All posts by Ozma

Art Imitates Life?

Edmund Wilson has been much in the press lately, because of a new “biography”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374113122/qid=1125531467/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-5680853-4509440?v=glance&s=books by Lewis M. Dabney. As it happens, I’ve been having an Edmund Wilson sort of summer. At the end of the spring semester I finally read To the Finland Station which was recommended to me years ago by my mom. I am ashamed to say I didn’t get around to reading it until I finally realized it was definitely not To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, which did not sound at all like my cup of tea (nor my mom’s, which made the recommendation seem all the more dubious and improbable). Result? A boffo point in the mater column and a big zero in the alma mater column. Years of graduate training laden with discussion of Marx and Marxism and nary a mention of Wilson’s amazing book on the man and his milieu! It’s true that Wilson doesn’t quite get Marx the theorist. But so what? Discussions of Marx the theorist are easily come by. What Wilson offers instead (and hoorah for that) is a hugely learned account of the social history from which Marxism emerged (ie, not the intellectual history of Hegel begat…) and of life as Marx and Engels and their families, friends, and lovers lived it.

Anyway, since then (and further inspired by some of the reviews of the new biography) I’ve gone on to O Canada (has an earning-his-keep magazine work feel throughout, unfortunately — but still interesting if you are interested in Canada of the 50s and early 60s) and Axel’s Castle in which I found these lovely paired descriptions, which brings me round again to anthropology:

“Anatole France was a popular writer: he aimed to be persuasive and intelligible – he used frankly to remind his secretary … ‘Leave to your reader the easy victory of seeing further than you.’ His books were sold on all the bookstalls of France and known all over the civilized world. …Whereas Paul Valéry disregards altogether the taste and intelligence of the ordinary reader: instead of allowing his reader the easy victory, he takes pride in outstripping him completely. And he is read chiefly by other writers or people with a special interest in literature… Paul Valéry has set himself … the task of reproducing by his very language all the complexities and confusions of our interacting sensations and ideas… When France turns away from literature, he occupies himself naturally with politics – he goes on the stump for Dreyfus, allies himself with the Socialist party, writes editorials for its paper, addresses meetings of working men and finally declares himself a Communist. But Valéry concerns himself little with politics… (1931: 88-89).

If a list of anthropologists scrolls through your mind at this juncture, you’ll probably be able to sort many of them into the “France” or the “Valéry” column. But not all of them, right?

Wilson sets up a compelling contrast between the two writers. You can feel that his sympathies are with France (and Wilson, who wrote widely and beautifully, is manifestly a writer of the France variety). But while Wilson condemns aspects of Valéry’s writing (and character), he also admires his artistic mission. It is clear, in fact, that Wilson thinks Valéry is the more important artist, even given that France and Valéry are very different kinds of writers. This is a small example of what is nice about Wilson’s writing –again and again, he takes apart a particular example in such a way that one is prompted to think about more general patterns. Isn’t this contrast between France and Valéry evocative of discussions we’ve had here about the public intellectual, the accessible writer, the spokesperson for anthropology versus the pointy-headed snoot, the abstruse theorizer, the politically ineffectual academic?

Wilson doesn’t say that one cannot choose between them — he suggests and in a way exemplifies that conclusion (thus giving the reader the “easy victory” of making the connection). While he writes as a France, he also generously acknowledges the accomplishments of Valéry, and thus makes room for both of their virtues. It’s a stance and a way of presenting that stance that is difficult to emulate, but always inspiring — in anthropology and outside of it.

Anthropology’s Guns, Germs, and Steel Problem

Kerim suggested Savage Minds mount a response to the recent “PBS special”:http://www.pbs.org/previews/gunsgermssteel/ (link courtesy of Kerim) on the theories of self-described polylingual polymath “Jared Diamond”:http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010805G.shtml (scroll down to “about the author”). Rex, our Melanesianist and thus an obvious choice to take up the task, was unfortunately departing for China just at that time. None of the rest of us leapt at the job, though we all conceded it was a worthy idea. Our collective reluctance points, I think, to anthropology’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393317552/qid=1122176923/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-8361077-2211200?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 problem.

Has this ever happened to you? You are at a party, or perhaps a family gathering, or maybe even just standing in line at the DMV when the person next to you strikes up a conversation. If they don’t start talking to you about Indiana Jones at the mention of anthropology, there is a fair chance they’ll bring up GG&S – expecting that you just love the book. Now you’re in a pickle. Diamond showily positions GG&S as the definitive anti-racist take on human history. If you say you don’t really care for it, your interlocutor is likely to get a slightly baffled look on her face. What could you possibly mean, you don’t like Diamond’s noble tome? Are you… a racist? To explain why you don’t like the book would take more time than most people making friendly small talk want to spend, and – worse yet – your explanation will necessarily impugn the motives of people who do like it, a group that you now know includes the person with whom you are speaking. My own usual reaction in such encounters is to say that unfortunately I have not read the book but that boy, it sure does sound interesting. Continue reading →

where the boys are

I don’t know if anyone else has heard this report, previously made and today vociferously defended on NPR and perhaps circulating elsewhere, about single moms producing fewer boys than partnered ones.

It seems a boffo exemplar of contemporary kinship anxiety.

The reported facts are as follows:
(1) Boys have always been born in slightly higher numbers than have girls
(2) Boy-baby pregnancies require a slightly higher energy investment on the part of the mother than do girl-baby pregnancies
(3) Recently, the boy/girl discrepancy has been dropping. There are still more boys born than girls, but not as many more
(4) Single moms contribute to this decline in the discrepancy — they are (supposedly) statistically less likely to have boys than are partnered moms.

The currently-circulating explanation is: somehow, humans are rapidly adapting to family instability; women’s bodies can “tell” if they haven’t got a male partner around to help out, they know it’s a big effort to produce a boy baby, and so they refuse to take any chances about male fetuses (or blastocysts, or implantation, or maybe even ovule friendliness toward Y chromosome sperm — the explanation part gets a bit hand-wavey here). To summarize: the bodies of single women are mysteriously inhospitable to male offspring.

The pop-cultural demographic take-home message, but of course, is: get out your tinfoil hats and await the parthenogenetic lesbian apocalypse.

But before we measure our heads for good fit, we might note that there is a gigantic black box in this explanation, capaciously enclosing the whole “how” part of the problem.

If all we need is an explanation that fits the available facts, with mystery clauses thrown in as necessary, I’ve got one, too — but I bet it won’t make the news.

It’s hard to see how energetics would operate any kind of constraining force, given that malnutrition is far less a problem for we moderns than it was for our ancestors. So let’s set the energetics aside. Although boy babies are energetically more difficult to carry to term than girl babies, they must be easier to successfully gestate in some other important ways — otherwise how to explain the ratio of boys to girls at birth, given the objectively 50/50 odds of conception? Working from this premise, one may as easily conclude (since we are unburdened by the need to offer any “how” account) that there is a positive rather than a negative message being received (mysteriously, of course) by single women’s bodies: “psst, you are in a position such that it is worth trying to bring off the rare girl rather than the more usual boy.”

Does this sound like a crackpot theory to you? Keep in mind it has as much to recommend it as does the reverse proposition, merely flipping the evaluative language.

The decline in boy babies is disturbing because of what it probably indicates about environmental contaminants. As for the single-mom part of the story, well — I can’t tell you why it is wrong, but I’ll happily offer a wager of $50 to the first taker that if will be thoroughly debunked within 5 years and probably much sooner. Unless that counts as internet gambling and could get Savage Minds in trouble, in which case I will satisfy myself with shaking my fist and intoning, Mark My Words. 😉

Anthropological Theory, Siglo XXI

Folks over at the Valve have been discussing a new collection of essays, Theory’s Empire : An Anthology of Dissent edited by Daphne Patai and Wilfrido Corral.

It’s prompted me to reflect — not for the first time — on how glad I am I went through grad school just after the high water mark of high theory. Some necessary battles were fought without my help, which suited me just fine, and I could approach the work of controversial scholars from the safe angle of necessity. That is to say, I never had to shout at my scholarly seniors “I’m going to my room to read Derrida and Foucault and there’s NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!!!!!” Instead, I read them because it was a given that one had to, and one could like or dislike them as one pleased without anybody getting very worked up about it.

A downside, however, was that the available paradigms felt a bit hoary. While writing my dissertation I got detoured in one chapter by my own critique of Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, which consisted in part in chiding him for using the format of a self-help manual. Then it occurred to me he probably meant it as a sort of joke; that anyway, who was I to be so cranky when I’d found it so useful; and that somehow, the darn thing had become a decade old since I’d “discovered” it two or three years after its publication.

In the end… I just couldn’t get that worked up about it. What excited me toward the end of my graduate career was perfectly straightforward work in political ecology and ecological economics. I still find that work very useful, and I am truly glad I’m not a battle-scarred veteran of the 80s. Still I wonder… why hasn’t a new generation of exhilirating theorists come along for my generation of scholars to fight about? Or have they, and I’ve just missed the boat?

Yanomami Referendum

Oops. I’d been thinking for several days that it seemed odd that the results of the referendum on rescinding the report of the El Dorado Task Force had not come out. I kept checking the AAA website — where, to my knowledge, they don’t appear in any obvious way — and finally decided to google search “yanomami referendum”.

Well, this is probably not news to many of you, but

“Members of the American Anthropological Association, weighing in on a dispute that has divided their discipline, voted 846 to 338 to rescind a controversial 2002 report on allegations of research misconduct by scholars studying the Yanomami people.”

This is from Inside Higher Ed.

I do belong to the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America but feelings about this have been so sore that there seems to be a collective decision not to discuss the issue at all on the listserv, thus I didn’t get the results from any flurry of discussion over there.

This outcome, while not surprising, is pretty saddening. First, doesn’t the AAA have something like 11,000 members? What a tiny turnout. And it’s not at all heartening that the association president herself — even now that the voting is over — refuses to say how she voted on it. Of course it’s her perfect right to keep her vote private, and I can imagine an argument for her not publicly stating her position before the vote. But why maintain silence even now?

I fear that the outcome recapitulates a contemporary disciplinary tendency: an incredible willingness to stake positions at an exalted, empyrean level and an utter refusal to say anything at all on small, messy, immediate issues except to ignore and/or dismiss them. For the record, I voted absolutely against the movement to rescind the report. The whole obfuscatory process that culminated in the effort to rescind reminded me of certain trends in U.S. public life — say, the discrediting of that 60 Minutes report about Bush’s national guard service on the basis of challenging the particular authenticity of certain documents rather than the substance of the report itself — and made me want to puke.

The only thing that makes me feel slightly cheered-up is the thought that with referendums like this one, a highly mobilized base can hijack the outcome. I hope this is what happened: that most people got what Rex has called “Yanomami fatigue”, stopped paying attention, and just sort of felt nonplussed by the time they got the ballot question (which was posed, in classic tricky-referendum form, as a double negative). Still, this vote is now a part of our disciplinary history, to our grave collective discredit.

Live 8: Naughty or Nice?

So I’d like to put a general theme of discussion here on SM to a concrete test: Live 8, naughty or nice?

I don’t work in Africa, but I do work in a HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Country), Bolivia. And many Savage Minds readers and participants obviously work on and think about issues of global inequality & the forms of mutual, ahem, recognition made possible and impossible by global inequality.

Over the weekend I watched a bit of TV coverage from the show in London (a city that has had quite a week…), and wasn’t at all sure how to feel about it. Or, to be more transparently honest, it’s the kind of thing for which I am a complete sucker but know I oughtn’t be.

Given the indubitably necessary and yet insufferably snarky anthropological literature of the past two decades, I know how to take Live 8 apart in a critical spirit. The trope of hapless Africa rescued by salvific Euroamerica. The unwarranted catharsis provided to a privileged audience by the spectacle itself. The cover given to the nasty machinations of the Man, recently manifested by G-8 leaders pretending their association exists only to help poor people and to watch out for the environment. Etc. etc.

On the other hand… well, I don’t guess I have to outline the “pro” side of the equation for anyone. Everyone involved vociferously and repeatedly made the case for the worthiness of the undertaking.

There are, of course, multiple other possibilities. One that comes to mind is that the whole thing was the last hurrah of anglophone imperialism, soon to be displaced by some combo of China/India/Brazil, so that Live 8 was a spectacle of another kind, ironically headlined by an (ex-colonial) Irishman, showily insisting upon the mighty benevolent potential of (mostly) England-and-the-United States just as they begin to slide under the domestic burden of their foreign adventures and have only to look forward to days ahead when they’ll be wanting a little external debt forgiveness of their own.

Who is to say. But to return to the point, I’ll state my position on Live 8: naughty AND nice. Does this make me a fatuous booby? Don’t hold back.

Look on the bright side of life?

I haven’t followed the case so I don’t know its outcome — perhaps some UK commentators can update us? — but an anthropological essay I find I have on the brain a lot these days is one written in 1999 by British anthropologist Alison Spedding. The full reference is at the end of this post; it was in Anthropology Today and I am not sure how to provide a universally accessible link.

At any rate, Spedding was writing from a Bolivian prison where she had been incarcerated (for 6 months at that point) on drug charges. Somehow under the conditions she managed to produce an amazingly thoughtful piece on the peculiarities of fieldwork. She writes of the “screen personality” we tend to adopt in the field — eating lamb flaps we don’t like, going to religious services we don’t believe in, nodding sympathetically to accounts of gender relations we’d condemn if they came from friends back home — and how impossible it was for her to maintain such a screen while in prison.

From there, she goes on to discuss the standard modality of ethnographic explanation: that “the apparent superstition is a reasonable way to understand the world, that what seems irrational is in fact entirely rational when one comprehends its context”. At the time of her writing, this mode wasn’t really working for her — when her fellow prisoners spent money on llama sacrifices and the like to influence the outcomes of their trials instead of using whatever funds they possessed to hire lawyers, she couldn’t help feeling it was basically counter-productive. And when women prisoners eagerly participated in the gender regimes of the prison routine she couldn’t help finding it, well, upsetting. The article ends on a rather despairing note (understandably). I can’t recreate its whole arc in this space but I highly recommend it.

So anyway — I thought about this article occasionally when I was writing my thesis, especially the bits on witchcraft. For all the structural rationales I could tease out about witchcraft discourse in the Bolivian community in which I carried out fieldwork, part of what motivated it seemed to be a kind of malicious glee. But mostly I ended up in the standard anthropological mode of explaining its relationship to social structure and so forth. Whatever, right? In the end I didn’t live in Isoso and neither I nor my loved ones would ever face witchcraft accusation.

However, living in the States the past few years I’ve started to get a bit of that ol’ Bolivian prison feeling. Of course my existence is quite cushy. But I mean in terms of hearing and being forced to live with rhetorics, discourses, regimes, practices — the lot — that I don’t want merely to understand/explain/analytically dissect. I don’t have a “screen personality” here — I’m me, and a lot of what is around me looks like flat-out meanness and stupidity. Are anthropologists allowed to say that? and having said it, then what?

article ref: Dreams of Leaving: Life in the Feminine Penitentiary Centre, Miraflores, La Paz, Bolivia, by A. L. Spedding
Anthropology Today (1999)

Journal Club

Something I have thought about since leaving graduate school is how theorists and ideas become influential. How, for example, did Taussig sweep the discipline in the late 80s and early 90s? How did that behemoth of a snowball get rolling? I wonder, because an odd feature of my graduate training was how little formal structure was in place to make sure we apprentice anthropologists were reading the current literature. Perhaps it was just me, but I felt that a lot more credit was awarded both in seminars and at parties for being able to trot out points from, say, the minor essays of Rodney Needham than for having something to say about the latest issue of AE. And again, it may just have been me but I only started paying close attention to disciplinary journals and the differences between them toward the end of my grad school sojourn — that is, as I started to think about trying to publish myself. I definitely felt that I had to figure a lot of it out on my own — what it meant for something to be a “Cultural Anthropology” sort of an article and so forth.

It’s made me remember something I used to hear about as an undergrad bio major: “Journal Club”. No, the first rule of Journal Club was not don’t talk about Journal Club 😉 I never went, but it seemed to be something that grad students had to attend — ie, though it was called a “club” it was a formal part of their training — and at which what they did was discuss the latest articles in the major journals. Doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea, and I wonder why we anthros don’t do it (or maybe other schools do, and only mine didn’t). It seems peculiar, in retrospect, that this kind of thing — the peer-reviewed best of our own collective research results, hot off the presses — wasn’t more at the heart of our formal training. So my queries are: is it a formal part of trainng at other schools? If not, why not? And, to return to the start, how does new research and how do new researchers become “hot”?