mercantilism and capitalism provide particular historical contexts in which (and in different though related ways) expansionist conquest appears an especially desirable activity—and one made especially feasible by the availability of guns, germs, and steel. This is to say, rather than merely proximate causes of lives more fundamentally and inexorably determined, mercantilism and capitalism impel the use of guns, germs, and steel in particular manners for particular ends.

Mercantilism and capitalism have spurred people to be bold—to go to the ends of the earth if necessary—in a search for ever greater profits. They have justified the subjugation of the New World as well as parts of Africa. They have also authorized the creation of lucrative, slave-run plantations in the Caribbean whose profits sustained the lavish lifestyles of the absentee planters and whose sugar sustained (in nutritionally imbalanced sweet tea and treacle-smeared bread) the impoverished lives of the British workers—those who manufactured the guns, chains, and instruments of torture.

Thus, we see such lives and historical outcomes as made possible by (for instance) guns, germs, and steel but as importantly propelled and shaped by cultural visions of what was worth pursuing and at what cost: of winning favor from God and King, acquiring gold and silver, attaining certain lifestyles, or achieving national strength. However, where we see the likes of guns, germs, and steel as necessary but not sufficient causes of such lives, Diamond sees such lives—apparently all lives—as inevitably seeking as much conquest and domination as possible. For Diamond, in other words, the necessary is the sufficient. To have the power is to express the power; to have the power to dominate is to use it to dominate in the maximal way possible. Where we see human activities as propelled and shaped by historically located visions, Diamond sees these activities as determined (presumably) by hard wiring—as part of the biological nature of the human animal. In these regards, activities of conquest and domination are simply in the nature of things—just as, for instance, lions by virtue of their size and armament will inevitably slaughter lambs.

Where Diamond sees activities of conquest and domination as simply in the nature of things – as the inevitable outcome of human nature.—Raymond Kelly’s recent comprehensive analysis of the origins of human warfare provides a relevant and contrasting view of human nature and of inevitability. In this critique of the Hobbesian notion that there is a “trinity of interrelationship between human nature, war and the constitution of society” (Kelly, 2000: 121), he writes:

Warfare is an episodic feature of human history and prehistory observed at certain times and places but not others. Moreover, the vast majority of societies in which warfare does occur are characterized by the alteration of war and peace; there are relatively few societies—only about 6 percent—in which warfare is continual and peace almost unknown. It is only in this relatively small percentage of cases that something approaching a Hobbesian social condition of pervasive and unending warfare can be found. It might thus be said that it is “the nature of man” (or humankind) to conclude episodes of armed conflict between neighboring social groups by breaking off hostilities, by truce, and/or by reestablishing peaceful relations (Kelly, 2000: 124).

Kelly concludes:

The human propensity to peacemaking, so strikingly evident from the characteristic alteration between war and peace, is central to the nexus of interrelationships between human nature, war and society—and this bodes well for the future (2000: 161).

It is the case that Yali was poor and that the people of the New World were brutally conquered by representatives of the Old. It is also the case that those who beat up on other people have the capacity to do so. But are these facts inevitable by virtue either of the nature of history or the nature of humans? As Kelly indicates, human beings always are capable of a range of behaviors and they always are capable of engaging with each other and their neighbors in a range of ways. They might make war, but they also might make peace. Whether they choose one or the other is powerfully affected by particular historically and culturally located ideas about the desirable and the feasible.

To our position concerning history’s rootedness in human culture, rather than in human nature, we would add an emphatic stipulation. Since it has become clear to anthropologists that cultures contain multiple perspectives about alternatives and how they might be pursued and otherwise dealt with, it follows that human beings have a measure of choice about how to act. Thus, for instance, from American ideas of the worth of the individual, one can generate political perspectives as diverse as libertarianism and welfare statism, the first position holding that no individual should be interfered with or regulated, the other, that no individual should be neglected or deprived. The existence of such alternatives means that human beings may, realistically, be held accountable for the choices they make. We find this stipulation important both in combating Diamond’s general world history and in constructing an aspect of Papua New Guinea’s more particular one. Pizarro (for example) had the capacity and resources to behave with remarkable brutality in the New World—he had both the technology and will to conquer. But the mere capacity to behave brutally does not absolve him from having done so. Likewise, Europeans had the resources to treat Yali and other Papua New Guineans with contempt. But that position should not absolve them from having done so. Such considerations, we argue, are important in rethinking historical outcomes. Indeed, the haves may be prompted to do such rethinking themselves by recognizing that the have-nots may already have come to their own conclusions.

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As we suggested in our first posting, Yali and other PNGuineans became preoccupied with the refusal of many whites to recognize their full human-ness—to make blacks and whites equal players in the same history. In their efforts to establish the exchanges on which the elusive equality would be based, many PNGuineans sought, often through magical and ritual means, the European things—the “cargo”—that whites so evidently valued. It would be an error, however, to believe that it was the things alone that interested them. Rather, with these things, they hoped to become interesting and socially significant (exchange-worthy) to the Europeans.

In Road Belong Cargo, Lawrence describes the attempts of Yali and his neighbors to acquire this cargo with a definition of what is now known as the cargo cult:

“It is based on the natives’ belief that European goods (cargo)—ships, aircraft, trade articles, and military equipment—are not man-made but have to be obtained from a non-human or divine source. It expresses the followers’ dissatisfaction with their status in colonial society, which is to be improved imminently or eventually by the acquisition of new wealth. It has, therefore, a disruptive influence and is regarded by the …. Australian Administration … as one of the [its] most serious problems ” (1964: 1).

Deeply resenting their inferiority in colonial society, PNGuineans sought for decades to improve their status by gaining access to cargo. In fact, during Fred’s early PNG research in New Britain on the island of Karavar (in 1968 and 1972) local people remained preoccupied with gaining long denied respect from Europeans. In discussing their contemporary cargo activities (which focused on learning how to place an order such that a small payment would elicit a shipload of manufactured items), they described a history of their efforts to compel Europeans to recognize mutual human-ness. In particular, they referred to the “dog movement,” a series of meetings they held during the 1930’s. The question addressed with perplexity and anger at these meetings was why the Europeans persisted in treating them with contempt—driving them away, telling them to get out, as if they were unwelcome dogs. Through obtaining cargo, they sought to win European respect by having that which Europeans so obviously valued.

Over a considerable period of time, hence, PNGuineans frequently sought to acquire and master the ritual techniques by which Europeans accessed cargo. Influenced by Yali or other cargo-cult leaders, they tried a combination of recalcitrance and ritual experimentation. They interrupted and transformed normal routines: they refused to pay taxes, repudiated the directions of colonial administrators, established alternative governments, wrested theological control from missionaries, and mobilized villages, if not whole regions, in fervent invocation and prophesy.

Diamond, hence, misunderstands what many PNGuineans desired when he explains the background to Yali’s question (about the differences between white and black people). In Diamond’s words: “whites had arrived, imposed centralized government, and brought material goods whose value New Guineans instantly recognized, ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas. In New Guinea all these goods were referred to collectively as ‘cargo’” (1999: 14). Because Diamond misunderstands that Yali really was asking less about cargo per se than about colonial relationships between white and black people, he describes the introduction of centralized government as almost parenthetical to the indisputable fact that whites and their goods had arrived. Thus, he presents local resentment as directed not at the nature and use of concerted colonial power so much as at the differential access to goods.

We might also note here that in using the term “goods” Diamond implies that such items were inherently desirable—instantly recognizable as worth acquiring. In defining cargo as goods, Diamond suggests that local people will do whatever it takes to get such things: that in their desire for goods, local people are the agents of their own domination. In so doing, he displaces our attention from the nature of colonial power relations. These relationships are not vested in the “nature of things.” They are not inevitable because of the instantly recognized value of manufactured items. Instead, colonial relationships have been forcefully imposed, often to the resentment and resistance of local people.

PNGuineans such as Yali wanted cargo not because of its inherent and instantly recognizable value, but because of a desire to transform the relations of inequality between whites and blacks that were pervasive in colonialism. They wanted cargo primarily because they objected to the ways in which the centralized, colonial government used power and, correspondingly, diminished their relative worth.

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We have read with interest your responses to Jared Diamond’s book and TV series about Yali’s question and we thought in this first posting we could add to the conversation by telling you something about who Yali actually was and by beginning to tell you why we think Diamond got Yali’s question wrong. Although we never knew Yali ourselves, we worked in a part of coastal Papua New Guinea where he was politically active and, as well, read a lot about him in the anthropological literature (as he has long been a very famous man).

Some of what we have to say is inspired by Marilyn Strathern’s discussion of how Australian prospectors misunderstood the PNGuineans they met when they first entered the interior Highlands during the 1930’s. The Australians assumed that these PNGuineans were impressed with their complex technology—for example, their guns and steel. However, in Strathern’s view, possession of this novel technology initially marked these explorers as spirits, and from the perspectives of PNG Highlanders, the appearance of spirits among the living was extraordinary but ultimately not very important. Spirits, after all, would likely disappear without affecting social life very much. Only when Highlanders discovered that these Australians not only had large quantities of pearl shells but wished to transact with them did the Australians become plausibly human. Pearl shells, traded up from the coast, were for a long time central in the Highland exchanges through which marriages were contracted, compensation for death or injury was paid, and alliances were established. In other words, only when the Australians showed that they apparently valued what the Highlanders already valued and desired did the Highlanders regard them as interesting and socially significant. Only then could the Highlanders fit these otherwise strange and peripheral beings into their own ideas about full human beings: only then did they become persons with whom they could, and would want to, engage.

Of course, Yali’s, and other coastal groups, had a much longer history of European contact (often dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century). Yali, himself, had especially extensive contact with Europeans. He served as a policeman in New Guinea’s colonial administration before World War Two and as a member of the Allied Intelligence Service during the war. In fact, there is a photograph taken in 1944 in the Australian War Memorial archives commemorating his military service. In it, Yali is inside the Dace, an American submarine, together with other members of his company of intelligence-gathering “Coastwatchers.” In advance of a major Allied landing, Yali’s group of twelve—seven Europeans, one Indonesian translator, and four PNGuineans—was sent to Hollandia, then Dutch New Guinea, on a hazardous mission to gather strategic information. After the war, as a distinguished veteran, Yali embarked on a controversial political career, one which kept him in extensive contact with Europeans. Indeed, he was sent to Australia to learn European ways.

Yet, like for the Highlanders Strathern describes, Yali’s life and aspirations remained largely PNGuinean. He remained concerned less about the material attributes of things themselves than about the social uses to which things were put. For him and many other PNGuineans both then and now, things have value because they can be used in transactions to establish relationships of recognition and respect. They are more like gifts than commodities. They are exchanged to establish relationships of obligation, alliance, and friendship rather than to get “good deals.” Therefore, when Highlanders desired pearl shells, and they did desire them with a passionate intensity, it was not for the sake of the shells alone. Indeed, men acquired the coveted shells so as to be able to give them away at a later time.

Because the Highlanders were relatively inexperienced in European ways, they apparently thought that the prospectors were generous in offering them the coveted pearl shells that affirmed their fundamental worth—their shared humanity. In contrast, Yali’s coastal peoples had long before learned that the colonists were stingy, offering them only meager wages (often for plantation labor) that denied a common humanity. More than lots of stuff, they wanted (just a little) respect.

More later – about “cargo” and “cults.”

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Hi, everyone. And, thanks to Rex for his introduction of us. We’re happy to be here—and will begin to post as soon as we figure out how this software works.

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Hurricane Katrina Relief

If you haven’t already (and even if you have), please consider making a donation to the American Red Cross Hurricane 2005 Relief campaign.

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Academic Commons is a new “online forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education.” Just looking at it (and the whuffie of the person who supplied me the link) I am not sure whether it is suck or not suck. However, it is heartening that they have an interview with Jerry Graff above the fold on their front page—the same guy whose book I recently whole heartedly endorsed.

I’m going to pull a Cory Doctorow on this one and post the link after having looked at it for mere femtoseconds. So you tell me—suck or not suck?

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Kerim sent me a link to a short piece on Democracy Now on the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholarship Program (PRISP; noted earlier here at SM by Kerim). PRISP is a scholarship program which funds students studying languages or area studies inexchange for service to the CIA. Anthropologist Felix Moos, whose idea PRISP was, defends the program, while David Price opposes it. Unfortunately, the segment is way too short to even begin to scratch the surface of the debate over PRISP; for a more in-depth look, check out the Chronicle’s Q&A with Moos from March and David Price’s CounterPunch article, The CIA’s Campus Spies.

You’d expect me to have an opinion on this, and I do, but I’ll spare you the political posturing. What interests me here is the impact of PRISP in terms of disciplinary history, which is, I think, Price’s (among others) underlying concern. The history of anxiety over the intersection of anthropology and the military-intelligence complex dates back at least to Boas’ 1919 letter to The Nation, “Scientists as Spies”, but it was not until the Vietnam War that concerns over secrecy, and the potential of intelligence-related work to have serious consequences for both anthropologists and their subjects, became part of the mainstream in the discipline. Since then, though, American anthropologists have generally (though in no way entirely) rejected efforts by the state to build closer ties—though, it must be noted that over the same time period, the government has rarely reached out to anthropologists, so this commitment hasn’t been oft-tested.

A question which, in the heat of the Vietnam War, had serious on-the-ground consequences (as, for example, in anthropologists’ involvement in Thailand counter-insurgency efforts) has since developed into a concern for academic autonomy from the state (even as much of that autonomy was being “captured” by corporate interests), and it is here, I think, that PRISP presents a threat. Anthropologists have largely been worried about the uses of their data and conclusions by military and intelligence agencies, where anthropologists cannot control or temper how their information is used and interpreted. When publishing, we can impose a filter of sorts—pseudonyms, composite characters, selective reporting, etc.—which is a bit different from putting one’s self and one’s knowledge into the direct emply of the state. So most anthropologists (but again, far from all) have declined to work for the government in military-intelligence capacities.

PRISP seems like an end-run around that position—if the CIA can’t get anthropologists to work for them directly, PRISP places us indirectly in the CIA’s employ, as teachers of a new wave of intelligence-oriented area and language experts. While to a degree this has always been the case—anthropology BAs have long been considered good recruits for intelligence work—PRISP makes the arrangement explicit and foreordained.

This is what makes us nervous, I think—the idea that PRISP students will be in our classrooms, without our knowledge, not to learn anthropology as a discipline, and not to learn anthropology as part of a solid liberal arts education, but to glean from us whatever data and theories might be particularly useful in the field of intelligence. Ultimately, even those of us who are critical of US intelligence work will find ourselves perpetuating it—and our critiques falling on the deaf ears of PRISP students who know what side their bread is buttered on.

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David Barash, a psychologist at U of Washington, poses the fundamental question posed by Intelligent Design theories: if the universe is so well-designed, why are human bodies such a mess? We have bad backs, weak knees, prostates that have older men leaning against a wall for half an hour trying to take a leak, and birth canals routed through skeletal structures barely (and often not even barely) wide enough to fit a baby through. In his words:

...these and other incongruities testify to the contingent, unplanned, entirely natural nature of natural selection. We are profoundly imperfect, cobbled together rather then designed. And in these imperfections reside some of the best arguments for our equally profound natural-ness.

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