I’m working on the manuscript for my book about Papua New Guinea (publishers reading this: it rocks and, as you can see, I’ve got ‘platform’. This could be the start of a beautiful relationship.) but would welcome some help with the terminology. The basic theoretical goal of the book is to combine in one framework two projects typically considered separate: 1) an analysis and decomposition of taken-for granted actors like companies, states, etc. and 2) a history of how indigenous identities solidify when exposed to said taken-for granted actors (‘ethnogenesis’). So I am starting from the top and working down in the one case and starting from the bottom and working up, as it were. There will be some sort of synthesis of Latour, Silverstein/Hanks, and the Book of Psalms involving the trope of ‘Leviathans’.
However, I am having trouble trying to choose a single term to designate ‘taken-for granted actors’. So far I have the following list:
Collective subjectivities (Sahlins)
Big actors (Callon and Latour)
Macroactors (lots of people)
Social totalities (Rumsey)
Collective actors (lots of people)
Leviathans (evocative, but imprecise)
Corporate actors (body metaphor + corporation as in ‘business’)
Ok that’s all I can think of for now.
At some point I am going to have to choose one and stick with it. I am dealing with hoary problems here. Anyone like one term over the other, or have any advice on which I should choose?
Could you give a more complete list of the taken-for-granted corporate collective actors?
I rather like “collective subjectivities”. The term “subjectivity” seems, to me, to imply the intentionality of their actions, as well as defining the indigenous groups as “objects” relative to them.
savage hearts and minds.
duh.
Ethnogenesis? Papua New Guinea? I remember writing a PhD. and few books and articles on this. Glad to send you citations if you’re interested.
Of the ones you list, I kind of like corporate actors. But what do you gain and lose by calling them actors? Makes it sound like they are uniform in action and intention. Seems like the ethnographic moment would be about how they are complex, and composed of contradictory parts/initiatives. So, maybe you want to find your own term that doesn’t reify them into a singularity?
Ken
PS. Send it on!
‘Corporate’ is a rich term and would allow you to cross-over the transnat capitalist thing with the Melanesian thing in a rather classic fashion (cf. ‘bigmen and business,’ ‘Melanesian managers,’ and so on).
I was gonna say something about ‘assemblage’ here but then realized that you know, by the time your book comes out, the fashion cycle will have turned a notch or two, and assemblage will seem very, well, last year actually. I personally like the idiosyncracy of ‘Leviathans’– ‘evocative but imprecise’ is exactly what makes contemporary theoretical neologisms take hold and get cited {and often enough such neologisms consist principally in re-branding someone else’s insight as one’s own (see “below”:/2008/02/29/the-true-paternity-of-the-habitus/ on Panofksy/Bourdieu)}… I think there is more ™-ability in that term than in the others you mention.
I like Leviathans too. It has a certain enjoyability e.g. I may be tempted to fall on my pencil after a chapter repeating ‘collective subjectivities’, but I’d probably feel much perkier after a chapter repeating ‘Leviathans’! Plus, it connects to and reinforces your synthesis.
That said, if your head is filled with the word ‘actors’, would you have difficulty changing?
Big actors, for the pure and simple reason that I like Orwell’s rule: “Never use a long word where a short one will do”.
Well, apparently “Big acting is back with an enthusiasm not seen since the 70s”:http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2235026,00.html . 😉
yeah, ‘leviathans’ or ‘corporate somethings’ are both potentially good for the reasons mentioned. The problem with anything involving ‘actors’ or ‘subjectivities,’ as i see it, is they both presume what they ought to be interrogating: how do these things represented as corporate act, think, feel, function, cohere, not cohere, etc?
imo, Leviathan points to scaling, individual actors adding up to the larger social body, it’s clearly a bottom-up concept, no? Whereas corporate bodies can grow from the head. Which aspect is stronger, the “taken for grantedness,” or the agency? And who’s doing the taking for granted? Scholars past, or the people they/you study? Perhaps some of those off-beat questions might be of use.
Thanks for the comments all! Sounds like ‘corporate actors’ or ‘Leviathans’ is ahead atm.
The dissertation is focused basically on two ‘corporate actors’ — ‘The Ipili’ as an ethnic group and ‘the Porgera gold mine’, a huge open cut operation which operates on (some of their) land. The punchline is that ‘the Ipili’ seems problematic — who are the ‘real leaders’ and the ‘true landowners’ who really speaks ‘for the clan’ in negotiations. Meanwhile the transnational company operating the mine with thousands of employees and logistics spread out all over the world seems unproblematically to be ‘the mine’.
So the irony is that it is the more-or-less locally bounded group with ties of kinship and affinity that people think is problematic, whereas the huge organization held together by wages rather than a depth of face to face shared experience is somehow seen as obviously ‘existing’.
So, to answer Ken’s question, _yes_ the goal is to do a symmetrical analysis and decompose the taken for granted actor back into its component networks. I just need a name for what I’m decomposing, and I’m betting that ‘retro’ is fashion forward and the Psalmist is the new Ong and Collier 🙂
Oh and Hal, thanks for your comment — I’m familiar with your work, both in PNG and NZ.
Of course, you could always use NGO-speak and say ‘stakeholders.’ What the heck are ‘stakeholders’ anywhoo? (And, what are ‘best practices’?)
PLEASE do an analysis of the use of the term ‘stakeholders’ in this local people and big corporations interacting work of yours.
it’s a good project, rex, and i’ve read parts of the diss, which i also liked. the word ‘corporate’ is great because of it’s many valences, but i still don’t think that ‘actors’ does what you want it to do(although i always find the latour stuff on macro-actors to be illuminating). the entities you’re talking about are represented as corporate actors but, of course, they don’t necessarily ‘act’ that way. i know that it’s not what you want to mean, but to my ears, ‘corporate actors’ conjures something a little too lock-step.
how about simply “collectivities”–possibly modified into “collective actor” when that’s what they are doing. A term which has a (possibly relevant) semi-local use in Australian IRB guidelines:
http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/publications/humans/part8.htm
i second ken’s and strong’s comments above. however, i couldn’t resist suggesting yet another catchy term, in the form of “conglomerates” (using the geological intonations of this term, you gain an image whereby individual stones or sediments are cemented together- perhaps accentuating the point that these kinds of ‘actors’ often look the same from the vantage point of the individuals not directly in the networks). in order to emphasize the juxtaposition with rootedness vis a vis kinship/place, you could add on “unmoored,” “floating,” or “para.”
Sean M — Well it seems to me that ‘actors’ is what I want because they are constantly being described as ‘doing’ things: signing agreements, sueing each other, pursuing sustainable outcomes for all ‘stakeholders’ etc. I’m fascinated by the way that complex histories of interpersonal negotiations ‘up in the valley’ are translated into ‘The Ipili and the Mine signed an agreement’ when they are recontextualized in Port Moresby (or on the Internet)
My vote is for Leviathans – it ensures I will remember your book, and it has a great literary pedigree. Whatever you might lose in analytical precision you gain in style.
Hi Rex,
Big problem here–the Leviathan doesn’t just come from the Psalms, and was most certainly neither created nor configured by the “Psalmist” (an authorial concept almost as incoherent as “the emailer”). Discourse about the Leviathan as a monster that threatens to overwhelm the world or prevent its beginning appears in a few Psalms (Pss. 74 and 89 are the best examples) but also Isaiah 51, Habbakkuk, Job, and others. It’s a whole discourse in the Hebrew Bible and Revelation. The single best thing on this is still probably Gunkel’s Schoepfung und Chaos, which has finally appeared convenientaly as Creation and Chaos.
As you and I both noticed, there is a huge shift whereby the creature that the king’s patron god must defeat to enthrone the king (and here Psalm 89 has a West Semitic genealogy that goes back over 1000 years, to the Mari texts of 1800 BCE–happy to provide references) BECOMES the state.
I imagine you’re ahead of me here, but was Hobbes’ reconfiguration of the idea as radical as it seems at first glance, or is there a step-by-step transformation?
Seth — that’s not a ‘big problem’ it is me taking a shortcut in a blog entry. Chill 🙂 I’m perfectly familiar with the work on Mari, etc. etc.
Just don’t want you to do a more recondite Jared Diamond here, buddy. I’m happy to take your arguments on faith, since they’re not supposed to be put forth in detail here. But there are dangers when you don’t handle any of the premodern languages and are talking about nearly 4,000 years of political theory, not all of which is well-explained in the non-technical literature. I’ve seen anthropologists radically flatten history and culture outside of modernity (“The Sadness of Sweetness” is brilliant on its own terms but by itself doesn’t demonstrate much). I mean, as hip as people are to the “”modern”” chronotope, there’s no substitute for extensive first-hand contact with the texts of premodern cultures.
What you’re doing in connecting Old Babylonian Mari to exilic Israel to Hobbes is crucial, but requires you be very explicit and thoughtful about how you contextualize. I have confidence you’ll do it. However the downside is potentially lots worse than if claimed to be ‘perfectly familiar’ with PNG if I knew that during the modern period there were colonialists, lots of languages, and mines. But the upside looks pretty great.
I think I’ve already sent you this link once:
http://manao.manoa.hawaii.edu/92/
But I’ll send it again.
I appreciate your concern that people not just throw ideas around randomly. Although that said, I think what we may be doing here is arguing about what exactly the appropriate level of persnickitiness ought to be. While anthropologists have always been suckers for detail, we will probably never please the philologists, and that may be due less to my own ignorance (which I agree is certainly one explanation) and more to do with disciplinary preferences in re: persnickitiness.
My two cents:
I quite like Leviathan also (I especially like the image of its skin stretched out over the multitudes like a canopy), although it also evokes for me (but maybe not for everyone) a valence of threat (also Hobbesian?)–the leviathan also *swallows* people. (See Book of Job 3:8, ‘May those who curse days curse that day, those who are ready to rouse leviathan.’) So I suppose this works depending on the valence you want to give your actor-units.
I would also like to second ‘conglomerate’, which would offer, as Crystal points out, a rich geological metaphor (while also alluding to business/economy). A conglomerate, for example, is a composite substance amassed and united in an aqueous solution; an agglomerate, its interesting counterpart, is such a substance united by heat (like volcanic rock). This might go some way towards incorporating notions of heterogeneity and multiplicity (if that’s what you want to do).
A final question: must you find a single/singular term and use it throughout? This makes sense, I think, if you’re interested in theory-building; but if you’re looking merely to find a way to refer to these entities, why rely on a single term that runs that risk of being blown out of proportion?