That is a small burn at the bottom of the cover of my copy of Discourses. No doubt from a flying ember sparked in the firepit of my fieldhouse. Since I was welcomed to the field by all kinds of spooky stuff (rumors of witchcraft and ghostly goings on), perhaps my mind turned to the Ivy text because of its thematics of ‘haunting.’ Yes, I read the book by lamplight. I had first encountered Discourses in Vincanne Adams’ “Transnational Culture and Power” seminar at Princeton way back in Spring 1995. I re-read it in the field in 2000. But it wasn’t exactly ‘phantasm’ that drew me back to a text that had initially struck me (and apparently Kelly & Kaplan) as difficult and unclear. It was specifically the idea of ‘vanishing.’ For in my fieldsite, men kept making a rather startling claim: they were [bodily] shrinking (see especially the work of Jeffrey Clark, among others).

I went to the field with just a few texts, all of them Melanesian ethnographies, and no novels. I remembered one colleague telling me that he only brought a ‘linguistics handbook’ or something like that to the field with him, noting that anthropologists in the field too often spend time reading and not enough time interacting. Once in the field, the notion struck me as absurd: I desperately wanted something to release me from interaction. So I wrote home to ask for some books. Among them, two complementary texts: Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and the Ivy monograph.

I got to thinking about Ivy as I contemplated the persistent claim amongst many of my informants that their ‘culture’ is ‘dying’ (a notion that was sometimes expressed in English: as in the sentence, “Our culture is dying”). I had been trained to be critical of such claims and to note that while my informants observed that their lives were fundamentally transformed, even ruptured, I could see that their culture was still being reproduced (see Robbins & Wardlow). The crux of my present work lies at the impasse presented by the juxtaposition of claims to cultural demise and anthropological faith in the integrity of culture. This is not at all a new problem for anthropologists. I like ‘modernity’ because it helps me to think about it.

Looping back to my previous post and taking a short detour: When the imposition of market capitalism, commodified wage-labor, and state sovereignty go hand-in-hand with missionization or revivalist and enthusiastic Christianity, are we forced to reassess what we mean by modern? When contemporary social orders line up with some aspects of modernity (rationalization of government and economy) but not others (secularization, disenchantment), do we thereby understand that “global modernity” is necessarily self-contradictory, oxymoronic? Is it perhaps consequently plural and local? Vernacular? Alter/native?

How does the presence or absence of any particular sociocultural trait in any particular locale disrupt or augment the analytic power of modernity? Arguing that the absence of a diacritically “modern” trait in any contemporary context disrupts the generalizability or the abstract analytic force of ‘modernity’ I think ends up reinscribing the very ‘meta-narrative’ of modernity it is intended to criticize (but I definitely do not thereby agree with Englund & Leach). I don’t think Pentecostal Christianity in New Guinea means that New Guineans are alternatively modern or that modernity for them is local. Why not? I hastily (bloggingly) sketch some thoughts. There is a thread here (imho).

• Alas: you’ve heard it all before. Just about any recent discussion (including no doubt this one) of ‘modernity’ in anthropology and the social sciences was prefigured and reviewed in Tipps’ article “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective” (as Kelly & Kaplan point out).
• Nevertheless: Englund & Leach suggest that analyses of a Comaroffian variety — emphasizing political economy plus malcontent about it — replace actual ethnographic analysis with a misleading meta-narrative; the content and contexts of peoples lives is presupposed rather than researched when ideas like “creeping commodification” account for such things as “occult economies.” (See Robert Foster’s excellent [Giddens-inspired] discussion in the Knauft volume.) They suggest instead that the context of people’s concerns be read off of their own actions and statements about the world.
• E & L accuse authors such as Brad Weiss of unconsciously or implicitly reproducing a ‘story about’ modernity rather than analyzing intricacies of social life. This raises a few complaints on my part: 1) Talking about ‘commodities’ doesn’t leave the meta-narrative unacknowledged. To the contrary: it points right at it. That’s the whole point. 2) E & L, on the evidence of their own ethnography, disallow the global or the modern as a salient context of people’s concerns. It appears to me that it is they who wish to constrain salient contexts, not those anthropologists who find relevant relations beyond the ‘local’ or the ‘native.’ 3) I wonder what they make of the use of the commodity construct in Gender of the Gift. 4) A quite classic narrative of post/modernity provides the substance of Strathern’s critique in After Nature (see Faubion’s review). Does After Nature reproduce the meta-narrative we should be trashing?
• So: What do we do when people reflexively and explicitly invoke, say, ‘Rome’ or ‘Washington D.C.’ as relevant contexts for their actions in the world? What do we do with indigenous claims of rupture? Of loss? Of decline? Whether on the Rai Coast or in the Asaro valley, the collapse of the plantation economy in Papua New Guinea has left people with a palpable sense of promises unkept, and of hopes dashed. Coffee growers in PNG well know that events in Vietnam and Brazil impinge upon their lives. Do I mistake their concern with transnational coffee markets as a metanarrative about global capitalism? In fact, flux in the price of their major source of cash income contributes directly to the palpable sense of despair about (lack of) development from which people suffer.
• I am well aware of the legacy of anthropologists’ imputations of ‘culture loss’ to the people they have studied and the mispercpetions that such imputation sometimes engendered (as, for example, in accounting for population decrease by claiming that people were too dejected to want to reproduce). As Strathern notes for the great Torres Strait expedition of 1898: “The members… took a great sense of loss with them, although as they saw it, it was the Melanesians who were suffering loss, loss of population and loss of culture. They were certainly anxious to record, as fully as possible, activities they thought were bound to diminish even further. It was the organiser, Alfred Haddon, who is credited with borrowing from natural history the term ‘fieldwork’ itself” (Property, Substance, Effect, pg. 2). Far from abandoning this legacy of loss, however, I think anthropologists should simply make explicit the elegiac structure of their knowledge.

There are cultural correlates for the sense of loss that informs the lives of the people I work with in PNG: certain conjunctural structures which I work to detail in my ethnogrpahic writing. I nevertheless name this loss ‘modernity’ and thereby probably fall into the ‘dichotomous approach’ according to Tipps’ classification of approaches. What some call ‘indigenisation’ I call ‘incomplete loss’ and I am working to model that loss that cannot be completed. That’s just exactly why I find Ivy’s work interesting. To quote:

…to assert Japanese modernity is not an unambiguous task [sounding sublime!]. Correlated with the historically located transformations that have accompanied the rise of capitalism and nation-statehood in the twentieth century, modernity implies a structure of consciousness and subjectivity with a peculiar relationship to temporality, one in which continuity (the continuity of ‘tradition,’ for example) can never be taken for granted wit hthe upheavals of capitalist commodity relations. Places of origins, displaced, subsist as traces of loss that reinfiltrate modernity’s present, in Japan as elsewhere… these losses emerge as actively troublesome to rationalized orders of things (p. 242).

Rather uncanny how the uncanny keeps reappearing in fancy anthropological writing. What is striking for me in much of the ‘discourse’ (ugh! I try to avoid that term) about loss in PNG is that while people often point to broad contexts of transformation as contributing to their present ‘unhappy consciousness,’ they just as often point to their own putative failings for contributing to the decay. This claim often has a raced cast to it (and, again, see Robbins, “On Reading ‘World News,'” Social Analysis 42(2) — an absolute must read). And so, channeling Ivy, or riffing, I quote my own paper from the AAA this year:

The relativizing effects of processes of rationalization and disenchantment – those effects that lead people to perceive themselves as having ‘beliefs’ and, concomitantly, ‘doubts’ (Faubion 1988; see Weber 1946) – seem almost always to precipitate the perception of loss. Modern social narratives require figures of disappearance, backsliding, and decline for their articulation; progress is understood through contrast. But while modernity understood as progress may elicit the past as traditional and backwards, it also produces nostalgia for it. In evoking or creating the past that it has supposedly superseded, modernist thought suggests that nothing is ever as good as it used to be – “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” an idea as evidently prevalent in rural PNG as it is in, say, Detroit. The past that is repressed by the twin modernist tropes of pathology and progress is destined to return in idealized form, challenging the very values that repudiate it (Gaonkar 1999:2-10; Boym 2001:3-32). And as modernity elicits notions of decline as a feature of “societies” or “races” (for example, in nineteenth century narratives of degeneration in Europe, see Pick 1989) it also inflects subjects with notions of morality that assess personal worth in terms of progress. Such constructions render decrepitude as an internal failing: people who do not ‘develop’ see themselves as responsible for their own decline. I reiterate the topoi of modern problematics, their sites: ‘culture’ and ‘the self’ (Faubion 1988; Gaonkar 1999).

So it is along these lines that I have found reading Ivy (and Murakami I must add!) productive. (See previous posts on nostalgia too.) Re-reading this particular post, scanning quickly for typos, I see that I take some turns that to me make perfect sense but that might be question-begging for those readers patient enough to have made it this far. Anticipating those confusions, I say simply: stay tuned.