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!

I only met Tambiah once, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Although Tambiah had taught there for only three years a quarter century ago, I was shocked by how well he was remembered. People — even the persnickety people who filled Chicago’s halls — were enthusiastic about his returning to the campus. I was voluntold (as they say) to organize a dinner for him to have with the graduate students. It ended up being an incredibly punishing task for me, I had to find the restaurant where we would eat and drive Tambiah there. Problems began immediately: we were given ‘more money than usual’ to take him out, but not enough to actually take him out somewhere nice. I had no car, had not driven regularly in a decade, and had never driven in a big city like Chicago. The department secretary lent me hers (yes, Chicago people, another good deed by Herself) and I had ended up navigating traffic, sweating profusely, with a Luminary sitting contentedly in the car with me.

Throughout all of this, one of the biggest problems was Tambiah himself. Although I attempted to cater to his needs, this proved almost impossible: in his presence I could do nothing wrong. Any kind of food would be acceptable. It didn’t matter if we got to the restaurant on time. We could have wine, or not, depending on what the students preferred. He was more interested in what we were studying than his own work. Gracious, quiet, and polite, Tambiah was almost too much of a gentleman. So you can see: I don’t study Buddhism, South Asia, or Southeast Asia, so I feel like I am not the right person to write a remembrance of him. But until a fuller appreciate comes along, this is what I will try to do.

The outlines of Tambiah’s career have been convered by most of the googleable sources: he was born in 1929 in the Christian community in Sri Lanka and grew interested in anthropology there. He eventually found his way to Cornell, an area studies center, and earned a Ph.D. in 1954 by writing a dissertation on peasant communities in what was then Ceylon. After graduating, Tambiah began doing work with UNESCO in Thailand (1960-1963), and he eventually became a specialist in this area.

Tambiah worked with many anthropologists on his Ph.D. (Lauriston Sharp, Morris Opler, etc.) in the course of his Ph.D., which dealt with issues raised by Robert Redfield. But I think a real turning point in his intellectual development came in 1963, when he began a ten-year stint as a reader of anthropology at Cambridge. It was there that he became influenced by Edmund Leach. At this point in his career Leach had finished up Pul Eliya, his ethnography of Sri Lanka, and was turning towards Lévi-Strauss. Leach was producing the essays that would later go into Genesis as Myth and Other Essays, and edit The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. I think we can see Leach’s influence on Tambiah in Tambiah’s essays on classification, ritual, magic, and symbolism.

In 1973 Tambiah came to the University of Chicago, as I mentioned, where he taught for three years. I think these years were also highly influential for him, since he helped contribute to the University’s strength in South Asian studies and conveyed a sense of the social-anthropological encounter with structuralism. At the same time, I think Tambiah was influenced by the linguistic-anthropological focus at Chicago, and American versions of symbolic anthropology. This influence is evident in his 1985 volume of collected essays Culture, Thought, and Social Action. His Morgan lectures of the previous year were eventually published in 1990 as Magic, Science, and Religion and the Scope of Rationality. Tambiah’s project was, roughly, to understand how it was that ritual was efficacious — this meant understanding how words did not just describe the world, but change it (how they were ‘performative’). It also meant understanding how people deployed classificatory systems and cosmologies in the course of everyday life, and how those shaped action. At the time, Tambiah was one of the many people creating what Sherry Ortner would call, in 1984, ‘practice theory’ by examining how cultural categories were used in action. He never achieved the fame of Victor Turner or Marshall Sahlins — I think he was too interested in ethnography to engage in high-level theorizing. What commanded attention was his powerful ethnographic analysis: not what he said about theory, but how he employed it. He would take this awareness of the cultural/symbolic/cosmological dimension of action with him to his analysis of the religious dimensions of ethnic tensions and mass actions in South Asia.

In 1976 Tambiah moved to Harvard, where he worked until he retired in 2001. There, his interest turned back towards South Asia and ethnic violence, a long-standing preoccupation of his. He produced books in 1986, 1992, and 1996 on this subjects, working in both Sri Lanka and India. As he grew closer to retirement he also began work memorializing Edmund Leach, producing an exhaustive biography of his teacher in 2002.

As I said, I don’t feel confident about my ability to speak about Tambiah’s work in South or Southeast Asia. But if you are interested in learning more about Tambiah, I highly recommend watching Alan MacFarlane’s 1983 interview with Tambiah. The good people at HAU have made one of his most well-known pieces, “The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia” available in golden (completely free to read) open access — an important way to salvage his legacy, since much of his work was published in obscure journals and collected in edited volumes that are not easily (or cheaply) accessible. I would also recommend Tambiah’s memoir of Edmund Leach, which is, frankly, so well-done that it is the only thing you will ever need to read about Leach, a small masterpiece of rigorous intellectual history. For those of you with access to Culture, Thought, and Social Action, I’d recommend… well, really there aren’t any bad essays in that book. But “A Performative Approach to Ritual”, “Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit”, and “On Flying Witches and Flying Canoes” are good places to start.

James Scott’s Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia [hereafter Anarchist History] presents a tragedy of hill tribes, who were “runaway, fugitive, maroon communities.” These upland anarchists were “over the course of two millennia … fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare” (ix). Living away from the state, they governed themselves—until they were defeated by the state. Reading Anarchist History is to mourn the death of tribal peoples as victims of the state and civilization.

Scott tells us that this tragedy of tribal peoples concerns all of us because it is in fact a story of humankind: “Not so very long ago … such self-governing peoples were the great majority of humankind” (ix). The tribal life represents the quality of autonomy and freedom that we humans once enjoyed. The hill anarchists were the last band of humans who fought valiantly against the state, the great villain, under whose rule we all live. Today, after this defeat, we live in “an era in which virtually the entire globe is ‘administered space’ and the periphery is not much more than a folkloric remnant. … there can be not a shred of doubt” (324-325).

According to Scott, things have gone tremendously wrong since the rise of the state a few thousand years ago. The quality of human life has qualitatively declined drastically. Scott’s anarchist tragedy reveals intense yearning for a bygone era, in which humans were fundamentally better and stronger. This longing is strikingly Nietzschean. The German philosopher longed for the time in which humans were noble and glorious, and he despaired how humans have become hopelessly mediocre and comfortable. Reading the Anarchist History, I am often reminded of Nietzsche, who wrote: “Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live.” For the Scottian anarchist cries: “Oh, those Zomians! They knew how to live. The frontier peoples—they knew how to be free.” (Sanjay Subrahmanya identifies Pierre Clastre as the chief inspiration to Scott in writing Anarchist History, and he detects “Clastres’s Nietzscheanism.”)

Leif Jonsson attributes Scott’s anarchist imaginary to another source, the Turnerian narrative of the American frontier. Scott’s narration of the enclosure of “nonstate space” indeed resonates with the well-known historical narrative of the American West. According to Larry Kutchen, the retrospective narration of the American frontier has been profoundly melancholic, anchored in unquenchable longing for a bygone era of freedom. Such melancholy has persisted throughout the history of frontier studies from Frederick Turner’s famous thesis to contemporary scholarship including Richard White’s Middle Ground. (White’s work is indeed mentioned in the Anarchist History as a source of inspiration.)

Drawing insights from Anne Anlin Cheng’s Melancholy of Race, Kutchen analyzes how the historical narrative retrospectively reopens and then recloses the frontier, and how this historical narration resuscitates native Americans “as serviceable ghosts” and reburies them. The ghosts do remind us of the horrible betrayal committed at the birth of the nation—how certain peoples were excluded at the very founding of the democratic nation. This is a painful, nightmarish reminder. How do we go on from this nightmare? We manage and go on, Cheng tells us, by narrating stories that resuscitate those have been dead, restore their honor and dignity, and rebury them. Our incessant consumptions of these narrations are a sign of melancholia, which consists the cycle of facing and overcoming the guilt. Kutchen warns us that the melancholic historiography of frontier “incur[s] the risk not only of predetermining what we recover from the past but also of indulging in an entirely retrospective radicalism” (164).

If this diagnosis, provided by Kutchen and Cheng, sounds at all plausible, then it raises a series of questions to those of us who read and reread Scott’s historical narrative of hill tribes. With Scott, the context is not the American history; it is the history of the entire human civilization. Perhaps more than any other text, Anarchist History reveals to us how melancholically we narrate human history, how we retrospectively dramatize the course of human civilization, what radicalism we endeavor to rescue from the past, and what lessons we want tribal peoples and frontiers to tell us today.

Are hill tribes dead? If so, how do we mourn their death? How should we bury them? Or are the dead tribes our imaginary ghosts? If so, how do those ghosts serve us?

[Savage Minds welcomes guest bloggers Leif Jonsson, Masao Imamura, and Jacob Hickman, who offer individual takes on some issues raised by James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale U P, 2009). Kerim’s previous post on the book is here. This post is by Leif.]

James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia is an interesting read. If anthropology-readers are used to embarrassment regarding the gaze on tribal peoples, then here is a license to guilt-free gawking: These weren’t tribals but rather freedom-seeking secessionists from the lowlands. There were no real ethnic others, the book suggests. Instead, linguistic and cultural diversity and the profusion of ethnic labels are just markers of state-evading strategies. In my view this is all rather problematic, in that clueless western readers (people ignorant of, say, particular histories, cultures, societies, languages, peoples, or politics in Southeast Asia) are invited to feast on the identities and politics of the Southeast Asian hinterlands without any involvement.

The effect bears some resemblance to the fickle fascination with Indians of the Brazilian Amazon as natural allies of the rainforest, that evaporated once the noble Other was seen as somehow too modern. Scott draws explicitly on the work of Pierre Clastres regarding the Guayaki and other Indians of Latin America, that the Indians had run away from the state and hierarchy and all that. Clastres had been a student of Levi-Strauss, and his early tribalist work was deeply fatalistic regarding the looming disappearance of all indigenous peoples. Clastres’ shift in focus, from pre-contact- to ex-contact peoples does not remove the assumed purity of the tribal slot but instead relocates its source. The tribals aren’t pure because of their cultural- or other essence, but because they ran away from the source of all pollution (the state, with its inequality, taxation, sedentary lifestyles, and other contaminants).

If this holds, then it suggests that we have successfully abandoned the “savage slot” without changing much of anything. We can still gawk at peoples in the tribal zone, as long as we call attention to the “monster slot” of the state (or capitalism, or development discourse, and so on). I will not blame Scott for this tendency. Rather, I suggest that all of the western anthropology about mainland Southeast Asia had uncritically recycled colonial- and Asian nationalist projects of racial divides and stages of civilization. What the Zomians of Scott’s book share is twentieth century discrimination, of being denied sameness, relatedness, and/or equality in the modern states of Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. They were brought together, analytically and descriptively, in various classificatory projects that denied them diversity, specificity, and any need for political negotiation: These were ethnic types, distinct from national society. The anti-defamation-effort of Scott’s analysis, to show that these were not traditional tribals but instead clever freedom-seekers, has a similar effect: These are not particular people in specific circumstances but the shadows of characters in a western academic drama about freedom and history.

Much twentieth century western anthropology was in the search for tribal peoples, and the credibility of researchers was partly based on their ethnic specialization (one scholar each for the Hmong, Lahu, Lisu, Mien, Lamet, Mnong Gar, Kachin, and so on). The structuring of research and expertise contributed to the notion of ethnic distinctness, similar to what went on regarding the Indian communities of the Amazon. Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma leaves the impression of people making strategic choices among rival “esteem systems” – stratified Shan, egalitarian Kachin (gumlao) and hierarchic Kachin (gumsa). This is one source for Scott’s ‘radical constructionist’ case for ethnogenesis. The areal or regional focus of Scott’s book is the best defense against the traps of tribalist specialization (the search to define the expression of Mien ways, say, and the general dismissal of their diversity, entanglements with various others, and of their historical specificity). But the regional focus arrives at predetermined conclusions: States are oppressive; sedentary agriculture invites hierarchic social organization; the only defense is voluntary assemblies of like-minded freedom seekers in the nooks and crannies outside the state’s reach.

Scott does not offer his readers the “same old” shadow puppet of traditional tribals. He denies the relevance of language, ritual, social entanglements such as kinship, or strategies of livelihood, beyond how these situate people within the binary of freedom and subjugation. The anthropologists that Scott draws on were interested in various ethnic and cultural others. Their notion of history and identity assumed destruction or dissolution with “contact,” so much of the ethnographic work was distrustful of any process of national integration or political negotiation. This bias in the ethnographic record is entrenched through the notion that the highland peoples were running away from the state – no matter how much Scott argues against tribalist expectations. That is, the sources contain ontological and epistemological elements that can be unwittingly reproduced for as long as scholars and others assume that Southeast Asian highland peoples are a particular social type.

The case for strategies of state-avoidance assumes a historical break soon after the Second World War. This replicates how tribal anthropology had assumed tradition (and adaptation to the environment) that came to an end by the 1950s or ‘60s. These distinct analytical approaches agree on the authenticity of the past and on modernity as a force of homogenization and loss. This may be compelling to an audience that has no personal stake in the social situation, but implies to the highland people that they were all doing some great stuff until the 1950s, which we appreciate, but that it’s all been over for a long time.

But what is the historical predicament of hinterland peoples in mainland Southeast Asia? Since the 1950s, many became engulfed in war and related conflict. In Burma, it was ethnicized civil war, while in Laos and Vietnam it was national conflict that was blown out of proportion by US involvement after French colonial authorities had left. In both Laos and Vietnam, highland peoples were recruited to fight, for the leftist nationalists as much as for their US-supported rivals. If the story came to an end by 1950, we can enjoy the spectacle of Southeast Asian history and ethnology in ways that brush aside the realities and repercussions of those wars. It is a little bit spooky to be left with a post-Cold-War image of pre-Cold-War freedom fighters, and no sign of weapons, war, or of the specifics of the Cold War context in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, or Burma.

If I did not feel implicated in the fashioning of this imagery then I could position myself somehow against Scott’s case. But I think that we are all in trouble, and that it is reasonable to aim for different ethnologies and politics. What does it suggest about the world of academics and their audiences that we easily imagine an essential tension between the state and the people, that this tension sets history and society in motion, and that we are keener on identifying with virtue than on undoing the conflict?

In this installment of Illustrated Man, we turn our attention to Burma Chronicles, Delisle’s most recent foray into the graphic representation of a westerner’s encounter with an Asian culture. Why Burma Chronicles you ask? They shuttered our local Borders Books and I got it on clearance, that’s why. I for one am not thrilled at that company’s implosion (unlike some snarky others). Shit man! I live in a city of 180,000 and now we have one bookstore left, a Barnes and Nobles. Okay, two if you count the used store that specializes in romance novels.

Back to the comic. Guy’s wife, Nadege, is an admin for Medecins Sans Frontières, and she brings them to Rangoon while MSF attempts to reach a remote and stigmatized ethnic group who reside along the border with Thailand. While Nadege is away Guy spends a lot of time caring for their infant son Louis, socializing with the NGO crowd, trying to squeeze in a little work on the side, and making wry observations about everyday life under the military junta.

Delisle’s art is highly skilled and alternates between a deceptively simply cartoony style (usually reserved for facial expressions and people in motion) and awesomely detailed (used sparingly to depict architecture and military uniforms, for instance). In an interesting pseudo-anthropological move, Delisle inserts occasional self-reflections on his artistic process, as when his ink supplies run out and he has to venture into the city markets or when a local artist warns him to change materials during the monsoon season and, after ignoring him, he concludes the story with intentionally smudged and runny pictures.

The author mixes up his narrative techniques too. Some vignettes are propelled mostly by dialogue among characters, while some others consist entirely of boxed narration. There are even a few wordless strips. This combined with the artistic variation helps to keep the reader engaged in the book, which is far from being a profound exegesis on Burmese history and culture. It’s light reading, but thoughtful.

There are a lot of warm, fatherly moments interspersed among the observations of a foreign culture and critiques of the military regime. Delisle pushes his son’s stroller through the streets and is everywhere stopped by locals fascinated to see an occidental baby. Then one day when the milk was gone Guy creamed his coffee from the baby’s bottle. Guy really gets to see how the other half lives when he and Louis join a play group for children of UN diplomats. In particular he has his eyes set on landing a membership at the swank and members only Australian club which features squash courts, a pool, swings for the kids, and steaks on the barbie.

The house is huge. I’m the only dad in the group. The group of moms are on one side… the nannies and babies on the other.

GUY: I draw comics.
EXPAT: Ah lovely… what a nice hobby.
GUY: It’s not a hobby. It’s what I do for a living. How about you? What do you do?
EXPAT: We work at the UN.
GUY: “We”?
EXPAT: My husband.
GUY: Ah, I see. And does anybody here have a husband at the Australian Embassy?

Life under the authoritarian military regime in Burma necessitates dealing with any of a number of apparent absurdities like reading censored magazines with the pages missing. The censors must abide by government mandated quotas and have been known to order the presses to run extra copies of the censored pages so they can seize them. On another occasion Deslisle offers to help MSF troubleshoot an email problem, which keep getting bounced back from the office in France. To meet with Burmese IT he has to wait in a fenced yard until he is allowed to enter a “fortress” by escort only. Next we learn that the Burmese drive on the right (a symbolic rejection of their British colonial past) but economic sanctions have limited the availability of cars. The result is that most cars have their steering wheel on the right as well, making it nearly impossible to pass!

Most of the Burmese people Delisle meets are poor and some are almost totally destitute. When his work as animator and cartoonist necessitates the purchase of a PC, Guy must use several huge stacks of cash so devalued is the currency. The bill denominations oddly enough come in 15, 45, and 90, apparently for some numerological reason by decree of the military.

There is also a sense of wonder at the difference Delisle perceives in Burmese culture, often represented in humorous shorts. In one he comes home with Louis from a UN play group to find a fat monk sitting on his porch but his doorman is gone. He knows that monks are not allowed to accept alms after noon, but he pays him anyway. Then moments too late his guard shows up furious, bad monks are to be chased away with a stick! He clucks his tongue. Helping them is bad luck.

Rangoon enjoys an annual water festival, which grew out a tradition of washing away the misdeeds of the past year at the peak of the hot season before the rains come. Today it has become a four day long citywide water gun fight with hoses spraying from the tops of buildings. The festivities are enjoyed by all as this is one of the few times a year when the junta allowed the Burmese people to gather in groups. “In principle you’re not supposed to spray monks and cops,” but he does manage to shoot a police officer from behind anyway. “Ooh! That felt great.”

A pervasive dissonance or irony runs through Burma Chronicles, which arises between the warmth of the Burmese people and the atrociously repressive political system they live with on an everyday basis. Guy has a political conscience, but also leads a privileged life by Burmese standards. In one short he conducts a death bed interview with a very sick and elderly local artist (who apologizes profusely for the state of his country) and the strip concludes with a game of ball between his doorman and little boy. In another a bomb goes off in the central market, 11 dead and 160 injured. Instead of going shopping that day he and his friends go to the Australian club instead.

I am completely infatuated with Burma Chronicles and will pursue Delisle’s other books. This is like the kind of comic book I envision myself making. Who hasn’t come back from the field with a dozen or more stories told and retold at cocktail parties? I probably have close to a hundred pages of these “tales from the field” already typed and even more that went nowhere. As I stated above, Delisle’s art in this book is deceptively simple, I hope others read it and are inspired to share some of their tall tales. After all, look at how much XKCD has accomplished with just stick figures!

Charming and lightweight, this book is imminently re-readable and thought provoking. Comic fans who haven’t explored Guy Delisle’s oeuvre will be delighted by the discovery and those who work with NGOs will no doubt have a chuckle too.

His focus is on Southeast Asia, specifically a region he calls “Zomia” which, to quote Martin Lewis:

denotes the mountainous areas of mainland Southeast Asia, along with adjacent parts of India and China, that have historically resisted incorporation into the states centered in the lowland basins of the larger region.

In chapter after chapter he lays out his argument, showing how virtually every aspect of Zomia hill society exists as a means of resisting state authority: If states like the flat plains, people move to the hills to avoid the state. If states like cultivating rice because it concentrates much needed manpower where it can easily be tapped, people adopt shifting cultivation for the very same reason. If states employ writing as a way of keeping track of who’s who, people ditch their books and rely upon easily modified oral genealogies instead. If states like organized religion, people engage in heterodox traditions that defy centralized control. And, perhaps most strikingly, if the state wishes to impose a shared ethnic identity upon its subjects, people choose “tribal” identities as a way of avoiding such ethnic ties.

This last one is likely to draw the most attention (although I personally found the brief section on orality the most provocative – perhaps I’ll write more about that later), although few anthropologists will have a problem with his view of ethnicity as socially constructed. Still, it is worth quoting him at length:

There is, clearly, no such thing as a “tribe” in the strong sense of the word — no objective genealogical, genetic, linguistic, or cultural formula that will unambiguously distinguish one “tribe” from another. But, we might well ask, who is confused? The historian and the colonial ethnographer might be mystified. The mixed villages in northern Burma were “anathema to the tidy bureaucratic officials” who, until, the last moment of imperial rule, were still trying in vain to draw administrative lines between the Kachins and Shans. But hill people were not confused; they were in no doubt who they were and who they were not! Not sharing the researcher’s or administrator’s mania for mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories, hill people were not paralyzed by identities that were plural and variable over time. On the contrary, as we shall see, the ambiguity and porosity of identities was and is, for them, a political resource.

Nor does Scott wish to limit his argument to Zomia. Throughout the book he makes comparisons to indigenous people in Latin America, Gypsies, Cossacks, Afghans, and other tribal and semi-nomadic populations. In an interview with the Boston Globe Scott “cheerfully” conceded “the possibility that he may have overgeneralized in the pursuit of a cohesive argument.” Yet he is careful to restrict his argument to the pre-modern era, saying “if my analysis does not apply to late-twentieth-century Southeast Asia, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” It would be interesting to compare this book with Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject which discusses the role of Colonialism in constructing African ethnic identities. Whereas Scott treats all “states” as essentially the same, Mamdani draws interesting distinctions between French and English strategies of rule, arguing that they led to very different dynamics of ethnic formation.

Of course, much of what Scott says is not new. Anthropologists will be especially aware of the tremendous debt to Edmund Leach and Pierre Clastres, both of whom are cited at length throughout the book. Here’s what he says about Clastres:

The French anthropologist Pierre Clastres was the first to argue that many of the hunting-and-gathering “tribes” of South America, far from being left behind, had previously lived in state formations and practiced fixed-field agriculture. They had purposely given it up to evade subordination. They were, he argued, quite capable of producing a larger economic surplus and a larger-scale political order, but they had chosen not to so as to remain outside state structures.

And Regarding Leach’s classic text, he writes:

Nothing in this distinguished critical literature, however, questions the fact that there are important differences in the relative openness and egalitarianism of various Kachin social systems or that there was, near the close of the past century, something like a movement to assassinate, depose, or desert the more autocratic chiefs. At its core, Leach’s ethnography is an analysis of escape social structure—a form of social organization designed to thwart capture and appropriation either by Shan statelets or by the petty Kachin chiefs (duwa) who attempt to mimic Shan power and hierarchy.

What Scott has done is woven together a huge literature on Southeast Asia and the Chinese border regions into a sweeping (if occasionally repetitive) narrative about the strategies hill people use to resist state power. If I have any reservations about his argument it is that, as someone who spends a lot of time looking at how specific state formations have led to the development of specific ethnic formations, it is more than a little disconcerting to take such a “long view” of history where these details seem so unimportant.

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?

William Roseberry thinks so. In his article, “Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology,” (ProQuest link – thanks to Rex), Roseberry draws from Geertz’s own footnotes to suggest that Geertz overlooks the importance of women (“traditional markets [where the fights were held] were ‘staffed almost entirely by women'”), political economy (“the sport has been one of the main agencies of the island’s monetization”), and post-colonial nationalism (“Balinese regard the island as taking the shape of ‘a small, proud cock, poised, neck extended, back taut, tail raised, in eternal challenge to large, feckless, Java.'”) Nor do we ever really learn the social origins of status in Balinese society – crucial information if these fights are symbolic battles over status.

Roseberry is not simply saying that Geertz’ thick description isn’t thick enough. Rather, he is arguing that there is a limitation to the whole culture-as-text approach advocated by Geertz’s interpretive anthropology. Roseberry argues that Geertz’s treatment of culture-as-text ignores the crucial questions of how texts are created?

To ask of any cultural text, be it a cockfight or a folktale, who is talking, who is being talked to, what is being talked about, and what form of action is being called for, is to move cultural analysis to a new level that renders the old antinomies of materialism and idealism irrelevant.

In some ways Geertz is one of the most well known anthropologists outside of the discipline, but my sense is that his influence within the discipline itself has waned. Still, Geertz’s essay is of more than purely historical interest. His excellent writing and the way in which he captures the spirit of the anthropological process ensures that “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” remains one of the most widely used texts in introductory anthropology courses.

More Geertz online at HyperGeertz.

Works cited in this post:

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. In The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, NY: Basic Books.

Roseberry, William. 1982. Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology. Social Research 49 1013-28.

But when I in fact did become a Ph.D. student, some of those books were required reading for my core classes. I should have kept those books, I told myself (all those margin notes and underlines!), but decided against buying them again. Except for the classics in anthro theory, I thought it was foolish to make the same purchase twice. Especially ethnographies.

But there were a few exceptions, and one was Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, a work that takes you right into the Bornean rain forests of South Kalimantan. I read this ethnography in 1994 and I remember falling in love it. At the time I didn’t quite understand her arguments, but I enjoyed the way she wrote about her encounter with Uma Adang, a shamaness, a local leader, and her main “informant” in the book. The photo of this Meratus Dayak woman, smiling while cradling a white doll, was for me what Tsing described as “a disorienting caricature of motherhood.”

That image of Uma Adang came to me when I read Tsing’s latest book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Prompted by a comment by Savage Minds regular Colin Danby, I thought I might post something on Tsing’s nuanced perspective on the way globalization is interpreted in South Kalimantan (The book is an on-the-ground look at the way different groups, such as conservationists, logging companies, and local communities, talk with and past one another in their relationship to the rain forest). But when I opened the book, all I could do was to recall the powerful image of Uma Adang holding a white doll.

Like her earlier book, Friction also presents Uma Adang as a marginal voice that embodies Tsing’s critique of the global political and economic network of power. Although the Meratus Dayak shamaness has a much less prominent role in the new book than in Diamond Queen, I could not help but fixate on this figure.

For one, the way I imagined Uma Adang has now changed. The younger image of her now evokes a different set of emotions for me when juxtaposed against the photograph of her in the new book: she is sitting in what looks like a bar and her expression is solemn — broken but defiant. Behind her is a cigarette ad that has the word “BOMB” in huge letters. The caption reads “Better you had brought me a bomb…” Her explosive anger is directed against the deforestation of the jungle by the logging companies, which by her account is stripping away Meratak culture itself. The smiling figure in the first book now looks to me as one of naivete, expressing truimphant exuberance in carving out a political space for herself and other Meratus Dayak.

But Uma Adang and Tsing also retain their playfulness in the new book, especially in the chapter on biodiversity. And it makes for a nice comparison with a chapter in her earlier book.

In “The History of the World” chapter of Diamond Queen, Tsing writes about her friend’s version of global history, all in fragments, in different narrative forms and temporal registers, and full of parodic mimicry of the dominant discourse. This history, which Tsing treats as an “official” history, is to be read for its coherent unity and political message. But rather than celebrating it wholesale as a moment of political resistance, the anthropologist also recognizes aspects of the shamaness’s historiography that ends up serving the national interest of the Indonesian state. At the end of the chapter this nuanced examination of a local story leads the author to reflect upon the state of identity politics in the U.S., and writes that “the cutting edge of political organizing often is the simultaneously dissociating and validating effect of parroting dominant discourse out of context.”

In the new book Friction, she examines the concept “biodiversity” in a chapter titled ““This earth, this island Borneo” [Biodiversity assessment as a multicultural exercise].” In it she relies on a similar move of parody as a critical endeavor in which she too takes part. Citing both proponents and critics of the promotion of “biodiversity,” Tsing brings to this discussion an ethnographic account of what it means to make a list. Here Uma Adang lists all the flowers and mushrooms and the fish and lizards, in disregard of Linnaean nomenclature and full of strange and non-scientific markers of identification. This, however, is not a simple case of a local critique of Western discourse. Instead, they both acknowledge the pleasure of listing, of writing down and numbering, and hence, of having that very power to picture the world course through their veins.

Uma Adang loved the idea that I was writing down the list and enumerating each item. […] The list took on all the pleasures of writing, counting, and classifying: Uma Adang and I were pretending to be bureaucrats with the authority of state and international codification. We were ordering the world by naming it. As Uma Adang explained to me, “Everyone knows these names; but not everyone knows how to organize them properly.” (168)

Tsing’s virtuosity as a writer shines forth — a partial list of fauna and flora runs down the page margins — and it reminds me of the discipline’s excitement over “the poetics and politics” of experimental ethnographic writing (and readers of Levi-Strauss and Derrida will perhaps recall here “The Writing Lesson” in Tristes Tropique). There are some risks, in my opinion and acknowledged by Tsing herself, of investing in a figure such as Uma Adang a certain subjectivity that by virtue of representing her in an ethnography domesticates the marginal within our own political agenda [footnote 1]. Yet this issue is repeatedly taken up in the book, not only in Borneo but also in other parts of the world. And this moment of parody — playful but also serious — is at least a partial answer to the question surrounding the politics of representation.

I am sure there are other compelling “informants” who span multiple books (I invite readers to comment on who might be other such figures in the annals of anthropology), but for some reason Uma Adang has made an impression on me. There are, I think, many possibilities in writing about the same person in different books over time. At the end of the first book there was a sense of a closure for my understanding of Uma Adang; when the new books takes her up again, it for me opened up new avenues of thought. This opening and closing of someone’s character is a rhetorical strategy I think might warrant some further discussion.

Postscript: As I work on my dissertation, I am finding myself increasingly drawn to good ethnographic writing as models for my own work. So in hindsight, I really wish I hadn’t given away my ethnographies!

[footnote 1: I am thinking here Vicente Rafael’s comments on Tsing’s earlier writings, but I think it equally applies to Friction.]