It has just come to me…

God (and versions thereof) is driving the train.

As we say here: no hay mal que por bien no venga

One last comment: as a painter -as well as an anthropologist- I just fear that adding new layers to the painting I will destroy its very grounds (which of course works differently whether one is using acrylics or oil, white zinc or white titanium, etc.)

End of my self-oriented postings! it’s so boring!

Are you familiar with the of Chicago sociologist Andrew Abbott? His Chaos of Disciplines examines the mechanisms by which disciplines fragment along lines defined by fractal recursive of methodological contrasts, quant versus qual, for example. In his Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences, he develops a model with a three dimensional space in which he locates five currently popular approaches to research: standard causal (large n statiscal research), small n (controlled comparisons, case-based quantitative approaches), historical and ethnographic accounts, and simulation. The relevant inference here is that if you write a paper with advocates of one approach in mind but send the paper to journal controlled by advocates of another, the paper is not likely to be published. The relevant considerations are, however, a bit more complex than a simple us versus them, qual versus quant hypothesis accounts for.

Hope this is helpful.

& I totally concur with: “On the other hand, a lot of them don’t seem to care when it comes to ignore or deform data from fieldwork so it will fit some pre-existing theory, turning everything into “a case of…”.

Sure: once I overcome the sort if phobia to re-read and rearrange previous works, I will give it another try!

“I was basically told: your article is not scientifically relevant because is basically wrong to compare politicians with Azande. A comparison shall be made differently; this one is based on incommensurable parameters”

I´ve been thinking about this for the past couple of days and I remembered that there is a review of Roy Wagner´s “The Invention of Culture” published in “Man” [New Series, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Dec., 1976)] that criticizes professor Wagner´s comparisons between the Daribi and America through a very interesting logic. The reviewer complains that professor Wagner “compares the cultures of diversified industrial society of over two hundred million people with a horticultural society of a few thousand in terms of contrasting systems of thought, with no reference to their different economies or historical contacts with other cultures.” The reviewer seems so concerned with these comparisons that he misses professor Wagner’s point.

I find it rather amusing how these comparative strategies of anthropological description seem disturbing to some of my colleagues, as if it was some kind of methodological failure. On the other hand, a lot of them don’t seem to care when it comes to ignore or deform data from fieldwork so it will fit some pre-existing theory, turning everything into “a case of…”.

So, will you try to publish your article again?

I thought about watching the discussion from the outside (feeling mildly uncomfortable to have my writings in the spotlight) but I thought should clear some dust concerning the place of “indigeneity” in HAU’s agenda. Possibly, some baffled responses arose because Rex assigned to read only the first few pages of the foreword. Here comes page xv:

“The large Editorial Board and list of eminent names that HAU boasts has a purpose beyond mere academic recognition: the board members are our reviewers, the first pool from which we draw the talents who assess the manuscripts and certify the journal‘s credentials beyond ―impact factors.‖ All members of HAU‘s Editorial Board have committed to review at least one manuscript per year for the journal, and in line with our goals to foster community and promote intellectual diversity across different traditions, we include scholars outside the North Atlantic and Anglo- Saxon academic juggernauts: Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Mongolia, Taiwan. More invitations are on their way as well plans for facilitating the submissions of manuscripts in several languages.”

The idea was that to engage in the production of an ethnographic theory we would need to include the perpective from non Euro-American anthropologies (here we were also inspired by Roy Wagner’s notion of ‘reverse anthropology’). So far we invited to HAU’s Editorial Board Hanan Sabea (American University, Cairo), Bum-Ochir Dulam (Mongolia), Katsuo Nawa (Japan), Paul Tapsell (Otago, NZ – and a native Maori), Amita Baviskar (India), Chen Bo and Wang Mingming (China), We invited all our EB members to submit their manuscripts and some of the above did or confirmed they will contribute. We also currently working to involve important actors in the production of local cultural knowledge in Melanesia, Amazonia (i.e. we have been trying to the elusive Davi Kopenawa a Yanomani Shaman co-author with Bruce Albert of La chute de chiel),

I was personally lucky in having teachers and mentors who highly valued the indigenous voice as quintessential _conceptual_data for the development of their styles of “ethnographic theory”. Examples include Caroline Humphrey (who also held the Rausing Chair of Collaborative Anthropology at Cambridge ) and her Shamans and Elders, written in collaboration with the Mongolian shaman Urgunge Onon, Stephen Gudeman and his methodology of ‘long conversations’, Roy Wagner and his idea of Reverse Anthropology, Marilyn Strathern and her concept of ‘Negative Strategies’.

On ethnographic theory, I haven’t much to add to the above and the clarifications given by David. I just want to convey the perspective on ethnographic theory of a very important voice and inspiring figure of HAU, Jeanne Favret-Saada (with her permission and the kind translation by Mylene Hengen).

After she responded enthusiastically to our proposal of joining the Editorial Board, I sent Jeanne Favret-Saada a personal letter outlining a highly theoretical engagement with her work on witchcraft in the French Bocage from the point of view of “topology” (Leach, Levi-Strauss petite mythologiques, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.). Well, here’s what she replied, it was a damn wake up call, like a bucket of icy water thrown straight at my face:

“Cher Giovanni,

Thank you for all the nice things you say about my work. I think my main virtue, all these years, was to not cede to call of the sirens: the structuralist, psychoanalytic, hermeneutic ones, etc. I just stick with what people had told or showed me in the Bocage, and try to represent it.

After HAU’s launch, I received another letter on the preface which I am transcribing hereunder since it provides a beautiful commentary to this discussion of the (re)opening of ethnographic theory

“Cher Giovanni,

I have just finished the foreword of Hau’s first issue: what a wonder! You project to tackle the entire history of anthropology without renouncing to infinite ethnographic detail, nor to what “our” favorite philosophers have brought (Deleuze, etc), in order to reflect upon and think it over, has completely seduced me. I myself proceeded in this matter in my work, but thinking that explicitly linking ethnographic themes with philosophical ones were out of my reach. Maybe it’s a question of epoch: I was a student of Deleuze, I participated to Foucalt’s book Moi, Pierre Rivière”, in other words, they were living people whose thinking moved all the time. You have the luck that they are now deceased authors, each one fixed in the little they managed to say, authorizing you to think what they had not yet said. When I speak in front of an audience of Freudians, I always maintain that my work on unwitching would surely have had Freud’s blessing, he whom we did not know and who confided, at the end of his life, that he would have liked to start it over again in order to study clairvoyance.

Let’s get back to the Foreword. I admire it’s consistency: it gives material to think over for a long time. But also: it’s complete absence of airs ; the desire to give the reader, in the issue, all the necessary texts to think over a subject in question (the “G” factor) ; the fact that these texts contain classics (Schneider) and groundbreaking works of classic authors (Leach) as well as contemporary ones (Strathern.) In short, it’s a whole that is as much monumental (thanks to the freedom allowed by a digital publication) as it is exciting. Old authors become new again, new contemporary scholars become classics. In sum, it incites ones to consider anthropological thought as something fundamentally alive and essential.

Giovanni, thank you to you and to your collaborators in this adventure, which I well hope will go beyond it’s fifth issue! We truly need it.

Je vous embrasse,

Jeanne

Indeed, thanks to all HAU’s Editorial Team, they’ve been really amazing. In case anyone is interested, we are launching a Call for Interns. Please do write editors@haujournal.org for more details.

And the whole ox-yoke element…

And the fact that attempts to ban the practice seem to have been largely inspired by British embarrassment when news of the practice reached places like France…

When I was researching Debt I ended up doing a little work on the old “bride-price” versus “bride-wealth” controversy in the 1920s. It turns out the League of Nations was debating whether to ban bride-price as a form of slavery (they were buying wives after all), and anthropologists like Evans-Pritchard successfully appealed to them not to, arguing, among other things, that one is not buying a woman if one cannot subsequently sell her. It was relevant to the book because I thought I had reason to believe that in ancient Mesopotamia, this came not to be true precisely because of debt contracts, in which family members could be effectively repossessed, but in the course of it, I discovered something remarkable. There is one place where a man could actually sell his wife – or at least, still could until roughly 1926 iirc. This was England! An English husband in principle had the right to sell off his wife at auction and there were cases of it in villages well into the 20th century. (True, they didn’t practice bridewealth. But they did sell their wives literally like oxen, when you hold the auction you were supposed to be a yoke on her and everything.)

It is facts like these which make me believe that there really are no Western Individuals, those supposedly non-exotic characters who operate by secular, liberal principles in a logico-experimental fashion (etc etc). They don’t really exist. We (and by “we” I include people in Ecuador or Siam incidentally) only become Western individuals, or the equivalent, when thinking or talking about customs and ideas we consider foreign or peculiar.

I see your “Bongo-Bongo” comments as a way to think this post on ethnographic theory as actually also in conversation with Jason’s “Taking Anthropology” post and some of the responses to it. Makes for an interesting synthesis.

Malinowski is our great prototype when it comes to how to play an effective role in contemporary debates. Argonauts of the Western Pacific challenges the assumptions of classical economics; Sex and Repression in Savage Society challenges Freud’s patriarchal assumptions; Coral Gardens and Their Magic develops a theory that, far from being confined to the Trobriands, points directly to the role of advertising in capitalist economies. Malinowski’s assertion that advertising is the modern world’s magic and his pointer to Dorothy Sayers’ murder mystery Murder Must Advertise is a marvelous illustration of how to bring the exotic home.

David Graeber’s piece on Shilluk Divine Kingship is very much in this great tradition. What could be more unsettling to a now conventional progressive view of the state as a tool of redistributive justice than to be reminded that states emerge from a fusion of predatory violence and utopian vision?

In this respect, neither Sahlin’s piece on Spartan diarchy nor Wagner’s on chess and kinship succeed as well. Both are fun for connoisseurs of anthropological thinking; but the arc that brings the message home as a comment on the anthropologist’s own society and how its members think about things is missing or obscure.

For those who worry about the exotic excluding work in the anthropologist’s own society, I would say that the art of the exotic is both the choice of subject and how it is presented. Phillippe Bourgois’ Selling Crack in the Barrio, Robert Dejarlais’ Shelter Blues and Gillian Tett’s Fools Gold all illustrate how powerful ethnography can be when Bongo-Bongo may be literally around the corner or in a nearby office building.

There are a few things that strike me as interesting in the previous comment which I think are relevant to this larger conversation of ET, especially relative to Rex’s comments about inluding indigenous anthropologists:

(1) What definition of place/space is being used in defining the alien and the exotic, as well as defining indigenous anthropology? This question is occasioned by John McCreery’s reference to Mary Douglas’ “not in Bongo-Bongo” so as to identify and understand “the observed realities that say to philosophers and other intellectual imperialists, “No, that isn’t the way it works here.”

What happens to this formulation of “not in Bongo-Bongo”–with its concomitant critique of cultural imperialism–if we consider the body and racial subject positions as ethnographic space/place? It seems that such a “not in Bongo-Bongo” critique was, implicitly, being made both in “Anthropology as White Public Space?” and in some of the responses to Jason’s post. (Including by Jason himself. But please correct me, Jason, if I am wrong). And this is why I see a direct and fundamental connection between Rex’s comments on indigenous anthropologists (and their perspectives), and Brodkin et al.’s comments about listening to anthropology’s internal others. 

(2) In the “not in Bongo-Bongo” reference, I also see a resonance relative to Rex’s comments about the limits of translation and cultural concepts:
“Ethnographic theory, on the other hand, wants to resist this easy assimilation. It wants to find the part of a concept which is untranslatable and use it as a jumping-off point for our own theoretical innovation. Instead of asking “how can we best translate this concept into our own system” it asks “how can we change our system so that it can understand this concept which resists classification”.

It seems that a similar point was being made in response to Jason’s ‘Taking Anthropology’ post. While these comments were ostensibly about race and racial subjectivity, I’d say they are also relevant to this discussion of ethnographic theory, especially in relation to the limits of translation across ethnographic space/place *broadly defined*.

Since I was the first to use the phrase, I think I was thinking of the Grand Tradition as detailed ethnographic description as a mode of engagement with larger questions, but also, engaging with the tradition of those who had done so before, and asking the kind of questions that have historically emerged from doing so. Like: do Shilluk really kill their kings? What does it mean that in so many African kingdoms people at least say that they do so…