Comments on: Traction and Feasibility

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Advantages of a Low Sun

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:44:36 +0000

[…] Helsinki has hosted some dynamite scholars in the past few months. Among them are: Riwanto Tirtosudarno, Alexander Edmonds, Eva Berglund, Michael F. Brown, and Anna Lowehaupt Tsing. Among my responsibilities as a junior (read: green) lecturer has been to organize our annual colloquia. I have ‘branded’ our colloquial inquiries this year under the theme “Indigeneity on the Global Scene.” We have been involved in discussions as diverse as: the government of culture (formal [state/economic] recognition of systems of meaning as a mode and means of assuring proper respect and recompense for the marginalized), forms through which indigenous activism appears vis-a-vis the nation-state, the problem of culture loss in the midst of globalization, and the earth itself as the ground on which people create and re-create themselves (as the surface that provides traction, and see Rex here on SM on Tsing). […]

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Making ‘The State’ feasible

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 02:00:14 +0000

[…] A bit ago I posted an entry on traction and feasibility and was about to do a follow up when I got distracted by crispiness and Latour. But there was a circle I was going to close there and so I thought I’d do it now. […]

By: Strong

Strong — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 07:31:17 +0000

I was thinking about this post last night, and wondering how feasability interesects with a couple of other key terms in anthropological conversations about states: legibility and recognition. Your notion of ‘feasability’ seems to me interestingly materialist (grounded, literally) in relation to some of the discourse-centered theorizing of the quandaries (and ‘cunning’) of political recognition for indigenous peoples. Something in what you wrote also made me remember Scott’s ‘seeing like a state’ and in fact, Max Weber: is the construction of the Ipili a rationalization of culture?

I am wondering about ethnonyms across the highlands and where they are or are not salient. Dano-speakers in the Asaro valley, for example, don’t really have a ‘we are the X’. It’s more a place-oriented language (so-and-so comes from X). I’m wondering about regional cosmologies (as opposed to states) in the creation of proto-ethnicities, and in particular, about Huli cosmology in relation to Ipili understandings of their identity and cultural distinctiveness.

Regarding Chanel. My oblique comment was meant to point to extra-linguistic phenomena that one might model notions of communicative competence and so on after, viz. the body.

By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 16:35:34 +0000

You know, I’ve been thining about the ancient Middle East pretty seriously recently but until Seth’s post it never really occurred to me but… Fried’s model of tribal formation fits the picture of what Seth is working on pretty well! Fried’s argument is that ‘tribes’ are not a social form that preexist states, but form on the periphery of them in response to the economic and political demands of empires dealing with their peripheries. Crazy eh. Or perhaps I just don’t know enough this area to really to know whether the model works here or not.

By: Strong

Strong — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:24:48 +0000

An oblique comment.

Once when Gail Kelly and I were having lunch at Vietnam’s Pearl (in downtown Portland, I’m sure I order mock chicken), our waitress was wearing really fabulous strappy shoes (they had like a two inch cork platform or something) and a Chanel belt. GK said to me confidentially at some point over the course of the lunch: “We know that’s not real Chanel.”

By: Seth

Seth — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 04:45:00 +0000

This is the best description of your diss I’ve seen, and I attended the defense! Then again, since I’m finishing a book on the Invention of Hebrew and the Formation of Ancient Israel, ethnogenesis within semiosis is the pitch my brain resonates to…