Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

This week my intro anthro class is studying race. Explaining why ‘race’ and folk heredity are bad science but omnipresent cultural constructs is something that every anthropology professor has to do over and over and over again. I sometimes find the anthropological knee-jerk against race unsatisfying because it often takes the form of a a sort of blind prejudice “culture determines everything and biology determines nothing and if you don’t agree with me you’re racist” sort of deal. Also, a lot of the time anthropological critiques of race show how race is a cultural construct and differs from place to place. While this is true, it doesn’t answer most students’ question — are human beings naturally divisible into a small number of discrete groups with differing natural characteristics and abilities? I mean, _all_ beliefs are cultural constructs, but whether they are _accurate_ or not is another question. Contemporary natural science is a cultural construct with a complex historical genealogy — but that by itself doesn’t mean I should fear driving over bridges because the engineers ‘just had culture’. Even more thoughtful critiques of authority of bench science like those found in science studies tend to make students eyes glaze over — you need to spend a _lot_ of time in graduate school before you’d trust Latour over Mayr. So I like to teach Jonathan Marks’s “What Does It Mean to be 98% Chimpanzee”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9172.html, since Marks (who, god bless him, has “PDFs of all his articles free online”:http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/pubs/main.html) deals with issues of genetics straight on and attempts to distinguish genetic science from folk heredity. It’s a snarky, pugnacious book that is highly readable and manages to squeeze in interesting little bits on the history of physical anthropology as well. I’d highly reccomend it.

At any rate, I spend a lot of the class slowly unprying my student’s idea of race. “Why are so many african americans professional athletes?” becomes “Why are so many professional athletes african american?” (because there are millions of african americans and very very few professional athletes). Then I try a thought experiment: if excellence in athletics is explained by genetic endowment, perhaps Australia’s dominance in Rugby League is due to the Australian Rugby gene? Obviously not, say my students, since Australians are white, and our weirdo American intuitions only like genetic explanations for non-white people.

Then I point to “Amartya Sen’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen work in “Development as Freedom”:http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-829758-0 which demonstrates that African Americans are less likely to live to 45 (if they reach the age of fifteen, i.e. with adjustments made for infant mortality) than people in rural India and China. Also I believe — although this is off the top of my head with NO evidence to back it up — based on current projections any african american born today has a 30% chance of being incarcerated. Perhaps african americans have the ‘third world conditions in first world countries gene’? (By the way, the reference to Sen’s article “The Economics of Life and Death” is incorrect in at least my version of Development as Freedom — his argument on mortality rates is actually located “here”:http://www.citeulike.org/user/rex/article/116927) None of this is an _argument_ about race, of course — it’s just some thought experiments to limber up people’s heads. Marks does most of the genetics arguments.

One of my students, however, asked me for more information about the prison and mortality figures. Now, due to my sense of professionalism, I can’t go around inflicting my lefty personal leanings on my students, and so in class I try to be very balanced. However, I am now BLOGGING so to everyone who is reading this I reccomend “Angela Davis’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis latest book “Are Prisons Obsolete?”:http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100778090. It’s _only seven dollars_ if you order it from Seven Stories Press, who put it out. Come on, aren’t your NPR reflexes just aching to buy this _progressive political book_ by a _strong, independent woman of color_ from a _small, independent publisher_? You know you want to.

The other option, of course, is to read “Angela Davis’s 1992 interview with Ice Cube”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0041-1191%281992%290%3A58%3C174%3ANH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 (JSTOR enabled only :( ). Word up.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. -Walter Benjamin

Ka wa mamua and ka wa mahope are the Hawaiian terms for the past and future, respectively. But note that ka wa mamua (past) means the time before, in front, or forward. Ka wa mahope (future) means the time after or behind. These terms do not merely describe time, but the Hawaiians’ orientation to it. We face the past, confidently interpreting the present, cautiously backing into the future, guided by what our ancestors knew and did. -John Osorio

Can the subaltern google? A wikified reflection on the connection between open source publishing and making our research available to our research subjects by Kerim. Via the very good anthropologi.info. We’re building the anthropology blogosphere one entry at a time folks — keep at it!

Two revs ago, on an early form of this blog I remarked on the Kantian nature of the datasphere — making your words world-readable enforces a weirdly universal morality. A few quick dictums:

A lot of stuff we right is not intelligible to nonspecialists because it is technical. This is OK — the world needs technical works.

A well-roundeed scholar should be able to write more than technical works. So I think there is an important role that anthropologists play as ‘public intellectuals’ to make their work available to non-specialists.

We must always proceed as if our research informants were also our audience — increasingly, they are! We must always be thinking: what would one of my research subjects say about this? In the case of technical work, we must always say: what would an anthropologist from my (tribe | ethnic group | field site ) say about this?

We must do our best to make our work available to our research informants without sacrificing the needs of our discipline.

Academics have the best incentive structure in the world to publish free (as in speech) texts: we are paid teaching, not by royalties (modulo a few outliers). But one’s desirability as a professor (and hence earning potential) is proportional to one’s fame, which is furthered by being read. Ditto for your sense of achievement, popularity, and a bintillion other factors. Everything about academics points towards making our texts free.

Acid-free, bound copies of our work need to be stored in cool, dry places — treeware really is still the best way to ensure knowledge sticks around. We still need paper, and we need it distributed widely enough that a few catastrophic disasters don’t decapitate our cultural patromony. This is one need of our discipline.

There is more out there than anyone can possibly read. Certain anthropological brands have whuffie. We use this setup at a filter — we choose what we read based on where it was published, and the institutional affiliation and personal ties of the person who published it. Students of famous professors, articles in flagship journals, monographs published by prestiguous presses — these are the things we read.

With all due respect — and I honestly mean this — University Presses are unique beasties with some very strange characteristics. I say this based on my experience (which is limited, but has centered around a pretty well-known press). Let’s face it: I don’t really know anything about the publishing business. But I thought I’d at least give it a shot:

The staff is sometimes choosen based on their personal connections rather than their ability. People are rarely fired for poor performance. Office politics are even more personal and intransigent than in other sorts of offices. Strong resistance to innovation.

Production is inefficient. Basic editorial functions such as catching typos or poor grammar are increasingly ignored. Quality control is often an issue.

Presses respond to increased competition and increased cost by raising prices or taking further shelter in the protection of the subsidies afforded them by their parent universities. They do not respond by increasing efficiency.

Attempts to reform presses to be ‘more businesslike’ go afoul in two ways: first, a backlash against the idea that business is a good model for presses devoted to The Life of the Mind (a good objection in theory, but perhaps not appropriate given the state of academic publishing) second, poorly-implemented attempts at reform that misunderstand how businesses work. Demanding that a press ‘turn a profit’ is really not the lesson to learn from commercial publishing.

So with all due respect I have to wonder whether resistance to innovation by presses is sometimes misrecognized as an objective fact that ‘academic publishing is just a fundamentally impossible thing’.

Let’s rethink what we want from presses:

1) a small amount of high-quality treeware for archival purposes.

4) Distribution that is quick, cheap, and easy for less privileged people: cheap and ubiquitous delivery of treeware through the well-established subscription channels that 3rd world libraries have been using for some time now.

How do we do this? My argument — which is certainly not original — is to make the electronic text cannonical. Rather than produce the book first and then worry about getting it online, make the online article the definitive version of the text and then publish the book form wherever needed.

How do we do it?

Make presses imprints. Make them smaller, leaner and meaner — since they are essentially brands which provide high-quality texts, hire editors and (for lack of a better term) A&R people to sniff out the best new talent (there are issues here I’ll skip about whether they ought be academics or not). Then hire good designers and pay them what they’re worth to make sure they don’t quit. Focus on producing documents in standards-compliant formats (*ahem* xml) that can be transformed into PDF, HTML, RTF, SXW, and paper formats without too much difficulty.

Shift to print on demand. Consortiums of presses pool their resources to create a cafe-press type setup that can produce cheapo one-off treeware as well as more expensive high-quality archival stuff. Economies of scale will drive down the price of the books. Having a single point of publication means more volume, which means cheaper costs. It also means simpler distribution mechanisms. I know this is wishful thinking, and there are obstacles to overcome, but perhaps we could try thinking in these terms.

I think we might be suprised at what happens to the economics of distributing journals if we were to do this.

Distribute electronically. Distribute electornically. Distribute electronically. Charge if you need to offset hosting costs — that’s cool. Create new lines of ‘occaisional papers’ and charge by the paper. Innovative and forward looking services such as Australia National University’s ePrints service have heaps of great stuff on line even as we speak.

Buy stock in companies that make printers and toner, sell stock in companies that do photocopying. People are going to be printing out a buttload of stuff.

It could even be the case: if anyone could publish anything anywhere they wanted, perhaps quantity of publications would not matter as much. Perhaps quality would become a more important metric of someone’s publication record? Perhaps people would be driven to high-whuffie publications?

Perhaps we’d find monographs are not the best way to publish anymore? I have trouble going there, but is it truly unthinkable?

Perhaps people might start judging the quality of an imprint for “what its done for them lately” in addition to traditional (and potentially ossified) notions of prestige.

Perhaps we’de have 500 small presses instead of 50 big ones.

As I said, there are problems with this model, and it would change how publishing happens. But as those of you who follow the industry know, academic publishing is in a pretty sad state. The future would look different. Very different. But:

How much do we have to loose, and how much do we have to gain?

Jacques Derrida is dead.

Those of you with subscriptions to Project Muse can download and read my latest article, Copyright and Taboo in both HTML and PDF. The person who indexed it decided that the subjects of the paper were “Copyright — Philosophy,” “Taboo,” and “Melanesians — Social Life and Customs.” If you don’t have a subscription, the Creative Commons Licensed versions will be around “in a week” — although I’m always skeptical when academics claim that they’re going to get something done quickly. Anyhoo, let he who has ear hear.

Levi-Strauss and Joss Whedon have a fundamental disagreement. Levi-Strauss believes that myths are machines for stopping time. Joss insists that myths are time in motion. From this we can easily deduce that bad comic books are bad because they are dead.

During his travels in Amazonia Levi-Strauss was impressed by the way that the indigenous people he met modeled their life on their mythic ancestors. One narrowly escaped death thanks to the help of a parrot, and vowed henceforth not to eat parents. Neither did they. In the past they harvested food thus and so. So did their descendants. In the mythic past people married in such and such a way. So do they. Do this extent some might want to call their mode of life picaresque. Levi-Strauss’s vision of the new world was that of an enormous crystalline structure stretching from Patagonia to Alaska, in intricately detailed, organically grown set of stories which dictated life for the people who lived beneath them. He loved to collect ‘primitive’ art.

The structure was brittle however – it resisted novelty, and refused to incorporate history into its mastering narratives. For this reason Levi-Strauss called it ‘cold’. But things had changed since the original peopling of the Americas. The age of discovery led to a second migration from Old World to the New. Amazonians may have lived lives guided by myths, by their colonizers were ‘hot’ – discarding old beliefs for new ones, they learned and innovated. This was the sadness of the tropics as Levi-Strauss saw them: the irrevocable destruction of unique cultures at the hands of a homogenizing Western juggernaut that was as unpalatable as it was unremitting. History and myth did battle, and myth seemed destined to loose.

* * *

Metaphors are figures of speech in which two things are compared. The juxtaposition allows us to see what connects them. When they are good they delight us with their unexpected correspondences. Metaphors such as ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer is like an omelets: they both delight us because they are folded over’ enrich our language an imagination. This is why Ricoeur called them ‘living’ metaphors and made them central to his account of how language innovates and changes. It’s also why he called commonplace metaphors ‘dead’ – they had nothing to teach us.

Joss Whedon has always claimed that Buffy The Vampire Slayer is metaphorical and he is right, but in reverse. Tales of monsters have always been effective metaphors that help us understand ourselves better, whether it be the controlling sexuality of vampires or the rapacious, uncontrollable appetites of werewolves. But what Joss doesn’t seem to get is that Buffy’s monsters are not metaphorical, they are real. Joss’s metaphors live because they fold back on themselves. In Dracula the symmetrical transfer of blood becomes a metaphor for emotional intimacy: Dracula acquired his three wives by sucking them dry, while Lucy’s three suitors demonstrate their loyalty by transferring their blood to her. Mina’s position in the novel because it crystallizes in metaphorical form the battle of desire (vampiric power) and duty (marital love). But Buffy is not a monster movie which functions as an allegory of adolescence. High school is not like a monster movie – it literally is a monster movie. The humanity in Angel and Spike that Buffy lays bare is a literal one. Like an omelet, Buffy delights us because it is folded over. Like a good metaphor, it is vibrantly alive.

In Buffy Joss harnesses myth to time. Would anyone argue that the rich inventory of stories and situations that Joss draws on are not mythic? The epic battles, romantic entanglements, and menagerie of bad guys are drawn from our collective imagination. But unlike Levi-Strauss’s Amazonians, Joss’s characters are not destined to replay myth after myth in a never-ending repetition. Buffy is not a sit com because its situation changes. People learn from their past mistakes, they regain their soul, they decide they like girls. In a word, they grow up. By realizing an inventory of mythic images in the context of a narrative arc, Joss uses them propel and motivate the change in his characters. In doing so, he implicitly disagrees with Levi-Strauss. In Levi-Strauss, cold myth is cold and history is hot. In Buffy, myth is the tools employed to drive time, not to stop it.

* * *

It’s for this reason that Joss might agree with the argument made in the title of Marshal Sahlins’s Historical Metaphor and Mythical Realities. Sahlins’s point is that it is the myths – meaning here the general cultural templates that we employ in our lives – that are enduring and real and our lives are instantiations or metaphors of them. Thus life is a series of metaphors of the mythic ensemble we employ to construct our worlds and make sense of our world. But Sahlins is not one of these cold-theorists. He argues for a feedback loop between history and myth. Universal myths realize themselves in circumstances so laden with particularity that their their manifestation gets tweaked, and the resulting instantiation of the myth then gets fed back into the mythic structure, altering it. Thus myths and history are not opposed, but in a dialectical relationship, feeding off of each other and their mutual morphings.

From this we can see two facts. First, Buffy Season Finale Five really really rawked not just because of how creepy Joel Grey was, but because of its literal instantiation of mythic themes. Second, Buffy has worked its way into our collective imagination that no story of vampires, much less female adolescence, would ever be the same. Although a historically existent television show, Buffy is now one of our mythical realities.

* * *

All of which is to say that we are all bricoleurs, and that bricolage – the creative rearrangement of a given set of elements to deal with this or that problem – is how all human beings operate. And no where is this more clear than in the case of oral performance. Contra generations of British classicists who insisted that the Iliad was Art while all that colonial chanting was so much hogwash. But as Albert Lord has pointed out, the Iliad is essentially a transcription of the epic oral poetry which people in the Balkans still practice. And, bricoleur like, its performers were almost certainly expected to make make every particular performance of its myths slightly different. Today philanthropists get their names on buildings, but back then their relatives just got spliced into the catalog of ships. A fully customizable custom, the Iliad is much a piece of bricolage as (and this is the point) everything else is.

Of course, there are bards and there are bards. I’m sure that Homer, Eminem like, would crush most comers in an archaic Greek rap battle while oxen-eyed Brittany Murphy eagerly waits in the wings. He won because he was good at freestyle, and it’s all freestyle. Art, like life, is all about the artfulness with which we apply general mythic, metric, and meaningful categories to our own life.

I feel sorry for the other guys – the guys who can’t pull off the caesura and can’t remember what’s to the left of the CourtTV scene on Achilles’s shield. But there’s nothing cosmically different from them and Homer. They don’t wallow in the aporias of the bricolesque. They’re just bad story tellers. Like uninformative metaphors, their stories are simply dead.

It’s true that there are interesting tensions between the unchanging situations of situation comedies and the urge to create a story arc that inevitable begins to manifest itself once the characters get really interesting. This is, after all, what explains the unraveling of Moonlighting. But this is a tension of myth and history is endemic to humanity and can be resolved in any number of ways. Excellent artists like Joss Whedon, Alan Moore, and Homer make this tension fruitful. Their realization of our myths is, like a good metaphor, startling and delightful. Their juxtaposition of elements kicks ass. Bad comics are bad because they fail to do something new and interesting with the mythical elements which are their patrimony. They seem superficial not because of the limitations of their genre, but because of the limitations of their artists. And this is something we’ve known intuitively for a very long time indeed.

In honor of Bastille Day I’d like a take a moment to rant and rave about how lousy translations of French are. It used to be that French was considered a model of elegant, artful prose. Somehow these days people have come to associate French and French theory jargony, impassable prose. And, to be fair, sometimes this is because the French philosophers that Americans like to read these days write jargony, impassale prose. But I think its also worth pointing out how many of these wounds are self-inflicted – a lot of times we fail to do justice to the prose that our Francophone colleagues hand us. Consider, for instance, the violence done to the following titles:

1. Six leçons sur le son le sens: This is one MSLV loves to rant about. Jakobson’s wonderfully mellifluous title should obviously have been translated as Six Sessions on Sounds and Sense. But no. We get Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Blech.

2. Ce que parler veut dire: Bourdieu’s collected essays on the intricate ways that language and power are intertwined, and the way that how and what we speak embeds us in structures of social inequality. A simple and literal gloss of the French would have caputed the ambiguity of the French title: What Speaking Means. But what do we get instead? Language and Symbolic Power. And we wonder why people consider Academics to be jargonheads?

3. La métaphor vive: Paul Ricoeur’s masterful volume focuses on ‘the fundamental metaphoricity of language’. While ‘dead’ metaphors become cliched, new and unexpected metaphors (‘living’ ones) let us see the connections between things we thought previously unrelated. In doing so metaphors push the envelope of language, keeping it new and fresh. Ricoeur’s book is meant to remind us that speaking is fundamentally a poetic, artistic activity and not simply an engineering feat of accurately denoting things in the world. It’s not suprising then, that the title of Ricoeur’s book is Living Metaphors. Except, of course, it’s not. It’s The Rule of Metaphor. Why? How? Hello? The book is about the way language innovates by violating rules and expectations. Sigh.

4. Le sens pratique: I find this one particularly infuriating. This book by Bourdieu attempts to reconcile a Levi-Straussian structuralism with Sartre’s insistence on the existential agency of actors (I mean, who wasn’t trying to do this post-68?). He gets there by applying Heidegger’s account of human being-in-the-world. His book – entitled “Practical Sense” (which harks back to classical takes on prudence and phronesis, by the way) is about how a certain kind of embodied, non-cognitive disposition can produce logically consistent and observable results. But the book’s title in English is ‘the Logic of Practice’. When the whole point is that practice isn’t logical. It’s practical. It may not seem like a big deal, but if you’ve read a lot of Bourdieu in English you may think my description of le sense pratique is completely screwy. One reason is that I could be wrong (though I don’t think I am) but partially its because the weirdo reception of Bourdieu due to things like these bizarre title translations. [Pause]. Ok I think I’m better now. Thanks for listening.

5. Pensee Sauvage: This is one I’ve already mentioned in several location. The title is an untranslateable pun which means simultaneously “savage thought” and “wild pansies” and, just to mess with you, the French edition has a huge picture of a pansy on the cover. So admittedly the English language translation as The Savage Mind was never going to capture the original French title. Still, Levi-Strauss’s own suggestion – riffing off of Ophelia – of Pansies for Thought would have been more rocking.

Happy Bastille Day everyone!

It’s become clear to me that the ‘cultural difference’ section of first chapter is going to have to be expanded and that its focus will be the critique of Latour’s ‘symmetric anthropology’ that has been boiling in my head for sometime. In fact, if properly played out, I see this as being the logical underpinning of the dissertation. Although difficult to write, it connects much more closely with the various issues that I deal with in different chapters. The basic idea of the critique – which I won’t go into here now because I’m not exactly sure how the details work out – is that it operates in bad faith and misrecognizes what happens when we do fieldwork and right ethnography. There are not “different beliefs” between anthropologists and their research subjects (since shared understanding is a condition of possibility for ethnographic research). There are only “different stakes” – different problems. Approaching it this way moves us back to questions not of ontological difference, but of differing motives for entextualization (and hence Weber’s problematic of value-relevance and his ‘even a Chinese’ assertion). When in doubt: Weber.

The idea is to get the political mileage of Latour’s current recasting of cultural relativism that people find so comforting in a more coherently theorized way, and in doing so to relate Latour’s work to the now-extinct (though relevant and unsolved) issues in kinship theory. Linking, in other words, The Pasteurization of France with Smith’s classic article On Segmentary Lineage Systems. In doing so I hope to re-link with Carsten in a pincer maneuver which pays homage to, while simultaneously taking the wind out of the sails of, David Schneider.

Got that?

Ok ok neither do I, exactly. But it’ll get clearer in the next couple of days. At least – it better get clearer. T Minus 22 and counting.