How to Do Things With Words

萨义德以其独特的双重身份,对西方中心权力话语做了分析,通过对文学作品、演讲演说等文本的解读,将O rie n ta lis m——"东方学",做了三重释义:一门学科、一种思维方式和一种权力话语系统,对东方学权力话语做了系统的批判,同时将东方学放入空间维度对东方学文本做了细致的解读。

萨义德的“Orientalism”释义

This project will deliver help to reduce the vulnerability of poor people in Haiti to the effects of climate change, while at the same time conserving threatened coastal and marine biodiversity. Investments in climateproofed and socially-sustainable BD conservation strategies, within the context of the National Protected Areas System (NPAS), will enable coastal and marine ecosystems to continue to generate Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EBA) services; while additional investment of adaptation funds in the watersheds which drain into these ecosystems will serve to maximize BD benefits and ecosystem functions, as well as generating EBA benefits for the populations living in the watersheds themselves.

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The United Nations Development Programme

Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things.  
Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule.  
Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.

An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

BRUNO LATOUR, The pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. GEORGES CANGUILHEM, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95. Bruno Latour has written a wonderfully funny book about himself. It is difficult, however, to summarize a text committed to the view that \"Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else\", (p. 158). In Latour's opinion, the common view that sociologists of knowledge and scientists are opposed is incorrect. Both groups, according to Latour, are the authors of identical mistakes: reductionism and, relatedly, attempting to conjoin (in the instance of the sociologist) science and society, or (in the instance of the scientist) keeping them apart. For Latour, there are only forces or resistances which different groups encounter and attempt to conquer by forming alliances. These groups, however, are not simply the actors of conventional sociology. They include, for example, microbes, the discovery of the Pasteurians, with which they have populated our world and which we must now take notice of in any encounter or war in which we engage. War is a fundamental metaphor for Latour, since in a war or a battle clashes of armies are later called the \"victory\" of a Napoleon or a Kutuzov. Likewise, he argues, the Pasteurization of France can be viewed as a battle, with its field and its myriad contestants, in which opposing sides attempted to mould and coerce various forces of resistance. Strangely, he points out, the outcome of this huge battle, the labour and struggle of these masses, we attribute to the scientific genius of Pasteur. Pasteur's genius, however, says Latour, lay not in science (for this could be yet another way of making science and society distinct) but as strategist. Pasteur was able to cross disciplinary lines, recruiting allies to laboratory science by persuading them that they were recruiting him. This was possible because, like the armies in battle, they had already done the work of the general. Thus Pasteur's microbiology, which might conventionally be seen as a whole new science, can also be construed as a brilliant reformulation of all that preceded it and made it possible. Hygienists seized on the work of the Pasteurians and the two rapidly became powerful allies because \"The time that they [the hygienists] had made was now working for them\" (p. 52). French physicians, on the other hand, resisted recruitment, since for them it meant enslavement. Finally, however, they recruited the Pasteurians to their enterprise. Pasteurian public health was turned into a triumph of medicine. It is impossible to read this book and not substitute Latour for Pasteur. At the head of his own army, increasingly enlarged by the recruitment of allies, Latour now presents us, in his own language, with something we have made, or at least made possible. The cynic might say, using the old jibe against sociologists, that Latour has explained to us in his own language everything we knew anyway. Retorting thus, however, would be to unselfconsciously make an ally of Latour and miss the point by a narrow margin that might as well be a million miles. Latour says all this much more clearly (and certainly more wittily) than any review. Read it, but beware; in spite of Latour's strictures about irreducibility, the text is not what it seems. This is a recruitment brochure: Bruno needs you. Among the many historians whom Latour convicts by quotation of mistaking the general for the army, Pasteur for all the forces at work in French society, is Georges Canguilhem. Latour uses two quotes from Canguilhem, both taken from the original French version of Ideology and rationality in the life sciences, first published in 1977. Reading Canguilhem after Latour induces a feeling akin to culture shock. Astonishingly, Canguilhem seems almost Anglo-American. Anyone familiar with Canguilhem's epistemological universe would hardly be surprised to discover that Latour finds in it perspectives different from his own. After all, Canguilhem remains committed to the epistemologically distinct entity science or, better still, sciences. Likewise he employs distinctions between science and ideology, as in Spencerian ideology and Darwinian science, which will seem familiar, possibly jaded to English-reading eyes. His text is liberally seeded with unLatourian expressions, including injunctions to distinguish \"between ideology and science\" (p. 39), lamentations that eighteenth-century medicine \"squandered its energy in the erection of systems\" (p. 53), rejoicing that physiology \"liberated itself' from classical anatomy (p. 54), and regret that \"Stahl's influence ... seriously impeded experimental

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Bruno Latour, The pasteurization of France , trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. - Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences , trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95.

This paper consists of the central part of the research "Migrations and Crime - the international dimension of the problem" commissioned by the Italian Ministry of Justice and carried out under my direction by TRANSCRIME, University of Trento, on behalf of the Centro Nazionale di Prevenzione e Difesa Sociale.

Dynamics of migration and crime in Europe: new patterns of an old nexus

Similarly to the Amerindian model, in Tibetan cosmology humans and nonhumans share an inner principle under the form of consciousness ( rnam shes ). Corporeal differences and perspectival access are nevertheless determined by the economy of a ‘field of fortune’. This fieldmay be regarded as a formof ‘clothing’ a being ‘wears’: a ‘body’ that may provide cosmological mobility, a ‘poor man ’s way’ to assume nonhumans’ points of view and transcending ontological domains without having to be a shaman. Nevertheless, the field is unstable and his configuration fragmented and folded. Each ‘perspective’ needs an event in order to be transiently activated and unfolding the configuration of forces composing a body of fortune. The absence of ideas of fortune and karma among Amerindians results in a perspectivism as being predominantly a spatial view from some where .Among Tibetans, an economy of merit and fortune produces an evenemental perception, a view from some when where perspectives are also points of view on one’s karmic continuum. After discussing notions of fortune, merit and the Tibetan perceptual propensity in relation to other living beings, this paper will examine the ontology of some key Tibetan bodies and their relation with perspectivism: the zombie ( ro langs ), the mountain god ( yul lha ), the reckless hunter ( rngon pa ), the ‘living Buddha’ ( sprul sku ) and the idiom of ‘emanation’ ( sprul pa ), commonly known as ‘incarnation’.

The View from Somewhen: Events, Bodies and the Perspective of Fortune around Khawa Karpo, a Tibetan Sacred Mountain in Yunnan Province

Debates on the epistemological, ethical, and historical constitution of the anthropological corpus are one of the reasons why anthropology has always thrived. Whether in terms of the complex relation between the production of anthropological knowledge and the political systems in which it takes place, or the proliferation of the language of “mutual constitution” as a way to bypass questions of causality, the question of the “suffering” vs. the “good,” the attribution of “colonial” or “white male privilege” to ethnographic classics, or the hackneyed debates on the precariousness of academic life, contemporary anthropology is traversed by critical shortcuts, worn paths we often take, without reflecting on them. This first installment of a new journal section titled “Shortcuts” aims to investigate and question the analytical, historical, and interpretive arguments that have become common knowledge in anthropology, intuitively true and agreeable, yet rarely subject to rigorous scrutiny and discussion. The fir...

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Why do we read the classics

centralized state homogenizing structures. This historical study analyzes the social force of markets and nature in the Songpan region in concert with the political and social conflicts and compromise at the heart of changing political regimes and the area's ethnic groups. It presents new perspectives on the social transformation and economies of Tibetans and Han Chinese from the late Qing Dynasty to Mao era and contemporary western This article presents some images and conceptual structures surrounding notions of fortune and luck among Dechen Tibetans in southwest China and reflects on the strategies for negotiating the integrity of persons and other 'social containers'. First, it analyzes the problem in separating the multifarious manifestations of fortune connected to the well-being and vitality of persons and households. Secondly, it examines the ethnographic concepts arising from the interface between fortune and sovereignty by illustrating the cosmological imagination surrounding contemporary state rituals focused on the cult of Mt. Khawa Karpo. Finally, musing on the relation between vitality, containership, and alterity, the article highlights how tracing the flows of fortune problematizes the divide between interiority and exteriority, or the question of where the outside and the inside of a being or a society begin. The Elementary Economies of Dechenwa Life

The Elementary Economies of Dechenwa Life: Fortune, Vitality, and the Mountain in Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

In the introduction to this collection, I aim to outline the debate sparked by Tim Ingold (2014) on the relation between ethnography and theory. I outline a few methodological principles that ground the idea of “ethnographic theory” by distinguishing it from some cognate approaches, including the so-called “ontological turn” and Ingold’s idea of correspondence. Rather than pursuing an isomorphism between thing and concept, between happenstances and their description, I argue that ethnographic theory rather aims to reach “satisfactory” (cf. Wittgenstein [1953] 2009) and “felicitous” (Austin 1975) effects, which account for the productive uncertainty at the core of human sociality and the anticipatory, subjunctive, and metapragmatic dimensions of any interaction.

Giovanni da Col

Papers

Dynamics of migration and crime in Europe: new patterns of an old nexus

The View from Somewhen: Events, Bodies and the Perspective of Fortune around Khawa Karpo, a Tibetan Sacred Mountain in Yunnan Province

Why do we read the classics

The Elementary Economies of Dechenwa Life: Fortune, Vitality, and the Mountain in Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

Two or three things I know about Ethnographic Theory