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.     

On trusting ethnography: serendipity and the reflexive return to the fields of Gujarat

We draw on David Pocock's fieldwork of the 1950s in central Gujarat, India, as a comparative resource to think about social change and anthropological knowledge. Revisiting where Pocock had been through new fieldwork, we were encouraged to think about the ways in which places are accessed and subsequently understood. Against our conscious will, the pathways we were able to take through the field strongly resembled those Pocock took sixty years earlier. The coincidence is such that the material casts shadows of doubt over the potency of terms such as ‘serendipity’ and ‘chance’ to characterize key moments of ethnographic fieldwork. Against the primacy given to the self in much reflexive anthropology, we demonstrate that the personal attributes of the anthropologist might influence the production of ethnographic research less than is generally assumed. The double bind of our ‘reflexive return’ comes from revisiting an anthropological field and experiencing the agency of that field in making what we can know.     

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.     

The reality of anthropology

The article concerns the continuity between anthropology and the reality it studies. Discovery and definition merge. This is substantiated by a discussion of ‘events’ and ‘worlds’. While the anthropologist becomes her own informant in the field, in the sense that her experience informs her ethnography, anthropology simultaneously shapes her discoveries. This simultaneity ultimately dissolves the distinction between subject and object, and from this point anthropology may recondition the conditions of science.     

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.     

Surrender to the Market: Thoughts on Anthropology,The Body Shop,and Intellectuals1

The direction of anthropology over the last century is tied to the shifts from colonialism to postcolonialism and from modernism to postmodernism. These shifts have seen the thoroughgoing incorporation of the world population into the economic, political and juridical domain established through the last throes of colonialism and the transmutations of capitalism and the State. Anthropology, a discipline whose history shows close and regular links with colonial government, also transforms in association with the world it describes and partly creates. Two dominant trends in contemporary anthropology—applied consultancy and historicist self‐reflexivity—are compared for the ways they represent the transmutation, which is characterised, following Fredric Jameson as ‘the surrender to the market’. In this way it is asserted that just as the discipline had hitherto revealed its links to colonialism, it now reveals its links to globalisation through a form of commodified self‐obsession. To illustrate this quality the paper considers the global chain of cosmetics stores, The Body Shop, as an example of ‘late capitalism’ and the moral juridical framework of globalisation. Finally, it treats these developments in anthropology as more generally affecting intellectuals and knowledge production through the promotion of intellectual ‘silence’.     

David Graeber's Wunderkammer,Debt: The First 5 000 Years

Graeber’s Debt: The First 5 000 Years has generated extensive commentary in the popular press and has captured the imagination of both activists at the barricades and investment fund managers in the City of London. Everyone is captivated by his critique of the myth of primitive barter. Yet it is a puzzle that a core element of his argument—the myth of primordial debt—has been largely overlooked. This review seeks to redress this oversight and in the process to suggest that Graeber’s emphasis on violence and enslavement, while compelling, is limited by his quest for origins. Feminist anthropology taught us to set aside the question, ‘when did “it” begin’ and instead open up to other questions, beyond the limits and biases the quest for origins presupposes. One wishes Graeber had entered the wonder cabinet he constructed in this book, rather than use it to ground a teleology.     

The Consequences of Being a Gift

The issues of dislocated identity are epitomised in Mary's story. Brought from Papua New Guinea to Australia at a very young age as a ‘gift’, she grew up in a series of foster homes in Adelaide, South Australia. Now, as a teenager, Mary constitutes her identity through her body, emphasising her distinctive physical features, through idealised memories and through representations—photographs, cultural icons and people who ‘look like me’. The self she creates in this way sits uneasily along side another self; the Western adolescent self in trouble with the law, the self who struggles to be ‘one of the boys’ on the streets, one who ‘runs amuck’. This paper explores the process of ‘self-making’, the ‘serious play’ that Mary has employed to constitute her identity through her juggling of and reappropriation of cultural symbols. As a participant in a wider ethnographic study into Australian youth and representation, Mary portrayed the complexities of her growing up between worlds, embedded in neither and desperate to belong to her past.     

Social Capital, Narratives of Fragmentation, and Schizophrenia: An Ethnographic Exploration of Factors Shaping African-Caribbeans’ Social Capital and Mental Health in a North London Community

Recent research studies have proposed the concept of social capital—broadly defined as social networks, community cohesion, and participation—as a social risk factor for health disparities and the high rates of schizophrenia among individuals of Caribbean heritage in England. However, many of the existing studies lack sociohistorical contexts and do not capture the experiential dimensions of individuals’ social capital. This paper adds to the debate by examining the mechanisms and sociocultural processes that shape the understandings and experiences of social capital in a sample of British African-Caribbeans. Drawing on ethnographic and survey data collected over 2 years in a North London community, the paper focuses on participants’ every day experiences and the stories they tell about their community and social fragmentation. These stories suggest that social changes and historical forces interact to affect the social capital and emotional well-being of local African-Caribbean residents. I argue that my participants’ collective narratives about their social environment contribute to the emotional tone of the community, and create added stressors that may impact their mental health.     

Autoethnographic Challenges: Confronting Self,Field and Home

Anthropologists working at ‘home’ or in realms of the familiar often share a considerable sense of connection with participants. In these contexts, the researcher's potential position as an ‘insider’ offers particular opportunities for utilising self as a key resource. Through my own fieldwork at ‘home’ in Melbourne as an ‘insider’ among Bosnian migrants, I was confronted with the challenge of using my self to understand others' experiences. In this paper I discuss the autoethnographic process and consider how its application enabled me to consciously understand my own experiences and utilise my experiential self to inform my study.     

Science stories: flies, planes, worms, and lasers

"Tell a story," my mother instructs her graduate students as they prepare their talks. I will make use of her advice here, and will tell several short stories. The themes revolve around the practice of science-what motivates us to go into science and how we choose questions once we get there. I also touch on progress in scientific tools, teaching, good mentors, and good colleagues, all of which contribute to making a career in science constantly compelling.     

Saflink bucks industry ‘bad news’ trend

Biometric middleware vendor Saflink has bucked the biometric industry’s current ‘bad news’ trend with a spate of good news stories which mark a turnaround in the company’s fortunes. Not so long ago the vendor had been on the brink of financial disaster but it has managed to pull itself around, even getting re-listed on Nasdaq’s SmallCap market at the end of April — a feat accomplished by very few in recent times.This is a short news story only. Visit www.compseconline.com for the latest computer security industry news.     

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.     

Wade in the Water: Personal Reflections on a Storm, a People, and a National Park

This article is a product of my associative thoughts on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, my return to the city, and my position as park anthropologist at Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, which includes the Chalmette Battlefield and National Cemetery. Fazendeville, or "the village" as it was known, was a historical African American community located on the site of the Battle of New Orleans, now Chalmette Battlefield, from 1867 to 1964. In 1999, the park undertook an oral history project on the community. As the anthropologist for the park, I wanted to reestablish contact with former residents or descendants who had been displaced as a result of the storms. It is my hope that the community's voices will not be lost in the floodwaters but will reemerge as determined and strong as they were once heard, singing "Wade in the Water" during the baptismal processions to the river.     

Bodies of data: doubles,composites, and aggregates

In this essay, I describe three bodies of data, analysing how relations are drawn between physical, digital, and political composites. Following the phrase ‘getting to know your data self’, my aim is to draw out the kinds of relations people use data to make, and the versions of the body that I find codified in data imaginaries. Thematically, the stories give different accounts of control over data, as the data body is doubled, built out of composites, and aggregated into a body politic.     

Snuggles,Cuddles and Sexuality: An(other) Anthropological Interpretation of May Gibbs's Snugglepot and Cuddlepie1

This paper offers an interpretation of May Gibbs's classic illustrated children's story, The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Its inspiration was Annette Hamilton's 1975 anthropological analysis, ‘Snugglepot and Cuddlepie: happy families in Australian society’. Rather than effacing that account, my reinterpretation draws on and augments it, even as it turns it ‘inside out’. The paper argues that stories acquire mythic status by magnetising interpretation. In suggesting that questions of subjectivity, identity and sublimated obsession are central concerns of May Gibbs's story, it directs our attention to the authoring of culture, its creation, transmission and transformation. The ‘Mother of the Gumnuts’ emerges from her recurring depictions of kinship and friendship, marriage and adoption, twinship and mirroring, androgyny, ambiguity and ambivalence, as queerly contemporary. If the approach advocated here is correct, such a revelation (and the sense we make of its significance) will not only complicate, but also enhance, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie's enduring appeal and emblematic status as a national icon.     

Purinergic Receptors,Past and Future (Closing Remarks)

Abstract

At the end of a symposium, it is useful to look back, both at the symposium itself and the developments that led up to the symposium. In this spirit, I thought it would be appropriate to tell the story of how I first became interested in purinergic receptors. I am recounting this story not because I believe that my audience has a burning interest in the history of my intellectual development, but rather because it illustrates the power of ideas.     

Telling the forest from the trees: Local images of national change in a Danish town

How can ethnographers see the ‘big picture’, while they are busy with everyday minutiae? Awareness of the local impacts of history and globalisation has revived debates about the pragmatics of fieldwork. Arguing that most fieldwork remains, for most practitioners, ‘local’, this paper explores how it is possible to apprehend change ethnographically. Something of how local people understand and experience change, as it happens to them and around them and as they contribute to it, can be grasped in ‘significant local imagery’, in this case, ‘significant people’, ‘significant things’, and ‘significant events’. These images are recognised in local discourse as indicative or ‘telling’ of change, and can be used to summarise analytically, and shed light on, wider vistas of change. This paper presents three local images deriving from fieldwork in a small town in mid-Jutland and uses them to tell a bigger story, a narrative about the modernisation of Danish society.     

‘The Earth Cannot Let Go of Us’: Analysing Ontological Conflicts

This paper examines certain key concepts of the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, with a view to a clearer understanding of its proposed methodology. It situates the ontological approach within the historical and intellectual conflicts through which it arose, outlining its motivations and the challenges it poses to traditional fieldwork methods and theory. The concepts of ‘radical alterity’ and ‘incommensurability’ are examined as intellectual as well as political concepts, highlighting their historical contingency on the politics of colonisation. Following from this, the notion of ‘ontological self-determination’ is analysed with respect to my fieldwork with the Dongria Kondh in the Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha, India; I show how an application of the ontological methodology allows a better understanding of certain conflicts within current discourses and practices of nationhood and development.     

Anthropological poetics: Reflections on a new perspective

Conclusion Given that the poetic dimension in anthropology is real, a code for understanding, a metaphor for truth, a myth about anthropology-as-practised, revealing the paradoxes of that discipline, where then does Reflections lead us? What are the implications of realizing that there are whole areas of anthropological field experience that have never been communicated in monographs and journal articles? Does a resolution of paradox, of the myths created by anthropologists, require the leaving of anthropology and university departments and an active engagement in praxis rather than an armchair documentation of consciousness raising? Is there to be an inversion between a practical endeavor that is non-praxis in outlook?It is true that a reflexive self-aware anthropology and the radicalness of poetic expression puts anthropology into question, but therein lies the basis of evolution to a different kind of anthropology. This is important as it becomes more and more difficult to justify fieldwork, particularly for professionals alienated from their own society and discipline.There is, however, a more important consideration. If the field lies to a great extent within us, then the question arises as to just what is anthropology doing in other people's cultures? Rarely are anthropologists invited to a particular field locale by the cultural groups living there. Their own presuppositions and career dictates lead to a global selection which is then rationalized and justified to university departments and funding bodies. It is an obvious but often overlooked fact that the discipline and culture of the anthropologist is located firmly within the social and ideological context of which it is a part. Anthropologists, therefore require a critical awareness of their relationship to the ideology of their own society and must take care that they do not unthinkingly aid in the reproduction of those conditions that in fact frame their object of study. The major part of anthropological practise has dealt with traditional and modernizing societies and anthropologists are often identified with the ideological dimension of a dependency that has already been defined in economic and political terms.Much of the reaction to and ambivalence towards anthropologists on the part of native groups is in terms of their implicit awareness that the anthropologist is part of the process that defines their present situation. Furthermore, they more often than not realize that the anthropologist needs them far more than they need the anthropologist! Without a critical awareness it is unfortunately the case that despite the best intentions of the anthropologist his presence in another culture is often part of an ongoing process that weakens and eventually destroys the culture chosen. Lévi-Strauss is exceedingly bitter about the role of anthropology as the harbinger of destruction [] because an anthropology geared to the exigencies of professionalism is the vanguard of a destructive process that seems unrelenting. I want a different kind of anthropology, one that will engage dialectically with the cultural other and express it in a way that is ultimately useful for the other culture and my own society.Edmund Carpenter's introduction to Stephen Williams' The Inuit Today speaks eloquently to this issue of destruction. He describes how the newcomers could not see the patterns of Inuit life; they smashed into them almost as innocently as men walk through cobwebs []. Professionalism, whether by anthropologists, explorers, or art experts resulted in a devastation that Carpenter alludes to as a faith being lost, an art replaced. We emptied graves, moved sacred objects from secret caves to public vaults, transferred songs to tapes, stored myths on dustry shelves. Reverential became referential; private, became public, theirs became ours []. And later — When Inuit history got classified as loot, the past was rewritten to justify the present. We re-invented the Inuit, then hired them to act out this action on film. We even re-invented their art, the taught them how to make it []. Carpenter's anger is directed at the way in which scholars use their tribe for self promotion, for movement along a professional career trajectory that bears little relation to those communities that hosted their initial intrusion. A double and devastating alienation. It must be pointed out, however, that anthropologists have increasingly moved into new venues —large urban areas of their own and other cultures, hospitals, factories, ghettoes and unemployment lines. The potential for unwitting damage is less obvious but one wonders if the ideological component of a hierarchical methodology is just as dangerous in these situations.Does all this necessarily lead us into the streets, missions and revolutions of this world or is it possible for anthropology to find an additional documentation of observation that will heighten perception about cultural others then diffuse to the civilization surrounding us? Both options are readily open, just as are the different methods of dealing with alienation for self and society — praxis or a gathering of the forces that may overcome alienation.This is where I wish to root my argument about anthropological poetics. My contention is that there is something crucial that is missing from fieldwork reporting. The collision of cultural assumptions that is the raw material of the discipline is usually expressed in emic/etic distinctions whereas I am proposing that a dialectic which subsumes both emic and etic considerations and moves both to a new language of experience is the missing component in anthropology. It can be expressed in various ways — art, narrative, theatre — anthropological poetics is simply the medium I have chosen to write about. What I am referring to is a process of incorporation that is coded in a symbolic way that then alters the professional perception of self/cultural other which then makes a different kind of impact on the professional's own society. The experience of other cultures by anthropologists should have diffused a greater humanism into Western consciousness. By and large this has not happened because as professionals we have not found the means to accurately represent the dialectic engaged with in the field. It is my conviction that anthropological poetics is one way of completing the anthropological endeavor, and thereby changing it. This is one of the major challenges facing the discipline in the closing era of the twentieth century. This latter theme has been elucidated in a highly instructive form in Stanley Diamond's poetry volume Totems [], which brings me to a final statement.Stanley Diamond, in an interview with Dan Rose, charted his evolution as a poet with the attendant circumstances that led to the latency of his poetic expression in favor of anthropological work. He emerged with a marvellous line to the effect that he chose anthropology because it was the next best thing to poetry []. I appreciate and admire Diamond's insight and humor but neither he nor I think anthropology is the next best thing to poetry. Diamond's original contribution to anthropological poetics demonstrates how the sensibilities of self and the cultural other can be fused []. Poetry in its own right is a powerful and moving mosaic of experience, but for anthropology in its present state of evolution it is so much more. It is a vital spark, a new signifying process for a discipline that is rethinking its own foundations and methodology.By methodology I refer specifically to the context of observer effects and follow Rose in treating poetry as poetic observation []. His comments are a critique, particular to Stanley Diamond's Totems. Diamond achieves the interiority I have referred to earlier, more strikingly than any other anthropologist-poet I have read. It is not so crucial for me or Dan Rose that he is a superb poet, it is that he has taken ethnography into a new domain, beyond the emic/etic distinction that shackles the discipline to methodological stasis. Diamond's ethnographic accounts in his poetics mirrors that which is not yet communicated within the discipline but it speaks directly to his own society rather than simply reporting on the state of the cultural other or Diamond himself. This is why I wish to take Rose's particular comments and move to the general as his observations about Diamond provide possible guidelines for the further development of anthropological poetics.Rose has described poetic observation as a vantage point where the poet resides in relation to his experience and to the poem, where the subjects of the poem exist in relation to the poet and where the reader stands in relation to subjects, author (observer) and text []. This set of connections succinctly exposes the dilemmas of interpretation and communication found in every field situation. The argument is that anthropological poetics as methodology permits another culture and comprehension of it to be expressed and interpreted in a way that moves beyond it. In this way one refers not just to interpretation but to a different way of relating to meanings inherent in another cultural system. Rose argues further that The accepted fieldwork device of plunging from the global to the local and rising from the local to the global preserves an older hierarchical methodology — a legacy of our anthropological forebears []. He invites us to compare this hierarchical legacy with the establishment of a new dimension between the anthropologist and native that involves different ways of perceiving the relation between cultural others and ourselves.Anthropological poetics — poetry as observations — thus has a crucial transforming role that should not be confined to the literary outlets of the day, but placed within the mainstream of anthropology as an evocation of a new consciousness for the discipline and the society of which it is but a part. It is an ethnographic statement that is presently missing from the discipline, wherein the anthropologist uses a rich linguistic code and different structures to express certain crucial areas of field experience that have not been communicated in professional monographs and articles. In addition the evocation of a critical self awareness within the discipline underlines the argument that a significant part of the field for anthropology lies within its professional practitioners. Fieldwork therefore belongs to us and our own civilization, the cultural other is a crucial part of our developing self-awareness. The anthropologist-as-poet using field experience as part of his raw material has chosen a form to convey the experience of the cultural other which then has the power to alter the listener, the reader, the unconvinced, irreversibly in a direction at once more human and humane []. It also may change the manner in which anthropology is justified and perhaps practiced.J. Iain Prattis is a Professor in the Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa.

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