Showing papers in "Hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory in 2013"

It is value that brings universes into being

Abstract: Any theoretical term is an implicit statement about human nature. Anthropologiststend to be uncomfortable with this fact but it is nonetheless true. Even if one were to make a statement as apparently innocuous as “ritual can take many forms in many places,” one is still asserting that “ritual” is a meaningful cross-cultural category, implying—as pretty much any anthropological discussion of ritual invariably does imply—that we can assume all human beings have engaged in some kind of ritual activity at some point or another, that ritual is an inherent aspect of human sociality, even if there’s no scholarly consensus whatsoever as to what, precisely, a ritual is or what it says about us that we are all in some sense ritual producing beings. And the same is true of any other theoretical term: kinship, authority, labor, symbol, the body, performance, or anything else.

Sorting out commodities: how capitalist value is made through gifts

Abstract: Far from being a self-enclosed system, capitalism is unable to create most of the skills, relations, and resources it needs to function. Capitalist accumulation depends on converting stuff created in varied ways, including photosynthesis and animal metabolism, into capitalist commodities. Capitalist commodities thus come into value by using—and obviating—non-capitalist social relations, human and non-human. How is this done? This article shows the importance of assessment practices in creating commodity value from non-capitalist value forms. Sorting mushrooms offers a startlingly clear example, because the mushrooms are basically unchanged except for sorting. Yet, similar practices are found in many commodity chains. Alienation cannot be taken for granted; it must be built into the commodity.

Monism, pluralism and the structure of value relations: A Dumontian contribution to the contemporary study of value

Abstract: Although the topic of values has not been a central focus of discussion in anthropology in recent decades, during this period questions concerning values have continued to be important in philosophy. One key debate surrounding values in that field takes up the question of whether monist or pluralist accounts best describe the way values relate to one another in the world. Reviewing some of the philosophical literature on this topic, I argue that it is primarily concerned not with how many values exist in any given society, but with the nature of the relations between them. Drawing on Dumont’s theoretical work, I suggest that ethnographic research demonstrates that both monist and pluralist tendencies exist in the value relations of all societies and that the key analytic task thus becomes not determining whether a society is monist or pluralist, but rather documenting which kinds of configurations of monist and pluralist relations we tend to find in actually existing societies. I present four ethnographic sketches of different configurations, demonstrating the promise of this kind of research for contributing to both anthropological research and philosophical debates about value.

What kinship does—and how

Abstract: Comment on SAHLINS, Marshall. 2013. What kinship is—and is not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Introduction. Value as theory: Comparison, cultural critique, and guerilla ethnographic theory

Abstract: The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an anti-theory of value. The two perspectives derive from two different visions for anthropology, which differ radically on how they see the relationship of the discipline to other disciplines and to the history of ideas more generally. Where these views converge, however, is on the aim of exploring the potential of value as theory. In both perspectives, value is seen as a powerful concept that can generate new ethnographic questions and insights and can provide a crucial dimension to cultural critique.

The galactic polity in Southeast Asia

Abstract: I have coined the label galactic polity to represent the design of traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms, a design that coded in a composite way cosmological, topographical, and politico-economic features. The label itself is derived from the concept of mandala, which according to a common Indo-Tibetan tradition is composed of two elements—a core (manda) and a container or enclosing element (la). Mandala designs, both simple and complex of satellites arranged around a center, occur with such insistence at various levels of Hindu-Buddhist thought and practice that one is invited to probe their representational efficacy.

Sharing: Allowing others to take what is valued

Abstract: Sharing adds a paradox to the question of transfer and value: Why do people share what they value even though they cannot count on a return? This contribution breaks with the conventional assumption that practices of sharing are simple prestages of more complex reciprocal gift-exchange or commodity transactions. Instead I consider sharing to be a complex social phenomenon that makes rather specific requirements in regard to bodily copresence, relatedness, and interaction. Based on ethnographic field research I also suggest that forms of “demand sharing” should not be considered to be aberrations since they conform particularly well to the values enshrined in sharing.

The value of (performative) acts

Abstract: In this paper I pursue arguments concerning the relation between economic and ethical value. I consider the relationship of activities to objects and (following Aristotle and Arendt) distinguish be...

The pre-eminence of the right hand: A study in religious polarity

Abstract: Aristotle justified slavery by Greek ethnic superiority over the barbarians; and men, who are today troubled by feminist demands, allege the natural inferiority of women. Social life involves a multitude of practices which while not an integral part of religion are yet tightly attached to it. In the sacred principle reside the powers that conserve and augment life, that give health, social preeminence, courage in war and excellence in work. Dualism, essential to primitive thought, dominates their social organization. Given the religious character with which the primitive community feels itself invested, social life has as a necessary condition the existence, in the same tribe, of an opposed and complementary part which can freely assume the functions forbidden to the members of the first group. In the sacred principle reside the powers that conserve and augment life, that give health, social preeminence, courage in war and excellence in work.

Financial value: Economic, moral, political, global

Abstract: Based on participant observation, this paper analyzes the professional everyday of employees of the financial industry. For them, giving financial value to a social activity means determining technically the monetary revenue that can be obtained from it. But it also means including it in a hierarchy of access to credit, according to liberal moral and political considerations found in financial regulation and financial theory, aiming to create efficient markets where individual investors would meet, leading to an optimal allocation of global monetary resources. Thus, this case shows that everyday practice in the financial industry challenges the opposition, found in Weber and in neo-liberalism, between an economic value (in the singular) and moral and political values (in the plural). Following Mauss and current trends in the anthropology of money, the paper concludes that the concept of value should not be an analytic tool, but is part of the object we study, as one of the ways in which the people observed make sense of their own practice.

The commensurability of carbon: Making value and money of climate change

Abstract: The introduction of the Kyoto Protocol is an attempt to save the climate through a number of schemes, or mechanisms, that commodify carbon. Among other things, these schemes create monetary incentives to reduce carbon emissions through the trade of permits and credits, and they make carbon an object of financial speculation. Most controversial is apparently the potential of carbon thus to be a universal yardstick for value by commensurating moral spheres of human action (the environment, the economy, development, etc.) that some people regard as distinct. This paper explores the consequences of the speculative aspects of carbon as a standard of value and as potential currency.

On Value. The Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology, 1980.

Abstract: I saw Radcliffe-Brown only once, in this very room. In my memory I can still see him today, though somewhat hazily, delivering the Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1951.2 I must have made it to London for the occasion, from Oxford where I was a new, if not that young, lecturer. As I listened to him, he seemed to have made one step in the direction of Lévi-Strauss, and I felt comforted in my recent structural allegiance. In fact it was only a limited, passing convergence.3

“The quickening of the unknown”: Epistemologies of surprise in anthropology (The Munro Lecture, 2013)

Abstract: My title is from an essay by Nigerian writer Ben Okri, which I draw on to address one aspect of classic empiricism in anthropology that I have found particularly important, namely the element of surprise, or “impression” (Hume), as an instigator to thought. Quickening is the moment when a being gives evidence of its own life and presence. An epistemology of surprise has been widely and frequently practiced in anthropology, as is illustrated from works across many fields and theoretical orientations. Variations in conventions of instigation and completion are traced back through skeptic and enlightenment practices; linked to artisanal, poetic, and artistic processes within the discipline across its history; compared in the imagery in classic works from Africa and Melanesia; and then explored in the recent “radical empiricism” of Michael Jackson and politically inflected works that focus on fragments, gaps, and absences rather than presences. Examples from my own work on political economic “quickenings”—a baffling confusion of referents for a number term in Cameroon, and an arresting Nigerian complaint that “there’s no money,” in a globally monetized world—conclude the lecture, showing the wide applicability of this mode of reasoning, which traces a genealogy from Hume and Greek skeptical empiricism.

Experimental forms for the expression of norms in the ethnography of the contemporary

Abstract: This article considers the methodological state of ethnographic projects that are situated in the context of complex global assemblages and projects, and of a tradition of critique that has defined the purpose of much anthropological research over the past two decades. How does the recent surge of concern with value as the analytic object of study mesh with the explicit normative concerns in the ways that many ethnographic projects are conceived and narrated? Value is both an object and informing frame of such projects. This article probes experiments in the weaving of longstanding theoretical orientations to value in the mesh of contemporary fieldwork itself.

The anthropology of an equation. Sieves, spam filters, agentive algorithms, and ontologies of transformation

Abstract: This article undertakes the anthropology of an equation that constitutes the essence of an algorithm that underlies a variety of computational technologies—most notably spam filters, but also data-mining tools, diagnostic tests, predictive parsers, risk assessment techniques, and Bayesian reasoning more generally. The article foregrounds the ways ontologies are both embodied in and transformed by such algorithms. And it shows the stakes such ontological transformations have for one particularly widespread and powerful metaphor and device—the sieve. In so doing, this inquiry shows some of the complex processes that must be considered if we are to understand some of the key relations linking semiosis and statistics. Reflexively, these processes perturb some core ontological assumptions in anthropology, science and technology studies, and critical theory.

Ontologies, anthropologists, and ethical life

Abstract: What is ontology? There seem to be two versions in play in Geoffrey Lloyd's book, what we can call strong and weak ontology. Lloyd is often talking about what I am calling the weak form: \" ontologies are. .. comprehensive accounts of whatever there is \" (Lloyd 2012: 39). Thus he refers to a \" picture \" the Greeks held, and remarks that where Jesuits saw things, Chinese saw events (ibid.: 23). Such expressions treat ontology as a perception; the language of visuality suggests a world that different people share, but view in various manners: if Jesuits see something one way, Chinese another, they nonetheless seem to be looking in the same direction. Moreover, \" the Chinese spoke not of elements but of phases. \" Thus we have a view manifested in words. Notice the double mediation: it's a verbal representation of an idea about the world. In all these cases, ontology turns out to be, or at least our access to it is by way of, a set of propositions or assertions. Lloyd's ancient Greek and Chinese examples are weak ontology; that is they are theories or interpretations of reality. A representation has the structure of what Brentano (1973) called \" intentionality \" : it is about something. This \" aboutness \" seems to require that there be some kind of object other than the representation itself that the representation is about, however opaque or ultimately unknowable that object might be. But the ethnographers Lloyd discusses, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, seem to have something stronger in mind. Of Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism, Lloyd (2012: 21) writes, \" different members of the human race have such different experiences, perceptions, and ways of interacting with their environment that we should think of them as living in different worlds. \" Now on first blush, this may seem to be merely a variation on, say, the linguistics of Whorf (1956: 158) when he suggests \" Hopi 'duration' seems to be inconceivable in terms of space or motion, \" or the cultural analysis of Sahlins (1985: 110) in asserting that \" Cook was welcomed as Lono. \" But the language of ontology

Transforming translations (part I): "The owner of these bones"

Abstract: Recent writing associated with anthropology's "ontological turn" has worked to transform the familiar trope of ethnography as a mode of translation. In place of popular conceptions of social anthropology as the more-or-less faithful transmission of other peoples' cultural meanings, these approaches frame the ethnographer’s task as that of generating novel concepts and terminology—ones that are "peculiarly ours" rather than "theirs"—through a creative synthesis of philosophy and field experience. Within this scheme, the roles that "native thinking" (and indeed "native thinkers") are invited to play in this burgeoning discourse remain unclear. Here I address this issue ethnographically, through an ongoing initiative on the part of Te Aitanga a Hauiti Māori people in New Zealand to build a digital repository of tribal taonga (ancestral artifacts, images, knowledge). In an account written with the purposes of their project in mind, I consider what Hauiti's efforts to translate their whakapapa (genealogies and oral histories) into digital forms might imply for an anthropology that would seek to reframe questions of difference by mobilizing such native "anthropologies" in the service of disciplinary self-renewal. These ethnographic insights then set the scene for a second discussion—to appear in the following issue of Hau —of how ontological approaches are seeking to transform anthropology, considered in relation to earlier debates on the difficulties of translating cultural and ontological alterity.

God on trial: Human sacrifice, trickery and faith

Abstract: What would the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac look like through the value magnitude of Chukchi sacrifice, and vice versa? Drawing on the Dumontian idea that a dominant value contains its contrary within, I show that what counts as the dominant value in each of the two sacrificial traditions is so deeply co-implicated that trickery (Chukchi) becomes the shadow of faith (Abraham), and vice versa. At certain moments, one dominant value or the other is captured by its own shadow and flips into its contrary. This reversibility takes place against a “paramount value” shared by both traditions: the necessary hierarchical distance between humanity and divinity. All of this allows us to reconsider Abraham’s trial in a manner that is precisely contrary to most prevailing interpretations—namely, as an act in which God is put on trial by Abraham.

Jinnealogy: Everyday life and Islamic theology in post-Partition Delhi

Abstract: In this article I explore what I call jinnealogy , a theological orientation that emerges when the genealogies of human memory are confronted with the amnesic forces of an obliterated landscape. In stories told in contemporary Delhi, long-lived jinn act as transmitters connecting human beings centuries apart in time. In petitions deposited to jinn -saints in a ruined medieval palace, medieval ideas of justice come together with modern bureaucratic techniques. Both stories and rituals attest to a theological newness intricately entwined with the transformations of the postcolonial city’s spiritual and physical landscapes. Jinn are present in the blank spaces of the map, where the plans of the bureaucracy, the verdicts of the judiciary, and the illegibility of the post-Partition Indian state coincide to attempt vast erasures of the city’s Muslim landscapes. Jinnealogy, the supersession of human chains of memory by the long lives of the jinn, challenges the magical amnesia of the state by bringing up other temporalities, political theologies, and modes of witnessing against the empty, homogenous time of a bureaucratically constituted present.

On the culture of material value and the cosmography of riches

Abstract: Herein is a discourse on value and how economics fails as a science thereof by banishing culture to the status of “exogenous factors” The argument is demonstrated by an ethnographically informed study of the external origins of riches Among the conclusions: money (“magical property”) as a means rather than the antithesis of extended kinship; scarcity as a function of value rather than the value of scarcity; and other such contradictions of the deceived wisdom

The atmospheric person: Value, experiment, and "making neighbors" in Madrid's popular assemblies

Abstract: The Occupy movement in Spain, locally known as the May 15 movement (15M), singularly developed throughout 2011 into a network of local neighborhood “popular assemblies.” Over one hundred assemblies cropped up in Madrid alone. This article explores the conceptual and infrastructural work invested by the assemblies in the production of a particular experience of neighborhood ( barrio ). The barrio has become the centerpiece of the assemblies’ political and geographical imagination. We offer here an ethnographic account of how the work of assembling is constitutive of a new experience of relationality, which assembly-goers refer to as “making neighbors.” One makes neighbors through processes of deambulation and through an investment in the rhythmic and atmospheric production of space. The neighbor fares thus as an atmospheric person . Further, in this guise it has become both a model of and a model for political citizenship expressive of a right to the city . People’s exploration of the question, “What is a neighbor?” offers an ethnographic case study on the invention of novel forms of social relations and political values in an urban commons—on the rise of the urban persona of the neighbor as a social-cum-political experimenter. Value, then, as an experimental form.

The "becoming-past" of places: Spacetime and memory in nineteenth-century, pre-Civil War New York

Abstract: I want to thank you for the honor of being asked to give this lecture in memory of Edward Westermarck. Westermarck had a long-term interest in articulating the generalizations of moral philosophy with the complications of ethnographic and historical particulars. The present paper, although very different in orientation and aim, takes up the analysis of some classic philosophical topics of interest in contemporary anthropology—namely spacetime, place, and memory—attempting to make self-evident how they are constituted as experiential forms only in and through the sociocultural complexities of a specific lived world. Among the diverse anthropological and related approaches to place, space, and time, much attention has recently been given to places as tangible mnemonics for spatially presencing the past or for mediating history in the experience of the present. In this paper, however, I shift from these perspectives to an exploration of the becoming-past-of-places: Considering disappearances and appearances of new places in a people’s lived place-world, I ask how these processes were configured in certain spatiotemporalizing practices in pre-Civil War, nineteenth-century New York. Interrelations being formed between the past, present, and future, placemnemonics and forgetting will then reemerge within this processual viewpoint. By “spatiotemporalizing practices,” I refer, on the one hand, to a particular nexus of common descriptions and related commentaries on observable changes in the city that we find in newspapers, magazines, speeches, and other everyday sources of the era. I think of these accounts as elements in what Bakhtin (1984: 6) calls a

The two conceptions of value

Abstract: At present, in Euro-America, value is usually associated with equality and not with hierarchy, which, however, is its natural partner In this paper, I investigate the status of this proposition Using the French veil debate as my principal example, I investigate the intricate ways in which the idea of laicite, a crucial democratic value for the French, is related to the social hierarchy that exists between mainstream French society and the banlieues (marginal neighborhoods) where new immigrants are offered residence Because this hierarchy is not generally taken into account by the French actors in the headscarf debate (although it is perfectly apparent to foreign observers), I propose that some invisible social mechanism must persuade them that the subordination of the banlieues and the value of laicite are totally independent I conclude by arguing that the dominant ideology in Euro-America, which posits that hierarchies are exclusively founded on political power, leads those who are in a position to act to track a mistaken, elusive culprit, instead of trying to strike some kind of bargain with the hierarchy of values

Two forms of the outside: Castaneda, Blanchot, ontology

Abstract: In recent years, anthropology has taken a renewed interest in alterity and otherness. Rather than using ethnography to determine the ways in which, cultural differences aside, we all share a common humanity, this body of work uses ethnography to figure out how humanity and sociality are produced in radically divergent ways, giving rise to different forms of “the social” and different forms of cosmology. We have thus left behind the realm of many (cultural) perspectives on one common (natural) world, and entered a realm of different ontologies. This brings the ethnographer face to face with the question of the outside . But which meaning(s) might be given to the outside? Is it located on the far side of language or cognition? Of intersubjectivity? Or does it designate what is external to sociality and humanity as such? In the interest of finding resources for grappling with these questions, this inquiry explores the works of quasi-ethnographer Carlos Castaneda and literary theorist and novelist Maurice Blanchot. Doing so, it elicits and articulates two radically distinct forms of the outside. In conjunction these forms of the outside provide novel perspectives on ongoing anthropological discussions on topology and ontology.

Don Quixote’s choice. A manifesto for a romanticist anthropology

Abstract: In this article we propose to engage anthropology as a romanticist discipline. Revisiting particular histories, we depict the anthropological discipline and its core method (ethnography) as imbued with sensibilities and militancies that define it as a "romantic subversion," an against-the-grain attitude against intellectual hegemonies and conformisms. We do so by focusing on three points: the charting of a romanticist conceptual agenda in anthropology; the analysis of ethnographic intersubjectivity and personal transformation as romantic heroisms ; and the discussion of a counterhegemonic militant anthropology . We speculate about an anthropological ethos that is inherently subversive and "quixotic," following the inspiration of Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel.

It's this, not that: How Marshall Sahlins solves kinship

Abstract: Comment on SAHLINS, Marshall. 2013. What kinship is—and is not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Why “belief” is hard work: Implications of Tanya Luhrmann’s When God talks back

Abstract: Comment on Luhrmann, Tanya. 2012. When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf.

Prologue. Value as theory: Value, action, and critique

Abstract: In the introduction to part one of this special issue we addressed the thorny question of whether an anthropological theory of value is needed or indeed possible at all. By way of a Socratic debate, we argued respectively for one of two opposite positions. Ton Otto suggested that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory and he was in favor of bringing the papers together from a “history of ideas” perspective, thereby tracing how the authors’ varied perspectives and approaches to questions of value advanced particular—and easily specified—trends in social theory. Rane Willerslev, to the contrary, proposed that anthropology is an ethnographically driven discipline, which can only produce idiosyncratic “antitheories” of value. In Willerslev’s view, anthropologists are and should be, primarily, warriors of the periphery—that is, “guerrilla warriors,” using indigenous conceptual productions as tactics to fight dominant theoretical traditions. The debate reflects an underlying disagreement, which runs through the collection of articles themselves, about the place of anthropology in relation to other disciplines and, in particular, whether anthropology is primarily theory-driven or ethnography-driven, and whether or not these two abstractions (“theory” and “ethnography”) can be reconciled. This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions about what value means for anthropological practice by considering how anthropologists engage with their field sites and projects via critique and collaboration.

Mortgaging the Bridewealth: problems with Brothers and problems with value

Abstract: In this article I raise some questions about the nature of value, largely as these arise from a situation in which the implicit value of the brother-sister relationship is foregrounded and question...