Just got my most recent issue of American Ethnologist which contains a great array of papers and commentary (an “AE Forum”) on the problem of IRBs in ethnographic research. From what I can tell, the articles all take a pretty hard line on the intrusion of the “biomedical model” and its inappropriateness for ethnographic research. Articles by Rena Lederman, Daniel Bradburd, Richard Schweder, and a great article by ethnographic sociologist Jack Katz, whose work I often use in my Fieldwork Methods class. I’d love to have a wide-ranging discussion of these issues on Savage Minds, as I also have strong opinions and experience with IRBs… but the issue is available only to AAA members through Anthrosource. Cf. the previous post.
Tag Archives: Books and Articles
Softcore porn: check!
I spent this weekend on the mainland at a friend’s wedding where I had the chance to run into David Andrews. I last saw Dave a few years ago where I saw him give a fascinating lecture on softcore pornography. His talk impressed me for a couple of reasons: first, he is one of the first Nabokov scholar I’ve met to admit that his interest in Lolita was really about the porn and not the literature and that his next project was going to be Debby Does Dallas rather than Pale Fire. Second, his point in the lecture (if I remember correctly) was that the literature on softcore tended to treat it as peripheral to the main form of porn, which was hardcore, and which was easily understood by feminist theory as part of the misogynistic power structure in the US that keeps women down. He argued that softcore was it’s own sort of thing and that the messages it sent about men and women were much more ambiguous and deeply rooted in America. Softcore is much more widespread in the US — you can get it at Blockbuster, apparently — and so understanding gender in the US means making sense of softcore as it’s own unique phenomenon. I thought it was a fascinating talk and that Andrews was a guy who had 1) buckets of brain-power and 2) watched a truly mind-boggling amount of softcore pornography.
When I ran into Dave this weekend he told me his new book on this topic was finally out. “Soft In The Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature In Its Contexts”:http://www.amazon.com/Soft-Middle-Contemporary-Softcore-Contexts/dp/0814210228/sr=8-1/qid=1162255403/ref=sr_1_1/002-0199581-3412860?ie=UTF8&s=books is now out from “Ohio State University Press”:http://www.ohiostatepress.org/ (which also has a long list of “open access titles”:http://www.ohiostatepress.org/index.htm?/books/openaccess.htm on their site. OHP++!!). I haven’t had a chance to look at it, but based on hanging out with Dave I really do reccomend the book. OHP has made the “first chapter”:http://www.ohiostatepress.org/books/Book%20PDFs/Andrews%20Soft.pdf available on their website (warning: this is the front and end matter as well, so it’s like a 100 page download). Give it a read and tell me what you think.
To Cherish the Life of the World
I have to admit not having read much by or about Margaret Mead, with the exception of the Bali work she did with Bateson, but Bookslut has a nice review of To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead:
To Cherish skates on the surface of academic anthropology but goes to the heart of human intimacy. Because readers can learn about other aspects of Mead’s life through Blackberry Winter, her autobiography, or through an earlier collection of correspondence, Letters from the Field: 1925-1975, editors Margaret Caffrey and Patricia Francis sensibly decided to focus this volume on Mead’s relationships. Combing through the Margaret Mead collection at the US library of Congress — the single largest collection that the Congress holds — they made fine choices. As anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (Mead’s daughter) writes in the preface,“The discipline of reading these letters is to avoid worrying too much about the references to events and about the order in which they unfolded, and rather to attend to the way Margaret frames her words to communicate with a particular person.”
I was quite surprised at the little factoid she slips in there: “the single largest collection that the Congress holds.” Not sure if that is 100% accurate, but it doesn’t seem far off the mark. Here is what the library says:
Totaling more than 500,000 items, the Margaret Mead Papers and South Pacific Ethnographic Archives is one of the largest collections for a single individual in the Library.
In 2001, for the the 100th anniversary of Margaret Mead’s birth the library put a some of this material up on the web.
One thing I’ve always liked about Mead is that she was very much a “public intellectual.” As Bookslut says:
Deeply committed to furthering anthropology’s method and theory, she was committed to activism in a troubled world. Mead brought her skills and insight to bear in various war efforts during the ’40s, when she testified before Congress and other governmental bodies on social issues, in helping Democrat presidential candidates (Humphrey, Carter) campaign effectively on television, and in inviting the average reader into social science through a column in Redbook magazine.
Maybe its time to go back and take a closer look at Mead’s legacy?
Collaborating with Corporations?
Long-time Savage Minds commentator John McCreery has a question for our readership:
The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography by Luke Eric Lassiter is a powerful, persuasive, and, to me, deeply troubling book. It’s thesis is summarized (p. 16) as follows.
“Collaborative ethnography invites commentary from our consultants and seeks to make that commentary overtly part of the ethnographic text as it develops. In turn, this negotiation is reintegrated back into the fieldwork process itself. Importantly, the process yields texts that are co-conceived and co-written with local communities of collaborators and consider multiple audiences outside the confines of academic discourse, including local constituencies.”
As the end of a story that begins with the colonial anthropologist writing about anonymous others surveyed with the God-like gaze, confident that they will never read what he has written, the steps prescribed in this passage sound like steps forward. But what, I ask myself, if the collaborators in question work for large corporations or government agencies and co-writing requires clearance from their employers’ PR departments?
Anthropology on demand
I just discovered (thanks Elise!) that Daniel Miller, a man who has published 23 of his own books, has started an on-demand publishing company with Sean Kingston Press with a rich and luminific editorial board. They’ve published 6 books, including at least one I’m sure Rex is all over. Miller has also published an article with some sharp words for US publishers. w00t for independent on-demand superfantastic british anthropologyness! Now if they could just provide openly licensed downloads of the pdfs I could post something arch and british about the scholarship….
Places and Frames: Reading Bruno Latour on Holiday
If anybody fancies some heavy but rewarding reading try Bruno Latour’s recently published book on Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. I took it on holiday, along with a pile of other books , including Friction and Global Shadows. In the event, or lack of it, I only managed to struggle through the Latour. And once I had read it the other books didn’t seem as inviting, although they are probably a more engaging read. Latour’s book seems to be directed not at the experience of reading so much as the consequence of having read. It takes the reader on a mental journey over difficult terrain, the terrain metaphor resurfacing throughout the book via a play on the acronym ANT and the notion that ants are somehow grounded and hence capable of dealing thoroughly with whatever minutiae are blocking their paths
to unspecified destinations.
Reassembling the Social is one of those books written against in order to work out what it is for. In this instance, its directed against sociologists, whom Latour divides into two types: sociologists of the social and those who claim to practice critical sociology. Latour argues that both kinds of sociology and their practitioners do not conform to what might be the expectations of scientific approaches to the study of society. This is because they rely on pre-existing notions of what the social is and does to account for what people do and why they do it. The idea of society in such accounts fails to explain the very thing which is the object of study. As a consequence the motivations of social actors are always silenced and ignored. The silenncing of social actors is paradoxical for what claims to be a science of the social which ought to be able to demonstrate how things happen or rather how happenings are made. The making is the social process which is both material and symbolic. There is then no break between material culture and cultural material. The object of study includes objects, the subject object divide is collapsed and the sociology of the social superseded by a sociology of association, that is the relations through which actors achieve agency to effect happening.
Latour says much more than this of course in this complicated text, some of which reiterates previous insights and ideas. He makes pertinent points about the sociology of the social’s preoccupation with context and place, hence the eternal return conceptually to the analytical split level of the global and the local. I will try and think more about this when I get around to reading Friction as an `ethnography of global connections’. But in the meantime I think that Latour’s arguments about place are worth exploring for the way they jog ones’ perspective and decentre comfort zones about where we are and what we are claiming to describe when we set out to describe other places. Latour proposes that there is nothing intrinsically contextual about place, that place is simply a staging or framing for traces and associations, near and distant, past and present. Context as such does not exist as a factor which explains or accounts for a place. Placeness is brought to a situation through framing, and only part of this situation is localised.
There is some truth in this way of thinking. As write this I am in what I had on first contact thought of as a post Augean non place, not Manchester although I am sure that others consider it so, but a holiday island in the Mediterranean, the kind of island so subjected to the onslaughts of package tourism and the internationalization of consumption that it seems to no longer have any real identity or sense of location. Among the Irish pubs, the West African street traders selling carved elephants, the Mexican, Chinese and Indian themed restaurants , the International Herald Tribune on the newsstands and the televisions broadcasting UK news and sport, you have to actively look for faint signs of some other more original identity. Latour’s account makes me reconsider my position. If place is frame rather than context then what I am witnessing is a framing of wider traces, some place.
Melanesian Mining Modernities
Wow. I’m super psyched to see the latest issue of “The Contemporary Pacific”:http://hawaii.edu/cpis/publications_5.html is out. It’s a special issue on ‘Melanesian Mining Modernities’ edited by my colleagues Paige West and Martha MacIntyre. The reason that I’m super-psyched is that one of my articles, “Who is the ‘original affluent society’?” is in it. The table of contents and abstracts are “available on Project Muse”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_pacific/toc/cp18.2.html and if you subscribe to Project Muse then you can also download them all, “including mine”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_pacific/v018/18.2golub01.pdf. The abstract for my paper — which I apparently wrote at some point, tho I have no memory of it now! — goes like this:
The idea of the “ecologically noble savage” once linked environmental activists and indigenous people. Today the concept is increasingly seen as problematic. In the Porgera district of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, Ipili people confront massive social change brought about by the presence of a large gold mine. This paper explores how Ipili people find some aspects of global consumer culture to offer utopian possibilities for change, while others present dystopic inversions of their own culture. In doing so, it compares Western attempts to understand Ipili as noble or ignoble savages with Ipili attempts to make sense of the material culture and mores of outsiders. It concludes that both Ipili and westerners have unsettling insights into each other’s culture.
Of course after I wrote this piece I immediately discovered Affluence and Cultural Survival ed. Richard Salisbury and Elisabeth Tooker, which I should have added to my biography. Also, although I cite it, I didn’t have a chance to read Ira Bashkow’s excellent new volume “The Meaning of Whtemen”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/185143.ctl, which I know of only in dissertation form. But anyone who has ever submitted anything to Contemporary Pacific knows that they do not just publish any old thing — I’m amazed at the rigor and scrutiny of the review process there and my article is much better (although much more exhausting to write!) because of it. They even let me use the phrase “Johannine phenomenology”! So if you are looking for state of the art ethnography on mining in Melanesia, look no further.
Ethnographies of Journalism
The latest issue of Ethnography (I should say, latest in my slow world, its from March of 2006) is a special issue (SAGE publications) on ethnography of Journalism, edited by Dominic Boyer and Ulf Hannerz. For those of you who long for a meatier analysis of contemporary journalism than “blogs are destroying conventional journalism” or “journalism is dead, long live journalism” then this might be it. One of the great virtues of it is that it has a wonderful mix of fieldsites across the various articles; it reads kind of like a SciFi World Cup 2012: Sweden v. India; Palestine vs. Ghana; EU vs. WTO.
Recent Debates on Race and Class
The concept of race as applied to humans has long been discredited by anthropologists. And yet it is not possible to discuss issues like the high rates of incarceration of black men, or the better medical treatment received by whites, purely in class terms. At the same time, immigration, DNA testing, intermarriage and other phenomenon have made the lived experience of racial categories more complex for many people. Changing attitudes have also made racial categories less useful as a basis for political action.
For anyone who is interested in how academics have attempted to deal with the dilemmas of theorizing race in the contemporary world, this recent Monthly Review article by David Roediger is must reading. In “The Retreat from Race and Class”, Roediger focuses on four works. Three from around 2000: Paul Gilroy’s book, Against Race, “Race Over” written by Orlando Patterson in The New Replubic (link for those with library access), and Bourdieu and Wacquant’s article, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason“, as well as the more recent (2004) After Race by Darder and Torres. All of these works are very critical of contemporary racial discourse, and Roediger takes them each to task for failing to adequately address the problems of what he calls “white supremacy.”
Roediger’s review is too short to provide much insight into such a complex literature, but it does provide a great set of references for further exploration, such as in this passage where he responds to After Race:
Insofar as Fields, Darder, Torres, and others contend that inattention to class distorts inquiry into all inequalities in the United States, they are exactly right. However, the strategy of banking on the retreat from race to solve that problem is a highly dubious one. It leads to an extremely embattled tone and to ignoring the most exciting work building on materialist insights. From Cheryl Harris’s brilliant studies of whiteness as property, to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s research on racial systems, to somewhat older South African scholarship on racial capitalism, to Lisa Lowe’s important observations on race, universality, and labor at the start of Immigrant Acts, much work seeks to revive the class question by bringing racism and class together more systematically. But you would not know it from After Race.
While I’ve read some of the older stuff, such as Adam’s classic on South Africa, Modernizing Racial Domination, I’ve been negligent at keeping up with this literature, and am happy to have an informed guide to current debates. And while the idea of “teaching the controversy” might have been appropriated by ID advocates, I do find that such debates make for an excellent teaching tool.
I would also like to see more discussion about race in the liberal blogsphere, which is generally good on labor and gender issues, but strangely silent when it comes to race.
(via Political Theory Daily)
UPDATE: In looking for some of these citations online, I came across this excellent site on “Race, Racism and the Law” by Vernellia R. Randall.
Is the Magic Fading?
The recent debate around FGC on Savage Minds raised some important questions about the political implications of how we choose to perceive social practice. It also raised the issue of agency in our selection of the analytic positions through which we situate practices relationally, and hence within particular political frames of argument. The key point here is not what the issue is, so much as with what other issues is it represented as being articulated in various ways. This articulation may be represented either within a particular social context, as in for example the relation between forms of practice and social outcomes, for which in the recent example read gender. Or, adopting the kind of argument put forward by Marilyn Strathern in her Partial Connections, it may be about how the issue is related through ethnography to what are represented as equivalent examples of social practice across social contexts, that is within anthropological theory or social theory more generally.
The ways in which issues become relationally articulated within anthropology is fundamental to establishing the legitimacy of what become accepted, or acceptable, responses to social phenomena within the discipline, some of which, despite anthropology’s claims to reflexivity and to the consistent examination of constructivist positions, seem remarkably persistent. The disciplinary representation of witchcraft is a case in point. Not only is witchcraft represented persistently as a problem of knowledge, rather than a problem of power, terror, inequality and violence manifested differently at different times and places. It is commonly represented as related to Zande practices of the late 1920’s as somehow paradigmatic, if not in terms modalities of divination then in terms of the essential logic and systematicity of Zande witchcraft cosmology.
Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic provides an account of the place of witchcraft in Zande society and the interrelationship between the persistence of witchcraft beliefs and oracular authority as mediated by princely rulers themselves subjected to Anglo- Egyptian colonial power. This book, a classic of functionalist ethnography and one which posits as its centre the question of the rationality of belief, continues to be a staple of anthropology reading lists, certainly in the UK. It also remains widely cited within the anthropology of religion, science studies and philosophy. This strikes me as somewhat surprising. What Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic actually describes is not so much the rationality of belief in witchcraft, as a political system in which the powerless are liable to be accused of involuntary murder and then forced to pay compensation for the deaths of alleged victims. To suggest that the comparative value of Evans Pritchard’s text lies in the power play of witchcraft as a weapon of violence working in conjunction with regimes of power is not to underplay the salience of ideas and world views in effecting social practice, merely to question why certain interpretations become established. Some of this has to do with what they are brought into relation to. Can disestablishment follow on then from new juxtapositions and new relations?
Anthro Classics Online: Geertz’s Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
Perhaps one of the most widely read anthropological essays, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” by Clifford Geertz is available online in standard HTML format, as well as a PDF file. The continued popularity of this piece is due in no small part to Geertz’s fluid prose, sharp observation, and self-depreciating humor. (Self-mockery seems to be an essential ingredient for making an anthropological classic.) But I think the real appeal of this article is the way the reader is drawn into the process of anthropological discovery.
The article starts with a heart-pounding chase. Cockfights are illegal and the sudden appearance of the police during one of the first fights Geertz and his wife witnessed sent everyone scurrying home:
On the established anthropological principle, When in Rome, my wife and I decided, only slightly less instantaneously than everyone else, that the thing to do was run too. We ran down the main village street, northward, away from where we were living, for we were on that side of the ring. About half-way down another fugitive ducked suddenly into a compound-his own, it turned out-and we, seeing nothing ahead of us but rice fields, open country, and a very high volcano, followed him. As the three of us came tumbling into the courtyard, his wife, who had apparently been through this sort of thing before, whipped out a table, a tablecloth, three chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without any explicit communication whatsoever, sat down, commenced to sip tea, and sought to compose ourselves.
This story serves two purposes: The first is to draw the audience into the society along with the anthropologist. Just as this event led to Geertz making the transition from “outsider” to “participant,” so too does it make the audience feel as if they are active participants in the drama. The other purpose is to establish the subjective authority of Geertz’s account. Geertz can tell us what this ritual “really means” because he was there. Not only was he there, but he was embraced by the members of the society who loved his clumsy ways.
Does Geertz’s effective prose lull us into a false sense of interpretive complacency?
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Anthro Classics Online: Shakespeare in the Bush
When I asked for suggestions for how this blog should move forward, one issue that was raised was the lack of discussion targeted at anthropological novices. For this reason I am starting a new series linking to classical works in anthropology which are available online. The idea is to both encourage newbies to read some classical anthropological texts as well as allow those with Ph.D.s in the discipline to debate the contemporary value of these works.
Today’s entry is Laura Bohannon’s essay “Shakespeare in the Bush.” First published in 1971, reading this essay in high school really turned me on to anthropology. It explores how difficult it is to translate Shakespeare’s Hamlet into the cultural idiom of the Tiv in West Africa (the Tiv are mostly located in Nigeria). While the article takes on a straw-man argument (the idea that there is something universal about Shakespeare’s plays overlooks just how hard it is for even American school kids to learn to appreciate Hamlet), it is a well written article which I believe holds up to the test of time. With Bohannon playing the fool, we follow along as she struggles to explain European notions of kinship, ghosts, and justice to her Tiv audience. It works so well because it is Bohannon who is the butt of the joke, not the Tiv (although the self-assurance of the Tiv elders that they know better than Shakespeare how this story should be told is part of the story’s charm). Despite its whimsical tone, I think we actually learn quite a bit about Tiv culture and society in this short article.
Reading this article again just now I was struck by the fact that her audience consists of respected elders. My guess is that she would have found the audience much more receptive to Shakespeare’s narrative if they had been lower status members of society, such as children. In other words, I don’t think it is simply a case of the Tiv failing to understand Hamlet. Rather, I suspect that these elders perceive Bohannon’s narrative as a threat and are eager to “correct” her in order to neutralize that threat, whereas children or other members of the society less threatened by narratives suggesting alternative social structures would have had considerably less trouble understanding Bohannon’s retelling of Hamlet. This suspicion comes out of my own understanding of ideology as what Zizek calls the “active refusal to know.” According to such an interpretation of Bohannon’s article, there is nothing specific about Tiv society which prevents them from understanding Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but her storytelling is frustrated by the “will to ignorance” of the elders. Sure, even Tiv children would have been confused by many aspects of the story, just as American children are, but I’m simply suggesting that they might not have rejected the very premise of the story in the way that the elders did. Of course, we would probably have learned much less from such an exchange.
Savageminds Summer Reading Circle
To celebrate Savagemind’s one year anniversary I’d like to try to implement an idea that we’ve thrown around on the site for some time — a reading group. I’m hoping this will really take off since it is now summer and perhaps we have free time?
Unless any of the other Minds object or have some other ideas, I’d like to propose we proceed as following: I’ll keep checking this post for a week — in the comments please provide lists of books you’d like to read with us. So far the two books that have been suggested have been
Worker in the Cane, Sydney Mintz
Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World, James Ferguson
Please leave other suggestions. After 27 -March- May I’ll make a decision about which of the books we should read based on the discussion we’ll have in the comments here. I’ll then give people a week or two to get the book. After that we can read one chapter a week. At the beginning of the week I’ll post some thoughts and then we can discuss in the comments. I’ve tried this sort of arrangement in real life and I find one chapter a week to be pretty doable. At this speed we can get through it in time to get ready for the fall.
So — what books would you all suggest or vote for?
The Real Saussure
In July of this year Oxford University Press will be publishing the English edition of recently discovered notes by Ferdinand de Saussure. These notes are important because they formed the basis for his famous Cours de Linguistique Generale, the founding text of structuralism. This is remarkable, because up till now the authoritative text had been based primarily on the notes of Saussure’s students. These new notes have been available in French for a number of years without any major shake-up in the world of linguistics, but their publication in English will still be an important event. Still, the blurb on the OUP website is laughable for its Batman-esque efforts to drum up excitement:
It is remarkable that for eighty years the understanding of Saussure’s thought has depended on an incomplete and non-definitive text, the sometimes aphoristic formulations of which gave rise to many creative interpretations and arguments for and against Saussure. Did he, or did he not, see language as a-social and a-historical? Did he, or did he not, rule out the study of speech within linguistics? Was he a reductionist? These disputes and many others can now be resolved on the basis of the work now published.
To find out, tune in next week, same Saussure-time, same Saussure-channel ….
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The hippopotamus is Othello
In an attempt to bone up on my Alfred Gell I’ve just finished his superb essay “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artwork and Artwork as Traps.” (from Journal of Material Culture 1, but also reprinted in the anthology The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams). It is truly a wonderful piece and I reccomend it, like much of his work, to all and sundry.
The trap is both a model of its creator, the hunter, and a model of its victim, the prey animal. But more than this, the trap embodies a scenario, which is the dramatic nexus that binds these two protagonists together, and which aligns them in time and space. Our illustrations cannot show this because they either show traps awaiting their victims, or victims who have been already entrapped; they cannot show the ‘time structure’ of the trap. This time structure opposes suspended time, the empty time of ‘waiting,’ to the sudden catastophe that ensues as the trap closes. This temporal structure varies with the kind of trap employed, but it is not hard to see in the drama of entrapment a mechanical analogue to the tragic sequence of hubris-nemesis-catastrophe.
Consider the doomed hippopotamus (fig. 6.8) lulled into a sense of false security by sheer bulk and majesty. How many tragic heroes have suffered from the same hubristic illusions and have invited the same fate? If the chimpanzee who falls for Boyer’s trap [described earlier] is Faust, perhaps this hippopotamus is Othello. The fact that animals who fall victim to traps have always brought about their own downfall by their own actions, their own complacent self-confidence, ensures that trapping is a far more poetic and tragic form of hunting than the simple chase. The latter kind of hunting equalizes hunters and victims, united in spontaneous action and reaction, whereas trapping decisively hierarchizes hunter and victim. The trapper is God, or the fates, the trapped animal is man in his tragic incarnation.