Plenary 1: Re-defining Europe: Perspectives from Socio-Cultural Anthropology
Convenor: Andre Gingrich (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Europe is going through complex and contradictory processes of transformation and re- definition. The current phase of globalization thus inspires creative creolisation and re-invention, as much as protective reaction and active adaptation. On this basis, recent developments – ranging from the war in Iraq to negotiations with new incoming EU member countries, on to debates about a European constitution- have indicated widespread concerns about the possible future of identities not only in Europe, but also of Europe in wider contexts. These concerns go far beyond the political sphere, they also relate to science and technology, education and the arts, gender roles and social status, minority rights and nationhood. It is thus high time that social anthropology considers anew some of the crucial fields in which Europe is being re-defined, and re-defines itself.
Marilyn Strathern (University of Cambridge)
Europe, the Scientific Citizen, and the Anthropologist
‘Science and society‘ debates are to be found across Europe. But what does it mean to say that science is entering into a new contract with society? Among the many scales of social life that they juggle, Europeans tend to attribute the rapid information flows that accompany developments in science to a globalised world while invoking ‘society‘ when it comes to thinking about ethics and the involvement of the public. Biotechnology is a case in point. Here society may emerge as specifically bound by national interests, not just in wealth creation but in efforts at regulation designed to protect local citizenry. How countries have dealt with GM crops is a case in point. What differences, and what continuities, lie in assumptions as to what a democratised and educated society means? And what is the anthropologist to make of the way the role of ‘the public‘ as judicious consumers combines with what some would see as a new role in the validation of scientific knowledge?
Susan Gal (University of Chicago)
What’s News: Media Circulations and the Politics of Truth in the East of Europe
The re-creation or re-definition of Europe is being accomplished, in part, through new routes of circulation and the restriction of old ones. Indeed, “freedom of movement” for people and goods is one of the salient mottos of the European Union. “Circulation” is a semiotic process, involving decontextualisations and recontextualisations that change the cultural meanings of moving objects. Yet while migration and commodity exchange have been studied in depth, we know far less about the borrowing, buying, stealing, appropriation, translation, echo and adoption of texts and ideas. By what routes do they travel? How does intertexuality work in the social world? How are such circulations legally and socioculturally regimented, how do they make boundaries, create and structure identities and politics?
I take as my case study the current circulation of ideas and practices of “news” “transparency” and media “truth” in Hungary. These terms have an important history in the Cold War. The west then claimed for itself the virtues of media truth, openness and transparency, while charging that the east had duplicitous and censored media that made “reading between the lines” a necessary practice of literacy in state socialist regimes. This image of the censored and closed society was one which weighed heavily against the eastern states in international politics. Dissidents longed for a “politics of truth.” Since 1989, by contrast, newspapers and magazines in Hungary have been bought by western media conglomerates. Much of what is printed is re-printed by acknowledged or pirated translation from English, German and French publications. Readers and journalists report that this corporate control constrains what can be written and published in a much more stringent way than the socialist state ever managed to do. The need to “read between the lines” has by no means disappeared, but now takes different forms. With their history of scepticism towards the media, Hungarians are creating new practices of reading and writing; new forms of publics. My paper considers several telling moments from the history and current operation of a Hungarian news magazine to show the contradictory changes in ideas about media transparency, truth and news, as these have circulated into Hungary in the last decade. The view from the east provides, I believe, an implicit critique of these notions as they circulate in the rest of Europe.
Jean-Loup Amselle (Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris)
What is at Stakes with the Deconstruction of Europe?
The paper will first focus on the three related intellectual trends which aim at the deconstruction of the very idea of European democracy, namely postmodernism, post colonialism and subalternism. Then it will deal with the reappropriation of subalternism by African and African American scholars and examine the way postcolonialism itself is challenged by some Third World intellectuals. Finally, the paper will try to define new forms of universalism or humanism stemming from postcolonialism and subalternism.
Andre Gingrich (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Transnational Politics and the Reconfiguration of Europe
This presentation discusses the EU-wide phenomenon of a new wave of nationalism through a medium-term anthropological perspective. After identifying some of the main differences and commonalties between these and earlier historical forms of nationalism in Europe, it will be attempted to up-date established anthropological concepts of nationalism for present purposes. While distinct neo-nationalist parties have managed to establish themselves inside and outside of Europe in governments and parliaments, and while they also suffered a number of setbacks, that first round does not exclude a second round: the wider, underlying factors cannot be reduced to specific parties and to charismatic agency alone. Those underlying factors are related to the current phase of globalisation, accompanied by individualisation and ensuing fears of losing status and identities. For these reasons, it would also be one-sided to conceptualise the present phenomenon exclusively in terms of “right wing” political labels that are derived from politics in the mid- 20th century. Leaving aside the fact that “left” nationalism also has a notorious legacy inside Europe and beyond, it is the constant blurring of traditional liberal, left, and right programmes which makes neo-nationalists so successful, and so unpredictable. European enlargement, and Europe’s contested search for its international role, may in fact create an environment which could favour a second round in the rise of neo-nationalism.
Plenary 2: The Dynamics of Peace
Convenor: Signe Howell (University of Oslo)
In this session we will ask to what extent a peaceful way of life is deemed possible. What kind of ontology is a prerequisite for such a belief, and which social and cultural means are employed in order to achieve it? Peace as a goal may be viewed as a dynamic process whose achievement requires concerted efforts which, in turn, needs to be constituted upon a shared understanding of the possibility of its achievement. To what extent do face-to-face interaction play a significant part? To what extent may different gender ideologies account for differences? How may we account for a recent popularity in processes of atonement and reconciliation? If aggression and violence are part and parcel of what it means to be human, then how can we account for the existence of societies where aggressive or violent behaviour is conspicuous by its absence? We shall explore some attempts at creating and maintaining peace and of handling conflict at a societal level. From domestic quarrelling to feuding, persecution and warfare, to peace and reconciliation tribunals, various socio-culturally embedded understandings challenge other’s (whoever and wherever they may be) entrenched notions of right and wrong, of rights and responsibilities and, ultimately, raise questions of ontology, psychology and personhood. Through empirical examples from very different parts of the world, and addressing very different situations of the dynamics of peace, the papers will seek to highlight how people seek to establish peace and how they resolve situations that threaten societal equilibrium.
Richard Fox (Wenner Gren Foundation)
Nonviolence and Charisma
The anthropology of peace has depended up till now on searching for cultures, primarily primitive ones, that are not violent or do not have war. The goal has been to show by the example of these societies that humanity is not inherently violent or bellicose. Unfortunately, very few societies without war have turned up and even fewer with low levels of violence, and, rather than peaceful, these societies are better typified as “pacified” because they often have been pushed into a marginal existence by more powerful neighbours. Furthermore, such an anthropology of peace seems “in denial” after a certain point: the more it searches for these would-be “harmless” cultures, the more its scholarship seems removed from the world of violence and war around us today. Let me propose one new direction for an anthropology of peace: I begin by acknowledging that interpersonal and group violence is commonplace in societies (and perhaps even fundamental to the human condition). Next, I look at the special circumstances under which violence has been overcome in favour of peacefulness. I look, in particular, at several instances in which nonviolent resistance has channelled mass social protest away from violent political conflict and toward active but peaceful resistance. In each instance, a charismatic leader, who enacts or “performs” proofs of supernatural abilities to his followers, facilitates the peacefulness. I suggest that one direction for an anthropology of peace is to shift attention away from whole societies in order to study the face-to-face relations between nonviolent leaders and followers—and through such a shift, to analyze the role that individual charisma plays in the construction of peaceful social behaviour.
Bruce Kapferer (University of Bergen)
Peace and the New Order
Fiona Ross (University of Cape Town)
Reconciliation and Strategies of Peace-Making: Thoughts on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
“Peace“ is almost always defined in negative relation to violence. Usually used as a noun preceded by a verb, its grammar describes an end potentially achievable by action. The avenues to peace are therefore manifold. The paper explores some attempts to bring peace into being through reconciliation in South Africa. An instruction to that effect in the Constitution became part of the grounds for the ambitious Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose work, begun in 1996, has recently been completed. In the Commission‘s work, reconciliation was predicated on revelation the truth, and was often posited as the establishment of a relationship between victim and perpetrator, usually in a face-toface encounter. Critics have noted that this leaves aside problems of the relationship between social structure and violence. The paper examines some of the arguments about reconciliation, drawing on biographical and ethnographic materials collected in work with political activists who had opposed the apartheid state. It suggest that commissions are important in generating terms of social interaction, and the precise relations of reconciliation to peace has yet to be investigated. It argues that close attention of the kind that Anthropology‘s epistemological and methodological approach offers to the everyday makings of ordinary lives is crucial for our understandings of the relationship between action and desired ends.
Fernanda Pirie (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
A Delicate Web of Order: Maintaining Peace in Village Ladakh
Within the small village communities of Himalayan Ladakh a commitment to non-violence is expressed as the unquestioned need to suppress all forms of violence and disorder. This paper describes the villagers’ strategies for the avoidance and resolution of conflict. It particularly focuses on the way in which these are intimately connected to and supported by an epistemological construction of what constitutes disorder and its consequences, by an ontology which entails that individual rights are eclipsed by community interests and by a strong, but non-religious, morality. These communities are also, however, considered in the context of the wider royal and monastic powers which formerly dominated the region and its current administration as part of the Indian nation state. The commitment to peace has been maintained in the face of regional wars, ethnic conflict and political agitation and the moral and social orders of the village have largely been constructed in opposition to centralised political and religious control. Conversely, however, in recent decades Ladakh’s elites have drawn upon forms of village justice and expanded local notions of order to establish a centralised dispute resolution service, which provides a real alternative to the courts and laws of the modern administration.
Plenary 3: Younger Scholars Forum – When Communication comes to an end…
Convenor: Penny Harvey (University of Manchester), Thomas Fillitz (University of Vienna)
Since the times of Malinowski, anthropologists have assumed that the quality of ethnographic evidence depends on the quality of interaction and communication with our interlocutors, i.e. the building of relationships over time, language proficiency, as well as sustained engagement with people in their daily lives.
This panel wants to scrutinize this taken-for-granted assumption by looking at the “discomfort of proximity”. By this notion we refer to the many fields/times in which ethnographers may feel the need to distance themselves from those they seek to understand, such as in research among those who hold radical beliefs with which they profoundly disagree, or in situations of violent conflict. The panel asks researchers to reflect on what can be learnt from the radical disjunctures that often appear between ethnographers and their interlocutors during fieldwork. Recent work on mimetic ways of knowing has discussed how hunters and shamans avoid total identification while seeking to approximate another way of being. Participant observation as a method also entails the drawing together of proximity and distance. How do such ways of knowing help ethnographers to approach beliefs and practices from which they simultaneously wish to keep their distance?
Possible topics to be addressed include:
- Truth claims of the interlocutors which conflict with the ethnographer´s experience;
- Contexts in which the ethnographer resists close relationships and feelings of empathy.
- Contexts in which the ethnographer deploys the interconnection of proximity and distance as suggested by other mimetic ways of knowing.
Rane Willerslev (University of Aarhus)
Anthropology and Ocularcentrism
The present crisis concerning ocularcentrism in anthropology has brought the question of vision to the forefront of the debate. Fabian (1983) has criticised the discipline’s visualist bias, arguing that anthropology’s stress on observation leads the fieldworker to adopt an objectifying and dehumanising stance towards the subjects studied, not unlike the naturalist watching an experiment. Other anthropologists, such as Stoller (1997) and Okely (1994), have sought to escape anthropology’s ocularcentric paradigm by developing sensuous perspectives towards ethnographic understanding. While I do not reject the ethnographer’s need to use the full range of the human senses as sources of knowledge, I shall nevertheless argue that vision ought to have a privileged status within anthropology as a fieldwork-based enterprise. This has to do with the fact that vision operates in a distinctive way that is essential to ethnographic practice. In vision, distance and vicinity are not mutually exclusive but rather imply one another. That is, we can only see something when our gaze grasps it from the right distance. With regard to all the other senses, there is contiguity between subject and object, if not an internalisation and incorporation of the object by the subject. The tactile, for example, keeps the toucher in direct contact with the object touched; taste further implicates the subject, for the object must be ingested, internalised in order for it to be accessible to taste. Vision, however, performs a distancing function in that the optimal distance is also the optimal vicinity. This dynamic of detachment and proximity, of being Self and being Other, is fundamental to the anthropological project, which involves not only the need to internalise an Other’s viewpoint, but also the equally important skill of avoiding the loss of one’s sense of Self in the process. In fact, I will go as far as to argue that it is through the privileged status of vision as a source of knowledge that anthropology derives its authority as a social science.
Gillian Evans (Brunel University)
Dirt, Disgust and Desire: Creating Distance on the Doorstep
Acknowledging that the value of persons and things is mutually specified in the process of exchange, this paper argues that an adequate theory of value must also account for emotional transformation, without which evaluation of worth is impossible. In Bermondsey, for example, a place in Southeast London where the families and descendants of ex-Dockers and food-processing factory workers imagine community in terms of residence and kinship criteria, feelings of disgust are often expressed about the increasing presence of black people on Bermondsey’s estates. Disgust is the justification for taboo, which makes being a Bermondsey person synonymous with ‘not mixing with blacks’; it sustains the idea that black people are synonymous with dirty polluting qualities and is the basis of an idealised refusal to enter into exchange relations of any kind with black people. Where house-proud women once cleaned the neighbourhood into existence via a system of turn-taking exchanges for cleaning of communal areas, the housing estates are now run down and neglected as the basis of community belonging is undermined by the failure to integrate women from immigrant families. Meanwhile, kin relations in those few remaining real Bermondsey households, continue to be constituted in specific kinds of exchanges that are inseparable from transforming feelings of desire. For the anthropologist, trying to understand what makes a people collectively distinctive, learning how to belong by trying to participate effectively in specific exchanges, there will be incremental and dramatic shifts both in the way she feels about her informants and in the way they feel about her. In situations of racial tension and violent confrontation, like in Bermondsey, for example, the assumption is challenged that as she becomes increasingly incorporated into everyday relations between people, the anthropologist moves on from feelings of profound alienation towards increasing identification with and empathy for her informants. Is it possible for her not to betray the distance that her increasing proximity creates?
Barak Kalir (University of Amsterdam)
Doing Fieldwork
Doing fieldwork among illegal non-Jewish migrants from Latin America in Israel would have always been a delicate task for an (Israeli) anthropologist. Even more so when the state, in its relentless effort to deport illegal migrants, widely employs undercover agents and snitchers to track down their residential addresses and working places. In this atmosphere, when migrants go even deeper underground, sharing and trusting an anthropologist with basic information like one’s address, let alone survival strategies, network building, and so on, can be a very risky act. And for what? Why should migrants co-operate with the completion of a research project that was design by an ambitious researcher on her/his road to an academic title? Under such circumstances, the management of fieldwork clearly requires: a) A subtle and lengthy process of confidence building that is based on close proximity with interlocutors and at times even intimate relationships; and b) A clear give-and-take relationship, where the anthropologist has something to offer and cannot simply stick to an ‘objective’ observer position. How do we then create distance when our interlocutors could interpret it with suspicion? How is it possible to develop the necessary give-and-take relationship without an axiomatic empathy to interlocutors? And does it then mean that, by definition, this kind of research is biased? What do we do when information given to us by interlocutors contradicts data from other sources, and moreover, when it contradicts interlocutors’ own previous self-presentation and judgments?
Ruy Llera Blanes (University of Lisbon)
Atheist Anthropologists. Believers and Non-believers in Anthropological Fieldwork
”Are all you anthropologists atheists?“ This question was put to me by a Pentecostal leader within an improvised discussion on “faith” and “truth”, as we stood outside the door of the Igreja Filadélfia (Philadelphia Church), waiting for the beginning of the daily religious cult. Following a reflection triggered by this somewhat unexpected question, this paper will then try to discuss issues of faith, belief, and personal convictions within anthropological fieldwork and namely within research in contexts of belief and religious practice. Incorporating fieldwork and biographical accounts, I will discuss the involvement of personal beliefs and attitudes in anthropological theory and practice, and its consequences on the production and circulation of scientific knowledge and “public” knowledge, and also on the construction of personal relationships and social interaction. Therefore, I will suggest three different points of future discussion: 1) anthropological fieldwork is a part of a multilateral and continuous development of ideology, morality, discourse, and practice within social life, where 2) the anthropologist is no longer the one and sole authority on the object of his study, and is also himself an object of study, not to mention the fact that 3) he is also, after all, a person with needs, beliefs, and routines.
