A Name By Any Other Smell Would Rose As...

    As someone who can read a novel from beginning to end without ever knowing the names of the main characters therein--except as unvoiced graphemic cyphers, visual landmarks upon a textual landscape, with no content or indeed meaning onto themselves--I found that the opening of Istvár Rév's Retroactive Justice read not unlike a calculus textbook, full of undefined variables awaiting practical applications to assign value to them.  

    The spurious footnote on the bottom of pp. 71-72, however, completely threw me:  here our author posits a theory of generalized mental representation to explain differential recall, among certain "elderly" individuals, of names and characteristics: demonstrating a startling naive ignorance¹  of now classic neuroscientific research involving corpus callostomy (i.e., "split brain") patients, in whom it is clearly demonstrated that different parts of the brain typically handle the tasks of speaking names, on the one hand (namely, the right, which transmits data to the left hemisphere of the brain), and recognition of semantic characteristics, on the other (the left).²    For Rév, it is taken as a given that both personal names and characteristics of persons named operate at the same order of things one knows and/or can recall, only different in that one might typically know more characteristics about a person then that person has names.

    Delving deeper into the text, we move from a cryptonomical necronomicon (a cypher-puzzle of so many names concerning the dead) to a historical accounting of intense political investment in... dates.  Here it went from reading like a calculus textbook to a biochemistry textbook, so many superficially indistinct labels that become a jumble of syllabic nonsense to my eye and my ear.  

    By this point I understood that this incessant recounting and auditing of names and dates was not just a peculiarly incomprehensible obsession of our author, but that in some real way these labels were the ethnographic objects of note here.  Rév is at great pains to catalog the historical process by which individuals and bodies sought to characterize these names (for dates are essentially names for objectified moments in time) because in the culture he is writing about, such names are deeply meaningful in and of themselves, so much so that they (and not necessarily what they name) take on characteristics in the social imagination!  

    The appeal to a general theory of memory in his earlier footnote now takes on a much more profound profile.  Here we have a culture where representation is not simply a trope of how a people explain their own social reality (as it often appears to be in the culture I encounter more regularly), but where, rather, representation has been fully elevated and reified as the substance of material sociality itself.  We have perhaps a genre-embodiment in which no signifier is ever allowed to go empty, except insofar as is buried deep enough that only the worms might empty it.³ 

notes

¹ Although perhaps, given the author's identification of himself as intimately situated within his site of study, and his sometime equally surprising characterizations of what is "normal" in a West that he compares his own context too, his unfamiliarity with scientific touchstones that I take for granted should not be quite so startling as it was at first encounter.

² Indeed, among the latest additions to a rich literature dealing with specialized memory and language capacities (and not discounting literature that criticizes claims regarding the localization of any such capacities), recent research by evolutionary psychologists at UC Santa Barbara suggests--in direct relevance to the footnote in the subject text here--that social traits may likewise be retained to and recalled from specialized memory systems specific to traits relevant to social interactions, as distinct from semantic memory regarding other environmental categories.

³ Or, if such signifier were buried in Siberia, those kneecap collecting badgers.

Liminal Sex, Biopolitics, and Cyber-Space

    This past June, Naomi Most, a/k/a DJ Prefect, science news community broadcaster¹, and a listener to the weekly science talk show of University of California at Davis KDVS radio 90.3 FM, "This Week in Science"², offered the following comment to the program's hosts via Twitter:

@jacksonfly³ should try an analogy -- Newton:Einstein :: Darwin:??? Newtonian model not complete but also not obsolete.

    Upon seeing the foregoing tweet, I suggested the following:

@drkiki @jacksonfly #Newton:" #physics in space" \ #Einstein:"physics of space"; #Darwin:"evolution in niche" \ t.b.d.:"evolution of niche"

    The readings this week comport nicely with this extended analogy.  To understand how, we may explore the ways in which Darwin's theory has been taken up in the understanding of biopolitics (and political embodiment) and identity (and identification), and the ways in which each of these open and are opened by niche.

    Darwin, in his Origin of Species, claims as supporting his argument the challenge of clearly differentiating species and varieties, and the arbitrariness by which such distinctions are made and upheld, as demonstrative the validity of his theory of descent through natural selection, while Stefan Helmreich, in "Trees and Seas of Information", points to just such arbitrary designation (both at the level of bioinformatic processing systems and the information upon which patents are based) and the problem of clearly identifying species, as such, in biota engaging in lateral transfer of genetic material, as challenging Darwin's claim that all life might be traced to a single genealogical trunk.  Meanwhile, where Darwin identified the tensions of reproductive and productive potentials among various casts of social insects, Donna Haraway, in her "A Cyborg Manifesto", disputes feminisms that cast one gender as being constituted as potentials of labor and/or sex.  Likewise, even as Haraway develops her ironic hybrid of machine and organism, so Helmreich opines that life forms on the land in effect hybridize the organic with the oceans that give organisms life.

    In each circumstance, we witness the dialectic between an essentialism and a dynamism.  It is not that there are essential species, of which other groupings are variants, but that through increasingly divergent variation species become apparent (or, in the very least, conventionalized).  It is not that there are essential re-productive identities, but that all identities operate as liminal interfaces of information and material transmission between the identified.  It is not that there are essential organisms, as distinct from machines and from a non-organistic environment, but that life organizes as at once bringing together and drawing apart, of information and material, node and system.  If there is an essential here, it is not in identities as constituted, humble-bee or hive-bee, man or not man, life or sea, but rather spacings by which variation constitutes and through which divergent forms interface.  It is in the unfolding of spaces, the opening of niches, the evolutionary process by which, in Darwin's words "new places will be formed", whether biological or political, cybernetic or scientific, that this dynamism--of both diversification and hybridization--plays out.

notes

¹ As host of "Subversive Science" on San Francisco's Pirate Cat radio 87.9 FM.

² The program is available to an international audience via podcast.

³ Justin Jackson, who together with Dr. Kirsten Sanford (a/k/a, Dr. Kiki) co-hosts "This Week in Science".

A Case for an Ethnography of Empathy

    Recently, Tom Ridge, former governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and inaugural Secretary of the Department Homeland Security, was invited to the New School to talk to students during a morning session.  The event did not go as planned.  Some students chose to disrupt the event.  Despite such disruptions, Ridge and three other speakers finished their respective presentations, a first question from the audience was posed, and then university president Bob Kerry, acting as moderator, called an end to the event.

    Thereafter, members of the University Student Senate (USS) began discussing, by e-mail, a potential response by the USS to the events surrounding Ridge's visit to the university.  This issue was taken up at the subsequent meeting of the USS¹ , where two Lang undergraduate students appeared with a prepared statement.  One of these two, as it turns out, was the individual who asked the question of Ridge.  As he tells the story, the claim by university administration, that the event was ended due to continued student disruption, was a misrepresentation:  the disruptions had been earlier during the event, and the true reason for stopping the event was so that his question, critical of the former governor, would not need to be answered.  Another student, who had also been present at the event, vouches that the student who posed the first question had not been among those disrupting the event--but also asserts, twice during the course of the discussion, that she had been unable to hear the question asked, due to disruption created others.  

    A letter is read from 9 students of Milano, who expressed displeasure at having gotten up early in the day to ask questions at the event, only to have other students's behavior lead to it ending early.  Another letter is read casting the event in terms of majority populism keeping a minority from speaking.  Counterarguments are heard:  that non-Milano students were not acknowledged or allowed to pose questions² ; that leftist radicals are the true subordinated position, rather than the majority; and that Kerry, not the disruptive students, was responsible and to be held accountable for ending the event.  The question of tolerance (for the policies Ridge represents) is raised.  Excerpts read from an anonymous e-mail purportedly from students claiming responsibility for the disruption characterize the termination of the event as a victory.  A statement from the administrator who arranged for Ridge's visit to the university is read:  some 20 Milano students and others remained after the event, and had a long, fruitful conversation with Ridge, despite the official ending.  

    It was a true Rashomon moment, complete with a mix of direct and mediated³  testimony.  University of South Carolina psychological anthropologist Karl G. Heider invokes such a moment under the heading "Rashomon effect"⁴ , but where Heider speaks to disagreements in tellings as between ethnographers, the USS meeting exemplifies a recurrent theme in our course readings in Anthropology as a History of the Present:  different tellings by participants within the same history.  

    My arguments in reading responses thus far this semester has been that such tellings articulate different genres of experience, and that all such genres are embodied.  Koselleck opens this door in his argument that temporalities (at least, the temporality of modernity) are inherently spatial.  Even the transition from premodern to modern experience can be characterized as movement.  With Ferguson, we open this spatiality of time, this placement of narrative, as the temporalities of the Zambian Copperbelt are explored:  not only the post-boom progressive decline ("down, down, down") as told by the Zambian townsfolk, but also in the tellings of white settlers and anthropologists struggling to understand Zambian households that are not recognizable as "family".⁵   

    What is happening here is often articulated as narrative, but story is but a superficial expression of embodied genre experience.  The challenge of understanding the living arrangements encountered in the Copperbelt was not the mismatch of Wolf's "imaginary norm" or "fiction" with world as encountered⁶ , but rather that, as Annemarie Mol might say, the white migrants and Zambian townsfolk do family differently.  Such performative expression appears in our Westinghouse refrigerator,⁷   and also in the emerging European relationship to glass at the close of the 19th century.⁸   White migrants in Zambia's Copperbelt, Egyptians caught by the European gaze, Enlightenment scholars interpreting Bildungsroman, each find themselves entering a space unfamiliar, and largely invisible to them.  The Players perform, embody a genre of experience in their act, and all (but for those few familiar with the lived experience of that genre), see nothing.⁹ 

    With Malkii and Amin, the problem of casting experience, historical or otherwise, entirely in narrative terms becomes all the more apparent.  Narrative is an important feature of how embodied genres are articulated, yet narrative is always situated¹⁰ , always voiced from some place, a place of embodiment. What's more, in taking up narrative as the object of ethnography, narrative assumes a position of mediation¹¹ , and with such mediation, the Rashomon effect is unleashed, not merely as between ethnographers, but between parties within a broader population, whether that population be national or institutional.  That under some situated conditions a coherent single narrative becomes apparent (e.g., in the case of white migrant characterizations of nuclear family, Mishamo camp's mythico-history, or the three New York theater groups studied by Carol Feldman¹² ) speaks to the power of shared genre; yet such embodied genres, shared or otherwise, express an orientation on a world.  Whether Hutu refugee or Indian pensioner, Lang critic or New School administrator, each experiences a genre-world reflective of their situatedness, their experiential spatiality and temporality.

    That we each orient of our own phenomenological experience is a universal.  Yet, even as each our embodied genre of experience may or may not be shared with any given other, there are basic human needs, for connection and physical-well being, honesty and play, peace, meaning, and autonomy¹³ , that we may also speak of as universals.  How such universal needs are expressed within any given embodied genre of experience may differ, yet no matter how alien the genre-embodied landscape of other may be, the universality of these needs, needs that one can imagine any human being at any point in history, any place in the world, at some moment experiencing¹⁴ , can not be in doubt.  Thus we have two planes of universals:  firstly, situatedness within genre-embodiment, shared potentially with some, but not all, others; and secondly, basic human needs, commonly experienced, but differentially expressed across embodied genres of experience.

    Within the practice of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), as set forth by Marshal Rosenberg¹⁵ , among others, everything any person does in life constitutes a strategy to meet basic human needs.  Every act, every thought, and yes, every narration and situation of self, expresses basic human needs.  Where conflict emerges, whether between the accounts given by a dead samauri and a passing woodcutter in the story of Rashomon, or between different attendees at an event held early in the day on the New School campus, or between different actors in an unfolding moment of cultural history, whether in Egypt or Tanzania, Zambia or India, such conflict operates at the encounter between differently situated doings of strategies to meet needs, as distinct from needs in-and-of themselves.

    The challenge for the ethnographer, then, in taking up narratives as a route to explicating a deeper understanding of being human, is that such narratives--whether the singular narrative as set forth by a given ethnographer or the multiple narratives mediated by way of a work of ethnography--are themselves but strategies employed in expression of needs, yet such needs are rarely, if ever, directly examined when the focus of the ethnographer's gaze is upon narrative.  Thus, rather than asking how universal needs are being expressed by a given genre-embodiment, here articulated in narrative form, we instead face the question of how to go about reconciling conflicting narratives, conflicting histories, conflicting genre-embodiments.¹⁶  The challenge emerges from looking to the universality of being situated, without addressing ourselves to the doing of situatedness as an expression of deeper universalities. 

    What is called for, then, is an ethnography of empathy¹⁷ , to supplement ethnography of narrative.  By an ethnography of empathy,  I do not intend just any such, but rather an ethnography employing a particular methodology of empathy.  A non-exhaustive list of such methodologies might include the aphoristic injunction to "walk a mile in another man's moccasins"¹⁸ , psychoanalysis, and NVC.  

    The "moccasins method"¹⁹  suffers most clearly from disparities in genre-embodiment. A dramatic failure of the moccasins method can be seen in Laura Bohannan's attempt to relate the story of Hamlet to an audience of Tiv²⁰ :  the listeners were simply not situated such that they might try on the footware of a protagonist seen at worst as evil, at best as a madman.  If our prince of Denmark is merely mad (and not simply cracking under the strain of an unjustice done by his uncle, but--as the Tiv would have it--clearly delusional for perceiving an injustice in the first place), then he at least may be deserving of our sympathy, but sympathy is not empathy.  The moccasins method demands that we take the place of our subject, position ourselves within their life, their history, their narrative.  If differential genre-embodiment presents issues in reconciling the experiences of others, how much more challenging must it be to attempt to inhabit the genre-embodied narrative of another!

    Psychoanalysis, by comparison, does not require that we assume the position of other.  Rather, from the psychoanalytic mode, we assert that the position of other comports to a universal genre of strategic narratives.  The psychoanalytic method begins with an understanding encompassing certain universal strategies, described as emerging of embodied developmental experience:  both primal strategies, that all individuals necessarily desire to implement, and developmental strategies, by which such primal desires a counteracted within each individual.  Unfortunately, the appeal to a universal genre of primal and developmental strategies (whatever claims may be made to embodied experience) to understand, let alone account for, the differentially situated genre-embodiments seen both within and between populations, is unsatisfactory:  even if the explanatory narratives of psychoanalysis held across cultures--and there is sufficient criticism to cast doubt that they do--the question would still remain as to why these narratives necessarily account for all other narratives.²¹   Meanwhile, the ease with which psychoanalysis renders numerous strategies within its universal genre as pathology fails to free us from sympathy-rather-than-empathy problem encountered with the moccasins method.

    NVC, by contrast, does not operate from an agenda of diagnosis.  Rather, in NVC, one starts with an observation²² , and orienting to said observation, asks what feelings²³  are present.  A hypothesis may be offered at this point:  "When you hear this said, I might guess that you would be confused, or perhaps worried?"  The invitation is made for the subject²⁴  to determine if the hypothesis reflects their emotional orientation toward the observation, and if not, to correct and/or elaborate upon the hypothesis.  Once such feelings have been clearly identified to the satisfaction of the subject, a further question is posed:  what needs do those feelings speak to?  Again, a hypothesis²⁵  might be offered.  "Would it be that your needs for trust and communication were not being met?"²⁶   Our subject again is given space to determine if the needs suggested are those most present in the observation-feeling context, and to articulate other needs more salient in that moment, as appropriate.  Subsequent observations may then be pursued in the same manner, both with the same individual, and with others, thereby fleshing out the situated genre-embodiments that give form and power to the narratives encountered.

    It is my argument that employment of a methodology of empathy, such as NVC, would provide richly informative data for more deeply and fully understanding the corpus of narrative produced within and between groups, both in terms of the coherence of such narratives within a given cultural context, and in relation to the narratives put forward by other actors.  In drawing upon a common language of needs, comparisons could then be drawn between genre-embodiments that might not be apparent when only considering conflicting narratives.  Likewise, where actors that might otherwise be considered within a single category are shown to employ different strategies of embodiment, having a clearly described account of operative needs, as reported by those actors, would better inform our understanding of how such differences emerge and are maintained.

notes

¹ My gratitude to Chris Crews, USS Vice President, for his assistance aiding my recall of the relevant events of that meeting.

² Note that this contrasts with the claim that the first question asked was the impetus for ending the event.

³ In Akira Kurosawa's film, multiple accounts of a rape and a murder (or alternatively, a suicide) are described by individuals involved, including the dead man, who testifies by way of a spirit medium.  The film itself operates as a frame story, the accounts themselves offered as recollections of what was said by others--with the exception of yet another account offered by one character in recanting his previous version.

⁴ Heider, K. The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree, American Anthropologist, 90(1), 73-81.

⁵ The appearance of the nuclear family, as an ontological category of phenomenal perceptibility, from the vantage of accelerated modernity, is more fully developed  Week 2 paper, "Movements of Modern Experience".

⁶ A fuller critique of Wolf is likewise found in the previously cited Wk. 2 paper.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Wk. 3, "History as Through a Glass Starkly"

⁹ Wk. 4, "Formative Genre Informative"

¹⁰ Wk. 5, "History Cosmologically Situated".

¹¹ Wk. 6, "Tellings, Doings, and Feelings:  The Problem of Narrative"

¹² In class presentation on Bakhtin & Dumont.  Available on my blog (as are all of cited reading responses), under title "Genre and Worldmaking".  http://espacement.blogspot.com/

¹³ The remainder of this paper develops concepts from the practice of Nonviolent Communication, from which these broad categories of basic human needs are drawn.

¹⁴ By this formulation, we expressly distinguish universal human needs from "needs" that emerge as situated strategies.  Thus, to say one "needs a job" is not to invoke a universal human need--one can imagine people in times and places for whom "a job" was never a "need".  Thus, a job can be recognized as a strategy for meeting certain universal needs, such as stability, food, ease, contribution, etc.

¹⁵ Rosenberg, M. Nonviolent Communication:  A Language of Life.  2003.  Encinitas, CA:  Puddle Dancer Press.

¹⁶ If, indeed, we admit to their being any possibility of reconciliation at all.  An alternative position, that of relativism, would abandon such an endeavor as blocked by biases inherent to any and all observers.  This is not the strategy advocated here.

¹⁷ There may be recognized three modalities under the concept empathy:  empathizing, empathism, and empathalizing.
    Empathizing, as that term is developed by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, refers to neurotypical comportment to social affect, without emerging as conscious awareness.  (Indeed, for empathizing to become salient to awareness is to indicate a breakdown.)
    Empathism points to a sensitivity to the affective conditions within a group, what might variously be termed atmosphere or mood, without attention to particularities of affect in individuals.
    Empathalizing (from empathy-rationalizing), here then, identifies any rationally articulated method, or practice, for accessing or producing an awareness of affect.  It is this last case that is meant in our discussion.

¹⁸ Arguably, the methodology of empathy most often employed, at least implicitly, by those ethnographers who conceive of their work as witnessing or otherwise drawing attention to situated challenges faced by a population for whom they have a personal concern.

¹⁹ That our aphorism, even in its American context, is variously glossed as involving "shoes" or "sandals" is our first sign that something might be amiss: before even being put into practice, this method struggles to situate itself culturally.

²⁰ Bohannan, L. Shakespeare in the Bush. Natural History, Aug-Sep 1966.

²¹ No claim is made here regarding psychoanalytic-derived models applied to broader cultural phenomena (e.g., Jungian archetypes with respect to the study of myth, or Deleuze & Guattari's schizophrenic conception of capitalism).  Rather, the limitations addressed in this paper are only with respect to psychoanalysis as a methodology of empathy.

²² An observation, within the NVC framework, is a specific statement that points to a discrete event or events, without evaluation, interpretation, or judgment.  e.g., "I am told that a Tanzanian official arrived at camp at 2 in the morning, and was taken to each village before sunrise."

²³ In a fieldwork setting, this would necessitate a familiarity with the lexicon of feelings available in the local language(s), including terms not often drawn on by native speakers.  Where NVC methods are studied among English speakers, lists of feeling words are typically provided, so as to facilitate more nuanced responses from speakers unaccustomed to using a rich vocabulary to distinguish emotional content.

²⁴ Who may be either another person or the person offering the observation themselves.  Self-empathy is an important component of NVC, and a comparison of self-empathy to the psychoanalytic mechanism of counter-transference might be considered in exploring these methodologies further.

²⁵ The importance of hypothesis in NVC can not be overstated.  There is no claim made to privileged knowledge concerning the feelings of needs of the subject, even in introspective self-empathy.  All guesses are offered as openings to reflection and intuitive validation.

²⁶ The example given notwithstanding, NVC does not focus exclusively on "bad" or "unpleasant" affect.  Were an observation to lead to an articulation of such feelings as joy, satisfaction, or warmth, the second hypothetical would query as to what needs were being met.  More complex emotional configurations, where some needs are and other need are not addressed, are also possible.

Persimmon Preserves

    "In all the five prohibitions and ten laws of Buddha and in all the Buddhist codes of discipline, I have never found any precept that warned against persimmons."

-- Fabian Fucan, Japanese Zen Buddhist convert to Christianity, and subsequent apostate

    This quote made me stop.  I was laughing too hard to continue reading.  Indeed, Sahlins's 1994 Sidney M. Mintz lecture was an enjoyable romp, replete as it was with sidebars establishing the very particular peculiarity of the Judeo-Christian, a/k/a Western, genre of being.  I am puzzled that it is described as a lecture however, as I'm not entirely certain how the sidebars would be pulled off in that mode of delivery.  If anything, it was more reminiscent of the sourcebooks¹ I read in younger days, in which a rich tapestry of geographically coincident yet ontologically (and often cosmologically) divergent populations are represented through their encounters with and reactions to alterity.

    Sahlins provides an exceptional frame for Mintz's Sweetness and Power, by positioning a globe-spanning anthropological and sociological account of historical changes in food consumption and food production within the world-view of its telling, that is, within a western cosmology².  Although the point is not explicitly developed by Sahlins, or his interlocutors in the Reply section following the lecture proper, one is reminded that just because various populations were drawn into, by Mintz's telling, a metropolis-countryside dynamic³ of drugfood production, a proto-capitalist liminality of pre-industrial agri-industry, such a telling necessarily comports with its cosmological genre, this does not imply that those indigenous American, African slave, Indian contract worker, or indeed even English working class, populations accounted for in Mintz's telling would have told the same tale, were the hermeneutic task of making sense of a world of sugar and tea and coffee open to them, let alone how a Kaluli, Hawaiian, or Zen Buddhist might have understood the same data Mintz presents.

    

notes

¹ Sourcebooks, here, refer to supplementary materials provided in various role playing game (RPG) systems, for tabletop or live action role play (LARP) use, in which particular fictional or fictionalized settings or populations were described in accordance with the tropes of the genre represented by those subjects.  Not all RPG systems leverage alterity as a game mechanic, but of those that do, the World of Darkness system (White Wolf Games) was well known at the time Sahlins was writing.  Sourcebooks for the TORG system (West End Games), from the same period, even more closely resemble the structure of Sahlins's article, although this system was not nearly as well known.  Sahlins's "Anthropology of _____" formulations are reminiscent of the World Laws that provided the phenomenological grist for characters representing each of the genre-worlds, or cosms, of TORG.

² It might be noted that at least one of the replies to Sahlins suggests that there may be more than one such cosmology.

³  Although, see De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History for another telling of city-outskirts temporality.

Tellings, Doings, and Feelings: The Problem of Narrative

    Last evening, the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) presented a talk by CUNY-based anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, entitled "Four Ways to Tell the Kuru Story:  Production and Dissemination of Authoritative Knowledge".  Lindenbaum presents the ways in which kuru--a fatal degenerative disease found among the Fore people and neighboring populations of Papau New Guinea--is told in four different contexts:  medicine, anthropology, folk knowledge, and journalism.  In so doing, she documents the genre effects that inform and conform the histories of the disease, the Fore, and those who study either or both.  From a slow to be accepted theory of long-gestating prions as infectious agents to uncorroborated explanations of transmission by inoculation that avoid taboo claims¹, from an epidemiological account articulated in terms of cultural diffusion of sorcerous knowledge to sensationalist news coverage of people laughing themselves to death, from the recall and reportage of two Nobel Prize winners as a single "discoverer" to the lifelong (and posthumous) attribution to one scientist of a theory he spent his entire career trying to discredit², these interpenetrating tellings of the kuru story³ present an epistemological problem akin to that presented in Amin's Event, Metaphor, Memory.

    Our reading of Amin was framed (in our syllabus) in the context of Benedict Anderson's discussion of Imagined Communities, specifically, nationalist communities as imagined (and re-imagined) through narrative.  This framing is perhaps premature, as it positions nationalism and nationhood as operating in an ontological category distinct from other kinds of groups.  The research of NYU cultural psychologist Carol Feldman⁴, however, develops nationalist narrative as another case of group narrative, developing analysis of nationalism from research conducted with theatre groups in New York City.  Extracting the question of story, of history, and of ethnography, from an expressly nationalist context, the synchronicity of Lindenbaum's talk for the NYAS becomes more readily apparent, as does, for that matter, the talk given by University of Amsterdam ethnographer Annemarie Mol here at the New School just this past week.  In her presentation, Mol makes a case for (what can be understood as) genre forming and informing our experience even in the absence of explicit narrative:  eating as nutrition is a markedly different doing of eating from eating as meal, just as eating as care does in a way distinct from both.⁵  It is Mol's work that opens up Amin (and indeed, Malkki, Dumont, Bakhtin, et al.) to a different way of thinking about the ethnographic project.

    Amin's multiple tellings:  of millennial moment of empowerment, of crime unrepresentative of nationalist aims, of criminal prosecution, of judicial judgment, of political leniency, of masculine power, of criminal anti-hero, of local sovereignty, of organized police brutality, of colonialist oppression⁶, etc., etc.--each of these accounts point to, but never quite develop, deeper questions of empathy⁷ for and betwixt the many uniquely situated parties involved in the doing and telling of Chauri Chaura.  The challenge of ethnography as performed here, is that it operates explicitly at the level of story, of narrative, but for the most part only implicitly at the level of care.  Having problematized the multivocity that is the telling of history (and thus, of ethnography), the question arises, can we shift from explicit storytelling to explicit empathizing, and in so doing better grasp the cultural actors and circumstances we seek to understand?  Is it possible to move narrative from a position of mediation, still observing it as an artifact, surely, but holding it distinct from our subject, rather than as lens through which our subject is necessarily viewed?

    My tentative answer is yes, but that discussion will have to wait for a midterm paper.

notes

¹ See subsequent footnote re: Mol for explanation.

² i.e., the unrevealed taboo claims previously alluded to.

³ Indeed, four tellings underestimates the situation.  A question from the audience regarding one possible telling, that of a new generation interpreting the varied histories of and about older generations elicited from Lindenbaum yet another telling:  that of those surviving old men (and it is mostly old men, as women were disproportionately struck by and died of the malady) telling the story to two Fore ethnographers, divulging details to these interested grandchildren markedly different from those told to non-Fore anthropologists previously.

⁴ Introduced in a recent class presentation: e.g., C. Feldman (2001). Narratives of National Identity as Group Narratives: Patterns of Interpretive Cognition. In J. Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh (eds.), Narrative and Identity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press.

⁵ The synchonicity between Mol and Lindenbaum's respective talks does not stop here.  For while Mol is exploring the question of being an eater, Lindenbaum's account speaks to Fore as cannibal.

⁶ This particular telling avoided, we are told, through non-publication of photos that might otherwise have been reinterpreted for sensationalist ends by journalists in the United States--representing a transformation remarkably similar to the telling of the White Paper discussed in Malkki.

⁷ Interestingly, I was all set to begin writing this, having organized my thoughts earlier in the day, when--during a brainstorming session in preparation for the departmental conference this Spring--the question of empathy as commitment was introduced as one theme worth exploring for said conference.

Cities Excorporate and Encounters Conflated

        Russian émigré and prodigious American writer Isaac Asimov, in his Robot series of novels, envisions a future history in which his adopted city of New York has, together with Philadelphia and Baltimore, long ago been subsumed by a single domed megalopolis, the distinctiveness of suburban and rural landscapes and territorialities (including the whole of the once state of New Jersey) having disappeared into a densely multi-tiered urban meshwork, the surplus of centuries having accreted as steel architecture of decentralized, multidimensional growth, such that ancient buildings perform as latticeworks vertically bisected and intersected by uncountable strata of flowing traffic, extending from the underside of the dome downward into the bowels of the Earth, :"microstates" (per Balbo, cited by Harvey), of slum and wealth both, stacked one upon another in organic profusion.  

    Asimov's Caves of Steel portend a process of urbanization not merely "obliterating step by step the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across national territory, if not beyond"¹    (David Harvey, citing to Lebefvre), but ultimately consuming town and country undigested and forgotten to generations knowing no other spatiality.  This vision of culminate urbanization, "another kind of world--including a different kind of urban experience" (Harvey), together with my own experiences in the historically redlined suburban ghetto of New Cassel, played in the background as I read Harvey's "The Right to the City".

    Sunder Rajan, meanwhile, in the introduction to Biocapital²   , through an explication of Marx's discussion of "the mystical and magical nature of the commodity" (Sunder Rajan) reproduces, and in so doing brings into sharp relief, the error of the Mineresque³    magical gloss enacted by Marxism.  Unlike the legerdemain employed by Marx in his discussion of the purported "estrangement" of labor, in which Marx conflates labor-as-such with sentiment attaching to an object of labor as mediated by a mode of production⁴   , where the metaphysical thinking is definitely on the part of the author, here Marx (as channeled by Sunder Rajan) reaches for a magical-thinking theory of money, as he attributes to the "interaction between either worker or capitalist and money or commodity" an "uncanny kernel of abstraction that eludes capture in purely materialistic terms."  

    Here we see performed a different conflation than that occurring in the "estrangement" account, this time of money/commodity--as embodied in currency, coin, and/or other material product and excorporated⁵    through an assemblage undergirding both its use and exchange values--with a encounter of such materiality as a phenomenological agent⁶    which might "become the mediator of social bonds" (Sunder Rajan).  Doing for Western cultures overtly (out of their own confounded understanding) what Miner did only clandestinely (as an exercise in a pedagogy of clarity) Marx/Sunder-Rajan declare "fetish" in their account of this conflated material-existential, appealing to "abstraction" to account for what appears, in its confused presentation, to be "full of metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" (Marx, quoted by Sunder Rajan).  

    That there is something "uncanny" here is not in dispute.  Rather, that the uncanniness invests in the money/commodity, and not in the encountering of such as agent of social mediation (a priori to any "abstraction" that might be conjured in efforts to dispel such uncanniness), continues a tradition of analysis that fetishizes abstraction as a talisman to contain the impurities introduced not in the encounter of phenomenological agents as such, but only in the mentalization of such material encounters by an objectivity blind to the objectivist's own capacities for the deployment of sentiments in social relation with a broad category of potential phenomenological agents, of which money, commodities, cities, and megalopolises are but a small sampling.

notes

¹ In his Foundation series of novels, set centuries after the Robot books, the galactic capitol is the city-planet of Trantor, a single domed complex "girding the globe" (as per Harvey).  Such themes of mutivocal complexity run throughout Asimov's work.  For instance, in an epic short story anticipating the Internet, search engines, and handheld computers, Asimov's "Multivac" outgrows first its mountain facility, then mountain, state, the North American continent, the planet Earth, and eventually three-dimensional space itself.  The themes of psychohistory, the Zeroth Law of Robots (and its consequences as developed in both his future history and a one-off alternative thereto), and Gaia/Galaxia (as developed by other authors authorized by his estate) operate in the same vein.

² In which the author's (but not the editor's)  ignorance of political geography may be forgiven.  Syosset, although admittedly small (one out of three ain't bad), is neither a town nor in upstate New York, but rather is an unincorporated hamlet (having only nominally more of a distinct political identity than a mere census designated place) within the Town of Oyster Bay, Nassau County, said town itself, together with Cold Spring Harbor (an even smaller hamlet, located in the Town of Huntington, Suffolk County--the Labs therefor named actually being sited in the Village of Laurel Hollow, also Nassau County) both to be found on Long Island, not even north of the Bronx, let alone "upstate".

³ In his "Body Ritual among the Narcirema", published in American Anthropologist, vol. 58 (1956), pp. 503-507, Miner applies the tropes of then contemporary anthropological accounts of magical thinking among non-Western cultures to an anynmically identified North American people.

⁴ A logical fallacy we shall not elaborate further upon here--it being beyond the scope of our present concern--except to note that in disentangling such conflation we might then ask whose sentiment(s) may be at issue, what sentiment may differently attach to labor-as-such, what derivative sentiments may play upon any or all such inflections, and whether and how any such sentiments might be situated culturally and/or temperamentally.

⁵ Deploying, in an expanded sense, a term neologized by Annamarie Mol and John Law in their 2004 "Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies:  The Example of Hypoglycemia", Body & Society, Vol. 10(2-3), 43-62.

⁶ i.e., the object of a capacity for agency perception, as made potential by a certain tolerance for ambiguity (as experienced in uncanniness) in said perception particular to the human animal, in theory emergent of heuristic adaptations to domestication, allowing for the deployment of affective social repertoires in relation to organisms possessed of non-human body plans.  The theory of agency perception is more fully elaborated by this author in other writings.

Biopolitics Unfolding: Imagining Identity Studies

    It has been suggested that a significant feature of the resistance to establishment of a gender studies program at the New School is a critique upheld by many that such a program would amount to a narrow biopolitics of identity, not in keeping with a professed (by those resistant to such) desire for a depoliticized academic mission.  A gender studies program had been established at the university in years past, only to be discontinued.  A cultural studies program, meanwhile, modeled on then contemporary programs in England, at its formation envisioned as a catch-all for studies of gender, race, queer, and related issues, did not last long as such, instead being shaped in accordance with the proclivities of other academic disciplines at the university.  Given the New School's historical claim to prominent voices speaking to issues of power, and given further demonstrable interest in the subject on the part of both faculty and students, the absence of a program continuing in this tradition is not simply notable in the abstract or disconcerting for its advocates.  Rather, the absence of gender studies at the New School presents itself as a problem itself open to study.  

    Indeed, a process has begun in recent weeks to formulate and implement a project to research the political and cultural landscape of the university vis a vis gender studies, its adherents and detractors, whereby the New School, as institution and community, itself is being taken up as a site in which a particular discourse differentially does and does not occur.  This research will necessarily operate at multiple valances, some instrumental, others theoretical and practical.  For even as these questions are born of disillusioning frustrations and unrepentant hopes, such situated activity toward change shadows deeper and broader processes in academia, politics, culture, and society.  It is through participation in this space of discourse, not simply as discussants but as leaders in the innovation of our very approach to questions of identity, that the New School may not simply hearken to unique voices of our institutional past, but distinguish itself as home to a coherent multivocity of practice.

    Our preliminary imaginings wind of three resonant plies:  1) a discernible critique of gender studies as a narrow, or limited, biopolitics of identity; 2) past and present affinity for an alliance or enfolding of gender studies with queer studies and/or race studies; 3) the New School's heritage of leadership in the integration of disparate political and philosophical traditions.  Following this yarn as it trundles off our jenny, we observe that where gender studies would problematize questions of identity, the establishment of any such program itself is stymied by a problematizing of that very act of inquiry.  Meanwhile, attempts to marshal power in opposition to such forces of resistance, by enfolding gender studies within broader categories, has served not so much to blend as to fray and wear away the very material at hand.  Finally, seeking to produce a meaningful program by embroidering the whole cloth of an imported intellectual fabric is to adopt a stance entirely out of keeping with our home-spun knitting of distinctive political and philosophical crafts.

    As already observed, the resistant encounter of gender studies--as itself constitutive of a problem--has emerged for us as a research question in its own right.  Such a study must necessarily take up the critique of gender studies as an object of investigation.  If we are to honor or traditions as a university, however, it is not enough to hold up such a critique as a recapitulation of the very relations of power that gender studies would have as their subject.  Such ipso facto recursion neither opens to our inquiry the forces against which any envisioned gender studies program runs afoul, nor offers a path to a skillful means of yielding (rather than wielding) power--drawing opposition into a shared space of debate.  We might instead perform a movement of Socratic jujitsu, by asking not "Why don't we have a gender studies program at the New School?" but instead "How might we engage and interrogate a critique of gender studies as a narrow biopolitics of identity?"  

    With this turn, we shift from a strategy of folding, to a space of unfolding.  No longer seeking to ball up gender, race, sexuality, etc.:  so as to thwart our clawed interlocutor by sheer mass of lowly denominational commonality, we here unwind and unpack biopolitics and identity, as at once problematized questions and questionings of problematicity.  Gender in this space neither struggles for admittance into the field of academe nor disappears into a morass of intermixed inquiries interned in an imported vessel.  Rather, from an inquiry unfolding both identity as problem and the problem of identity, questions gendered, racial, and queer, but also neutered, race-blind, and normative, would necessarily emerge.  It is suggested that such a generative unfolding would be decidedly more in keeping with the New School's reputation for avant garde transgression into new spaces of inquiry than would be a post hoc adoption of an area of studies already well established in other institutional settings.  

    It is with this conception that we shall imagine a curriculum of identity.  We begin with a tentative list of prospective course offerings, which shall, with gestation over the coming weeks, more fully develop and flesh out.  The intent is not that the pedagogical profile set forth below would substitute for or replace traditional coursework in gender studies (or, for that matter, queer or race studies), but rather that by defining a core curriculum of Identity Studies, together with electives (cross-listed with other disciplines) that continue a line of flight expressive of inquiry into a critique of identity, the wealth of existing courses examining identity as encountered along one or more dimensions would be enriched and more deeply elaborated.  This being the genre across which our imaginings unfold, let us consider the following:  

• History of Identity - modeled after Paul Duguid and Geoffrey Nunberg's "History of Information" course at UC Berkeley, drawing a timeline history of identity as concept and experience, from earliest archeological artifacts to the digital era
• Biopolitics and its Discontents - tracing the geneology of biopolitics, the term itself, its usage in both political theory and philosophy, and the strains of thought both dismissed and embraced under said label, both contemporaneously and anachronistically
• Identity Impure/Identity Instrumental - exploring the intersection of culture, morality, politics, nationalism, conflict, and relations of power and empowerment, through the lens of identity as it is taken up, discarded, policed and challenged
• Who Owns Identity?  Categories of Production - examining identity as manifestation of capital and mechanism of control, with attention to the economic, political, and legal claims and counter-claims to, upon, and against identity and group
• Comparative Religion of Identity - orienting themes of identity, commonality, and universality across religious traditions, Abrahamic, Indian, and Taoic, and within ethical schools of thought emerging of and responding to these religious frames
• I Am Who:  Reflections on Self and Other - drawing upon multiple fields across psychology and political theory to articulate historical and current understandings of identity formation and attribution, empathy and altruism, and social group dynamics
• Performative Encounters:  Workshop in Identification - training in dramatical and role-play methods and techniques for acting upon and through identity, and elaborating identities in performance as an approach to critical reflection and dialogue
• Nonlinear Geology of Identity - observing identity as movements of temporality and flows, territoriality and scale, at once coincident and stratified, with attention to interstitial and macrohistorical processes of formation and subduction
• A Habit of Saying "I":  Identity as Philosophical Problem - delving into philosophical critiques of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, including post-humanist, anti-humanist, and trans-humanist conceptions of identity and its alternatives
  
• Body Politic:  Identity Embodied - investigating the existential, linguistic, performative, and organic dimensions of identity as embodiment and body plan, as incorporated into and "excorporated" (per Mol) without of multivalent, enmeshed bodies of identity