Tag Archives: Books and Articles

Narrating the Nation in Australian Soccer

Oneman’s post “‘Savage’ Mascots Take A Blow” sparked some commentary about European mascots. I think it is useful, in trying to understand the status of European mascots, to look at a country where many Europeans are still not considered “white” in the same way that they are now considered white in the United States. (A number of recent studies have discussed the different process by which Irish [also here] and Jews became “white” Americans.) That country is Australia, and there is an excellent article [AnthroSource link] by Loring M. Danforth entitled: “Is the ‘World Game’ an ‘Ethnic Game’ or an ‘Aussie Game’? Narrating the Nation in Australian Soccer.”

I have to confess a deep aversion to reading anything which cites Homi Bhabha extensively, but Danforth admirably demonstrates that one is not required to emulate Bhabha’s impenetrable prose to deploy his ideas effectively.

Soccer, as opposed to Ruby or “Aussie Rules” football, is still largely considered to be an immigrant sport in Australia. Up until quite recently soccer clubs were, in fact, run entirely along ethnic lines:

This “ethnic club” system, which characterized Australian soccer for so long, was based on the principle of ethnic nationalism according to which individual clubs, like individual nation-states, constituted homogeneous, closed cultural communities whose members were bound together by a common national identity. The owners and administrators of these clubs, like the vast majority of their supporters, were members of a single ethnic group.” Ethnic soccer clubs served as powerful symbols of the diaspora communities they represented. They played important roles in fostering ethnic solidarity and pride in the face of the assimilationist pressures of Australian society. According to its president, George Vasilopoulos, South Melbourne Hellas, one of the most successful soccer clubs in Australia, was formed to “bring together” the Greeks of Melbourne and to provide them with “a home away from home.” The club, he said, is “a clear indication of the progress this community has made. They grew and prospered together”…

A specialist in Greece, Danforth focuses on three clubs which represented deep divisions within the Greeks and Macedonian community over whether or not Macedonia was a part of Greece. “South Melbourne Hellas “was the Greek team, “Preston Makedonia” the pro-Macedonian independence team, and “Heidelberg United Alexander the Great Soccer Club” which was “founded by a group of people from the northwestern part of Greek Macedonia.”

What is particularly interesting, however, is not so much the exporting of the Macedonian conflict to Australian soil, as much as the efforts of the Australian Soccer Federation (now “Football Federation Australia“) to deethnicize the sport in order to make it more profitable. While finally successful, such efforts initially met with tremendous resistance:

The owners of ethnic soccer clubs and leaders of Australia’s ethnic communities vigorously opposed this campaign to “deethnicize” Australian soccer. They attempted to defend the “ethnic club system” by appealing to the ideology of multiculturalism in order to counter the narrative of traditional Australian ethnic nationalism that had been used by soccer officials to abolish the “ethnic clubs.”

Supporters of South Melbourne Hellas and Preston Makedonia were outraged by this campaign to destroy the “ethnic club system.” They called it an “antiethnic” and “undemocratic” plan that insulted members of Australia’s ethnic communities and made a mockery of the government’s multicultural policies. They said it was an example of “ethnic cleansing,” a case of “forced assimilation,” an attempt to put a “foreign face” (an Australian face) on soccer in Australia …

In a more humorous vein, one commentator suggested that if the commissioners of the Australian Soccer Federation really wanted to enhance the popularity of soccer in Australia, they should not stop at mere “cosmetic surgery.” Applying a “Band-aid” to the names of some clubs was not enough. If they were really interested in increasing attendance at soccer matches, commissioners should consider changing their own names (Papasavas and Labozzetta), banning players with ethnic names (Blagojevic and Van Blerk), or even forbidding the consumption of ethnic food (pizza and souvlaki) at all soccer matches …

At the heart of this conflict are competing images of what it means for Australia to be a multicultural nation. Danforth contrasts the dominant narrative which is one of ethnic assimilation, with a competing hybrid narrative. In American ethnic studies these two models are often referred to as the “melting pot” versus the “salad bowl” models of multiculturalism.

Eventually, the ethnic clubs were forced out of the league, and with the 1998 World Cup finals match against Iran, it seemed as if Australia had overcome the ethnic origins of the sport.

It is also ironic that many of the people enthusiastically shouting “Aussie! Aussie!” at the World Cup qualifying match between Australia and Iran would not be identified by themselves or by Anglo-Australians as “Aussies,” but rather as “Europeans,” “ethnics,” or “wogs.” At a fundamental level, they are not members of the very national community whose team they are supporting. Finally, it is ironic that when Greeks and Macedonians wave Greek and Macedonian flags and root for soccer teams named Hellas and Makedonia, their behavior is criticized as un-Australian, but when the same people-speaking the same foreign languages and eating the same ethnic food-wave Australian flags and root for the Socceroos, their behavior is lauded as representing multicultural Australia at its best. It seems that “ethnics become Aussies for a day” when they root for the Australian national team …

In a future post I will discuss representations of Aborigines in Taiwanese baseball.

Witchcraft in the Modern World

Via Sepia Mutiny, a Washington Post story about accusations of witchcraft in modern day India. The author, Rama Lakshmi, takes the view that such accusations are really about maintaining patriarchy, and should not be thought of as mere “superstition”:

In a tribal society steeped in superstition, the spells of witches often are blamed for stubborn illnesses, a stroke of bad luck, the drying up of wells, crop failure or the inability to give birth to a son. But social analysts and officials said that superstition and faith in witchcraft often are a ploy for carrying out violence against women.

“Superstition is only an excuse. Often a woman is branded a witch so that you can throw her out of the village and grab her land, or to settle scores, family rivalry, or because powerful men want to punish her for spurning their sexual advances. Sometimes it is used to punish women who question social norms,” said Pooja Singhal Purwar, an official at the Jharkhand social welfare department.

“Women from well-to-do homes in the village are never branded witches,” Purwar said. “It is always the socially and economically vulnerable women who are targeted and boycotted.”

Unfortunately, the online fulltext version of Mahasveta Devi’s excellent story Bayen has been removed from the web at the request of the publishers. It is an account of how such witchcraft accusations play out in rural India (and like Zora Neal Hurston’s work, it is ethnographically informed). You can find it in the collection: Five Plays.

A book about witchcraft in South Africa, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy, sees contemporary witchcraft accusations in a very different light. According to this H-Net review by Gary Kynoch (via Anthropologi.info), the book sees witchcraft accusations as an attempt to explain continued suffering even after the demise of the Apartheid state:

Community solidarity has eroded when compared to the unity of the “struggle” years. At the same time, improved opportunities for black South Africans have enabled a significant minority of Sowetans to accumulate material wealth and enjoy a relatively privileged lifestyle. The less fortunate are often bitter at being left behind and rising inequalities have fuelled community and family conflict in the post-apartheid period. Without “the system” to blame, witchcraft is increasingly considered the source of many of these difficulties. The anxiety engendered by the AIDS crisis has further heightened witchcraft fears.

I personally haven’t read anything Anthropological on witchcraft more recent than Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, but I almost feel inspired to create a course syllabus on witchcraft in the contemporary world. Anyone similarly inspired would definitely want to take a look at this MIT Open Courseware syllabus for James Howe’s course: “Magic, Witchcraft, and the Spirit World.”

Finally, I wanted to add one other witchcraft link: to the excellent Museum of Witchcraft in Iceland. I visited this exhibit in 2000, and enjoyed it tremendously. The witchcraft accusations discussed there were mostly in the seventeenth century, where they seem to have been a European import. The most fun part of visiting the exhibit was watching the Icelandic visitors discussing whose ancestors were accusers and whose were the accused (Iceland is a small country and everyone is related).

Around 130 cases of witchcraft or sorcery are found in court records both from the high court at Þingvellir and in fragments of county court records. Of the approximately 170 persons accused around 10% were women, the rest were males, mostly of the lower classes though some sheriffs and clergymen were also accused. None of the latter suffered physical punishments. It must be remembered in this context that the total population of Iceland at the time was only around fifty thousand.

UPDATE: This story from the Telegraph UK just happened to appear today:

A Sicilian palazzo once used as a headquarters for the Spanish Inquisition has been discovered to contain dozens of pieces of graffiti by “witches” condemned to burn at the stake.

The anguished scribblings and drawings were found on the walls during renovation work on the Palazzo Steri in Palermo, reviving what had been a nightmare for the many women held there to await their fate centuries ago.

One of the damned wrote: “Hot and cold I am / as I be consumed by the fever of malaria / my guts do tremble / and mine heart and spirit grow weak.”

Studying Keitai (or ‘Mobile Phones’ in Japanese)

Mizuko Ito, an anthropologist who specializes in technology and youth culture in Japan, has announced on her website that she with Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda (a psychologist and a sociologist based in Japan) has co-edited a volume titled Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. (via her brother, Joi Ito)

Aside from making available the table of contents (in her post), she has also posted the introduction to the volume as a pdf file. See also some of the backcover endorsements at MIT Press, the book’s publisher.

In reading through this introduction, the following two paragraphs caught my attention. She discusses how keitai (the Japanese word for mobile phone) technology, despite the fact that it was first targetted for the savvy business person, has effected a new kind of interpersonal “intimacy.” Then from this focus on intimate social relationships she opens up her analytical aperture to discuss how it has been used “outdoors.” There she observes the way these tiny communication devices have “coloniz[ed …] the small and seemingly inconsequential in-between temporalities and spaces of everyday life.”

One cross-cutting theme is the salience of “the personal” and discourses of intimacy in keitai communications. Decisive was the shift in the late nineties from keitai primarily identified as a business tool to identification as a tool for personal communication and play. Now, even when being used for “serious” work purposes, keitai in the workplace and in public places generally (and often negatively) invoke “personal business.” Even before the keitai Internet, voice communications created a juxtaposition between private affairs and public place, tagging the keitai as a narcissistic device that invaded the communal with the demands of the personal. Now, widespread mobile email and other online communication tools mean that these intimate spheres are even more pervasively present; mobile text and visual communication can colonize even communal places where telephony would be frowned upon (ie., public transportation, classrooms, restaurants). The micro-coordination between family members and the ubiquitous spaces of intimacy between young couples and peers are the most evocative of these new dimensions of always-on intimate connection. Even workplace studies have documented the keitai’s now indispensable role in coordinating small and tightly coordinated workgroups. These tele-cocoons and full-time intimate communities represent an expansion of the long-standing sphere of intimate relations. The papers in this volume have only just begun to explore the profound implications for the production of social identity, the experience of public and urban spaces, and the structuring of institutions such as the households, couples, and peer groups.

This dimension of the pervasively personal is tied to an out-of-doors and low-profile vision of informational and communication networks which goes against the metaphors of indoor, immersive experience that have dominated our imaginings of virtual reality, cyberspace and Internet social life. The keitai’s social value is tied to its colonization of the small and seemingly inconsequential in-between temporalities and spaces of everyday life. Whether it is the quick text reminder sent by a multi-tasking housewife, the service technician who wants to keep track of which of their team members is out to lunch, or young couples texting sweet nothings as they take the bus to school, keitai connectivity is a seeping membrane between the real and virtual, here and elsewhere, rather than a portal of highfidelity connectivity that demands full and sustained engagement. Metaphors of keitai engagement are as often side-by-side as they are face to face, as much about ambient and peripheral awareness as they are about demanding attention in the here and now.

This is thought-provoking for me and it resonates with what I had always thought about the use of mobile phones. The way people (at least in Japan, although this I guess might be catching on in the U.S.) keep photos of friends in their keitai had always reminded me of Christian Metz’s discussion about how photographs are akin to the Freudian notion of the fetish, in part because of the portability of printed images (as opposed to film) (Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish” October, Vol. 34. (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90.

Autoethnographic Text

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s 1615 document, Primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government) is a fascinating document, written by “an ethnic Andean who addressed his 1,200-page work, of which nearly 400 were pen-and-ink drawings of Inca and colonial life, to King Philip II of Spain” with the hope of reforming colonial rule. It was discovered in 1908, sitting forgotten in a library in Copenhagen, and was first published in 1936. Now it is online, thanks to Rolena Adorno at Yale University.

I discovered the site via this post by Language Hat, which points to several excellent essays in English about the history and importance of the document. This one, by Rolena Adorno, offers a good overview:

Guaman Poma’s activities as an investigator and writer are those which hold greatest interest for us today. His reliance on Andean languages and the accounts of the elders who either had survived the Spanish conquest, or had known those who had, gives his accounts of pre-Columbian Andean society an authority found in few other places. His time spent working with colonial church inspectors and civil officers gave him the experience from which to construct an unusually complex view of colonial administration, including its goals at the highest levels and its practices and abuses at the level of the local community. His self-taught knowledge of the European historiographic, juridical and rhetorical traditions reveals the type of Spanish literary and intellectual culture that was available to the native elite.

Language Hat also highlights this article by Mary Louise Pratt which coins the term “autoethnographic text” to refer to “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.”

Autoethnographic texts are not, then, what are usually thought of as autochthonous forms of expression or self-representation (as the Andean quipus were). Rather they involve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. These are merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding. Autoethnographic works are often addressed to both metropolitan audiences and the speakers own community. Their reception is thus highly indeterminate. Such texts often constitute a marginalized groups point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture. It is interesting to think, for example, of American slave autobiography in its autoethnographic dimensions, which in some respects distinguish it from Euramerican autobiographical tradition. The concept might help explain why some of the earliest published writing by Chicanas took the form of folkloric manners and customs sketches written in English and published in English-language newspapers or folklore magazines (see Treviño). Autoethnographic representation often involves concrete collaborations between people, as between literate ex-slaves and abolitionist intellectuals, or between Guaman Poma and the Inca elders who were his informants. Often, as in Guaman Poma, it involves more than one language. In recent decades autoethnography, critique, and resistance have reconnected with writing in a contemporary creation of the contact zone, the testimonio.

Pratt’s essay analyses the ways in which Guaman Poma appropriates and adapts “pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders” to form his critique of colonial practices.

Pratt’s discussion of the illustrations is also quite interesting:

The genre of the four hundred line drawings is European–there seems to have been no tradition of representational drawing among the Incas–but in their execution they deploy specifically Andean systems of spatial symbolism that express Andean values and aspirations.

The caption for this image reads: “The Inka asks what the Spaniard eats. The Spaniard replies: ‘Gold.'”

eatgold

Literary Kinship Studies

While there was once a time that anthropological theory influenced literary studies, lately it seems as if the trend has been the other way around; so, can we assume that when literary scholars turn their attention to kinship studies it will spark renewed interest in the subject among anthropologists? The book I’m referring to is: Novel Relations : The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748-1818. It was recently reviewed in a New York Review of Books article on Jane Austen, by Diane Johnson.

Perry’s book shows that Austen lived at a time when women’s status was shifting. While it had previously been defined by blood relations, making a woman’s relationship with her parents and siblings more important than who she married, by the end of the eighteenth century women’s status was increasingly defined entirely by the family she married into. This has important implications for literary studies, since sibling relationships are often overlooked in readings of Austen’s novels:

In Perry’s view, previous definitions of the family have been based on incorrect inferences from statistical norms and prescriptive conduct manuals. Statistics taken from public records of marriages and births ignore “many of the other filaments in the web of kinship that located people psychologically in the period,” because there are no published records of such filaments—a maiden aunt, like Austen living with the family, for example, would not appear in any record. And where modern readers assume that a novel will contain a love story, the main story the author had in mind might in fact be about a bad or good brother, a long-lost relative, fathers separated from daughters, a devoted aunt, or some other aspect of the birth family (with mothers often missing or unimportant, as in Austen). Such elements were more important than love stories in the novels Austen read, like Tristram Shandy or The Castle of Otronto.

… This loss of female authority was accompanied or explained by other social factors that were not in women’s interest: the growing “dispersion of communities, and the growing power of individualism,” and changes in property laws and marriage settlements that left sisters and daughters less well provided for than they had been, and with little legal leverage. Inheritance issues drive most of Jane Austen’s plots and subplots; and because she was on the cusp of changes that would increasingly commodify women and virginity for the marriage market, trends masked by conventions of romantic love, she came to seem to some later readers as somewhat hardhearted in the practicality of her views, for instance (in Perry’s example) her implicit mockery in Sense and Sensibility of Marianne Dashwood’s “ardent belief in a first and only love,” a belief that would have made no sense in an earlier period, when a third of all marriages were second marriages, after the death of a spouse, but was fashionably new in Marianne’s day.

Perry’s elucidation of the plots of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century novels in the light of these broad social changes goes a long way toward explaining why many of them do not move us today; the reunion of long-lost fathers and daughters, for instance, or the intense relation of brother and sister no longer seem especially affecting. The long-lost relative plot simply had more emotional force when the “consanguinal” family rather than the “affinal” family was the principle focus of emotional life (though, thinking of The Mill on the Floss or Silas Marner we can see that such consanguinal plots appear at least as late as George Eliot). It may be that the marriage plot itself has seen its day, and in these times of redefined families, plots will change—there is already a spate of family novels and novels about friendship that do not resolve in marriage.

This makes me think about the differences between Hollywood and Bollywood films. In the latter (although it is changing now) familial relations between siblings and between children and their parents are far more important than romantic relations between unmarried men and women. In fact, the main emotional relationship in many Hindi movies is between the male lead and his mother, not between him and the woman he is to marry at the end of the film. I wonder if this (even more than colonial history) explains the love so many Indian’s have of classic English literature?

Easter Island and Its Mysteries

While Easter Island and Its Mysteries might not be as great a book as it was deemed to be by Dr. Étienne Loppé, Chief Curator of the Lafaille Museum in La Rochelle (France), who wrote a gushing preface, it certainly provides interesting insights into ethnography in the mid 1930s.

A translation of this 1930s French ethnography is freely available online, as “a gift from [Dr. Ann Altman] to the academic community and to everyone else who is interested in Easter Island.” It includes copious footnotes by the translator.

Lisa Rofel’s Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism

Lisa Rofel’s Other Moderities has been mentioned a few times in comments on recent posts, so, as it is one of my favorite recent ethnographies, I thought I would post the text of a classroom presentation I gave on the book some years ago. Since this was originally written for a seminar in which my colleagues were assumed to have also read the same material, there may be some gaps where I could count on the rest of the class to understand — for example, there’s some heavy borrowing from Appadurai, which we had read immediately prior to Rofel, but I do not mention him by name here. However, I do not trust myself to make edits all these years later, when the book is not fresh in my mind anymore.

In Lisa Rofel’s words, Other Modernities “addresses the cultural politics of modernity in the late twentieth century. It suggests how modernity is imagined, pursued, and experienced… in those places marked by a deferred relationship to modernity” (3). She offers us an at least introductory definition of modernity the following: “…an imaginary and continuously shifting site of global/local claims, commitments, and knowledge, forged within uneven dialogues about the place of those who move in and out of categories of otherness” (3). As the central project of the book, Rofel presents us with a conception of modernity which is local and particularistic while placing those local forms of meaning in increasingly larger spheres of class, ideology, nation, and global capital, in ways which are, frequently, frustrating in their complexity. In addressing this complexity, I’ve found it useful to adopt a distinction suggested by [a colleague] between Rofel’s presentation of modernity as an academic or theoretical construct, mainly calling on Foucault and Althusser and addressing the modern human condition in the context of global and transnational forces, and modernity as the object of desire for the people whose lives make the subject of Rofel’s ethnographic work. Although this division is wholly artificial — which is part of Rofel’s point — it does have a precedent in the structure of her own (challenging) introduction, in which she moves back and forth from 1st-person descriptions of Hangzhou and its inhabitants to 3rd-person academic inquiry. Artificial as it is, I think that this approach helps to compensate for Rofel’s introduction which, for me at least, was highly confusing in its multiple use of multiple concepts of modernity invoked to account for each other. This is not all Rofel’s fault — the lack of specificity in academic concepts of modernity, which Rofel challenges, has produced a somewhat limited vocabulary.

So for the moment we sidestep the question of modernity as a theoretical position and look at the lives described by Rofel. On this level, modernity becomes the desires of the state and of its subjects, a local imaginary grounded in local conditions even as it looks elsewhere for its inspiration. But Rofel shows that this desire and its inspirations have neither remained constant nor been mobilized in constant fashions over time. Furthermore, the vision of modernity strived for by both Zhenfu workers and the Chinese party/state is necessarily and irrevocably intertwined with constructions of labour, gender, age, social networks, and geographical location. Rather than forming separate and separable parts of local identities, these factors are each constituted in and through the others. For example, Rofel is challenged by the oldest cohort of women workers’ unflinching adherence to the doctrine of their own liberation. How can they remain so convinced of their liberation, she asks, while they recognize the bitterness of their lives, both with regard to their work in the factories as silk workers and their work in their homes as mothers and wives (aside: which is, unfortunately, largely ignored, even rejected as important, by Rofel, who is almost ecstatic about women’s reports of their lack of affection for their children….)? However, as Rofel discovers, for the elder women of the Revolutionary era, the criteria by which Rofel and her fellow Western feminists judge “liberation” were not applicable — unsuited to the particular history of pre-Revolution Chinese industrialization and capitalization, they fail to adequately account for the specific projects of modernization and subject-formation undertaken in the establishment of the Chinese socialist state from the late ’40’s. Although Rofel does not give a lot of background information about pre-socialist China, she does hint at the collapse of traditional sources of income (e.g. the difficulties faced by Yu Shifu following her father’s death and her early entry into the silk factory [64-70]) and the pressure this put on women, especially young and unmarried women, to enter the workforce where, as sexualized (feminized) bodies inhabiting an “outside” space (not contained within the social network of ostensibly responsible parents and relatives) they were subject to disrespect and humiliation. By stressing labour as a foundational element, rather than gender, the Revolution liberated women from the imposed boundaries of “inside” and “outside” work. (Incidentally, note that this concept, used either ethnographically or theoretically, never ignores the presence of “work” in the home, the way Western concepts of “private” and “public” spheres do — partially explaining the lack of affection and the importance of raising children out of “maternal” desire which Rofel so blatantly admires later on, as the invention of “maternality” mystifies the “work” aspect of Western women’s household activities.)

Modernity in the desires of these women, then, is immediately tangible, even as it turns to imagined futures in its attempted realization — that is, it deals with the particular hardships or “bitterness”-es experienced by particular people at particular times and places. Although State policies may slavishly admire and imitate Western or Soviet models of modernity, Rofel shows that in the implementation of these policies by individual subjects there exists a space of interpretation and misrecognition (on which, more momentarily) which alters and can even challenge the conceptions of the State. For the cohort of women closely identified with the Cultural Revolution, the elaboration of this space became a primary concern, even as they became disillusioned with the promises and practices of that time — consider, for example, Xiao Bao, the shift leader who protested her lack of promotion to an office job by setting up her own office on the shop floor. Given authority over the women of her shop, Xiao Bao exercises that authority by not exercising it, subverting the very power which she exercises. Although it is unclear for how long she can continue to non-exercise her authority, in the meantime, she has constructed around herself (or rather, around her desk) a space of non-participation in the imagined modernity of the state, instead enacting her own contradictory desires in that space.

Rofel’s analysis of this act of subversion owes a lot to her understanding of an undertheorized (in fact, virtually ignored) aspect of Althusser’s concept of “interpellation”. Rofel mentions Althusser earlier in her discussion of the construction of Liberation-era female subjectivities and, for those unfamiliar with the concept, I’ll rehearse the main points of Althusser’s theory. In his article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Althusser is concerned with the way a State (in his conception, Western States, despite the fact that he describes Stalinist Communism almost to the letter…) creates appropriate subjects. On the one hand, he notes, there are Repressive State Apparatuses, such as the military, the police, mental institutions, and so on, which serve to impose certain behaviours and exclude others. The use of such apparatuses is costly, however, both in resources and in the potential threat of resistance. Ideally, then, domination is achieved through the creation of self-regulated subjects, accomplished though the Ideological Apparatuses of education, vocation, religion, and so on. The goal is the production of subjects who “recognize” themselves in terms of the state ideology. Althusser uses the metaphorical illustration of a police officer hailing a man in the street—yelling out “You, there!” into the crowd of pedestrians. The man who turns — who recognizes the hail as meant for him — immediately admits his guilt and takes on himself the identity of the criminal (note that it is not necessary for the police officer to know anything about the hailed man’s guilt — it is the act of recognition which makes him guilty, rather than any previous knowledge on the part of the officer). In this sense he becomes subject to the domination of the legal apparatus. But, as well, in his recognition, he acts — he turns. In becoming subjected (relative to domination), he also becomes a subject (relative to agency). Rofel discusses the agency of the Liberation-era cohort in terms of their recognition of and identification with the ideology of the early Socialist State, from which their agency as women and as labour is derived. But Althusser hints at something else: in a one-phrase, parenthetical aside, he mentions “misrecognition”, a mention which is never followed up, leaving it entirely open to interpretation (ironic, that). Misrecognition would imply the construction of subjectivity at odds with the structure within which it resides. In their various challenges and subversions of State policy, the workers Rofel describe enact such a subjectivity — not necessarily consciously resisting State domination (although there is an element of that at times, too) but in subjecting the official significations to personal and positional interpretations which produce other modernities than originally intended.

The history related by Rofel is one of unfinished State projects of modernity. Each of the cohorts described corresponds to an incomplete modernization project: the original optimism of Socialist progress, cut short apparently by the disasters of the Great Leap Forward (which Rofel leaves perturbingly unclear) and the breaking off of relations with the Soviet Union, the hoped-for but unrealized perpetual revolution of the Cultural Revolution, cut short by the death of Mao Zedong and the overthrow of the Gang of Four, and the present (re-)introduction of Free Market Capitalism, as unfinished in China as elsewhere. In the wake of each of these projects was left a body of subjects formed and informed by the future modernity imagined and imaged by the State in each period, and by the local interpretations of those modernities. Rather than an undifferentiated Modern toward which the Chinese people as a whole are converging, Rofel shows the multiplication of modernities at every turn, with their concomitant genderizations, class-ifications, and localizations.

This divergence is already suggested by Rofel’s simultaneous use of and criticism of Foucault’s analysis of modernity and it’s investment in “biopower”. Rofel pretty consistently uses a Foucauldian definition of modernity which has at it’s core the penetration of State power into the lives of its subjects or, to be more precise, the entanglement of subjects at every level with the apparatuses of the State. For Foucault, one of the primary manifestations of this involvement is in State surveillance of its subjects — the panopticon of state control, constructed through normative discourses of medicine, psychiatry, criminology, sexuality, biology, and so on. Rofel shows in detail the refinements of these methods and their implementations in post-Revolution China, adding to the mix an understanding of the role of labour ideology and the ways that the work of the individual (for lack of a better term) has been used to integrate them into the workings of State power. With each shift in State conceptions of modernity, the forms and uses of bio-power have shifted, culminating in the radical individuation and re-gendering of bodies illustrated by Rofel’s description of the contemporary “family planning” office at Zhenfu. But in her particularistic analysis of the deployment of such power, Rofel challenges Foucault for both his Eurocentrism and his failure to understand the shifting meanings such power could hold at the local level. In effect, she says, Foucault assumes the homogenizing nature of modernity — an assumption which is not upheld by the reality of local situations, but is rather informed by ethnocentric assumptions about the efficacy of European civilization and the converse weakness of non-Western others. As Rofel points out, the heightened awareness of sexuality and the personal pleasure promised in its name — as well as the technology of statistics and display through which sexuality is monitored by the State — have not in fact produced a more efficient work force. Instead, the re-feminized female workers at Zhenfu are well-known as the worst labourers — increased absences, off-hours partying, “uncontrolled” or “inappropriate” pregnancies, and a refusal to construct their subjectivities through labour make the newest cohort of silk workers highly unlikely candidates for carrying China to an approximation of Western wealth. Rofel’s analysis thus widens and supplements Foucault’s, calling for a consideration of the modernities constructed in local subjectivities, rather than one which encompasses and supplants those local configurations.

The one thing that nags at me is Rofel’s’ discussion of hyper-masculinity. Although it all sounds OK to me, she never really gets into a discussion of masculinity per se — although she does note the presence of male workers in the silk factory, and not always in exclusively male spaces. Why this bothers me is this: the hyper-masculinity she refers to seems explicitly oriented towards local conceptions of Western business practices, as well as local conceptions of femininity since the introduction of economic reform. As such, fine. But it fails to account for the more everyday forms of masculinity, as illustrated by local interpretations of weft-threading as women’s work, while warp-threading is exclusively men’s work—or why men in the weaving shop hang their scissors from their ear while women tuck them into the pocket of their apron. These little considerations — the ways in which virtually identical tasks are differentiated — form an underexplored territory of gender in Rofel’s book. While the hyper-masculinity of market trade may represent a desired modernity of the men in the shop, it is not a realized desire, and the opposition of feminine and hyper-masculine leaves out the everyday gendered lives of the real men involved.

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 →

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?

The Gift of SPAM

Here is one for all you Mauss fans:

Forwarding a quirky email or an amusing link or video attachment to colleagues may seem innocent enough, but it is the modern equivalent of ritual gift exchange and carries with it similar social implications, say US researchers.

Email forwarding is a familiar part of modern email communications, and has spawned many an internet phenomenon, the Star Wars kid, the Numa Numa dance, and Oolong the rabbit to name just a few.

Benjamin Gross at the University of Illinois, US, and colleagues studied email forwarding behaviour by conducting informal interviews among email users. He says forwarding emails plays a vital role in constructing and maintaining modern social ties, despite the phenomenon receiving scant attention from social scientists.

Of course, within my friendship networks such gift-giving is strictly taboo!

Zoo Update

Its been almost two months since I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about plans for an African exhibit (which turned out to be more of a marketplace) at a zoo in Germany. This weekend Annariitta Grzonka (aka orangemcm, aka orange) posted an update on Ethno::log. It is a new report by Nina Glick Schiller, Data Dea and Markus Höhne, to be presented at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology this Thursday.

The 48 page report [PDF download] is entitled “African Culture and the Zoo in the 21 Century: The “African Village” in the Augsburg Zoo and Its Wider Implications” and is based on ethnographic research conducted before and during the event. It is really a mini-ethnography of the event. (It also contains color pictures.)

This bit from the report seems particularly relevant to the ongoing Savage Minds discussion about Live8.

There is little room in the picture of Africa disseminated by the humanitarians to acknowledge that many regions of Africa have vast riches in oil, uranium, diamonds, gold, coltran, and other minerals and that profit from this wealth flow into European, American, and now Chinese companies. Broader issues about globalization, about the contrasts between wealth and poverty in Africa’s vast cities, and about the history of African civilizations have no place in the images of Africa generated the way in which Africa was being presented in the zoo. The zoo event took place at the same time that the G8 was debating canceling the debt to Africa. News media was publicized that lack of money for health services and public education in Africa was related to the massive amount of wealth sent yearly to financial institutions to service the debt. The zoo visitors, with few exceptions, most of which were Africans or protestors, made no reference to these issues and portrayed Africa as uniformly poor and in need of “our help.” The linking of nature, Africans, and poverty does seem to contribute to drawing a line between Europe and Africa that makes it difficult to see the financial connections, at the very time that the press in Europe and some members of the G8 were acknowledging these connections.

See the Ethno::log post for the full executive summary of the report.

Dr. Livingstone’s Presumptions

This image is perhaps most iconic of the age of European exploration in Africa, Henry Morton Stanley greeting Dr. David Livingstone in Ujiji, Tanzania.

Stanley2

I suppose the scene is so famous because it epitomizes a certain idea of “civilization”: the use of formal polite speech, as one would expect to encounter at a formal occasion in London, set amid a seemingly “improbable” context. Improbable because we aren’t supposed to associate Africa with civilization. In addition, there is the humor at the use of such stiff formality during a moment in which two outsiders (clearly marked as such by the color of their skin) meet in an alien environment, a moment of recognition which would assume to be a cause for great excitement. Even more so since one of them had been presumed dead for some time. Finally, there is the irony of a famous explorer himself being the object of exploration and discovery.

But all most of us know about this encounter is that it took place. Although wether it took place in the way we imagine it is unclear. A new biography of Livingstone, David Livingstone: Mission and Empire, offers some important background into the life of the famous man found by Morgan in Ujiji.

While Livingstone was a famous explorer and missionary, it seems, according to David Gilmour’s review of the book, that Livingston wasn’t particularly good at either task. (And he wasn’t much of a husband either.) As a missionary, he was the subject of ridicule:

A trader who visited a tribe the missionary had been trying to convert reported that one of its “favourite pastimes was imitating Livingstone reading and singing psalms. This would always be accompanied by howls of derisive laughter.”

Livingstone had scoffed at his father-in-law’s record, but his own was much feebler, consisting of the solitary, temporary conversion of a tribal chief called Sechele. The affair made everybody unhappy: the chief, who became unpopular when he was forced to discard his junior wives; the wives themselves, who had previously been receptive to the ideas of Christianity; and ultimately also Livingstone, who was appalled when he learned that Sechele had resumed conjugal relations with one of the abandoned consorts.

His failure made Livingstone all the more ambitious, persuading him to abandon local missionary activity in favor of grandiose schemes and lengthy expeditions.

But, despite some initial success, he became famous for the disastrous expedition up the Zambesi river:

he dismissed all warnings that the rapids at Cabora Bassa were insurmountable and insisted that steamers could get through them during the rainy season. The fact that the Portuguese had failed to make anything of the river over the previous three centuries suggested to him not navigational difficulties but Portuguese incompetence. Livingstone’s absurd optimism not only led to the failure of his own expedition but also to a tragic missionary endeavor that ended in a large number of deaths.

Another victim of the scheme was the luckless Mary, whose years of misery had already resulted in alcoholism and a loss of religious faith. Determined not to be left behind in Britain, she had insisted on accompanying her husband on the expedition. On becoming pregnant, however, she had been forced to remain in Cape Town and, on rejoining Livingstone, she succumbed to malaria and died.

Gilmour is critical of the biographer, Andrew Ross, who tries to paint Livingstone as the “patron saint of African nationalism,” a title which seems to conflict with Livingstone’s advocacy of various colonial schemes, such as the resettlement of millions of English to Africa. Nonetheless, it sounds like a useful book for anyone teaching about the age of exploration and colonial Africa.

Cultural Evolution For Sale! New! New! New!

PLoS has published an essay by biologists Paul Ehrlich and Simon Levin telling us what for in the matter of cultural evolution. While the tone is genial (social scientists and biologists should work together!) and it pulls the rug out from under some of the worst forms of cultural evolutionary ballyhoo (memes, ma, memes), I still can’t help but feel like this is an example of the incredible hubris scientists develop in approaching problems outside their field. It used to be that physicists were the ones who did this regularly (Heisenberg on “What is Life”? Von Neumann on, well, on everything, etc.), but now biologists seem much more likely to do so. Anthropologists, it seems, should be front and center in assessing such articles… is this new cultevo wine in old bottles, or vice versa? And what shall we make of sentences like this:

There is a long-recognized need both to understand the process of human cultural evolution per se and to find ways of altering its course (an operation in which institutions as diverse as schools, prisons, and governments have long been engaged).

The Noise of Nongovernance

Jacques Attali, who was otherwise only known to me as the author of a great little book on “noise” but was actually founding president of the European Development Bank (shows where i’ve had my head…), has penned this curious piece calling for a “UN for NGOs”–essentially a formalization of their role in global governance. This strikes me as very french (though not in the way that Attali’s book on Noise will no doubt strike many as very french), especially the demand to rename them “solidarity institutions.” But what I find most curious is the unrepentant, somewhat naive glorification of the NGO as the motor of civil society. Clearly there are bad and good NGOs, and at least a few dissertations I have supervised have focused on the weird parasitic role these institutions often play, especially in poorer nations, on the activities of well-meaning citizens. Even when they work (Grameen Bank, perhaps), they demand a critical eye, and they are best held to account precisely because there is no global or local guarantee of their existence. Attali seems to want to formalize them in order to ensure the existence of “civil society.” This strikes me as particularly poor thinking–since civil society, like that other mysterious entity “the public” exists only when it has no singloe concrete form. But, I ask, what do savage minds think? Global governance by NGOs: hot or not? And what’s a better name than “solidarity institutions”?

Ethics in Social Science Research

The Health Partners Research Foundation in Minneapolis mailed an anonymous survey to thousands of scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health. The survey asked respondents about a range of ethical practices relating to their research, such as outright falsification data, modifying research design to produce results more favorable to securing funding, or fudging the requirements on use of human subjects, etc.

Of 3,247 early- and mid-career researchers who responded, less than 1.5% admitted to falsification or plagiarism, the most serious types of misconduct listed. But 15.5% said they had changed the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source; 12.5% admitted overlooking others’ use of flawed data; and 7.6% said they had circumvented minor aspects of requirements regarding the use of human subjects …

Overall, about a third admitted to at least one of the ten most serious offences on the list — a range of misbehaviours described by the authors as “striking in its breadth and prevalence”.

As we debate morality in anthropology, it is worth thinking about more basic ethical issues related to writing our ethnographies. Do we fudge our data and overlook inconvenient facts any more than other social scientists? One would like to think that anthropologists’ concern with the ethics of representation and the self-reflexive nature of modern ethnographies would serve to reduce such unethical practices, but the competitive nature of the current job market and our political commitments seem just as likely to pull us in the opposite direction. Still, one third of all respondents seems like a lot. I’d have to look at the original paper to see what this might mean.

(via Jonathan Benda)