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Yearly Archives: 2013
Cultural Anthropology, now publishing SCA members only
So now we know how at least one anthropology journal is going to handle the financial challenge that comes with being open-access. I guess the only question is whether this is merely a subsection of the AAA ensuring a service for its members, and a clarity in the journal’s mission, or is this just pay-to-publish at one remove?
Are we beyond liberal and conservative, deontological and consequentialist?
This week by accident I came across one of those examples of a certain kind of academic psychology that attempts to boil off the differences between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ to some sole global explanatory cognitive trait, such as their differing models for what counts as a just father (such as a “liberal” “nurturing parent” versus a “conservative” “strict father” which reads like a caricature of the paternal leg of the Lacanian Œdipal triangle). In this particular journal article, the difference between conservatives (which was set up as an effective conflation of the religious and political sense of this term) and liberals was a moral one, and not a difference in substantive content of the moral, but rather a difference at a formal level. Drawing from answers given by Americans (and in one case, by Indians and Americans) this essay claimed that Conservatives supposedly operate under a deontological logic, in which the question of whether or not there is harm is unimportant, or rather, that the harm is in the violation of the rule itself. By contrast, this report tells us that liberals operate under a consequentialist concept of the ethical, where the harm that is avoided by following the rule is the focus; hence, when the violation results in no harm, in one way the violation is not truly a violation at all.
Even granting for the sake of the argument that there might be some truth to this formulation, what is striking about this claim is that these are both particular, and to some degree historically situated, stances towards the question of moral code. Now, as Foucault has suggested, the moral code is just once aspect of what is considered proper behavior, and just as important as the moral code is one’s stance towards it. So far, this seems to be in accord with what was suggested in the psychology journal article under consideration here. But Foucault also posited numerous different ways of making oneself a subject in relation to the law, and this is something that has been born out by some very careful thought in cultural anthropology. Other ways are possible. Further, when there are multiple modes of subjectification in a single social millieu, there is no reason to presuppose that there will only be two positions, forming a nice oppositional binary; one can take as an example Egypt, where not only is there is both a liberal Islam which views the religion as a source of propositional ethical truths, and a dakah oriented Islam that sees proper religion as the taking on a set of ritual practices that, through repetition, exercise and mold the adherent’s character, but there is also a Sufi-influenced form of Islam which view ethical subjectification as an opening to the possibility of encounter with a radical alterity.
What is of note here is that the Egyptian triadic system is one that is not easily reducible to a liberal/conservative opposition borrowed directly from the United States, but the Sufi-influenced wing is in some ways unassimilable to this distinction. We can imagine that such a group, when being interrogated by survey questions designed to measure on a singular axis how conservative to liberal one is, might give answers that would look like noise – some conservative answers, some liberal answers, making what actually is a separate political formation look like stragglers suspended between the two poles.
Returning to America, we could ask whether there is such an occlusion being performed by this survey, and if so, what we might look for as a sign. If one assumes that it is the ethical that leads, and that it is politics which trails, we would look for modes of subjectification that are neither consequentialism or deontological. It seems to me that there are modes of religiosity in America today that are centered on forms of subjectification that looks like a blend of Dakwah and Sufi Islam, about a training of the self that ends up in an opening to an alterity which is siuationaly privileged as a source of the ethical. Such an ethical form, neither deontological or consequentialist, would not be visible to a questionnaire designed only to identify those two positions, and might in turn lead to a politics that aspire to radically break with the current milieu – though it would be a politics that would also escape a questionnaire crafted to only chart a liberal-to-conservative political continuum.
Boing Boing and Chagnon, the Ev-Psych Martyr
I’m posting this because even though it came out a while ago (at least according to internet time) I’ve seen almost no discussion of it by my anthropologist friends/colleagues – all this despite the fact that I suspect a good swath of them read BoingBoing on a regular basis. In fact, other than a brief cri de coeur from Eduardo Viveiros De Castro on Facebook, I don’t think I’ve seen any discussion at all.
Have we simply reached Chagnon exhaustion? Or is it just that people like Dawkins are so far beyond the pale that there is no point? Maybe this is one Dawkins “meme” just has no reproductive fitness . . . .
Epiphenomenal Anthropology – Grim Thoughts During Finals Week about Anthropology, Speculative Realism, Materiality and Affect Theory
I am probably late to this party, and I certainly don’t want to be seen as piling on, offering yet another iteration of a critique that hasn’t been particularly well received. This is especially the case because I’m someone who has tried to play around at the margins of these concepts myself. But a conversation with an archeologist colleague has left me in a somewhat deflated mood about things such as Object Oriented Ontologies and Speculative Realism. He suggested that the general interest in this whole line of thought, including a wider-scale interest in materiality in the anthropology of religion, might be seen as epiphenomenal of a broader University-level interest in the STEM disciplines. There are certainly some tells – one can remember Danilyn Rutherford’s observation that affect theory (which has both a family resemblance and a genealogical tie to a lot of this thought) has an attraction for anthropologists “who have dreamt of forging alliances with former enemies – of science peace, not science war.”
Also, this not to substantively critique this thought, nor is this a claim that those presenting this thought are opportunists. One can imagine an almost Darwinian scenario in which these sets of questions, always somewhat latent, are not produced in bad faith, but rather were always capable of being brought into being. However it is only now that they happen hit on the controlling problematic of the time, and hence can enjoy a greater reception and a prosperity beyond the idiosyncratic and unread.
There is of course no reason for this to be disheartening – anthropology (and the social sciences and humanities more broadly) have long been comfortable with the social and material forces immanent in the production of certain kinds of knowledge. The sense of loss rather is locatable in the question of what other virtualities of thought are lying latent, and the sense of passivity that comes along with it, the idea of not quite being the product of an event, but rather captives of it as well.
Orienting The East
This is just a brief note to mention something – or to be honest, to crow about something, because I think it is extraordinarily cool, and I had a very small, passing role in its coming into being (when the website is named after its author, you can expect a thin sheen of narcissism over everything, even when the author’s role is at best marginal).
Over at AnthroCyBib, my co-curator Tom Boylston has published our first truly in depth review essay. This in itself would be worth note, but what I’m particularly happy about its topic: anthropological accounts of Orthodox Christianities. This is a field that (at least in some accounts) has been relatively neglected by a comparative anthropology of Christianity, and so this is not only a step in undoing this error, but it is a very full-throated account of the current state of the field, and brings attention to some very sharp anthropologists. This is especially nice since (in addition to Roman Catholicism) some of the best work in the Anthropology of Christianity is currently being done on Orthodox and Eastern religious forms these days.
On Kevin Lewis O’Neill and the question of whether Cultural Anthropology is “Left Behind.”
There’s a nice interview up with Kevin Lewis O’Neill, based on his recent piece in Cultural Anthropology, “Left Behind: Security, Salvation, and the Subject of Prevention.” I’m particularly enamored with the supplemental videos, and so this interview is probably doing what it is intended to do, specifically increase the likelihood of my putting it on a relevant syllabus.
But if I do, I may do what was intended for me to do, but I may not do if for the reason that was intended. In short, I suspect that there is a kind of subtle ‘teaching moment’ contained in the interview. While I have not sat down and done a comparative reading of the entire Cultural Anthropology interview series, there appears to be something off almost immediately in the interviewer’s footing. It reads here as if the interviewer really wanted to know. Specifically, he really wanted to know if O’Neill was a Christian. It could be argued that O’Neill opened the door by mentioning that he had gone on a church-related visit to Central America in his youth, but it seems as if even before this aside, there was a probing, a desire to see O’Neill’s article as a critique (and hence a form of ethical judgment), one that would position the author in relation to his subject. Can you or can you not make a confession of faith?
Of course, this sense of there being an initial desire to know, to have O’Neill make a confession one way or the other, could simply be an illusion, an aftereffect of the way the conversation turned a little bit later down the line. But it does seem a bit odd that all the work in complicating and opening up the subject positions of anthropological informants evaporates when the question is whether or not an anthropologist is or is not a Christian. One could argue that his might be a linger after-effect of the status of Christianity and Christians in anthropology a decade or so ago. But the interviewer, from what little can be seen about him on line, doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would be filled with animus, and the questions don’t seem to show any bias along those lines. He comes across, rather, as a rather bright graduate student, simply asking what appears to be relevant questions.
Rather than suspecting some kind of bias, the more interesting possibility is that this is another case of Anthropology “believing” in Christianity, of the discipline taking a certain kind of binary, in or out, faithful or fallen logic particular to a very influential but peculiar stream of Euro-American Protestant thought, and unconsciously accepting its truth in a manner that seems almost transferential, the in psychoanalytic sense of the term. There may be an inversion of values (perhaps Christian is the ‘wrong” answer here), but the structure may be present all the same. This, of course, is the same logic of judgment that animates “Left Behind” – not the O’Neill essay, but the best selling millennial fantasy that is itself referenced in the interview, and to which the O’Neill title is an allusion. This suggests that despite my skepticism about there being some kind of Christian specter haunting anthropology, my disbelief that past origins and current practices should be conflated, that history is the logic of nothing but trace and taint, there may be something to claims about “the Christianity of Anthropology” after all.
UPDATE: On review, it appears that I mistook the photography credit for the byline, meaning that the proper pronoun should have been ‘she,’ and that the author wasn’t exactly who I thought they were. Given that the object was the interview itself, though, I still stand behind my claims, speculative though they may be.
Enough ontological turns to go all the way around the block?
Here is a piece from Anthropology of the Century on what a friend of mine calls the “Laidlaw vs. Pedersen” debate (which put that way, to be honest, sounds a bit more like a civil trial than an intellectual exchange, but no matter).
In the midsts of grading, but hopefully I’ll have some thoughts up on this matter soon.
On kneeling
A friend of mine posted on Facebook Camille Paglia’s review of three academic ethnographies of the American BDSM scene.There is, needless to say, many things that could be said, though still passing over in silence does seem to be the more prudent act. But still, one passage particularly struck me. Separating sheep from goats, academics with scruples versus the depraved, Paglia throws out this comment: “Unlike Weiss and Newmahr, she [Lindemann] maintains her professional objectivity and attunement to ordinary social standards by preserving her outsider’s stance and declining to become a participant in the world she is studying.”
I acknowledge that it’s a fools statement to say that ethnography is nothing but participant observation, or even that participant observation is at some level central or a prerequisite. However, it seems to me that failure to participate is still problematic (assuming Paglia’s description is right – she seems to be the quintessence of the “untrustworthy narrator”). A moral refusal to participate, articulated as such (as opposed, say, to an inability) seems to break the secret compact of empathy that, Geertz aside, is vital to ethnographic projects.
But this has yet another turn. A few years ago, I co-organized a panel on the problem of anthropological participation as a part of fieldwork in Christian rites and practices . It turns out that many, many ethnographers refuse to engage in quotidian Christian activities, such as prayer or church services, while conducting fieldwork. In some instances this refusal is the result of a complicated necessity to counterpoise themselves against missionaries, with whom they are often confused by their informants. Fair enough. But in many other instances, this refusal is presented as an ethical act; that engaging in practices and speech acts that run counter to their ontological commitments would be a breach of integrity that overrides field-expectations of commensurability and openness. This despite the quite credible argument that Christianity is impossible to understand without exposure to the subjectifying work accomplished by it as an ethical discipline.
I may be making too much of the common use of the word discipline here, but this suggests that if we juxtapose the practiced field research ethics found in the ethnography of BDSM and of Christianity, something shocking comes up. Most anthropologists of Christianity refuse to pray, and it is the ummarked option, while one ethnographer of BDSM does not, and in this case it is the marked option. While I really wouldn’t want this to suggest that their is some objective hierarchy of values between Pentecostalism on the one hand, and BDSM on the other, and my views on the ontological commitments regarding Christianity is a matter of record, it is very striking that when viewed as a very rough approximation, apparently more academics find it comfortable to kneel before a mistress than to kneel in prayer.
Particles and Waves
I recently gave a talk in the UCSD Linguistic Anthropology Laboratory series; despite the limitations forced on me by circumstance (I had only an hour to give my talk, and it had to be scheduled right between two classes I was teaching) I really enjoyed myself.
The topic was taking work I had already done on dual models for ethical speech in the Vineyard, and ask whether the methodological and analytic tools developed by linguistic anthropology could be use to provide a more rigorous manner of understanding the role that affect might play in the pivoting between an Evangelical and a Pentecostal modes of speech (affect and field methods being a problem as of late in sociocultural anthropology).
Since this was a linguistic anthropology talk, it was naturally centered around video evidence – a moment that occurred near to close the of the 1985 “Signs and Wonders” conference, when a bevy of pastors come to the stage to tearfully repent after someone gets a prophetic word that many of the paid clergy present are ‘harlots.’
The comments I received during the workshop segment were particularly sharp, and this was a community that knows how to give very fine readings of “in situ” video material. But upon reflection, one thing in particular stuck me about the conversation that ensued. There was a tendency on the part of my linguistic anthropology colleagues to read the phenomenon through Goffmanian ‘footings,’ and as a series of interactions between actors contesting control of the speech event. My concern, with affect as forms of intensity that might be doing recondrite but still chartable work in shifting speakers from Evangelical modes of speech to Pentecostal ones was, to a considerable degree, seen as not being necessary for a rigorous analysis of the speech event.
There might be several reasons for this disconnect. One could simply be that absent first hand experience, it is hard to grasp the role that affect plays in the uncanny dins that sometimes accompany large events where (at least in my interlocutors’ eyes) the Holy Spirit is at work. Not even the best of speakers can convey how at once thrilling and unsettling that collective soundscape, pieced together from groans of agony and tears of joy, can be.
But I also think that our discussion might have been slightly skewed by different framings as to what we were attending to. It seems to me that many of my linguistic anthropology colleagues were understanding this as a series of exchanges between discrete actors; while I was understanding this an event, in which boundaries of the person were at least temporality held in abeyance, overwritten for a spell by transmissions from person to person. It may be argued that I am simply presuming my conclusion – that affect does act as a contagion that is analytically distinguishable from, though not completely uninvolved in, the performance of speech.
Of course, to some degree, the promise of affect theory is that one doesn’t have to choose, that one is speaking two [metaphorical] languages at once, as Mazzarella has suggested. We would think, then, of communication as being, like the photon, at once discursive particles and affective wave, discrete sets of code exchanged between identifiable and bounded actors, and as intensifies that work as historically caused and conditioned intensities. The key to making this claim more than an empty agreement that both frames are right, though, would be to catch those particular moments when a granular sense of human interactions, and a sense of the difference made by refractions, would leave identifiable effects . . .
Jon Bialecki 