On human correspondence

In this article I offer an overture to social life, starting from the premise that every living being should be envisaged not as a blob but as a bundle of lines. I show that in joining with one another, these lines comprise a meshwork, in which every node is a knot. And in answering to one another, lifelines co‐respond. I propose the term ‘correspondence’ to connote their affiliation, and go on to show that correspondence rests on three essential principles: of habit (rather than volition), ‘agencing’ (rather than agency), and attentionality (rather than intentionality). I explain habit as ‘doing undergoing’, agencing as a process in which the ‘I’ emerges as a question, and attention as a resonant coupling of concurrent movements. I discuss the ethical and imaginative dimensions of correspondence under the respective rubrics of care and longing. Finally, I spell out the implications of a theory of correspondence for the way we approach classic themes of anthropological inquiry, including kinship and affinity, ecology and economy, ritual and religion, and politics and law. In a coda, I suggest that anthropology, too, must be a discipline of correspondence.     

Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good

In the 1980s, anthropology set aside a focus on societies defined as radically ‘other’ to the anthropologists' own. There was little consensus at the time, however, about who might replace the other as the primary object of anthropological attention. In important respects, I argue, its replacement has been the suffering subject. Tracing this change, I consider how it addressed key problems of the anthropology of the other, but I also suggest that some strengths of earlier work – particularly some of its unique critical capacities – were lost in the transition. The conclusion considers how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses.     

An Indigenous Philosophical Ecology: Situating the Human

Can Indigenous ecological knowledge contribute to major debates in Western science and philosophy? I argue that it offers a ‘philosophical ecology’ that works synergistically with Western eco‐philosophy and some streams of ecological science. This paper takes up the challenge offered by Val Plumwood: that anthropology can contribute to the work of re‐situating the human. It examines an ecological philosophy of mutual benefits, and shows patterns, and a broader meta‐pattern, in which life is both for itself and for others, and in which connectivity and stability are achieved through densely recursive benefits. I identify these and other contexts as areas for further dialogue.     

Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing contemporary global change

The Anthropocene is the scientific label given by earth scientists to the current epoch of unprecedented anthropogenic planetary change. The Anthropocene is also a political label designed to call attention to this change and evolving notions of agency and responsibility in contemporary life. This article critically explores what I call ‘the Anthropocene idea’ and the condition of ‘Anthropocene spaces’ through selected anthropological writing about recent planetary change and through analysis of current events in a specific ‘vulnerable’ location. By considering recent events in The Bahamas, I arrive at an orientation that I call simply Anthropocene anthropology. Rather than advocating for the creation of a new subfield of research, this mode of engagement offers an open‐ended conceptual framework for the critical examination of the Anthropocene idea as it influences the symbolic and material realities of contemporary Anthropocene spaces.     

Settler indigeneity and the eradication of the non‐native: self‐determination and biosecurity in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas)

This article analyses how settlers of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) construct themselves as ‘natives’ through environmental management. Taking a multispecies ethnographic and historical approach to studying the Falkland Islanders’ self‐determination claim, I explore a series of ecological practices that demonstrate how some nonhumans become institutionalized into systems of racial and colonial classification whereas others appear natural. I show how agroindustrial and technoscientific value systems categorize human and nonhuman cohabitants according to degrees of political, economic, and ecological status through particular periods in the Falklands: from the eradication of ‘native pests’ (1833‐1982) to defence against ‘alien invaders’ (1982‐present). Towards a conclusion, I analyse how Islanders have begun to uproot their own ecological imperial past through removal of British‐introduced ‘invasive’ species and native habitat restoration. The article argues that attention to how settlers colonize with natives contributes significantly to a critical multispecies anthropology with broader implications for debates on ethnogenesis and indigeneity.     

Primitivist tourism and anthropological research: awkward relations★

Many anthropologists dislike the tourism depicted in the film Cannibal tours (1988), which values visited people for their supposed embodiment of an archaic mode of life, isolated from capitalist modernity. Here I approach such tourism through how its participants relate to anthropology, based on research into encounters between tourists and Korowai of Indonesian Papua. I juxtapose three patterns. First, Korowai sometimes assimilate me to ‘tourist’ or ‘tour guide’. Second, tourists often embrace ‘anthropology’ as an adjunct to their primitivist goals. Third, certain tourists investigate their own primitivism, in ways that parallel my research on that topic. This diversity of alignments of tourist, anthropologist, and Korowai calls for an analytic strategy not of seeking out the ultimate basic relations between these character-types, but of understanding categorization as a practice of its own, through which categorizers grapple with broader historical conditions.     

The ethics of efficacy in North India's goonda raj (rule of toughs)

This study of goondas (gangsters or toughs) in North Indian politics comes by way of a comment on intellectual method in the anthropology of moralities. More especially, it offers critical remarks on the recent adoption of ‘virtue’ as the cardinal moral co‐ordinate of human life. Drawing on field research conducted across northern India, we show that when people celebrate goondas as leaders, they do so not because they see in them virtuous men, but because they think them capable of ‘getting things done’. This ethics of efficacy is neither merely instrumental nor is it but another variant of virtue ethics. It presents, instead, an altogether different moral teleology orientated towards effective action rather than excellent character. While challenging the self‐centred bent of the late anthropology of ethics, we also make preliminary remarks on the contrast between ‘moral’ and ‘practical’ judgement, and the limits of ‘the moral’ as such.     

Whatever happened to economic anthropology?1

In the 1970s, economic anthropology, along with kinship and ecological anthropology, was regarded as a core discipline in the teaching of anthropology. The centrality of all these subjects was reflected in the debates of the time. For economic anthropology, understanding the articulation of modes of production was the problem; the holy trinity—tribe, peasant, capitalist—provided the key terms of the debate. These terms, and this problem, are history. The discipline of anthropology has been de‐cored over the past 30 years: economic anthropology, kinship and ecological anthropology are not even on the agenda in many universities today (ANU included). This presents us with a paradox because these academic trends are in inverse proportion to the importance of contemporary developments in the economy, the family and ecology as global problems facing humanity. This paradox must be addressed not by arguing for a rehabilitation of the core subjects of the 1970s—those days are long gone—but by taking a critical look at the implicit theories of value that inform anthropological thinking about the economy, the family and ecology today. I shall argue that, along with neoliberalism, ‘agency’ has been the key term of the new paradigm that emerged in the 1970s, that this paradigm is about to become history and that new ways of thinking about the economy will have to emerge as we all become victims of the ‘financialisation’ of Europe, the industrialisation of Asia and the desiccation of Australia.     

Equivocal locations: being ‘red’ in ‘Red Bologna’

This article addresses a classic ethnographic problem in the study of Italy: how is it that people can subscribe simultaneously to seemingly contradictory ideologies, such as Catholicism and Communism? It does so by describing examples from Italy's ‘showcase city’ of the left, ‘Red Bologna’, in which to be ‘red’ is ubiquitous but each person's ‘red’ is a different thing: being ‘red’ (differently) is the idiom in which real political distinctions are expressed over issues like religion or immigration. In parallel, I discuss the relationship between the ‘field’ as a location and the ‘field’ as a conceptual topic. My account replicates internal ethnographic differences at the analytical level by highlighting the differences between being left‐wing in Bologna and its meaning as a concept in anthropology. Hence the ‘equivocal location’: a field‐site that is productively different, from what an inexperienced ethnographer expected from it, from conceptual discussions in anthropology, and from itself.     

The odour of things: Smell and the cultural elaboration of disgust in Eastern Indonesia

Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of calls for anthropology to devote more attention to non‐visual modes of perception. Frequently, the implicit suggestion of these calls has been that the acknowledgement of different ways of organising the senses could help us escape the supposed malaise of modern ‘ocular‐centrism ‘. This paper explores the sense and symbolism of smell in Buli, a village in eastern Indonesia, to argue that smell is part of an ontology that catches Buli people in a malaise of their own. ‘Bad’ smell attests to an ambiguous moral order that can be traced across myth, ritual and everyday life. Ambiguity is ever‐present because ‘bad’ or disgusting smells destabilise the very conceptual order they also help support. The analysis of smells as they relate to local notions of disgust is therefore suggested as an alternative way to conceptualise the contradictory nature of power.     

What anthropologists can learn from psychologists,and the other way around

The Mind and Spirit project uses methods from anthropology and psychology to explore the way understandings of what English-speakers call ‘the mind’ may shape the kinds of events people experience and deem ‘spiritual’. In this piece, we step back to reflect on this interdisciplinary approach. We observe that, in some ways, both fields are in parallel states of critical self-reflection around explanation and comparison: anthropology in the wake of the postmodern and postcolonial critique; and psychology in response to a pair of recent crises about the overreliance on Western samples and the reproducibility of psychological research. We suggest that combining our methods may go some way towards giving each field more confidence in its research. Joint fieldwork with specific point-by-point comparison is not common in either anthropology or psychology. We found it fruitful and commend it to others.     

Random Mind: Towards an Appreciation of Openness in Individual,Society and Anthropology

Gregory Bateson laid stress on treating anthropology as a ‘non‐specialist’ subject which would draw upon, and hence illuminate the interdependence of, all the human sciences in its endeavour to tackle what he called the `vast intricacies' of socio‐cultural complexity. What was called for was an ‘abductive’ project which would qualitatively or aesthetically identify certain vital `patterns' which connected different arenas of human experience. By this means, anthropology could hope to disinter specific sociological and psychological laws. In the manner of Bateson, this paper sets out to describe and isolate one such law: the random workings of the individual human mind. These workings are considered abductively across a range of different but related discourses: ethnographic, aesthetic, political and moral. It is argued that to appreciate the randomness of the individual mind is to gain important insight not only into the diversity of human culture and society but also the singularity of human being. An appreciation of human randomness and its ramifications, it is concluded, may serve as the basis not only of explanation but also a sense of moral value and beauty in anthropological analysis.     

Life as a process of making in the Mixe Highlands (Oaxaca,Mexico): towards a ‘general pragmatics’ of life

In contrast to Western philosophy, which has considered the distinction between life and the living to be fundamental, anthropology seems not to have given much thought to the difference between the two. However, the existence of an entity called ‘The One Who Makes Live’ among the Mixe, an Amerindian group living in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, proves that ethno‐theories of non‐Western peoples often make the distinction between the characteristics and vital processes of living beings (growth, degeneration, reproduction, etc.), on the one hand, and the more or less personified causes that produce them, on the other. Given these circumstances, this article pursues a two‐fold objective. First, based on the results of ethnographic inquiry, it tries to describe the categories of nonhuman agents with which the Mixe understand this production or making of the living. Second, it suggests that, in parallel with numerous approaches developed by anthropologists past and present, the anthropology of life would benefit from an approach based on a ‘general pragmatics’ in order to better understand the diversity of conceptions of life.     

Interior Landscapes and External Worlds: the Return of Grand Theory in Anthropology1

This paper argues that the retreat from ‘theory’ characteristic of the postmodernist turn in anthropology has not had the impact on the ethics and politics of disciplinary practice that was hoped for. One reason for this is the problematic relationship between cultural relativism and identity politics which has paralysed the critical project in the discipline and prevented a more radical interrogation of two fundamental questions: ‘what is anthropology?' and ‘who is the anthropologist?'. Discussions in anthropological writing on hybridity and postcoloniality have more often highlighted the hybrid nature of `informants' than that of ‘anthropologists’. Feminist, native and minority writing in the discipline are areas where these questions have been seriously addressed through debates on positionality and location. However, the impact of these discussions on the politics of knowledge in the discipline are rarely recognised by ‘mainstrean anthropology’. One particularly noticeable lacuna is the fact that so little attention is paid to disciplinary education and its impact on theorising. Anthropology, rather than turning away from theory, should spend more time ‘anthropologising’ the concepts of ‘value’, ‘relativism’, ‘humanism’ and ‘comparison’ which underlie disciplinary theorising. The paper concludes by arguing for a return to theory in anthropology accompanied by a critical politics.     

An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world‐building: a critical response to ordinary ethics

In this essay I provide a critical reading of so‐called ‘ordinary ethics’ in order to disclose how it ultimately undoes two of the three major contributions of the anthropology of moralities and ethics: that is, ordinary ethics ultimately equates morality/ethics with all social activity and at the same time only accounts for morality/ethics in terms of the moral concepts already provided by the Western moral philosophical tradition. In the second part of this essay I provide an ethnographic example from anti‐drug war political activism that shows how a critical hermeneutics provides a theoretical‐analytical framework for the radical rethinking of both the moral tradition and the social and political worlds that mobilize the concepts and assumptions of this tradition.     

Two kinds of physician‐assisted death

I argue that the concept ‘physician‐assisted suicide’ covers two procedures that should be distinguished: giving someone access to humane means to end his own life, and taking co‐responsibility for the safe and effective execution of that plan. In the first section I explain the distinction, in the following sections I show why it is important. To begin with I argue that we should expect the laws that permit these two kinds of ‘assistance’ to be different in their justificatory structure. Laws that permit giving access only presuppose that the right to self‐determination implies a right to suicide, but laws that permit doctors to take co‐responsibility may have to appeal to a principle of mercy or beneficence. Actually this difference in justificatory structure can to some extent be found in existing regulatory systems, though far from consistently. Finally I argue that if one recognizes a right to suicide, as Oregon and other American states implicitly do, and as the European Court of Human Rights has recently done explicitly, one is committed to permit the first kind of ‘assistance’ under some conditions.     

Tunnel Vision: Part One – Resisting post‐colonialism in Australian anthropology

This essay is based on my conviction that Australian ethnography's narrow purview and anthropology's theoretical limitations need exploring and explaining. While internationally the discipline developed new sites, new theoretical fields and new political ideas in the post‐colonial era from around 1970, classicism continued to dominate research in Australia. New forms of Aboriginal social life and politics created by changing ‘post‐colonial’ conditions largely escaped ethnographic attention, but anthropology was rescued from irrelevance with the emergence of opportunities to assist the courts and Aborigines with land retrievals. By examining selected ethnographies and exceptions to the discipline's main trajectory, I hope to encourage reflection and expansion so that the discipline might realise its potential as the most radical and critical of the social sciences.     

Loving recognition: a proposal for the practical efficacy of love as a public virtue

The anthropology of love has tended to focus on the romantic, and to explore its universality. In this article I ask a different kind of question of love. How might love be recruited as a moral force and deployed as a public virtue? I conceive of love not solely or principally as a private and domestic virtue but as a public and civil practice: a structuring of social interaction by means of affective appreciation of individual others. I understand love as the human capacity and the human practice of respecting the individuality of other lives. The desirous appreciation and affirmation of another ‘I’ – the loving attention – serves to surmount the customary ‘category‐thinking’ by which the world is normally apprehended: the generalizing, homogenizing, and stereotyping that characterize a culture's symbolic identification of the world. Loving recognition is such that the individuality of another life, its precious integrity and uniqueness, may be socially accommodated.     

Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition: Emmanuel Levinas and the practice of critique

As an alternative to approaching Islam as an object for anthropological analysis, this article develops the idea of an anthropologist participating in conversations going on within an Islamic tradition. The idea of a conversation is developed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ideal of knowing as an ethical relation with an infinite other. Levinas opposes a sterile and oppressive relation of ‘totality’, where the knowing self encompasses the other within concepts and thought that originate in the self, with a critical and creative relation of ‘infinity’, in which the alterity of the other is maintained and invites conversation that brings the self into question. In the article, recent disciplinary discussions of how anthropology should engage with alterity, which have been framed in terms of ontology and post‐secular anthropology, are examined in the light of Levinas's ideal of knowing as ethical and critical practice.