How to Do Things With Words

A pioneering attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction, using fictions of apocalypse as a model. This pioneering exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis offers many new insights into some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of a wide range of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode demonstrates how writers have persistently imposed their \"fictions\" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.

Frank Kermode and the Invented World@@@The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

This essay situates contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media. In the spirit of Writing Culture, it calls for ethnography attuned to its times. It also calls for ethnography that “loops,” using ethnographic techniques to discern the discursive risks and gaps of a particular problem domain so that further ethnographic engagement in that domain is responsive and creative, provoking new articulations, attending to emergent realities. Ethnographic findings are thus fed back into ethnographic engagement. This mode of ethnography stages collaboration with interlocutors to activate new idioms and ways of engaging the world. It is activist, in a manner open to futures that cannot yet be imagined.

/pdf/ethnography-in-late-industrialism-58ykdg65ww.pdf

Ethnography in Late Industrialism

The project of religious conversion commonly proposes a more or less dramatic transformation of the person. To the extent that this project succeeds or fails, it may offer more general insights into the practices by which human subjects are constituted. This article looks at the subject proposed by religious conversion in the context of certain common ideas about "modernity." Drawing on the 20th-century Dutch Calvinist missionization of Sumba in eastern Indonesia, it concerns Protestant efforts to define the subject, especially as it is supposed to transcend this world, and thus to distinguish it from that which might threaten its relative autonomy. My focus is on changes in signifying practices and ideologies within what can be called a representational economy.' The article begins with a brief discussion of the effort to reform the subject by redefining its distinction from objects such as material goods. It then turns at greater length to the normative ideal of sincerity in speech as another component of this reform. The concept of sincerity is of particular interest here because of the links it forges among language, social interaction, personal character, freedom, regimes of truth, and some narratives of modernity. I would suggest, though I cannot argue it here, that these links are part of the taken-for-granted background for the liberal tradition out of which have emerged many of the questions, methods, politics, and worries of anthropology and related disciplines at both the epistemic and ethical levels. I draw on the ethnographic example of Sumbanese Calvinists as one illustration of some general problems faced by the effort to produce and sustain a relatively autonomous subject. The trouble is partly due, I argue, to the inescapably social and material character of the representational practices by which that ideal autonomy is meant to be inhabited. As a form of self-understanding, the subject is likely to require some contrastive terms-those objects against which its distinctiveness can be defined. Such "objects" may comprise not only material things, but also institutions, rituals, social others, and the language one shares with those others. For instance, we need look no farther than familiar, sometimes trivial anxieties about plagiarism, quotation, clichd and originality, truth telling, keeping one's word,

Sincerity, "Modernity," and the Protestants

This article surveys the literature that constitutes the newly emergent anthropology of Christianity. Arguing that the development of this sub-discipline was impeded until recently by anthropology's theoretical framing and empirical interests, this article explains that demographic and world-historical forces have made it such that anthropology has had to recently come to terms with Christianity as an ethnographic object. In doing so, anthropology also has had to address its problematic relationship with Christianity, either in the religion's direct effect on the formation of the discipline, or as reflected by Christianity's influence on modernity itself, which has been vital for anthropology as both a category and as a style of cognition. In addition to these meta-theoretical questions, the anthropology of Christianity has become a space in which anthropology has been able to re-examine issues of social and cultural continuity and discontinuity in light of conversion to Christianity. Specifically, the issue of social change (often thought through or against the issue of ‘modernity’) has involved specific ethnographic examinations of fields, such as the relation between linguistic ideology and language use, economic practice, changing formations of gender and race, and the modes through which the person is culturally structured, and how that category of the person stands in relation to the social. Rather than presenting an overarching theoretical narrative, however, this review notes that these issues play out in divergent ways in differently situated communities, especially where Christianity's individuating effect may be muted where is it functions as an anti- or counter-modern force; this dynamic and contingent nature of Christianity underscores that Christianity itself is a heterogeneous object, and thus promises to be an area of rich empirical research and theoretical focus that should be beneficial not only for this sub-discipline, but also for the field of anthropology as a whole.

/pdf/the-anthropology-of-christianity-3cezb6egn1.pdf

The Anthropology of Christianity

What is the role of sympathy in imperial state building? In this essay, inspired by the empiricist philosopher David Hume and the anthropologist Nancy Munn, I develop a materialist concept of sympathy in an effort to cast new light on the expansion of colonial rule. I deploy this concept in an analysis of reports written just before WWII by officials charged with extending the Netherlands Indies government's reach within western New Guinea. Along with gifts and outright acts of coercion, these officials made sympathy into a central component of their practices. Instead of avoiding the natives' gaze, they sought out more or less intimate moments of identification with their subjects; they tried to adopt the Papuans' perspective to reform Papuan ways. In teasing out the causal force of sympathy, as these officials viewed it, I make causal claims of my own about the impact of this experience of empire on the Netherlands' subsequent policy in New Guinea. In doing so, I advocate an approach to anthropological analysis that is empirical, if not empiricist, one that insists on the power of circumstances to shape the imagination, and the power of the imagination to shape the world.

Sympathy, State Building, and the Experience of Empire

For West Papua and its people, the promise of sovereignty has never been realized, despite a long and fraught struggle for independence from Indonesia. In "Laughing at Leviathan", Danilyn Rutherford examines this struggle through a series of interlocking essays that drive at the core meaning of sovereignty itself - how it is fueled, formed, and even thwarted by pivotal but often overlooked players: those that make up an audience. Whether these players are citizens, missionaries, competing governmental powers, nongovernmental organizations, or the international community at large, Rutherford shows how a complex interplay of various observers is key to the establishment and understanding of the sovereign nation-state. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from YouTube videos to Dutch propaganda to her own fieldwork observations, Rutherford draws the history of Indonesia, empire, and postcolonial nation-building into a powerful examination of performance and power. Ultimately she revises Thomas Hobbes, painting a picture of the Leviathan not as a coherent body but a fragmented one distributed across a wide range of both real and imagined spectators. In doing so, she offers an important new approach to the understanding of political struggle.

Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua

I fundamentally disagree with Herdt when he asserts: “To interpret ritual secrecy as a lie or hoax, or primarily as a sham or game, was to underrate the wonderfully terrifying complexities of Melanesian precolonial life” (220). Those accused of this sin (Barth, Hogbin, Tuzin, and Read) have produced some of the richest ethnography of men’s house cultures. Herdt cannot accept ethnography that documents the ambiguous and ambivalent nature of public secrecy, the nature of the complicities (and the complicity with complicity) that made social life possible. All Melanesia is assimilated to his Sambian model of ritual secrecy as progressively disclosing truths. Here Herdt suffers from the sin he projects onto those he accuses of having “ignored the social contradictions of these sociocultural systems, so rich and intricately layered in public and secret subjectivities and practices” (220). Herdt briefly touches on what other anthropologists were tapping into, namely, a pride and pleasure by men in successfully staging ritual secrets, but this homosocial pleasure in male artifice is never ontologically explored. Why couldn’t this self-reflexive pleasure in one’s ability to stage and produce a virtual world not also imply an ontology of the need for fictions, of the generative power of lies, and of folding women back into relations of complicity with what they originally created—artifice? To treat ritual as a lie is not necessarily to say it is empty, as Herdt often assumes. Instead it can entail an analysis of the ontological dimension to a social order built on lies created in a mythological past from the procreative powers of women. The myths linking initiation rituals with secrecy and the procreative powers of woman are, as Herdt and Bamberger point out, partly about men’s secret appropriation of women’s powers of reproduction, but they may also be about the procreative nature of secrecy and fictions.

Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier

Raiding the land of the foreigners

In Biak, Irian Jaya, in the far east of Indonesia, foreign slogans, narratives, and books are considered a crucial source of authority. In this article, I examine how amber beba (big foreigners), the Biak term for respected leaders, harness the potency attributed to distant lands by presenting their words as translations of an alien text. I explore the implications of this strategy for pursuing authority by examining the worldview expressed in big foreigners' translations of the Bible and other imported works. The case of Biak calls into question scholarly treatments that have taken literacy and Christian conversion as setting the stage for the emergence ofpostcolonial forms of hegemony. In valorizing the textual aspects of outsiders' words, Biaks reproduce a boundary between local and national structures of meaning, keeping foreign orders at a distance even as they tap them for authority and power. [leadership, literacy, translation, Christianity, intercultural relations, postcolonial societies, modernity]

Danilyn Rutherford

Papers

Sympathy, State Building, and the Experience of Empire

Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua

Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier

Raiding the land of the foreigners

The White Edge of the Margin: Textuality and Authority in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia