We are living in affective times. At least according to the many journal themes, conference panel titles and other measures of anthropology’s current interests, affect is in the air. This feels relevant for thinking about writing. Feeling seems central to the reasons we write, even if we rarely say that out loud. Feeling in the mood to write, feeling ready to say something, feeling safe to say it, feeling passionately about it, feeling proud of it once we’ve said it, these all undergird the conditions for writing. These feelings contrast with the objectivity of a social science based in data and facts, and we have a now decades-long critique in the discipline about the fundamentally political and subjective nature of knowledge production. But these are also largely positive feelings.

I want to suggest that one of the motivations to write is also irritation. This may seem contrary and cranky. I don’t mean for it to. For me it is empowering. I increasingly find that the nudge that takes me from mental idea to written word is much more than a deadline. It is a feeling that might be impolite. I find I am most in the mood to write when I am agitated.

My research is about gender, style and politics in contemporary Indonesia. These may seem superficial, but in the US Indonesia is far too little known a place, and my predominantly Muslim friends and informants in Indonesia are far too pious to be recognizable to most Americans. The zeitgeists in which my friends in both places currently live frame them as radically other to each other. While they would disagree with each other on many things, I also know they would recognize fundamental familiarities. Most of my friends, in both places, are disappointed with their current political choices. They question their place in an imbalanced class system. They worry about getting ahead. They worry about looking good. They are stressed. They are bored. They worry about their parents, their partners, and their kids. In short, they have lots of feelings and those feelings are often very similar. They often turn to similar sociality to soothe these worries, like cooking, celebrating holidays with family or going shopping.

Affect theory has emphasized that affect is about public feelings, not just personal emotions. Yet it is precisely the public feelings that frame these personal feelings as mutually unintelligible. Public representations of Islam in the US position it as singular and sinister. Indeed, in these depictions Islam is threatening in large part because its adherents are imagined to be incapable of keeping their religious beliefs to themselves. Representations of the US are similarly alien in Indonesia, frequently depicting a place where atheists have great wealth, few kin and empty lives.

If ethnography is the antidote to misrepresentation, then stories about similar families, worries and pastimes can say something humane in a sea of fear mongering. But we also know that anthropology has also relied on categories of difference for its role in translation. Our own stories shape how we see that humanity. I am often asked a simple question: Why did I choose to study Indonesia? Indonesians, Americans, students, family members ask this innocent, reasonable question. It isn’t easy to answer. As I suspect is true for most anthropologists, the answer is a mix of choice and luck. I was lucky to be born to parents who raised me in Southeast Asia (Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore). While I probably would have become an anthropologist, I likely would not have focused on the countries in which I was raised because they were too familiar. As a college student in California, I had little interest in studying the places I already knew. I wanted to study a place that was just unfamiliar enough to still be a bit exotic. My university had an excellent program in Indonesian studies, so that is the place I chose. If I had gone to a different college, I might have chosen another place. Selecting Indonesia was both choice and luck.

Sharing a background story of that sort is vulnerable because it appears to threaten the emotional foundation anthropologists are supposed to have with their research communities. We are supposed to fall in love with a place, a people, and have sentimental explanations for our choices. Yet in spite of my own journey, I only feel more connected to my Indonesian friends’ feelings in the intervening decades. Here or there, when a friend gets married, has a child, gets divorced, loses a parent, these all cause me joy or pain. If I am truly lucky, I am able to be present for some of these events. Small things connect me, too, like being able to wander through a market arm in arm with a dear friend, bargaining and chatting with vendors. Gossiping about cousins and colleagues while sitting in interminable traffic.

These small delights could be enough. The little joys of feeling close to people who, like me, are sorting out life as it comes to them, making sense of the contours as they emerge. But they aren’t enough. It should be sufficient to simply want to relate those recognizable insecurities we all share, but that is rarely enough. Instead, I find that the nothing sends me to the keyboard faster than reading regrettably common and acceptable descriptions of Muslims in general and Indonesians in particular as provincial and anachronistic. No writing block can endure the irritation born of my reaction to radical difference. Being offended and agitated truly is empowering. And if writing is any way a small solution to continued circulation of conventional wisdoms that reproduce exclusions, then maybe getting cranky is good because it produces more writing. I would really like to live in a world where writing about the small things was enough. I would like to find myself in a world where I wasn’t provoked, but until that day comes, here’s to turning to the keyboard. Here’s to feeling.

I should start by pointing out that I’m not a guileless HAU fanboy. I’ve promoted the journal heavily on the site, but not uncritically. The first “Theory Classics” piece they published, for instance, was great to have back in print, hard for non-specialists to love. The Masterclass series also has a mixed track record in my book, producing work that I’m glad is available, but again is more likely to appeal to trufans than the average anthropologist. So is Rites and Annals any different?

To some extent, Valerio Valeri’s Rites and Annals falls into the trufan category. Valeri was an Italian anthropologist influenced by French structuralism who taught at the University of Chicago, where he died at the shockingly young age of 53  due to brain cancer. At Chicago Valeri had a reputation for unmatched brilliance and erudition and had a small but strong community of followers who read offprints of his work, work which was typically published in obscure journals and edited collections. Hence the doomed genius, secret works narrative. He also had a reputation for being difficult to work with. I laid eyes on the guy, but never took a class with him. My greatest memory of Valeri was after he passed away and a faculty member told me “it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person” So yes, Valeri had his trufans.

During his life, Valeri produced two books, one on Hawai‘i (based on archival work) and one on Indonesia (based on fieldwork). After his death his colleagues collected two volumes of essays. The difference between them demonstrates how much academic publishing has changed. The first, Fragments from Forests and Libraries, was published by Carolina Academic Press, exists only in hardcover, and costs US$70. The second, Rites and Annals, is now open access on HAU. The first book focuses on Valeri’s Indonesian work, while the second focuses more on his Pacific writings.

As I mentioned earlier, Valeri tended to publish in obscure places: the valuable autobiographical essay “On the train from Paris to Chicago” was published in the excellent but obscure Finnish journal Suomen Antropologi the excellent but obscure Norwegian journal Antropolognytt. Fragments from Forests and Libraries remains as difficult to access as the journals in which its contents were originally published, while the HAU volume is free to access for anyone with a connection to the Internet.

But Valeri’s work really does merit consideration, even from people who didn’t have a personal connection with him. Many of them are written as “historical anthropology,” a movement which most people associate with the early 1980s. But Valeri’s work is more than just an example of an out-of-fashion genre. It uses the issues of historical anthropology — continuity in change, and how the unexpected is incorporated into human life — to examine deep issues in the human existential predicament: How our attempts to order the world are always provisional, how our relations with others define us even as they enable our autonomy, how we all long to live but know that we will die. Valeri’s work is important, then, because it demonstrated how anthropology could speak to great philosophical questions, not just academic philosophizing.

It’s also important because it demonstrates the value of an ideographic, particularist approach to ethnographic phenomena. He was a man who got down into the weeds. His work on Hawai‘ian kingship is often unreadable unless you are already an expert on eighteenth and nineteenth century Hawai‘i — which it ought to be, right?

What makes Valeri such a superlative anthropologist, then, is not only his theoretical sophistication and his ethnographic erudition — its the way he brought both of these commitments into a single scholarly project. The mortar which connected these two part of his approach was his scholarly style, a habitus that it is difficult to pin down but which was truly unique. I call his work rigorous and humanistic as a shorthand for describing this approach. It was a method that included an elegant authorial voice which didn’t assume prose style and subjectivity were an impediment to accuracy and truth. It also assumed the reader had deep knowledge of European traditions of literature and philosophy. This included knowledge of the classics — Valeri apparently considered himself one of the Valerii, related to Diocletian and other Roman eminences.

Was Valeri’s band of anthropology a path not taken in the history of anthropology? To some extent, it was taken — his humanistic, philosophical approach is well represented in European anthropology today. And isn’t much of contemporary American anthropology concerned with philosophical issues and inspired by literature and art? But at the same time, it seems that key aspects of Valeri’s scholarly vision have languished, or are carried on only by his students and colleagues. His appetite for ethnographic detail is today found more in the museum community than in the academy, and his focus on topics such as taboo and kinship — not adoptions and genetic engineering, but kinship — seem a world away from ethnographies of heroin addicts in the Rio Grande or studies of geneticists in Iceland.

I admire Valeri’s work, and I think he produced some great students. But I remain ambivalent about his legacy. On the one hand, I feel like anthropology has undergone a massive deskilling — it is almost as though anthropologists are simply not trained enough these days to comprehend what he is saying. We are training experts who aren’t experts: ethnographers who don’t do ethnography, and philosophers who frankly only have a passing familiarity with the thinkers that they cite.

At the same time, Valeri was a unique person. Can we really ask all of our graduate students to learn a dozen languages or however many he spoke? In this day and age isn’t it silly to ask the members of a global scholarly community to pick up casual references to French authors of the eighteenth century? And it seems completely disconnected from any sort of program for social justice. Valeri’s work may be fascinating, but there may not be a course of normal science that could grow out of it. He may be a one-off.

I remain ambivalent but dazzled. And the good news is that now you can too! Rites and Annals is open access and available to all. I’d suggest starting with the editor’s introduction, or diving in to chapter 4, which I seem to remember is relatively easy to read. Good luck!

The filmmakers behind one of my favorite ethnographic films from last year, ManDove, are not professional anthropologists, but you’d never know that from watching this insightful, sensitive portrait of Indonesia’s National Perkutut Championship — a singing competition for doves. In fact, Kian Tjong, who made the film with his partner Jim de Sève, calls himself “a self-taught anthropologist and sociologist” and so it is only the lack of some institutional stamp of approval which prevents me from referring to him as a “professional” anthropologist…

The official synopsis for ManDove does a good job of setting up the story:

To be a real man, one must have a wife, a house, a horse, a dagger and a singing dove. – Javanese traditional wisdom

When General Zainuri annouunces the National Perkutut Championship, thousands of Muslim men arrive at the grounds. Seven hundred poles stand in the center. Men hoist their doves – perkutut – seven meters up and dangle them in a sea of colorful cages. A team of judges passes through the forest of tall posts straining to discern the birds’ magical coos. If the judges are impressed they score a bird’s song by tacking a small flag to the pole. After three hours a winner is declared. Winning perkutut sell for tens of millions rupiahs – tens of thousands of dollars.

The subject itself is inherently interesting and would have made for a great documentary, but what makes this film particularly enjoyable are de Sève and Tjong’s humor and cinematic eye. Apart from some engaging interviews, the film is mostly observational, but it isn’t your typical fly-on-the-wall cinema verité… One of the things I liked most about this film was how it frequently breaks the fourth wall in creative and interesting ways. In one scene we see a contestant buying a ticket but the subtitles inform us that he is saying “I’m actually not in today’s event. I just want to be in the film. Let me pretend to buy a ticket and then give me my money back.” (Or something to that effect, it has been a while since I saw the film.) In another scene a contestant gets angry with the filmmakers, blaming them for his bird’s poor performance, saying the camera (which they had hoisted in a bird cage along with the other birds) looked like a cat and scared his bird.

There are also scenes that are pure observation, but which offer up a kind of cinematic pleasure that is too often missing from observational documentaries. The filmmakers have a keen eye for capturing interesting details that lesser filmmakers would overlook. In short, not only is this a good film for anyone interested in the subject matter, it is also a good piece for teaching the craft of documentary filmmaking.