Posturing

“And as for the style of detachment, surely the posture of neutrality is just that, a posture recognized as such, a charade acknowledged as a public secert by one and all? This would make most social scientists and their funding agencies even better material for study than Andalusians”

-Michael Taussig, 1999 (Defacement. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Pg 75)

a moral view

“My Political view of anthropology is also a moral one.  I believe…that making the things of this world a bit more intelligible, especially when they appear opaque, incomprehensible, and irrational, can make them less unjust, ineluctable, or unacceptable…I am convinced that social science would not be worth a moment’s attention or labor if it had no political role”

-Didier Fassin, 2007 (When Bodies Remember.  Berkeley: U California Press.  Pg xxii-xxiii)

Another tack

“I start from another tack: from the premise that these discrepant stories provide ethnographic entry into the confused space in which people lived, to the fragmented and incomplete knowledge on which they relied, and to the ill-formed and inept responses that knowledge engendered.  Coherence is seductive for narrative form, but disparties are ethnographically more compellingly powerful.”

-Ann Stoler, 2008 (Along the Archival Grain.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.  Pg 185.)

Counting (methodological) chickens

“…Hence inquiry begins midstream, always already embedded in a situation, one both settled and unsettled…

“…There are situations that may reach a determined state rapidly and others where it is not possible to tell before the inquiry is well underway whether, and in what manner, and for how long, it will take to move beyond a first loose state to one in which both the situation and its determinants become clearer, more determinate.  Thus, to claim to know beforehand precisely what one is going to do, or to find, as grant proposals demand, would constitute bad method, poor logic, and falsely disciplined inquiry.  Or, more accurately, it seems to me, run the risk of no doing inquiry at all…

“…since inquiry arises within a problematic and indeterminate situation, the inquirer is not outside the situation, nor is she in a position such that she could construct something that was not to a degree present already…

“…Hence, problems and solutions are terms that are joined in practice and in that sense coproductive…The solution to a particular problem consists in a series of steps whose particularities are not know before those steps are undertaken”

Paul Rabinow, 2008.  (Marking Time.  Princeton NJ: University of Princeton Press.  Pp 8-10)

This opinion is a mistake…

“Anthropology is often considered a collection of curious facts, telling about the peculiar appearance of exotic people and describing their strange customs and beliefs.  It is looked upon as an entertaining diversion, apparently without any bearing upon the conduct of life of civilized communities”

-Franz Boas, 1928 (Anthropology and Modern Life.  New York: Dover Publications Inc.  Pg 11)

The punster

“Puns are frequent in ethnography. They position the ethnographer between his world of primary orientation, his reader’s world, and the world of those others, the people he has studied, whom at some level, I believe, he is also addressing…Through the pun he appeals collusive to the members of one or the other world, usually the world of his readership, thereby creating a hierarchical relationship between them, He himself, the punster, mediates between these worlds”

-Vincent Crapanzano, 1986 (“Hermes’ Dilemma”. In Writing Culture. Clifford & Marcus, eds. Pg 69. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.)

Test of translation

“…’Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English, into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English…The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue…He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. ([Pannwitz, in Benjamin] 1969: 80-1)’

…the good translator does not immediately assume that unusual difficulty in conveying the sense of an alien discourse denotes a fault in the latter, but instead critically examines the normal state of his or her own language. The relevant question therefore is…how she can test the tolerance of her own language for assuming unaccustomed forms”

-Talal Asad, 1986 (“The Concept of Translation in British Social Anthropology”. In Writing Culture. Clifford & Marcus, eds. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Pg 157)

Worried about his heirs

“it is important to say something and not just threaten to say something, and there are better things to do with even a defective inheritance than to trash it”

-Clifford Geertz, 2000 (Available Light. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 18)

Off on the right foot

“I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions…Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstaces and insignificant happenings? Adventure has no place in the anthropologist’s profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months…The fact that so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when separated from this dross.”

-Claude Levi-Strauss sets out, 1955 (Tristes Tropiques. New York: Penguin. Pg 1)

Self-portraiture

“…if indeed the Savage exists primarily within an implicit correspondence with utopia, the specialist in savagery is in dire straits.  He does no know what to aim at.  His favorite model has disappeared or, when found, refuses to pose as expected.  The fieldworker examines his tools and finds his camera inadequate.  Most importantly, his very field of vision is blurred.  Yet he needs to come back home with a picture.  It’s pouring out there, and the mosquitoes are starting to bite.  In desperation, the baffled anthropologist burns his notes to create a moment of light, moves his face against the flame, closes his eyes and, hands grasping the camera, takes a picture of himself”

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003 (Global Transformations.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan.  Pg 24.)

The Trinity: Order-Savage-Utopia

“In defense of a particular vision of order, the Savage became evidence for a particular type of utopia.  That the same ethnographic source could be used to make the opposite point did not matter beyond a minimal requirement for verisimilitude…But now, as before, the Savage is only evidence within a debate, the importance of which surpasses not only his understanding but his very existence.

Just as utopia itself can be offered as a promise or as a dangerous illusion, the Savage can be noble, wise, barbaric, victim, or aggressor, depending on the debate and the aims of the interlocutors.  The space within the slot is not static, and its changing contents are not pre-determined by its structural position…a critique of anthropology cannot skirt around this slot.  The direction of the discipline now depends upon an explicit attack on that slot itself and the symbolic order upon which it is premised.  As long as the slot remains, the Savage is at best a figure of speech, a metaphor in an argument about nature and the universe, about being and existence – in short, an argument about foundational thought”

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003 (Global Transformations.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan Pg. 22-3.)

A passionate science, then?

“Anthropology is not a dispassionate science like astronomy, which springs from the contemplation of things at a distance. It is the outcome of an historical process, which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered, their institutions and beliefs destroyed while they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence. Its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as an object.”

-Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1966 (“Anthropology: Its Achievement and Future,” Current Anthropology, vol. 7, 1966, p. 126.) via Open Anthropology

Rupture Ready

“What if we accepted that the people who Columbus or Vasco da Gama “discovered” on their expeditions were just us? Or certainly, just as much “us” as Columbus and Vasco da Gama ever were? I’m not arguing that nothing important has changed over the last five hundred years, any more than I’m arguing that cultural differences are unimportant. In one sense everyone, every community, every individual for that matter, lives in their own unique universe….

By “blowing up walls,” I mean most of all, blowing up the arrogant, unreflecting assumptions which tell us we have nothing in common with 98% of people who ever lived, so we don’t really have to think about them. Since, after all, if you assume the fundamental break, the only theoretical question you can ask is some variation on “what makes us so special?” Once we get rid of those assumptions, decide to at least entertain the notion we aren’t quite so special as we might like to think, we can also begin to think about what really has changed and what hasn’t.”

-David Graeber, 2004 (Fragments on an Anarchist Anthropology.  Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 47)

Relativism, simply put.

“Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretive anthropological—that is to say, methodological— procedure. It is not the moral argument that any culture or custom is as good as any other, if not better. Relativism is the simple prescription that, in order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and ideals must be placed in their own historical context, understood as positional values in the field of their own cultural relationships rather than appreciated by categorical and moral judgments of our making. Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s own judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural order that made them possible. It is in no other way a matter of advocacy.“

-Marshall Sahlins, 2002. (Waiting for Foucault, Still. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg46)

Anthropology, or nothing.

“…The phonetic alphabet is made up of all known phonemic distinctions: of all differences in sound-segments known to signify differences in meaning in the natural languages of the world. So in principle the objective description of any language consists of its comparison with the meaningful order of all other languages.

The same for ethnography.  No good ethnography is self-contained. Implicitly or explicitly ethnography is an act of comparison.  By virtue of comparison ethnographic description becomes objective.  Not in the naive positivist sense of an unmediated perception— just the opposite: it becomes a universal understanding to the extent it brings to bear on the perception of any society the conceptions of all the others…ethnography is Anthropology, or it is nothing”

-Marshall Sahlins, 2002.  (Waiting for Foucault, Still.  Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg 12)