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 . . .
“New” Publications on Latour, semi-narcissm edition
This post title needs some light explaining – the “New” is in parenthesis, because the title should actually be “untimely,” but that is too precious by half. The publication I’m referring to is an in-press article for the Journal for the Society of the Anthropology of Consciousness, which has recently been turned over to a rather promising editorial team. While my article for it – “Does God Exist in Methodological Atheism? On Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back and Bruno Latour” – won’t be out until 2014, the manuscript is temporarily up on academia.edu in the mean time.
This is also only semi-narcisssm because I feel obliged to also point out that Speculative Grace, a book I relied on a lot when writing the piece, is also just now available. Adam Miller was kind enough to share the manuscript with me before it had been published, and it is the most concise and clear eyed treatment of Latour on religion that I have ever come across.
Talk at UCSD on Monday, May 20th
After several previous attempts to schedule this, I’m delighted to finally be giving a talk at the Linguistic Anthropology Lab, at one o’clock at room 340 SSRB.
The talk’s title is “Ideology to Affect: Evangelical Speech and Pentecostal Prayer.” Here is the abstract:
“While the concept of language ideology has been well received by many different anthropological sub-disciplines, it has arguably had the most effect in the nascent Anthropology of Christianity. In this new anthropological endeavor, language ideology (occasionally repackaged as ‘semiotic ideology’) has quickly achieved the status of ‘normal science,’ and in particular has been used to promulgate an influential model of referentially-oriented, sincerity-centered Protestant ethic of speech.
This framing, though, obscures the fact that in some forms of Protestantism that have adopted Pentecostal practices, there are multiple and to some degree incommensurable models for what consists of ethical speech. This talk maps the relations and differentials between the speech ethics found in the Vineyard, a Southern California originated Evangelical movement, and concludes with a discussion of ongoing research regarding the role of affect as force that effects switches between these different language ideologies.”
Jon Bialecki 