Comments on: Writing with Love and Hate /2015/11/30/writing-with-love-and-hate/ Notes and Queries in Anthropology Fri, 08 Dec 2017 18:00:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1 By: John McCreery /2015/11/30/writing-with-love-and-hate/comment-page-1/#comment-839022 Wed, 09 Dec 2015 06:11:55 +0000 /?p=18527#comment-839022 Isn’t our first responsibility to look a thing full in its face and call it by name?

No. Our first responsibility is to look as deeply and broadly as we can, withholding judgment and asking what the names that leap to mind conceal. Only then can we add something worth knowing to the sum of human knowledge.

]]> By: Lee Drummond /2015/11/30/writing-with-love-and-hate/comment-page-1/#comment-839008 Sat, 05 Dec 2015 20:32:51 +0000 /?p=18527#comment-839008 Nietzsche and Naipaul. Hard to find writers – and thinkers – better suited to serve as inspirations and models for anthropologists who have discovered that writing as anthropologists is not particularly successful in rendering the truth of lives one has intruded upon. Kudos for that observation / connection.
But, love and hate – that’s a complicating wrinkle. That combination of basic feelings spells ambivalence, which may well be the natural state of an intellectual. You find aspects of N and N meritorious, a style of thinking and writing you wish to emulate, and yet some of their ideas are, well, how shall we characterize them, distasteful, uncomfortable in today’s world of safe places and ideologically well-scrubbed ideas.
Although admiring his brilliant writing, you include Naipaul in your long list of “hates.” Why? Well, it appears, because he says not so nice things about social arrangements he has observed (NOTE: “observed” as any ethnographer does) in India. Two big problems here. First, Naipaul doesn’t just drop into India like a third-year Cambridge graduate student (from either side of the Atlantic); India was the birthplace of his ancestors. On his “return” he seeks to know whence he came. There he exercises his superb novelist’s eye and ear, as he has in the Caribbean, Africa, Indonesia, Britain. Can you tell us the name(s) of any anthropologist/s who have addressed such a wide swath of humankind? And done so with such consummate mastery? I can’t think of a one. Naipaul is as close as we come to a universal ethnographer. Second, your hatred seems too like that of cookie-cutter liberals and the Nobel Prize committee who have found alarming ideas in Naipaul’s works: Oh dear, he doesn’t say nice things, soulful things about the lives of people in those Other parts of the world. Year after year the Nobel committee struggled to come up with some writer who was, oh so feeling, oh so sympathetic with Third World peoples. Virtually unknown writers, to be sure, but at least their hearts were in the right place and – most important here – they delivered a message eminently palatable to the literati powers-that-be. But alas, the Nobel folks ran out of candidates; they finally had to anoint Naipaul.
As anthropologists we should be better than that. The profound connection between Nietzsche and Naipaul is that both looked around them – as anthropologists are supposed to do – and saw a horror show about to happen. For Nietzsche that horror show was anti-Semitism and World War I, for Naipaul, well, the jury is still out . . . but the future is pretty scary. You find Naipaul’s accounts distasteful; well, perhaps that’s because much of contemporary existence is distasteful, to the point of being diseased. I suggest we think of Naipaul as a pathologist of the social. The medical pathologist studies diseased organisms with an aim to describe them in detail and, just perhaps, suggest a means of treatment. Why should we fault Naipaul, along with other writers – Franz Fanon, Tom Wolfe, Peter Matthiessen, Albert Camus, Studs Terkel, Camille Paglia, Joseph Wambaugh – who conduct in magisterial prose, a pathologist’s study of the society, the lives, they find around them? Isn’t our first responsibility to look a thing full in its face and call it by name? Can’t the cultural anthropologist follow the exemplary models of Nietzsche and Naipaul and become a cultural pathologist?

]]> By: What We’re Reading: Week of Nov. 28th | JHIBlog /2015/11/30/writing-with-love-and-hate/comment-page-1/#comment-839007 Sat, 05 Dec 2015 15:40:09 +0000 /?p=18527#comment-839007 […] Singh, “Writing with Love and Hate” (Savage […]

]]> By: johnmccreery /2015/11/30/writing-with-love-and-hate/comment-page-1/#comment-838998 Wed, 02 Dec 2015 07:21:14 +0000 /?p=18527#comment-838998 To be able to write like this is a gift. To share it is to bestow grace.

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