Anthropology and Alterity: Responding to the Other 9781138671843, 9781315616759

Citation preview

Anthropology and Alterity

Alterity or otherness is a central notion in cultural anthropology and philosophy, as well as in other disciplines. While anthropology, with its aim of understanding cultural difference, tends to depart from otherness as an empirical fact, there have been vigorous attempts in contemporary philosophy, particularly in phenomenology, to answer the fundamental question: What is the Other? This book brings the two approaches to otherness—the hermeneutical pragmatics of anthropology, and the radical reflection of philosophy—together, with the goal of enriching one through the other. The philosophy of the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, up to now little known to anthropologists, has a central position in this undertaking. Waldenfels’ concept of a responsivity to the Other offers to cultural anthropology the possibility of a philosophical engagement with the Other that does not contradict the project of making sense of concrete empirical others. The book illustrates the fertility of this new approach to alterity through a broad spectrum of themes, ranging from reflections on theory formation, via discussions of race and human-animal relations, to personal meditations on experiences of alterity. Bernhard Leistle is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University.

Routledge Studies in Anthropology For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

24 Magical Consciousness An Anthropological and Neurobiological Approach Susan Greenwood and Erik D. Goodwyn 25 Diagnostic Controversy Cultural Perspectives on Competing Knowledge in Healthcare Edited by Carolyn Smith-Morris 26 Transpacific Americas Encounters and Engagements Between the Americas and the South Pacific Edited by Eveline Dürr and Philipp Schorch 27 The Anthropology of Postindustrialism Ethnographies of Disconnection Edited by Ismael Vaccaro, Krista Harper and Seth Murray 28 Islam, Standards, and Technoscience In Global Halal Zones Johan Fischer 29 After the Crisis Anthropological thought, neoliberalism and the aftermath James G. Carrier 30 Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration Edited by Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen 31 Work and Livelihoods in Times of Crisis Edited by Susana Narotzky and Victoria Goddard 32 Anthropology and Alterity Edited by Bernhard Leistle

Anthropology and Alterity Responding to the Other

Edited by Bernhard Leistle

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Bernhard Leistle; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Bernhard Leistle to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-67184-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-61675-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgments Note on Terminology and Translation Anthropology and Alterity—Responding to the Other: Introduction

vii viii

1

B E R N H A R D L E ISTL E

1 The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

25

B E R N H A R D L E ISTL E

2 Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

45

B E R N H A R D WA L DE N FE L S

3 The Friendly Other

72

V I N C E N T CRAPAN ZAN O

4 “Haunted by the Aboriginal”: Theory and Its Other

89

V I C TO R L I

5 The Other Otter: Relational Being at the Edge of Empire

107

D A N I E L L E DIN O VE L L I- L A N G

6 Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness: Skin Whitening, Vitiligo and Albinism

124

AMINA MIRE

7 The Alien and the Self TH O M A S F UCH S

148

vi

Contents

8 Intimate and Inaccessible: The Role of Asymmetry in Charismatic Christian Perceptions of God, Self and Fellow Believers

164

C H R I S TO P H E R STE P H AN

9 Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

185

C . J A S O N TH R O O P

10 Otherness and the Underground: Buried Treasure in the Sierra Tarahumara

207

FRANCES M. SLANEY

11 The Limits of Understanding: Empirical and Radical Otherness in the Andes

230

MARIEKA SAX

12 “The Order of the World”: A Responsive Phenomenology of Schreber’s Memoirs

254

B E R N H A R D L E ISTL E

13 Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

282

R O B E RT D E S J ARL A IS

List of Contributors Index

308 309

Acknowledgments

Most of the texts in this volume are based on presentations by the contributors at the conference “Anthropology and Otherness”, which took place at Carleton University, Nov. 01 to Nov. 03, 2013. Organization of the conference and publication of this book, including translations, was made possible by a connection grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC, Grant No. 611–2013–0014). Complementary funding was generously provided by Carleton University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, represented by Dean John Osborne. The excerpt from Victor Li’s book The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity (2006), pp. 22–30, that forms part of Chapter 4, has been reprinted with permission of University of Toronto Press. The English translation of Bernhard Waldenfels’ essay “Paradoxien ethnographischer Fremddarstellung” (Chapter 2), originally published in 1999 in Vielstimmigkeit der Rede. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden 4, 117–151, appears with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt. Completion of this book would not have been possible without the contribution and help of many people: first and foremost the contributors to this volume and the participants in the conference “Anthropology and Otherness,” in particular Vincent Crapanzano and Bernhard Waldenfels, who impressed everyone with their energy and enthusiasm; Danielle DiNovelli-Lang, who commented on a draft of my introduction; Robert Desjarlais, who provided valuable advice in the writing process; Sandy Vandervalk, who worked thoroughly and diligently on the manuscript; Megan Graham, who assisted in the organization of the conference; the students of my seminar “Phenomenology for Anthropologists and Sociologists: Otherness,” who attended the conference, arranged furniture and were available to help in countless other ways; our departmental administrator, Marlene Brancato, without whom I wouldn’t have been able to find my way through the administrative jungle of room and catering bookings; finally, my wife, Stephanie Wimmer, who chose hotel and restaurants for the conference, and gracefully supported me in hosting the event. To all of them I owe great thanks. To those I have forgotten, I offer my apologies.

Note on Terminology and Translation

There is considerable variation in the literature in the spelling and meaning of the terms Other, other, and otherness; a short note on how these terms are being used in a book in which they are supposed to fulfill conceptual function seems appropriate. “Other” has been capitalized when it is meant in the sense of an abstract noun, designating everything that is non-self, but stands in relation to self. Examples are phrases like: “the radical Other,” or “self and Other.” Whenever “other” is concretized to refer to an individual entity, as in “others,” i.e., other persons, or is used in an adjective sense, as in the phrase “the Other as other,” it begins with a small letter. The same applies to “otherness” whose abstract character is expressed in its form, by the suffix “-ness,” and therefore doesn’t have to be highlighted by artificial means. In quotations, the usage of the quoted author has been preserved. Within the abstract category of Other, I differentiate between a “radical Other” and an “empirical Other.” While the “radical Other” designates a purely conceptual sphere of otherness, the “empirical Other” refers to the entry of the Other into orders of sense and meaning. The empirical Other can be individualized, named, counted, etc., but the concept is still used in an abstract sense, hence the capitalization. I have proposed to use radical Other and alien as synonymous to each other. This proposal is related to the decision of generally translating the German word fremd by the English word “alien.” (This applies to the chapters by Waldenfels and Fuchs, both of whom were originally written in German.) The term fremd, or Fremdheit (“alienness”), not only occupies a central place in the philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels, it also appears frequently in everyday German. Even in its colloquial sense, fremd has none of the negative connotations that accompany the English “alien,” but its basic meaning of something that shows itself by withdrawing from the perceiving self is, in my opinion, better preserved by “alien” than by any other English alternative. I hope that this terminological choice will be accepted by readers and that they will be able to read “alien” and “alienness” in the more analytical or technical sense in which these terms are intended.

Note on Terminology and Translation

ix

In a semantic field like that of “otherness,” complete disambiguation is difficult to achieve, perhaps even impossible, when several authors are involved. It is possible that readers might not agree with a classification as “Other” or “other” in individual cases (not counting, for now, genuine oversights). I would regard such disagreement as an indication that this book has achieved one of its objectives: to reflect on the Other (and the alien) as a conceptual category of central importance to anthropology.

Anthropology and Alterity— Responding to the Other Introduction Bernhard Leistle

About This Book Responding to an Other which challenges, seduces, persecutes—this is the common theme of the essays put together in this volume. Most of the texts are revised versions of papers presented at the conference “Anthropology and Otherness,” held at Carleton University, Ottawa, from November 1 to November 3, 2013.1 The general objective of this meeting had been to bring recent developments in the philosophical discourse on otherness and anthropological approaches to the Other in communication with each other. Over the last three decades, the so-called “question of the Other” was one of the most intensely debated topics in continental philosophy, in particular phenomenology. A key contributor in the discussion about the philosophical status of the Other was the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, whose concept of responsivity has provided the present collection with its guiding idea. Indeed, it was the specific intention behind the organization of the conference to introduce Waldenfels’ work to a broader anthropological audience. Waldenfels’ oeuvre consists of more than 25 books written in German and hundreds of essays in several languages; up to now, however, only three of his books have appeared in English (Waldenfels 1996, 2007, 2011) and his philosophical approach to otherness has, in marked contrast to that of his colleagues Derrida and Levinas, not been taken note of widely in anthropology. Edited with the conviction that Waldenfels’ phenomenology of the alien and his concept of responsivity harbors great potential for all aspects of anthropology, the present volume intends to change this situation.

The Radical and the Empirical Other But what exactly is the question of the Other and why should anthropology or other empirical sciences be concerned with it? A more detailed, even though still cursory, answer to this question can be found in Chapter 1 of this book, but here I want to state the problem in simple yet, for introductory purposes, sufficiently accurate terms.

2

Bernhard Leistle

The question of the Other concerns the problem of determining the status of the Other in philosophical discourse. Every form of discourse, or of thought, action and experience for that matter, makes thematic; it says what it is about by naming it, thereby constituting what is named as an object that can be further inquired into and about which knowledge, however defined, can be gained. Indeed, it is inconceivable to think of anything existing for us that has not become thematic in one way or another. This inconceivability has received a positive articulation in the phenomenological concept of the intentionality of consciousness according to which consciousness is inevitably consciousness of something. Philosophy is the discipline of thinking radically, in the sense of a thought that goes to the roots of things,2 or, as Husserl famously proclaimed for phenomenology, “back to the things themselves.” But when it applies itself to the Other in this manner, an interesting paradox arises: when the Other is made the object of discourse, or of knowledge in general, what defines it as itself is necessarily destroyed. What is essential to the Other is its otherness; for the Other to be itself it must appear to me as genuinely, i.e., radically other. When my consciousness creates the Other as a perceptual object, when I assign a meaning to this Other, or, even more obviously, I name the Other as such and such a being, the Other ceases to be truly other; it acquires an aspect of “mineness”; it is appropriated by me, even if only by becoming part of my experiencing. It follows from this that a “radical Other,” the Other itself (that is: the Other as other, in its otherness) must be approached as something that cannot be made thematic, cannot be named or objectified in whatever form, for to do so is to deny to the Other what defines it as itself. This is, somewhat crudely put, the point of departure for philosophers who, like, for example, Levinas and Waldenfels, take the problem of radical alterity seriously. While this might explain the recent philosophical concern with the Other, it doesn’t answer the question why anthropology should be bothered by the idea of a radical Other. A first step in this direction can be taken by considering Clifford Geertz’ characterization of ethnography as “strange science”: It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what being an ethnographer is like (Geertz 1973:29). In his typical light-handed and slightly ironic manner, Geertz suggests here that there is something that inevitably escapes the anthropologist’s efforts at understanding and producing knowledge. What is more, he seems to imply that this elusive something is central to the definition of the anthropological— in Geertz’s understanding, ethnographic—project. The better it gets, the

Anthropology and Alterity

3

more it approaches its hermeneutic goals of “thick” description and interpretation, the more obvious ethnography communicates that its efforts are incomplete and partial. In other words: in the very center of the production of anthropological knowledge we find something that cannot be transformed into an object of such knowledge; radical otherness lies therefore at the heart of anthropology. In a sense, a recognition of this “present absence” at the core of the discipline is already discernible in the first formulation of modern anthropology’s objective: This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. (Malinowski [1922] 1961:25) The culturally Other is to be understood from within; his life is to be interpreted and evaluated using the other’s own standards, not that of the anthropologist or his home society. These standards, however, as Malinowski elaborates, are different from ours and they inform the other’s perspective right down to the level of personal aspirations and sentiments. As a scientific project, anthropology is thus to understand the Other as it understands itself; the subject matter of anthropology is the Other as other. To be certain, this is not how Malinowski intended his definition of the discipline to be read. In his mind, formed by the natural sciences, there was no doubt that the ethnographer could step out of his own cultural world and into that of the other while at the same time remaining distant from both and comparing between them. But contemporary anthropologists have long been robbed of such self-assurance, which even in Malinowski’s case was an illusion, as was demonstrated by the contents of his Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Seen from today’s perspective, Malinowski’s continued relevance for the discipline doesn’t lie in the definition of a scientific method but in the formulation of the productive tensions that lie at the heart of anthropology and keep it alive. This tension results from the opposition between the Other in a philosophically radical sense, that is, another which cannot be experienced, interpreted and represented without denying its otherness, and an empirical Other in the ethnographic sense whose understanding and rendering constitutes the subject matter of anthropology as a scientific project. Indeed, anthropology seems to be caught in a paradoxical position, aptly expressed

4

Bernhard Leistle

by Geertz in calling it a “strange science,” and summarized by Waldenfels as the “paradox of the science of the alien” (Waldenfels 1997:95ff.). As the final goal of the ethnographic project we find not a complete understanding of its domain, but a realization of the radical alterity of the culturally Other. At the same time, however, this realization can only be achieved via the detour of a confrontation with empirical others whom the anthropologist encounters during fieldwork. Only by an existential effort to make sense of the behaviors, experiences, institutions of these concrete others, an effort which ultimately proves its own impossibility, can anthropology approach, yet never reach, its true objective: a relationship to the Other as the Other. The opposition between the radical and the empirical Other has led to and continues to inspire many heated debates within anthropology and beyond its boundaries. In my view, it would be possible to write a history of the discipline using the accentuation of one or the other pole as ordering scheme. The development of anthropology over the last hundred or so years could then be portrayed as an oscillation between the project of “gaining knowledge” about the Other as an object of some sort of scientific inquiry and a relationship to radical alterity. Different approaches could be distinguished from each other by the ways in which they stress the importance of one or the other pole, but ultimately every form of anthropological practice would have to be regarded as an intertwining of both: even the most positivist styles of anthropology would be unable to completely suppress the otherness of the Other, and conversely, even in its most self-reflective expressions anthropology would have to contain some proposition as to how to make sense of the Other. Inability to think of the relation between empirical and radical otherness in non-dichotomous terms has produced a permanent sense of crisis among practitioners of anthropology as well as critics from other disciplines. In a recent collection on the current state of the discipline titled The End of Anthropology, the anthropologist Holger Jebens concluded his review of the “crisis of anthropology” with a call to return to the Other: After anthropology’s ‘turning back on itself’, after its engagement with its own history, method and texts, I think it would be worthwhile to shift one’s gaze onto the Other again, not as, in Knauft’s words, a ‘retreat into neo-empiricism’ or a ‘tendency to take reactionary refuge by simply presenting more and more specifics, but in order to reclaim the ability lost, according to Kapferer, to ‘criticise on the basis of in-depth knowledge of other forms of existence’. (Jebens 2011:27) It is exactly this proposition of a renewed orientation towards the empirical Other that critics of anthropological practice mean when they accuse anthropology of carrying on with “business as usual.” As a particularly outspoken example of such criticism, consider the following passage from a book by

Anthropology and Alterity

5

the literary scholars Scott Michaelsen and David Johnson with the telling title Anthropology’s Wake: Cultural anthropology’s others will never be left in a position that promises or permits the unpredictability of a relation to alterity. In anthropology, inevitably, the anthropologist’s “experience” of the other produces a meaning that necessarily misses the chance of others and alterity. These are grave consequences: Cultural anthropology’s promise has always been the possibility of something other than ourselves, yet anthropology relentlessly forecloses such a possibility. Anthropology’s promise, then, will only be reimaginable at its gravesite. Anthropology’s stake in a future different from a mere repetition of the past will involve, from here onward, rethinking to the limit both anthropology’s object and the “subject” of anthropology.” (Michaelsen and Johnson 2008:3) The question here is not to decide which of these remedies—return to the empirical Other, or radical reflection on anthropology’s foundations— provides a cure to the anthropological malaise. Rather, it is crucial to understand that they don’t present mutually exclusive positions. It is true that anthropology is in need of a “rethinking to the limit” of its relationship to the Other as other, as claimed by Michaelsen and Johnson. It is equally true that this rethinking can only take place in and through an anthropology that is alive and whose point of departure consists in some form of making sense of empirical others. In other words, “progress” in anthropology, if there is such a thing, consists in putting empirical and radical Other into a productive relation to each other. To achieve this, a theory is called for that is capable of integrating empirical and radical alterity within one conceptual framework. The present collection, in particular in its emphasis on the concept of responsivity derived from Waldenfels, intends to be a step in this direction.3

The Other in Anthropology While it is true that for most of its history anthropology has been concerned predominantly with achieving specialist knowledge about other cultures, that is, has focused on the empirically Other, it would be inaccurate to say that its practitioners have never developed any awareness of their discipline’s relation to radical alterity. Quite to the contrary, if we follow Geertz’s statement or think about Malinowski’s tribulations, we are led to believe that the feeling of “not getting it right” is a strong, perhaps dominant motivating force in the production of anthropology. Beginning in the 1970s and through the 1980s, however, anthropology went through a phase of heightened explicit awareness of its problematic, because ultimately paradoxical, relationship to otherness. This development had its origins already in the 1950s and 1960s when many of the colonial

6

Bernhard Leistle

states in which anthropologists customarily conducted their research became independent, often after long and violent struggles. In the postcolonial context, anthropology faced increasing resistance from its research subjects: the others didn’t subject themselves anymore to being studied and represented by people they associated with the colonial power. The Other “talked back,” demanding the right to speak with his or her own voice. A Western-style educated elite criticized anthropology for its active contribution to colonial oppression by providing “intelligence” about the colonized peoples with the ultimate objective to make them governable. Although many anthropologists took an anti-colonialist stance individually, these criticisms were well founded systemically and thus not to be refuted in total. Anthropology came to be seen more and more as a Western, rather than a neutral, scientific project, as serving the power interests of a particular group of people, not as providing “innocent” knowledge about exotic people. It is against the background of this challenge by anthropology’s others that the discipline undertook its turn towards reflecting on its foundations and practices. Anthropological self-reflexivity first focused on fieldwork, on the personal involvement of the individual researcher and the constitutive role of interpersonal encounters and relationships (see, for example: Bowen 1964; Malinowski 1967; Rabinow 1977; Crapanzano 1980), but ultimately turned towards the problem of ethnographic representation. What was the basis for the anthropologist’s claim to represent the Other, to accurately portray a reality that is by definition alien to him or her? Important as this question was and continues to be for anthropology, it must be stated firmly that ethnographic representation and writing are but one aspect of anthropology’s relation to otherness. A “solution” of the problem of the Other, in the sense of an overcoming of a conceptual contradiction, is not expected to come from this direction alone. To identify the Other with its representation means once more to reduce it to a function of the self, in this case the self of the writing anthropologist. The ethnographic portrayal would be situated exclusively in a sphere of ownness: personal idiosyncrasies of the anthropologist interweave with signifying structures like literary and rhetorical tropes from his or her home culture to form a representation which ultimately need not have anything to do with the reality of the Other as other (see Said 1978). If this were the case, anthropology would indeed be a lost cause, a project best to be abandoned. Radical otherness, however, means to insist on the fundamental ability of the Other to elude the appropriative tendencies of the self; an other that would be completely and once and for all possessed by the self would be no Other in the radical sense. To the contrary, the Other retains its otherness by placing a demand on the self, by disturbing it in its self-righteousness and self-satisfaction, by forcing it to question itself ethically (this ethical resistance is a major theme in the philosophy of Emanuel Levinas, see Chapter 1). It is in the sense of such selfquestioning demanded by the Other that we have to understand the philosopher Stephen Galt Crowell when he says that “the notion of radical

Anthropology and Alterity

7

alterity has engendered anthropology’s crisis of representation and its desire to articulate a strong notion of cultural difference” (Crowell 1998:19). Traces of other voices are necessarily present even in the most “authoritative” “positivist” ethnographic texts. Anthropology’s Other is never completely invented—which doesn’t mean that he or she cannot be distorted beyond recognition and with harmful consequences. It must be admitted that the work commonly cited as the key event in anthropology’s turn toward the problem of representing the Other, James Clifford’s and George Marcus’ edited collection Writing Culture, takes a differentiated standpoint. At the end of his introduction, Clifford rejects the assumption that a concern with epistemological issues, i.e., the alterity of the represented Other, and the scientific goal of approaching culturally others to understand their way of life, are by definition mutually exclusive (Clifford 1986:24–25). He acknowledges the one-sidedness of a focus on practices of writing and representation, but defends it on heuristic grounds: “Our focus was . . . on textual theory as well as textual form: a defensible, productive focus.” (Clifford 1986:20). Clifford was right about this and continues to be proven so by the continuing fame of the collection in the discipline: writing is essential to what anthropologists are doing, and representation a crucial aspect of anthropology’s relation to the Other. It is from an artificially, although admittedly artfully, reduced perspective that Writing Culture approaches the problem of radical alterity. This again becomes obvious in the introduction when Clifford discusses the notion of ethnographic texts as fictions in the more general and etymologically correct sense of “something made” (see also Geertz 1973:16). He objects, however, to the tendency to completely dismiss the conventional sense of the fictional as invention, product of imagination, as this would amount to stating the truism that all truths are constructed. He asserts that “the essays collected here keep the oxymoron sharp.” (Clifford 1986:6). In my opinion this can be read as a commitment to a preservation of the otherness of the Other, as can be the following elaboration: In this view, more Nietzschean than realist or hermeneutic, all constructed truths are made possible by powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric. Even the best ethnographic texts—serious, true fictions—are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control. (Clifford 1986:7) The output of “systems” and “economies,” truth is always partial (“Partial Truths” is the title of Clifford’s introduction), both in the sense of being incomplete and in that of serving particular interests. The Other represented in such economies of truth can never be the Other as it understands itself; it escapes the net of signification that is thrown over it. Moreover, the representing self is not in full control of what it produces; the ethnographic text

8

Bernhard Leistle

is shaped by power and history, powerful forces of alterity, alienating the self from its own intentions. The crisis of ethnographic representation thus forces us to acknowledge the otherness of the Other, but the anthropological discourse failed to address the problem explicitly; it remained on a level where radical alterity is indicated but not reflected, not thought through consequentially. A radically Other must challenge the very idea of selfhood and ownness as closed autonomous spheres. A conception that reduces the Other in anthropology to its ethnographic representation can never do justice to the Other as other (see also Waldenfels, this volume); this, however, is demanded by the essential role played by radical alterity in the anthropological project. What is at stake here can also be illustrated by another hallmark study of this period of the discipline’s history, Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983). In a 2006 article with the title “The Other Revisited,” Fabian clarifies in retrospect his perspective on otherness. After presenting himself as “someone who has been credited with, and sometimes accused of, contributing to a certain discourse on alterity that is now current in anthropology as well as in cultural studies and post-colonial theory” (Fabian 2006:139), he proceeds to delimit his objective: “The aim of the book was not to develop a theoretical concept of the Other (or to give an anthropological twist to a philosophical concept.” (143) Rather, he continues, his argument concerned the way in which anthropology represented the Other as belonging to another time, what Fabian refers to as “allochronic discourse.” While the anthropologist and his or her interlocutors experience each other as contemporaries or “coevals” during their encounter in fieldwork, the subsequent ethnographic account denies this “coevalness,” presenting the Other as object and in the past. Justified and pertinent as this criticism might be regarding the anthropological discourse of Fabian’s time, and possibly even now, it still has to be maintained that it reintroduces through the backdoor what it throws out through the front entrance: an autonomous self that is defined as a process of transforming otherness into ownness. In Fabian’s case this becomes particularly obvious as he juxtaposes the business of representation and the distortion effected by it to a fieldwork experience characterized by simultaneity, equality and reciprocity. The juxtaposition of experience and representation suggests that there might be other, non-allochronic ways of representing the Other, ways that preserve the mutuality of fieldwork. Like the transposition of the Other into the past, however, its preservation in the present presumes a selfhood that is already constituted, in full control of itself and not dependent on the Other for its self-fashioning.4 Writing in the year 2006 and reflecting on the “crisis of representation,” Fabian finds that “the issues and problems raised by the concept of anthropology’s other are as difficult, complex, and numerous now as they were then” (Fabian 2006:139). Indeed, the anthropological debates that reached their climax in the 1980s cannot be regarded as concluded and lying in the past; the problems they addressed cannot be resolved since they define

Anthropology and Alterity

9

anthropology itself. The tension of its relation to otherness is the moving force behind the project of anthropology. Once the Other is disclosed, it cannot be bottled up again like a genie; it keeps bugging us. Therefore, it doesn’t come as a big surprise that alterity has made it onto the list of key concepts in social and cultural anthropology (see, for example, Rapport 2014, “Alterity”). The “question of the Other” (cf. Todorov 1999) has also acquired particular prominence in postcolonialism. Although the recognition of the otherness of the Other is one of its key themes, and many important contributions have come from this direction, postcolonial scholarship ultimately falls short of formulating a productive relationship between the radical and the empirical Other, as is called for in anthropology. The emphasis is generally placed again on practices of representing the Other as means of appropriating him, in the best of cases by “making sense of,” “understanding” and “explaining” the Other, in the worst by “distorting,” “discriminating,” “othering.” Anthropology’s role is described as that of a producer of an “objectified imagery of otherness” (Rapport 2014:11). It thus becomes part of the wider project of Western modernity, which can be defined, amongst other things, as a specific way of relation to the Other. The otherness of the Other is intolerable to the Western mindset; it must be overcome in scientific understanding, treated inferior in moral terms, subordinated politically and economically (see also the chapters by DiNovelli-Lang and Mire in this volume). In Rapport we read the following summary of the postcolonial assessment of the Western relationship to the Other: The stress time and again is that Western creations of difference and images of otherness are products of a process of exclusion. The exclusivist ideology which assumes the superiority of self vis-à-vis others, is a very good strategy through which to disempower others. (Rapport 2014:14) If these generalizations about what is of course a very wide and heterogeneous intellectual field are accurate (as generalizations), then postcolonialism, like the “postmodernism” of the literary turn marked by Writing Culture, misses the otherness of the Other. Justified and even necessary as the postcolonial critiques may be in a situation marked by power imbalances and inequalities, they don’t reach the ground of the self-Other relation, and consequentially run the danger of committing the same sins of appropriation that they criticize so passionately (see also Victor Li’s critical discussion of the work of Gayarti Chakravorty Spivak in this volume). For if the existence of the (postcolonial) Other is assumed to exhaust itself in the representations fashioned by a (Western) self, this still amounts to a denial of the otherness of the Other, even if the practice of representation is evaluated negatively. Conversely, it reaffirms the autonomy of a selfhood that is capable of such appropriation of the Other, a “subjectivity” that is often claimed as one of the defining elements of Western modernity.

10

Bernhard Leistle

One other domain of anthropological discourse in which the Other has gained a certain currency is the current concern with questions of ontology. Drawing on the work of philosophers like Merleau-Ponty (1968, [1945] 2012) and Heidegger ([1927] 2010) and anthropologists like Viveiros de Castro (1992, 1998); Ingold (2011) and Descola (2013), proponents of the so-called “ontological turn” argue for a shift in emphasis from how humans know the world and represent it to themselves and to each other, towards questions of how they live in the world, or, simpler and yet more technically, how they are in the world—a shift, in other words, from epistemology as the study of knowledge, to ontology as the study of being. One of the most fundamental issues of the application of the concept of ontology in anthropology is to decide whether ontology is to be understood in a universalistic or a pluralistic sense. Unlike philosophers who by trade favor the first understanding, anthropologists tend towards ontological pluralism, describing different modes of cultural existence in terms of different ontologies. A “genuine ontological approach” in anthropology is “one that does not privilege epistemology or the study of other peoples’ representations of what we know to be the real world, acknowledging rather the existence of multiple worlds” (Venkatesan et al. 2010:153). This quote was taken from the introduction to a debate on whether “ontology is just another word for culture.” For the present purposes it is not so important how the question was settled in the context of the debate, but rather, that both positions have been argued with explicit reference to otherness. Here is Matei Candea speaking in favor of the proposition: They are words for each other because, amidst all their differences, there is one difference which relates them. The difference which relates culture and ontology is the difference they both point to. Ontology and culture are both words that point to an other—and it is in this sense that they point to one another. In other words, ontology is another word for bringing home to anthropologists the fact of difference, of alterity. (175) His opponent Martin Holbraad seems to agree with him, at least in this respect. After characterizing anthropology through its “peculiar investment in what has quite trendily come to be known as ‘alterity’” (180), Holbraad proceeds to portray ontology as the pinnacle of this investment in alterity: I for one know of no theoretical position in anthropology that departs from the basic assumption that the differences in which anthropologists are interested (‘alterity’) are differences in the way people ‘see the world’—no position, that is, other than the ontological one. (Venkatesan et al. 2010:181) Like the postcolonial discourse, the ontological turn in anthropology has contributed a lot to an increased sensitivity to the problem of the Other in

Anthropology and Alterity

11

anthropology; neither of them, however, is able to address its basic conundrum, since both fail to acknowledge the fundamental paradox of a radical alterity, an otherness of the Other. Ontological anthropology even goes one step further in formulating the paradox of otherness when it speaks of multiple ontologies, “our” ontology and “their” ontology. But by driving the difference further into the depths of human existence, it exacerbates the logical conflict between self and Other, rather than overcoming it. The other ontology is still claimed by me, the anthropologist, as the ontology of the other; and if it is true that my cultural existence is only one among many but possesses ontological value, then my claiming of the other’s ontology contains a value judgement, an implicit claim to ontological superiority.5 A radical alterity, a relation to the Other as other, is not possible within an ontological framework; on the other hand, such a relation has to be accepted as necessarily present and foundational for anthropology, as we have seen. This is echoed by the philosopher Stephen Galt Crowell, who writes with explicit reference to anthropology: The goal announced in the phrase, “giving permission to diversity and difference”, is best achieved precisely by resisting the temptation to locate that origin in the world of the Other (an alternative “reality”), and by showing that an attestable concept of radical alterity can arise only in the ethical encounter where the Other is given as Other. Ontologically, there is no (radically) Other. (Crowell 1998:17)

Responding to the Other How then can a relation to the Other as other, to a radical alterity, be thought of in anthropology without leading to the inevitable rejection of anthropology’s goal as a science of “understanding,” “making sense of,” “knowing” the Other? The philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels proposes as an answer to this question that the relation to the Other on the primordial level is not one of signification or objectification, but of responsivity. We don’t talk about the Other, we don’t reflect on it, we don’t even perceive it through the body and the senses, at least we don’t when discourse, reflection and perception are understood in the sense in which they are normally used. All of these forms of relating to something negate the Other in its otherness, necessarily reducing it to something that already belongs to a selfhood and its correlating sphere of ownness. The Other thought of, talked about, experienced, is the Other as thought, talked about, experienced by me. To be absolutely clear here: Waldenfels doesn’t deny the necessary nature of this process of appropriating. In order for the phenomenon of sense to appear in experience, it is indispensable that a form of consciousness relates to something as something, that it takes something in a particular sense. This fundamental structural law, referred to as intentionality in phenomenology, holds regardless of

12

Bernhard Leistle

the specific level of experiencing, whether the mode of consciousness involved is regarded as reflective, discursive or perceptual. To put it bluntly: without the order of intentionality no sense, and without sense no experience. What Waldenfels asserts is that the rules and orders of experience and communication are not the fundamental processes through which we relate to the Other; all of these processes of sense constitution and meaning making must in turn be regarded as grounded in processes of responding. We relate to the Other as what we respond to. In responding we are thus faced with a fundamentally asymmetrical relationship: we can never capture what we respond to, no matter what answer we give, whether it corresponds to what is asked from us, or whether it leaves the question unanswered. In our relation to the Other, we are always in delay: what we respond to is already gone when we reach for it. At the same time, we can’t anticipate when we are called to respond: a scream in the night, a telephone call, an accident; sudden events don’t announce themselves and then unfold—they happen to us. They compel us to respond through our perception, cognition and behavior. To hear a call means to already have heard it, and to have heard it means to have to respond to it. Responding is inevitable, compulsory: even the refusal to give an answer to a question is still a response. Responding begins elsewhere; in no way does the respondent control what he responds to. In other words: responding begins in the sphere of otherness, and what we respond to is a radical Other, or alien;6 it eludes the grasp of the self which nevertheless is constituted in the act of responding. The radically Other places a demand on us from which we cannot escape and yet our answer is always too late to capture what gave rise to it. At the same time, however, reality, what we experience and accept as real, emerges through what we answer. To give a very simple, everyday example: when someone calls me in the street, every form of my behavior immediately acquires a responsive character. Whether I answer the call verbally or gesturally, or whether I pretend to not have heard the call,7 I am responding to an event that has already begun elsewhere and over which I don’t have control. But what I give as an answer is certainly not insignificant; quite to the contrary, my answer gives the situation its specific significance, defines it as “call for help,” “request for information,” “threat,” “provocation,” “flirtation,” etcetera. If the definition of the situation contained in my answer to the call of the Other is accepted by him (or, more precisely, is responded to by him accordingly), a reality that is experienced as objective by both of us will arise, for example, “a stranger asks me for directions.” On this basis we will be able to interact and communicate following an order that seems to exist independent of our encounter. The more I and the other share the same cultural, linguistic, social background, the more we belong to the same “lifeworld” or have the same “habitus,” the greater the probability that our encounter will unfold smoothly, without ruptures. Our “culture” assists us in this

Anthropology and Alterity

13

endeavor by endowing us with pre-established types of situations, sets of rules and orders of meaning. When these orders pass the test of social interaction, they come to be seen as inscribed into nature, as reflecting reality as it is (cf. Schütz and Luckmann 1973). In this respect, Waldenfels’ notion of responsivity is compatible with semiotic and performative theories of culture which have gained great prominence in anthropology over the last decades (see Goffman 1959; Geertz 1973; Schieffelin 1985, 1996; Turner 1987; Schechner 1988, and many more). What he adds to and beyond these theories is his insistence on a relation to radical alterity that underlies and grounds phenomena of order and meaning. Questions asked and answers given are necessarily informed by cultural meanings, systems of communication and rules of behavior. But the ordered exchange of question and answer rests on a relation between demand and response that is not contained in any order. Quite to the contrary, the process of responding to an alien demand is the origin of any kind of order. Responding in this sense is creative: “I” as a self that is “friendly,” “fearful,” “confident,” “polite,” “gullible,” or whatever, is produced in the particular response I give to the stranger’s call, the self doesn’t pre-exist the response. Conversely, the place from which the call reaches me is only defined in my response as of such and such a kind: “a stranger,” “a man,” “a woman,” “a beggar,” “a tourist,” “a threat,” “a nice guy.” In the moment I assign any kind of significance, whether perceptually, gesturally or discursively, to the Other and our encounter, an order of sense emerges and everything in it, I, the Other, the interaction between us, gains a particular significance. But this order only comes to pass through a process of responding that is not included in it, or in any pre-existing order. Responding ultimately takes place in an in-between-sphere; it follows neither rules nor regulations and is therefore the origin of all change and transformation in human existence. Anything that is genuinely new must consist in a radical departure from what was before; as new it cannot conform to rules already in operation—it must be radically Other in this sense. But likewise the new cannot be subsumed under the order it eventually brings into being.8 As the place or point of view from which a different order is proclaimed, the new can never be part of that order. For change and innovation to be possible, a realm must be acknowledged which is neither determined nor determinative; it is this realm that Waldenfels’ notion of responding to the Other aspires to circumscribe. What we respond to and how we respond is not determined by rules or regulations, but that doesn’t mean that our responses are completely free or arbitrary. Quite to the contrary, the answers we give to a demand or a challenge are always in relation to existing orders, as confirming such orders, or deviating from them, or even overturning them. The radically Other escapes the order as what we respond to and so becomes the source of our creativity and our inventiveness. But what we respond, the answer we give, is in necessary relation to existing orders and at the origin of emerging orders. In

14

Bernhard Leistle

responding we inevitably make use of or reject a repertoire of answers presented to us by our culture, and we position ourselves with respect to our personal history of responding, what is commonly called our “character” or “personality.” Our present response inevitably puts itself in a relation to these psychological and sociocultural contexts, without ever being completely enclosed in them. Responding to the Other takes place in a sphere between determination and free will, displaying an ambiguity that suspends both categories. When Waldenfels says, we invent what we respond but not what we respond to, this needs to be qualified by adding that our factual ability to invent responses is always relative to past and emerging inventions. In what sense then are we justified to credit Waldenfels’ concept of responsivity with overcoming the aporia between the radical and the empirical Other? Every exchange of demand and response, as we have seen, presents itself in two aspects: (1) a question or request which is correlated to an answer which either fulfills the intention of the request, or leaves it unfulfilled (for example: “What is the time?” “3 p.m.”; “I don’t know”); and (2) a call or appeal which is responded to in a realm not regulated by conventions or orders, and which is the original form of relating between self and Other. Waldenfels refers to this duplication of aspects as responsive difference (in contradistinction to the phenomenological “significative difference” according to which everything appears as something in consciousness). What is of crucial importance for our present purpose is that the dual aspects of responsivity are necessarily intertwined with each other. Responding in the strict sense of the term is related to radical alterity by moving beyond the realm of signification, transcending the universe of perceptual, cognitive, discursive sense; at the same time, as answering, it emerges out of and falls back into that universe by assigning significance and creating an order. Both aspects are inseparable from each other: the Other identified, named, discriminated always indicates an Other that has already passed and cannot be caught up with. Empirical and radical Other are two sides of the same coin. This conception which, to my knowledge, can with this degree of clarity and elaboration only be found in the philosophy of Waldenfels, has an extraordinary potential for anthropological theory and practice, a potential that I have called paradigmatic at a previous occasion (Leistle 2015). It enables anthropologists not only to reflect on the foundations of their ethnographic accounts by approaching them from the perspective of a responsive difference between what they respond to and the answers they give in form of their representations. Moreover, the notion of responsivity provides anthropologists with a more solid—in the sense of: more thoroughly reflected—foundation for going on with their craft, the understanding, interpretation and translation of the culturally Other. For on the plane of theory and analysis, the concept of responsivity can be extended to others and other cultures: if the anthropological self and his or her own culture arises out of a response to a radical alterity which self and culture cannot contain, the

Anthropology and Alterity

15

same must hold true for the selves of others and their cultures. In other words: others, too, respond to the Other and the answers they give will be characterized by a style that can on the one hand be described empirically and which, on the other hand, will point towards a relationship to radical alterity. To put it succinctly: an empirical anthropology of otherness will shift its focus towards the responsivity of others.

Perspectives for an Anthropology of Otherness All of this is of course not absolutely new to anthropologists. Otherness and the Other have sometimes been explicit elements of attempts to define the discipline;9 and every anthropologist who has conducted intensive fieldwork, often called a ritual of initiation into the discipline, has come up at one point or another against the question of the Other, has felt Geertz’s suspicion of “not getting it right.” It is precisely this elusiveness at the center of the project that makes otherness an important notion for anthropology: the demand of the Other is keenly felt, but insofar as it is a radical otherness that raises its head all answers to it will be provisory and partial. This is the reason why there are so few explicit discussions of the concept of otherness in anthropology, in comparison with the multitude of treatises and debates on the notion of culture, which in the latter case even include demands for its demise. The relation to the Other remains the blind spot from which anthropology moves towards the cultural world, the standpoint from which the project of the “interpretation of cultures” can be embarked on. Again, this is not supposed to mean that the importance of the Other has not been pointed out by individual anthropologists, and that some of these efforts have been widely read in the discipline.10 But mostly they have been just that: individual voices, rather than a concerted effort. Where the relation to the Other has been an element of a “turn” in the discipline, as in the “literary turn” that accompanied the “crisis of representation,” or in the recent “ontological turn,” it was in the context of other, more dominant concerns. The present collection of essays puts the focus on otherness in its own right. In this sense they are to be read as responses to the demand of the Other in anthropology. It would be presumptuous to expect that they mark the beginning of a “turn to the Other,” or a “responsive turn” (a questionable success in consideration of the many turns of the discipline in recent years); but it is hoped that the contributions assembled here make a convincing case for the centrality of the Other in all domains of anthropological practice. Chapter 1 continues the work of contextualization begun in this introduction. The conception of radical otherness in contemporary philosophy has emerged predominantly from within phenomenology and the essay sketches one possible genealogy of this emergence. It is selective, not exhaustive, and attempts to show how the contributions by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Waldenfels relate to each other through their varying interpretation of phenomenological key motifs, in particular intentionality. The intention of

16

Bernhard Leistle

the chapter is to provide to the non-specialist reader an introduction to the phenomenology of the Other, especially to further acquaint her or him with the work of Waldenfels and its position in the phenomenological tradition. While the book’s introduction placed emphasis on the notion of responsivity, here the concept of the alien as the extra-ordinary, that is as excess in relation to an order (of self, of culture, of reason) is discussed. Both philosophical context and further introduction to Waldenfels’ thought should make the reading of his own essay more accessible. In Chapter 2, entitled “Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography,” Bernhard Waldenfels embarks on an in-depth analysis of the concept of representation and its use in anthropology. He points out that “representation” can be understood in four interrelated but different ways: as “idea,” “presentiation,” “presentation,” and “substitution,” and that these four meanings have often been used indiscriminately in the debates around the “crisis of representation.” Despite his criticism of “over-complexity” in the anthropological discussions, Waldenfels feels the need to protect anthropology from some forms of self-criticism. Although the radically Other, or alien, cannot be captured perfectly and completely in any representation, for Waldenfels that doesn’t mean that representation can simply be identified with repression. “Radical alienness,” he insists, “can only be grasped indirectly as an extra-ordinary that at all times presupposes the existence of orders” (105). To do justice to its relationship to the Other, anthropology has to begin to think of itself in terms of responsivity and to find indirect ways of speaking, a kind of “double speech” which he already sees implicated in anthropology’s core method of “participant observation.” In Waldenfels’ essay, anthropology doesn’t emerge as the contemptible project of cognitive colonization, as that it is presented by some critics, but as a practice that is confronted with alienness in an exemplary fashion. Chapter 3 opens up the field of relations to the Other in its full empirical complexity and heterogeneity: Vincent Crapanzano’s contribution starts out with a critique of what he refers to as the tendency towards abstraction in contemporary theories of alterity. All too often, the relations between self and Other are considered separately from the concrete modes of social and cultural existence, classification, narration and morality that inform them. This bears the danger of confounding understandings peculiar to one’s own culture with the “unmediated essence” of a self-Other dyad. Against this, Crapanzano holds a triadic conception in which the relation between self and Other is necessarily mediated by a Third: “Can we speak of the other without considering a tertium quid, a lure, which brings about engagement?” (122), he asks. In other words, like the self and in relation to it, the Other is always already entangled in culture and must be studied in its cultural specificity and relativity. In the second part of his essay, Crapanzano carries out an exemplary study of such entanglement: he analyzes the different conceptions of a concrete relation to the Other, that of friendship, in Plato, Aristotle and Montaigne, showing that the notion of subjectivity only gains

Anthropology and Alterity

17

importance for our understanding of friendship with the advent of modernity. Crapanzano thus reminds us that we, too, and the culture we call our own, result from a continuous process of responding to the Other. Ultimately, this must also include our philosophical preoccupations with otherness. The function of the “primitive Other,” that is of our representations of the people contrasted with “modern” “Western” civilization in postmodern and postcolonial theory and practice, is the topic of Victor Li’s chapter. Referring to theorists like Lyotard, Baudrillard and Spivak, Li discusses examples of the abstraction of the Other warned against by Crapanzano. Despite the positive evaluation of the “primitive” and the demand to respect the otherness of the Other, postmodern discourse typically reduces the Other to a rhetorical function in a project of extending Western modes of thinking. This even applies to Spivak in whose writings Li identifies a tendency to declare the “subaltern,” her version of the “primitive Other,” as inaccessible and inexpressible. The subaltern becomes the absolutely Other, thereby confirming the Western conception of the self as a closed-off, autonomous subjectivity. A discussion of the self-presentation of the recently opened Musée du Quai Branly demonstrates that this stance of “anti-primitivist primitivism” is not restricted to academic discourse but informs social practice at large. Engaging Waldenfels’ philosophy directly, Li concludes with a call to rethink the role of the “primitive Other” in theory from a perspective of an entanglement of ownness and alienness: “Theory is already a “half-alien word,” already other to itself, while the primitive or subaltern other is already theorizing, already speaking and engaging with theory” (171). Danielle DiNovelli-Lang’s chapter entitled “The Other Otter” can be read as continuation and concretization of Li’s concerns. The figure of the Other as “savage” which has been so prevalent in Western thought and theory is here coupled with the problem of human self-definition in relation to the animal sphere. Drawing on and combining insights from both postcolonialism and posthumanism, DiNovelli-Lang cautions against the tendency to play one of these distinctions against the other, as when peoples whose cultural worlds seem to allow for a greater permeability between humans and animals are again portrayed as closer to animality, that is, as a new kind of “savage.” As an alternative figure of otherness, DiNovelli-Lang introduces the Kooshdakhaa, the legendary hybrid between otter and human that plays an important role in the mythology of the Tlingit people. The Kooshdakhaa, she argues, ultimately evades the problematic intersection of universal definitions of the human and definitions of particular kinds of humans by challenging our capacity to understanding: “The lesson/legend of the Kooshdakhaa is the story . . . of the other who knows what we cannot” (182). Cultivating a sense for the radical otherness of the Kooshdakhaa, and of animals, is the only way to break out of the circles of ethnocentrism and logocentrism in which Western (post)modernity entangles itself. In her discussion of the complex and absurd situation of the exploding otter

18

Bernhard Leistle

population in Southeast Alaska, DiNovelli-Lang provides an example of what such an approach to the Other might look like: real-life otter and Kooshdakhaa blend into each other, demanding a response from us. Touching on related themes of colonial and postcolonial othering, albeit in the domain of race, Amina Mire’s chapter critically examines the lasting fascination with whiteness of skin. Establishing parallels between the current preoccupation in the West with violence against individuals with albinism and vitiligo in Africa, the anxieties of American slaveholders about “white slaves,” and the burgeoning sales of high-tech skin-whitening products in Africa and Asia, Mire is able to show how the theme of whiteness continues to haunt the representation and experience of non-whites. Disparate as they may be in time and in space, in all of these contexts the white skin appears as the marker of civilization, strength and purity, while the brown or black skin is presented as deficient and in need of repair. The pervasive othering of the Other along racial lines that is so characteristic for Western modernity doesn’t seem to allow any room for a genuine self-presentation of the Other as other; “black” and “brown” inevitably define themselves in relation to a hegemonic “white,” thus as “non-white.” Nevertheless, Mire’s study also gives testimony to an ongoing challenge, a demand coming from the Other: all forceful, psychologically and physically violent efforts to create an absolute boundary between “white” and “non-white” have failed, de-masking the idea of “racial purity” as a construct and, ultimately delusional, fantasy. The otherness of the Other can be overcome neither through absolute exclusion, nor through complete assimilation. Chapter 7 completes the interdisciplinary canon with Thomas Fuchs’ essay “The Self and the Alien.” A phenomenological psychiatrist, Fuchs uses basic motifs of Waldenfels’ phenomenology of the alien to stake out a theory of the personal self as a process of responding to alien demands. The self needs to incorporate alienness in itself and yet can do so only imperfectly, excluding unrealized possibilities with every moment of its realization as self. This fundamental non-coincidence of self with itself is the structural foundation for the vulnerability to illness, a vulnerability which becomes acute in liminal phases of transition, such as adolescence. Fuchs discusses three clinical disorders whose onset often occurs during adolescence: borderline personality disorder, anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia. All of these become intelligible as a failure to accept the intertwining of selfhood and alienness at the basis of personal identity; they are distinguished from each other as different kinds of incapacities. Although written from a psychiatric perspective, Fuchs’ paper has considerable relevance for an anthropology of otherness. Besides the applicability of his responsive conception of the self to other cultural contexts, Fuchs points towards an affinity between psychiatry and anthropology when he refers to psychopathology as a “special science of the alien.” Here the door swings open for a discussion of these two projects and institutions within the framework of responsivity.

Anthropology and Alterity

19

An ethnographic example of the inseparability of radical otherness and empirical otherness in a particular cultural context is provided by Christopher Stephan’s chapter. Charismatic Christians in the contemporary US interpret the otherness of the other person as indications of the radical alterity of God. The often-noted observation that the other’s religious experiences may be incomprehensible to oneself is taken as a confirmation of the inscrutability of His ways. Every believer has their own individualized relationship to Him but, although intimate and personal, this relationship can never exhaust God’s essence. This essence is in its totality inaccessible by definition, and manifestations of the other’s relationship to God thus provide the “sacred self” (Csordas 1994) with a different aspect of the deity. Multiplication of such aspects through experience leads to the deepening of one’s relation to God, but can never end in complete understanding. Self, other and God finally come to be seen as intertwined with each other: each implies the other without ever coinciding with them. Stephan’s chapter demonstrates convincingly that the nexus of radical and empirical otherness possesses concrete ethnographic reality, particularly in religious groups, for which such intertwining might be characteristic, perhaps even definitional. The concrete ways of responding to the Other are culturally relative; or, perhaps more precisely, cultures are “responsive repertoires.” Chapter 9, Jason Throop’s essay “Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain,” leads us into yet another culturally specific nexus of self and Other, ownness and alienness. The Micronesian healers he studied, specialists in bonesetting and massage, claim to be able to touch their patients’ pain. An investigation into the structure of intersubjectivity inspired by Husserl shows, however, that the other’s experience is never immediately accessible. All the more, this is true for pain, which is the subjective experience par excellence, inaccessible and inexpressible. The looming impasse can be avoided by taking into account the otherness of one’s own pain in relation to the self: while excessively subjectifying, pain also breaks the structures of subjectivity; pain eludes control by the self; it disturbs, challenges, overwhelms. In pain a radical otherness, an alienness of one’s own body announces itself. It is because of the permeability of the embodied self to the alien that the healer can sense her patient’s pain, not as an object but as an alternative possibility of her own existence. Like in Stephan’s paper, but in a very different cultural setting and domain of practice, the empirical otherness of the other person is connected to a sphere of radical alterity. Even the place in which one dwells, which one inhabits as home, is permeated by forces of radical otherness that cannot be banned once and for all. People’s representations of the invisible, dark, subterranean dimensions of landscapes and houses are responses to the call of the Other in one’s own home. Frances Slaney’s chapter “Otherness and the Underground: Buried Treasure in the Sierra Tarahumara” describes the very different responses of two ethnic groups to the same physical environment. While the indigenous Tarahumara regard the subterranean realm as populated by dangerous

20

Bernhard Leistle

ancestor spirits and their objects, and therefore as best avoided, Mexican newcomers to the region, called “blancos,” relate to the underground as a potential source of material riches. These differing responses to inhabited space have their correlates in divergent histories: through their conception of the underground as treasure chest, the blancos renew the colonial claim of the Spanish conquerors, whom they regard as forebears. The Tarahumara, by contrast, express their sense of ontological entanglement with the landscape they inhabit through the idea of being haunted by discontented ancestors. Thus, we seem to be confronted with ontological incommensurability. Slaney’s careful ethnographic descriptions show, however, that both forms of relating to the underground in the Sierra Tarahumara have to be understood as modes of responding to the Other, and, as such modes, are linked to a sphere which neither life-world can include. Marieka Sax’s chapter brings us from Mexico to Peru. Applying a Waldenfelsian framework, Sax discusses how inhabitants of the Andean town of Kañaris conceive of and respond to forces of otherness that permeate their life-world. On the one hand, the Other is part of the cultural horizon of the people of Kañaris, finding expression in different kinds of “place-based spirits” which can afflict humans with misfortune and disease. By invoking these spirits in the diagnosis and therapy of certain afflictions, ritual experts are able to effect cure or, at least, to endow suffering with sense and meaning. On the other hand, the Other shows its dimension of radical otherness in situations in which local interpretations fail to provide satisfactory explanations of events. This occurred in the case of Andres, a schoolteacher who lost his young daughter due to an undiagnosed illness. Although Andres consulted biomedical specialists as well as ritual experts, neither system of knowledge and practice could prevent or explain the death of his child, leaving him suspended between belief and disbelief in both modes of thinking. It is in the analysis of such liminal states and interstitial events, Sax argues, that the concept of alienness demonstrates its anthropological usefulness. Chapter 12, written by myself, explores the interpretive potential of the concept of responsivity through a reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. The text, which contains descriptions of the author’s acute psychotic illness, is approached as an effort to find a creative response to alien demands which besiege the subject, threatening to overwhelm and annihilate it. Imploring a universal “Order of the World” to which even God is bound, Schreber can be seen to struggle for order in his own experience. In my interpretation I discuss three different, yet existentially interconnected levels of responding and ordering: the order of the embodied self, where Schreber’s hallucinations and compulsions express his inability to respond productively; the order of social and psychiatric discourse to which Schreber’s text responds in form of indirect, yet critical reflections; and the order of reason, which Schreber appeals to in the form of legal documents that are included as an integral element into his Memoirs. Among the many

Anthropology and Alterity

21

interpretations of this classical psychiatric text, I argue, only a reading in terms of responsivity allows us to integrate all the heterogeneous components into one account. At the same time, Waldenfels’ phenomenology alerts us to the alienness of the text itself, to its ultimate resistance against any claim to complete understanding. The collection is closed by Robert Desjarlais’ meditations on how “Photography Tears the Subject From Itself.” Evoking the alienness of the Other, rather than addressing it discursively, Desjarlais’ text consists of a series of autoethnographic diary entries revolving around the author’s fascination with a photograph he had taken years ago. The image of an—apparently— blind man in a—perhaps North African cloak, who begs—so it seems—for money at the doors of Sacré-Coeur in Paris, continues to perturb the photographer/anthropologist. It haunts him, persecutes him, up to a point where he feels compelled to go on a quest to find the man in the photograph. Entry by entry, the journal describes a progressively stronger identification between the photographer and the photographed. The image places an alien demand on the anthropologist’s self, a demand that threatens the self with disintegration. The alienness of the image cannot be incorporated into the order of experience; it remains elusive, ultimately resisting interpretation. While full of insightful reflections and original comments on the role of visual media in anthropology and their relation to verbal representation, Desjarlais’ text is first and foremost a poetic meditation on the responsive relationship between anthropology and the Other which precedes and underlies all efforts aimed at comprehension.

Notes 1 The only exceptions are Thomas Fuchs’ chapter, which was solicited from the author, and Bernhard Waldenfels’ contribution, which is the translation of an essay originally written in German and published in 1999. 2 “Radical” derives from the Latin radix, meaning “root.” 3 Tullio Maranhão’s edited number of the German journal Paideuma (No. 44, 1998) can be regarded as a precursor to the present volume. While it explores the possible contribution of a philosophy of radical alterity epitomized in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the collection stops short of formulating a productive relationship between empirical and radical Other, leaving off with a question: “The subversion carried out by Levinas and others is not a symmetrical reversion of self and other, placing the other where self had traditionally been. The Other of radical alterity is not at the center but comes to self from a position of height, and has a face which, more than a visual sign, is a command addressed to self entailing self’s obligation not to harm his or her other, reminding self of his or her responsibility for the Other. Such an asymmetry does not have a sociopolitical nature. It is not a matter of power relation. Is there an intersection between the empirical and the radical Other?” (Maranhão 1998:12) I believe that the philosophy of Waldenfels possesses a unique potential to provide the “missing link” searched for by Maranhão (see also Chapter 1 of this volume). 4 In his “The Other Revisited,” Fabian denies that he has argued for overcoming the alterity of the Other, or had assumed that such overcoming was possible. In this regard, however, it is legitimate to differentiate between what an author has

22

5 6

7

8

9

10

Bernhard Leistle consciously intended to say and what his text says by way of implication. Interestingly, Fabian qualifies his position in the later essay by introducing the distinction between Latin “alius” and “alter,” which corresponds to that made here between radical and empirical otherness (Fabian 2006:147). A related critique can be found in Vigh and Sausdal (2014). The English translation of the German term fremd presents considerable difficulties. Although somewhat strange for English speakers, “alien” offers the closest approximation to the meaning of fremd in German, which Waldenfels, following Edmund Husserl, defines as the accessibility of something which is inaccessible (see Chapter 1). “Alien” has consequently been chosen as the preferred rendering of fremd in the sense of Waldenfels. In this introduction, however, which aims at an exposition of the topic with as little jargon as possible, the more common usage of “Other” has been retained. A general rule can be stated: “alien” refers to Waldenfels’ concept of the radical Other. One might want to object here that it is quite possible that I haven’t heard the call and that this is the reason for my not giving an answer. Such an assumption, however, is irrelevant for the encounter between me and the Other since it is necessarily been made from an observer’s standpoint and therefore from outside the situation of the encounter. What establishes the relation between me and the Other is his or her call and my hearing the call. Should I genuinely not have heard the call, no relationship has come into being. Freud’s notion of a “pathology of everyday life” teaches us moreover, to not mistake the explicit consciousness of perceiving something with hearing a call in the sense implied here. In an interesting aside, Tzvetan Todorov remarks about Christopher Columbus: “Columbus himself is not a modern man, and this fact is pertinent to the course of the discovery, as though the man who was to give birth to a new world could not yet belong to it.” (Todorov 1999:12) See, for example, John Beattie’s classical introduction to anthropology entitled Other Cultures, or the more recent attempt by the German anthropologist KarlHeinz Kohl (1993) to establish a relational definition of ethnology as the “science of the culturally alien” (Wissenschaft vom kulturell Fremden). Of particular relevance in the present context is Marc Augé’s attempt to ground the project of a “generalized anthropology” in a relation to otherness that is not just a privilege of the anthropologist, but is extended to the culturally Other, thus encompassing others’ others (Augé 1998). Consider, for example, Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity or, James Fernandez notion of the “inchoate” (Fernandez 1986). Tom Csordas’ essay “Asymptote of the Ineffable. Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion” (2004) deserves separate mentioning. This essay can be read as a complement to the perspective on otherness developed here, as it arrives at comparable conclusions but without developing explicitly a notion of responsivity. While disclosing a number of interesting applications for the notion of radical otherness in the field of religion, Csordas’ text also demonstrates how a conceptualization of the relation to the Other might provide greater clarity to the discussion.

References Augé, Marc. 1998. A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Beattie, John. 1964. Other Cultures: Aims, Methods and Achievements in Social Anthropology. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Bowen, Elenore Smith. 1964. Return to Laughter. Garden City: Doubleday.

Anthropology and Alterity

23

Clifford, James. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Crowell, Stephen Galt. 1998. “There Is No Other: Notes on the Logical Place of a Concept.” Paideuma: Mitteilung zur Kulturkunde 44:13–29. Csordas, Thomas J. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2004. “Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity and the Theory of Religion.” Current Anthropology 45(2):163–185. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2006. “The Other Revisited: Critical Afterthoughts.” Anthropological Theory 6(2):139–152. Fernandez, James. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Goffmann, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books. Heidegger, Martin. (1927)2010. Being and Time. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ingold, Tim. 2011. The Perception of the Environment. London and New York: Routledge. Jebens, Holger. 2011. “The Crisis of Anthropology.” In The End of Anthropology?, edited by Holger Jebens and Karl-Heinz Kohl, 13–36. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing. Kohl, Karl-Heinz. 1993. Ethnologie–Die Wissenschaft vom kulturell Fremden. München: C.H. Beck. Leistle, Bernhard. 2015. “Otherness as a Paradigm in Anthropology.” Semiotica 204:292–313. Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1922)1961. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E.P. Dutton. ———. 1967. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. New York: Brace. Maranhão, Tullio, ed. 1998. Anthropology and the Question of the Other: Paideuma. Vol. 44. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1945)2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Michaelsen, Scott and David E. Johnson. 2008. Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture. New York: Fordham University Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections of Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rapport, Nigel. 2014. Social and Cultural Anthropology—The Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

24

Bernhard Leistle

Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory . London and New York: Routledge. Schieffelin, Edward. 1985. “Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality.” American Ethnologist 12(4):707–724. ———. 1996. “On Failure and Performance: Throwing the Medium out of the Séance.” In The Performance of Healing, edited by Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, 59–89. London and New York: Routledge. Schütz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann. 1973. Structures of the Life-World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity. London and New York: Routledge. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1999. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Turner, Victor. 1987. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Venkatesan, Soumhya, Michael Carrithers, Karen Sykes, Matei Candea, and Martin Holbraad, ed. 2010. “Ontology Is Just another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester.” Critique of Anthropology 30(2):152–200. Vigh, Henrik Erdman and David Brehm Sausdal. 2014. “From Essence Back to Existence: Anthropology Beyond the Ontological Turn.” Anthropological Theory 14(1):49–73. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3):469–488. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1996. Order in the Twilight. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1997. Topographie des Fremden. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden, Bd 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2007. The Question of the Other. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Translated by Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

1

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology Bernhard Leistle

For the last three decades, the “question of the Other” has been one of the most discussed topics in what is referred to in North America as “continental philosophy.”1 While there are many ways of approaching otherness—since every intellectual project concerned with problems of selfhood and identity must inevitably, even if only by implication, also speak about the Other— major developments in the conception of alterity have often originated in phenomenology. Due to restrictions of space and limitations that have to do with the enormous dimensions of the intellectual field to be covered for an exhaustive overview, I will limit myself to sketching some fundamental steps that have led to the emergence of the notion of radical alterity, the sincere attempt to think the Other genuinely, that is: as other.2 Parallel to tracing one possible genealogy of the radical Other I will explore what the respective conceptions of otherness in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Waldenfels imply for anthropology in general, and for the project of an anthropology of otherness in particular.

Intentionality and Otherness That otherness figures so prominently in phenomenology is no coincidence but is related to the philosophical project itself. Very generally speaking, phenomenology strives to clarify how meaning is constituted within human experience, or, to express this more technically, how something appears as something in consciousness (see, for example, Moran 2000:4). The conjunctive particle “as” is of fundamental importance here, since what the phenomenologist finds when reflecting on the structures and principles of experience is not a simple reproduction of the exterior world, but a content that has necessarily been modified, taken as something, in a certain sense, by the activity of the human mind. Consciousness is essentially directed at its object, transforming it in the process in a meaningful experiential content. Neither is possible without the other; consciousness is only conceivable as consciousness of something, and, conversely, everything that appears in our experience has been worked over, “constituted by” consciousness. This mutual relatedness of experiencing subject and experienced world is expressed in the

26

Bernhard Leistle

famous concept of intentionality, often claimed to be the most important discovery of phenomenology.3 Regarding otherness, phenomenological intentionality means that consciousness and the selfhood correlated with it are necessarily related to something other than itself; what is more, consciousness and self can be conceptualized as processes of relating to the Other. At the same time, the relation between self and Other becomes extremely problematic and thus impossible to ignore in phenomenology. For if everything that appears in my experience has already been modified by the intentional acts of my consciousness, then it is all but clear how I and others live in a shared world in which we can act together and about which we can communicate. To put it differently: on the one hand phenomenology shows that every experience is subjective; on the other hand it shows that subjectivity can only be thought of as a continuous process of taking up relations that transcend subjectivity.

The Other in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology,4 has grappled with this problem throughout his work, but most famously in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations. In this work, subtitled an Introduction to Phenomenology but written at an advanced stage of his career, Husserl traces the problem of the Other back to the question of the existence of the other person: if I am, through the acts of my consciousness, constitutive for my experiential world, and thus for reality as such, how can there be for me another ego, whose consciousness is endowed with the same constitutive powers as my own? If I am at the center of my world, how can the Other be in the center of his world, without his or my world necessarily negating each other? Husserl dissolves the paradox of the Other by claiming that I experience the other person precisely as “another ego” that transcends me. The Other is experienced as “other,” that is a center of meaningful experience and constitutive of his or her experiential world and reality in exactly the same sense as I myself am such a center. His reality and his world therefore transcend mine but only insofar as I have experience of this transcendence. I am constitutive of what I can’t possibly constitute by virtue of the fact that it presents itself to me as “other”: The character of the existent ‘other’ has its basis in this kind of verifiable accessibility of what is not originally accessible. Whatever can become presented, and evidently verified, originally—is something I am; or else it belongs to me as peculiarly my own. Whatever, by virtue thereof, is experienced in that founded manner which characterizes a primordially unfulfillable experience—an experience that does not give something itself originally but that consistently verifies something indicated is “other”. (Husserl 1960:114–115, my emphasis)

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

27

I can never have a direct, unmediated experience of the Other; as another ego, the Other is never present in my experience, but “appresented”; it is never perceived, but “apperceived.” But it is precisely this indirect givenness, this “unfulfillable experience” that characterizes the Other as “other” in my experience. Once this subjective constitution of the Other is achieved, the existence of an objective world shared by Ego and alter ego doesn’t pose paradoxical problems anymore. Such a common world becomes possible as a “community of monads” in which each Ego carries within it the perspectives of an infinite number of “other egos,” each of them absolutely at the center of their own worlds. Transcendental subjectivity is extended to become “transcendental intersubjectivity” (Husserl 1960:130), but the subjective sphere remains intact; the self is not radically challenged by the Other.5 Most post-Husserlian phenomenologists agree that Husserl has ultimately failed to solve the problem of the Other (Ricoeur 1992:322ff.; Crowell 1998; Kearney and Semonovitch 2011:8–9; Waldenfels, this volume). By conceiving of the Other as another Ego, thus defining the Other through my experience of him or her, Husserl was unable to approach the Other as other, as a radical phenomenology of alterity would require. He deserves credit, however, for throwing the problem of otherness into sharp relief, thereby enabling those after him to build on his efforts, as Bernhard Waldenfels points out in his essay in the present volume. By insisting that the Other shows itself as something that eludes our constitutive powers but which we are nevertheless related to, as “accessible in its inaccessibility,” Husserl has taken an important step towards a radicalization of the problem of the Other, even though the solution proposed by him proved to be unsatisfactory.

Husserl and the Culturally Other Towards the end of the Fifth Meditation, Husserl comes to speak about the relativity of cultural existence. He acknowledges that “men belonging to one and the same world . . . constitute different surrounding worlds of culture, as concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate communities live their passive and active lives” (Husserl 1960:133). This culturally specific life-world forms the core of understanding for every individual, its own perspective from which individuals belonging to other cultures appear necessarily at first as “generically men, and men of a ‘certain’ cultural world” (Husserl 1960:133). Based on this generic understanding, the interpreting self can move to deeper comprehension by unraveling layer by layer the meaningstrata of his own life-world, as well as of the alien life-world. Possible is this hermeneutic process on the basis of the primordial, common world, defined by “transcendental intersubjectivity,” which enters the secondary constitution of the various cultural worlds, giving them a shared “orientation”: If we return to our case, that of the cultural world, we find that it too, as a world of cultures, is given orientedly on the underlying basis of the

28

Bernhard Leistle Nature common to all and on the basis of the spatiotemporal form that gives access to Nature and must function also in making the multiplicity of cultural formations and cultures accessible. We see that in this fashion the cultural world too is given “orientedly”, in relation to a zero member or a [zero] “personality”. Here I and my culture are primordial, over against every alien culture. To me and to those who share in my culture, an alien culture is accessible only by a kind of “experience of someone else”, a kind of “empathy”, by which we project ourselves into the alien cultural community and its culture. This empathy also calls for intentional investigations. (Husserl 1960:134–135)

The problem of understanding other cultures is therefore a derivation of the more fundamental problem of the alter ego. Consequentially, the solution is also the same: the other culture shows itself as other but necessarily in the field of consciousness defined by my own culturally informed perspective. The culturally Other doesn’t disturb me in my cultural existence; it doesn’t challenge me as a cultural being. Grounded in transcendental subjectivity, my culture remains a solid ground on which to stand and from which to access other cultures. But if transcendental intersubjectivity doesn’t provide a solution to the enigma of the Other, neither does a “transculturality” that remains anchored in a closed subjective and cultural sphere.

The Other in the Flesh: Merleau-Ponty Maurice Merleau-Ponty is known in anthropology primarily for his theory of the body. Mediated through the work of phenomenological anthropologists, in particular Tom Csordas (1990, 1994), Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has provided conceptual foundations for influential work on the embodiment of cultural meaning. Less acknowledged are Merleau-Ponty’s contributions to a philosophy of alterity,6 although these can be regarded as grounded in his understanding of the body and its pre-reflective and preobjective relationship to the world. In Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological intentionality is re-conceptualized in terms of the body; the agent operative in experience and thought is not a disembodied mind, a reflecting cogito, but the moving, sentient body; consciousness becomes incarnate consciousness, a thinking in and through the flesh. In his major work Phenomenology of Perception, ([1945] 2012), Merleau-Ponty shows convincingly that it is the motoric and perceptual activity of the body and the senses that gives us our primordial understanding of the world and the things in it. Objects and an objective world emerge out of a pre-objective communication between the embodied self and the environment. Moreover, the environment is only created by the body’s situating itself in the world through an act of self-transcendence.7 In the last analysis, the body is nothing other than a movement towards the world, and the world presents itself first and

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

29

foremost through the movements and perceptions it suggests to our body. Both body and world are processes of becoming, each continuously directing demands and questions at, responding to and receiving answers from the other. Body and world, self and Other are mutually defining; both form parts of one system, are inseparably intertwined with each other (MerleauPonty 2012:49). Unlike Husserl, who, as we have seen, left the sphere of subjectivity and ownness intact, Merleau-Ponty is led by his understanding of intentionality as corporeality to conceive of selfhood as permeated by otherness. If it is true that the body functions as the subject of perception and creates our experiential reality through a pre-reflective exchange with the world, then the question arises how the body is able to enter this exchange. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that communication of embodied self and world as disclosed by the description of experience is only possible if the subject of perception, i.e., the body is itself nothing else than a project of the world: Universality and the world are at the core of individuality and of the subject. We will never understand this as long as we turn the world into an ob-ject; but we will understand it immediately if the world is the field of our experience, and if we are nothing but a perspective upon the world, for then the most secret vibration of our psychophysical being already anticipates the world, quality is the sketch of a thing, and the thing is the initial sketch of the world. A world that is never, as Malebranche said, anything other than an “unfinished work”, or that, according to the phrase that Husserl applies to the body, is “never completely constituted” does not require, and even excludes a constituting subject. (Merleau-Ponty 2012:428–429) At the center of subjectivity Merleau-Ponty discovers worldliness, at the center of individuality he finds anonymity; underlying perceptual experience and enabling it is an “older” way of thinking. To realize itself as self, human existence in every respect has to make use of faculties and tools which are not of its own making, and which consequently elude its control. This not only applies to the world of perception, but also and particularly to the cultural world where language and technology are always already constituted by others before we necessarily appropriate them in one way or another. In his later work, in particular in the unfinished project that was posthumously published under the title The Visible and the Invisible, MerleauPonty attempted to express the chiasmatic intertwining of body and world, self and Other, in ontological language (Merleau-Ponty 1968:130–155; Csordas 2004). Here, he speaks of body and world as belonging to the same “flesh” (chair), a shared being that enables the communication between them and that expresses itself in paradigmatic form in the

30

Bernhard Leistle

reversibility of sensing and being sensed. Selfhood and otherness are here identified linguistically, that is, their relationship is expressed in new, poetic terms designed to capture their interrelatedness, much as in Heidegger’s Being and Time.8

“From Mauss to Levi-Strauss” This ontology in which body-self and world can communicate with each other without reflective consciousness or language signs acting as intermediaries because they are of the same “flesh” also encompasses the Other in general and the culturally Other in particular. The Other, too, is of the flesh of the world and this shared anonymous being guarantees the possibility of communication between self and Other. But now the selfhood of self and the selfhood of Other are not closed monadic spheres anymore, as they were in Husserl. In the late Merleau-Ponty, the self is characterized by an irreducible non-coincidence with itself illustrated by the incomplete reversibility of touching and being touched: it is impossible to touch one’s hand while it is touching an object with the other hand. Experience always oscillates between two alternatives: either feeling the worldly object through the hand that touches it, or feeling the touching hand itself as object. But I cannot not touch myself touching, even though the experience communicates to me that I can be touched by others, that I am as a generally touchable being. What does this mean for anthropology and the anthropologist’s efforts of understanding and translating the Other? Merleau-Ponty’s ontology has only come down to us in fragments and so it is difficult to give an unambiguous answer to this question. To some, Levinas and Waldenfels for example, his radicalization of the notion of embodied being seems to point beyond the realm of ontology and towards an acknowledgement of the radical alterity of the Other. But in his attempts to grasp the worldliness of the sentient body and the sensitivity of the world in terms of “flesh” and “chiasm,” MerleauPonty seems to have subscribed to the traditional language of a universal being. This ambiguity is also characteristic of Merleau-Ponty’s explicit reflections on anthropology contained in an essay with the title “From Mauss to Levi-Strauss” (1964). Herein, Merleau-Ponty follows closely the argumentation of his friend and colleague Claude Levi-Strauss that the latter put forward in his influential “Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss” ([1950] 1987). In this text, which was prefixed to the Marcel Mauss’ collected essays Sociologie et Anthropologie, Levi-Strauss famously presented Mauss as proto-structuralist and his own structuralism as consequent development out of his predecessor’s project. In “From Mauss to Levi-Strauss,” Merleau-Ponty follows this presentation relatively uncritically, but he also points in directions other than and potentially opposed to Levi-Strauss’ structuralism.

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

31

He starts out with echoing Levi-Strauss’ criticism of French sociology, founded by Durkheim and Mauss: In both ways the French school missed that access to another person which nonetheless defines sociology. How can we understand someone else without sacrificing him to our logic or it to him? Whether it assimilated reality too quickly to our own ideas, or on the contrary declared it impenetrable to them, sociology always spoke as if it could roam over the object of its investigations at will—the sociologist was an absolute observer. What was lacking was a patient penetration of its object, communication with it. (Merleau-Ponty 1964:115) And while, presumably, this communication with the object has become reality in Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology, Merleau-Ponty also insists that even universal structures of the mind are not reality itself but models designed for the purpose of understanding reality (1964:118–119). We are therefore brought back to the relationship between the anthropologist, or the anthropological self and the cultural Other that he or she seeks to understand. There is a problem of clashing logics here, which Merleau-Ponty sees as defining sociology and, by extension and with even more justification, anthropology: “How can we understand someone else without sacrificing him to our logic or it to him?” Particularly interesting is the second component of the question, as it amounts to a positive acknowledgement of the anthropologist’s own cultural being. One’s own culture constitutes a perspective, a way of speaking and thinking, a logic or “logos” that cannot be simply discarded without negating what defines anthropology—the relation to the culturally Other as other. In the moment in which we completely take over the other’s perspective, fully “grasp the native’s point of view”—if this were at all possible— we would lose what we set out to understand, the other culture. In the practice of fieldwork, as in the ability to learn another language, Merleau-Ponty sees at work “a second way to the universal”: No longer the overarching universal of a strictly objective method, but a sort of lateral universal which we acquire through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self. . . . Ethnology is not a specialty defined by a particular object, “primitive societies.” It is a way of thinking, the way which imposes itself when the object is “different”, and requires us to transform ourselves. We also become the ethnologists of our own society if we set ourselves at a distance from it. (Merleau-Ponty 1964:120) In these passages we find a clear recognition of the centrality of otherness in anthropology, even of radical alterity, since the testing of the self through the

32

Bernhard Leistle

Other and vice versa is not achieved by another, autonomous self, but requires self-transformation. This assessment is confirmed at a later point in the essay when Merleau-Ponty credits structural anthropology with enabling philosophy “to understand how we are in a sort of circuit with the sociohistorical world” (Merleau-Ponty 1964:123). This can only mean that human existence is cultural through and through, and that, therefore, in the culturally Other we find ourselves confronted with radical alterity. Although he points in this direction, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t follow it through consequentially in “From Mauss to Levi-Strauss.” He continues to speak of a “general system of reference,” in which the differing point of views of self and Other could eventually find a place (120); a “ground” on which they could be both “intelligible without any reduction or rash transposition” (122); an “untamed region,” unincorporated in the anthropologist’s own culture through which he or she communicates with other cultures (120). Such commonalities or ontological foundations, claimed—as they inevitably must be—from a particular standpoint, that of self, ultimately deny what they seek to explain: the otherness of the Other.

The Other Beyond Being: Emmanuel Levinas To think the Other radically, to its limit, therefore, might even involve more than ontology. Some contemporary phenomenologists have argued that the relation to the Other as other must ultimately break the boundaries of being. The most influential of these phenomenologists was the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. For him, the phenomenological relation of intentionality, even in Merleau-Ponty’s variety of a pre-objective, bodily intentionality (Levinas 1969:205–206), still presumes a totality of which self and Other form parts. In other words, the relation between them is one of sameness and difference, not one of genuine alterity. For the Other to become conceivable as other, it is necessary to not make any claims regarding the Other, to not signify it any way, or make it part of an order of any kind. According to Levinas, radical alterity cannot be experienced in the traditional phenomenological sense, for intentionality still means an imposition of rules and principles; it cannot be talked about, since thematization means to include the Other in a discursive order; it cannot even be said to exist, for even the ontological statement calls the Other to order, thereby destroying it as radically other. In his main work Totality and Infinity ([1961] 1969), Levinas shows that a relation to radical alterity is not wishful thinking but a necessary condition for the possibility of human existence. When assigning meaning to things, we make use of experiential and discursive orders that are already constituted for us, and these orders enable us to make the world our own. They allow us to assign meaning to everything we encounter, thereby effectively eradicating the otherness of the Other. But the existence of these orders would not be possible if there was not something that signifies without being

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

33

assigned meaning, that carries meaning in itself without being given it from us; a first speech that only says itself, a pure expression. Levinas identifies the face of the other human being as this first signification: What we call the face is precisely this exceptional presentation of self by self, incommensurable with the presentation of realities simply given, always suspect of some swindle, always possibly dreamt up. To seek truth I have already established a relationship with a face which can guarantee itself, whose epiphany itself is somehow a word of honor. Every language as an exchange of verbal signs refers already to this primordial word of honor. The verbal sign is placed where someone signifies something to someone else. It therefore already presupposes an authentification of the signifier. (Levinas 1969:202) “Epiphany,” “word of honor,” Levinas’ language already suggests that the philosophical discourse has left the ontological sphere and moved into that of ethics, or even religion. The primordial meaning that announces itself in the face of the Other is a command; it says, “you shall not commit murder” (Levinas 1969:199). This command is not guaranteed by an already established morality; quite to the contrary, Levinas describes the Other as the sole being I can wish to kill (198).9 But while the Other thus arouses the wish in the self to annihilate, his face shows the impossibility of doing so successfully. For if I kill the Other, his face, i.e., that which has awakened a murderous wish, is gone; I can never possess it like I possess a thing. The resistance encountered by the self in the face of the Other is not a force that would be pitted against the strength of the self and that it would have to overcome. If the relationship between self and Other was of this kind we would be back in a world governed by one principle, will or violence. The Other poses rather an ethical resistance; his face appeals to me not to kill him, not because he is strong and I am fearing the consequences, but in that it is powerless, defenseless, destitute. The only resistance that cannot be overcome, that transcends the self completely, is the non-violent plea of the Other, his call for mercy: “The Other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obligated” (Levinas 1969:215). Just like the order of discourse can only arise on the basis of a first word that is not part of the order, that says itself, so the order of selfhood can only be conceived as originating in a truly “non-selfish act.” If the self is understood as a process of making one’s own what is other, as Levinas does, such an act can only be conceived of as a taking over of responsibility, a sacrifice of the self in the realization of its guilt and injustice towards the Other. Rather than regarding the ethical domain as secondary to the domain of knowledge, Levinas locates the origin of subjectivity and rationality in the

34

Bernhard Leistle

acceptance of unlimited, infinite and non-objectifiable responsibility for the Other. In his later work, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence ([1974] 1981), he describes the genesis of the subject in terms of a possession and persecution by the Other. The self is “taken hostage” and becomes a subject in the realization that no one can respond in lieu of it. Hearing the call of the Other and taking over a boundless responsibility for him is the only way of creating a relationship to oneself that is singular. The activity of the subject arises out of an absolute passivity through an act of substitution for the Other, by taking a responsibility for him that even includes the wrongs that he has done to the subject.

Levinas and Anthropology In our passage from Husserl via Merleau-Ponty to Levinas we have moved from an Other who is constituted in a sphere of subjectivity, to an Other that intertwines with the self in an indeterminate, ambiguous existence, and, finally, to a subjectivity which arises out of an absolute passivity in its ethical relationship to the Other. We can certainly say that Levinas’ conception of the ethical Other meets the criteria of a genuine effort to think alterity radically, to approach the Other in its otherness. Indeed, this has been widely acknowledged as his contribution to twentieth-century philosophy. From the perspective of philosophical phenomenology one could of course ask whether Levinas’ argument is entirely persuasive, whether, for example he is correct in interpreting experience and consciousness exclusively in terms of appropriation, ultimately even violation of the Other. This negative evaluation of any relationship to the Other that is not ethical has important consequences for the anthropological project when approached from a Levinasian perspective. The Other in Levinas is not just radically other, it is absolutely other. The relation to this Other undergirds human intercourse, makes it possible even, but only indirectly so, leaving no more than traces of its having-beenthere. It is only consequential that such an absolute Other which cannot be measured against a human standard at all, should take on god-like features. Levinas first uses the term illeity (from the Latin demonstrative pronoun ille, “something or someone over there, beyond a boundary”) to refer to the exteriority, the beyond-ness of the Other; in his later work, the word “God” becomes more frequent. It is thus very difficult to see how radical alterity in the absolute sense of Levinas could provide anthropology with a workable notion of otherness, that is one that provides a foundation for the unavoidable business of making sense of what others are doing and communicating this understanding in ethnographic representations. This is not to say that Levinas doesn’t have much to contribute for anthropology; but these contributions must be created through an interpretation of his philosophy, which is at least partially in opposition to Levinas’ philosophical project.10 If we take Levinas literally, we must regard all ethnographic description and anthropological

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

35

interpretation as non-ethical. This restriction does not apply to the philosophy of the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels.

The Other as Alien: Bernhard Waldenfels Bridging the gap between the radical and the empirical Other, Waldenfels’ approach to otherness holds a unique potential for methodological and theoretical reflection in anthropology (Leistle 2014, 2015; Schwarz Wentzer 2014). Waldenfels accepts from Levinas the characterization of radical alterity as “originary and irreducible from of asymmetry” (Waldenfels 1997:38). The Other, when thought consequently in its otherness, cannot be understood, known, represented without depleting it of what defines it. Waldenfels takes advantage of the expressive possibilities of the German language to characterize the Other as other, making use of the ubiquitous German word fremd. This polysemous term, extremely productive in the formation of composites, covers a semantic field that is divided in English among a number of lexemes. Depending on the context, fremd can be translated into English as “alien” (“this is alien to me”; dies ist mir fremd); “foreign” (as in Fremdsprache, “foreign language”); “strange” (the “stranger,” the one who doesn’t belong here, is referred to as Fremd-er in German); and, as is often the case, “other” (German composites like Fremd-Darstellung or Fremd-Erfahrung are routinely rendered as “representation of the Other” or “experience of the Other”). Through this very multi-vocality, German promotes a unifying perception of the field of fremd phenomena. Indeed, the colloquial meaning of the term suggests the “accessibility of something inaccessible” that has already been emphasized by Husserl and is taken up by Waldenfels.11 Furthermore, German, like other languages such as Latin (aliud vs. alter), marks a difference between alien (fremd) and other (anders). Waldenfels seizes on this semantic distinction and establishes an important conceptual distinction between the Other and the alien. A relation of otherness exists between two or more elements when these are related to each other on the basis of a commonality between them. For example, apples and pears can be compared to each other because they are both types of fruit. An apple is something other than a pear in the sense that they are not the same; it would, however, be absurd to say that an apple is alien to a pear (Waldenfels 1997:21, 2011:11–12). The relation of alienness is not mediated by a third term against which a difference could be measured; rather, what is alien differentiates itself from what belongs to the self, from a sphere of ownness: Selfness and ownness are the results of drawing boundaries that distinguish an inside from an outside and thus adopt the shapes of inclusion and exclusion. Ownness arises when something withdraws from it, and exactly that which withdraws is what we experience as alien or heterogeneous. This separation of the own and the alien, effected by no third

36

Bernhard Leistle party, belongs to a different dimension than the distinction between the same and the other, which is backed by a dialectically created whole. (Waldenfels 2011:11)

The relationship between self (and what the self claims as its own) and alien is a dual relationship, but it is not reciprocal. The alien emerges through a withdrawal from the order of selfhood, and it is separated from the self by a threshold. I cannot be myself and the alien at the same time, I cannot situate myself on both sides of the threshold: I am man or woman, child or adult, healthy or sick—no third position is available from which to view any of these relations from the outside.12 As indicated in the quote above, Waldenfels regards the alien as related to the phenomenon of order, and here he departs decisively, and in very productive ways, from Levinas. Waldenfels rejects the idea of an absolute Other or alien; for him the alien can only exist as the extra-ordinary, as that which withdraws from a particular order in a process of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion (Waldenfels 1997:19–20). In this context, “order” is not to be understood in a strictly legal political sense as in the phrase law and order. Rather, ordering is a necessary element of every process of meaning constitution, or, conversely, every act of “understanding,” “interpreting,” “knowing” can be regarded as a creation or imposition of order. Waldenfels’ definition of order as “a regulated (i.e., not arbitrary) connection of one thing and another.” (Waldenfels 1996:1) also applies to the phenomenological conception of experience. Intentionality, the correlation between consciousness and its object, is a fundamental, irreducible order: without intentionality there can be no experience, no sense or meaning whatsoever (Waldenfels 1997:19). But the founding of experience on orders doesn’t mean that orders are everything. This would be the case if there were an order that was all-encompassing and in which everything would find its place, like in the Greek cosmos or, perhaps, in other, non-European cosmologies. Waldenfels shows that such a total order is impossible, that all ordering processes are inevitably partial and contingent. No order can completely include the place from which its validity is claimed: my body whose perspective lies at the origin of the perceptual order cannot itself become an object of perception; conversational rules which give order to dialogic exchange can never completely include the event of conversing; a universal order like that of “universal human rights” is inevitably claimed from a particular standpoint which in precisely this sense is not universal.13 What we are ultimately faced with is not the one, singular, all-encompassing order, but orders in the plural. And each one of these multiple, in principle infinitely numerous, orders excludes in the very moment of its emergence the alien as that which it cannot include: “The rule applies: So many orders, so many types of alienness. The extra-ordinary accompanies the orders like a shadow” (Waldenfels 1997:33, my translation). It is with this relational conception of alienness that Waldenfels opens the door for an empirical anthropology of otherness.

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

37

Human experience in its totality can be conceptualized as a dynamic intersection of multiple and multi-leveled ordering processes. Grossly simplifying, and therefore tentatively, one could distinguish between an order of the personal self, a cultural order, or life-world and an order of reason, or logos. To all of these orders correspond specific forms of alienness, which have indeed given rise to specific intellectual projects and academic disciplines: psychiatry can be said to deal with the “personally alien” (see also Fuchs, this volume), anthropology with the “culturally alien” and philosophy, when it confronts radical alterity at least, with what is alien to reason. It needs to be kept in mind, however, that all of these distinctions cannot be regarded as absolute, and that the different levels of ordering intertwine with each other: a mad person also embodies unreason in the philosophical sense (Foucault [1961] 2006), as well as a specific cultural style (see Leistle, Chapter 12, this volume). Moreover, he or she might be personally alienated but conforming socially by playing the role of “crazy person,” thus becoming part of the cultural order. Here many interesting questions arise which would have to be addressed in a possible anthropology of otherness. Intersecting with the order levels just mentioned, Waldenfels distinguishes between degrees of alienness on an ascending scale (Waldenfels 1997:35–36). There is an everyday, familiar alien that we encounter within our own lifeworld in the guise of, for example, a neighbor, a cashier or the mail carrier. This form of alienness normally leaves us undisturbed as it can easily be converted into something that is ‘known” and “understood” through interpretation using available types (cf. Schütz and Luckmann 1973). An alien that transcends the boundaries of the life-world can be referred to as structural alienness. The reintegration of the structurally alien involves some sort of transposition as when we translate from a foreign language into our own, or when the anthropologist struggles to understand the sense of a practice in the other culture he or she studies. But, like every kind of making sense, such translations still presuppose the existence of a commonality, a wider order of which the translated languages and practices can become part. A foreign language must be recognizable as a human language, a cultural practice as a form of expressive behavior to make interpretation and translation possible in the first place. This is not the case in the most profound mode in which the alien makes its appearance, radical alienness (radikale Fremdheit).14 What is experienced as radically alien not only casts doubt on a particular interpretation of a phenomenon but on the possibility of interpretation as such. We encounter the radical alien in such extra-ordinary events as birth and death, pain and illness, shock and trauma, but also in more everyday occurrences such as sleep and dream. Although the alien, defined in relation to particular orders and therefore infinitely variable, has to be acknowledged as an aspect of mundane, everyday life, it must ultimately be thought from the perspective of radical alienness. There might be another order that can be invoked to make sense of everyday or structural alienness, the order of the life-world to interpret

38

Bernhard Leistle

one’s fellow human as a certain type of individual, for example. But this possibility must not lead us to assume that the alien can be tamed once and for all; alienness is fundamentally radical and a radical alien can always break into and through the orders of experience on all of its various levels. This radicalization of the question of the Other leads Waldenfels to a reconceptualization of experience as pathos, that is in terms of events that happen to us. Pain and trauma, pleasure and desire are not subjective acts that we perform and over which we have control; they are happenings that overcome, stir, surprise, attack us; we suffer from them and they possess us rather than we them. To put it simple: the alien appears to us in the mode of pathic experience. Although it cannot be understood in terms of activity, pathos must not be identified with passivity. My pain is certainly something that happens to me, subjective experience par excellence, inaccessible and inexpressible to others (cf. Scarry 1985, see also Throop, this volume). “Pathos is an event, but an event of a special kind which happens to somebody” (Waldenfels 2011:27). The elements of an intentional relationship are therefore present but in a way that challenges intentionality, and therefore the constitution of meaning in consciousness. A pathic event is not experienced as a meaningful segment of one’s inner duration, it is not reflected on, understood, interpreted. We respond to it; the pathos of the alien is what we respond to: The “from what” of being affected turns into a “to what” of responding as somebody relates to it in a speaking and acting fashion, rejects it, welcomes it, and brings it to expression. The ability “to say what I suffer from,” which the poet emphatically declares to be the gift of a god, designates a saying of a special kind in everyday life as well. It is a saying and also a doing which does not begin with itself, but elsewhere, and which therefore always bears traces of some alien influence. The ownness without which nobody would be him- or herself can only come about because of an openness to the alien which nonetheless evades us. It is exactly this which I designate as answering, as response. (Waldenfels 2011:27–28) Selfhood and ownness, experiential reality and life-world, every order of sense ultimately arises out of a response to something that eludes our grasp, escaping the very order it has called into being. No order can encompass the alien that lies in its origin and at its end: my birth is not accessible to me as part of my life because it is the beginning of that life, nor can I transform my death into an orderly event. My name, which marks the origin of my social identity, is given to me by others, and I develop a personal self by responding to their calls. Cultural orders can never include their own beginnings; they inevitably arise in response to something outside themselves. In this sense, concrete cultures are related to a pre-cultural, or extra-cultural sphere, poetically expressed in myth and ritual.

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

39

Waldenfels’ philosophical project consists in the development of a “responsive phenomenology” based on a description of the specific logos of responsivity and amounts to nothing less than a “transformation of the phenomenological conception of intentionality, using insights from communication theory” (Waldenfels 1994:332). The conceptual language of this effort makes use of a modified behaviorist vocabulary.15 The alien presents itself as a demand to which we are forced to respond. The structure of the experience of the alien, which is characterized by a “responsive difference” between claim (or request) and appeal, between answer and response, has been described in some detail in the introduction (see section “Responding to the Other”). It mays thus suffice to add some additional remarks on Waldenfels’ notion of a creative responsivity, as it strikes me as crucial for our understanding of self, society and culture as processes unfolding in history. Conceived radically as alien, the Other can only be observed and thematized indirectly, as traces left in the process of responding in the form of disturbances, confusion, silences. When we live our lives unperturbed, when objects arise seemingly automatically from our perception of the physical and cultural world, we are afforded the luxury of being unaware of the responsivity of our existence. Constancy of objects and a taken-for-granted reality are products of recurrent patterns of responding. Nevertheless, in the interstices of every reality order there exists a sphere of alienness not regulated by rules and principles. Responding ultimately takes place in this inbetween-sphere. Waldenfels speaks of a creative response, meaning that the event of responding which produces the answer as an outcome, and which departs from, as well as falls back into a particular order, is not determined by any overarching principle, not even by the intentionality of the body, or by communicative reason. In this indeterminacy of the response lies the possibility of the emergence of the genuinely new in human existence: “Responding in the full sense does not give what it has, but rather what it finds and invents in responding.” (Waldenfels 2007:27). Without this inventive element in human behavior, thought and expression, we would forever move in the same circular paths, genuine change as testified through revolutions in politics and science would be impossible. On the other hand the creative freedom of responsivity is never completely arbitrary for it realizes itself in relation to an alien that has always already happened, and has placed a demand on us: The response is creative as a response i.e. as a form of saying and doing which begins elsewhere without being grounded in a given sense or in existing rules. Creative responses are not pre-given, neither in the realm of things nor in the realm of words. Thus responding runs over a small ridge which separates bondage (Hörigkeit) from arbitrariness (Beliebigkeit). This means: whenever we respond, we invent to some extent that which we respond, but we do not invent that to which we are responding. (Waldenfels 2007:34)

40

Bernhard Leistle

The Paradox of a Science of the Alien Besides numerous references to anthropology (or ethnology16) scattered throughout his work, Waldenfels has devoted two essays exploring the relationships between his philosophy and anthropology as an empirical science. One of these essays deals with the problem of ethnographic representation and is included in this volume (see Chapter 2). The other text is entitled “Phenomenology as Xenology—The Paradox of a Science of the Alien” (Phänomenologie als Xenologie—Das Paradox einer Wissenschaft vom Fremden), and takes a broader stance towards the topic. Here Waldenfels probes into the (im-)possibility of a science of the alien which he sees concretized in the project of anthropology. The culturally alien, so Waldenfels argues in a manner familiar by now, cannot serve as defining subject of anthropology, as a xenology can never be a science in the conventional sense. As long as science is understood as the enterprise to “understand,” “describe,” “analyze,” and ultimately “know” an object, a science of the alien must remain a paradox, since the alien is precisely that which eludes description and knowledge. Understanding the alien, or even just making it thematic in discourse, already means denying the alienness of the alien. This, of course, is the essential criterion of radical alterity and its repetition seems to bring us back to where Levinas has left us, at an absolute incommensurability. But only apparently so: By insisting that our relationship to the alien consists in responding to it, Waldenfels shows us a way out of the anthropological dilemma. “Complete understanding of the Other” or “declaring the inaccessibility of the Other” become recognizable as false alternatives. Anthropology, both as experience and representation, is a form of responding; before the anthropologist thinks about, researches on, and finally understands and represents the other culture, he is attracted (or repulsed) by it. Anthropology’s origins lie in: the invitation, incitation or appeal to which the ethnologist’s look responds and which initiates his research without being integrated into its results. This kind of attraction is the intercultural and also the ethnological phenomenon par excellence. Renouncing this phenomenon means renouncing the ethnological experience from which every science of the alien has to start. This science escapes from its self-dissolution only if the alien is more than something not yet known or understood (Waldenfels 2007:18–19, see also 1997:103). As responsivity, anthropology takes place in a sphere between orders, between self and Other, between its own and the other culture. That it can never completely understand and know its object also means that it cannot miss the Other completely. Even gross distortion and self-interested appropriation, of the kind that Edward Said has labeled “orientalist,” is not a pure invention but a response to an alien demand—a negative one, but a response nonetheless.

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

41

From the perspective of Waldenfels’ phenomenology, anthropology as the science of the culturally Other is not by definition epistemologically absurd, politically suspect and generally unethical. No doubt, these tendencies are present in the anthropological project, as anthropology’s history has amply demonstrated. But they become most dominant in precisely those moments in which the discipline suppresses its relatedness to the alien, when it tries to define itself rigorously as science in the conventional sense. Then anthropology indeed runs a great risk of becoming an objectifying, dehumanizing practice; and the height of fall might indeed be greater than in other disciplines due to anthropology’s foundation on experiencing others in interpersonal encounters. But this is not an inevitable outcome for anthropology, nor is its occurrence limited to anthropology. Rather, anthropology has a “special status” (Waldenfels, this volume) among the sciences in shifting the thematic focus on the self-alien relation. This shift could also serve as an explanation for why “fieldwork” and “ethnography” have become popular beyond the confines of the discipline, threatening anthropology’s persistent efforts at self-definition (cf. Kohl 2011). As shown by Foucault, sciences are discursive orders and as orders they are selective, making possible certain realities and excluding others as impossible. But what is excluded is not simply non-existent; it persists as an alternative, challenging and disturbing the status quo. Responding to a demand of the alien is the motor behind every scientific process, and anthropology is the discipline that makes conscious this relation to the alien in ways that can generate forms of selfreflexivity. This would, perhaps, be a way to reformulate the anthropological project in terms that distinguish it from other projects in the field of the social and cultural sciences, by capturing anthropology’s essential characteristic. To be sure, this is not the solution to the problem. Rather, we might say: if there is a solution to the problem of the Other in anthropology, this solution consists in the acceptance of the insolubility of the problem. The alien known and understood is not the alien itself; the other culture represented and interpreted in the ethnographic text (or film, for that matter) is not the other culture itself. The paradox of a science of the alien is irreducible and has therefore to be acknowledged as fundamental. But anthropology can become “responsive,” and in an unconventional sense more scientific, if it accepts this paradox as constitutive, that is, if it starts regarding the research process in terms of demand and response, from the first project idea and the experience of fieldwork to the interpretation of materials and the finished ethnographic record.

Notes 1 For essay collections see, for example, Dallery, Arleen B. and Scott, Charles E. 1989. The Question of the Other. Albany: State University of New York Press; Quellet, Pierre and Harel, Simon. 2007. Quel Autre? L’alterité en question. Montreal: VLB Editeur; Kearney, Richard and Semonovitch, Sacha. 2011. Phenomenologies of the Stranger. New York: Fordham University Press.

42

Bernhard Leistle

2 Originally the present chapter was intended to be a part of the introduction. While writing, however, it became obvious that the text would exceed the limitations of a section in a chapter, both in terms of length and specialization of content. It was therefore decided to expand it and include it as a separate chapter with a somewhat ambiguous status: on the one hand, giving new and relevant information and putting forward a self-contained argument; on the other hand, adding context to the volume as a whole by providing more details about the philosophy that inspired much thinking about alterity and explicitly, or implicitly, informs many of the papers assembled here. I am aware that my selection of authors to show a genealogy of the notion of radical alterity in phenomenology is somewhat idiosyncratic and that the treatment of the topic might not be satisfying to phenomenologists (for other genealogies see Crowell 1998; Kearney and Semonovitch 2011, “Introduction”). The text is, however, written with an anthropological, or perhaps interdisciplinary audience in mind which possesses little or no previous knowledge about philosophical phenomenology, and I trust that it proves useful in this context. 3 The origin of the concept is, however, proto-phenomenological. It was formulated in its basic outlines by Husserl’s teacher, Franz Brentano, as fundamental element of his “descriptive psychology.” Husserl borrowed the concept and radicalized it by connecting it with the tradition of logic (Moran 2000:59). 4 The term “phenomenology” has been used by some philosophers before Husserl, most famously of course by Hegel in his Phenomenology of the Spirit. But it was Husserl who articulated “phenomenology” as a philosophical project and announced it as a “new way of doing philosophy” (Moran 2000:1). 5 Consider the following passage, in which Husserl explicates his understanding of “transcendental intersubjectivity”: “We need hardly say that, as existing for me, it is constituted purely within me, the meditating ego, purely by virtue of sources belonging to my intentionality; nevertheless it is constituted thus as a community constituted also in every other monad (who, in turn, is constituted with the modification: “other”) as the same community—only with a different subjective mode of appearance—and as necessarily bearing within itself the same Objective world.” (Husserl 1960:130) 6 But this is not to say that this contribution has gone completely unnoticed in anthropology, see Csordas (2004). In philosophy, Bernhard Waldenfels has gained important inspiration for his phenomenology of the alien from Merleau-Ponty. 7 For an account of sensory experience as communication, see the chapter “Sensing” in the Phenomenology of Perception, in particular 216ff. 8 Some readers might ask why Heidegger’s contribution to the development of a notion of radical alterity is not discussed in this sketch. There is certainly much in Being and Time, not to mention his later philosophy, which would offer itself for interpretation in these terms: his conception of existence as always already beingin-the-world, as thrown into the world; the existential relationship to death; his understanding of anxiety as ontological mood; all of this can be related to the question of the Other. On the other hand, however, it needs to be stated that the notion of radical alterity developed in phenomenology in explicit opposition to Heidegger’s ontology which, moreover, was regarded by many as a translation of Husserl’s phenomenology into ontological terms. Levinas in particular argued that a genuine otherness of the Other would have to burst through the confines of ontological thinking (see his direct engagement with Heidegger in his essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?”, Levinas 1996:1–10). From this perspective, even to posit that the Other “is” means to subject him to a system of meanings and/or rules which is necessarily based on the selfhood invoking it. It is in this sense that Stephen Crowell (1998) states that “there is no Other.” 9 The dark and dramatic tone of Levinas’ language is partially explained by his biography. He survived the war in a German POW camp and lost many members of his

The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

43

family in the Holocaust. Having started his philosophical career as a student of Husserl, his first book consisted in a study of Husserl’s theory of intuition. He also translated the Cartesian Meditations and was responsible that the French version of the book was published long before the German. His war experiences changed his philosophical style and while it remained phenomenological in orientation, it also exhibited influences from Jewish religious traditions. Besides his work in phenomenology and ethics, Levinas also continued to work as a Talmud scholar. See also Johannes Fabian’s remarks on Levinas’ philosophy in Fabian (2006). Particularly interesting is Fabian’s admission that he had not known Levinas’ lecture series Time and the Other ([1948] 1987. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), when he wrote his book of the same title. This shows that the mutual awareness of philosophers and anthropologists of each other is not as great as is sometimes claimed. If a philosophically oriented and theologically trained anthropologist as Fabian can remain unaware of a work like that of Levinas, then certainly cross-disciplinary dialogue is not a superfluous undertaking. Within the present publication, fremd has been rendered by “alien,” Fremdheit, the quality of being fremd, by “alienness,” wherever the terms are specifically meant in the sense of Waldenfels. Alternatively, the terms “radical Other,” or “radical alterity” have been used to designate the idea of something that presents itself by withdrawal to which the German word fremd is connected. See also Endnote 5, “Introduction.” Given the current preoccupation with difference, in particular in the domain of gender identities, I should perhaps add that this applies to any gender, not just to masculinity and femininity. A transgender person would be equally unable to draw a comparison between their gender and another. This contingence underlies the persistent critique of and resistance against “universal human rights” as a product of Western cultural and political history. To admit that human rights in the form in which they are proclaimed by the UN are a Western concept and therefore connected to a specific standpoint, however, is not the same as saying they are simply “not valid” for non-Western cultures, as is claimed, for example, by the government of the PRC. It simply means to acknowledge that no order, no matter how “right” and “good” it appears to its adherents, can ever claim to be complete and is therefore open to contestation. As Waldenfels puts it: “The point of view of universality should not be confused with a supposed universal point of view” (2007:33). What is called “radical alienness” here is referred to as “radical alterity” or “radical otherness” elsewhere in the book, in particular in the introduction. The use of the term “alien” is motivated by the effort to do justice to the specificity of Waldenfels’ approach. We can also put it this way: “Alienness” in general is Waldenfels’ way to conceptualize the broader philosophical notion of radical alterity. “Radical alienness” designates the most dramatic modes of appearance of radical alterity in experience. Waldenfels names German behaviorist psychology, in particular Karl Bühler, as well as the conception of illness as defective responsiveness in the work of the neurologist Kurt Goldstein and the theory of literature as “heteroglossia” of Mikhail Bakhtin as sources of inspiration, see Waldenfels (2007:28). “Ethnology” is commonly used in Germany to designate what North Americans call “cultural anthropology.”

References Crowell, Stephen Galt. 1998. “There Is No Other: Notes on the Logical Place of a Concept.” Paideuma: Mitteilung zur Kulturkunde 44:13–29. Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.” Ethos 18(1):5–47.

44

Bernhard Leistle

———, ed. 1994. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. “Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity and the Theory of Religion.” Current Anthropology 45(2):163–185. Fabian, Johannes. 2006. “The Other Revisited: Critical Afterthoughts.” Anthropological Theory 6(2):139–152. Foucault, Michel. 2006. History of Madness. London and New York: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Kearney, Richard and Kascha Semonovitch, eds. 2011. Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality. New York: Fordham University Press. Kohl, Karl-Heinz. 2011. “Introduction.” In The End of Anthropology?, edited by Holger Jebens and Karl-Heinz Kohl, 1–12. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing. Leistle, Bernhard. 2014. “From the Alien to the Other: Steps towards a Phenomenological Theory of Spirit Possession.” Anthropology of Consciousness 25(1):53–90. ———. 2015. “Otherness as a Paradigm in Anthropology.” Semiotica 204: 292–313. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1987. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London and New York: Routledge. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1981. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1996. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. “From Mauss to Levi-Strauss.” In Signs, 114–125. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1945)2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schütz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann. 1973. Structures of the Life-World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Schwarz Wentzer, Thomas. 2014. “‘I Have Seen Königsberg Burning’—Philosophical Anthropology and the Responsiveness of Historical Experience.” Anthropological Theory 14(1):27–48. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1994. Antwortregister. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1996. Order in the Twilight. Translated by David J. Parent. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1997. Topographie des Fremden. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden, Bd 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2007. The Question of the Other. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Translated by Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

2

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography Bernhard Waldenfels Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright and Bernhard Leistle

The Special Status of Ethnology It would be curious if ethnology remained untouched by the trends of philosophical and scientific research, not to mention the politically, economically and religiously determined appropriation of concepts and foreign cultures, with which it was closely interrelated from the very beginning. Yet this discipline owes its particular interest to the fact that, as a “science of the culturally alien” (Wissenschaft vom kulturell Fremden, Kohl 1993), it has embraced a subject, which was not envisaged in the usual catalogue of the nomological and idiographic sciences. Alienness is a relational and occasional definition that is removed from the disjunction of universal laws or values and individual facts. If, beyond any other comparable projects, ethnology becomes entangled in paradoxes and dilemmas, this is not least attributable to such an unstable starting point that complicates, if not prohibits any normalization. It is understandable for a science struggling with the definition and delimitation of its research area to be inclined to more intense reflection on its methods, and similarly to a resulting openness for philosophical problems along with a corresponding susceptibility to manipulation in service of one or the other Weltanschauung. However, this only has relevance for the innerdisciplinary side. A particular interdisciplinary interest emerges due to a situation in which the alien has become a troublesome area, which is spreading wider and wider, since the theoretical support in an all-encompassing reason has become as fragile as the central position of a dominant subject or a dominant culture. The crisis of reason and the crisis of the subject have fanned the flame of an alien that neither allows for its integration into an individual or collective sphere of ownness (Eigenheitssphäre) nor for its expansion to a general sphere of reason, nor its classification in the subsystem of a functionally differentiated rationality. If this diagnosis is accurate, one can expect the representatives of philosophy and other disciplines to partly recognize their own paradoxes and dilemmas in the self-entanglements of ethnology, even if they endeavour to tackle them in different ways. Whenever reference is made in what follows to a “crisis of ethnographical representation” this concerns a debate initiated mainly by American

46

Bernhard Waldenfels

ethnographers, where a philosopher intervenes only with extreme caution, and not merely on grounds of insufficient specialist expertise.1 While the debate of course addresses a number of interesting points, it suffers from a conceptual and methodological over-complexity that makes it difficult to identify a unified problem behind the key word “representation.” Moreover, a European reader who is familiar with the phenomenology of the experience of the Other (Fremderfahrung), the hermeneutics of understanding the Other, Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, Bakhtin’s theory of literary polyphony or Foucault’s discourse theory, recognizes much he has known long since and partly in a more differentiated form. Ultimately this debate, fanned by the controversy about modernism and postmodernism, carries with it several problems that go far beyond the disputed status of ethno-logy and ethno-graphy.2 The following attempt, which is deliberately aporetic, is intended to contribute to the clarification, differentiation and more precise analysis of the central problems. Philosophers cannot be concerned to mitigate or avoid paradoxes or dilemmas at any price, in particular not, when this is at the cost of that alien experience from which the entire problematics draws its dynamic. Central will be the question what might be meant when one talks about “representation of the alien” and how one could overcome corresponding shortcomings. The methods and approaches of a responsive phenomenology of the alien which I essentially apply in dealing with these questions, have been discussed in detail elsewhere so that I can restrict myself to indirect references.3

The Ambiguity of ‘Representation’ If one refers to a “crisis of ethnographic representation” then neither of these terms is harmless and each element has a considerable pre-history. Let us start with the key word “representation” whose current as well as historical usage doesn’t imply a single meaning, but a whole series of meanings. Strictly speaking, this applies for the English and French word representation or représentation, derived from Latin, and less so for German usage, which offers a series of signifiers each of whom, throughout history and until the present day, has taken on terminological function. In German “representation” can at least be expressed in four different ways: as “idea” (Vorstellung), “presentiation” (Vergegenwärtigung), “presentation” (Darstellung) or “substitution” (Stellvertretung).4 The borrowing of English usage that the editors of the aforementioned essay collection (Berg and Fuchs 1993:9, see endnote 1) propose is partly the consequence of the problem of a translation that cannot simply skip a complex starting point. Yet this does not make things easier, but more difficult, since it imposes on the reader a decoding task that an author or commentator—who entrenches himself behind the verbal ambiguity—is spared. Whoever interprets ambiguity as entirely virtuous takes an advantage for granted that can emerge as such only in a favourable instance in the course of the analysis. The elaboration of the problem

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

47

consequently suffers from a lack of preliminary investigation of the analytical and conceptual history, and any research practice satisfied with this runs the risk of undertaking too much at once. One cannot branch out simultaneously in all directions, as Clifford Geertz states correctly (1973:89). If we keep in mind the four fundamental meanings, which are all treated as crisis-ridden in the current debate, then heterogeneous problem areas emerge, provisionally at least, their heterogeneity reflecting the equivocalness of the basic concept. (1) As idea (Vorstellung)—that is to say, as a mental act or state related to an object, which it opposes, and renders more or less adequately, “representation” indicates an epistemological problem that was formed in the aftermath of Descartes. The subjective idea contrasts with the imagined object or reality, insofar as this signifies more than something merely imagined. The presuppositions of an ideational thinking (vorstellenden Denkens) that located the basic capacity of the soul in the vis repraesentativa (Christian Wolff5) and the basic problem of knowledge in the relation between psychic inner and physical outer world, have already met with criticism in Husserl’s fifth Logische Untersuchung and afterwards in Heidegger, Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Levinas and many others. This has by no means become obsolete on account of the recent emergence of a cognitivist representationism. Richard Rorty’s spectacular attack on an epistemology based on mentalistic representations on which, for instance, Paul Rabinow relies (1986:234), merely caught up for analytical philosophy on what had already been discussed long since elsewhere.6 Phenomenologically and hermeneutically speaking, experience doesn’t mean that someone or an act represents something but that something shows itself as something to someone. This means that everything that manifests itself is intended, given, considered, interpreted, understood or treated as something; therefore a repeatable sense as well as repeatable forms (Gestalten), structures and general rules are always in play. In this sense, for Husserl or Heidegger as for Natorp or Cassirer (cf. 1964:236) there is no First, no Immediate that would be “simply present.” Something similar can, of course, also be said about ethnological experiences, without already touching on their specific character thereby. (2) As presentiation (Vergegenwärtigung) of something which is not present in time and space, but rather is “presentified,” “representation” belongs with the temporal-spatial dimensions of experience. In this case, the contrasting concept is presentation (Präsentation) or making present (Gegenwärtigung) such as in the works of Husserl and Heidegger. In this case, the question arises whether it is possible to go back to a pure and simple presentation with Bergson (1972:506) and to dismiss all representations as secondary, intellectual processing, or whether the lived present is not rather characterized by an original

48

Bernhard Waldenfels

form of de-presentation (Ent-Gegenwärtigung, cf. Hua, Volume VI:189), so that we can always only return to the present in an initial repetition. These are questions originating in Husserl, which have given rise to an extensive debate in Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Derrida. This should be borne in mind when in his contribution entitled “Presence and Representation” Johann Fabian claims a primacy of experience for ethnographic practice, yet on the other hand ascribes to representations a creative formative power that expresses itself processually, namely, in a movement from here (from our place in the world) to there (to the exotic place), or in a movement from the then to the now (Fabian 1990:756). Obviously, the “view from afar” and life in different present-fields play a central role in ethnology. In this case one might ask whether the alien experience (Fremderfahrung) would not precisely consist in something happening here that begins elsewhere, so that one’s own place (Eigenort) and the alien place (Fremdort) are nested in each other in a kind of place-shifting. The otherness of the temporal shift gives rise to similar questions. (3) “Representation” further describes presentation (Darstellung) which in Karl Bühler’s well-known theory of language functions, largely neglected in the Anglo-Saxon context, establishes the object-relation of linguistic signs. Conversely, the word account (Engl. in original), which in Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology describes self-articulation and self-explanation of action, can be rendered in German as “Darstellung” or “Selbstdarstellung” (cf. Weingarten, Sack, and Schenkein 1976). Generally, we encounter the presentation function in all media in which something appears, be it in the form of word, script, symbol and text or picture, photo, audio tape and video.7 Medial presentation is contrasted by an immediate experience in which something appears in “bodily presence (leibhaftige Gegenwart) as itself” and not mediated by another (cf. Hua, vol. III, sec. 99). Husserl’s critique of an image theory and sign theory, according to which we observe images or signs instead of things, thus ensnaring us in an infinite regression of image and sign sequences, has to this day not lost its plausibility. Nevertheless, the question remains whether images and signs as well as the corresponding techniques are not involved in the structuring and articulation of our experience from the outset. If this is the case, the further question poses itself how we can fathom the contribution of the media to the constitution of experience, having no media-free “innocent” experience at our disposal. As for ethnology, the shift of emphasis from ethnological theory formation, which bases itself on generalizations of experiential materials, to an ethnographical work of description and interpretation which realizes itself in the medium of experience and persistently immerses itself in it anew, has led to an increased interest in the various forms of presentation. It is

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

49

probably no digression to suppose that questions of presentation define the core of the ethnographic crises of representation (cf. Berg and Fuchs 1993:7; Kohl 1993:121). A unified view of the problem can be expected to emerge most likely from here. (4) Finally, there is the possibility of “representation” as substitution (Stellvertretung). Substitution implies an entity or authority, which stands for the Other or for others. What is substituted for is not communicated itself in a direct manner “on one’s personal account,” but by means of something else. The process and structure of substitution already confront us in the sphere of linguistic signs; we may recall the old Scholastic formula aliquid stat pro aliquo that was introduced into modern semiotics by Karl Bühler. Yet the central application field is the political and legal domain. Here, there is not only something which substitutes for something else, but someone who steps in for others, for instance, in the form of official representatives, delegates, advocates and legal guardians. The question is, then, from where the representing body gains the authority to speak and make decisions on others’ behalf. The delegation of powers such as envisaged in representative democracy only presents one of the forms in which this kind of representation is regulated. Ethnology is again directly affected by this problematic. Jean-Paul Dumont points out that the ethnic others in traditional ethnology texts are absent in terms of their voice and their existence, and that they only gain a voice and appear through the intercession of the ethnologist (cf. Fabian 1990:755). The question thus emerges how one can withdraw from the “pull toward authoritative representation of the Other,” in the words of James Clifford (1988:44), or how one can prevent the repression that goes along with representation, as Stephen Tyler argues (1987:338). The basic problem in the background is whether representation in the sense of substitution or replacement is to be considered as merely secondary or even as dispensable, or from which vantage point one can distinguish between “worse and better representation” (Berg and Fuchs 1993:12). Jacques Derrida shows in his revision of Plato and Rousseau carried out in L’ecriture et la difference that we have to anticipate the possibility of an “original supplement.” The disparate set of problems assembled under the provisional umbrella term of “representation” could be unified, if one assumed a discursive order of experience that assigns us questions of the following nature: (1) As what, in which sense and with which meaning, does what comes to appearance and is verbalized manifest itself? (2) In which spatial-temporal contexts does this occur and (3) In which media? (4) Who speaks when something is verbalized? Cutting across the discussion of different discursive authorities, the question is posed about the relationship between those experiences, which are verbalized and come to appearance, and the expression and the media in

50

Bernhard Waldenfels

which they are presented. In this case, it is by no means indifferent whether one defines this organization process as constitution, conception (Auffassung), interpretation or construction. If one insists with Merleau-Ponty on a “paradox of expression,” i.e., that what is expressed can only be grasped through the process of being expressed, one is suspended in a field of tensions (Spannungsfeld) within which pure reproduction and pure production, sheer repetition and complete innovation, simple replay and free invention are only thinkable as borderline cases. With the paradox of a creative expression, which emerges from experience without being able to build on it, and which in a certain sense precedes itself in the form of a pre-language (Vor-sprache), which can never be completely transformed into discourse (Merleau-Ponty 1968:126), we approach precisely those problems discussed in ethnography as the “crisis of representation.”

Crises of Representing the Alien The review of the different variations of “representation” has already indicated the areas where, in general, bridges may be built to ethnographical research. But the particular problematic of ethnology and ethnography is not that anything is represented, but that something alien is represented, and not any kind of alien, but specifically a culturally alien that confronts us in foreign ethnicities. The Greek term “ethnos” already implies the “assertion of alienness,” as Wolfgang Rudolf observes (cf. Kohl 1993:26). If one can refer to a “crisis of ethnographic representation,” then one can only do so in the sense of a crisis of the “science of the cultural alien.” If this is the case, we land in a maelstrom of questions that leaves none of the applied conceptual marks in place. At stake is how to determine the alien (das Fremde), which causes embarrassment for the science in question, and also what kind of science is embarrassed by the alien. Moreover, it remains to be asked: what quality is that crisis which has beset this science of the alien. Is this merely a critical transition stage, as the use of the traditional concept of crisis leads one to assume, or are we dealing with paradoxes, dilemmas or inner contradictions inherent in the ethnological project since its inception? Finally, the question remains whether the source of this much-implored crisis can be localized at all within this science or within the sciences in general. Eberhard Berg and Martin Fuchs immediately adopt a more general tone in the foreword to their edited volume: “The confrontation of language games and lifeworlds, which are alien to each other, is superimposed—‘overdetermined’— by the contrast of tradition and modernity” (1993:7). The ambiguity of the diagnostically employed basic concept is tremendously augmented by the abundant factors that are to be taken into consideration in such a diagnosis. Here, too, it is advisable to thoroughly scrutinize the field of investigation beforehand. An initial result is to be expected from a decisive historicizing of the problem. This can demonstrate that in each case something more and different is

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

51

and was possible than what became reality. In their own contribution to the aforementioned collection the editors illuminate the “problematic history of ethnographic representation” (Berg and Fuchs 1993:8) by assuming an increasing reflexivity of the discipline and categorizing the reflection process in stages of reflection. The way in which the history of ethnography is introduced as a “three-stage process” (24) shows that the questions of representation are indeed primarily treated as questions of presentation (Darstellungsfragen). The first stage is formed by the model of fieldwork, which dates back to Bronislaw Malinowski, and was dominant from the 1920s to the 1930s. Fieldwork first consists of participant observation, eventually leading to the production of large-scale monographs. A transition phase follows in the 1960s and 1970s that is centred on culture and text. It found its strongest expression in the interpretive, symbol-oriented cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz and in the ethnographic “confessional” literature in which the researcher’s self-experience is given wide scope. Lastly, the present phase commences in the second half of the 1970s with the dissolution of ethnographic authority that allows the appearance of the voices of others. The constitution of the others referred to here follows different pathways from polyphonic dialogue to rhetorical and textual constructions up to social practices. This othering (cf. Fabian 1990:755, 763; Berg and Fuchs 1993:35) dominates the discussions around representation in all its forms. The structuring in three phases undertaken by the editors, corresponds largely to the periodization proposed by James Clifford, one of the protagonists of the last phase to date, in his article “On Ethnographic Authority” (1988). The acceptance of a sequence of stages in itself appears by no means unproblematic, for it suggests a unified progress that is impossible without consistent standard. The pluralizing of standards makes no allowance for progress, but merely for advances, which are limited to specific and changeable problematics.8 Taking the polyphony of all utterances seriously, even of the apparently most subjective and most objective ones, would accordingly disrupt the principle of the monologue without replacing it by another principle. This means that different and traditional methods need not vanish completely. Correspondingly, James Clifford concludes his remarks in his contribution with the words: “Experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic processes are at work, discordantly, in any ethnography.” (Clifford 1988:54)9 Dispensing with the monologic, authoritative principle merely leads to shifts of emphasis and permits strategic alternatives that keep the overall structure flexible. It follows that even periodization not only registers what has happened, but intervenes from the present time by setting new priorities. These can emerge differently. Thus, Karl-Heinz Kohl (1993:127ff.) regards the “postmodern ethnographies” as “documents of despondence”: their authors forego risking general statements, make themselves incontestable through permanent questioning of existing stocks of knowledge and burden

52

Bernhard Waldenfels

the reader with the translation of foreign cultural experiences into own experiences, a task which they themselves don’t dare carry out. The quoted introductory text accordingly fades out with the more familiar counterpoint (in the German context) of hermeneutically and scientifically oriented ethnology. Whatever one’s opinion of this, it is clear that by dispensing with a unified standard, the lines of argument are more mobile than in the dispute— itself already old—between the old and the new. The concept of crisis, ringing with echoes of salvation and world history, is subject to a corresponding shrinkage of meaning and its use should only be continued with caution.10 In what follows I refer provisionally to the three-phase scheme outlined above to accentuate in what way the alien (Fremdes) is expressed as alien in each case. The tension between alien experience and presentation of the alien (Fremddarstellung) will constantly increase in the process.

Participant Observation An objectively oriented, methodically proceeding science of the alien is confronted with the fundamental dilemma that alienness is not an attribute of objects, which one observes, names or analyzes. The word “alien” and similarly its foreign-language equivalents belong to the class of two-place predicates. It can only be used relationally: x is alien for y; and it can only be used occasionally: something is alien on a case-by-case basis. The alien (Fremdes) finally requires the contrast to the self (Eigenes), which isolates one’s own through the exclusion of otherness (Anderes). This origin in a process of inclusion and exclusion differentiates the alien from the merely other that contrasts with the same (Selben) and emerges through a reversible form of mutual delimitation.11 The alienness of Africa that a European experiences, or the alienness of Europe that the other senses as an African, is not to be mistaken for the difference of sun and moon claimed by a neutral observer of the sky. Alien experience, in which the alien appears as alien, consists of something meeting me or us by withdrawing itself. Absence characterizes the alien as alien, just as in another way it denotes the past as past. As an objective definition the alien would be nothing more than what is not yet known, explained and understood, describing a provisional stage of research, and including no inherent quality of what is to be researched. The alien would consist of a factual deficit that would be resolvable in principle. It would have no status of its own; traditionally speaking there would be no alien de jure, rather only de facto. If the alien implied nothing more than this, a science of the alien would consume its object, and thus itself, the further it advances. It is precisely this self-destructive character of a project, which runs counter itself, and perishes with its success that I have called elsewhere the paradox of a science of the alien. This simple reflection leads to the conclusion that the alien cannot appear in a normal objective science. A researcher refers to a subject area, together with other researchers. He communicates with them about something, but

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

53

subject, object and co-subject (Mitsubjekt) remain strictly separate in functional terms. The communication proceeds for its part on the basis of a shared logos, via common rules, methods and codes; these guarantee an exchange of subjective standpoints so that here, too, no gap opens up for the alien. Naturally, compiling this brief sketch assumes itself a meta-level where research practice itself becomes an object, and the same relationships apply for this thematizing of research. Meanwhile, from a structural viewpoint such an iteration only means raising the number of object levels but no breakthrough of the trend towards objectification. This shutting-off of traditional research against the alien explains why in conventional ethnology it was customary to refer not to the alien, but rather to primitives, savages, aboriginals or native peoples. Their rudimentary alienness is limited to the otherness of a species. In this case, ethnology would be nothing more than a kind of human biology, which focuses on the essence of human pre-history, or a kind of astral biology, which so to speak engages with creatures from other stars. What Edward Evans-Pritchard whimsically describes as “if-Iwere-a-horse-speculation” (Kohl 1993:112) would then not be so absurd. If we bear in mind these scientifically influenced starting conditions of ethnology,12 we must admit that Malinowski’s determined switch to his own fieldwork doesn’t exhaust itself in an expansion of conventional research practice, but rather changes the research coordinates. Participant observation, which is decisive from now on, means that the researcher speaks with (and not only speaks, but also lives with) those about whom he researches and writes. Participation emerges from belonging to a common field, which makes available the ground of experience and conversational context, in which researchers and their subjects meet each other, and simultaneously serves as a space for observation in which the researcher adopts his distanced position as an observer.13 The field researcher conducts a kind of doublecrossing game; he joins in, but with the intention of drawing his own gain in knowledge from the game. This double position resembles the attempt to answer something or to listen to something in a conversation while simultaneously transforming it into a quotation. Firstly, this leads to the above-mentioned representation forms undergoing a specific transformation in relation to normal scientific practice. (1) The scientific ideation of something as something, which according to the example of Aristotelian apodeixis aims at a general situation, now leaves greater space for an ideographic approach, as was common practice in historiography and also in the Greek beginnings of ethnography, which perceived itself as ιστορια. Something is first recorded and charted in its own reality and not subsumed from the outset in conceptual schematics or adjusted to theoretical models. (2) The presentiation of what remains distant for the ethnographer’s domestic audience is not translated immediately into objective space and time data, as occurs when recording an experiment that can in principle be repeated under identical conditions. The terrain, which enters the retrospective research report as what was once the “here” and “now” of research,

54

Bernhard Waldenfels

retains occasional or indexical attributes, displaying a space and course of experience, and not simply to be equated with objective data.14 (3) The presentation of what is identified by fieldwork demonstrates an irrevocable ambiguity in relation to the exact parameters of the classical sciences, since no raw data are first processed here; rather, pre-formed, meaningful and systematic expressions are recorded that follow their own standards. The constructions of the social sciences are constructions of the second degree, as stated by Alfred Schütz, or rule-systems of the second order, as Peter Winch shows, following Wittgenstein. Not only in the case of ethnography, transferring everyday experiences and institutional practices into the terminology of the sciences means achieving a translation where algorithmic rules reach their limits. Ethnography appears here as the vanguard of a general sociography. (4) Finally, as far as substitution is concerned, the role of the ethnographer, who speaks for foreign peoples, cannot be transformed into the general function of Everyman. The ambiguity resulting from the confrontation of different interpretive systems corresponds to an equally genuine polyphony, since the ethnographer’s own statements overlap and intertwine with the alien statements of the ethnic groups. Malinowski’s tentative conclusion of participating in events “yet without becoming an other” (Berg and Fuchs 1993:3) is akin to the effort of swimming without getting wet. Here, it should be noted that becoming other does not mean becoming the other person or like other persons. Only if own and alien reference systems emerge as alternatives does becoming other (Anderswerden) mean a conversion to the alien (Fremde), which gives up the self (Eigene). The disappointment with Malinowski’s ethnographic paradigm shift, which even his admirers could not permanently conceal, results from the half-heartedness of this change of attitude that is, anyway, based on a misconception of the self. The simultaneity of participation and observation, of belonging and distance, of speaking with . . . and speaking about . . . in fact cannot be sustained, if simultaneity is understood as coincidence. It would then follow that—in Bühler’s terminology—the functions of presentation and of appeal collapse into each other. The person, with whom I am speaking, would be identical with the person about whom I am writing ex-post, and the ethnographer would confront the foreign groups he studies simultaneously as alien and as Third. In Malinowski’s work this impossibility leads, as was often criticized, to the consequence that the unsustainable coincidence of participation and observation, of belonging and distance ultimately is to the detriment of the first member. The ethnographer reverts to the tracks of traditional ethnology so that in the end the experience of the alien again sinks to the level of delivering the raw material—the “brute material of information”—that awaits scientific analysis and processing (cf. Berg and Fuchs 1993:38). The door to the alien, which had half opened in the course of the practice of fieldwork, falls shut again as soon as ethnological theory formation starts, which—like all generalizing theory—involves nothing of an alien nature at all. But the lock of the door gets jammed. Malinowski’s

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

55

posthumously published field diaries show that the researcher secretly worshipped a double truth—a public truth, which ultimately once again sacrifices the alien to a normal science, and a private truth, which confesses unprocessed shocks of alienness. Furthermore, doubts remain about the suitability of a shared logos, which should have the capacity to link together not only the experiences of the peers among the research community, but also those of researchers and research subjects. A universal (gesetzesförmiger) logos, which leaps over the differences between the self and the alien, leaves little scope for hope in this regard.

Culture as a Web of Significance The interpretive turn in ethnography prompted another shift of the research coordinates. As Clifford Geertz announced in his programmatic essay “Thick Description,” he assumes in his ethnographic studies that the human being is an animal “suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” where culture is to be regarded precisely as these webs (Geertz 1973:5). Thick description corresponds to a polysemy of symbolic actions and expressions: What the ethnographer is in fact faced with—except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection—is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households . . . writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. (Geertz 1973:10) One can say that in his ethnography, which is oriented towards hermeneutics and symbol theory, Geertz in a certain sense fulfils what the older fieldwork strives for and has begun through participant observation. The turn to achieve this doesn’t have to be substantial but is nevertheless decisive. Geertz doesn’t begin with the hybrid method of participant observation that trails along with it much of the old subject—object-set (Einstellung); rather, he starts with participation, which in turn incorporates aspects of methodological distancing, including the necessary data collection. Thus, the dilemma of an impossible coincidence of participation and observation, of belonging and

56

Bernhard Waldenfels

distance yields to a preceding commonality that also persists when distancing oneself. The existence of a web of significance indicates that the threads of one’s own and alien experiences and utterances run into one another, before the question of a synthesis of ownness and alienness can even arise. We are familiar with such types of unification as passive synthesis in Husserl, as intertwining (Verflechtung) or chiasm in Merleau-Ponty or as the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) in Gadamer. Like the phases of the flowing in [of time],15 ownness and alienness merge into each other in the form of a “synthesis of transition” (Übergangssynthesis).16 The revision of traditional forms of representation, merely initiated in previous ethnography, now fully unfolds. Ethnological experience and ethnographic presentation no longer merely comprise the preliminary stage for ethnological theory formation; rather, “thick description” develops its theories by immersing itself in experience again and again, deepening its meanings. This interpretive process (Deutungsgeschehen) adopts aspects of phenomenological description, yet steers these all too abruptly into hermeneutical waters because experiences are treated as or like texts. The difference between the genesis of meaning and the interpretation of meaning, between coming to appearance and being verbalized is in danger of being obscured. Gadamer’s hermeneutics has made us sufficiently familiar with the open endlessness of the interpretive process. The remarkable art of description in Geertz corresponds in Gadamer to an equally remarkable practice of interpretation; and in both cases, the sideways glance into the scholar’s workshop serves as a substitute for setting up methodological frameworks. Yet, if we ask ourselves what of the alien, and specifically, the culturally alien is let through the textual lines and patterns by the all-pervasive interpretive community behind this research practice, we begin to sense disappointment once again. The alien is not continually skipped over scientistically, but it is overridden hermeneutically. True, cultural texts have their alien qualities, yet these are disarmed, in a similar way as we know it from Gadamer. Whereas in Gadamer the alien is integrated into a meaning process (Sinngeschehen) of potentially endless scope and is again and again overcome through understanding, Geertz (1973:14) defines the aim of ethnology as “the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.” The separation of what is said from the event of saying proposed in Ricoeur’s text theory, which Geertz explicitly endorses (1973:19, see further 27), seems suitable to guarantee a continuum of sense that transcends all contingency of linguistic events. In defiance of all incisions and dark zones, the process of meaning constitution (Bedeutungsgeschehen) establishes a unifying bond not only between the members of the culture under examination and between the members of the research community, but also between researchers and research subjects. Anything that has sense and value finds its place in the “archive of human expressions,”17 just as it does in Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte. Only what is not yet or no longer, but potentially, familiar appears as alien. Only the unfamiliar, coming from outside, is left as ethnography’s

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

57

speciality. “Ethnographic findings are not privileged, just particular: another country heard from” (Geertz 1973:23). The inaccessibility of the alien is contained in the factual boundaries of an open-endless process of understanding. However, this interpretive incorporation of the alien into a generality of interpreters hinges on a strong assumption. It presupposes the existence of fundamentally one single meaning process (Sinngeschehen) that is permeable to all sides and is not subject to restrictive conditions which throttle the growth and dispersion of sense, and impose limits on unanimity. As a number of critics have noted, this incorporation of the alien can only succeed if the textualization of discourse, the omnipresent authorities of interpretation and finally the place of discourse remain concealed. This omission has its parallels in Gadamer in the under-exposure of the formation of tradition and of corresponding conflicts of tradition. For ethnography, as James Clifford argues against Clifford Geertz, this means a “quasi-invisibility of participant observation” (Clifford 1988:41). The interpreting ethnographer threatens to descend to a mere mouthpiece of the interpreted culture, since his own role has not been given sufficient thought.

The Dilemma of the Constitution of the Other18 The third, current phase—if we follow our main source—has othering as its key term (Berg and Fuchs 1993:73). Yet, what do we understand by that? Johannes Fabian interprets it as a “making of the Other,” which is in contrast to a simple “givenness.” “Othering describes the insight that the others are never simply given, never just found or encountered, but made” (Fabian 1990:755). Simple “representationism” serves as a foil for a rather vague constructivism that currently enjoys a better press and shows stronger technological momentum. Here again, the two German commentators flee all too quickly into untranslatability by offering a whole series of German concepts as equivalents for the English term othering (Berg and Fuchs 1993:35), including “‘alienation’ (Verfremdung), constitution of the Other through delimiting from the Other and thereby the constitution of the self,” also “distancing,” “contextualizing” and lastly, spectacularly at the beginning as usual, the “construction of the Other” (Berg and Fuchs 1993:11).19 Such dispersion of concepts does not exactly help advance matters. If we keep to “making” we quickly arrive at “fabrication” (Herstellen), which in Heidegger not unjustifiably forms a close association with “imagining” (Vorstellen).20 This can be followed up in Heidegger’s 1938 essay “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” (“The Age of the World Picture”) from Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track, Heidegger 2002) of which an author like Foucault was quite aware. It is virtually impossible to understand how making something should bring forth something alien and even more someone alien as a personal Other. What shines through these batteries of concepts is the question formulated at the start of our ramble through the history of problems: what

58

Bernhard Waldenfels

does it mean for something alien to be experienced as alien? Whoever confronts this question has to acknowledge that experience of the alien also affects experience itself in form of a becoming alien of experience. Here the connection of constitution of the Other and self-constitution announces itself that Fabian has in mind when he asserts that “our ways of making the Other are ways of making ourselves” (Fabian 1990:756). An alien experience, which includes one’s self, has as little to do with a representationism, in the sense of an accurate rendition of a given reality, as with a constructivism, in which the constructors or devices prescribe the conditions for their constructs. Only if one introduces these and similar provisos and goes to greater lengths in clarifying the terms and concepts, may it be justified in claiming othering as a key concept. Similar refinements are required regarding what is presented in association with “making the Other” as the basic dilemma or basic paradox of ethnology and ethnography. The basic tension or basic contradiction is sought in the fact that the representation of the Other—whatever one understands by this—strives to represent something that refuses and withdraws from representation. Moreover, what opposes representation seems to be nothing else than precisely the otherness of the Other, the alienness of the alien. However, in Berg and Fuchs’ opening commentary this otherness is accentuated in a variety of ways, and this in accordance with the development of the problem within ethnography. Malinowski’s fieldwork would correspondingly find its “constitutive paradox” in the fact that the viewpoints and ways of seeing of the others (the natives) are accessed, reported and represented in a “paternalistic” way by an outsider (Berg and Fuchs 1993:36). At the same time, a “paradox of proximity and distancing” is claimed that emerges from the tension between situative participation and generalizing account (Darstellung) (42). In the case of more recent authors like Fabian and Clifford it is the “break between encounter and representation” (73), leading to a “fundamental ethnological contradiction” that causes Fabian to juxtapose representation, now identified with objectification in general, with an original presence of the Other, a co-presence (Fabian 1990:756; Berg and Fuchs 1993:88). Berg and Fuchs who—in agreement with authors like Paul Rabinow and Pierre Bourdieu—oppose a straightforward suspension of distance as well as a simple renouncing of representation, finally shift the “fundamental dilemma or paradox,” which even affects an “‘emancipative’, (self-) critical ethnology,” to the “tension between the (not only) cognitive claim to appropriate and the claim to respect the Others in their otherness—which would have to include that they represent themselves” (1993:93). Thus, what is ultimately to be respected is the self-validity of the Other (Eigengeltung des Anderen), which opposes representation as a general form of appropriation including its “claim to universal validity” (1993:93). The tension, which permeates the process of the constitution of the Other, has therefore noticeably increased, since now it is not only an objective science of the Other that collides with the claims of alien experience, rather every knowledge and even

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

59

every preoccupation with the alien obtains the qualities of appropriation. In respecting otherness, epistemological reflection additionally acquires an ethical and political tone, since now the focus is not merely on what can be done, but also on what should happen. In the various aspects of otherness that we have reviewed: autonomy (Eigenstand), uniqueness (Besonderheit), proximity (Nähe), original presence (ursprüngliche Präsenz) and self-validity (Eigengeltung), we recognize individual moments of that discursive order of experience, which we relied on in the initial categorization of the concept of representation. Each of the aforementioned aspects would require careful individual examination; yet let us first limit our scope to examining that dilemma or paradox, which is attributed to the constitution of the Other. Similar to the way Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ambiguity, we can separate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ paradoxes or dilemmas. The latter are resolvable and reversible, for they rest on a false or one-sided view of the matter under negotiation such as, for example, Zenon’s paradox of the flying arrow, which is always at a particular spatial point and thus always at rest. Or they result from an untenable simplification as in the case of the lying Cretan, who manoeuvres himself into a dilemma by integrating the present speech act into the propositional content of his speech to make every statement true, when it is false, and false when it is true. The striking fact that the para-dox, that is, literally, what collides with common opinion, is proliferating since Kant’s enquiry into the limits of reason and Kierkegaard’s insistence on the finitude of our existence, is decidedly linked to the fact that infinite claims are supposed to be fulfilled with the finite, contingent means of limited orders. Such exaggerated claims always tend to emerge when an all-encompassing Whole, which no longer has anything else beyond it, or a First and Last, which has nothing ahead of it or behind it, is thematized with the consequence that this theme (in form of a propositional content (Aussagegehalt)) has a reflexive effect on the process of thematizing (in form of an event of saying (Aussageereignis)). A simple example: a statement about the world as a whole, about humanity, a culture, a people or a class would only be possible if this statement would itself be included in the stated whole; thus, this statement would be made to disappear as an event of ‘saying’ (Aussageereignis), while the place of ‘saying’ (Aussageort) and the time of ‘saying’ (Aussagezeit) would be integrated into a space—time order. To form a Whole, the alleged Whole would have to state itself in such a way that the saying and the said would coincide. The ideal model, as already implied in Parmedian ontological thought, would be the sphere, where it makes no difference from which point on the surface one begins; the distance to the center would remain the same. Let us return to the dilemma of alien experience and alien presentation. Here, we are dealing with a dilemma, which emerges from the difference of ownness and alienness, and does not coincide with the dilemmas of the Whole, the First and the Last, although these intervene time and again. The

60

Bernhard Waldenfels

dilemma of ownness and alienness quite obviously arises in Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Husserl intends to show that what the “ego” experiences as alien is “constituted” within and with the means of its ownness (Hua, Volume I:131, English, see Husserl 1960:104). The paradox originating from this attempt brings Husserl to the formula of an “accessibility of the originally inaccessible” (“Zugänglichkeit des original Unzugänglichen”) (Hua, Volume I: 144, Husserl 1960: 114). One could continue by referring to the aforementioned paradox of expression describing it as “presentation of the originally non-presentable” (“Darstellung des original Undarstellbaren”). The paradox would dissolve itself if one’s own self could leap over its “sphere of ownness” (Eigenheitssphäre) along with the means of experience and presentation that are at its disposal. However, this assumption cancels itself; for along with the counterpart of the self we would also have abolished the alien. The paradox would also dissolve itself if the “means of ownness” were sufficient to constitute the Other as other, for then the self would remain caught up in its “sphere of ownness” (Eigenheitssphäre). The puzzle thus lies in the impossibility of the “I” or “We” alone achieving the leap from the self to the alien, in a “reaching over” (Übergreifen), an “into-one-another” (Ineinander), as the late Husserl used to call it, which can neither be accessed one-sidedly from the self nor one-sidedly from the alien, since the self like the alien originates from a primordial distinction (Urscheidung; Hua, VolumeVI: 260).21 We would then be dealing with a ‘good’ paradox of alien experience, if the paradoxical tension were to lie in the experience itself and did not originate from a one-sided description or a contradictory judgment. The prepredicative conflict of experience is not to be mistaken for a predicative or normative contradiction. What is subjected to judgment doesn’t dissolve in the act of judging because it is already presumed in the judgement itself. The question is then how one deals properly with this paradoxical starting point; and further, whether “constitution” of the Other signifies more than a problematic sub-heading that is in need of revision.22

Ethnological Self-Contestations A brief excursion should be permitted at this juncture. It is notable in ethnology how a bad conscience flares up time and again that is unrelated to any specific shortcomings, but rather has to do with the scientific project as such. It is often difficult to distinguish here between epistemological self-doubt and moral scruples. In the first case, the question is whether ethnology has the resources, methods and practices to adequately grasp the other or the stranger in the alienness of his expressions, actions, rituals and idea of the world and to bring the alien experience “to a pure expression of its own sense.” The epistemological unease attaches itself to the incapacity of traditional methods of acquiring knowledge. It is often reinforced by moral scruples, which derive not from any lack of capacity, but rather from infringing upon demands that originate in the Other. In this case, the overriding concern is the Other’s right

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

61

to speak for himself and not be at the mercy of the ethnographer’s monopoly of presentation. Yet an obvious danger arises here. The appropriate measure of self-criticism is surpassed when Stephen Tyler equates representation per se with political repression (Tyler 1987:338ff.). Presumably without noticing, he sounds reminiscent of Rousseau—with overtones of a representation-free radical democracy. Dennis Tedlock, who in a similar vein to other authors opposes such a moral tabula rasa (Tedlock 1987b:343–344), affirms in contrast a “utopia of plural authorship” (Tedlock 1987a:335). James Clifford (1988:51) cautiously follows the same line of argument. Utopias evoke what is desirable—desirable for whom? For everyone and permanently? Does utopian thinking not run the risk of chasing after an imaginary whole? Must the utopian “nowhere” not be newly thought through from the standpoint of the alien, for instance, as a shift of place (Ortsverschiebung), as the somewhereelse of an atopia? In popular writings, the bad conscience is rife on a grand scale.23 There is only a thin line separating the ethical and political reorientation that awakens the awareness for alien demands, from a moralizing of alien experience and alien presentation that submits such demands in advance to a moral law. Setting aside all potential hypocrisies and resentments that tend to go along with a moralizing push, still there always remains, within all the xenophile demeanor, a double tendency towards a break with the alien. The one tendency amounts to reversing the relations by juxtaposing culpable appropriation with innocent dispossession, like egoism tended to be turned into altruism in the early modern age. In the compensatory obsession with the non-self, the turn to the alien descends into a reversed reflex. The other tendency flirts with a conflict-free community sphere in which “a thousand blossoms bloom” (cf. Rabinow 1986:354). In this manner, the alien remains in the double clutches of the self (des Eigenen) on the one hand, and of a loosely defined commonality on the other. The defining paradox of alien experience— the contrast between the self and the alien—evaporates one way or the other. The fact that ethnology is haunted by self-doubts more than other disciplines within the human and social sciences is surely related to its exposed position. Unlike classic sociology, which stays within its own cultural sphere, ethnology cannot rely on a common pre-understanding. The primordial distinction (Urscheidung) between the self and the alien becomes a permanent professional theme that leads to epistemological and moral short-circuit reactions, or else to aesthetic foolery and cynical abreacting. Much of what smoulders beneath the official presentations and leads to a “split of the subject”24 (Berg and Fuchs 1993:64–69, further Kohl 1993:114–118) is attributable to disappointed scientism and to a similarly disappointed moralism.

Self-Reflexion and Polyphony The ethnological endeavors of those authors who are often described in an abbreviated and simplified way as postmodern,25 and who are neither satisfied with the scientistic processing nor with the hermeneutical incorporation

62

Bernhard Waldenfels

of the alien, can be interpreted as an attempt to make the paradox of the alien fruitful without dissolving the tension. It remains to be asked in what way this occurs and to what extent it is successful. The over-complexity of the question takes on particular dimensions at this point due to the convergence of various motifs like dialogue, polylogue, textualization, discourses and social practices. Accordingly, Berg and Fuchs don’t attempt to create the impression that we are dealing with a unified project that could be based on a uniform assessment of the problematic (Berg and Fuchs 1993:74). From the multitude of viewpoints invoked here, I highlight two central aspects: the self-reflexive turn and the multiplication of voices. Karl-Heinz Kohl’s resume, which strikes a more critical tone than Berg and Fuchs’ well-meaning introduction, also emphasizes these two aspects: “The postmodern ethnographic discourse . . . is self-reflexive and multifocal at one and the same time” (Kohl 1993:126). The erosion, which issues from alien experience, thus begins at two decisive points: with the ethnographer’s own self (and own ethnos) and with the shared logos of ethnology. It is vital to clarify in advance that the self-reflexion, which is privileged here, is not related primarily to the psychological constitution or the social standing of the individual ethnological researcher, but rather to the ethnographic research process itself (Berg and Fuchs 1993:14). This means it concerns the researcher’s location in a shared field, his participation in the research process as well as forms of textualization, medial techniques, social practices and much more. Otherwise, ethnography would merely be complemented by a biographical and sociographic component; it would not be taken into consideration and reflected on as such. The researcher’s selfexperience is certainly co-affected, but in the way that “alien experience” manifests as “self-experience” (Fremderfahrung als Selbsterfahrung) (Kohl 1993:114). To this experience of the alien as experience of oneself corresponds, conversely, an experience of oneself as alien, an alienness ‘in one’s own house’ that, among other things, undermines a one-sided or exclusive authorship. If this indirect and intertwined character of self-experience is overlooked, scientistic ethnocentrism is only replaced by ethno-narcissism. Since what is at stake in this reflexive turn is ethnography as process and not a separate or central subjectivity, forms of duplication like “ethnographer’s ethnographer,” “anthropology of anthropology” (according to Rabinow 1986:243, 253) or “anthropography” (according to Dumont, cf. Berg and Fuchs 1993:15) sound quite plausible. Nevertheless, here, too, caution is advised. The alien experience, which is presented in the ethnographic process, would again forfeit its character of alienness if reflexion were understood in the sense of a traditional philosophy of reflexion as return to one’s self. It would also forfeit this character if reflexion were merely perceived as transition to a meta-stage, as the reference to a “meta-anthropology” suggests (Rabinow 1986:243). In the first case, the alien would consist in what was not yet reached by means of reflexion, and in the second case in what was not yet objectified. The trend to overcoming the alien would therefore

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

63

only be delayed, not broken. This also applies for the endless iteration of representation in the form of representations of representations of representations (cf. Rabinow1986:250). It applies no less for the “sociology of sociology,” in which Pierre Bourdieu seeks salvation for a “scientific reflexivity.” The objectifying of objectification, or more exactly: the “objectifying of the objective social conditions” may demarcate that place in the social field where somebody (a ‘subject’) can appear; ownness (Eigenheit) and alienness of the self inevitably evade the objectifying external gaze. The claim that subject and object of reflexive analysis are nothing other than the “scientific field itself” (Bourdieu 1993:373ff.) disregards in old scientistic style the field theoretician and thus naturally also the experience of his self as alien. Since Bourdieu in his usual manner identifies social-phenomenology with an egocentric subjectivism (which only partly applies even to Alfred Schütz), we may recall in this context the debate about a “phenomenology of phenomenology” that was initiated by Husserl and Eugen Fink (cf. Waldenfels 1995, ch. 4) and left obvious traces in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of a “radical reflection,” i.e., reflection that becomes conscious of its own, unattainable preconditions. In discussing the relationship of philosophy and sociology, Merleau-Ponty remarks (1964a:105): “Reflection is no longer the passage to a different order which reabsorbs the order of present things; it is first and foremost a more acute awareness of the way in which we are rooted in them.” The reflexive turn remains bound to scientistic and objectivist, or to intellectualist (bewusstseinstheoretischen) and subjectivist tendencies, unless it is conceived of as self-duplication, as non-coincidence in coincidence with the result that every operative (fungierende) formation of and presentation of sense slips from itself. This self-withdrawal releases in one’s self an alien that escapes every appropriation. One may doubt whether the mirror term ‘reflexion’ is a suitable indicator of this withdrawal within the self’s relation to itself. The self-withdrawal releases alien voices. Here again one must beware of drifting away in the current of a traditional dialogism. The Platonic idea of dialogue, which is sustained with alternating nuances up to Hegel, Gadamer, Ricoeur and Habermas, denotes a thinking and linguistic space that, across all divergences and beyond all disputes, produces a homology, a fundamental consensus, so that the self (Eigenes) and the alien only emerge as relative differences by participating in a whole or within a basic set of rules. Scientism is a late echo of this idea—the “last superstition,” according to Nietzsche, which continues to daydream about a truth in things, although that truth is undermined by the sciences themselves. A dialogical change of course which steers ethnographic writing back on the tracks of traditional dialogue, and which integrates the give and take into a “communication among equals,” and reminisces about a “participatory whole,” as is the case with Stephen Tyler (1987:340), may promise an improvement in comparison with the scientistic impoverishment of experience; yet it, too, only allows the

64

Bernhard Waldenfels

alien to the extent that it can be integrated into a general logos. This doesn’t change even when one evokes “the other’s originary presence outside of the text that represents it” (Tyler 1987:289). Even if, in the old Platonic fashion, we work towards everyone speaking with one’s own voice within the dialogue, it is still the one general logos speaking from each voice whenever it utters a truth. Strictly speaking, one would have to talk of a monologue with distributed roles, since the “dia-“ does not furrow through and divide the “logos” itself. This changes with the “fragmentation of dialogue.” Only when every expression is subject to discursive conditions and calls forth effects that cannot be caught in a web of truth, only then do the adventures of alienness begin for the ethnographer, and not merely for him. Alienness thus only penetrates the dialogue when the logos that sets the rules for the dialogue, multiplies itself in the form of a polylogue or polyphony. This reconfiguration of dialogue, which we owe to Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary and dialogue theory, opens up the possibility of a field of interlocution and writing in which the ethnographic researcher and the subjects of research can participate in multiple ways and in multiple positions. Moreover, this takes place in the form of a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung), which is not regulated beforehand by a canonical logos, and which searches for its place within the discourse, rather than having it already. Yet, even here restrictions are appropriate. Whoever hopes for a miracle of Pentecost will certainly be disappointed. Polyphony does not mean eo ipso consonance and harmony. Polyphonic records of texts and montages of quotations, too, are staged according to theatrical directions that are not up for arbitrary disposition. Even the waves of the polylogue collide with discourse conditions that exclude a general osmosis of meaning. The logoi do not disappear with the great logos. There are orders of speaking and writing, which delimit the margin within which one thing can be said and another not said. At this point Foucault’s discourse analysis proves its strength, and consequently an author like James Clifford also mentions discourse, dialogue and polyphony in a single breath (Clifford 1988:41). Radical alienness can only be grasped indirectly as an extra-ordinary that at all times presupposes the existence of orders. Furthermore, we must beware of stating the plurality of voices, discourses and text types from the outside, or, worse, of counting them. What is at stake is a pluralization of voices that is never to be completed and begins with the division between one’s own and alien voice. One’s own voice is not merely a voice among others, but a kind of resonating ground for alien voices. The occasionality of the here and now cannot be skipped over; it alone defines the field in which the ethnographer moves, a field of experience and interlocution, in which the alien can appear and show itself. The alien can only be said indirectly through showing itself. Like the indexical “here,” “there,” “now,” “I” or “you,” it remains attached to a deictic field, which can never be fully transformed into a symbolic field, as Karl Bühler has convincingly demonstrated. Seeing and saying, alien experience and alien presentation

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

65

intersect, yet without ever completely coinciding. The difference between Here, where one’s own voice resounds, and There, where the alien voice comes from, also produces a genuine asymmetry excluding, among other things, that one treats listening as a mere reversal of speaking, and reading as a mere reversal of writing. Asymmetry only merges into symmetry to the extent that one’s own and the alien voice speak with the shared voice of a Third. The motif of asymmetry, which plays a central role in Levinas, is justifiably identified by Dennis Tedlock with the “phenomenology of being Other, of alienness” (Tedlock 1987a:329). The discursive throttling and filtering of all vocal expressions, which are voiced in a polylogue, implies that claims for expression conflict with each other. In expressing something, one silences something else. A bounded order doesn’t allow that everything is ‘compossible’ with everything else like the different sights of a single city. Leibniz’s idea of harmony therefore yields to an incompossibility, as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in this context (cf. 1968:136, 215). The impossibility, which is co-experienced as such, forms another attribute of alien experience. The question for ethnography is how it can integrate these tacit impossibilities in its presentation of the alien. Relevant in this context are the reflections Johannes Fabian devotes to the relationship of writing and non-writing (Fabian 1990:767–772). However, this cannot involve a critique of writing that plainly accuses writing of “oppression” (768). What is required is, rather, a writing practice that in the act of writing itself leaves space for the unwritten and unwritable, instead of filling the white sheet with written text.26 Finally, one aspect of polyphony is to be highlighted that is closely connected with representation as substitution (Stellvertretung) and is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.27 Just as alienness only assumes radical forms when it is experienced with one’s own body, in one’s own Ego, so too polyphony only obtains its full meaning when—as predicated by Bakhtin—it is understood as inner polyphony, which erodes all harmony and uniformity of one’s own voice. Inner polyphony corresponds to the necessity of an inner-linguistic translation, claimed by Roman Jakobson and, following him, Dennis Tedlock (1987a:329). The key factor is here that the self and the alien overlap and permeate each other. Others speak through me, even before I step in their place and speak for them. Conversely, alienness meets us in the alien before the Other makes himself the advocate of an alien voice. Representation (Stellvertretung), which means more than a paternalistic usurpation, presupposes that I am never completely in my own place. Following Merleau-Ponty one can speak of a “vertical intersubjectivity” (1968:175), of an alienness, therefore, that puts its stamp on me, before the mediatory mechanisms of understanding, of searching for consensus or of concluding the contract set in. The idea of an original “substitution” for the Other, a kind of hostage status, which Levinas develops in Autrement qu’être et au-dela de l’essence, contributes to shifting representation (Stellvertretung) to a level where the self is interlocked with the alien and both emerge with a double blow (Doppelschlag).

66

Bernhard Waldenfels

Presentation as Response Finally, my intention is not to summarize the multiplicity of problems in terms of a single common denominator. Nevertheless, there is a single constantly recurring motif that keeps going our main question about the connection of alien experience and alien presentation. Reflective duplication and polyphonic multiplication, which prevent that alien experience begins in the self and ends in a Whole, presuppose a moving force (movens) that cannot be pinned down. The alien appears like a strange guest, who comes and goes, who is there, yet never completely belongs, and this is more than a metaphor, as since time immemorial the role of the guest has been closely linked to the status of the alien. The question, which we finally need to ask ourselves, is: how do we refer to the alien, when we are talking about it? Another question lies behind this: is the alien something that we can talk of and about at all? This question sounds rhetorical, since we constantly do so and since ethnography does this professionally. Perhaps, we should ask ourselves the first question by allowing ourselves to be disquieted by the second. We have attempted to show that representation in all its forms arrives at a paradoxically skewed position, if it strives to satisfy the demand of the alien. The alien cannot simply be understood as such, like something that obtains its meaning from our experience and is subject to specific phenomenological rules; it cannot be presentified like a distant or past event for which we were, or could be, witnesses; it cannot be presented in a suitable medium, as though one could learn the language of the alien like a foreign language; it cannot be substituted for like a ward, in whose mouth the guardian puts words.28 The alien is more and other than what can be “represented,” yet it is what it is, not without all of this. The paradox of alien presentation, which has been noticeably reinforced since the introduction of participant observation, makes it tempting to break away in toto from the complicated web of alien experience and alien presentation and to pit a pure presence against the representations of the alien, to substitute evocation for representation and to overcome the limits of discourse in an “ethical discourse.”29 The other temptation lies in breaking off some pieces of the complicated web and being satisfied with an analysis of texts, media, discourses and practices, as if it were enough to undermine the illusion of an autonomous self, of a sense-totality, or a sense-continuum, in order to release alien demands. A lack of presentability says nothing about a possible worthiness of presentation. One’s own incapacity produces no alien demand, notwithstanding all the ethical undertones that again and again mingle with the analysis of finitude. If there is an alien demand which resists the diverse endeavours at appropriation, then it is something that we start from and have always started from, before we attempt to arrive there. Alien experience and alien presentation are distinguished precisely by the fact that our own experience and presentations begin elsewhere. We catch up to the alien as little as we catch up to the primordial past of our birth that is characterized by originary

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

67

alienness. I refer to such seeing, hearing, desiring, speaking and acting which begins elsewhere as responding.30 That, what we respond to is always infinitely more than what we give as an answer “with our own means.” The alien constitutes itself as alien in that we respond to it; the alien as alien thus proves itself as the unimaginable and unpresentable in all imaginations and presentations. We have already encountered precisely this as the fruitful, ‘good’ paradox of expression and presentation. The question then is what a research practice might look like that preserves in its own practices the alien experience from which it originates. An alien presentation would itself have to adopt the characteristics of responding in order to “formulate insights in response to concrete, practical demands . . . while trying to stay in the presence of the Other [to be more precise: in the presence/absence of the others]”31 (Fabian 1990:770). As a kind of excess that doesn’t dissolve in the interplay of appropriation and becoming whole, the alien demands a kind of double gaze, double hearing and double speech, as we have already encountered in rudimentary and inadequate form in participant observation. This presupposes that in what is seen, heard and said a responsive seeing, hearing and saying presents and simultaneously withdraws itself. The responsivity of speech neither finds rest in a pure saying, which transcends all that has been said, nor in a pure said-ness (Gesagten), which could preserve all saying. Speaking in dialogic terms this would mean that the first, second and third persons are all involved together in shifting ways (cf. Tedlock 1987a:332). However, this would be a “dialogue” that does not proceed symmetrically and synchronically, but would be diachronically displaced against itself. A presentation, which accounts for alienness, is only possible as indirect speech, which always reveals more and something different than what it says, and is in this respect comparable to the omission techniques of “indirect painting” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b:184). Since the alien does not restrict itself to the alienness of other cultures, but appears everywhere where orders reach their limits, it is not surprising that ethnographic experiments with alienness have long since set a precedent. Exceptional conditions have multiplied. The same then applies for the entanglement in diverse paradoxes. Where these paradoxes are completely absent, reason is sleeping.

Acknowledgments Translation of the German original was supported by a SSHRC Connection grant (No. 611–2013–0014); printed with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt.

Notes 1 “Crisis of ethnographical representation” was the subtitle of the essay collection edited by Eberhard Berg and Martin Fuchs, Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text (1993). The collection offers a cross-section of recent research. The original texts, which all originate from the US, mostly appeared in the second half of the 1980s.

68

Bernhard Waldenfels

2 I will adopt the usual term “ethnology” when referring to the discipline as a whole and its general theoretical claims, and “ethnography” when concrete practices of description and writing are under discussion. The debate which informs our analysis is mainly concerned with questions of ethnography. 3 See, in particular, Topographie des Fremden (1997), Chapter 4: “Phänomenologie als Xenologie. Das Paradox einer Wissenschaft vom Fremden” (published in Italian in 1992); here, I continue on a broader basis with my approach to ethnology which I have begun in this work. 4 Cf. the article on “representation” in Volume 8 of the Historical Dictionary of Philosophy that includes no less than 64 columns. The preliminary note that differentiates the four above-mentioned basic meanings states: “A conceptual history of ‘R’ [representation] based on the scheme of these four essential meanings remains a desideratum”; the decisive obstacle are the “permanently existent equivocations.” Such equivocations are reinforced in an unfortunate manner, if one appropriates Cassirer’s diversified use of this term (cf. 1964:131: Darstellung, 133: Vertreter eines Ganzen, 199: Vergegenwärtigung, 229: Repräsentation oder Intention, 236: Beziehung vs. Unmittelbares) in an unqualified way. On the “Crisis of Representation” cf. section 4 of the quoted article, which undertakes more a searching enterprise than a conceptual analysis. 5 Translators’ note: Christian Wolff (1679–1754), philosopher in the German enlightenment, whose work had a profound influence on the terminology of modern German philosophy. 6 Compare, for example, Levinas’ relevant essay “La ruine de la representation,” first published in 1959 in a volume in memory of Husserl (reprinted in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1967). 7 Already in Thomas Aquinus a distinction is drawn between representation ad modum imaginis and ad modum vestigii, a repraesentatio speculi and a repraesentatio libri. A clear differentiation between the forms of representation distinguished by us is not to be found in the context of Scholastic philosophy. Cf. the article “Representation” (see above, note 5), column 791. 8 See further the far-sighted critique by Maurice Merleau-Ponty of the classical history of philosophy that he practises in his work Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). 9 Translators’ note: The German translation of Clifford’s essay from which Waldenfels cites has divided one sentence in the original into two. Waldenfels only cites the first of these. The original passage goes like this: “Experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic processes are at work, discordantly, in any ethnography, but coherent presentation presupposes a controlling mode of authority.” 10 I refer to Chapter 3 in: Grenzen der Normalisierung (1998): “Antwortlogik statt Entwicklungslogik: Zur Frage nach Krise und Dynamik in der Kultur.” 11 See Waldenfels (1997:20–22, 68, 110ff.) Even if one follows English and French usage and refers to the “Other,” one cannot escape the necessity of an objective distinction. “The image of the Other accentuates the relationship that ethnology maintains with its counterpart,” as stated in Berg and Fuchs (1993:9). Now, besides the fact that the history of “otherness” which extends from Plato’s Sophist to Hegel’s dialectic, hardly justifies to reduce the motif of “otherness” to an “image,” the question would be what distinguishes the “counterpart” from a mere object, and even further from a mere alter ego. 12 More exactly, we would have to assume a specific phase, and even more exactly— a specific reception status of the natural sciences. 13 The electrodynamic field concept not only changed the relation of power and spatiality in physics, it also produced substantial effects in the human and social sciences and in their phenomenological environment.

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

69

14 The indexicality and reflexivity of everyday action plays a central role in the ethnomethodological studies of Harald Garfinkel (1967), and this also applies for a series of other methodological problems that are discussed in contemporary ethnography. 15 Translators’ note: This is missing in the original but was added under consideration to the passages from Merleau-Ponty quoted by Waldenfels, which refer to the problem of time. 16 Merleau-Ponty (2012:443). 17 Translators’ note: The phrase “Archiv menschlicher Äußerungen” is newly rendered here; Geertz’s original phrase was “in the consultable record of what man has said” (1973:30). 18 Translators’ note: Fremdkonstitution has here been rendered as “constitution of the Other,” rather than “constitution of the alien,” since the term suggests the appearance of something as other in experience, rather than an alien experience in the strict sense. 19 In this regard we refer to Michael Theunissen’s pertinent monograph The Other (Der Andere 1977:84) where he renders the central process of the constitution of the Other with “othering” [“Veranderung”], as occasionally Husserl does too (cf. Der Andere 1977:xiii, note 20), who elsewhere speaks of “alienation” (Entfremdung) to designate the appearance of the alien in my experience (Hua, vol. VI, p. 189). These are merely two examples from the rich supply of concepts from a phenomenology of alien experience and of the constitution of the Other. 20 See further in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century school philosophy the definition of representation as “production of intentional presence” that includes even the etymological explanation of “repraesentare” as “rem praesentem facere” (Article “Representation,” see note 5 above, column 797). 21 Husserl’s treatment of the question of alien experience is certainly not devoid of ambiguities, and what is offered by him as the actual solution, in my opinion, presents no solution. Yet, Husserl circumscribed the problem of alienness with extraordinary intensity. Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida and many others were able to depart from here with their own attempts at revision. These endeavours should not end in a gentle and watered down form of “intersubjectivity” from which one has removed the sting of the alien—then it is better to err with Husserl! Cf. further the recent overview by Iris Därmann, “Fremdgehen: Phänomenologische ‘Schritte zum Anderen’” (1998) about possible variants of a phenomenology of the alien, which is richly peppered with references to the literature. 22 Sartre already succinctly observes: “On rencontre autrui, on ne le constitue pas” (1943:307). 23 Other examples of a “crisis of ethnology,” even tending towards the “self-surrender” of this discipline, can be found in Justin Stagl: “Die Beschreibung des Fremden in der Wissenschaft” (1981, “The Description of the Alien in Science”). While contributing much that is worthy of discussion regarding the scientific art of description, the author makes his task too easy by referring to a “self-understanding of science as a search for truth that is open to everyone, communal and directed at reality as a whole” (Stagl 1981:275), to “a humanist basic option” (279), and when he does not hesitate to merge ethnography straight into a “transcultural science” (288). If this were an option, virtually all the problems addressed here would simply vanish. 24 Translators’ note: Waldenfels here refers to the tendency in traditional anthropology to separate the subjectivity of the ethnographer from the official scientific account of his or her research. If at all, personal and emotional experiences and attitudes had to be described in separate, non-scientific texts, like diaries or fiction writing.

70

Bernhard Waldenfels

25 See further Berg and Fuchs’ carefully moderated comments (1993:75). The authors emphasize the strong phenomenological and dialogical influences that don’t fit into the usual image of postmodernism. It is worth noting that Foucault whom James Clifford is following in this respect (cf. Berg and Fuchs 1993:77) avoided declaring himself as postmodern and that Derrida avoids this to the present day. [Translators’ note: Derrida died in 2004, Waldenfels’ essay was published in 1999]. 26 Translators’ note: “Es bedarf vielmehr einer Schreibpraxis, die im Schreiben selbst Ungeschriebenes and Unschreibbares ausspart, anstatt das weisse Blatt mit Geschriebenem zu füllen.” This sentence posed difficulties of translation as the German word “aussparen” literally means “leave out.” The context within the sentence, and in the whole argument, suggests a more active translation as “to make or leave space.” 27 Translators’ note: That is, the next chapter of the book in which the essay was published originally, Vielstimmigkeit der Rede. 1999. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 28 Translators’ note: This is a word play on the meaning of the German term for guardian, “Vormund,” which contains the word for mouth, “Mund.” 29 Stephen Tyler, for example, argues this (Tyler 1987:341). The fruitful arguments presented by this author, as well as by Dennis Tedlock and Johannes Fabian, should be prevented from drifting away into the questionable waters of unmediated dialogism. The immediacy of the Other presupposes precisely those means and mediations that it breaks through. One cannot grasp the reverse of the extraordinary without the face of the ordinary. 30 On the connection between political representation and responsiveness or responsibility cf. Birch, A. H. 1964. Representative and Responsible Government. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 31 Translators’ note: Bracketed remark added by Waldenfels.

References Berg, Eberhard and Martin Fuchs. 1993. “Phänomenologie der Differenz. Reflexionsstufen ethnographischer Repräsentation.” In Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text. Die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsentation, edited by Eberhard Berg and Martin Fuchs, 11–108. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bergson, Henri. 1972. Melanges. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. “Narzisstische Reflexivität und wissenschaftliche Reflexivität.” In Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text. Die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsentation, edited by Eberhard Berg and Martin Fuchs, 365–374. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Cassirer, Ernst. 1964. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Bd. 3. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Clifford, James. 1988. “On Ethnographic Authority.” In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, 21–54. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Därmann, Iris. 1998. “Fremdgehen: Phänomenologische Schritte zum Anderen.” In Herfried Münkler Die Herausforderung durch das Fremde, 461–544. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Fabian, Johannes. 1990. “Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing.” Critical Inquiry 16(4):753–772. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography

71

Heidegger, Martin. 2002. Off the Beaten Track. Husserl, Edmund. 1950ff. Husserliana (cited as Hua). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff ———. 1960. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Kohl, Karl-Heinz. 1993. Ethnologie—Die Wissenschaft vom Kulturell Fremden. Ein Einführung. München: C.H. Beck. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964a. Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964b. The Primacy of Perception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. New York/London: Routledge Rabinow, Paul. 1986. “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and PostModernity in Anthropology.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, 234–261. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’Être et le Néant. Paris: Gallimard Stagl, Justin. 1981. “Die Beschreibung des Fremden in der Wissenschaft.” In Der Wissenschaftler und das Irrationale, Bd 1 Beiträge as Ethnologie und Anthropologie, edited by Hans-Peter Duerr, 273–295. Frankfurt: Syndikat. Tedlock, Dennis. 1987a. “Questions Concerning Dialogical Anthropology.” Journal of Anthropological Research 43(4):325–337. ———. 1987b. “On the Representation of Discourse in Discourse’.” Journal of Anthropological Research 43(4):343–344. Theunissen, Michael. 1977. Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart. Berlin: deGruyter Tyler, Stephen. 1987. “On ‘Writing-up/off’ as ‘Speaking-for’.” Journal of Anthropological Research 43(4):338–342. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1995. Deutsch-Französische Gedankengänge. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997. Topographie des Fremden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp ———. 1998. Grenzen der Normalisierung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Weingarten, Elmar, Fritz Sack, and Jim Schenkein, eds. 1976. Ethnomethodologie. Beiträge zu einer Soziologie des Alltagshandelns. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

3

The Friendly Other Vincent Crapanzano

“The Friendly Other” arises out of discomfort with the importance notions of the other, the Other, otherness and alterity have come to play in the human sciences, most notably in anthropology. It is provisional and provocative rather than conclusive. It is divided into two parts. The first part is a panoramic view of prevailing theories of alterity. I suggest that their abstract, mechanical understanding, however insightful it may be, has encouraged a picture of social relations that does not do justice to their complexity—to their paradoxical nature, their rich texture, the ambivalences they generate, and the contortions of resolution and accommodation they produce. The second part is concerned with canonical notions of friendship as they have been formulated by Plato, Aristotle and Montaigne. I do not address their theories philosophically, that is critically, but symptomatically, as exemplifying particular understandings of alterity, which, through contrast, bring to light some of the taken-for-granted assumptions of alterity in the human sciences. I am particularly interested in how the moralizing of relations of otherness—absent, at least explicitly, in many contemporary theories—affect those theories and the importance they attribute to subjectivity, opacity, interiority, self-conception and the value given to pleasure, utility, goodness and nobleness. That the classical theories of friendship considered here tend to confound the descriptive and the normative leads me to ask whether the abstraction of relations of self and Other in the human sciences has succeeded in separating the two and to what effect.

The Abstract Other Notions of alterity are embedded in prevailing understandings of dominance and submission, dependency and independence, the etiquette of the encounter, the plays of power and desire, the development of self-consciousness and even the unconscious, the nature of the person, the body, identity, gender, race, age, personal possessions and notions of responsibility. More abstractly, they reflect the logic of inclusion and exclusion, perceptions of sameness and difference, equality and inequality, and the understanding of social and psychological dynamics in, for example, dialectical, dramatistic, behaviorist and transferential terms.

The Friendly Other

73

The Other is, ontologically, a hybrid concept, as it is used in the human sciences, since it can refer to a “real” entity, a projective one, and at the extreme, as in paranoia, a phantasmatic one that may, but need not, be articulated around a “real” entity. It may be functionally fragmented, particularly in its projective modality, as in Lacan’s differentiation between the Other, the other, and the petit a (Lacan 1977:292–324). It is transcendent, at least in the phenomenological sense and at times in the spiritual sense (for example, a deity or spirit). Though transcendent, it may be “located” outside ego in the “real” or ethereal world, hovering between exteriority and interiority, as in spirit possession, or—paradoxically—within the ego itself as an inner voice, conscience, or a sense of the unknowable at the core of the psyche (Lacan’s petit a).1 It may be treated with suspicion, as mysterious, menacing, death-dealing even, or as welcoming, friendly, seductive and supportive, but always disturbing—fremd, or alien, in Waldenfels’ (2011) sense—and in consequence challenging the status quo and the taken-forgranted. It always bears considerable symbolic weight in both of these modalities and as such is emotionally invested, at times, as in war or racial hatred, with inordinate intensity. It may refer to a singular entity—the person who stands before you—or a group, which, though less tangible, is subject to the dynamics of singular confrontations, as in the personification of a group. Of course, the singular entity may be taken as a representative of the group. The Other can simply be an orientation point in “space.” It figures the ego within that space by pointing out how it stands with respect to where and what (note a possible slippage) it is not. But the topological Other is not simply a definable point within a predefined space but it is also constitutive of that space or, more accurately, those spaces; for, the Other can shift and almost inevitably shifts over time in a serial or stochastic fashion, in which its earlier figurations influence, if they do not determine, later figurations. As such it orients, punctuates or historicizes our sense of time. I suggest that one way of conceiving of the Other/other is in terms of its pragmatic function. Whatever its own illocutionary effect, it can refer abstractly, as Other, or in its singularity, as other, to a potential or real interlocutor—a you—or it negates any interlocutory possibility, preserving, as it were, the referentiality of its object, as a she, he or they, or more interestingly it may play on its potential ambiguity. In other words, it may refer to a referential indexical—the you—or to a simple referential (a she, he or they) or oscillate between the two. The “you” as a referential indexical has both referential content, referring to the interlocutor of any exchange as it indexes the interlocutor in a particular exchange. Like all indices the other as you serves not simply to indicate but to create its context (Silverstein 1976; Crapanzano 1992:13–18). This is not the place to rehearse the interplay between referential and indexical functions other than to note that the referential masks the indexical, often leading to an illusory fixity of context. Included in this context are the relevant actors: ego and alter, self and other,

74

Vincent Crapanzano

and third parties if there should be any. Referential indices index themselves, at times creatively, at others stolidly. I have tried to speak of space and time in their most abstract sense, but I have not succeeded, if only because I have considered the Other as an index. This immediately forces us to reformulate idealized, abstract space and time as a social and cultural chronotope in which objects, persons, bodies and their relationships define that idealized space and give it meaning and value. The Other insofar as it has significance for the ego is vested with meaning and value, which it may assume, reject or manipulate. Put another way, it is appraised and characterized and responds to that appraisal and characterization. The Other is, we must not forget, animated even if that animation is frozen. Engagement between ego and alter is dynamic: at one level a struggle between dominance and submission, best illustrated in Hegel’s (1977:111– 119) master and slave dialectic and that of his progeny; and at another between fixity and change, convention and transgression, and incorporative recognition and resistance to that incorporation, that recognition. Insofar as the antagonists measure themselves against each other, they become selfconscious—selves which, self-characterized, are objectified as master and slave. But, as Hegel shows, ostensible domination and submission are not necessarily coordinate with dependency. Despite his dominant position, the master relies on the labor of the slave, rendering his domination fragile by giving the slave (potential) power over the master. We should note that the struggle for domination can be internalized, resulting in a fixating trauma. The incorporating recognition of the Other is reminiscent of the Other in object relations theory in psychoanalysis and figures in the classical theories of friendship. I want to make two observations concerning Hegel’s allegory. Both focus on the triangulation of a seemingly dual relationship. The first concerns the object of desire that, as I (mis)read Hegel, initiates the antagonists’ struggle for recognition and the fear of death that ends it.2 Put another way, in Lacanian terms, the object of desire triggers the demand for recognition (Lacan 1977:59ff.). Can we speak of the other without considering a tertium quid, a lure, which brings about engagement? Is there always a play of deflection between the other—the other’s demand for recognition—and the desired object? Does the object reify the relations between self and other—a fetish (in Marx’s sense)? Does it have the force of an indexical that preserves the relationship—its articulation and evaluation over time? Indeed, do the two consciousnesses even desire the same object? Is there engagement founded on misrecognition (méconnaissance)? Desired and possessed, the object’s symbolic value affects the personhood, the identity, of the desiring or the possessing other as it affects in complex (dialectical) fashion ego’s personhood. It becomes an extension of the other’s personhood and a possible, but only a possible, source of ego’s envy, for that object may be unwanted or disparaged by ego.

The Friendly Other

75

My second observation concerns Hegel’s failure to consider the effect of a real, implicit or fantasized audience on the struggle between the two combatants—one that would enable them to see themselves, their engagement, their struggle, at a possibly dangerous remove. Of course, in so far as Hegel’s allegory depicts the origin of self-consciousness (or, I would prefer, self-appraisal) the question of an audience, a Third, or social convention, is side-stepped since their recognition would not yet be possible; but, as the allegory has come to be used in the consideration of social life, the acknowledgement of the Third, cannot be ignored. Hegel has, in any case, privileged a moment in which the struggle is so dangerous that the audience, the remove, may in any case fall out of consciousness, as, ironically, the possibility of self-appraisal. Beside life and death struggles, there are, to be sure, other moments of such total absorption in what we are doing—playing a musical instrument, contemplating a sublime landscape, love-making, or, for that matter, welding or playing a computer game—that an awareness of an audience is lost.3 By privileging of these exceptional moments has Hegel been led to underplay here the tertiary logic of human engagement and the effect of social conventions on that engagement? In most discussions of alterity, the Other is figured animistically, even when it is regarded as a placeholder; that is, as being alive, once alive, or about to become alive, as in certain conceptions of birth and the afterlife. Put differently, the Other is possessed of a responsive consciousness. I use “animistically” to include animals, a pet, for example, a fetish, a religious icon, or, as a conceit, a portrait (e.g., Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray), or the mirror image. The relationship to subjectivity is varied and problematic. It may be given central importance, or, as we shall see in Aristotle’s discussion of friendship, it may be ignored. The postulation of subjectivity relates to its epistemological and evidentiary significance. The Other may be conceived of in certain epistemological regimes as transparent or potentially so; that is, its subjectivity is thought to be discoverable or at least imagined with some certainty, as for example on the basis of the other’s reacting as the self would under similar circumstances (Crapanzano 2014). There are epistemologies of the heart, as in Morocco, where knowledge of the Other, is understood not through mind (‘aqel) but in its immediacy, intuitively, through the heart (qalb) (Pandolfo 2009:88; Crapanzano 2014:276). And there are also fusion states where identities are said to collapse into each other as in spirit possession or in ecstatic states—Saint Teresa’s mergence with God—or into a third, as in those moments reported by some psychoanalysts when the patient and therapist are so intensely engaged, so caught up in each other’s transference, that they seem to merge in a distinct consciousness (Ogden 1999). But, under these circumstances, were they to exist, there would not be a sufficient remove for there to be an “Other.” These fusion states can have considerable metaphorical force, as in Montaigne’s discussion of friendship. I suggest, however, that at least in complex societies, such as the EuroAmerican, the mind of the other, its subjectivity, is felt at times to be opaque

76

Vincent Crapanzano

(Crapanzano 2014). One, but only one, of our prevailing epistemologies is rooted in the reality or the threat of solipsism. Whether accepted or ignored, solipsism, its possibility, if not its reality, influences our constitution of and response to the other. We do not really know what the other is thinking or feeling, what he desires or by what he is repelled. But, under ordinary circumstances, we assume we do on the basis of familiarity, responses to events similar to our own, or by simply working together, as Heidegger (1962:161ff.) suggests. We look for bodily clues, parataxic ones, changes in tone and even slippages of the tongue. Most of the time, in daily life, we ignore the possibility of solipsism. It only becomes an issue when there is a breakdown in communications, an unexpected reaction to what you think is transpiring, or an extraordinary occurrence. I think it important to recognize the positive as well as the negative role of misrecognition. It can be devastating but, insofar as it produces puzzlement and has a Verfremdungseffekt that is rendering alien the taken-forgranted world, it can also be creative. At its most romantic, it facilitates that sense of mystery, of suspense, that invigorates social life. To my knowledge, anthropologists, among others, have paid insufficient attention to the effect of their misrecognition on their interlocutors and on themselves. Does it open horizons of understanding and feeling? Or is it so disquieting that it produces a backlash, a retreat from an expansive view of the quotidian, or a nostalgic idealization of the past? Misrecognition can also be feigned, purposeful and manipulative. Having lived in South Africa during apartheid, the way misrecognition—purposeful misrecognition—figured in the understanding and the exchanges between the races was quite obvious. Opacity of the other can at times be a social convenience. So far I have considered the Other in its singularity, which, characterized, may come to be representative of a class of those so characterized. Ego and alter’s grasp of each other is less constant in most, if not all, social relations than is usually assumed, for the other may at one moment be taken in its singularity and at another in its representational capacity. The oscillation is from the intimate to the distant, as in flirtations, interrogations (the torturer as an ordinary guy one moment and a disciplined representative of the state, the next) and political discourse when, as so frequent in American political campaigning, as the candidate explains his policy on, say workers’ rights or taxing the middle class, an individual, a Joe-the-Plumber, is brought on stage in fact or story, as at once an exemplary and singular worker. The Other may be so massified, as when we speak of a whole people as x or y that there seems to be no instability. This is especially true of racism, but even racism can have fuzzy borders. When the Portuguese settlers in Angola and Mozambique fled to South Africa in the Seventies and Eighties, they were classified as whites, though many of them, children of mixed marriages, bore the phenotypic markers of “coloreds.” The “coloreds” were particularly outraged, since the Portuguese settlers had the rights and privileges of whites that they did not have. For the most part, they did not realize the degree to which

The Friendly Other

77

the Portuguese settlers were discriminated against by the established whites. Or, to cite another example, a white Canadian girl’s parents adopted a black boy. Until her brother went to school, her classmates considered her white, but when her brother started school, she suddenly became, if not black, at least suspect white, and was ostracized by her friends. Where the body is not perceived as marking identity, as in class and ethnic attributions, the borders are fuzzier. Personal style and beauty can at times trump racial classification. In Brazilian job classifieds, good appearance (boa aparência) is a code for not black (preto) or at least not looking black. I need not mention stigma attached to the anomalous discriminatory features (hermaphrodites, transsexuals, albinos, dwarfs or sufferers from disfiguring diseases) or those who are discovered to be or know themselves to be “passers.” There is one feature of the Other that deserves special consideration: its real, fantasized or metaphorized gaze. The Other is endowed with sight or some other perceptive capacity. It can look back in various ways—the controlling, seductive, beckoning, dismissive, aggressive, repelling or blank gaze—all of which affect ego’s sense of self. In whatever modality, the gaze of the other insofar as it is perceived by ego spurs self-objectification, which can manifest itself in, for example, an inarticulate sense of body (as in embarrassment) or in more or less articulate forms as one projects how the other sees itself. I should note that the dynamic of the gaze is often extended metaphorically to the collective Other. Self-objectifications can lead to stop-time, as when one is stunned by embarrassment or characterized in essentialist terms (Sartre 1964). The engagement between self and Other extends over time; it is always dramatic. It has an anaclitic history. The relations shift continually, even when the self strives to preserve the fixity of the Other (and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, self-constancy). The way the Other is constituted serves, particularly in prejudicial situations, to detemporalize the Other. Johannis Fabian (1983:32; passim) noted more than thirty years ago, that by ignoring the temporal dimension, the coevalness, of their engagement with their interlocutors in the field, anthropologists risk missing the object of their search by “deluding” themselves into a distorting temporal distance. Of course, if there is any truth in the dialectical engagement of self and Other, detemporalizing the Other backfires, for it also detemporalizes the self. The abstraction of the self and Other and the mechanization of their relations, as pertinent as they may be to our social and psychological understanding, have so articulated that understanding, the images of psyche and society it proclaims, that they have precluded from—or dominated—consideration of other more concrete modes of conceptualizing interpersonal relations and self-reflection. They re-affirm, ethnocentrically, our social and psychological understanding, if only by removing the dangers that lurk in the murky defiles of alterity. Perhaps the most pertinent of these dangers is our inability, our difficulty at least, to arrive at a systemic understanding of the relations of ego and alter

78

Vincent Crapanzano

when they are taken less abstractly as, say, friendly, loving, inimical or casual, particularly when these relations are immediately articulated in terms of the pre-classified parties to the relationship—friends, lovers, enemies and passers-by—rather than looking at the relations themselves before they have been classified. Focusing on the relations immediately calls attention to their temporality— their emergence, elaboration, perpetuation, transformation and ossification— and leads inevitably to narrative, figuration and the application of prevailing theories of relational dynamics (e.g., transference and countertransference, exchange theories and those of self-interest) that paradoxically arrest the very temporalization they are aiming to explain. Story, figuration and dynamics, all at a remove from relational flow, punctuate that flow at both internal and external levels. Emergent events, as they emerge, continually index their environment, including themselves both substantively and as events. Reference masks index, as I have noted, and thereby detemporalizes emergence or retemporalizes it, as a series of disjunctive events. The power inherent in indexical movement—its context casting—is referentially masked as reference indexes itself as reference, that is, in Silverstein’s terms, metapragmatically.

The Friendly Other: Friendship in Plato, Aristotle and Montaigne There is of course nothing particularly new in these observations, but they do point to the dilemma of developing a systematic understanding of more concrete social relations, like those between friends, as Plato, Aristotle and Montaigne and others have described them.4 I begin, however, with Plato’s Lysis, which is the first philosophical attempt to define friendship and ends in seeming failure. It is important to note that unlike most of the Platonic dialogues, which read like authorless theater scripts, giving the illusion of spontaneity and forcing the reader to follow the movement as live argument, the Lysis is recounted by Socrates, a participant in the discussions in which (Socratic) dialogues are nested. Irony is doubled, for there is the diegetic irony, internal to the dialogues Socrates reproduces, and the irony that arises from Socrates’ own narrative, indeed, his position as narrator. The indexical drama of the nested dialogues is narratively flattened; the irony inherent in the narrator’s account is so self-consciously playful that one wonders whether Socrates didn’t recognize the absurdity of defining friendship. Of course, his ancient readers, most notably Aristotle, seem oblivious to the comic dimension of the dialogue and comment on the arguments Socrates advances without regard to their literary context. In an erotically playful manner, Socrates asks a group of boys what a friend (philos) is.5 Instead of describing the qualities of a friend, however, he focuses on the relationship between friends. He immediately dismisses the notion that friendship rests on mutual feelings of love (philia), for the beloved

The Friendly Other

79

need not love the lover. He rejects four possible causes—motivations would be too psychological an expression—for these relations: (1) Like seeks like; (2) Opposites are attracted to opposites; (3) The neither good nor evil are attracted to the good because of the presence of evil; and (4) Desire for congeniality. The first and fourth arguments are rejected because the like or the congenial would desire nothing from the other; the second, because it would be monstrous that the good would be a friend of the bad; and the third, because evil would be the cause of the good. The dialogue ends without resolution. It is, however, an eristic dialogue that despite its manifest goal of defining friendship serves to alert Socrates’ young interlocutors to the fact that they are not yet mature enough to understand the full meaning of friendship (Gadamer 1980). Socrates’ understanding of friendship, as perplexing as it is, is mechanical, even when desire is invoked. Good and evil are understood in terms of attraction and repulsion much as a physicist describes magnetism. There is no explicit concern for the subjective experience of the friends, though the dramatic structure of the dialogue may evoke it. But such evocations have to be treated with caution since interiority and subjectivity have different rhetorical and evidential values in different cultures. Friends are simply attracted to each other. Aristotle also stresses the relations between friends (philoi) rather than describing friends. His two principal texts on friendship (philia), one in the Nicomachean Ethics and the other in the presumably earlier Eudemian Ethics, are less systematic than other of his treatises. The classicist David Konstan (1997:70) has argued that some of the confusion arises out of translating philia as friendship rather than “love” or” loving relationship.” His point is that philia has a wide range of meanings only one of which corresponds to “friendship” as we use it and that in this context Aristotle uses philos, “friend.”6 When one accepts the fact that Aristotle is exploring a range of relations then, Konstan argues, many of the problems in his discussion of philia disappear. I am not a classicist and cannot comment on Konstan’s argument, though, even a superficial reading of the philosopher’s texts points to his focus on the range of relations associated with “philia.” Where Konstan errs is in his implicit assumption that “friendship” does not also have a wide range of meanings. We refer to friends generally, best friends, deep friends, and when we consider spouses, children, lovers, colleagues, pets and even Jesus (as do many evangelical Christians) as friends, we are, in effect, describing particular styles of friendship. What is important is the inherent ambiguity in “friends” and “friendship” and their Greek equivalents. Before turning to Aristotle’s argument, I would like to consider his failure to arrive at a systematic account of friendship. His arguments are embedded in an array of examples, maxims, legalisms, casual observations and digressions that are not always pertinent. They confound levels and styles of analysis, the normative and the descriptive, public and private friendship. Though

80

Vincent Crapanzano

Aristotle refers to the affective dimensions of friendship, he does not describe the subjective experience of having—loving—a friend. His explanations are less mechanical than those of Plato, but he does not share Socrates’ playfulness and irony. Monographs, Aristotle’s texts do not evoke the genesis of argument that the Platonic dialogues do. Though they reflect his metaphysical, rhetorical and psychological theories, he does not refer to them specifically. Philosophers have generally extracted Aristotle’s “philosophical” arguments from their literary context and have often neglected to relate them to his epistemological assumptions, as, for example, his particular stress on the actualization of potentialities (Derrida 1988:633). Is he referring to friendship as an actualized state or as a potential always in the act of becoming (Brantley 2009)? Can there ever be a complete friendship? Aristotle stresses the temporal dimension of friendship as it matures over time, as, say, from an initial expression of goodwill. He notes its fragility. Those friendships based on pleasure and, to a lesser extent, utility are short-lived. Those based on virtue, insofar as they are immune to the contingencies of everyday life, are stable and enduring. They are not founded on immediate attraction, and even if they were, they require time to mature. I would relate this, as I do below in my discussion of Montaigne, to the relationship between death and friendship. Although commentators have argued whether the chapters on friendship in the two Ethics were written independently of the treatises and added later, the important point is that Aristotle apparently saw fit to include them. They are, as such, situated in the goal toward which all men (should) strive: happiness, or eudaimonium, which, Aristotle describes, at the beginning of the Eudemian Ethics (2011a), as “the noblest, the best, and the most pleasant of human goods.” He considers friendship a virtue, though strictly speaking, it is not friendship that is a virtue but something like friendly or loving relations between “friends.” The ambiguity is already present in the opening of the Nicomachean Ethics where he writes that friendship is “a certain virtue or is accompanied by virtue” (2011b:1155a). Aristotle approaches friendship in two not always distinct ways. The first focuses on the relations themselves without immediate regard to the social status of the friends, and the second asks whether friendship, however conceived, is possible between people of different statuses (e.g., between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, superiors and inferiors, humans and gods, masters and slaves, merchants and members of the polis), and if so, what form they take. The second is far less systematic than the first—legalistic, folksy insofar as it is based on casual and often stereotypical observations and common adages. Aristotle’s derivation of modes of friendship from the social status of the “friends” tends toward a mechanistic particularism that does not do justice to the intimacy of friendly relations. It can, in other words, be as mechanical as those sociologies that define social relations in terms of status and role without taking into account the identity-defining

The Friendly Other

81

pleasures and pains of ironized conventions, levels of commitment, alienation, elaboration and transgression. It should be remembered that the pragmatic effect of status and role are never without creative potential. Aristotle distinguishes three basic types of friendship: those based on utility, the most common; on pleasure, the most short-lived; and on virtue (aret ) or goodness, the best. Though some commentators simply accept the distinction between the three, others have attempted to place them in a hierarchical or a developmental relationship that grows out of utility or the desire for pleasure and ends, but rarely in Aristotle’s view, with complete, or virtuous, friendship. The three cannot be fully distinguished; for, both utility and pleasure figure in complete friendship as they do between themselves. Aristotle asks if it is possible to have a virtuous friendship free of what we would call self-interest. I stress the cultural specificity of self-interest, since, like altruism, it has to be related to the prevailing etiquette of self-display (Annas 1977; Brantley 2009). This is already apparent in the beginning of his discussion on friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics, where functional arguments can be related to those of utility: For friendship is a certain virtue or is accompanied by virtue; and, further, it is most necessary with a view to life: without friends no one would choose to live, even if he possessed all other goods. . . . What benefit would there be in such prosperity if one were deprived of [the opportunity to perform] a good deed, which arises and is most praiseworthy of relations with friends especially? Or how would one’s prosperity be guarded and preserved without friends? In poverty as well as in other misfortunes, people suppose that friends are their only refuge. (Aristotle 2011b:1155/263) Here, as elsewhere, utility, like pleasure, appears to instigate and motivate friendship—in a straightforward way for one’s friend and indirectly, in an ennobling fashion for oneself. But this mode of utility has to be distinguished from those friendships that are based on unabashed utilitarian motives. Political friendships—those between or among the politikoi, or members of the polis—present a particularly complex case. Noting that lawgivers appear to be more concerned with friendship than justice, Aristotle (2011b:55a22–26) claims that friendship, which he likens to concord (homonomia rather than philia) binds the polis together. The lawgivers are caught in a paradox. They should be free of self-interest insofar as they are ideally motivated by the good of the community, and, yet, they are essentially utilitarian, insofar as they are required for attaining that good. In other words, the ideal political friendship has to be at once virtuous and utilitarian. It underlies justice. Indeed, Aristotle (2011b:155a26–27) claims, “Where there is friendship there is no need for justice.”7 This is not the place to discuss the “utility” of conceiving of political relations in terms of friendship. It has been

82

Vincent Crapanzano

amply noted by commentators that what may have been an appropriate analogy in ancient Greece has little meaning today. What has to be asked is whether its supposed irrelevance today is the result of changes in our political system and its values or in our understanding of friendship. To correlate them in causal or functional terms is to miss their disjunction and the play that disjunction plays, if only rhetorically. Think, for example, of John McCain addressing his audience, as “my friends” in his presidential campaign in 2008. I want to focus here on those friendships that rely on virtue. They are based on goodness and produce goodness as they give expression to love and are conducive to love, for friendship is mutual and where possible reciprocal. But does it require equality, similarity and shared goodness? Must friends’ love for each other be reciprocated for there to be complete friendship? Aristotle discusses in considerable detail asymmetrical relations between friends. A friend may love his “friend” without being loved in return, he notes mechanically, without ever considering the effect on them—the pain, guilt, and forlornness that obsesses the modern sensibility. Reciprocity does present problems, however, for it suggests exchange that risks reducing virtuous to utilitarian friendship. Can there be disinterested prestations and gratuitous acts that demand no reciprocity and would be destroyed were they in fact reciprocated? “[I]t is clear,” Aristotle observes (2011a:1237a30ff.) “that the primary friendship is nothing other than the reciprocal choice of things that are good and pleasant in the abstract, and that friendship is, that which finds expression in such choice. For what friendship produces is a certain activity, not an external activity, but one in the person loving.” This is perhaps as close as the philosopher comes to considering what we would call—I stress, what we would call—subjective experience; for subjectivity, as we understand it, does not figure in his approach to friendship. He adds that loving is a pleasant feeling but being loved is not because it is not an activity. The pleasure of friendship “is the pleasure derived from the friend himself in himself and not for being something else” (2011a:1237b 3). Aristotle appears caught in a trap insofar as virtuous friendship has to be without self-interest and yet it is indubitably self-interested insofar as it takes pleasure—ennobling pleasure in it. Can someone be his own friend? Aristotle (2011a:12401, 6) asks. He notes an analogy between self-love and friendship. The latter requires two separate partners. But, self-love is possible insofar as the soul is considered bipartite but not when it is considered a unity. Can one part of the bipartite soul share with the other part as one shares with a friend? Aristotle implies that it can, for “that is the manner in which a man wishes good for himself.” He relates this to the view that true friends share a single soul. Although Aristotle does not accept this fusionist position, he recognizes the effects of a loving affection on friends. He writes: By nature a friend is what is most akin to his friend, but one friend is alike in body and another alike in soul, and one friend in one part of

The Friendly Other

83

body or soul, and another in another. But nonetheless, being a friend amounts to being a separate self. Perceiving a friend, then, must be in a manner perceiving oneself, and it is a manner of knowing one’s self. (Aristotle 2011a:1245a) Sharing, living in a community of virtuous friends, is, for Aristotle, an ideal. But he is too much of a realist to assume its possibility. He reminds us continually of the failures of friendships that result from the contingencies of life, base desires and self-interest. Though, as I have said, he never considers in experiential terms what we would call the subjective life of friends, insofar as he reflects on the appropriate attitude necessary for virtuous friendship, he carves out a space for subjective experience and in so doing points to the evidentiary, and in consequence the rhetorical—the affirming—role that subjective experience will play in the varying episteme that have ensued. Nearly two thousand years after Aristotle Michel de Montaigne approaches friendship with Aristotle in mind but from a different set of parameters that, reflecting his autobiographical turn, give greater weight to its experiential dimension. “De l’amitié,” which, though usually translated as “On Friendship,” should be translated as something like “On Affectionate Relations” since “amitié” had in Montaigne’s time a wider range of meaning than it does today. Montaigne’s essay is deeply personal: an idealization of his friendship with Etienne de La Boétie. His essay should be read not only in terms of what he has to say about friendship but as a memorial—an encomium—and a defense of his friend whose own youthful essay “On Voluntary Slavery” was to be the centerpiece of the first edition of Montaigne’s collected essays. In the end it was not included. In praising the Venetian republic, it was considered seditious. La Boétie’s essay treats friendship in ways that are not dissimilar to Montaigne’s. This is not surprising if we accept Montaigne’s insistence that their friendship was—in Aristotle’s words quoted by Montaigne—two souls with one body. He writes: “In the friendship I am talking about [with La Boétie], souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that they cannot be found” (Montaigne 2003:212). There is nothing mystical in Montaigne’s description. He writes that if he were pressed to say why he loved La Boétie, he would say that “it cannot be explained” except by saying “because it was him, because it was me.” Elsewhere, he says there was no one quality that led to his friendship with La Boétie. It rests on “not one special consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand.” He cannot explain its occurrence except in terms of “some inexplicable force of destiny” (Montaigne 2003:212). Friendship is simply the highest good. He struggles with various metaphors throughout the essay to evoke the closeness of their relationship, but they remain metaphors evoking that, which can be neither described nor explained. They cover—they attempt to cover over—the paradoxical nature of friendship (whether understood in reciprocal or fusional terms) that

84

Vincent Crapanzano

demands at once sameness and difference, equality and inequality, and identity and non-identity.8 Like Aristotle, though less tediously, Montaigne distinguished his friendship from self-interested (my word) acquaintances or accommodations to contingent circumstances. He observes: Within fellowship the peak of perfection consists in friendship; for all forms of which are forged or fostered pleasure or profit or by public or private necessity are so much less beautiful and noble—therefore so much the less “friendship”—in that they bring in some purpose, end, or fruition other than the friendship itself. (Montaigne 2003:207) Like Aristotle, Montaigne asks whether friendship is possible among fathers and children or among brothers or between husbands and wives. He argues, in the case of children’s relations with fathers that it is impossible, not only because of distance (as Aristotle recognized) but also because fathers have secrets they cannot reveal to their children “for fear of begetting an unbecoming intimacy.” And children cannot be friends with their fathers because they cannot give them council and admonitions. In the case of brothers, the sharing of wealth “weakens the solder binding brothers together (soudure fraternelle)” (Montaigne 2003:208). Friendship between spouses is impossible, he argues, because of legalistic marital obligations. Like the ancient writers on friendship, Montaigne argues that friendship between men and women is impossible because of intensity and capriciousness of erotic relations. Women “are in truth and not normally capable of responding to the familiarity and mutual confidence as to sustain the holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn [as friendship]” (Montaigne 2003:210). But, Montaigne speculates that were it possible, a bond of friendship between men and women would unite soul and body and therefore be fuller and more abundant than among men. He goes on to consider homosexual relations in the ancient world, which he finds “abhorrent to our manners” (Montaigne 2003:210). Note the relativism, so exemplary in his essay on cannibals. Though Montaigne is not averse to considering practical strains on friendship, he figures the bonds between friends in affective terms and, in more sober ones, as the need to share knowledge. So intense is his idealization of his friendship with LaBoétie that it is nearly impossible to avoid asking whether it masks the fragility of their relationship. Derrida (1988:643; Goodrich 2003), among others, notes a linkage between canonical reflections on friendship and mourning and, therefore, on loss—and on the fracturing of the oppositions “singular/universal, private/public, familial/political, secret/phenomenal”—that are contained in their model of friendship.9 Derrida’s point may be well taken, but we can also view the relationship in other

The Friendly Other

85

terms, particularly with regard to the ancient theorists. Given that friendship is always in the process of actualization or, as we might say in another idiom, maturation, friendship is only fully actualized with the death of one of the friends and concluded with both their deaths. There are important epistemological differences in our reflections on friendship, as witnessed by my reference to both “actualization” and “maturation.” Does the one suggest fulfillment and the second loss? And yet, in both cases, friendships can and do, for a time, extend beyond death, in immediate and mediated memory.

Discussion Although I have done justice neither to Plato, Aristotle nor Montaigne’s theories of friendship, my discussion, if only by contrast, points to the disquieting scotomas produced by the contemporary focus on the abstract Other. I do not want to deny the convenience and theoretical insight provided by prevailing approaches to alterity, especially the dialectical ones, but we must not lose sight of the fact that they are conveniences and subject to contemporary—ethnocentric—preoccupations and, as such, require critical scrutiny. It would seem that they sidestep more concrete relations that texture and motivate social life. I refer here to the (inevitable) moralization of relations of alterity; the epistemological assumptions that underlie them (e.g., the stress on the actualized rather than the potential or potentiating); the effect of prevailing understandings of language usage (e.g., the emphasis on referential rather than indexical functions); the mechanization of relations of exchange; the primacy of paradox and ambiguity in everyday life; and, finally, systemic understandings that so reduces the messiness of social, cultural and psychological reality that the effect of this messiness is ignored (Crapanzano 2015a). I stress our propensity to describe relations in terms of their defining terms rather than bracketing those defined terms, in order to focus on the relations themselves as productive of its defining terms. In other words we have to recognize the way in which our focus on the defining terms, referentially understood, by which we derive and classify the relations, blinds us to the genesis of the relations, to the way they both draw on and create their context, and how their derivation from stereotypic classifications blinds us to movement itself—e.g., the actualization of potential relations that come to be denominated as, for example, those of friendship. We are alerted thereby to the punctuation of relations, the oscillation between fixity and movement, being and becoming—ultimately the way the temporality of relations on one level and their history on another are articulated. This raises the importance of story, so central to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, forcing us to look at how our narrative conventions influence our theorizing. Think of the way, for example, Levinas’ (1971) notion of ethical responsibility that arises out of face-to-face encounters, is inspired by the Hegelian allegory. It also draws our attention to the narratives that undergird legalist argument and aphoristic references.

86

Vincent Crapanzano

What merits critical attention is the role narratives play in prevailing social scientific regimens. We often fail to realize the extent to which underlying our categories of social understanding, such as race, class and gender, are conventional narratives that are usually evoked iconically rather than elaborated. As we turn from Plato and Aristotle’s depiction of friendship to that of Montaigne we move from legalistic understanding, that gives little if any weight to subjective experience, to one that gives those experiences definitional importance, if not yet that which arises with romanticism and the hyper-evaluation of subjective life that has been taken as a threat and foil to contemporary social understandings of friendship and other concrete social relations. We should note that with the turn to the subjective experience of friendship there is a marked increase in figurative language—one that is conveniently bracketed in our abstraction of self and Other and their relations. They are to be sure convenient—but at what expense, we must ask.

Notes 1 I am using ego to refer to a perspectival source, a consciousness, in order to avoid consideration of self-formation. 2 My understanding of Hegel here is indebted to Alexander Kojève (1980), but I make no claim to being a Hegel expert. Rather I am using his master-slave dialectic as a trope for considering relations of alterity (Crapanzano 2015b:156–157). 3 I should note that the positions of the narrator and the reader (as mediated by the narrator) can be likened to that of an audience and, accordingly, narrators and readers have a certain—for lack of a better term—empathetic freedom. They may remain steadfast in their external position or they may identify with one or the other of the protagonists. 4 Pangle (2003) notes that after Montaigne’s 1580 and Bacon’s 1612 (rev.1625) essays on friendship, friendship ceased to be a philosophical preoccupation until recently. But, Kant and Emerson, among others, wrote significantly about friendship. 5 The constellation of Greek terms associated with friendship—philia, usually translated as “friendship”; philos, “friend”; phil sis,”loving emotion”; philika, “friendliness; phil tos, “lovable” and philein, “to love”—do not coincide with their English equivalents in significant ways. 6 Julia Annas (1977:532–533) suggests that unlike the English “friend,” philos has both an active and passive sense and relates this to Aristotle’s discussion of asymmetrical relations between or among friends. 7 We might well ask: Is it that friendship incorporates justice? Or is friendship so perfect that it presupposes justice? 8 Quoting Montaigne’s observation that La Boétie “surpassed me by an infinite distance,” (but ignoring Aristotle’s concern with the asymmetry of friendship relations) Derrida (1988:644) argues that Montaigne “discretely introduced” the heterological dimension of friendship. 9 Goodrich (2003) relates the relationship between friendship and death to Christian notions of the afterlife, but, as Goodrich himself notes, the relationship can be found in ancient treatises on friendship. He quotes Cicero: “real friendship is eternal.” Friendship must survive absence, he notes, death being the ultimate absence.

The Friendly Other

87

References Annas, Julia. 1977. “Plato and Aristotle on Friendship and Altruism.” Mind (New Series) 86(349):532–554. Aristotle. 2011a. Eudemian Ethics. Translated by Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011b. Nichomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert D. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brantley, Bryan. 2009. “Approaching Others: Aristotle on Friendship’s Possibility.” Political Theory 37(6):734–779. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1992. Hermes’s Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2014. “Must We be Bad Epistemologists? Illusions of Transparency, the Opaque Other, and Interpretive Foibles.” In The Ground between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, edited by Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman and Bhrigupati Singh , 254–278. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015a. “Half Disciplined Chaos: Thoughts on Contingency, Fate, Destiny, Story, and Trauma.” In Mass Violence: Memory, Symptom, and Recovery, edited by Alexander L. Hinton and Devon E. Hinton, 157–174. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015b. “L’autre entre l’abstraction et l’intimité.” In Savoir, Poivoir, et Processus Démocratique, edited by Essedik Jeddi, Kamaleddine Gaha, and Sofiane Zribi, 155–162. Tunis: Bibliotéque Nationale de Unisie Edition. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “The Politics of Friendship.” Journal of Philosophy 85(Nov.):632–644. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1980. “Logos and Ergon in Plato’s Lysis.” In Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies of Plato, 1–20. New Haven: Yale University Press. Goodrich, Peter. 2003. “Laws of Friendship.” Law and Literature 15(1):23–52. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row. Kojève, Alexandre. 1980. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Konstan, David. 1997. Friendship in the Classical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. Levinas, Emanuel. 1971. Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Kluwer. Montaigne, Michel de. 2003. “On Affectionate Relationships.” In The Complete Essays. Translated by M.A. Screech, 205–219. London: Penguin Books. Ogden, Thomas H. 1999. “The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts.” In Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition, edited by Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron, 459–492. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Pandolfo, Stefania. 2009. “Soul-Choking: Maladies of the Soul, Islam, and Ethics of Psychoanalysis.” Islam, Special Issue of Umbri(a): A Journal of the Unconscious: 71–103. Pangle, Lorraine. 2003. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

88

Vincent Crapanzano

Plato. 2013. Lysis (or Friendship). Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/lysis.html. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1964. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. New York: Mentor. Silverstein, Michael. 1976. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description.” In Meaning in Anthropology, edited by K. Basso and H. Selby, 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

4

“Haunted by the Aboriginal” Theory and Its Other Victor Li

Postmodern and postcolonial theories are especially sensitive to the question of otherness. They are intensely aware of their social, historical, institutional and geo-political formation and location, and express this reflexive awareness by taking an ethical stance towards otherness that can be described as anti-ethnocentric and anti-assimilative. The assimilative impulse that leads to the logic of identity and the ethnocentrism that can only see the Other in its own image are staunchly opposed by these theories which, instead, aim to value and preserve the Other as unbridgeable difference or absolute alterity. But I want to argue in this essay that in adopting an ethics of alterity, in showing sensitivity to otherness and in strongly opposing any aggressive appropriation of the Other, postmodern and postcolonial theories often encounter a problem in which their ethical approach to the Other ends up using the Other to prop up their own theoretical enterprise. In order to narrow my focus, I will argue that the “primitive” or “aboriginal” functions as a favoured sign of otherness for postmodern and postcolonial theories and that what we witness in them is a rejection of old-style primitivism, in which the non-European “primitive” is regarded as a known entity that provides a positive or negative contrast to the Euro-American modern, for a more subtle form of primitivism that respects the otherness of the Other, that seeks to let the Other remain in its absolute alterity, but that ends up making the “primitive” Other serve the theory that employs it. I call this subtle form of primitivism “neo-primitivism” and I define it as an “antiprimitivist primitivism,” that is, a critical repudiation of older forms of primitivism that nonetheless results in a reconfiguration and re-inscription of primitivism in new forms. I will look briefly first at how neo-primitivism manifests itself in the work of postmodern theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard and in the museological practices of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, before examining, in some detail, how neo-primitivism insinuates itself even into the work of a postcolonial theorist like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of our most vigilant critics opposed to the assimilation and appropriation of the Other. Spivak argues that we have “to open our minds to being haunted by the aboriginal” (1995:116) and, together with the other theorists and curators mentioned above, she seems to confirm

90

Victor Li

Michel de Certeau’s remark that “Theorizing always needs a savage” (cited in Féral 1980:88). I will then conclude by turning to Bernhard Waldenfels’ “phenomenology of the alien,” which may offer us a way out of the impasse into which neo-primitivism’s idealization of the absolute Other leads us.

The Primitive Other in Baudrillard, Lyotard and the Musée du Quai Branly In my book, The Neo-Primitivist Turn (Li 2006), I showed how neo-primitivism is present in the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. Where primitivism attempted directly to know, appropriate or incorporate the primitive Other to serve its own Western ends, Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s neo-primitivism sees the primitive Other as that radical alterity that, in resisting universalizing Western grand narratives, allows us to escape from what Baudrillard calls “the hell of the Same” (1993:122). The primitive Other’s resistant alterity thus also functions as a redemptive power that delivers the modern or postmodern subject from its own will to universality. At once resistant alterity and redemptive force, the primitive Other has little choice or say in how it is positioned and used in neo-primitivist discourses. Though critical of primitivism for its ethnocentrism, neo-primitivism is, nonetheless, in the final analysis, similar to its predecessor in that its anti-ethnocentric relativism reintroduces a subtler theoretical recuperation of the primitive. We see a good example of this critical yet redemptive logic in Claude LéviStauss’ belief that in our encounter with primitive societies lies “the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching” from our own ([1955] 1976:544). LéviStrauss’ assertion is echoed by Lyotard: “The real political task today . . . is to carry forward the resistance . . . to established thought, to what is well known, to what is widely recognized” (1988b:302). The break with established thought advocated in Lyotard’s avant-gardist declaration finds its inspiration, as is often the case in artistic avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Surrealism, in the challenge posed to the modern West’s grand narratives of legitimation by the narrative pragmatics, the petits récits, of a “savage” society such as that of the Cashinahua, a small South American tribe that Lyotard refers to in works such as The Postmodern Condition (1984), The Differend (1988a) and “Missive on Universal History” (1992). Similarly, Baudrillard’s aphorism—“The Other is what allows me not to repeat myself for ever” (1993:174, my emphasis)—puts as much weight on the challenge posed by radical alterity (Baudrillard mentions primitive others such as “South American Indians,” the Dogon of Africa, the Tasaday of the Phillipines) as on its role in rescuing and renewing the creativity of the postmodern subject. In both Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s work what ultimately matters is not the actual presence of the primitive others—the descriptions of these others are based on very thin ethnographic evidence—but their discursive presence, their function as theoretical place-holders representing a radical

“Haunted by the Aboriginal”

91

otherness in contention or conflict with Western universalism. The primitive others are merely adduced to represent an empty otherness, made to fit what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called “the savage slot,” a pre-figured category awaiting occupation. To both Baudrillard and Lyotard ethnographic details remain secondary to the theoretical role played by “the savage slot” in which, to quote Trouillot, “the savage is only evidence within a debate the importance of which surpasses not only his understanding but his very existence” (1991:33). Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s sharp criticism of Western primitivism’s universalizing and colonizing aim thus relies on a re-conceptualization and re-inscription of the primitive Other as culturally and cognitively incommensurable and, hence, opposed to any assimilation or appropriation by the modern West. Their work can, therefore, be regarded as a form of neo-primitivism, an anti-primitivist primitivism. As such, their project, for all its ostensible avant-gardism, rejoins that venerable European tradition, since Montaigne at least, that has imagined and relied on a valorized Other in its internal quarrel with its own culture. What is never asked in all these theoretical manoeuvres is what the primitive Other thinks of the role it is made to play. But the Other is not asked because while its discursive or theoretical presence is needed, its active response is not. It is, after all, only a theory-effect, only present, like Baudrillard’s Tasaday and Lyotard’s Cashinahua, to guarantee the continued vitality of Western theory. A neo-primitivism linked to an ethics of alterity, similar to Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s, can also be found in recent museological practice. On June 20, 2006, a new museum was inaugurated in Paris by Jacques Chirac, then President of France, who had pushed for its creation. Honoured guests on that occasion included the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu. This new museum, which joined many other great museums in Paris, is called the Musée du Quai Branly. The museum takes its name from its location on the left bank of the Seine, not far from the Eiffel Tower. The museum’s innocuous name was settled on only after objections were made to another frontrunning nomination, the Musée des Arts Premiers. But for all the politically correct efforts to avoid the term “primitive” or its metonymic equivalents, the Musée du Quai Branly is essentially dedicated to promoting what one can call “an aesthetic neo-primitivism.” To view the cultural artifacts from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas at the Musée, one has to walk first through an upward sloping, dimly lit ramp along which the filmmaker and critic Trinh Minh Ha has arranged light-projections of slogans such as “L’entreé en soi ouvre sur l’autre” (Entry into the self opens on to the Other) and “Entendre avec l’oreille de l’autre” (Listen with the ear of the Other). One of the museum’s guidebooks describes the passage through this ramp as providing “a subtle mental exercise designed to adapt the Western mindset to other ways of thinking” (Viatte 2006:8). Continuing this theme of avoiding ethnocentrism and respecting alterity is

92

Victor Li

the call for dialogical exchange in the museum’s poster: “Le Musée du Quai Branly, là où dialoguent les cultures” (The Musée du Quai Branly, there where cultures dialogue). Together with this injunction to respect the alterity of the Other is another equally central museological precept: the difference of the Other is a difference of time. Thus not only do the slogans projected on the museum’s ramp remind us to open ourselves to alterity, the passage through the ramp is supposed to convey to us the impression of a journey to another time. The museum’s press release tells us that visitors are made to feel as if they are “making their way upstream in a river.” As Sally Price notes in her insightful and informative book, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly, “The rushing water sounds and images toward the end of the installation might also be seen as preparing visitors for the main exhibition space, explicitly conceived as a museological riverbed” (2007:132). The experience of going upstream has often been likened to a form of time travel. One is reminded, for example, of Conrad’s description of Marlowe’s journey upriver in the Congo in Heart of Darkness. One is also reminded of Johannes Fabian’s remark that anthropology’s reliance on evolutionary time “promoted a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time—some upstream, others downstream” (1983:17). Writing in the New York Times of July 2, 2006, Michael Kimmelman describes rather sarcastically, but accurately, what any unprepared visitor will experience on emerging from the ramp to the main exhibition area: If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky . . . think of the museum as a kind of ghetto for the ‘other,’ . . . an enormous, rambling, crepuscular cavern that tries to evoke a journey into the jungle . . . where suddenly scary masks or totem poles loom out of the darkness and everything is meant to be foreign and exotic. . . . The only thing missing are people throwing spears at you. (Price 2007:150) But the Museé’s emphasis on temporal difference is not just some kind of nod to Disneyland time travel or an Indiana Jones–like adventure. In terms of museological practice, the temporal gap provides a measure of the value of our present’s encounter with the Other’s past; hence, the wider the temporal gap, the more valuable and authentic the encounter. The museum’s principle of collection and display is after all firmly oriented towards the pre-modern or primitive. The museum’s identity, as one critic points out, “is glued to the past. The present and future [are thought to] provide nothing but degraded images of early humanity. As the curators’ adage goes: If it’s old it’s better, and if it’s recent it can’t be authentic” (Price 2007:141). We

“Haunted by the Aboriginal”

93

must note, however, that the value inherent in temporal difference is conceptualized and emphasized by the Musée and its curators, not necessarily by the producers of the artifacts on display or by their descendents. A visiting Moroccan novelist, for example, was both amused and annoyed by the display of bowls and jars from his village as examples of “les arts premiers,” a euphemism for “primitive arts.” He noted that his mother still uses these types of bowls and jars for serving soup or storing oil and that to exalt common utensils still in everyday use is to issue a backhanded compliment that ends up insulting him and his family as primitive others (Chaslin 2007:15–16). Accompanying the Museé’s insistence on the value of the premodern, however, is its belief that moderns (or postmoderns) like the curators or us can better understand, appreciate and value the aesthetic or cultural merits of these artifacts from the past, something their producers, lacking our modern cognitive reflexivity and more discriminating aesthetic sensibility, may not discern. As Claude Lèvi-Strauss, after whom the auditorium in the Musée du Quai Branly is named, has argued, savage thought is innocent like “an art that does not know itself as art” (Henaff 1998:158) whereas modern thought is more formalized and reflexive and thus knows not only the nature and value of art but can conduct a discourse on it. We can see in the museological practices how time can become a form of chronopolitics that permits moderns like us to regard premoderns or primitives as possessing the value of temporal difference: this difference is what enables us to exercise a non-ethnocentric openness and generosity to their otherness while also allowing us to mark the distance between our cognitive reflexivity and their lack of that capacity. The premodern or primitive thus possesses a value that should not be dismissed as it was in colonial times when a Eurocentric theory of social evolution regarded the primitive as undeveloped, backward and inferior; instead, the difference of the primitive Other is affirmed and valorized, though, it should also be noted, that valorization is only made possible by another version of chronopolitics which confers on the modern a cognitive advantage, a non-ethnocentric and reflexive mode of thought that enables it to value the difference of the primitive Other. The Musée du Quai Branly thus remains a monument to primitivism, though with a difference. This difference, which makes the Musée an example of neo-primitivism, can be found in its professed respect for alterity, a non-assimilative stance intended to resist, if not transcend Western universalism. This is a noble intention, but, as we have seen, it still ends up with the museum’s curator, like the theorist, situating and fixing the Other chronologically in the past and geographically in the non-West. Thus, like the ethics of alterity adopted by Baudrillard and Lyotard, the Musée du Quai Branly’s valorization of otherness has to face up to a number of difficult questions. It is to the difficulties encountered by such an ethics of alterity in the influential work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that I turn to next in this essay.

94

Victor Li

Spivak and the Aboriginal Subaltern Other Criticizing Jacques Derrida’s reduction of Chinese to a silent ideographic writing that is the very antithesis of Western phonetic languages, Rey Chow argues that the inscrutable alterity of Chinese is paradoxically converted into its scrutability as the Other that allows for certain theoretical insights. In her words: [T]he silent graphicity of Chinese writing is both inscrutable and very scrutable: though Westerners such as Derrida may not be able to read it, they nonetheless proceed to do so by inscribing in it a new kind of theorizing; . . . a new kind of intelligibility. The inscrutable Chinese ideogram has led to a new scrutability, a new insight that remains western and that becomes, thereafter, global. (Chow 2001:72) To Chow, the unintelligible Other becomes intelligible as that which enables a critique of the modern West, its unrepresentability the very representation of the Other’s power to mark the limits of Western knowledge. The Other’s designated unassimilability and unintelligibility guarantee its exteriority to modern Western epistemes, its radical and incommensurable otherness. Ethnocentrism is, therefore, held in check and an external zone of authentic otherness is preserved, a utopian outside to remind us of our limitations. At the same time, however, the presence of an unintelligible, unrepresentable Other delivers the modern West from its ethnocentric imperiousness, making it more self-reflexive and self-critical, ensuring thereby that it is not duped by its own blind arrogance. The Other makes possible an awareness of limitation, but it is, nonetheless, an awareness that confers greater knowledge and enlightenment. Chow has astutely noted how the Western subject can use the Other for self-critique as well as for enhanced understanding and authority: “Our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage and all such figures is therefore a desire to hold on to an unchanging certainty somewhere outside our own ‘fake’ experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped,’ which is a not-too-innocent desire to seize control” (1993:53). Though Chow may overstate the subject’s “desire to seize control,” she is surely right to suggest that the subject’s commitment to demystification, to being “non-duped” (which should be supported) is enabled by its continuing mystification of an exterior, authentic Other (which poses a problem). Such an inseparability of demystification from mystification describes the powerful paralogic present in some of our sharpest postcolonial critiques of Eurocentrism, critiques that still have to presuppose an Other whose primal, untouched authenticity provides the utopian exterior to a globalizing Western modernity. Here a brief examination of some of Gayatri Spivak’s writings will prove instructive. Spivak is one of our most vigilant critics of Orientalist and primitivist forms of representation. Her devastating critique of Julia Kristeva’s About

“Haunted by the Aboriginal”

95

Chinese Women, for example, concludes that the book’s essentializing opposition of an archaic matrilineal Chinese society to Western patriarchy reflects “a broader Western cultural practice, [in which] the ‘classical’ East is studied with primitivistic reverence, even as the ‘contemporary’ East is treated with realpolitikal contempt” (1987:138). In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak is scrupulously alert to Kant’s contemptuous primitivism which is revealed in his dismissal of the New Hollander (or Australian Aborigine) and the Tierra del Fuegan as the not fully human, not-yet-subject whose lack can be made up by human (Western) culture (1999:9–37). In the same book, she also discusses how the primitivist appropriation of the native informant can be resisted by the strategic impenetrable silence of the Other. Reading J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Spivak argues that unlike Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in which the savage Friday is converted into the obedient native informant, the Friday of Foe is the unemphatic agent of witholding in the text. For every territorial space that is value coded by colonialism and every command of metropolitan anticolonialism for the native to yield his “voice,” there is a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked. “The native,” whatever that might mean, is not only a victim, but also an agent. The curious guardian at the margin who will not inform. (1999:190) Critics like Benita Parry are therefore not quite correct when they accuse Spivak of silencing the subaltern or native Other. Spivak’s notorious question, “Can the subaltern speak?” is not just about whether the subaltern can speak without her voice being mediated or appropriated by the metropolitan wellwisher; it is also about the subaltern’s strategic resistance to well-intentioned metropolitan efforts to make her yield her voice. Spivak pushes for a rigorous critique of ethnocentric benevolence, arguing that “the sustained and developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other” is more useful for the Western critic “than invocations of the authenticity of the Other” (1994:90). Her work is in many ways admirable for setting the postcolonial benchmark for critical vigilance against the ethnocentric appropriation of the Other to shore up the self or the equally problematic desire to constitute the Other as a romantic alternative to the self. But Spivak’s vigilance against the metropolitan constitution and invocation of the Other’s “authenticity” is curiously made possible by her belief in subaltern or aboriginal otherness that cannot be recuperated. For example, the strength of subaltern resistance to the logic of modern capitalism lies, according to Spivak, in the fact that subalterns are “non-narrativisable” (1990:144). They are like the Friday of Foe, uninformative guardians of an unassimilable margin. The subaltern maintains her difference refusing to become “the object of emancipatory benevolence”; thus, “the emancipatory

96

Victor Li

project is more likely to succeed if one thinks of other people as being different; ultimately, perhaps absolutely different” (1990:136). The word “subaltern,” we are told, “is reserved for the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space” (1999:310). In Spivak’s work, therefore, the subaltern is conceived as an absolute alterity. In an astute analysis of Spivak’s “singularization” of the subaltern as an incommensurable Other, Peter Hallward writes: “As if to conform to the familiar strictures of negative theology, the subaltern is defined as inaccessible to relations of nomination, situation and evaluation. . . . The subaltern, in other words, is the theoretically untouchable, the altogether—beyond—relation” (2001:30). But if the subaltern is radically heterogeneous, non-narrativisable and theoretically unassimilable, the question becomes not so much whether the subaltern can speak but whether we can say anything about her. If “Knowledge of the other subject is theoretically impossible” (Spivak 1999:283), how can the Other be described or represented? Can we in fact even name this unrepresentable Other “the subaltern,” a term which becomes representative in Spivak’s use, referring not only to those excluded or oppressed by modern nation-states or neo-imperial global capitalism—that is, the tribal or aboriginal, the victims of internal colonization, the poor and exploited, and especially the doubly oppressed women of marginalized groups—but also conferring value on their resisting non-compliance with the powers that be? Can we define what not only is supposed to be undefinable, but should, ethically, remain undefinable? Can we explain what being subaltern means without doing violence to the subaltern’s wish to be free from our explanations? Hasn’t Spivak warned us that “the desire to explain might be a symptom of the desire to have a self that can control knowledge and a world that can be known” and that “[e]xplaining, we exclude the possibility of the radically heterogeneous?” (1987:104–105). In her interview with Spivak, Jenny Sharpe addresses this problem directly when she asks: “Does subalternity have to remain unnamable?” Spivak’s reply is somewhat equivocal. She asserts that the problem is not that the subaltern is unnamable but that it is all too nameable: When one thinks about subalternity in the sense of no lines of mobility into upward social movement, it’s still not unnamable. We must, however, take a moratorium on naming too soon, if we manage to penetrate there. . . . There’s nothing particularly good about penetrating into subalternity. I’m not in search of the primitive or anything. But if we are going to talk about it, then I will say that if one manages to penetrate in there, and it’s not easy, then I think what we have to do is to take a moratorium on speaking too soon. I used to be against information retrieval years ago, but now I’ve thought it through in greater detail. We hear a lot of talk now—and I’m not particularly happy about it—about intellectual capital and cultural capital . . . if we are going to use that metaphorology, then I would say that this is like mercantile capitalism:

“Haunted by the Aboriginal”

97

buying cheap and selling dear because nobody can go there. So that’s something one really must be careful about. It’s not unnamable. In many ways, it’s only too easily nameable! (2002:619–620) Spivak appears to have softened her stance on the absolute inaccessibility of the subaltern and now admits that subalternity can be “penetrated,” a word that a feminist like Spivak would surely recognize as equating knowing with a certain sexual violence. If the subaltern is no longer theoretically or discursively impenetrable, we must be even more careful not to do her violence by giving her a name or trading our knowledge of her in the academic marketplace. The subaltern or aboriginal Other may be namable; but, at the same time, we must guard against the subaltern being too easily named. What we have in this equivocation is Spivak’s awareness that to assert the unnameability of the subaltern, to insist on the subaltern’s absolute alterity is to invite the criticism that she seeks to preserve some kind of untouched authenticity. Thus she protests that she is “not in search of the primitive or anything.” At the same time, however, she wants to retain the subaltern’s resistant alterity, the radical difference that is not easily recuperable by the knowledge regimes of the hegemonic West. Thus she uses the aggressive word “penetrate” to refer to the act of knowing the Other and calls for a moratorium on naming the subaltern. So even if one gets to know the subaltern, that knowledge, Spivak argues, should remain heterogeneous and not be re-coded as the dominant power’s understanding of the subaltern. After all, the subaltern is who she is because her difference continues to resist the knowledge systems that seek to understand her, even those that try to do so responsibly. Thus, in response to Sharpe’s question, Spivak admits the possibility of an opening into subalternity only to close it again almost immediately. On the one hand, Spivak has to concede that the subaltern is accessible or nameable. How else can we name the subaltern as resistance, or, even more importantly, how else can we learn from the subaltern? Spivak states, for example, that she has “no doubt that we must learn to learn from the original practical ecological philosophies of the world [that is, from aboriginal ecological practices]” (1999:383). On the other hand, she remains suspicious of Western metropolitan attempts to retrieve information from subalterns since she sees information retrieval as part of a strategy to recuperate resistant subaltern alterity. The word “subaltern,” Spivak reminds us, “is reserved for the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space” (1999:310). The subaltern must remain resolutely other, elusive, ungraspable even to its metropolitan supporters. It is possible therefore to argue that when Spivak talks about learning from the subaltern, the learning in question can only be genuine if the subaltern remains heterogeneous to hegemonic epistemes. In other words, any form of accessibility to subalternity, if it is not to become another ethno- or Eurocentric act of violation and appropriation, has to acknowledge a subalternity

98

Victor Li

that must, paradoxically, remain impenetrable and inaccessible. Spivak’s admirable anti-ethnocentric vigilance against any act that ventriloquizes the subaltern depends, it seems, on the maintenance of a subaltern space radically heterogeneous to modern forms of knowledge-power. To be sure, Spivak denies that her view of subaltern alterity endorses a form of romantic primitivism. Nevertheless, it is hard not to see her work as an instance of neo-primitivism or anti-primitivist primitivism. Spivak’s anti-primitivist gesture of uncovering Western metropolitan constructions and appropriations of the Other is enabled precisely by her insistence on the authenticity of an Other untouched by and hence heterogeneous to the forces of the modern nation-state and global capitalism. Let us look at a number of other examples of Spivak’s anti-primitivist primitivism. In the context of a discussion of “the perhaps impossible vision of an ecologically just world,” (1999:382) Spivak mentions a subaltern aboriginal group who may offer an alternative to modernity’s instrumentalization of nature: Among Indian Aboriginals, I know a very small percentage of a small percentage that was “denotified” in 1952. These forest-dwelling tribals, defined by the British as “criminal tribes,” had been left alone not just by the British, but also by the Hindu and Muslim civilizations of India. They are not “radicals.” But because they (unlike the larger ethnic groups) were left alone, they conform to certain cultural norms . . . and instantiate certain attitudes that can be extremely useful for us, who have lost them, in our global predicament. . . . We are not proposing to catch their culture, but using some residues to fight the dominant, which have [sic] irreducibly changed us. They are themselves interested in changing their life pattern, and, as far as we can, we too should be interested in following into this desire . . . But must that part of their cultural habit that internalizes the techniques of their pre-national ecological sanity be irretrievably lost to planetary justice in the urgently needed process of integration, as a minority, into the modern state? (1999:384–385, my emphasis) What makes this small group of Indian aboriginals interesting to Spivak is the fact that they were left alone (a phrase she repeats twice) by all the dominant powers that have ruled India; untouched, the authenticity of their culture still uncompromised, these aboriginals can offer helpful alternatives to modernity’s predicament. At the same time, however, Spivak does not wish to romanticize or primitivize these Indian Aboriginals. She acknowledges their interest “in changing their life pattern” and recognizes the political need to integrate them into the modern nation as full and equal citizens with all the rights and privileges which would otherwise be denied them. Unlike Kristeva, Spivak will not make the mistake of essentializing or primitivizing the Indian Aboriginals while ignoring their plight in the realpolitik of contemporary

“Haunted by the Aboriginal”

99

India. Nonetheless, there is a deep desire on Spivak’s part not to see them lose that aspect of their culture that still retains a “pre-national ecological sanity.” A similar desire not to lose the subaltern’s pre-national, premodern culture is expressed in a more mournful register in a passage in which Spivak recognizes both the practical, political need to integrate the subaltern as citizen and the resulting tragic loss of subaltern singularity through that integration: When a line of communication is established between a member of subaltern groups and the circuits of citizenship or institutionality, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony. Unless we want to be romantic purists or primitivists about “preserving subalternity” . . . this is absolutely to be desired. . . . This trace-structure (effacement in disclosure) surfaces as the tragic emotions of the political activist, springing not out of superficial utopianism, but out of the depths of . . . moral love. (1999:310) We notice again the denial of any nostalgia for primitive authenticity. The subaltern needs to claim her right to full citizenship. But, at the same time, this political realism is a tragic necessity because it entails the effacement of the subaltern’s singularity in her “disclosure” to the nation, her accession to citizenship. As Spivak sees it, the tragedy is felt most deeply by the political activist whose desire to gain political rights for the subaltern is balanced by the elegiac realization that an irreplaceable, singular way of life stands to be lost. Since neither the (mainly metropolitan) political activist nor Spivak can or desire to “penetrate” fully into the subaltern’s singularity, there is no disclosure of what the subaltern feels about her integration as a citizen into the modern nation. But to a non-subaltern like Spivak, an enthusiastic integration of the subaltern, first, into the circuits of nationhood and, then, into the global circuits of international capital, seems like a betrayal of subalternity’s oppositional otherness. The upwardly mobile, diasporic immigrant becomes a target of criticism for betraying her subaltern forbears’ resistant alterity: “Bhubaneswari [a young subaltern woman who killed herself in 1926 for failing to carry out a political assassination] had fought for national liberation. Her great-grandniece [a new US immigrant with ‘an executive position in a US-based transnational’] works for the New Empire. This too is a historical silencing of the subaltern” (1999:311). The subaltern, especially the unassimilated aboriginal subaltern who has been left alone,1 is seen as the Other who poses a limit to triumphalist accounts of diaspora: The figure of the New Immigrant has a radical limit: those who have stayed in place for more than thirty thousand years. We need not value this limit for itself, but we must take it into account. Is there an

100

Victor Li alternative vision of the human here? The tempo of learning to learn from this immensely slow temporizing will not only take us clear out of diasporas, but will also yield no answers or conclusions readily. Let this stand as the name of the other of the question of diaspora. That question, so taken for granted these days as the historically necessary ground of resistance, marks the forgetting of this name. Friday? (1999:402)

Opposing success stories of upwardly mobile immigrants and postmodern valorizations of mobility and migrancy (writers like Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee are presumably indicted here) is Friday, the mute and stubbornly uninformative guardian of the radically heterogeneous space of subalternity. Spivak’s work is dedicated to not forgetting Friday’s name even as other nominations proliferate in our contemporary world. We must remember Friday’s name for it enables us to discern the limits of those names that brook no alternatives, that seek to put an end to other names. Friday is the name of the primitive Other who resists assimilation into a triumphant Eurocentric modernity. Spivak’s vigilance against the ethnocentric essentializing or primitivizing of the Other which is clearly present, for example, in her critique of Kristeva, depends paradoxically on the enduring presence of an unassimilated, uncompromised aboriginality. The aboriginal, Spivak argues, enables “traffic with the incalculable,” that is, with the sacred. The “sacred,” Spivak cautions, need not have a religious sanction but simply a sanction that cannot be contained within the principle of reason alone. In this sense, nature is no longer sacred for civilizations based on the control of nature. The result is global devastation due to a failure of ecology. It is noticeable that less advanced groups in the fourth world still retain this sense as a matter of their cultural conformity. I am not exoticising or romanticizing the aboriginal, they are not all “radicals”. . . . What we are dreaming of here is not how to keep the aboriginal in a state of excluded cultural conformity, but how to learn and construct a sense of sacred nature by attending to them. . . . We want to open our minds to being haunted by the aboriginal. We want the spectral to haunt the calculus. (1995:115–116) The “less advanced groups in the fourth world” with their sense of the sacred are held up as salvific alternatives to modern civilization’s devastation of the planet’s ecology. Once again, despite Spivak’s familiar denial of romanticizing the aboriginal, the primitive Other is valorized in order to save us, its radical heterogeneity all too predictably serving our desire for a way out of modern civilization. The aboriginal must remain untouched in all its inappropriable singularity, outside the teaching machine, so that, as a genuine

“Haunted by the Aboriginal”

101

alternative, it can deliver us from our ethnocentric arrogance. However, as Rey Chow has cautioned (a warning I have already cited earlier): “Our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage and all such figures is . . . a desire to hold on to an unchanging certainty somewhere outside our own ‘fake’ experience” (1993:53). Spivak’s injunction that we “open our minds to being haunted by the aboriginal” is an example of our desire to have the radically heterogeneous Other save us from our illusions. The Other exists radically apart from us, but, curiously, its difference always refers to or is defined by our drama of guilt, remorse and redemption. Whatever its difference, the subaltern or aboriginal Other is still made to underwrite our theoretical enterprise.

Waldenfels on the Entanglement of Self and Other For the theorists we have discussed and for the curators of the Musée du Quai Branly, the primitive Other, even if it does not exist, has to be imagined in order for us to entertain not only the utopian hope for something different from our homogenous global present, but also the possibility of critical reflexivity in general. In other words, to be critical means to be able to recognize our own conceptual limits, the ethnocentric boundaries of our world-view. This requires us to challenge those limits through the postulation of an outside, an alternative to them. Such an alternative is readily supplied by the idea of the primitive Other. Baudrillard, Lyotard, Spivak and the Musée’s curators all turn to the concept of the primitive Other to test the limits of the modern world-view. The primitive Other is thus what enables them to ward off ethnocentrism and to be critical of Western modernity. Moreover, as I have noted, it is the idea or concept of the primitive Other that is important for these theorists and curators, not the other’s actual presence which may in fact contradict or question its conceptualization or idealization. The idealization of the primitive Other leads, however, to a number of problematic, if unintended consequences. While the primitive Other enables our theorists to expose the limits of Western thought, it also gains them a renewed epistemic advantage which once again opens up a gap between themselves and the Other. From Baudrillard to Spivak, what we have observed is a troubling movement in which the theorist’s self-critical generosity to the primitive Other returns as a greater form of theoretical awareness not necessarily shared by the Other. Generosity to the Other wins for the theorist, but not for the incommensurable Other, theoretical insight. Thus for Baudrillard, Lyotard and Spivak, the resistant Other who cannot be known is nonetheless also that which redeems them from the “hell of the Same.” It should of course be noted that there is a difference between the French philosophers and the postcolonial critic. While Spivak’s work is grounded in an acute and uneasy awareness of empirical others, such as the aboriginal subalterns of India, the Other of Baudrillard and Lyotard largely remains a rhetorical trope despite their cursory nod in the direction of ethnography. Nonetheless, for all our theorists,

102

Victor Li

the primitive Other who cannot be known fully and whose alterity demands respect is nonetheless also the Other who enables them to know the limits of their own knowledge, a renewed knowledge the Other does not share. The role of the primitive Other appears simply to be that of embodying a resistant alterity that makes possible the critical reflexivity of the theorist. What appears to be an ethics of alterity that favours the Other turns out, ultimately, to privilege the theorist who activated that ethics. In his biting critique of Western philosophy’s inaugural self-constitution which required it to distinguish between intellectual reflection and manual labor, Jacques Rancière writes: “In the beginning, there was the following: philosophy defined itself in defining its other. The order of discourse delimited itself by tracing a circle that excluded from the right to think those who earned their living by the labor of their hands” (2002:203). Just as philosophy’s first act of self-definition and self-distinction required the unthinking poor, so, in the work of the theorists and curators we have examined, it appears that theory’s understanding of itself as critically reflexive and selfquestioning needs, as its constitutive opposite and outside, the innocent primitive Other. But does theorizing always require a “savage” Other? I would like to argue that it does not. Postmodern and postcolonial theories run into a serious problem when they adopt, out of an understandable need to avoid both egocentrism and ethnocentrism, an ethics of radical alterity that decenters the self while elevating and idealizing the absolute Other. Yet, in doing so, these theories end up, as we have seen, securing the Other to prop up their very own ethical agency and epistemic advantage. To avoid such a problem, we would have to rethink the Self-Other relationship. Bernhard Waldenfels’ “phenomenology of the alien” can help us in this task. Waldenfels’ phenomenology attempts to account for our experience of what he calls Fremdheit or alienness. In using the term fremd or alien, he wants us to distinguish between otherness as mere difference (as in the difference between two types of wine, for example) and alienness as “a kind of otherness that is opposed to the self.” (Waldenfels 1995:36). Moreover, Waldenfels does not want “to thematize phenomena as belonging to the other, coming from the outside, or being unfamiliar as special phenomena, but rather to show that there is a dimension of otherness, or Fremdheit, that pervades all that is taken as our own inner and familiar world” (Waldenfels 1995:36). Otherness or alienness is “a central feature of all our experience” and Waldenfels can therefore assert that “the ‘alien’ begins at home” (Waldenfels 1995:36). It is important to note that for Waldenfels the Other is not an ontological entity that is totally heterogeneous or entirely other and, hence, absolutely inaccessible to the Self. We must thus exclude “the possibility that otherness could ever be total and complete” (1995:37). What is clear is that while he wants to avoid the assimilation, incorporation or hermeneutic completion of the alien Other, he also refuses the other extreme of monadic atomism or solipsism. Waldenfels insists that “alien experience does not connote that the own and the alien, the own body and the alien body,

“Haunted by the Aboriginal”

103

the mother tongue and the foreign language, the home culture and the alien culture are opposed to each other like monads, which are closed in on themselves” (2011:75). Instead, what we experience is an entanglement of the own and the alien. As Waldenfels notes, the own and the alien, despite their separation, are more or less interwoven and entangled. This entanglement excludes a complete coinciding or melting of the own and the alien just as much as a complete disparity does. Therefore, we cannot speak of an absolutely or totally alien in either interpersonal or intercultural contexts. (2011:76) In such an entanglement “we find the alien in the own and the own in the alien well before comparativists undertake their comparisons” (2011:80). There is a primordial entanglement which refuses the absolute separation of self and Other as well as the resulting monadism in which any exchange between self and Other is regarded as impossible or founded on the incorporation or appropriation of one by the other. But even as self and Other are not sharply or totally separated, so too they are not seamlessly connected or fused. Waldenfels sees the self as “a ‘transfer-point’ (Umschlagstelle) . . . because one’s own is transformed into the alien and vice versa” (2011:56). Continuing with the simile of the self as “transfer-point,” Waldenfels notes that To speak of “my own body” or of a corps propre expresses only half the truth. In his theory of the novel Mikhail Bakhtin develops the idea of “inner dialogism” of speech. He claims that each word is a “half-alien word” because it is “charged, even overcharged by others’ intentions.” In a similar way, my own body could be described as a half-alien body, charged by alien intentions, but also desires, projections, habits, affections, and violations, coming from others. (2011:56) If the self is already half-alien and vice versa, then what we have is an entanglement or intertwining that allows us to see the two different entities with their different experiences and logics not as absolutely and solipsistically separated from each other, but as occupying an “in-between sphere.” What happens in this in-between sphere belongs neither to the self nor to the Other, nor to both conceived as a totality. The self and, by implication, the Other should be seen as constituting “a no-man’s land, a liminal landscape which simultaneously connects and separates” (2011:71). Waldenfels sees this liminality of the self and Other as a threshold which, while it insists on separation and resists any form of fusion, nevertheless allows for exchange and intercourse. As he puts it: “If we were completely at home in our own culture, the other would remain completely outside of it; there would not be

104

Victor Li

any threshold between our own world and that of the other. A threshold, that is, a place of passage or transition we cross but do not surpass in a definitive way” (1995:41). Waldenfels’ characterization of the entanglement of self and Other as a threshold is important because it allows us to find a way out of a problem that confronts postmodern and postcolonial theories of alterity. The problem occurs when the absolute separation of the self and Other, intended understandably as a defence of the other from aggressive appropriation by the self, results ironically, as we have seen, in the totally inaccessible Other supporting the self’s ethical and epistemic advantage. With reference to the theorists of radical alterity we have discussed earlier in this essay, we can say that by keeping the Western or hegemonic self absolutely separate from the primitive or subaltern Other, they may, inadvertently, against their own good intentions, strengthen the position of the self while substantially weakening the Other. Since there is no possibility of self-Other entanglement, of finding the self in the Other or the Other in the self, there can be no liminal zone or threshold that contains both self and Other, no passage of communication or possibility of exchange between the two parties. As a consequence, the hegemonic self can remain secure in its own domain, uninterrupted or unthreatened by the primitive or subaltern Other which, in turn, by being epistemologically inaccessible and unassimilable, cannot engage in any exchange, be it in the form of agreement or contestation, with the hegemonic order of the self. It appears, therefore, that in the work of postmodern and postcolonial theorists like Baudrillard, Lyotard and Spivak, and practitioners like the curators of the Musée du Quai Branly, ethical and political vigilance against the hegemonic appropriation of the primitive or subaltern Other requires a total separation of self from Other that ironically also means keeping the Other in its absolutely heterogeneous place unable to engage or struggle with, argue against, interrupt or threaten the hegemonic self. Like postmodern and postcolonial theorists, Waldenfels is supremely aware of the danger of the self overwhelming and incorporating the Other. Like them he is even willing to accord a certain priority to the Other. As he admits: “[W]hen facing the Other I am not standing with him on the same level. . . . The alien call comes from the ‘height,’ according to Levinas, since it transcends my own expectations, wishes, and ideas, and overcomes us before we are able to assume a proper position on it” (2011:56). At the same time, however, he warns against the idealization or ethical elevation of the Other as in Levinas. The Other, he insists, “must not be confused with a wholly other outside of any order, nor with a social other, who enjoys a higher status and is superior to myself due to his authority or power. The Other does not succeed to a throne or altar” (2011:57). The Other is not “wholly other” because, as we have seen, it is interwoven or entwined with the self. No absolute epistemological or ontological barrier need be erected between self and Other to protect the latter since they occupy together an intermediary zone or threshold in which all kinds of exchange can take place.

“Haunted by the Aboriginal”

105

Though the difference between self and Other has to be vigilantly observed, so too must we presuppose “a certain indifference” between them and acknowledge that “the own and the alien, despite their separation, are more or less interwoven and entangled” (2011:76). If that is indeed the case, then, turning to the concerns of this essay, we must conclude that the radical difference of the primitive or subaltern Other that is made to underwrite theory’s comparative advantage must be challenged by the counter-argument that theory is already a “half-alien word,” already other to itself, while the primitive or subaltern Other is already theorizing, already speaking and engaging with theory. Theory, it seems, does not require an absolute “savage” Other since their difference is also subtended by an indifference between them. Waldenfels is fond of quoting Rimbaud’s pronouncement, “Je est un autre” (1995:38, 2011:76). In like manner, we should be able to claim that theory does not need a “savage” Other because the Other is already co-present with theory, and theory is, among other things, other to itself.

Acknowledgment Pages 154 to 165 have been reprinted from Victor Li’s book The Neo-primitivist Turn (pages 22–30), with friendly permission from University of Toronto Press.

Note 1 In a footnote in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (403n119), Spivak explains how subaltern singularity or authenticity may be indexed to its being left alone: “It is again instructive that, mining ‘indigenous knowledge’ or the DNA of ‘the subaltern body,’ transnational organizations are aware that the real source is the smaller and remoter groups, historically distanced from the cultures of domination, for whatever reason.”

References Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Translated by J. Benedict. London: Verso. Chaslin, Francois. 2007. “L’Arche de Nouvel at Les Mythes du Cargo” Le Debat 147 : 40–56 Chow, Rey. 1993. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2001. “How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory.” PMLA 116(1):69–74. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects. New York: Columbia University Press. Féral, Josette. 1980. “The Powers of Difference.” In The Future of Difference, edited by H. Eisenstein and A. Jardine, 88–94. Boston: G. K. Hall. Hallward, Peter. 2001. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Henaff, Marcel. 1998. Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology. Translated by M. Barker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

106

Victor Li

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1955)1976. Tristes Tropiques. Translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Li, Victor. 2006. The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1988a. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by G. Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1988b. “An Interview with Jean-François Lyotard.” Theory, Culture and Society 5(2–3):277–309. ———. 1992. “Missive on Universal History.” In The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, edited by J. Pefanis and M. Thomas, 23–37. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Price, Sally. 2007. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2002. The Philosopher and His Poor. Translated by J. Drury, C. Oster, and A. Parker. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharpe, Jenny and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak. 2002. “A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination.” Signs 28(2):609–624. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1987. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Methuen. ———. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York: Routledge. ———. 1994. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Williams and L. Chrisman, 66–111. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1995. “Supplementing Marxism.” In Whither Marxism?: Global Crises in International Perspective, edited by B. Magnus and S. Cullenberg, 109–119. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by R.G. Fox, 17–44. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Viatte, Germain. 2006. “Foreword.” In Masterpieces from the Musée du Quai Branly Collections. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1995. “Response to the Other.” In Encountering the Other(s): Studies in Literature, History, and Culture, edited by. G. Brinker-Gabler, 35–44. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Translated by A. Kozin and T. Stähler. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

5

The Other Otter Relational Being at the Edge of Empire Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

Other/Knowledge The most ubiquitous legendary creature in Southeast Alaska, besides the multitudinous contemporary avatars of the creator, Raven, is the Kooshdakhaa, or land-otter man. The Kooshdakhaa is no avatar either, no half-mute descendant of the once-eloquent animal masters, punitively split for a long time now into the various Tlingit clans and the various animal species. The Kooshdakhaa persists in constitutively modern times, surviving the dispersal of the ancient gods, the silence of the animals and the disenchantment of the shamans. The Kooshdakhaa is the shape-shifting, monstrous, occasionally benevolent, death-harbinging, ongoing reassembly of otter and human parts, always more than one and less than two, who speaks in whistles and words with notorious persuasiveness. They, Kooshdakhaas, appear most often on beaches, where people have nearly or fully drowned, but also deep in the woods, where people are lost, to be found or not, with their wits intact or not. Regardless of one’s willingness to be moved by other-than-human wills, and regardless of whether it is possible or meaningful to categorically determine the benevolence or malevolence of such wills in advance, one can be sure that an encounter with the Kooshdakhaa indicates the presence of a limit that singularly human beings transgress at their peril. To remain a human person after an encounter with a Kooshdakhaa qua limit is always to stop or to turn back before it is too late, sometimes by heeding the Kooshdakhaa’s warning, but more often by resisting its enticement. In this respect they would seem to be of an ethnological type, together with the shamans to whom they are related (De Laguna 1972; Beck 1991)— boundary-guarders and boundary-crossers who simultaneously represent and maintain the cosmological structure of what used to be called “primitive cultures.” These are supposed to represent the porosity of the human-animal boundary and at the same time highlight the necessity of its sustained upkeep for human/cultural survival in the face of nature’s caprice.1 In a recent survey inclusive of the entire “Sibero-american shamanic tradition,” Carlos Fausto (2007) takes pains to distinguish Amazonian anxiety about the thin but crucial distinction between hunting and warfare, from Siberian hunters’

108

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

concerns about being misled by the same animals they necessarily strive to mislead, as well as from American Arctic and sub-Arctic fastidiousness about returning to the animal the gift of its life. His point in making the comparison is to highlight the delicate relationship between predation and kinship in Amazonia, and indirectly to distinguish what he calls “anthropophagy” from cannibalism. This distinction is important because, in the Amazon at least, it is not the difference between humans and animals as kinds of beings that is of concern, but rather the maintenance of their ideal and dangerously variable roles as predators and prey. Yet this valuable insight arises partly from comparison with subarctic cultures with respect not to how they handle the relations of predator and prey but rather humans and animals (2007:500), and so it comes at the cost of implying that the human-animal boundary is a universal fact, to which different cultures necessarily impute different meanings, such as rather than as against predator and prey. The power-effects of this implication precede Fausto’s work by centuries. Nowadays, there are a range of less obviously offensive names for those peoples formerly designated by the sign “primitive,” such as “hunter-gatherer,” “indigenous,” and, now and again, “animist”; and the raw list of cultures itemized under each of these overlapping categories of course continues to change, as anthropological knowledge and the subject of history grow increasingly complex; but the classificatory structure by which certain groups of people are linked to the nonhuman animals that in turn demarcate and guarantee their conformity to order—famously, both their own internal order and order as such (Lévi-Strauss 1969)—remains essentially the same. It consists first of all of a contrast between the knowing us and the known them, an us that is really an I who knows about others, and a them who is grouped into a correspondingly singular category of the Other; and second of all on a contrast between culture and nature, which has recently been refined into a more durable contrast between humans and nonhuman others.2 But no matter what is said specifically, with what ethnographic rigor, in what cosmopolitan spirit, once these oppositions are established, it is obvious that the Other’s hold on the privilege we grant to the human is tenuous; those who live under its sign are always at risk of becoming animal, and so they must obsessively follow the rules that make them who they are, lest they become, as they are, substantively, and not just formally, other. The stakes of such a fall (and “fall” it is—see Pagden 1982) are held in place by the persistent philosophical premise that the human-animal relation is essentially fatal. Whether this is thought in the utilitarian balance of necessity and suffering or its misanthropic response in deep ecology, our conscious decisions about animals are almost always framed ultimately as a choice between life and death. The classic exception of household pets here proves the rule, as pets are routinely defined as those animals that one does not eat (see Haraway 2003). The rule is also invoked in the philosophical and anthropological fascination with cannibalism, which, whenever it has not been greeted with the horror reserved for inhumanity, has necessitated an

The Other Otter

109

utter reversal of perspective on the nature-culture opposition that undergirds our relationship to animals as others. This explains why it is axiomatic in Amazonian ethnography to argue that animals are persons and people are animals, at least part of the time (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Fausto 2007). While the personhood of nonhuman animals in many parts of the world is an unassailable ethnographic fact, it is worth noting that its repeated invocation in certain particularly “strange” contexts happens to preserve for the expert European observer the rule that personhood is the character of the one who eats, and thinghood that of the eaten, even if it might appear to the naked (European) eye that something very different is happening. The bloody rule is foundational for and of European civilization as human history, accompanying the birth of man in Descartes’ justification of animal vivisection, or the birth of the species homo sapiens in the slaughter of the Neanderthals before that, or in the evolved bloodthirstiness of chimpanzees even earlier. But the actual historical event that made these anthropological ideas both possible and necessary was the confrontation with other humans in the New World, and the need to decide whether they too could be yoked and slaughtered with impunity before god or not. Even then, the structure of the problem was already determining the form of the question—to be or to kill. In the event, the decision was equivocal, and it is well known that the progressive history of man—of Reason’s triumph over savagery—has been marked, meaning both “stained” and “made discernable,” by the particular horror, not simply of murder and bloodshed, but of the unacknowledged deaths of those whose killings were ordered not to count. This is the process Giorgio Agamben (1998) sees has having reached its logical conclusion in the Holocaust and/or that Foucault (1979) says culminates in a generalized regime of biopower. For Agamben the total loss of humanity follows from a long history of racist dehumanization, and for Foucault the literalization of the metaphor that made the human sciences possible renders animal life the workable substance of the commonwealth. Yet both the license to kill and the order to cultivate animal life equally exploit and extend the widening gap between that which is capable of making decisions about life and death and that which is capable of experiencing life and death, or, in other words, the human and the animal. According to Achille Mbembe (2003), it does not matter whether this whole story originated in the colonies or whether the colonies merely provided a morally unfettered terrain for experimentation with this simultaneously novel and ancient anthropological apparatus. Either way, the colonies are where the contradiction inherent in the concept of the human animal is catastrophically resolved and renewed in what he calls “necropolitics,” the reorganization of all of nature and society into a geospatially enforced hierarchy of killer and killed. For Mbembe, the paradigmatic subject of necropolitics is the suicide bomber, who chooses to make the only gesture that is left for choice in this scenario—to die a killer. While the roles of killer and killed are collapsed into one, and so in this sense the contradiction is resolved,

110

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

the idea of the subject, and of choice, even rational choice, is preserved in the purposefulness of the act, and so the contradiction is renewed as the idea is cataclysmically liberated from its material integument. Mbembe writes, “the body duplicates itself and, in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation” (2003:37). What makes this explanation work for Mbembe and, if he is right, for suicide bombers, is a concept of political action inherited from Aristotle and, at least in Mbembe’s case, reinterpreted through Hannah Arendt. It is the power to choose, or to deliberate in Aristotle’s terms, and ultimately to act on one’s choices, or to do something new in Arendt’s. This sense of politics is not limited to the enacting of such choices through the deliberative process of making them or the pragmatic process of doing them, but is meant to describe especially those kinds of choices and actions that determine or alter the very framework in which choice and action take place. The extra move away from what is regular, predictable or expected is the only way to ensure the authenticity of choice and the possibility of change that undergirds this radical conception of the political. This impulse runs parallel to Nietzsche’s project of re-evaluating values, and through Nietzsche to Foucault’s critique of biopower, which emerges from the latter’s genealogical reconstruction of European intellectual history. Not surprisingly then, this is a form of politics that is utterly suppressed in contemporary biopolitics, which is inseparable from a much longer history of the systematic reduction of difference to diversity in the thinking and organizing of the liberal tradition (see Honig 1993, 2001; Connolly 1995, 1999; Waldenfels 2007). The aspirational security of organized humanity as a reliable norm is what makes others interesting and, more fatally, available to us.3 The acquisition of their knowledge as fact can only proceed by means of and in the company of a precise and absolute violence because we—Westerners, moderns, humanism’s humans—have also insisted on the identity of the human and the self as the condition of the possession of both knowledge (the knowing subject of The Order of Things) and political speech (which is another reason the subaltern cannot speak, after Spivak 1988). This presents us with a serious conundrum: on the one hand, the suppression of difference as diversity through the biopolitical regulation of knowledge as power; on the other—in a manner that doubtless provides considerable incentive for those well-meaning but much-maligned fieldworkers (namely, anthropologists) whose vocation is to strive to include their favorite others in the global collective—the hyperbolic reduction of difference to “bare life” (Agamben 1998). Thus the first problem, the suppression of difference, cannot be simply reversed by means of the second, by seeking, highlighting and celebrating truly radical difference. For us, “Westerners,” the latter is inevitably tinged with violence—a violence that tends to manifest well away from the halls of the power we might have hoped such radical difference would disturb. If such subversive disturbances are at best unlikely, at worst, i.e., when the sign of the animal/slot of the primitive (Trouillot 1991; Brosius 1999)

The Other Otter

111

is in play, they are almost certainly to be detrimental to the interests of constitutive others, human and animal. The Kooshdakhaa is particularly enticing to us because it marks and crosses the conjoined boundaries of these two modes of operation around difference. It can easily represent, encompass and stand for, the totality of Tlingit culture, to and of which it is native; and it occupies the liminal space between human and animal, thus simultaneously drawing and revealing the totality of humanity as a collection of cultures bounded just so. But while the collectivization proceeds by including Tlingit culture as one among many, the bounding of the collective (universal humanity) depends upon referencing the position of Tlingit culture at or near the totality’s limit yet again. This almost inevitable fall betrays the political function (in and for Tlingit orders) of the Kooshdakhaa as a setter of limits in its own right, in particular the limit not of the human, to which the creature itself is obviously and spectacularly indifferent, but rather the limits of knowledge. In transgressing this limit, we return from other worlds in a state of ontological confusion, having been misled to substitute an inert array of types and kinds of appropriable, ghostly others for the advice their real selves might have given us about how to participate in the relational production of meaningful difference without claiming their territory in advance as our own (Waldenfels 2007, 2011). To take the Kooshdakhaa seriously, then, is definitely not to consider ourselves in light of the Tlingit ontology its function reveals, as though we, and not actually existing Tlingit people nor, for that matter, actually existing otters, were the rightful heirs of the shamans, able to inhabit the Other as the Self. It is instead to heed its warning, to contemplate the limit it embodies as a challenge not for knowledge to transgress, but, for once, to yield (Foucault 1984; see also Cameron 2015). This entails working to sustain, and even enhance, a relationship with the unknown and unknowable, a relationship that gains material weight in the unaccountable mass of figures infinitely large and small that appear other not just to the self but even to the procedures of recognition that would attempt to stabilize the self as the one who knows. The lesson/legend of the Kooshdakhaa is the story, rather, of the other who knows what we cannot. To recognize that other cultures—i.e., Tlingit—are more attuned to the Other as limit than we—i.e., the “global” bourgeoisie—ought not entail transposing their “way of knowing” the Other onto our knowledge of them as (the) Other. To enact such a transposition is not just costly for the Tlingit and all the other others of postcolonial critique, but irreparably damaging to the theory and practice of earthly coexistence.

Otter Trouble The politics of the human as literal violence and the knowledge of the Other as epistemic violence (Spivak 1988) are related with deadly force and profound ignorance throughout “our” history, whether in the cathection of Jews to lice in the Holocaust (Raffles 2007), or the identification of Australian

112

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

aboriginals with dingoes (Bird-Rose 2011), or really in any of the millions of smaller instances in which racism boils out of its deep structures in malarial swamps and statistical morbidity and onto, say, an ice hockey rink in what should be but is not the innocuous form of a banana (Canadian Press 2011). In each of these cases, a boundary that should not be crossed is crossed and crossed again. We know this because we know that; we do this because we do that; we are this because we aren’t that; and—Bang!—the gas, the firing range, the abattoir. In this old story it is as much or more the appearance of the boundary to be transgressed (are/aren’t) as the transgression (like/as) that heralds the danger and calls forth the violence. But what makes this implicit violence manifest as a genuine catastrophe is the historically contingent institution of the nation-state as body politic, which requires and asserts its own boundaries between inside and outside as though between the human and the non-human (Raffles 2007). The resulting appearance or reappearance of the human/animal scapegoat to shore up the identity of such an inauthentic singularity represents the worst possible form of preemptive, or “autoimmune” (Esposito 2011), response to the Other. The scapegoat is the all-too historical opposite of the Kooshdakhaa, heralding the selfdestructive event that occurs when the Kooshdakhaa’s warning goes unheeded. In Southeast Alaska, right this very minute, by which I mean in a time that is supposed to be somehow different than the times in the last century, or last year, when we didn’t know what we know now about how all this humanism, racism, nationalism works, a unique scapegoat has come onto the scene. This seafaring predator and near cousin of the Kooshdakhaa, possessed of a rapacious appetite for both shellfish and sex, an elaborate social structure, a gaze as intent as any in the animal kingdom, and the densest, most luxuriant fur in all of creation, is being held responsible for the fundamental contradictions of the postcolonial state qua “resource colony” (Haycox 2000) that is the modern-day state of Alaska. Historically, what makes a continuously occupied landscape, such as Alaska was and is, into an untouched wilderness that might be fantastically discovered and materially transformed into a form of wealth (and power) is the entrenchment of a socio-political—or socio-natural—organization that rigorously, and violently, separates the latent potential of the mass of things from the active production of an archetypically singular rational human subject (Latour 1993; Mitchell 2011; see also DiNovelli-Lang 2010). But this entrenchment of what Bruno Latour has called “the modern constitution” does not, at least not in the colonies, and perhaps not anywhere, actually precede frontier-like experiences of discovery. Its prehistory is its pretense, which its human bearers carry into the wilderness to justify the necessity of exploitation as a fait accompli, after the fact. To wit, the infamous “folly” of Alaska’s purchase by William Henry Seward, on behalf of the reconstructing US thirty years before the Klondike gold rush, and a hundred years before the Prudhoe Bay oil field was rediscovered as wealth, is a trope that substitutes luck and

The Other Otter

113

manifest destiny for the world historical shift from old to new imperialism, and the completion of the US’ transition from rebel colony to world power. The more complete “natural history” (Raffles 2002) of the US’ Alaskan adventure includes the over-exploitation of the sea otter, whose incomparably luxuriant fur for a time secured Russia’s domination of the North Pacific in terms of both wealth and power. But while Russian wealth was rooted in its Far East, its power was elsewhere, and the Empire’s inability to keep lawless Western competitors out of the Alaskan fur trade meant it could ultimately manage neither the sea otter population nor that population’s Native hunters in such a way as to sustain the trans-Pacific exchange of wealth for power. One last exchange, this time of power for wealth, was arranged, and so the Czar sold his superficially held corner of the New World to the US in 1867; the absence of the otters, in more than one sense, forming the material substance of the trade from one form of rule to another. The Alaska Purchase was consummated at Castle Hill in Sitka, the Russian fort qua “capitol,” within the confines of a well-defended stockade surrounded by hundreds of seething, unemployed Tlingit sea otter hunters, already and quite rightly suspicious of the bellicose new pretenders to their territory. For the next twenty years, Alaska was ruled by Navy gunboats, which used arbitrary and deadly force to ensure the priority of white property over Native labor, as the mercantile economy of furs and traders slowly and painfully gave way to the capitalist economy of mining stakes, fur farms, fish traps and absentee ownership. While historical, political, economic and ecological progress in Alaska is typically measured from this point—a strategically produced state of exception (Agamben 2005) and privation—which sustains the appearance that the development of democratic institutions and the steady increase of resourcevalue go hand-in-hand as reason and the law, the military aspect of the US’ adventure in the North Pacific has never been disentangled from the economic. Exhibit A: the otters, whose potential value to the postcolonial state a hundred years later did not quite outweigh the strategic importance of nuclear weapons testing on the Aleutian Islands within earshot of the USSR. The Aleuts themselves had already been forcibly removed from their island homelands and taken to internment camps in Southeast Alaska during World War II, ostensibly in order to prevent their capture and conscription by the would-be Japanese empire; but a remnant population of soon-to-be-designated endangered sea otters, shrewdly claimed as state property by Alaska’s entrepreneurial governor, were in the way of the experimental new bomb. Thanks to the strategic superiority of the economic narrative over the imperial, all of Southeast Alaska’s currently existing sea otters are descended from these 300 survivors of the fur trade, who were transferred from the doomed shoreline of Amchitka Island on the Aleutian chain to a few key spots off Southeast Alaska’s outer coast by the grace of a complex state and federal bureaucracy, already overgrown in the no-man’s-land between democracy and war.

114

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

As the two faces of the state’s tortured narrative of self-presentation threaten to expose each other, progress as war, and war as progress, the iconic otter morphs into a scapegoat for a collapsing “American” identity. Progress: The otters have been restored by an enlightened regime to their historic range; they represent at once Alaska’s conformity to natural/original conditions and the necessity of active state and federal management to sustain this conformity. War: The otters have invaded the sheltered waters of the Inside Passage like a colonizing enemy and/or thanks to the thoughtless intervention of one; they are destroying a hard-won ecological balance, still and always vulnerable to economic crisis and population collapse. Practically speaking, the problem is the utter disappearance within a span of as few as ten years of almost all of the sea urchins and many aggregates of Dungeness crabs that for the century between the abrupt departure of the Russian imperialists and the deadly experiments of the Cold War provided the protected waters of the famous Inside Passage with supplementary protein and an entrepreneurial niche for those regional residents (human and nonhuman) shut out of the larger, more volatile (politically, economically and ecologically) finfish fisheries. Complicating this already-complex problem are the following factors: (1) The otters were brought back by the coordinated efforts of both the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, entities that since 1980 have tended to blame each other for management failures; (2) Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 only coastal dwelling Alaska Natives can hunt sea otters, and then only for “traditional” purposes; and (3) In a context of contemporary environmental politics dominated by climate change (and in particular its confounding of traditional approaches to management), sea otters depredation of sea urchins is positively associated with greater areas of kelp forest (it turns out urchins eat kelp as enthusiastically as otters eat urchins), and thus with the emergent supreme calculus of carbon sequestration/ negativity. The crisis is thus not the “underpopulation” of urchins expressed in the “overpopulation” of otters, or vice-versa, but rather of the management regime that finds in such dubious concepts as under- and over-population its raison-d’etre. When knowledge fails (a), and power cannot look outside itself for the form of an answer to the problem and the failure (b), a scapegoat becomes necessary. Because the otters, insofar as they are animals subject to the authority of science, cannot actually be held responsible for themselves and their fondness for urchins, but yet, in their apparently or actually willful (re)production in excess of their adjudged needs, insult the specific authorities and authorizing structures that would have “saved” them, they both confound and incite the scapegoating formula/procedure. The insane— insane with respect to the orders of natural science and economics that heretofore have governed otters and so many other animal species in Alaska—results of this manifest contradiction include proposals by Sitka’s state senator to put a $100 bounty on sea otter skins, a cull, relocation (yet

The Other Otter

115

again) and even mass sterilization. Meanwhile, a relatively sane proposal by the US Congressman Don Young—who, because sea otters are managed under federal legislation, at least in theory has the authority to see his proposal enacted—to liberalize the conditions under which Alaska Natives can sell sea otter parts and products to non-Natives has been opposed, among other reasons, for potentially accomplishing exactly what would seem to be the remedy for the problem: the creation of a commercial market for otter adequate to the rate of reproduction of their population. The failure of Congressman Young’s proposal to gain political traction in either Washington or Alaska suggests, in yet another way, that the trouble with sea otters cannot be reduced to their alleged disruption of the ecological and economic status quo (which Young’s proposal was theoretically designed to restore). Nor is the trouble reducible to the logic articulated in the conservationist counterpoint to Young’s proposal, which is nevertheless formally identical to it, which claims the ecological and economic benefits of more kelp, for carbon sequestration, and more otters, for the tourism industry, will ultimately effect a better, more sustainable status quo than the one of urchins and dive fishermen that preceded the return of the otters. Both proposals—to sell unaltered pelts, and to wait for the otter population to stabilize on its own—are “win-win” rapprochements of ecology and value (Gallagher and DiNovelli-Lang 2014) that are notably, if not purposefully, silent about what is (actually) so troubling about sea otters. This is a wicked combination of their history, the qualitative excess of their fur, and, above all, their charisma, all of which put them into relation with human beings in such a way that the otters act upon, effect and transform the humans they encounter in a way that the humans, as such, cannot at all “manage.” The otters are gregarious; they are insatiable. As a result and worst of all, they are almost, too much, not at all, human.

The Condition of Posthumanism In Derrida’s (2002) assessment, the salient division is not between man and the animal, but about the historically ripening relationship between humans and a multitude of other animals. The ground of this historical relationship rests on what Derrida insists is the “undeniable” fact that animals suffer, “like us,” and the requirement that we therefore have to respond. What follows from this “older than [indubitable]” incitement is an unequal struggle, a war being waged, the unequal forces of which could one day be reversed, between those who violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion and, on the other hand, those who appeal to an irrefutable testimony to this pity. War is waged over the matter of pity. This war probably has no age but, and here is my hypothesis, it is passing through a critical phase. We are passing through that phase and it passes through us. To think the

116

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, everyone is held to. Henceforth and more than ever. And I say “to think” this war, because I believe it concerns what we call “thinking.” The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there. (Derrida 2002:397)

What is happening in this moment, our moment, is the failure of philosophy, our philosophy, to even recognize the “unprecedented subjection of the animal,” and, concomitantly, the degree to which we are constituted by, or literally embody, that subjection. The reason the phase is critical is because both these inhumanities (Lyotard 1991) are approaching their limit, which is the same but not singular limit of “the so-called human” (Derrida 2002:399). Our long historical effort to distance ourselves from the slaughter of animals, which is reflected equally in the philosophical effort not to think about it and in the geopolitical spatialization of death, as described by Mbembe in regards to the colonies, or, by the political scientist Tim Pachirat (2011) in regards to slaughterhouses in the American heartland, has permitted the scale of killing to grow so large as to overtake us. There is no humanity to be found in this particular world, leaving the thinker with the choice to abandon the world or the human completely. This is the condition of posthumanism, and it is grim. But this is not all it is. Even for Derrida, in the emergence of the problematic discourse of animal rights there can be found the invitation to reconsider the task of thinking as a relational practice of response to the Other. Indeed the starting point of his meditation in “The Animal That Therefore I Am” is an encounter with his cat in the bathroom in the morning, a cat who sees, acknowledges and recognizes him, but cares not a whit for his philosophy. What to think? While Derrida urges we should reconsider ourselves and our history from this moment of astonishment, which we should not deny, Donna Haraway (2006) insists that we can train our thinking a little more on how to relate to the actual cat, as another genuine being and not only as the instantiation of radical otherness.4 Haraway argues, I think rightly, that this is the only way to get beyond the grim stopping point of suffering and pity, to make politically possible more kinds of different projects than the (albeit necessary) requirement to be honest with ourselves about our own ultimately animal deaths. But for attention to the actual cat to work on the world, she and we have to be careful at the same time to not reduce this actual relationship to a merely particular one amidst the unqualified flow of universal history. This entails reformulating the philosophical endeavor as a kind of world ethnography of companion species (Haraway 2003), a nonuniversal we of un-summable other-animal parts. Haraway issues an important two-part qualification against the broad use of companion species as a trope for understanding otherness and others,

The Other Otter

117

which is that, “generally speaking, one does not eat one’s companion animals (nor get eaten by them); and one has a hard time shaking colonialist, ethnocentric, ahistorical attitudes towards those who do (eat or get eaten)” (Haraway 2003:10). Thus it is not surprising that companion species provide, for us, a way out of the predominant necropolitics, since they are by definition what it does not describe. This categorical exclusion does not on its own diminish the potential transformativeness of companion species as a philosophical/anthropological project, since it is half the point of Haraway’s intervention to learn to pay attention to our less dramatically alter co-evolved species, intestinal flora as much as dogs. These dangerous but not “generally speaking” deadly relations have already begun to be translated into vast new territories for responsible and reflexive anthropological inquiry, if the proliferation of multi-species ethnographies in recent years (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) are any indication. But far too few of us have attended with sufficient care to the second part of the qualification, which warns that part of the discourse of companion species contains a (colonialist, ahistorical) ethnocentrism about, “those who do (eat or get eaten).” I take the ambiguous phrase “those who do” to refer not only to people who eat, say, dogs, or to the dogs so eaten, or to humans who get eaten by trained lions or killer whales, but also to cannibals and all those human and other-than-human persons who eat their kin, in the properly expansive sense of the term. Sea otters in Southeast Alaska embody this, what might be called the dark side of companion species. They appear as the alien invaders of another unlikely and unlooked for world, but yet they are—like the companions they are resolutely not—significantly constitutive of Southeast Alaskan history, politics and, after all, culture. In this duality they conjure a fundamental, maybe even ontological, ethnocentrism: one by which the West materially describes itself as the human, but one that, at the same time, regularizes itself as ethnocentrism, in the expansive sense entailing the demarcation of others as cultures, precisely in response to the constitutively Western anxiety about the animal/Other. Companion species may still be the best frame in which to understand these more other others, but for the trope to live up to its anthropological or, better, its alter-anthropological promise in this case, the humans who unleash it must do more to heed Haraway’s warning about the actual and potential ethnocentrism that comes with distinguishing companion species from others. This is not simply a matter of remembering that other people have different types of relationships with animals, or concepts of nature, or ontologies of the subject, and repeating these ethnographic facts as talismans for the continued utility of comparative anthropology in the posthumanist moment. It is to assiduously document the ways in which “our” relationships with animals have always substantially constituted the more or less acknowledged ground of our relationships with others. (And in a way that is like but also unlike the ways in which all people arguably distinguish themselves from others through various food-related prohibitions and proscriptions. It is like,

118

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

let’s say, in its ethnocentrism, but it is unlike in its colonialism.) More specifically it is to track the constitution of those relationships in, through and over the often-dead bodies of actual animals. Finally, it is to consider that the universalizing concept of biological species may frequently blind us to the way animals themselves relate to “their own” others, and vice-versa. This last consideration—of other selves and other others—is why it is necessary to retain the rigorously non-specific, anti-identitarian notion of companion species, which is therefore as indispensable as it is dangerous, like the Kooshdakhaa itself.

Dangerous Company A recent Guardian UK feature ran under the headline, “Why Would Anyone Want to Shoot a Sea Otter?” (Perlin 2015)5 It documents a few days in the quixotic life of one Peter Williams, of Sitka, an Alaska Native sea otter hunter of Yup’ik Eskimo descent who is desperately, by the article’s account, trying to stitch together a living by selling his hand-sewn sea otter hats and vests to East Coast fashion mavens. There are challenges, perhaps insurmountable, at both ends of Williams’ enterprise, from the difficulty of hunting otters in accordance with restrictive federal regulations to the absence of a ready market for their fur. The story follows Williams from his hunting grounds on the rocky shores of Sitka Sound all the way to New York City’s Fashion Week in 2015, where and when, despite the fact that both fur and generically indigenous design motifs appear to have been in demand, Williams was having trouble converting his fur’s admirers into actual buyers. While the body of the article references the difficulty of finding the right price-point for such a rare, incomparable commodity, and hints at the capriciousness of urban fashion trends, the article’s headline, as well as the very first online comment posted after the ads at its conclusion suggest Williams’ problem is a bit more dire: “I’ve no objection to hunting in general, but killing sea otters is ridiculous.” Killing sea otters is ridiculous to the Guardian’s readers because, as another Alaska Native sea otter hunter I know6 put it, “They’re so damn cute.” They look like furry babies, or little old men, or Ewoks, or whatever long-lashed, wide-eyed creature most tugs at the heart-strings of human innocence lost. Williams himself is quoted in the Guardian article as admiring the otters’ human-like social habits, including familial bonding and playfulness. It supposedly took him six years of practice before he could bring himself to actually kill an otter, despite his confidence that this bloody work was to be his true calling. Overdetermining the personal sentiment of these hunters is the awesome public profile of the sea otter, whose imploring gaze through the black wreckage of human error has made the creature the literal poster child of marine conservation worldwide, at least since the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill all at once transformed the Last Frontier from the land of unvanquished wilderness to the last pocket of

The Other Otter

119

vanishing habitat for these and other species of charismatic megafauna. Because of this, and regardless of the unexpected success of the sea otter’s reintroduction to Southeast Alaska, it (if not they) will always be representative of endangered species, and thus as theoretically unhuntable as a bald eagle or a chimpanzee. The otters’ essential endangeredness structures and amplifies the ridiculousness of the situation in Alaska, where the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) continues to do everything in its power to prevent the creation of a market in sea otter fur, parts or products. The agency protects the otters by insisting not only that no part of their bodies can be sold without first being “significantly” and irreversibly altered from its original form, but also that each alteration must take a form characteristic of “traditional handicraft,” bearing no trace of the modern qualities of a “significant” (that word again) “commercial enterprise.” The justification for these rules is that the Native exception under the Marine Mammal Protection Act is granted on the basis of Natives’ need to harvest marine mammals for their basic cultural and material survival. The rules literally ensure, therefore, as Williams’ and others’ experience suggests, that such bare survival is all any Alaska Native will ever gain from sea otter hunting in the present day, despite the fact that the last time sea otters were hunted regularly, and perhaps traditionally, in Southeast Alaska, their pelts formed the economic base of more than one world empire. This historical legacy haunts both sea otters and Southeast Alaskan Natives in the present. In order for the legitimacy of US sovereignty in Alaska to be maintained, too many otters cannot die, and yet, for the very same reason, the too-many otters must die. Rather than confronting the historical contradictions of American empire as a particular relation of wealth and power, which requires that otters represent their value as endangered species despite the otters quite understandable inclination to multiply beyond this limit, however, the biopolitical state makes Alaska Native hunters and hide-sewers responsible for what amounts to the very mechanism of their own dispossession, essentially forcing them to kill many more otters than they have the moral or practical capacity to kill, in order to sustain their aboriginal right not only to hunt sea otters and other species of marine mammals, but also to continue to claim the right to do so in what many of these hunters and sewers know to be the dubious the names of culture and tradition.7 Under the best of circumstances the bureaucratic regulation of any form of traditional culture is problematic (Nadasdy 2004), and the sheer scale of production, of the hunting, tanning and sewing necessary to combat sea otter population growth arduous within the restrictive framework of cottage industry. But these are not the best of circumstances. The FWS aggressively prosecutes people selling sea-otter fur products that do not meet its capricious standards of “significant alteration” or “traditional handicraft,” such that attaching a zipper to a hand-sewn vest has been prosecuted as a federal

120

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

crime, as if sea otter hunting, via an open skiff along the outer reefs of farflung north Pacific islands, is not dangerous enough. Williams himself has been fined for sewing plaid backing on a vest, flaunting the appearance of tradition in favor of the demands of style. But Williams can at least trace his heritage to Yup’ik territories, where sea otters and sea otter hunting survived the industrialization of the fur trade and the nuclearization of war. The Tlingit people who make up the majority of those Native to Southeast Alaska did not hunt sea otters, never mind traditionally sew their skins, for at least 150 years between the abrupt departure of the Baranof fur-traders and the successful settlement of the Amchitka refugees. Instead, their “tradition” as it has been taught to them and their non-Native classmates by elders and schoolteachers alike is the story of how they once sold too many otter skins for too little cash just in order to survive. If this is the most widely known remnant of Tlingit relations with sea otters, then what is the effective meaning of the FWS rules, “significantly altered,” “traditional native handicraft,” and “no significant commercial enterprise”? It is to punish practically all Southeast Alaskan Native people into performing an extremely dangerous and painstaking form of labor in order to produce, on the one hand, the appearance of a traditional lifestyle in need of the affordances of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and thus, on the other hand, the appearance that the FWS is managing Southeast Alaska’s sea otter population for the benefit of this imagined tradition. It also is to reinforce the idea that this tradition, which only came into being after the law, is the rationale for the law, which exposes Native hunters and sewers not only to the harassment of law enforcement agents, but also to the charge of inauthenticity that coats every instance of failure to perform the imposed tradition with the kind of jeering racism endemic to Southeast Alaska’s race of unapologetic settlers. In this atmosphere, transplanted sea otters become ideal scapegoats for the melancholic rage of the economically insecure and politically disenfranchised, as well as opportunistic elites, who seem to always find themselves atop one or another mother lode in the Last Frontier’s perpetual cycle of boom and bust. Slaughtering the otters appears as a nifty way for elected officials to capitalize on this problem, destroying a common enemy for the sake of the archetypally small business in sea urchins; hence the bounty proposal and recurring discussions about the possibility of a cull. At the other extreme, the boutique tourism industry qua capitalist conservationism (Igoe, Neves, and Brockington 2010) never ceases its incantation that no value, in urchins or otters, can ever equal the value a tourist experiences and hands over in cash to watch sea otters playing in their “natural habitat.” Clearly neither science nor anthropology can resolve the conflict between these two sides. But can we represent (as Latour says we should) the sea otters as a party to the debate concerning their very existence? Perhaps, but where does this leave Alaska Native hunters and sewers except in the middle again, the quasiactive agents of a profit-maximizing compromise (if a compromise can in

The Other Otter

121

fact be reached), or utterly bereft, again, again, just as much if the otters were to be culled as if hunting were to be banned. Could they be represented in these ideal democratic procedures alongside sea otters, urchins, crab fishermen and tour-boat operators? The hunters’ failure to represent themselves and their different interests in sea otters before the law and the court of public opinion is not the consequence of an ontological divide between themselves and the general public, a divide that is conventionally characterized by their understanding that sea otters are willful subjects who work to make themselves available to hunters (and tourists) just as the hunters work, in this case quite hard, to make themselves available to otters. The fact that they understand them this way may be part of why they consider it worth their while to continue to fight for their exclusive right to work on and with sea otters, and thereby to ensure the continuation of both otters and themselves in Southeast Alaska, together, but it does not explain the refusal of the FWS to heed their appeal to simply relax the rules on modern design and minimally altered pelts. This may be explained by the constitutional inability of the biopolitical state to justly recognize any other form of order, ancient or modern, human or animal. It can recognize generic “Natives,” but it cannot recognize Native governance, networks of skill or politics of care. It can conscript Natives into particular roles, hunting sea otters for fur, for science or for ecological stability, but it cannot abide the kind of authority this labor entails, whether this be the power to ratify their own traditions, or the power of the otter to flourish or die, or transform itself, and others, if they would only dare to look one in the face.

Notes 1 One can follow this necessity/analytic “tradition” from at least the work of LevíStrauss (1969), and through Philippe Descola (1996) to Bruno Latour (1999), or, with the arrow of compulsion reversed, in Marks (2002) or Sahlins (2005). 2 Most notably, by Latour (1993, 1999), but the idea that the nature/culture binary does not hold water, period (as opposed to not just for some) should be credited to Marilyn Strathern (1980). See also Tim Ingold (2000). 3 The phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, whose work has inspired some of these reflections, might put this statement in slightly different terms: Western modernity has answered the call to respond by suppressing the experience of the Other with an unlimited quest for knowledge about others. 4 See Leistle (Introduction to this volume) for a deft rendering of the dilemma anthropology faces as it perpetually confronts these two forms of difference. 5 Thanks to my colleague, Frances Slaney, for alerting me to the Guardian story. 6 My reflections on the situation of sea otters and Alaska Native marine mammal hunters are informed by three seasons of collaborative fieldwork on contemporary Alaskan environmental politics with Dr. Karen Hébert and several of her graduate students from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, especially Taylor Rees. 7 Culture and tradition that is left to them as what is specifically not wealth and power, in the way that economy masks its own status as European “culture” by defining culture as that which denies the economic reality. See Povinelli (1995).

122

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. State of Exception. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Beck, Mary. 1991. Shamans and Kushtakas: Northwest Coast Tales of the Supernatural. Bothell, WA: Alaska Northwest Books. Bird-Rose, Deborah. 2011. Wild Dog Dreaming. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Brosius, Peter. 1999. “Green Dots, Pink Hearts: Displacing Politics from the Melanesian Rainforest.” American Anthropologist 101(1):36–57. Cameron, Emilie. 2015. Far Off Metal River. Vancouver: UBC Press. Canadian Press. 2011. “NHL Condemns Banana Toss in London, ON.” CBC Sports. http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/nhl-condemns-banana-toss-in-london-ont1.1024155 Connolly, William. 1995. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 32–50. ———. 1999. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Laguna, Frederica. 1972. Under Mount St. Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” Critical Inquiry 28(2):369–418. Descola, Philippe. 1996. In the Society of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DiNovelli-Lang, Danielle. 2010. Nature, Value and Territory in Alaskan Subsistence Politics. PhD. Dissertation. New York: Columbia University. Esposito, Roberto. 2011. Immunitas. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fausto, Carlos. 2007. “Feasting on People: Eating Animals and Humans in Amazonia.” Current Anthropology 48(4):497–530. Foucault, Michel. 1979. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage. ———. 1984. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Pantheon. Gallagher, Patrick and Danielle DiNovelli-Lang. 2014. “Nature and Knowledge: Contemporary Ecologies of Value.” Environment and Society 5(1):1–6. Haraway, Donna. 2003. Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. ———. 2006. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haycox, Stephen. 2000. Alaska: An American Colony. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Honig, Bonnie. 1993. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2001. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Igoe, James, Katja Neves, and Dan Brockington. 2010. “A Spectacular Ecotour around the Historic Bloc.” Antipode 42(3):486–512. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge. Kirksey, Eben and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25(Supplement 4):545–576. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

The Other Otter

123

———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Leví-Strauss, Claude. 1969. Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1991. The Inhuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Marks, Jonathan. 2002. What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15(1):11–40. Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy. New York: Vintage. Nadasdy, Paul. 2004. Hunters and Bureaucrats. Vancouver: UBC Press. Pachirat, Tim. 2011. Every Twelve Seconds. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pagden, Anthony. 1982. The Fall of Natural Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perlin, Ross. 2015. “Why Would Anyone Want to Shoot a Sea Otter?” The Guardian. UK. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/10/why-would-anyonewant-to-shoot-a-sea-otter Povinelli, Elizabeth. 1995. “Do Rocks Listen?” American Anthropologist 97(3):505–518. Raffles, Hugh. 2002. In Amazonia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. “Jews, Lice and History.” Public Culture 19(3):521–566. Sahlins, Marshall. 2005. The Western Illusion of Human Nature. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and L. Grossberg, 271–313. New York: Macmillan. Strathern, Marilyn. 1980. “No Nature; No Culture: The Hagen Case.” In Nature, Culture and Gender, edited by Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, 174– 222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot.” In Recapturing Anthropology, edited by Richard Fox, 17–44. Santa Fe: SAR Press. Vivieros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3):469–488. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2007. The Question of the Other: Sha Tin. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. ———. 2011. The Phenomenology of the Alien. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.

6

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness Skin Whitening, Vitiligo and Albinism Amina Mire

Introduction Nietzsche’s concept of willful forgetting is a useful metaphor for this chapter, which seeks to critically examine historically grounded Western cultural productions of othering. This is because it allows me to pay due attention to dominant tendencies of othering in modernist Western discourses, as well as to colonial constructions of exclusive identities and absolute difference based on ethnic or racial purity (Kawash 1997; Markell 2003; Weinbaum 2004). Nietzsche’s anti-Enlightenment critique in the Genealogy of Morals consisted in showing how Western discourses of scientific essentialism, rationality and logic are historically specific, and how they were secured by the willful suppression of ideas, practices and modes of knowing which were considered alien, superstitious, primitive, intuitive, emotional and excessive. The judgement of ‘good’ does not derive from those to whom ‘goodness’ is shown! Rather, the ‘good’ themselves—that is, the noble, the powerful, the superior, and the high-minded—were the ones who felt themselves and their actions to be good—that is, as of the first rank—and posited them as such, in contrast to everything low, low-minded, common, and plebeian. (Nietzsche 1996:12) In the above quoted passage, Nietzsche shows that apriori or absolute knowledge of the ‘good’ is impossible. In addition, he demonstrates that ideas, concepts such as reason, logic and scientific method have historically specific genealogies. Hence, contrary to the proposition of the Enlightenment that by using correct scientific method, truth of the world as it really is can be obtained, Nietzsche insists that there is no knowledge outside of history (1996:125). Nietzsche claimed that according to the scientific method, the object of inquiry must be first isolated and its boundaries predetermined before accurate knowledge of it is possible. However, if all knowledge is historically specific, then universal knowledge apriori to history is impossible. As a result, Nietzsche rejects the rationalistic scientific method and

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

125

concomitant analytic concepts and calls logical thinking delusional: “science is a hiding-place for all kinds of discontent, lack of conviction, gnawing worm, . . . bad conscience”(Nietzsche 1996:125). Nietzsche proposes that instead of the futile quest for uncovering pristine pure knowledge, one must seek historical knowledge of the world as it really is. Accepting that all knowledge is historical and specific, we will come to see how all social, political and scientific boundaries are contingent, arbitrary and historical. Social construction of knowledge includes the concepts of logic, rationality and the good (Nietzsche 1996). In this way, according to Nietzsche, one would be able to pay due attention to how power struggles play a central role in who has the ability to assert his, her or their version of truth, then often framed as ahistorical, universal and objective (Sherratt 2006:130). In his book Historical Ontology (2002), Hacking shows the process through which what was “once the ultimate other, the unknowable” came to be known and universalized (Hacking 2002:4). According to Hacking, universalism and scientific inquiry are discursive formations through which we constitute ourselves as objects of knowledge and agents of action (Hacking 2002:2). Inevitably, processes of self-creation in turn entail inclusion and exclusion, validation, access and delimitation. However, these processes are never complete or fixed. Instead, they are malleable and open to contestations. Similarly, German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels shows that repeated Western attempts to fix the boundaries between self and Other, civilized and savage, rationality and emotionality are doomed to fail (Waldenfels 2007). Since the social construction of Western modernity is predicated on the construction of its opposite, that is, barbaric practices and superstitions, modernity is permanently haunted by all that is excluded as irrational, superstitious and threatening. The rise of the alien resembles the sunrise. Just like the sun it appears suddenly. At the same time it does not resemble it because, unlike the sun, whose rising we are accustomed to, the alien surprises us. It goes beyond our expectations, it is not easy to grasp, it enters unsummoned. (Waldenfels 2007:3) What Hacking and Waldenfels show in their different ways is that universalism is a socially constructed powerful discourse formation though which primitive cultures and nations came to be imagined, classified, studied, tamed, controlled, classified, but never completely appropriated. The imposition of universal values of the Enlightenment remained haunted by the otherness of the Other. In particularly drastic form, this applies to the attempt to construct Western modernity in terms of racial purity and white European settler identity (Weinbaum 2004:15). The modern invention of racial purity based on an imagined unbroken genealogy is one of the most salient fictions upon which racialized whiteness came to be constructed and asserted (15). Although dreams of whiteness are nothing more than fabrication, these ideas

126

Amina Mire

have powerful and consequential implications (17). However, the excluded alien—the slaves, native peoples and centuries of interracial miscegenation— haunts all social constructions of genealogical origin. All forms of the social construction of racial purity reveal “genealogical impossibility” (17). This is because it is impossible to discover “genealogical origin of racial identity predicated on a past that cannot be accurately known” (17). On the contrary, the alien Other such as the specter of interracial “miscegenation” weighs heavily upon the quest for “pure” and knowable origin of whiteness. Whilst her focus is primarily on the US discourse of race, Weinbaum (2004) convincingly demonstrates that the white subject’s socially constructed ‘ontological certitude’ conceals nothing less than the pervasive history of centuries of interracial mixing in the US. In Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought, Weinbaum reveals historically specific ways in which racialized whiteness came to be mobilized in colonial times as well as in the contemporary US. Weinbaum’s argument that modern constitution of “white racial identity” is predicated on a past “which cannot be accurately known” suggests that all genealogical certitude requires mystification of an unknowable past as well as the willful forgetting of the historical specificity of the social construction of race. This chapter draws on the work of various scholars in order to examine three phenomena that continue to haunt the fiction of racial purity of whiteness: the Albino or white African body whose skin contains no skin pigment; the vitiligo subject, a person whose skin gradually loses its original pigment by developing white spots which gradually increase in size and numbers until the person eventually turns completely white; and the global trend of active skin whitening. I will examine how the figures of the albino, the vitiligo subject and of those who practice skin whitening challenge the socially constructed racial purity of whiteness. Second, I will examine some of the strategies which have been deployed to shore up the racialized boundary of whiteness and how these strategies ultimately fail to exclude those whose whiteness is considered alien, inferior, degenerate and threatening.

Willful Forgetting and the Social Construction of the Racial Purity of Whiteness Albinism and vitiligo pigment disorders could happen to any person regardless of race or ethnicity (Benthien 2002:169; Martin 2002:19). Additionally, skin whitening is commonly practiced by people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds including, for various and complex reasons, those who self-identity themselves as being white (Peiss 1998; Ashikari 2005; Mire 2012). And yet, vitiligo, albinism and skin whitening came to be framed in the dominant popular culture, medical journal and media discourses as “anomalies,” sites of illegitimate and threatening whiteness (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992; Peiss 1998; Martin 2002; Mire 2014). In particular,

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

127

dominant discourses frame these phenomena exclusively black-oriented. As a result, albinism, vitiligo and skin whitening have become important sites in which the fiction of genealogical reproducibility of racial purity of whiteness continues to be asserted, reinforced and consolidated. Although some have declared that we are already in a post-racial era, the notion that there is a pure, fixed and immutable white race continues to be a powerful site of racial formation. The current media hysteria surrounding a ‘white’ American woman, Rachel Dolezal, who ‘passed’ herself as ‘black’ shows the enduring mythology that there is a “pure,” genealogically inheritable essence to whiteness is as strong as ever (Johnson, Pérez-Peña, and Eligon 2015). Yet, if Dolezal possesses immutable whiteness, how did she manage to adopt a new black identity? The fact that she freely decided to adopt a new identity clearly shows that all identities are historically specific social constructions. And yet the following passage from an opinion piece in the New York Times about the racial passing of Rachel Dolezal suggests how the notion of whiteness as essence that can be protected and reproduced in its “pure” form remains a salient factor in contemporary US society: When she moved into her uncle’s basement in the largely white town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 2004, Rachel A. Dolezal was still blond and pale-skinned and identified herself as a white woman—one who had left a black husband and had a biracial child. But within a few years, her already deep commitment to black causes and culture intensified. Coworkers and relatives began hearing from her or others that her background was mixed-race—and even that she had called herself black. (Johnson, Pérez-Peña, and Eligon 2015) The above quote underscores that the quest for genealogical origin of whiteness is nothing more than fabrication. It is worthwhile paying extra attention to how the authors make a telling reference to Dolezal’s initial decision to cross the racialized color line and leave the “secure space of whiteness” to engage in transgressive interracial biological reproduction: she “left a black husband and had a biracial child.” If whiteness is immutable and fixed, instead of a socially constructed fiction, how do we make sense of the fact that Rachel Dolezal was able to forge a new identity for herself as a black woman? One way to approach this question is to recall almost 400 years of practice in which white women who crossed the color line have been symbolically and often legally rendered black. It is worth noting that as early as in 1622 in the American colonies, a white woman who crossed the racial color line or who engaged in sexual intimacy with a black man risked being forced to adopt a non-white new identity (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992:13). If we take this historical context into account, then the media hysteria surrounding the “racial passing” of Rachel Dolezal willfully avoids the fact that for hundreds of years it was the expected common practice that the moment a white woman becomes intimate with an African American

128

Amina Mire

man she risked losing her white identity. It is also worthy of attention that anti-miscegenation laws focused primarily on policing the racialized boundaries between white women and black men (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992:23). In other words, despite claims that differences between blacks and whites were essential, absolute, immutable and fixed, anti-miscegenation laws, and not nature, had to police the fictionalized borders of whiteness. Although the race mixing of Indians and Africans was of little interest to the colonial Whites, the rapid proliferation of White-Black race mixing was causing them great alarm. For slavery to gain moral acceptance, it was essential to keep the races apart. White leaders knew that if sexual relations with Africans continued unchecked, ethical questions about slavery would surely follow. As early as 1622, a little more than two years after the first Africans arrived, Virginia legislators passed the earliest anti-miscegenation statutes. (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992:12–13) What the sudden and explosive media storm around Rachel Dolezal’s decision to adopt a black identity shows is that the fiction of the racial purity of whiteness is haunted by a suppressed history of centuries of interracial mixing and interracial miscegenation. The gap between the fabricated fiction of an alleged unbroken genealogy pedigree of whiteness and the impossibility of genealogical certitude became evident when the authors of the New York Times opinion piece cited earlier in this chapter pointed to Rachel Dolezal’s past life when she was “blond and pale-skinned.” In doing so, the authors forgot that having “blond hair and pale skin” cannot show the difference between being ‘white’ and ‘white-looking,’ a fictional distinction upon which the 400-year-old US anti-miscegenation statutes depended on. That is: anybody with as little as one drop of African American blood can be rendered legally black regardless of his or her physical appearance (Benthien 2002:169). There can be neither proof nor disproof that Rachel Dolezal is “really” white and or that she is “passing” for black since both essentialist blackness and essentialist whiteness are socially constructed fictions. In the place of irrefutable facts, we are presented with the claims of Dolezal’s parents asserting that their daughter has no “known” black ancestry and that she once had “blond hair” and “pale skin.” The fact that she has four adopted African American siblings and that her own child has an African American father might have greatly influenced Rachel Dolezal’s decision to adopt black identity: She is estranged from her parents, Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal, and in Spokane, she has represented a friend, an older African-American man, as her father. When Rachel Dolezal was a teenager, her parents adopted four black children, one of whom now lives with Ms. Dolezal and her son, whom she had with her former husband, Kevin D. Moore, who is black. (Johnson, Pérez-Peña, and Eligon 2015)

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

129

The gap between the quest for finding unbroken genealogical pedigree of whiteness and the reality of widespread interracial mixing in the US is captured in a brilliantly witty political novel, Désirée Baby by Kate Chopin. I will draw upon Alys Eve Weinbaum’s excellent analysis of this novel because it reveals how the fabricated genealogical purity of the whiteness of Désirée, the central protagonist of the novel, ultimately fails to reproduce itself when despite her white appearance, she gave birth to a “black-looking” baby (Weinbaum 2004:16). The ironic twist to this fictional story is that it is not clear who is the source of the blackness in Désirée Baby, she or her whitelooking husband, Armand. However, Armand quickly blamed Désirée of being the source of the blackness in their child and immediately cast her and the baby out. In addition, he burned all of Désirée’s belongings. One of the items he found in one of her drawers was a fragment of a letter written by Armand’s black slave mother: This letter, written in Armand’s mother’s hand, thanks “the good God for having so arranged[life] that [her] dear Armand will never know that his dear mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.” (Weinbaum 2004:16) By casting out Désirée and her black-looking baby, and by burning the fragment of a letter written by his own black slave mother, Armand was able to construct his own identity as a white man. This story is instructive because it shows that identities are not only historical and specific but that they are also the outcome of power struggles. In the following section, I will examine how the discourses around albinism and vitiligo came to be framed and strategically deployed to explain away the spread of whiteness within the enslaved African population during the slavery era in the American colonies and later the US. It will be demonstrated that discourses around vitiligo and albinism are discourse formations that served similar agendas and aims such as, for example, anti-miscegenation laws. However, all attempts to isolate the whiteness of black subjects with albinism and vitiligo have failed.

Albinism, Interracial Miscegenation and Uncontrollable Whiteness As we have already noted earlier in this chapter, in 1622 the first antimiscegenation statutes were passed in the colony of Virginia. In their book The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans (1992), Russell, Wilson and Hall show that when the first anti-miscegenation statues were enacted there were few Africans living in Virginia; nevertheless, these laws were meant to safeguard the racial purity of the white settlers (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992:12). In spite of the existence of anti-miscegenation statutes, interracial mixing between the enslaved

130

Amina Mire

African population and members of the white settler classes became widespread (13). The anxiety around uncontrollable interracial mixing was considered most threatening when it involved black men and white women. In 1720, Richard Tilghman of Philadelphia filed a protest when his mulatto slave, Richard Molson, escaped with a White woman, and in 1747 a White servant named Ann Wainwright, of New Castle County, reportedly ran off with a Negro man. Concern was greatest when, as in these two cases, the interracial relationship involved a White woman and a Black man. (13) These cases show that attempts to regulate interracial intimacy between the African slave population and members of the white settler classes were complicated by gender and class dynamics. In addition, “the one drop of black blood” anti-miscegenation statutes meant that visibly white subjects, if they have any hint of known African ancestry could be re-categorized as slave property. However, anti-miscegenation statutes can control neither the spread of whites within those who are considered legally black by those statutes, nor can they stop white-looking people passing for white. Furthermore, spreading of whiteness through interracial reproduction became an unmentionable taboo because the primary source of this interracial “wayward reproduction” (Weinbaum 2004:37) were members of the class of white male slave owners and their slave black women. The central question for colonial lawmakers to settle was whether mixed-breed offspring should have the free status of the White father or the slave status of the Black mother. Virginia’s legislators found a solution that worked to their advantage. Departing from traditional English law, in which the status of the child was always determined by that of the father, the colonists voted in 1662 that children in Virginia would have the status of the mother. (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992:13) However, this matriarchal anti-miscegenation law intended not only to safeguard the racial purity of whiteness but, primarily, to control the offspring of interracial reproduction. Often anti-miscegenation laws allowed the white slave master to own their own children as slave property. But this practice posed a threat to the body politic of the white settler state. It was under these complex dynamics that albinism and vitiligo emerged in the late seventeenth century as sites of discourse formation and were deployed to control the spread of whiteness within the slave population which ultimately would undermine the racial order of the color line. It was no accident that the attempts to collapse interracial miscegenation with albinism and vitiligo emerged in Virginia. Discourses around the problem of albinism became a convenient strategy to relocate discourses of interracial miscegenation away from interracial sexual

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

131

reproduction and into the realm of medical pathology. Of course, claims that albinism and vitiligo alone were responsible for the spread of whiteness within the slave population were not credible. First, because these pigmentation disorders occur in all ethnic and racial groups and also, because they are limited phenomena (Benthien 2002:150; Martin 2002:20). Nevertheless, vitiligo and albinism came to be framed almost exclusively as signs of “defective,” or “anomalous” whiteness on black skin (Benthien 2002:150; Martin 2002:21). This strategy was meant to tacitly explain away the taboo subject of interracial miscegenation (Martin 2002:21). However, reducing the proliferation of whiteness within and across the racialized color line to albinism and vitiligo presented unexpected new challenges. For example, if, as the colonial political leaders and racial scientists claimed, vitiligo and albinism were the sole causes of the spread of whiteness within the slave population, and if this form of whiteness was a limited, anomalous, degenerate form of whiteness, then how to explain the presence of large populations of healthy and white-looking people within the slave population? Despite this contradiction, slave-owning colonialists such as Thomas Jefferson sought to relocate the site of the “wayward” interracial sexual reproduction between white masters and their black female slaves to the domain of the medical discourse on vitiligo and albinism (Martin 2002:19). Thomas Jefferson was one of the early racial theorists who put forward a speculative theory about the causes of what Martin called the emergence of the “White Negro” (2002:49). Jefferson’s primary focus was to show that the whiteness of African slaves cannot be sexually reproduced since it is a sign of ‘disease’ and ‘degeneracy’: In order to mitigate this threat to the order of nature and society, Jefferson attempts to stabilize the revolutionary potential of the white Negro body by effacing the distinction between it and the body of the albino and reinforcing the difference between African and Anglo-Saxon skin. He describes the color of the albino as ‘a pallid cadaverous white, untinged with red,’ reducing the albino, through this description, beyond the position of an analyzable living object of natural history to that of a dissectible corpse, apparently devoid of the warming and to a small extent, humanizing blood that marks proper whiteness of skin. (Martin 2002:23–24) The medicalization of the interracial reproduction of whiteness was designed to remove moral responsibility from white masters. They were also designed to calm anxieties of the white settler population who feared if whiteness continued spreading within the slave population, eventually, it would lead to the dissolution of the boundaries between the races and with it the very enterprise of slavery and the racial order of the color line: In spite his efforts to limit its effect, Jefferson’s literary exhibition of his white Negroes spurred further display and discussions of the

132

Amina Mire encroachment of white skin on the black body. The image of the African American deprived of blackness—slaves transforming, degenerating, possibly regenerating—fired the political imagination and insinuated its way into the debate on race as disconcerting indication of the fiction of whiteness. (Martin 2002:24)

The passage quoted above shows that while attempts were made to isolate and fix the whiteness of the African American body by reducing it to anomaly, those who opposed the slave system saw revolutionary potential in the white African American body. Anti-slavery advocates argued that if the blackness of the slave could be dissolved, it would also dissolve the very foundation of the racial color line. The final result could lead to the end of slavery (Martin 2002:27). In order to suppress this revolutionary potential, Jefferson proposed more drastic measures in order to prove the supposedly innate and immutable inferiority of the white African American body, more specifically its surgical dissection: Dissatisfied that African skin will not yield the knowledge he sought, Jefferson understands the next logical, intrusive step: to delve beneath the surface, to apply scalpel to the skin and remove it to unveil the secrets of racial difference he hopes to uncover. The proof of inferiority that Jefferson believes dwells beneath the skin requires submission to ‘then anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire, or by solvents’ to delineate the difference. (Martin 2002:50) Jefferson’s radical approach to the threatening presence of the white African American body was to cut it up, fragment it, burn it by fire, dissolve it through solvent and place it under scrutiny of scientific optical glasses, and to subject it to the sharp knife of the anatomist. All of these drastic measures were mobilized to counter the revolutionary potential of the white African American body. In addition, the systematic deployment of the language of scientific precision sought to give moral legitimacy to the discourse of scientific racism and the social and political order of the color line. Failure to fix and control the threatening presence of the white African American body in Jefferson’s discourse shows the impossibility of overcoming the alienness of the Other (Waldenfels 2007). It seems the more Jefferson tried to explain away the presence of whiteness within the African slave population, the more he tried to isolate it, contain it and destroy it, the more difficult it got to do so. At the end, Jefferson and contemporary racial scientists failed to show an effective way to overcome the threatening whiteness of the white African American body. Faced with the possible erasure of color that the figure of the White Negro presents, the natural philosophers and medical practitioners of

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

133

the early Republic sought to define more physiological markers of variation and bring hidden sources of difference to the surface. Intrusive experimentation toward the end of the eighteen century and into the nineteenth began to replace observation at a distance. (Martin 2002:51) The failure to contain the alien, in this case the African slave with the white skin, indicates the extent to which violence could be unleashed to contain, isolate and ultimately eradicate otherness. In the following section, I will link this historical representation of vitiligo and albinism as figures of threatening otherness to the current, disturbing violence against people with vitiligo and albinism in a number of regions in Africa.

The Contemporary African Witch-Doctor and the White African Albino Body In our contemporary context, there is a resurgence of the Western fascination with the African body drained of any trace of melanin. There is equal Western fascination with the gradual whitening of the African body with vitiligo (Obulutsa 2008:1–2; Smith 2012:1; Barlow 2015:1). Some of the leading Western media outlets, such as The Guardian (UK), have been publishing lurid stories about cases involving cannibalism in Africa involving “witchdoctors” whose primary prey are people with albinism and vitiligo (Obulutsa 2008; Smith 2012; Barlow 2015). According to one such report, in Tanzania people with albinism are being kidnapped and murdered, and their body parts sold in the black market because of the belief that people with albinism and vitiligo have magical powers which are transferred to those consuming their bodies. The idea that the white body has a magical power was first promoted during the colonial era. According to Dyer, in the age of Western colonialism, claims that the white European body had “special and unique power” and possessed “enterprise” were not uncommon (Dyer 1997:23). European colonialists claimed this special power was missing from the nonwhite bodies of the colonized subjects. It seems now African witch-doctors are making similar claims with respect to the white bodies of African albinos. Eating African albino body parts does not come cheaply, however: A hereditary genetic condition that causes an absence of pigmentation in the skin, hair and eyes, albinism affects one Tanzanian in 1,400, according to experts. It affects just one person in 20,000 in the west. Body parts sell for around $600 in Tanzania, with an entire corpse fetching $75,000. A US survey in 2010 found that while most people in Tanzania are Christian or Muslim, 93% said they believed in witchcraft. Despite the scourge, only 10 people have been convicted of murder. Last month a four-year-old girl was kidnapped from her home by men armed with machetes in the northern Mwanza region. Police have since arrested

134

Amina Mire 15 people, including the girl’s father and two uncles, but she remains unaccounted for. (Smith 2015)

It is particularly shocking that family members of some of the victims have played a role in the disappearance and murder of their own kin. Apparent is that money and strong belief in the magical powers of the albino white body play critical roles in this deadly illicit trafficking in whiteness. While the statistical data are lacking because only a small number of victims have been officially reported, the allure of these stories lies in the fact that bodies are literally being killed, sold and consumed for their whiteness. On the other hand, each year millions of Africans die from a plethora of diseases but they do not receive the high level of media coverage dedicated to the violence against African albinos. For example, according to the newspaper article cited already, as of 2015, “Tanzania has banned witchdoctors in an attempt to combat a rise in the killing of people with albinism for their body parts” (Smith 2015:1). The same report showed that since the year 2000, at least seventy-four people with albinism have reportedly been murdered in that country (1). Of course, the banning of this horrific practice is great news for the albino victims. However, as noted previously, the current Western media present the attacks as a barbaric practice based on superstition and witchcraft. On the other hand, I have presented scholarly evidence which shows the Western fascination with the African albino skin (Benthien 2002; Martin 2002). As we have seen in previous sections of this chapter, in the American colonies and later the US, African slaves with albinism faced deeply troubling medical, political and social scrutiny. While by no means I do wish to question the real threat faced by people with albinism and vitiligo in African countries such as Tanzania, it is pertinent to also mention that Tanzania is a major market for Western produced and often deadly toxic skin whitening products, some of which contain mercury, hydroquinone and corticosteroids (Mire 2001, 2012; The Economist 2012). Often missing from Western media reports about the violence faced by people with albinism and vitiligo in various countries in Africa is that for centuries European colonial literature promulgated whiteness as connected with energy, health, wealth and class mobility (McClintock 1995). Also not mentioned is that currently skin whitening products are promoted to African consumers. In this way, for centuries Africans have been enticed to whiten and brighten their black skin with whitening products (Mire 2014). “African witch-doctors” have been singled out as barbaric and superstitious for kidnapping, killing and selling white bodies of albino subjects, while the aggressive and globalized promotion of skin whitening commodities (Mire 2012) to Africans and everybody else receives very little media attention. It is therefore important to ask whether and if so, to what extent, today’s African witch-doctor is radically different from the nineteenth-century American racial anatomist whose primary objective was to cut up and dissect the

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

135

threatening white African American body in order to prove the alleged racial superiority of the whiteness of Europeans. Despite the fact that threats to people with albinism and vitiligo is a very recent phenomenon in Africa, contemporary discussions make no mention of three centuries of American racial science which sought to completely eradicate people who suffer from albinism and vitiligo. Parallels and differences between these two figures are, however, instructive. Whereas in late eighteenth and nineteenth century American anatomists sought to cut up the white African white body in order to “reveal its secrets” (Martin 2002:51), in contemporary Africa, the witch-doctor seeks to cut up and literally consume the white African body in order to access “secret powers” hidden inside it (Obulutsa 2008; Smith 2015). In an analogous manner, media discourse in the West frames vitiligo and albinism almost exclusively as “anomalous” whiteness on innately black Africans, although both are pigmentation disorders that can occur in people regardless of ethnicity or race (Martin 2002:25). As mentioned previously, it is critically important to stress that attacks against albino and vitiligo sufferers in Africa are taking place in a contemporary context in which skin whitening products are being aggressively promoted to Africans as well as to people in other parts of the world (Mire 2005). It is equally important to underscore that the discourse of skin whitening first emerged in the modern era among enslaved African populations in America (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992:51) and that it has now become a multibillion-dollar industry (Mire 2014). In spite of the fact that skin whitening products have been marketed to both African American and white women in the US for over two centuries (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992; Peiss 1998:150), and although the skin whitening industry produces its own brand of economic and cultural discourses as well as its own version of entrepreneurial academic officers backed by cutting-edge scientific innovations, this practice has often been dismissed as nothing more than tanning by whites (Blades 2012).

Scientific Objectivity and Universal Humanism as Modes of Willful Forgetting What the current attempt to relocate the long and painful history of violence against people with albinism and vitiligo into the primitivist realm of “African witch-craft,” and the dismissive ways in which the multibillion-dollar skin whitening industry is portrayed in the media have in common is that both phenomena are represented through the discursive strategy of willful forgetting and deliberate othering. I would like to stress that willful othering is different from the discourse around the appropriation of otherness in that in willful forgetting and deliberate othering, the aim is the complete obliteration of otherness. Willful forgetting focuses on assimilation to one’s own culture without giving due acknowledgment and respect to the appropriated otherness (Root 1996:3). It often includes a denial of otherness, even

136

Amina Mire

of its tacit recognition, through the process of commodification of the difference, but also by collapsing historically specific otherness into an ahistorical universal same and/or through violent attempts at eradication (Dussel 1995; Mire 2002). The attempt to eradicate alienness is a constitutive aspect of the modernist humanist paradigm, for which it is impossible to acknowledge the ontological difference and epistemic framework of the life world of the Other. The apriori modernist sovereign self and the paradigm of the absolute truth of the rational subject cannot allow the philosophical space of otherness. Within the dominant discourse of modernity there are only two options: rationality of the sovereign individual and the irrationality of the primitive Other (Dussel 1995; Mire 2002). Consequently, historically specific European subjectivity and cultural values are often framed as universal humanism and scientific rationality. And these European notions of universalism often became the only legitimate standards for human action, ethics and politics. Societies with different value systems were marginalized and colonized and their values rendered irrational and associated with magic and witchcraft (Dussel 1995; Roots 1996; Mire 2002). ‘Scientific objectivity’ is, of course, the foundation of universal humanism. Humanism in turn provided the moral justification when the Europeans decided to conduct their civilizing mission and bring ‘irrational primitive societies’ to the light of scientific enlightenment (McClintock 1995). In the modern era, Western representations of non-European cultures came to be populated by “savages” with no ontological stances of their own (Dussel 1995; Mire 2002). It is interesting to note that in the Middle Ages, European travellers and storytellers reported the world outside of Europe as different, alien and in some cases alluring, exciting and adventurous (Goldberg 1993; Dussel 1995). However, with the onset of the European colonial expansion, earlier narratives of enchanting and alluring alien continents and culture came gradually to be replaced by a new ‘sober,’ self-distancing scientific discourse of containment, control and subduing the threatening Other. Hence, with the advent of the modern scientific enterprise in the seventeenth century, European representations of Africa, for example, changed from alluring, mysterious and exotic to the homogenized image of a dark, threatening continent symbolically associated with ‘cannibalism,’ ‘witchcraft’ and collective superstition (Eze 1997:124). The following passage is taken from a 1770 lecture Hegel delivered in Berlin entitled Race, History, and Imperialism: Africa proper is the characteristic part of the whole continent as such. We have chosen to examine this continent first, because it can well be taken as antecedent to our main inquiry. It has no historical interest of its own, for we find its inhabitants living in barbarism and savagery in a land which has not furnished them with any ingredient of culture. From the earliest historical times, Africa has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold, for ever pressing

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

137

in upon itself, and the land of childhood, removed from the light of selfconscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night. (Hegel, quoted in Eze 1997:124) In the above quoted passage, Hegel attempts to frame Africa as absolute Other, utterly alien and uninteresting not only to the history of European civilization but to the very notions of historical development and civilization as such. Hegel’s primary aim is to overcome Africa. Ironically, Africa is much closer to Europe than East Asia and the Americas. However, Hegel wants to overcome Africa’s alienness in the same manner in which Jefferson sought to overcome the white African American body within colonial settler society. While it can be said that premodern representations of Africa contained at least implicit recognition of the alienness of the Other, now the West divided the spatio-temporal world into what McClintock called the anachronistic space occupied by the primitive Other and the forward-looking temporal time of the modern Western scientific enterprise (McClintock 1995). Dyer (1997) argued that in the age of European colonial expansion, the term enterprise had been conflated with the concepts of “spirit and of whiteness” (23). Whereas the ideology of the anachronistic space came to be associated with stagnation, rigidity, primitivism, the concept of enterprise was used to capture historical time, scientific progress and the embodiment of whiteness. According to Dyer, in the nineteenth century, the concepts of enterprise and spirit of the North European race played a critical role in the conceptual transformation of the primarily linguistically based Aryan model of race into the more biologically oriented Caucasian model (1997:22–25). Whereas non-white bodies are supposed to be fixed in rigid spaces of the past, white bodies are infused with energy, flexibility, movement, innovative spirit and enterprise. In colonial adventure stories, the white subjects are supposed to bring the dynamic movement of temporal progress: “The Western as (manled, woman-inspired) success myth allows us to experience a sense of white historical mastery of time and space (Dyer 1997:36). The embodiment of whiteness intersected with the European scientific enterprise, most clearly in the scientific method of Francis Bacon, which was based on the metaphysics of Rene Descartes. In the remaining sections I will show how this discursive intersection of scientific rationality and superiority of whiteness is perpetuated in the discourses and practices of the burgeoning skin whitening industry.

Dislocating Western History of Skin Whitening and Contemporary Globalization of Whiteness According to the literature, skin whitening has been commercially promoted to African American women since the late eighteenth century (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992:51). The same literature shows that in the US legally white Eastern and Southern European women have used skin whitening in

138

Amina Mire

order to appear as ‘white’ as their ‘Anglo-Saxon’ “native” white sisters (Peiss 1998:150). In the US, women of color also have practiced skin whitening. Many of the early skin-bleaching commodities such as Nadinola cream, a product that has been on the US market since 1889, contained 10 percent ammoniated mercury. According to Kathy Peiss, in 1930 a single survey found advertising for 232 different brand names of skin-bleaching creams promoted in mainstream magazines to mainly white women consumers (Peiss 1998:149). The dominant skin whitening discourse was based on a dual strategy in which skin whitening was often rendered as a legitimate cosmetic practice when used by ‘white’ ethnic immigrant European, and as a foolish and futile attempt at gaining whiteness when practiced by African Americans. This essentialist discourse reduced all African American women to immutable blackness. The following quote from Kathy Peiss’ book Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (1998) demonstrates the mentioned dual strategy: Women might purchase a skin whitener that covered and colored the skin and simultaneously disclaim its status as paint. For women of European descent, whitening could be absorbed within the acceptable skincare routine and assimilated into the ruling beauty ideas, the natural face of white genteel womanhood—although, as Jessie Benton Frémont testified, one glance at the hands could undo this careful effort to naturalize artifice. For African Americans, this fiction was impossible: Whitening cosmetics, touted as cures for ‘disabling’ African features, reinforced a racialized aesthetic through a makeover that appeared anything but natural. (Peiss 1998:42–43) In the above-quoted passage Peiss at once admits and ignores that the construction of European racial genealogy is nothing but a ruse because after centuries of interracial and interethnic mixing in the new colonial context, there is no logical reason why, if dark-skinned Eastern and Southern Europeans can “pass” for white with a little help from skin whitening, lightskinned African American women can’t do the same. Here, Peiss assumes that the fiction of the color line and the “epistemic certitude” of the “invisible” blackness and anti-miscegenation narrative of the one drop of “black blood” could factually prevent African Americans from passing for white. The “appearance of whiteness” is the key to accessing the exclusive cultural and economic privileges whiteness accrues. In reality, during the colonial era, fear of the infiltration of “invisible” blackness partially fuelled both the marketing strategies of industry and the anxieties of white women that they may not appear “white enough.” Peiss notes this much as evidenced by the following quote from Hope in a Jar: Dorothy Dignam’s ads for Nadinola skin bleach and Nadine face power, appearing in mass circulation women’s magazines, resurrected the Old

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

139

South. Dignam later noticed “This line made in the South was largely sold to the Negro market; the advertising was a planned attempt to capture the white market also.” (Peiss 1998:150) It is clear that skin whitening marketing targeted both African American and white women in the American South by playing up fears of interracial miscegenation in white Southern women and by enticing African American women with the possibility of participating in commodified whiteness. We have seen similar dynamics of social constructions of whiteness when we examined Kate Chopin’s novel, Désirée Baby (Weinbaum 2004:17). It is pertinent to note Peiss’ suggestion that “women of European descent” (1998:150) were able to practice skin whitening within the secure space of whiteness. This suggestion points to the fantasy of an unbroken and unquestioned genealogical pedigree of European whiteness. Of course, this is nothing more than fabrication as we have noticed in Weinbaum’s analysis of Chopin’s novel. The following quote from Peiss’s Hope in a Jar (1998), shows how the specter of invisible blackness weighs on Southern white women’s skin whitening practices. Her paean to ‘the beauty secret of Southern women,’ featuring plantations, magnolia blossoms, and hoop-skirted bells, erased any hint of Nadinola’s black clientele. Although usually rendered obliquely, racial prejudice was an explicit talking point for manufacturers Albert F. Wood: ‘A white person objects to a swarthy brown-hued or mulatto-like skin, therefore if staying much out of doors use regularly Satin Skin Vanishing Greaseless Cream to keep the skin normally white.’ (Peiss 1998:150) The fiction of the “epistemic certitude” of the color line is expected to guard the racial border between whiteness and blackness, but it is not clear how the eye could tell the visible differences between a light-skinned African American and an olive-skinned ethnic European immigrant.

Consuming Whiteness and Assimilating Otherness In the preceding section, I addressed the historical foundation of modern skin whitening in its colonial historical context. In this final section, I examine the emerging discourse and practice of the industry, which operates at the intersecting dynamics of biotechnological innovations and the aesthetic desire for whiter skin. However, unlike the African witch-doctor who illicitly consumes and sells the remaining body parts of her albino and vitiligo victims, the skin whitening industry has been institutionalized as a site of capital accumulation and a source of knowledge production (Mire 2012). The

140

Amina Mire

institutionalization of the skin whitening industry in turn facilitates the normalization and globalization of whiteness consumerism (Ashikari 2005; Global Industry Analysts, Inc. 2009). Although these products promise to drain the skin of users of its natural melanin, skin whitening biotechnology has been normalized under the purview of the globalization of ‘beauty’ (Jesús 2005). This strategy means very little critical attention has been paid to the social, ethical and political implications of skin whitening. The normalization and popularization of skin whitening facilitates the globalization of a homogenizing and hegemonic ideal beauty, into what Jesús (2005) called “global look.” Skin whitening as a catalyst of the paler shade of the global look has the capacity to reinforce the stigmatization and normalization of global racism and sexism (Mire 2014). In this section, I use Dyer’s (1997) concept of the embodiment of whiteness to examine the specific ways in which the supposed ‘superiority’ of whiteness is promulgated through the globalized marketing of skin whitening commodities and related technologies to women around the world. Dyer’s “embodiment of whiteness” is a useful way of describing consumer desire to actively acquire whiteness through commodity practices. It also allows me to expose the dark side of the allure of whiteness consumerism by superimposing it both with the morbid obsession with natural albinos and with the scarred faces of African women whose dream of white skin resulted in disfigurement. The concept of an embodiment of whiteness obtained through skin whitening consumerism seeks to capture the flow of information, images, ideas, goods and services across national and international borders. In this context, the global look is an effect of the global circulation of whiteness. The embodiment of whiteness in the context of skin whitening consumerism displaces whiteness from any fixed specific place or body and places it in the fluid spaces of transnational circulation (Osuri 2008:110). The ‘space age’ has collapsed the old modernist division of the anachronistic fixed spaces and the forward march of the temporal (historical) time of progress and enterprise. In the age of the Internet, potentially anybody can invest in whiteness. However, investment in white skin works only if the consumer chooses ‘the right kind’ of safe, which often means expensive products. This, in turn, means that the moral responsibility to practice ‘safe’ skin whitening becomes the duty of the consumer. In other words, consumers are expected to do their own research in order to avoid skin whitening products with harmful agents such as hydroquinone, mercury and corticosteroids, which are prohibited in most countries but are widely available on illegal markets. Skin whitening biotechnology is a new regime, and presumably, a ‘safer’ industry. In this context, high-technology skin whitening represents a ‘healthier’ form of whiteness consumerism. As a result, high-end skin whitening consumerism accrues higher symbolic values of whiteness (Mire 2012). The data and the literature examined in this section deal with the globalization of skin whitening biotechnology promoted explicitly to produce whitening

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

141

effects for aesthetic reasons. This market is presented as booming by analysts: The global market for skin lighteners is projected to reach $19.8 billion by 2018, driven by the growing desire for light-coloured skin among both men and women primarily from the Asian, African and the Middle East regions. Skin whitening products represents one of the rapidly growing segments in the global beauty industry, with manufacturers capitalizing on consumers’ desire for fair skin in these regions. Although skin-whitening products were initially aimed at face care, the trend has changed with companies offering products for overall skin care, and the demand for male skin brightening and lightening products is now on the rise too, particularly in Asia. (McDougall 2013:1) We need to ask to what extent the biotechnologically mediated production of skin drained of its natural melanin is different from albinism. We are deliberating the chemical production of globalized albino populations by actively suppressing the body’s ability to produce melanin. It is critically important to compare skin whitening with albinism, as has been noted earlier. At the moment when there are well publicized attempts in the Western media to raise awareness of violence against people with albinism and vitiligo in various parts of Africa, we also witness the globalizing promotion of a multibillion-dollar high-technology skin whitening industry. Skin whitening products are promoted in legitimate sources and constitute a lucrative market. The report “Skin Lightening Trend in Asia Boosts Global Market” (McDougall 2013) suggests that skin lightening is an emerging market trend but makes no mention that it also can lead to albinism. Published by a leading online clearing house for cosmetics, the report focuses exclusively on economic potential (Gram 2007; Yeomans 2012; McDougall 2013). And despite the fact that these whitening products target women and men in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Western media continue to focus on campaigns to protect African subjects with albinism and vitiligo. When it comes to the commercial promotion of skin whitening products, media representation is often reduced either to frivolous consumerism or to disfigured black faces in medical journals. As a result, the Western biotechnology entrepreneur escapes the harsh judgment of the nineteenth-century American racial anatomist or today’s African witch-doctor. Instead, his “scientific” knowledge and the economic wealth he creates from promoting skin whitening products make him a highly valued scientific officer (Mire 2012) and respected captain of the knowledge economy. However, we are already acquainted with this discursive coupling of the Western captain of empire and industry with the global promotion of whiteness. Soap was also used to infuse the power of whiteness to cleanse and purify both the colonizing and colonized. Like the metaphor of enterprise, soap had

142

Amina Mire

been invested with the symbolic power to order and regulate hierarchical relations of power within coloniality. On the one hand, soap had the function of safeguarding the racial purity of the white bourgeois elite. On the other hand, it was invested with the magical power to penetrate, cleanse and civilize atavistic bodies and cultural spaces of the colonized non-white others so that they can be magically transformed to whiteness (McClintock 1995:33). In Whose Debt? Globalisation and Whitefacing in Asia, Goon and Craven (2003), analyze the marketing of skin whitening cosmetics to Asian women in Malaysia. The authors trace the global flow of images, ideas, goods and services from the West to the rest of the world and examine the contradictory and complex responses by Asian societies (Goon and Craven 2003:2). They link the contemporary popularization of skin whitening practices in Asian countries such as Malaysia, India, China, Hong Kong and Thailand to the emergence of the interracial trope of the ‘fair-skinned’ Eurasian female model (i.e., models with Asian and Caucasian interracial backgrounds) whose naturally light face is often used in advertisements for skin whitening. Goon and Craven interrogate the fact that images of naturally light-skinned models have been used in skin whitening ads directed primarily to ‘brown-skinned’ Asian women (Goon and Craven 2003:3). Drawing from performativity and poststructuralist theories, they suggest that Asian women’s deliberate investment in artificially whitened faces could challenge the hegemonic domination of whiteness (Goon and Craven 2003:5). However, Goon and Craven also underscore the sinister side of the practice. The authors stress that skin whitening is not a playful act of putting on and off a white paint over yellow or brown skin. Instead, it is “state-of-the art scientific modification” which requires the literal draining of the skin of its natural pigment, melanin (Goon and Craven 2003:6). The message promoted is contradictory: the texts advocate halting the natural production of melanin within the body in order to bring about what they call a ‘natural’ or ‘true’ beauty—in actuality an artificiallyenhanced and genetically-unnatural whiteness. The beauty discourses at work within these texts refer to an understanding of ‘beauty’ strongly rationalised by Enlightenment naturalisations of splitting, colonial notions of white power, and class-based constitutions of paler-skinned aristocracy. The ‘gaze’ constructed through these texts is neither ‘coloured’ nor ‘white’: these texts market the production of a hybrid creature, a dream-doll with Asian features and Caucasian skin. The reader is invited to participate in a most ironic conflict of return—the reconstitution of colonialised values through the application of state-ofthe-art scientific modification. (Goon and Craven 2003:6) Contradictory influences of the colonial legacy of white domination and the Enlightenment promise of universal inclusion are woven together through artificially produced pale skin. This artificial albino skin is placed within the

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

143

context of both globalized flows of whiteness and local dynamics of ‘colorcoded’ social stratification as the contributing factors of the skin whitening boom in Asia. However, at the end, Goon and Craven reject the industrydriven assertion that the consumption of the skin whitening commodity is a meaningful form of empowerment (Goon and Craven 2003:6). Instead, they argue that the postcolonial skin whitening consumerism normalizes and reinforces contemporary recuperations of the colonial legacy of hegemonic whiteness. In this context, “whitefacing” in Asia results in the symbolic fragmentation of the Asian woman and denies her a subjective position as legitimate Other. The trope of the Asian woman with pale skin drained of its natural pigment by skin whitening products lacks the capacity to challenge dominating effects of hegemonic whiteness. Goon and Craven’s (2003) reference to the symbolic figure of an Asian woman with a “ghost-like ash-colored white skin” is critically important because biotechnology and cosmetics firms that promote these products to both African and Asian women and men, openly assert that blocking the body’s capacity to produce melanin will lead to the attainment of a “healthy” new whiter skin (Mire 2012). As a result, skin whitening effects are more than skin deep: these products claim to have the capacity of penetrating the skin and acting at the site of melanin production. In the biotechnological discourse of whiteness, the pigmented skin becomes a site of pollution and disease. This discursive linking fits into the academic biomedical discourse in skin whitening research which aims at finding ways to minimize, and if possible, eliminate melanin-producing cells in the body (Mire 2012). In fact, central to the innovations of skin whitening biotechnology is finding ways to control the biosynthesis of melanin in order to design stronger, more effective skin whitening products. Skin whitening research findings are published in peer-reviewed scientific journals (Maeda and Fukuda 1991; Dooley 1997). These researchers do not hide the fact that their research goal is to find scientific methods that can be used to effectively reduce or block the body’s capacity to produce melanin. The following quote clearly shows a close association between ongoing scientific research in melanin production and the emerging skin whitening biotechnology market: A team of researchers working at the Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Japan claims it has clarified the structure of melanin, a move which could enable cosmetic companies to develop more effective skin whitening products. (Pitman 2006:1) In other words, finding more effective methods of blocking melanin biosynthesis could increase the industry’s capacity in making more powerful skin whitening products. This is another clear example that presents skin whitening biotechnology as a penetrating technology. Yet, perhaps with the exception of my own research (Mire 2001, 2012), few scholars have so far paid due attention to the

144

Amina Mire

symbolic violence of this technology, its capacity to penetrate, fragment and stigmatize women’s bodies and skin. In “Pigmentation and Empire: The Emerging Skin-Whitening Industry,” I examined extensive medical literature published in peer-reviewed medical and dermatology journals about the health risks associated with using toxic skin whitening products (Mire 2005). Reading these case studies one gets the feeling that the victims, almost all of them black women, are often pitied and ridiculed for their naïve and ultimately “dubious desire for unattainable corporeal whiteness” (Mire 2005:3). The article generated a firestorm of online discussion. I have received over 600 emails since its publication. This kind of attention suggests that the public is ready to discuss skin whitening but that industry and corporate media are not willing to address the social, health and ethical implications of the practice. Some scholars have tried to shrug off skin whitening as misguided and harmful, similar to tanning (Blades 2012). However, in the tanning discourse, a ‘pale’ white skin is considered unhealthy and sickly whereas in the skin whitening discourse the natural pigmented skin of non-white people is considered as a sign of unhealthiness and “hyper-accumulation of pigment” (Mire 2012). This strategy, therefore, recuperates the discourse of pigmentation ‘diseases,’ ‘brown spots,’ and ‘hyper-pigmentation’ as signs of a pathology which skin whitening biotechnology is designed to ameliorate. In this way, skin whitening biotechnology promulgates “eurocentric diffusionism” and hegemonic whiteness (Blaut 1993; Dyer 1997). Currently, the diffusion of whiteness is globalized through the flow of information, ideas, goods and services across national and continental borders. It can be argued that the current diffusion of whiteness through skin whitening biotechnology recalls the nineteenth-century European colonial discourse through which ordinary commodities such as soaps were used as convenient instruments of the ‘civilizing mission,’ while at the same time creating new markets for Western commodities. As McClintock notes, ordinary commodities such as soap became powerful sites through which colonial messages of ‘racial progress’ and colonial rule could be mediated and transmuted within the colonial imperative (McClintock 1995). It is pertinent to make conceptual and methodological links between the nineteenth-century advertisements for the consumption of whiteness through a bar of soap, historic marketing of skin whitening to white immigrants and African American women, medicalization and racialization of albinism and vitiligo, and the current aggressive globalizing advertisements for skin whitening commodities. This is because all these discourses are predicated on open or tacit strategies of exclusion, othering and symbolic violence.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to use inspiration from the discourse of otherness which frames this book project in order to examine to what extent certain emerging phenomena, namely fascination with Africans suffering

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

145

from albinism and vitiligo and mass marketing of skin whitening products, can be critically examined in reference not only to current cultural discourses but also to the contradictory dualistic narrative of Enlightenment ideals based on the commitment to universal humanity and concrete exclusionary practices based on differences in physical appearance such as skin color (Goldberg 1993; Eze 1997). This dual conceptual strategy allowed me to reveal the moral, philosophical and political paradigms, theories and concepts through which the whiteness of the European body, its unique enterprise and spirit (Dyer 1997) came to be represented as irrefutable sign of European moral, cultural and corporeal superiority over the non-white bodies of colonized others. The proliferation of the skin whitening industry seems to show that the global allure of whiteness is as strong as ever. If that is the case, on what philosophical and moral grounds could non-white otherness express its legitimate claim to its own difference? This question is complicated and not easy to answer. However, as Bernhard Waldenfels shows us (2007:1–19), it is impossible to overcome the alienness of the Other. Modernists repeat their futile attempts to conquer the alien by various means including forced assimilation, violent eradication, suppression and willfully forgetting. None of these strategies have been successful, nor can they ever be if the objective is the complete annihilation of the alien.

References Ashikari, Mikiko. 2005. “Cultivating Japanese Whiteness: The ‘Whitening’ Cosmetics Boom and the Japanese Identity.” Journal of Material Culture 10(1):73–91. Barlow, E. 2015. “Chantelle Winnie: ‘I’m Proud of My Skin’.” The Observer. February 15. http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/feb/15/chantelle-winnie-modelvitiligo Benthien, Claudia. 2002. Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World. Translated by Thomas Dunlop. New York: Columbia University Press. Blades, D. 2012. “Power and Socioscientific Issue: The Pedagogy of Mire’s Critique of Skin Whitening Cosmeceuticals.” Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education 12(3):292–301. Blaut, James. M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford Press. Dooley, T.P. 1997. “Topical Skin Depigmentation Agents: Current Products and Discovery of Novel Inhibitors of Melanogenesis.” Journal of Dermatological Treatment 8:275–279. Dussel, Enrique. 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by Michael D. Barber. New York: Continuum. Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London and New York: Routledge. The Economist. 2012. “Beauty in Nigeria: Lighter Shade of Shades of Skin.” Copyright© The Economist Newspaper Limited 2013. http://www.economist.com/ blogs/baobab/2012/09/beauty-nigeria Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed. 1997. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

146

Amina Mire

Global Industry Analysts, Inc. 2009. “Skin Lighteners: A Global Strategic Business Report.” (Report Code MCP-6140). http://www.strategyr.com/Skin_Lighteners_ Market_Report.asp Goldberg, Theo David. 1993. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Malden: Blackwell. Goon, Patricia and Allison Craven. 2003. “Whose Debt?: Globalization and Whitefacing in Asia.” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context. August (9). http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue9/gooncraven.html Gram, M. 2007. “Whiteness and Western Values in Global Advertisements: An Exploratory Study.” Journal of Marketing Communications 13(4):291–309. Hacking, I. 2002. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jesús, Attilio. 2005. “That Global Look: China’s New Faces.” Le Monde diplomatique. June 17. http://mondediplo.com/2005/06/17beauty Johnson, Kirk, Richard Pérez-Peña, and John Eligon. 2015. “Rachel Dolezal, in Center of Storm, Is Defiant: ‘I Identify as Black’.” New York Times. June 16. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/rachel-dolezal-nbc-today-show. html?_r=0 Kawash, Samira. 1997. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Maeda, K. and M. Fukuda. 1991. “In Vitro Effectiveness of Several Whitening Cosmetic Components in Human Melanocytes.” Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists 42:361–368. Markell, P. 2003. Bound by Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Martin, Charles D. 2002. The White African American Body: A Cultural and Literary Exploration. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. McClintock, A. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London and New York: Routledge. McDougall, A. 2013. “Skin Lightening Trend in Asia Boosts Global Market.” Cosmeticsdesign.com-Asia.com. Accessed May 2013. http://www.cosmeticsdesignasia.com/Market-Trends/Skin-lightening-trend-in-Asia-boosts-global-market Mire, Amina. 2001. “Skin-Bleaching: Poison, Beauty, Power, and the Politics of the Colour Line.” Resources for Feminist Research (Winter/Spring) 28(3–4):13–38. ———. 2002. “The Genealogy of Witchcraft: Colonialism and Modern Science.” In Postmodernism, Postcoloniality and African Studies, edited by Zine Magubane, 80–97. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press Inc. ———. 2005. “Pigmentation and Empire: The Emerging Skin-Whitening Industry.” CounterPunch. July 28. http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/07/28/the-emerging-skinwhitening-industry/ ———. 2012. “The Scientification of Skin Whitening and the Entrepreneurial University-Linked Corporate Scientific Officer.” Canadian Journal for Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education 12(3):271–291. ———. 2014. “‘Skin Trade:’ Genealogy of Anti-Ageing ‘Whiteness Therapy’ in Colonial Medicine.” Medicine Studies 4(1–4):119–129. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Obulutsa, G. 2008. “Albinos Live in Fear after Body Part Murders.” The Guardian. November 4. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/04/tanzania-albinosmurder-witchcraft

Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness

147

Osuri, Goldie. 2008. “Ash-Coloured Whiteness: The Transfiguration of Aishwarya Rai.” South Asian Popular Culture 6(2):109–123.DOI: 10.1080/14746680802365212 Peiss, Kathy. 1998. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Henry Holt & Company. Pitman, Simon. 2006. “Breaking News on Cosmetics Formula and PackagingEurope. Melanin Discovery Key to Skin Whitening Formulas.” CosmeticsDesignEurope.com. Cosmeticsdesign-europe.com © 2013 William Reed Business Media SAS. http://www.cosmeticsdesign-europe.com/news/ng.asp?n=65637-melaninsskin-whitening Roots, Deborah. 1996. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder: Westview Press. Russell, Kathy, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall. 1992. The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans. New York: Anchor Books. Sherratt, Yvonne. 2006. Continental Philosophy of Social Science: Hermeneutics, Genealogy, and Critical Theory from Greece to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, David. 2012. “South African Model with Albinism Challenges Prejudices.” The Guardian. November 2. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/02/ south-africa-model-albinism-prejudice ———. 2015. “Tanzania Bans Witchdoctors in Attempt to End Albino Killings.” The Guardian. January 14. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/14/ tanzania-bans-witchdoctors-attempt-end-albino-killings Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2007. The Question of the Other: The Tang Chun-I Lecture for 2004. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Weinbaum, Alys Eve. 2004. Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Durham: Duke University Press. Yeomans, M. 2012. “Skin Whiteners Doing Well in the US Market on Back of Asian Success.” Cosmeticsdesign-asia.com © 2012 William Reed Business Media SAS. Accessed 22 June 2013. http://www.cosmeticsdesign.com/Market-Trends/ Skin-whitener-doing-well-in-US-market-on-back-of-Asian-success.

7

The Alien and the Self Thomas Fuchs

Introduction The alien (das Fremde) is in several respects a central theme in psychiatry and psychotherapy. Mental illness takes hold of the afflicted person as an alien aspect that emerges within the self. Something within me confronts me and eludes my control, be it sudden feelings of panic, uncontrollable compulsive thoughts or tormenting voices. In the widest sense, becoming alien (fremd) to oneself is so characteristic of mental illnesses that French psychiatry described them in general with the concept of aliénation mentale. Accompanying this self-alienation, however, is also the estrangement that mental illnesses evoke in others. They were traditionally regarded as essentially unfathomable, even as disconcerting and frightening, and all efforts at destigmatizing have not entirely countered this old impression. Another factor for us finally to bear in mind is that the causes of numerous mental disorders lie in experiences of the alien, namely, in situations of exclusion and discrimination, migration or even trauma. Hence, we can virtually regard psychopathology as a special science of the alien. The alien acquires additional significance if we observe it in its irresolvable association with the self: in this case it emerges as a necessary polar opposite of what we call personal identity. Even more crucial for the psychiatrist and psychotherapist is how the self and the alien, the self and the non-self are mutually interrelated in psychic development because the root causes of numerous mental illnesses lie in disorders of identity formation. The disintegration of the self that arises in the illness is then traceable to a failure of the self and the alien to be integrated within psychic development. Several dimensions of the complex subject of the alien have thus already been exposed, although clearly these cannot be examined in sufficient depth within this essay. In what follows I will first present a brief outline of the phenomenology of the alien and proceed with an enquiry into the dialectic of the self and the alien in terms of their significance for personal identity. I will then give a separate analysis of the phase of adolescence by referring to the dialectic of identity. Finally, I will analyze three major psychic disturbances in terms of a conflict between the self and the alien, namely borderline personality disorder, anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia.

The Alien and the Self

149

On the Phenomenology of the Alien When do we perceive something as alien? Everything that is alien firstly implies the experience of a disturbance: something eludes our expectation or knowledge; it can neither be foreseen nor appropriately classified. Bernhard Waldenfels, whose work places central emphasis on the experience of the alien, ascribes to it the character of an “af-fect” (Widerfahrnis): the alien befalls and affects us; it challenges us in a surprising, irritating, disconcerting or frightening way (Waldenfels 2006). Thus, the alien becomes the anti-pole of what is familiar, known or belonging to us: the alien and the self are relational or complementary concepts. The one cannot be experienced or thought without reference to the other. A closer analysis helps us to differentiate three aspects of the experience of the alien that is more nuanced in English terminology (cf. Waldenfels 2006:111): Firstly, alien is “out of one’s domain” or foreign, and thus differentiated from the inner or private domain (Waldenfels 2003:25); it follows that alien is what belongs not to the self or one’s own group, that is, the alien is a counterpoint to the self, the other; finally, alien is the unknown, unfamiliar or strange, in contrast to the known, familiar and usual. Each aspect of the alien is therefore negatively defined and delimits it from the inner, from the self and from familiarity. Yet it is true that these three aspects frequently blend into each other. Of further significance is which forms of emotional reaction appear towards the alien that confronts or affects us. Initially, these range from mere surprise and irritation via uncertainty and disquiet to fear or anxiety (“xenophobia”), yet they also include despising, hostility and, finally, aggression. Accordingly, the alien can bring forth reactions of avoidance, withdrawal and escape as well as the attempt to repel, fight or even destroy it. On the other hand, these negative reactions are contrasted by positive tendencies. The alien can also arouse curiosity, even fascination, particularly when perceived in terms of the exotic (literally, “from another place or outside”) as an enticing counterworld: as a space for potential encounter, which breaks through the ordinary; and as an opportunity for transgressing borders and for adventure, as was always the incentive for travel. Interculturally, too—and we need only think of Europe’s historical relations with other cultures—the alien can appear in one respect as the inferior or threatening, and in another respect as a space to project wishful thinking and counterdesigns to one’s own world. These preliminary reflections already reveal that the alien and the self are correlated and mutually interconnected in complex ways. The alien is seen

150

Thomas Fuchs

in one light as the counterplayer to the self that we seek to assert in opposing it; and in another light, the alien becomes the counterworld in which we place our hope of finding our longed for self. This interrelationship becomes even more obvious if we consider the link between the alien and identity.

Identity and the Alien Identity firstly means the coherence and constancy of experiencing oneself over time. However, being oneself and self-preservation begin not only on the psychic, but already on the biological level, that is, with the living organism. All life is constituted through the delimitation of an inner order and homeostasis from the chaotic processes of the physical environment. Every organism from the monad to the highest life forms is “autopoietic,” that is, a system that constantly reproduces itself; and it maintains itself in its form and structure despite the continual alteration of its material substance, so we can certainly speak of a biological identity of the organism. Nevertheless, this self-preservation is only possible at the price of dependence on the external environment: the alien matter must be continually absorbed, appropriated, and conversely one’s own substance must be repeatedly discarded. Semi-permeable membranes serve this purpose in the simplest species, and complex metabolic processes do so in higher life forms (Jonas 2001:64ff.). In addition, the organs of sensory and motor exchange with the environment develop in the course of evolution, as well as the related subjective needs, sensations and movements. The instinctive, feeling and acting relationship of the living organism with the external and the alien is the condition for its self-preservation. Without suggesting any sort of biological reductionism, we can certainly state that the formation and preservation of identity on all biological and psychosocial levels is equally based on delimitation from the environment, as well as on interactive exchange with it. The self must separate from the alien or non-self; and yet the alien must also be continually appropriated and, conversely, one’s own must be discharged once again. Hence, the body’s peripheral zones serve both as delimitation as well as a relation with the surrounding world. The skin reacts with excitation or pain to irritations, while alternatively it opens up towards light, air, warmth or a delicate touch. We find the same polarity in drives and affections: hunger, thirst and desire are the basic impulses of incorporation, while disgust, fear or anger characterize self-delimitation, thus also conveying the ambivalent relationship of the self and the alien. Disgust is a particularly interesting phenomenon that serves to reject the alien from one’s own body domain. Hence, we perceive saliva in our mouth as naturally belonging to us, yet we would find drinking a cup of our own saliva as highly disgusting: unwittingly, the self has become the alien. Similar “tipping” phenomena are involved in sexual body contact, which frequently lets those concerned fluctuate between desire on the one hand, and disgust or shame on the other. Even here it becomes obvious how

The Alien and the Self

151

the self and the alien, attraction and repulsion can constantly revert to the other. Let us advance our analysis by examining the development of psychic identity that is nonetheless based on experience of the body: the ‘ego’ is first and foremost bodily, as Freud already posited (1961). Contrary to socialconstructivist ideas, the self is by no means merely the result of a later social attribution; rather we must already assume an elementary self-experience during the prenatal period. From the second trimester, the fetus already experiences its own effect, which gains a response from its surroundings, by sensing the resistance of the uterus towards its spontaneous movements. Furthermore, the sensation of its own body feels different upon self-touch, in other words there is already a basic “mineness,” and therefore a distinction from the foreign space (cf. Stern 1985:76ff.; Robinson and Kleven 2005:144ff., 150ff.). Through increasing integration of the proprioceptive, kinaesthetic and sensory observations thus a primary bodily self emerges that delimits itself from the non-self (Fuchs 2010). On the other hand, from the third month the fetus is already in multiple sensory-motor contact with its surroundings, as is recognizable from its reactions to touch or sound stimuli. On ultrasound scans, even from four months on twins in the uterus show specific patterns of movement directed at each other, and therefore revealing elementary social interactions (Castiello et al. 2010). Postnatally, self-differentiation through interaction with the environment continues in a more intensified form. Firstly, the infant learns to orient himself in space, to engage with things with growing skill, and thus by using his body gradually gains familiarity with the world. He expands his action radius and increasingly transforms the foreign space into his own space. Thus, his basic self-awareness expands to a bodily-spatial or “ecological self” (Neisser 1988). Simultaneously, however, the primary social self develops, that is, in the bodily and affective interactions with others. Winnicott and Spitz, and even more so the recent research into infant behavior by Stern, Tronick and others have shown that the mother’s attention and recognition, expressed in the behavior of greeting, loving looks, gestures of affection and corresponding vocalizations, is of crucial importance for the child’s selfdevelopment as well as attachment relations (Winnicott 1965; Spitz 1967; Stern 1985; Tronick 2007). Even before any self-reflection, the child experiences itself primarily in affective mirroring through others. In a successful case, the child feels noticed, cherished and loved. In a less favorable case, for example, due to a mother’s postpartal depression, in instances of serious deprivation or abuse, early experiences of alienation, rejection or injury are predominant. These can more or less severely impair the child’s sense of feeling at home in the world, the basic sense of trust and development of a stable sense of self. The consequences can be lifelong basic existential feelings of alienation, insecurity and abandonment in the world.

152

Thomas Fuchs

Dialectic of Personal Identity We have seen how primary self-experience neither emerges from selfreflection nor from social attribution; nor is this experience yet selfconsciousness. The reflexive or personal self only develops step-by-step from the second year of life and is evidenced in the ability to recognize oneself in the mirror, describing oneself as “I” and delimitating oneself from others. The difference between self and others, previously only implicitly given, now becomes a conscious difference to the child, who recognizes himself as an individual person among others. A key step on this path are situations of joint attention towards external objects, starting from the age of nine months; such situations are communicated by pointing gestures and exchanging glances between mother and child. The child therefore begins to grasp that the mother is a being with a perspective that is different from his own, and he learns to see the world with her eyes (Fuchs 2013). The primary, body-centred perspective of the first year is now extended by the awareness of others’ perspectives that is also directed in manifold ways towards the child himself. The child now gradually internalizes this external perspective to reflexive self-awareness: he no longer merely sees the world, but also himself through others’ eyes. However, this is not only a cognitive achievement, but also includes a series of “self-reflexive emotions” such as shame, embarrassment, pride or guilt, which are based on the internalized, evaluating “gaze of the others.” According to Sartre (2003), to be seen, evaluated and seen through by others, as occurs paradigmatically in the case of shame, even represents the birth of self-consciousness. It is true that this reflexive consciousness also means alienation, that is, the loss of the spontaneity, naturalness and innocence of childish life; it approaches the biblical “fall from Paradise.” As Adam and Eve grow aware of their nakedness in their shame, the child’s body now acquires an external side, which must be concealed beneath clothing. The body becomes a “body-for-others” (Sartre 2003), an object of their evaluation and thus increasingly also the carrier of attitudes, manners and roles, which the child adopts from others. She learns to represent herself with her own body, yet also to play a role and to inhibit spontaneous expression. The earliest structures of social identity are not yet formed through linguistic attributions, but rather by means of bodily imitation and identification with role models like ‘the well-behaved,’ ‘the elegant,’ ‘the little princess,’ or ‘the soft one,’ ‘the gallant,’ ‘the little grown-up’ and so on. Of course, children do not play these roles from the very beginning. Identity develops from the continual interplay between spontaneous, bodily selfbeing and attitudes or roles assigned or adopted by others. This dialectic of identity can be expressed in George Herbert Mead’s terms as the “I” and “me”: I means one’s own primary self as the source of spontaneity, while me is the “organized set of attitudes of others which one assumes” (Mead 1934:175).

The Alien and the Self

153

Every defined social identity requires that we equate our self-image with the image externally offered or attributed to us. However, this often conflicts with primary, spontaneous self-being. Here is the fundamental dilemma of human identity: the self-image or role-playing-‘ego,’ which is created by one’s own or others’ attributions, repeatedly emerges as alien to the spontaneous, becoming self—the role-playing attire, as it were, no longer fits and must be tailored anew. This inner contradiction is also conveyed in the notion of the “person,” which originates from Latin persona, that is, deriving from a mask or role, yet subsequently also meaning the carrier of such roles, or simply the person (Fuchs 2002). The concept per se already implies that the alien and the self are inseparably, and yet also ambivalently linked. In every identification something originally external, or alien becomes part of the self whether this is an offer of roles, a behavioral pattern or a basic attitude. This goes as far as identification with the aggressor, where even threatening or violent behavior is imitated and re-appropriated as one’s own. In every identification, conversely, parts of one’s own self are cast off and transformed into the alien, since every identity excludes other possibilities of self-being. Being a boy also means not being a girl, which means that the boy must repel any potential girlishness within himself. To become a conformist and loyal subject observing the rules and regulations means suppressing the idiosyncratic, insubordinate and rebellious nature within oneself. That is also the root of neurotic identification: for instance, narcissistic or histrionic disorders can be understood as the acceptance of attitudes and self-images that repress the authentic bodily self in favour of an ideal self or even a “false self.” The individual forgets how he is actually feeling, as needs for love and recognition remain unfulfilled, and compensates for this with a grandiose or fairy tale image of his personal self. Nevertheless, the excluded element always remains a latent challenge; we never succeed in entirely letting go of it. The self remains latently connected to what it has excluded as non-self. This is clear from the fierceness with which what was repressed is attacked in others. In the projection, the other represents what was originally found within the person’s inner self, and what has remained secretly sought after or coveted. The opponent must be fought even more relentlessly to silence the latent self in the alien (Gruen 2000:10ff.). This leads to the paradox that defense even tends to intensify with the similarity or social proximity of the other. Nothing is so defiantly opposed as a fellow member of the same class or the same nation; no war is so brutal and remorseless as civil war. The closer and the more similar the alien appears to ourselves, the more threatening is its effect. To summarize: personal identity is not bestowed as a gift on any human individual, but rather it becomes an individual quest to find it, and invariably also a burden. Self-consciousness introduces a contradiction into human existence, namely, between primary bodily self-being and the reflected ‘ego.’ We encounter ourselves in reflexion; we see and evaluate ourselves from the viewpoint of others. Social identity now forms itself, as the attitudes,

154

Thomas Fuchs

expectations and role-schemes of others are accepted and internalized. In this way, identity becomes a contradictory entity: it connects the experience of one’s own, primary self with others’ perception and recognition of the self. These two poles of identity never entirely succeed in matching up. In this process, the self and the alien are interrelated in a complex manner: the alien is accepted in identifications and becomes the self, yet conversely the self is also alienated and transforms into the repelled or repressed, which again encounters the subject in the alien Other. Identity is constituted and transforms itself in a continual interplay of identification and dis-identification, of “belonging” and “self-delimitation.” My identifications, my accepted attitudes, roles and self-attributions, my appearance, my image: I am all this, and yet I am not this. I am not myself, but rather I am always only on the way to myself. The contradictory nature of our self-being propels us forward on the track of time. The dialectic of the self becomes the dynamics of development in which we are in search of ourselves for our entire lives. Of course, the biological and social stages of our life course also demand our developments. Ultimately, however, it is the irresolvable tension in the core of our self-being that maintains a potentially lifelong development in process. The hallmark of the mature personality is to endure this tension and increasingly to achieve throughout a congruence of the primary and realized self.

Identity in Adolescence Identity undergoes an acutely problematic period during adolescence, to which I devote the next section. Adolescence qualifies for consideration as a phase-specific identity crisis that is resolved in a variety of ways, or else can lead to development disorders (Erikson 1959; Marcia 1980). For the child neither of the previously mentioned identity poles is basically distinguished to any great extent. The child lives openly towards the world and is absorbed in his primary relationships and bonds. An inner space of private subjectivity only develops rudimentarily. Only the young adolescent becomes really conscious of his inner world; quite often, the reality of being alone with oneself occurs to him in an almost startling way. He withdraws more and more frequently, isolating himself in order to release himself from identifications with his parents, to win his own personality and then to open up in late adolescence to discover new intimacy again in a partner relationship. This process also entails internal contradictions: on the one hand, it means social retreat, above all, from the family, and is often associated with solitary, egocentric self-adulation. On the other hand, it requires outward orientation towards new role models or idols, the exploration of roles and self-projections, in particular, within the peer group. Emphasis on one’s own otherness and group conformism can therefore simultaneously coexist. In this case, the real and the ideal self become increasing contrasts for each other. A typical phenomenon for this phase is to see oneself in front of an invisible audience,

The Alien and the Self

155

playing an imaginary, if possible, outstanding role, while simultaneously harboring feelings of deep uncertainty about real relationships. Feelings of inauthenticity and self-alienation can emerge from the acceptance of ‘readymade’ role models. Am I the person I feel myself to be? Or am I only the person whom the others see in me? Am I losing myself in the process? Adolescents during puberty also become aware of their bodily existence in an entirely different way. They observe their changing body and scrutinize its impact on others in their peer group. Now it actually first becomes the “body-for-others,” as Sartre expressed it, an object of their gaze and means of self-representation, an object of comparison and evaluation. Adolescence is the time when the body image attains its actual meaning. Young people also increasingly and deliberately attempt to model their body with fitness training, diets, jewelry, tattoos or piercing and to make it the carrier of a specific self-image or subcultural identities. Self-evaluations and corresponding feelings of pride, but also embarrassment, shame or insufficiency are to a substantial degree then dependent on the body image. In turn, potential self-alienations result from the discrepancy between the ideal self and body image. Supposed deformations or inadequate body size can lead to severe crises of self-esteem, even often to persistent dysmorphophobia directed to a body part, which is perceived as malformed. We can read an early literary example in Luigi Pirandello’s novel Uno, Nessuno e Centomilla (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand; [1926] 1992): the protagonist in this novel is confronted with the harmlessly intended observation that his nose points slightly to the right. This triggers a process of growing self-doubt that leads to the destruction of the personality. In an endless monologue, all the stages of self-alienation are listed: from the doubtful glance in the mirror to the questioning of social position and disintegration of identity—culminating in the recognition, “that for others I was not what till now, privately, I had imaged myself to be . . . not seeing myself in me . . . but as if I were another: that other whom everyone sees, except me” (Pirandello 1992:7, 17). In a less drastic way, under others’ gaze young adolescents can at least lose the assertiveness of their own bodily self-being. This is even more applicable in a society that measures self-esteem in the categories of media coverage, in the ever-growing importance of being noticed and being reflected in the prism of others’ perceptions, thus yet again being dependent on body image. One could describe the self-image of many youngsters as “videor ergo sum” (Altmeyer 2002). In a society that is profoundly oriented towards external aspects, pluralistic and proliferated in virtual realities, it is more common for the adolescent identity crisis to culminate in an ongoing identity diffusion or fragmented identity. In his studies conducted towards the end of the last century, the American development psychologist James Marcia already identified a sharp increase in identity diffusion in adolescents (from 20 percent to 40 percent in one decade; Marcia 1989). His analysis not only ascribed this to disorders of identity formation (for example, due to early childhood trauma), but also

156

Thomas Fuchs

to a type of culturally adapted identity diffusion distinguished by a noncommittal stance, openness and flexibility, and thus particularly accommodating for the requirements of late modern society. In this state scarcely any prescribed models of living apply any longer, but instead a multitude of divergent life-worlds that tend to favor more kaleidoscopic than coherent identity developments (Sennett 1998).

Psychopathology of the Self Borderline Personality Disorder The above-mentioned societal development is particularly precarious for adolescents with a borderline personality structure whose primary selfdevelopment is mostly characterized by early traumas, a lack of reinforcement and deficit of basic trust. Accordingly, during adolescence these patients lack the basis required for the development of a coherent personal self. Contradictory self-images and role models replace each other and remain unconnected; the youngsters hardly gain any authentic sense of self, no core of their identity from which they could integrate the changing and contradictory aspects of their own personalities (Fuchs 2007). All attempts at identification merely leave a feeling of emptiness and alienation. They attempt all the more and bordering on desperation to win acknowledgement through other people, albeit through idealizing others who are meant to replace the basic deficit of a sense of self-esteem, and who for their part are rapidly devalued again. The result is a permanent fragmented identity, often with sharp breaks between different roles and relationships. The adolescents or young adults frequently switch their friends, goals, training courses, careers and equally their convictions and principles; they are not in a position to commit to enduring relationships and long-term plans whereby they could define themselves (Westen and Cohen 1993). They then describe tormented feelings of inner emptiness, incoherence and inauthenticity, as if they only claimed to be what they are and other people had been mistaken about them. Actually, there are often dramatic fluctuations in their personality, depending on whom they come into contact with. Like a chameleon they seem to embrace different identities depending on the present situation. The alien overgrows or replaces the poorly developed self. Borderline personalities lack a strong ego required for the development of a coherent self. Instead, they adopt—albeit out of necessity—what one could call a “postmodern” attitude towards their life, that is, they switch from one present to the next and in doing so are fully identified each time with their momentary state. This leads to a temporal splintering of the self: the connection of their biography dissolves into single episodes. Thus, borderline patients exhibit what one can call a fragmented self (Fuchs 2007). Their suffering also reflects the increasing effort of individuals in postmodern society to develop coherent structures for their identity.

The Alien and the Self

157

Anorexia Nervosa In many respects, we find an opposing solution for the identity dilemma of borderline personality disorder in the condition of anorexia. The anorexic only apparently seeks her ideal in her body image from the viewpoint of others. In fact, she rejects precisely the sexualization of the body and associated feminine identity options, and so ultimately the separation from childhood, which is supposedly “sexless.” In a state of puberty, as the body now takes on fuller, feminine forms, and wants to steer the individual towards the erotic and sexuality, the body becomes an alienating, even repugnant object for the anorexic. Absorbing food is no longer connected with pleasure, but also with disgust; the non-assimilatory alien material is rejected again through vomit. On the other hand, the source of amazing triumph becomes the capacity to be in total control of the body, to gain independence from it and from food, while at the same time also from others (Walter et al. 2007). Although the cultural ideal of the slender figure and corresponding distortions of body image can therefore play a role as a trigger, such external aspects do not constitute the actual source of the disorder. Instead, the patients attempt to compensate for their profound sense of a lack of selfesteem and identity by successfully controlling and modelling their body. The anorexic adopts the societal ideal of body image, yet at the same time inverts it, for she is no longer concerned with the body-for-others, quite the contrary, through the body’s submission to become independent from everyone else. “I don’t feel hungry, I have no desire”—for her this means: I am self-sufficient and no longer need anything from outside (Dignon et al. 2006). Her ideal is the non-bodily, asexual, angelic body; her actual role model is not the model on the catwalk, but the saint. In the desperate striving for perfection, the anorexic alienates herself from her earthly, bodily being. The tension of being a body and having a body becomes a radical dualism that is reminiscent of the Platonic and Christian ideas of the body as the prison of the soul: “It was as if I had to punish my body. I hate and detest it. If I let it be normal for a few days, then I would have to deprive it again. I feel caught in my body—as long as I keep it under rigid control, it can’t betray me” (Kaplan 1984:278). Anorexics desperately strive for command of their body, which they have transformed into an external, alien object, to find an independent self through the body’s submission. Hence, they give an entirely different response to the dilemma of identity formation under the conditions of today’s society. While young adults with borderline personality disorder lose themselves in external orientations and cannot establish any coherent identity, anorexics have sufficient will power at least to gain a substitute identity from the radical negation of all feminine role possibilities. However, they also lack a strong enough ‘ego’ to enter into a productive relation to the available identities. Instead, they reject all external dependencies and withdraw into an unapproachable and elitist autarchy, as if they could gain their self-being through the exclusion of all bodily and emotional relationships.

158

Thomas Fuchs

For the anorexic, the body is only the instrument of realizing her fantasies of perfection. She suppresses all bodily impulses, while borderline patients are at the mercy of them. The anorexic heroically caps all relationships in which borderline patients repeatedly and in vain search for stability. However, a stable development of identity is based on bodily self-experience as well as on interaction with others. If the self is to persist in an unstable world, it must experience and have the capacity to accept its own body and feelings as its primordial selfhood. At the same time, it must risk relationships if it does not want to collapse in isolation. The anorexic individual cannot escape the conflict potential of identity between the self and the alien. Self and Alien in Schizophrenia On a more fundamental level, the dialectic of self and alien becomes the source of major self-disturbances that we find in schizophrenia. As a starting point, I take some reports of patients in which the self seems virtually threatened by dissolution: “When I look at somebody my own personality is in danger. I am undergoing a transformation and my self is beginning to disappear.” (Chapman 1966:232) “The others’ gazes get penetrating, and it is as if there was a consciousness of my person emerging around me . . . they can read in me like in a book. Then I don’t know who I am anymore.” (Fuchs 2000:172) Such reports show that ‘being conscious of another consciousness’ may threaten schizophrenic patients with a loss of self. In grasping the other’s perspective, they are no longer able to maintain their own position; as a result, they feel observed, spied at, persecuted or even invaded from all sides. The schizophrenic person precisely experiences intersubjectivity in the way Sartre (2003) has described it, namely as a potential “annihilation” by the other’s gaze and intentionality, as a fight of opposing worlds of consciousness in which either self-affirmation or the demise of the self are at stake. How can we get a closer understanding of this phenomenon? We have seen above that prior to reflective self-consciousness, there is already a primary bodily self that delimits itself from the non-self (Fuchs 2010). This delimitation returns on a higher level from the second year of life, when the child becomes aware of the others’ perspectives and begins to see itself with their eyes. The primary, bodily or centrifugal perspective is thus complemented by a centripetal perspective, directed from the other’s vantage point back towards the child. Intersubjectivity on this higher level thus presupposes the integration of a primary, egocentric perspective and a

The Alien and the Self

159

secondary, allocentric perspective—an integration that is characteristic of what it means to be a human person. The German philosopher Helmuth Plessner (1981) has coined the term “excentric position” to denote this dialectic: persons are beings who recognize each other as centers of a subjective world, centered around their bodies, and who, precisely through this recognition, step out of this center, in an excentric move. This happens already in every exchange of gazes: I see the other seeing me, and he sees me seeing him. I am aware that I am part of his world, and that he knows about my awareness. This oscillating shift of perspectives occurs constantly in our everyday interactions with others, where we repeatedly take the other’s perspective and yet remain who we are. This self-affirmation, however, is bound to the basic bodily self-awareness or pre-reflective self-familiarity mentioned above. In the last decade, phenomenological psychopathology has elaborated the concept of a diminished basic self-awareness in schizophrenia, resulting in what may be termed a “disembodiment of the self” (Fuchs 2000, 2005, 2010; Parnas 2003; Sass and Parnas 2003; Stanghellini 2004). This fundamental disturbance—which I take as a basis in what follows—is bound to compromise the higher level of the personal self as well. For the oscillation of perspectives between self and other is only possible as long as the person maintains his own embodied center; otherwise the presence of another’s consciousness gains a threatening centripetal power. This is illustrated by the following case description: A young man was frequently confused in a conversation, being unable to distinguish between himself and his interlocutor. He tended to lose the sense of whose thoughts originated in whom, and felt ‘as if’ the interlocutor somehow ‘invaded’ him, an experience that shattered his identity and was intensely anxiety-provoking. When walking on the street, he scrupulously avoided glancing at his mirror image in the windowpanes of the shops, because he felt uncertain on which side he actually was. (Parnas 2003:232) In grasping the other’s perspective, the patient loses his own embodied center, which renders him unable to keep up the dialectical tension of the “excentric position.” The perspectives of self and Other are now confused instead of being integrated, resulting in a sense of being invaded and overpowered by the Other. A similar confusion arises for the patient when perceiving himself in the mirror. Another case example is given by the Japanese psychiatrist Kimura: When I am looking into a mirror, I do not know any more whether I am here looking at me there in the mirror, or whether I am there in the mirror looking at me here. . . . If I look at someone else in the mirror, I am not able to distinguish him from myself any more. When I am feeling

160

Thomas Fuchs worse, the distinction between me and a real other person gets lost, too. While watching TV, I don’t know any more whether I am speaking in the TV-set or whether I am hearing the words here. I don’t know whether the inside turns outwards or the outside inwards. It is as if the foundation of my self collapses. Are there perhaps two ‘I’s? (Kimura 1994:194; my own translation)

Here it is precisely the virtuality of the mirror image that undermines the bodily sense of self, leading to a confusion of embodied and virtual self. For the patient there is no difference between his actual ‘I’ that looks into the mirror and the virtual ‘I’ that he sees in it. This is generalized to the perception of others in the mirror, and finally to the encounter with real others. He takes their perspectives and gets lost in them. Now being aware of others’ awareness becomes a constant threat: schizophrenic patients feel observed and persecuted from all sides; the actions of others gain a hidden self-reference; everything seems to revolve around them and to convey a sinister significance which has to be deciphered. All alien perspectives that the patient takes inevitably turn towards himself and finally overpower him. As we can see, the loss of the self-Other boundary in schizophrenia is rooted in the dialectical structure of intersubjectivity. To recognize others as persons or as centers of a world, and to recognize oneself as a separate person among them is one and the same achievement, namely reaching and maintaining the excentric position. Self-consciousness or the “I” which is gained through internalizing the perspective of others on the primary self requires its own delimitation and affirmation, namely precisely against the others’ point of view from which it has emerged. This does not concern the psychological level of self-assertiveness or self-worth, but the more fundamental level of the constitution of the personal self in the dialectic process of intersubjectivity. This constitution is threatened when the basic bodily sense of self fades and the ‘I’ may no longer be affirmed in the presence of others. The schizophrenic patient, in shifting towards their perspective, loses the centrality of his body, his inexchangeable vantage point in the world. This results in a confusion or a “short-circuit” of perspectives, and in a loss of the delimitation of self and Other. Schizophrenia is the illness that can only arise because human beings develop a reflective self-awareness, thus facing the task to differentiate and to affirm themselves as a person among other persons.

Conclusion In different ways, the conflicts of the borderline and anorexic patients as well as the disturbances of the self in schizophrenia equally refer to the dialectic of all identity: on the one hand, self-preservation and self-development are only possible through a delimitation from what is non-self; on the other hand, the self remains related to this non-self, and even dependent on it.

The Alien and the Self

161

Ultimately, all selfhood is always disposed to the alien, from which it has originally split. We have seen that from the start the self is interspersed with the alien—whether we call to mind the organism’s metabolism in exchange with the surroundings, or our body that, on the one hand, we are ourselves, and on the other we have as our body and that can confront us as irritating and alien; or whether we finally recall the dialectic of the self and the alien in developing identity. “The ego is not even master in its own house,” as Freud remarked, thus, there is something ‘alien’ within us, and conversely the repressed self unwittingly meets us again in the supposedly alien, external. “Je est un autre,” according to Rimbaud,1 “I is another,” since alienness already begins in one’s own house, within oneself. Becoming oneself is only possible through the encounter with the external and alien—otherwise, I would only experience what is already known, familiar and eternally the same, which confirms me and my attitudes. In contrast, the alien places me in question. In other words, it requests my answer. The answer can be hostile, defensive—then I perhaps notice precisely what I do not wish to become, and this is also a mode of self-definition. Alternatively, the alien can open me to a new possibility of my self and entice me to leave my shell. The self can paradoxically only become really “self-dependent” and autonomous if it strives not to exclude the alien as absolute otherness and to become totally self-sufficient, but instead if it acknowledges the origination of the alien from the self, and even to a certain extent re-appropriates it. Presumably, this is also the implication of the well-known “tat twam asi” (“that you are”) in the Upanishads: the world faces me not as an alien, external world, but rather I find myself in it. Whatever I have excluded as ‘non-self’ belongs to me precisely as a result of this, for it defines me, and I remain connected with it. The self cannot constitute itself without the alien, just as the alien does not emerge without the self. The alien is in its entirety, in Hegel’s words, only “the other of myself.”2 We share our origins in a common root.

Notes 1 Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, second so-called “Seer” letters (“Lettre du Voyant”; Rimbaud 1990). 2 G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Something and an Other, §218.

References Altmeyer, M. 2002. “Video(r) Ergo Sum.” Lecture, April 15, 2002, 52. Lindauer Psychotherapiewochen (www.lptw.de/archiv). Castiello, Umberto, Cristina Becchio, Stefania Zoia, Cristian Nelini, Luisa Sartori, Laura Blason, Giuseppina D’Ottavio, Maria Bulgheroni, and Vittorio Gallese. 2010. “Wired to be Social: The Ontogeny of Human Interaction.” PLoS ONE 5:e13199. Chapman, James. 1966. “The Early Symptoms of Schizophrenia.” British Journal of Psychiatry 112:225–251.

162

Thomas Fuchs

Dignon, Andrée, Angela Beardsmore, Sean Spain, and Ann Kuan. 2006. “‘Why I Won’t Eat’: Patient Testimony from 15 Anorexics Concerning the Causes of Their Disorder.” Journal of Health Psychology 11:942–956. Erikson, Erik. H. 1959. Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: International Universities Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. “The Ego and the Id.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19, Translated and edited by James Strachey, 3–66. London: Hogarth Press. Fuchs, Thomas. 2000. Psychopathologie von Leib und Raum. Phänomenologischempirische Untersuchungen zu depressiven und paranoiden Erkrankungen. Darmstadt: Steinkopff. ———. 2002 “Der Begriff der Person in der Psychiatrie.” Nervenarzt 73:239–246. ———. 2005. “Corporealized and Disembodied Minds: A Phenomenological View of the Body in Melancholia and Shizophrenia.” Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology 12:95–107. ———. 2007. “Fragmented Selves: Temporality and Identity in Borderline Personality Disorder.” Psychopathology 40:379–387. ———. 2010. “Phenomenology and Psychopathology.” In Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, edited by Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking, 547–573. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2013. “The Phenomenology and Development of Social Perspectives.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12:655–683. Gruen, Arno. 2000. Das Fremde in uns. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Jonas, Hans. 2001. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kaplan, Louise. J. 1984. Adolescence—The Farewell to Childhood. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kimura, B. 1994. “Psychopathologie der Zufälligkeit oder Verlust des Aufenthaltsortes beim Schizophrenen.” Daseinsanalyse 11:192–204. Marcia, James. E. 1980. “Identity in Adolescence.” In Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, edited by Joseph Adelson, 159–187. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ———. 1989. “Identity Diffusion Differentiated.” In Psychological Development across the Life, edited by Mary A. Luszcz and Ted Nettelbeck, 289–295. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Neisser, Ulric. 1988. “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge.” Philosophical Psychology 1:35–39. Parnas, Josef. 2003. “Self and Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Perspective.” In The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, edited by Tilo Kircher and Anthony David, 217–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pirandello, Luigi. 1992. One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Marsilio. Plessner, Helmuth. 1981. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Gesammelte Schriften IV. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Rimbaud, Arthur. 1990. Seher-Briefe / Lettres du voyant. Translated and edited by Werner von Koppenfels. Mainz: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Robinson, Scott R. and Gale A. Kleven. 2005. “Learning to Move before Birth.” In Prenatal Development of Postnatal Functions, edited by Brian Hopkins and Scott P. Johnson, 132–175. London and Westport: Praeger.

The Alien and the Self

163

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2003. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge. Sass, Louis. A. and Josef Parnas. 2003. “Schizophrenia, Consciousness, and the Self.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 29:427–444. Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Spitz, Rene A. 1967. Vom Säugling zum Kleinkind: Naturgeschichte der MutterKind-Beziehungen im ersten Lebensjahr. Stuttgart: Klett. Stanghellini, Giovanni. 2004. Disembodied Spirits and Deanimatied Bodies: The Psychopathology of Common Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, Daniel. N. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. London: Karnak. Tronick, Ed. Z. 2007. The Neurobehavioral and Social Emotional Development of Infants and Children. New York: Norton & Company. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2003. “From Intentionality to Responsivity.” In Phenomenology Today: The Schuwer SPEP Lectures, 1998–2002, edited by Daniel J. Martino, 23–35. Pittsburg: Duquesne University. Accessed from http://learningspaces.org/ files/Waldenfels_1999.pdf ———. 2006. Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Walter, Glenn, Jennie Sines, Caroline Meyer, Emma Foster, and Anna Skelton. 2007. “Narcissism and Narcissistic Defenses in the Eating Disorders.” International Journal of Eating Disorders 40:143–148. Westen, Drew and Robert P. Cohen. 1993. “The Self in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Psychodynamic Perspective.” In The Self in Emotional Distress: Cognitive and Psychodynamic Perspectives, edited by Zindel V. Segal and Sidney J. Blatt, 334–360. New York: Guilford Press. Winnicott, Donald Woods. 1965. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press.

8

Intimate and Inaccessible The Role of Asymmetry in Charismatic Christian Perceptions of God, Self and Fellow Believers Christopher Stephan

Prologue I was visiting Mary in her home when she told me that something very unusual had occurred at church the week before. “There was something that happened last Wednesday that I wanted to tell you about,” she volunteered. “My husband and I have been attending this class that teaches us about the Holy Spirit. One of the women who teaches in it, Silvia, was going around praying for different people, and she came to me with an impartation.” Mary briefly explained that an impartation was the act of transferring a divine blessing one had received on behalf of another. For this, Mary explained, Silvia liked to pray by standing face-to-face, hand-over-hand with palms touching. That night, as Silvia prayed over Mary in this manner, Mary had a vision of heaven. In hushed tones she described for me her vision, an aerial view of an alabaster city filled with glimmering fountains, and her reaction to the sight, her quiet sobbing and the deep, almost anesthetic peace she had experienced. “When it was done,” she told me, “I was just softly crying and I said ‘I saw the Holy City.’ Silvia looks at me and she says, ‘I know. I saw it, too.’” It was a remarkable event in Mary’s life; she had never before shared a vision with even her closest friends, let alone a near stranger. A little way into our discussion of the event, I happened to ask Mary what exactly Silvia had seen. Was the city the same? “No. In her vision everything was gold and jewels,” she replied. When I asked why Mary thought they might have seen something they deemed to be essentially the same and yet was so different in character she took a long pause before she answered, “I think that’s what she needed to see.” She may as well have phrased it the other way around: “Perhaps,” she might have said, “that’s what I needed to see.” Otherness is a focal phenomenon in Charismatic practice, and a productive force in the genesis of cultural and personal meanings derived from and feeding into Charismatic experience. The recognition that another has had an alternate experience to one’s own, and the concomitant reaffirmation that one’s own experience represents an alternative to those of others is pervasive

Intimate and Inaccessible

165

in the Charismatic Christian setting.1 Adherents experience direct evidence of God’s presence and influence through the gifts and manifestations of His Spirit. The form and efficacy of the divine power they embody flows directly from the Holy Spirit. And yet, they acknowledge individual variation not only in who experiences what, but in how any two persons experience what is ostensibly the same gift or event. The story of the shared vision draws our attention to a dynamic that must be addressed if we are to understand the life-world of Charismatic Christians: how encountering otherness in the form of asymmetries between their own experiences and those of others informs their spiritual experiences and their conception of the divine power behind those experiences. This chapter, like most of the others in this volume, emerges from a conference convened by Bernhard Leistle. In his framing paper, Leistle proposed the notion that otherness deserves paradigmatic status within anthropology (Leistle 2015, and “Introduction,” this volume). My own approach to such a paradigm would take the following questions into account: How closely do any two people see themselves as sharing in an experience of the same event? How does alterity come to light and what forms of difference are recognized in this particular setting? What is the personal and cultural significance of asymmetries between one’s own and another’s experience? Indeed, what comes to count as other and in what form is the Other perceived in particular cultural contexts? These questions, phrased as generically as possible, outline a phenomenologically oriented ethnographic exploration of otherness. My purpose here is to address these questions with answers specific to my own research setting, and in so doing hopefully draw some attention to the broader project of conducting phenomenological anthropology through an investigation of particular cultural attunements to the Other. The body of this chapter proceeds in two parts. First, I will offer some preliminary theoretical framing for the ongoing role of others in shaping our phenomenal life-worlds. I focus in particular on highlighting observations on intersubjectivity and asymmetry in perception from existing anthropological accounts of the cultural constitution of the life-world. In the second part, I give an ethnographic account of the salience of asymmetries in Charismatic practice, arguing that the persistence of this form of otherness gives shape to three interrelated domains of Charismatic experience: perceptions of God as both intimately revealed through bodily experience, yet transcendent in the surfeit of how others experience Him; the supplementarity of others’ experiences to one’s own; and the sense of having a progressively personalized relationship with Him. Throughout the chapter I will be relying upon the notion that intersubjective asymmetries are generative of social phenomena. I will conclude the chapter with a brief discussion in which I advocate beginning phenomenological anthropology with this form of otherness.

166

Christopher Stephan

Framing Ideas We begin with a premise: the range of beings constituting others is not a cross-cultural constant. For anthropologists, it was Irving Hallowell (1955) who first couched a predecessor to this point in proto-phenomenological terms in his essay “Self and Its Behavioral Environment.” In Hallowell’s conception, the emergence of self-awareness was accompanied by a “concomitant emergence . . . of a contrasting world of articulated objects, experienced as the ‘other-than-self’” (Hallowell 1955:83). In continuing this line of thought, Hallowell argued that the “behavioral environment,” the world of experience, emerged in historically and culturally specific form. Though Hallowell says little about the possible orientations one can take toward the Other, he clearly envisioned a key component of the behavioral environment to be spirits and gods belonging to the category of “culturally reified objects” (Hallowell 1955:87). These are other selves whose perceived or conceived existence is, in our terms, intersubjectively constituted. By positioning self and Other as configured through manifold cultural orientations Hallowell provided an important linkage between empirical studies of cultural variability and what, in Husserlian terms, we would call the “natural attitude” (see Duranti 2010). However, he provides no vocabulary with which to speak of the ongoing constitution of self and Other as objects of perception. More importantly for our purposes, apart from childhood socialization, this absence leaves us without any way to grapple with the influence of others on experience. Drawing on Hallowell, it was Thomas Csordas’ (1990) theory of embodiment that first provided an anthropological vocabulary with which to describe the constitution of cultural objects through perception, and with that a point of access to the intersubjective dynamism thereof. Rather than begin with reflective consciousness, in which self and Other are already abstracted, Csordas argued for a hermeneutic investigation of bodily experience as impressed with practical and perceptual predispositions. While embodiment can function as an account of how experience takes a given form, it is also a model that makes apparent the intersubjectively derived vulnerability of individual perception. Csordas argues that what Hallowell referred to as “culturally reified objects” are presented through the elaboration of more fundamental sensations in one’s own or another’s body. In a passage dedicated to describing the phenomenology of exorcism, Csordas provides a description of how supernatural others, in this case demons, are given perceptible form through a culturally elaborated process of objectifying unwanted feelings as evidence of sinister others who have taken up residence within them: Evil spirits interact with humans by harassing, oppressing, or possessing them . . . Persons do not perceive a demon inside themselves, they sense a particular thought, behavior, or emotion as outside their control. It is

Intimate and Inaccessible

167

the healer, specialist in cultural objectification, who typically “discerns” whether a supplicant’s problem is of demonic origin. (Csordas 1990:13–14) The author goes on to assert that at times a supplicant may be told that she suffers from emotional disturbances rather than a demon. That is, embodiment is intersubjective and open to interpretation. Crucially, we see right away that these embodied others take their particular form through the collective activity of multiple persons. While Csordas does not in this context discuss what happens if such a decision conflicts with the supplicant’s own perception, extending his insights allows us to reexamine Hallowell’s “culturally reified objects” as things still essentially nebulous and open to direct or indirect negotiation between persons, despite their momentary concretion in the form of a given instance of perception. Thus we have a basis upon which to claim that in the ordinary flow of events, we are still intersubjectively constructing the “culturally reified objects.” Here I wish to sidestep the question of how religious experience is legitimated in favor of speaking to the subtler phenomenon of how the recognition of benign difference in others’ experiences shapes Charismatic sensibilities about the supernatural Other whose presence they embody and one’s own sense of relationship with that Other, as well as how idiosyncrasies between adherents configure the social dimensions of Charismatic spirituality. Some phenomenologically influenced anthropologists have claimed that the experience of the supernatural, or divine Other, is predicated upon primordial sensations of otherness. In his paper “Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and a Theory of Religion,” Csordas (2004) argues that alterity constitutes the “kernel of religion.” Inasmuch as alterity is an inalienable feature of being-in-the-world, it constitutes an ineradicable substrate of experience from which cultural elaborations may follow. It is further the case, Csordas argues, that as alterity is fundamental and intimately related through our bodily experience of the world, we ought not look for the source of supernatural experience in the exalted ideas of the radical Other, but rather in the fundamental otherness of embodied experience. In a somewhat similar vein, Bernhard Leistle (2014) has recently argued persuasively that anthropological understanding of possession trance requires a distinction between other and alien—the former being, according to Leistle, a response to the latter. Here again we see a distinction between a substrate and a cultural elaboration with which the author intends to evoke the distinction between a fundament of experience itself and the particular way in which an experience is constituted within an intersubjective milieu (see also the differentiation between empirical and radical otherness in the introduction to the present volume). The differences between these authors’ terms, “alterity” for Csordas and “alienness” for Leistle, reflect their philosophical heritages—Csordas draws most frequently upon the work of Merleau-Ponty,

168

Christopher Stephan

while Leistle descends from Waldenfels. Without intending to belie what differences these lineages entail, I believe we can understand both authors as pointing toward the indeterminate fundament of all experiences and conceptions of the Other. My purpose here lies at another level of analysis, but one that relies upon the former. I prefer, for the time being, to operate, as Csordas does elsewhere (1993, 1997), hermeneutically between what appears for particular persons at a particular time as someone or something other, its significance for the persons involved, and the conditions of intersubjectivity which brought it to light. In particular, I consider the cultural phenomenological significance of Charismatic Christians’ experiences of a lack of coincidence with the experiences of others in their community. While aimed at a different register of otherness, my argument here owes much to Csordas’ insights. To draw on Csordas’ (2004:163) own words: My point is about being-in-the-world, our human condition of existence not only as beings with experience but as beings in relation to others. And here also we are inevitably surprised by others, given the impossibility of perfectly coinciding with them in thought or feeling, mood or motivation. In this sense, the problem of subjectivity is that we are never completely ourselves, and the problem of intersubjectivity is that we are never completely in accord with others. Like Csordas, I suggest that what I refer to as intersubjective asymmetry, the lack of coincidence with others, is a fundamental component of our existence, and one that necessarily patterns that existence. It is for that reason a significant point of access of phenomenological anthropologists. It is my intention to take up this issue of recognizing where one’s experience fails to coincide with others, and to elaborate precisely the ways in which it inflects and draws together different domains of experience within the Charismatic life-world. Stated precisely, an intersubjectively oriented model of religious experience must contend with the fact that the existence of other perceiving subjects is both the ground of our embodied sense of the constitution of the world, and a fault line where our embodied dispositions can be shaken and redrawn. Each of us has our own perceptions to deal with but we must also contend with what others may perceive simply by virtue of living in an intersubjectively constituted life-world. The insight that others’ alternative experiences hold the potential to complicate or alter our own necessitates an operative principle, and hence a return to Edmund Husserl’s concept of intentionality. Intentionality can be most succinctly defined as “experiencing as” or “aboutness” (Duranti 2006). These “ways of seeing” can undergo vicissitudes or “modifications.” Following Duranti (2009) and Throop (2015), I believe that for heuristic reasons the concept of “intentional modifications” can be likened to Wittgenstein’s notion of “aspect dawning.” Both Duranti and Throop take up the

Intimate and Inaccessible

169

fundamental insight that others and objects always possess qualities that escape our perceptual capacities. Each author, following Husserl and Wittgenstein, demonstrates how, in perceiving an object, we can alter (or have altered) what qualities we attend to or the manner of our regard, effectively altering our experience of that self-same object. I can perceive my notebook as the repository of my ideas, as a product of someone’s labor, a whole thing, or an assemblage of pages and binding elements. I can take it at face value or inspect it more closely and realize it has begun to tear in places. All the while the notebook remains the same. In switching back and forth between qualities we are engaging in a process much like the “aspect seeing” that Wittgenstein illustrated with his famous example of a drawing that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, but never as both. Becoming aware of asymmetries between our own experiences and those of others can instigate these shifts. Others can trigger such shifts, but in doing so they always also reveal the limitations of our subjective standpoint. Sometimes you see a duck. Sometimes you see a rabbit. If the drawing is God and we are experiencing it together but each of us sees a different aspect then a whole new experience comes into being: the intersubjective revelation of a deficit manifest in any individual perception, as well as the possibility that I might come to see more or differently than I do presently. The practices of the Charismatic community bring this potential for complication to the fore. Adherents to Charismatic Christianity act on their faith in, and personal experience of, God’s Holy Spirit—which not only provides them with supernatural abilities to heal and prophesize, but also with the virtuous embodied attunement of thought, feeling and volition integral to living out righteous lives. The breadth of the ways one can experience God’s power in Charismatic Christianity opens up possibilities for perceiving His presence, but also new possibilities for disjunctures between one’s own embodied modes of experience and those of others. Fundamentally, adherents are faced with the problem of both experiencing the direction and power of a God that is absolute and all knowing, and contending with the fact that others can perceive and embody that power in different ways. Due to its intersubjective nature, the embodiment of God’s power may inhabit, in Jason Throop’s (2009) terms, “intermediary varieties of experience” that evade any finalized distinction between subjective and objective. This dynamism, animated by intentional modifications stemming from intersubjective asymmetries, is a significant conditioning factor in Charismatics experience of God, themselves and others. Through the following ethnographic analysis I will demonstrate the role that asymmetries between one’s own and another’s experiences of God’s Spirit play in shaping Charismatic conceptions of God as simultaneously presented in intimacy and inaccessibility—intimate and personal because His Holy Spirit is perceived within or through their bodies, and inaccessible because those bodily perceptions are always revealed to be partial or controvertible in light of others’ experiences. The non-coincidence between the Self

170

Christopher Stephan

and the Other that can never be reconciled, ensures that each new experience only displaces this incompleteness. However, others’ experiences also present what Vincent Crapanzano (2003) has called an horizon, such that even though one’s experience of God is deemed incomplete, the gap that appears between any two persons’ embodiments of God’s power also presents the possibility of experiencing oneself as growing to know God more fully than might be afforded by individual experience alone. Intersubjective asymmetry is a continual source of small-scale transformation. It animates the social world, lends dimension to cultural objects, and doubles back on the experiencer, giving events and persons evolving identity. The other subject is also an experiencer. He is someone who is experiencing this world with me. How I gather he takes the world to be is another part of the world I perceive, and there are times when, because he takes the world to be different than I have, I am given cause to reconsider. But there is no reason to restrict this insight to the level of reflective consciousness. Rather, that my counterpart is someone else who experiences from his own perspective is a part of how I experience our world from the beginning (Zahavi 2003, 2005; Duranti 2010). However and wherever asymmetry is revealed in experience some “more” to the other, and to myself, and to our shared world is revealed also. By isolating my analysis here to those moments wherein participants recognize this asymmetry I am merely attempting to restrict my discussion to what matters for them. That it matters is important, but how it matters is more so. It is on the latter that I hang my thesis of the co-constitution of these experiences of intimacy and inaccessibility, and all that those entail.

Charismata + Life Church This chapter emerged out of fieldwork I conducted with members of Life Church, a fledgling congregation located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles in an area known locally as the “Inland Empire.” In addition to participant observation during church services and activities, I conducted extended interviews with five participants. The data for this chapter comes primarily from approximately fifteen hours of video and audio from those interviews. While my argument is corroborated by two other short bouts of fieldwork at Charismatic-leaning churches in Southern California, I am restricting my ethnographic argument to a single community for the sake of continuity and depth. When I began my fieldwork at Life Church, my research goal was to understand how adherents who had converted to Charismatic Christianity made the transition from one cultural idiom to another. Resultantly, in addition to questions about transitional periods and lifestyle integration, much of my interview data relates directly to the issues of how these participants arrived at their current practices and idioms of experience, the degree to which they felt that their experiences coincided with those of others in their

Intimate and Inaccessible

171

community, and the role that others (particularly close relationships) played in structuring their spiritual lives. These conversations were what first drew my attention to the salience of intersubjective asymmetries in Charismatic practice. For reasons described below, I believe that these asymmetries have a special role in shaping the phenomenological properties of enacting or being party to an enactment of the gifts of the Spirit. The general cast of my argument in this section is to give broad historical and particular theological context to the community in which I conducted my fieldwork; the specific goal will be to demonstrate that the Charismatic movement’s emphasis upon directly experiencing and acting upon the experience of God’s Holy Spirit precipitates frequent occasions for adherents to recognize the asymmetry between their own embodied experiences and those of others. My interest in Charismatic Christianity pertains to the movements’ namesake, the Charismata, or spiritual gifts, exhibited by its adherents (Robbins 2004b; Burgess 2006; Hayford and Moore 2006; Westerlund 2009). In contemporary practice these gifts come in sundry forms—a point of great significance for this chapter—but variations are often expansions on the gifts of prophecy, healing and speaking in tongues (glossolalia). These phenomena are arguably as old as Christianity itself, but there is no unbroken chain that we might refer to as a Charismatic church linking ancient practices to contemporary ones (see Poewe 1994; Burgess 2011). By most historical accounts, what we now refer to as Charismatic Christianity is derived most directly from the birth of Pentecostalism (Robbins 2004b; Lindhardt 2011). Pentecostalism was forged in an uptick in religious fervor that marked the coming of the twentieth century. In the decades preceding and following the turn of the century, a number of revivals broke out in Europe and North America (Hayford and Moore 2006). Among these revivalist enterprises was William Seymour’s Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles. Seymour was the protégé of a radical of the Wesleyan Holiness movement named Charles Parham. It was Parham’s theological innovation to insist that true evidence of God’s spiritual bestowal upon his people was to be found in, and only in, speaking in tongues. Seymour preached this tenet to his growing congregation at Azusa Street. Like the day of Pentecost that would later become the namesake of the movement, Seymour and his followers sought the impartation of God’s divine essence. “Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” as it was called, was the hallmark of God’s redemption, manifested in divine revelations, miraculous healing and glossolalia. The innovative aspect of the Pentecostal movement was to take Spirit baptism as a separate event from conversion, thus moving the goalpost—so to speak—from mere ritual adherence to tangible evidence, default experiential proof of God’s divine grace (Robbins 2004b; Burgess 2006). The brunt of this theological postulate was that all believers should expect and desire God’s power to manifest itself concretely in their lives (cf. Luhrmann 2012a, 2012b). Ecstatic experiences became the rule, not the exception. Not only

172

Christopher Stephan

could God’s presence be discernible in every true believer’s immediate experience, but that presence would be discernible to others through its outward expression in the form of spiritual gifts (the charismata). The significance of this innovation in the shaping of contemporary Christian experience simply cannot be overstated, not simply because Pentecostalism went on to achieve such demographic significance, but because the movement is deeply linked to an important reconfiguration of much of contemporary Christianity. In the years following the birth of Pentecostalism, many of its converts eventually founded their own churches (Hayford and Moore 2006). What resulted was a tremendous efflorescence of congregations that practiced the charismata. As the practices spread they diversified. By the 1960s, some forty years after the Azusa Street Mission had closed its doors, the gifts of the Spirit had become decoupled from strict Pentecostal theology and, little by little, they worked their way into mainstream Christian practice. The change was, of course, incremental, but it had a number of key turning points including the gaining of widespread popularity by faith healers Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1930s and Oral Roberts in the late 1940s and 1950s (Hayford and Moore 2006), Episcopalian minister Dennis Bennett’s public endorsement of Spirit Baptism on Palm Sunday of 1960 (Poewe 1994; Hayford and Moore 2006; Burgess 2011), and the inception of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal at Duquesne University in 1967 (Csordas 2001). The Charismata had begun the process of becoming generic phenomena—hallmarks of an attainable, intensive and personal communion with God. Believers and scholars alike divide the Charismatic movement into three “waves” (Hayford and Moore 2006; Luhrmann 2012b). The first was the development of Pentecostalism; the second was the long process through which the Spirit Baptism and the charismata became generic practices. The present epoch is the wake of the Third Wave, which began in the 1980s and was characterized by greater dissemination and diversification of Charismatic practices (Robbins 2004b; Westerlund 2009). Presently, all brands of Christianity that can be characterized as Charismatic and Pentecostal make up the fastest-growing segment of Christianity globally (Robbins 2004b). A key aspect of the proliferation of Charismatic Christian practices has been their selective implementation. While the gifts of the Spirit that have been the hallmark of the movement still play a central role in many congregations, the neo-Pentecostal/neo-Charismatic congregations that have made up the Third Wave have, on average, made a second extraction: where the Second Wave teased apart Pentecostal theology and Spirit Baptism, the Third Wave has seemed to downplay canonical gifts of the Spirit for a more broadly interpreted experiential Christianity (see Luhrmann 2004 for an example). In many, though by no means all church communities, the forms in which the influence of the Holy Spirit is made manifest have been downplayed in favor of an emphasis on the function that the Holy Spirit plays in spiritual, personal and interpersonal fulfillment.

Intimate and Inaccessible

173

What is broadly referred to as the Charismatic movement is difficult to characterize in depth. The difficulty is owing mainly to the diversity of beliefs and practices produced by the piecemeal introduction of Charismatic elements into existing Christian denominations, and the differential framings of the gifts in each historical period of Charismatic Renewal. Despite these important caveats, a few general statements about the contemporary nature of Charismatic practices should be made. First, the Charismatic movement has championed the use of the gifts and other aspects in which the Holy Spirit manifests in lived experience (Csordas 1997; Robbins 2004b; Hayford and Moore 2006; Luhrmann 2012b). The implementation of this belief sits on something of a spectrum: on the one hand there are churches that keep the manifestations of the supernatural in daily life relatively minimal—hearing God’s voice or imagining His presence to such an extent that it feels almost real may be the outstanding achievement of one’s spiritual life (see Corwin 2012; Luhrmann 2012a for examples); on the other hand there are those communities that teach the traditional gifts, deal in demonology and generally accept more ecstatic manifestations of the Spirit (Csordas 1990, 1997 is on this end). Second, as Joel Robbins (2004a, 2004b; but see also Westerlund 2009) has argued, by insisting that each believer can have direct access to the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity has radically democratized Christian practice, as the new de facto locus of religious authority is embodied experience. This is significant, I argue, because a great deal of the experiential richness and complexity of Charismatic practice emerges from the recognition of variations between adherents. Third, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is oriented toward direct divine intervention in worldly action (Csordas 1997, 2001; Miller and Yamamori 2007; Luhrmann 2012b). This is particularly the case with the gifts, where divine inspiration is, by definition, intended for the edification of oneself and others; the necessary entailment of action on behalf of believers is, by extension, a guarantee that adherents will manifest many of the particularities of God’s felt presence. Taken together, these three features make up the historical/theological conditions in which individuals are primed to confront asymmetries in one another’s perceptions and practices. All of these features were present at Life Church at the time I was conducting my fieldwork. Life Church is a small congregation (approximately 100 members) made up primarily of densely overlapping networks of very close friends. This was partially the case because the church was so new at the time I was there, so existing networks were primarily responsible for its draw. However, more integral to these affiliations was the fact that the founding body of the church had formed through breaking off from another more religiously mainstream congregation. All five of the interview participants had been founding members of Life Church, but they had varied lengths of affiliation with the Charismatic movement and with one another. Two participants, Rachel and Peter, were married and had been active on the

174

Christopher Stephan

Charismatic scene for forty years. Mary was a close friend of theirs who was a generation younger, and had been a member of prayer groups with Peter and Rachel for over twenty years. Then there were Debra and Hannah, two young women who were in their early thirties and mid-twenties, respectively. Debra’s history in the Charismatic movement went back about three years. Hannah’s went back about two, though she had only been baptized with the Spirit about nine months before our interview. Debra and Hannah were both acquainted with the three previously mentioned participants, but they were not well acquainted with one another.

Limited Access The members I spoke to at Life Church reported that they felt it was a privilege to be empowered to operate in their gifts for the benefit of their fellows. To convey the power of the Holy Spirit to one another in sundry forms was to act, for the moment, as an extension of God’s power—the implement through which His will is realized. Their abnegation of the capacities they attributed to the Holy Spirit meant that each enactment of their gifts was, to some extent, felt to be a small transcendence of their human limitations. It was an exciting prospect, and an invigorating experience. The members of Life Church were in continuous communication about the most recent events in which they or someone they knew had used the gifts to great effect. While cautious not to take credit for the actions they attribute to God’s power working through them, the participants from Life Church were confident that they would see their gifts have tangible results on others. There remains, however, the possibility that one will witness one’s own or someone else’s enactment of a gift having an opaque or unexpected impact. For Rachel, a long-time prayer minister at Life Church whose involvement in Charismatic Christianity began during the early days of John Wimber’s Vineyard movement,2 recognizing the Holy Spirit in asymmetry of others’ experiences took some getting used to. She tells me she was particularly wary of the odd manifestations she saw in others. She was very cognizant of the opacity of acts such as being “Slain in the Spirit”—falling down and “resting” when one feels the Spirit’s power. What most troubled her was that the efficacy of these manifestations was unclear. She could not tell what it was that God was doing in the people she saw fall. But the spiritual leaders in that church encouraged her to ask about what she did not understand. In so doing, she came to see others’ opaque behavior as evidence that the Spirit was doing unique work in them that might itself be imperceptible. “Being down there,” she recollects, I was able to ask questions and one of the teachers down there said, you know, don’t be afraid to interview people and ask ‘What did God do for you when you were down on the ground?’ And so I became an investigator for myself. And so I would question, um. I, I would, if I prayed for

Intimate and Inaccessible

175

somebody and they went down on the floor and I continued to pray then afterwards I would ask them ‘what happened?’ . . . And I began to realize that God had a purpose in this and it wasn’t something to be afraid of. Importantly for our discussion, these behaviors that seemed so opaque to Rachel were often responses individuals had to her own spiritual gifts. As she notes, one of the common instances in which she would encounter these opaque manifestations was when she was interceding over fellow believers. Later in the conversation, Rachel related the answers people would give to her inquiries. She frequently discovered that the supplicants felt that they were being healed of internal emotional wounds, often from childhood. But Rachel was never able to discern this efficacy without these discussions. The experience of the other remained somewhat inscrutable. Thus, despite Rachel’s very straightforward application of her gift of intercession,3 the movement of the Spirit did not always take obvious forms, especially when the evidence of its work was in itself very nebulous and the real efficacy was something internal. As others explained to her what they had experienced in these moments of uncertainty, her attitude toward this asymmetry changed, and she began to believe there was indeed some purpose to the manifestations despite her inability to discern what it might be. In such instances, the asymmetry that surfaces becomes evidence that God was, in fact, doing more through the enactment than one anticipated. By extension, the incapacity to fully access or accord with another’s spiritual experience reveals a limit to what access one can have to the extent and direction of the Holy Spirit’s movement, even in the event that its power is embodied through a gift. Recalling Rachel’s narrative about becoming accustomed to the manifestation of the Spirit, I noted that her shift in perspective entailed both a new way of understanding the opacity of others’ responses as evidence of the Spirit’s movement and as an assurance that certain aspects of even her own spiritual actions would remain opaque. Hence, becoming intimately aware of the Spirit’s power meant also becoming equally aware of the fact that there were aspects of the Spirit’s movement that she could never have direct knowledge of. The only way to know was to ask the other party to the event what they had experienced and from that hope to reach an understanding of her experience that was greater than her own embodied understanding of her actions. In Rachel’s case, however, because the asymmetry appeared in the difference between what Rachel perceived herself to be doing and the impact her actions had on the supplicant, the other’s response was informative of both the direct, intimate influence of the Spirit on the event at hand, and the ultimate inaccessibility of the full extent of the role of her actions in the Spirit’s work. In such instances, the other goes full circle from being the source of intentional modifications that re-situate the other’s response as evidence of the Holy Spirit’s presence to the experiential basis for the Spirit’s unassumability. Revelation and obscurity go hand in hand.

176

Christopher Stephan

That pattern is ultimately reflected in participants’ attitudes toward their experiences. While asymmetry is the basis for the perceptual shifts that are identified as the Spirit’s movement, the recognition of asymmetries in perception between people also constitutes the basis on which these participants qualify their perspectives. When I asked Mary, the woman whose story of a shared vision I recounted earlier, “Can you describe the Holy Spirit?” she provided me with a surprisingly concise and provocative answer: “Well I don’t think I’ve experienced him in any kind of full way. But what I know of him is wisdom, immediacy, inaccessibility.” I want to draw attention to two things from this brief exchange. First, Mary immediately qualifies her knowledge of the Holy Spirit. This stance is very consistent with those taken by the other participants, especially when my questions contained implicit biases toward absolutes rather than appeals only to personal experience. Second, Mary generously redirects my question into an answerable framing that privileges her partial experience. As she does so she frames her response to indicate the simultaneity of accessing something of God’s Spirit and having the separateness and unassumability of that Spirit confirmed. It is a response that mirrors the existential relation to the Other. The possibility that asymmetries offer limited revelations of what the Spirit is doing in an event was a topic that Peter, a pastor at Life Church, brought into our interviews many times. When he did so, he also variously indicated that he had come to expect this partial insight—to expect that the other’s experience would be unpredictable, that the work God was doing through his Spirit would be, to some extent, unpredictable. In our discussion of “impartation,” the practice through which the power of the Spirit is passed from one individual to another through the laying on of hands, he frequently brought up the perceptible differences in the experience of people involved in the same activity. Contrasting perspectives of the person doing the imparting with the perspective of the person who is being imparted to, Peter drew a number of distinctions relevant to the limitations of his own perspective. In his own words, [I found out that] I could impart life to them—that people had assignments of death against them, or they were feeling depressed or overwhelmed or whatever. And so by laying hands on them, I would be able to transmit the power of the Holy Spirit through me to them, and build them up in different ways. I mean, I’ve described a couple but undoubtedly there are more ways than that. Or, there are ways that I thought I was imparting that were exceeded by what the Lord did in a person’s life. Sometimes you find out about it, sometimes you don’t. But, the impartation is the laying on of hands, sometimes it’s to stir up spiritual gifts, it’s to give people a touch from the lord, sometimes they can feel it physically. Sometimes they’ll feel a tingling. So they’ll get different sensations—different ways of reacting to the power of the Spirit that flows through you to them.

Intimate and Inaccessible

177

Here we see yet another way in which asymmetries between persons’ experiences make apparent the possibility that one is missing out on some aspect of the event. Peter is, in various ways, making distinctions between what he feels and what others feel, what he can know about the Spirit, and the full scope of the Spirit’s activities. He first establishes that the act of impartation varies based on how it is received, and that following from that any account of the ways in which the Spirit could work through impartation would necessarily be incomplete. Its reception is not necessarily predictable, nor is it always perceptible. What is interesting here is that despite the fact that only the variation one finds out about should be affirming the limitations of his experience, Peter is predicating his perspective on impartation upon the consistency of asymmetries he has found in the past. He is careful to point out that there can be ways he has never experienced God’s power being manifested in impartation; nonetheless, they “undoubtedly” exist. What comes to the foreground is the inestimable range of the Spirit’s power, rather than merely some counterpart’s contingent reception of an impartation. This goes beyond qualifying his in-the-moment experiential understanding. In essence, alterity of the other’s experience engenders a conception of God that is feeding forward into Peter’s expectations for future experiences. Peter’s statement here resonates well with the message conveyed by others in his community. Inasmuch as Peter, Mary and Rachel realize that they cannot anticipate or fully know the experience of their counterparts, they are confronted with experiential evidence of the incompleteness of their momentto-moment experiences of God’s Spirit. As Peter and Mary display in a particularly poignant form: continual confrontations with asymmetries in experience bear out in a forward-feeding attitude toward one’s own experience as a privileged, but nonetheless incomplete, revelation of the Spirit’s workings. The impact of this orientation toward future experiences is that while God is perceived to be inexhaustibly other, the continuous revelation of that otherness in manifold scenarios secures the possibility that believers can experience themselves as coming to know God better over time. As with Rachel’s example of the opacity of being slain in the Spirit, others’ alternate experiences can afford new perspective on what would otherwise escape one’s perceptual grasp. Consequently, Charismatic encounters with asymmetry not only condition the significance of embodying God’s Spirit, but also one’s relation to others’ embodied experience, and to oneself as an object of reflection. To approach the latter point first: participants recognized the role of asymmetries in instigating changes in their perceptual patterns and attitudes, both of which were significant contributors to their overall narratives of themselves as progressing in their faith. A younger member of Life Church, Debra, shared a story that helps to illustrate this point. Now in her early thirties, she had grown up Christian but left the church during a particularly difficult time in her life. She had come back to Christianity just a few years before we

178

Christopher Stephan

met. In the process of her reconversion Debra discovered Charismatic Christianity through a series of ecstatic experiences in which she claimed she had received a great deal of emotional healing. As we talked, she kept referring to God as “the God of my understanding,” a phrase I at first believed she had borrowed from a twelve-step program. It was only when we began to discuss a recent event in which some church members had unsuccessfully prayed to heal her injured foot that the phrase took on new meaning. She explained that the event had made her skeptical, particularly because the people that prayed for her were so confident that the Holy Spirit was working through them to heal her. “So I’m like, ok, yeah, I have some doubts about that,” she said, but quickly added, But, like, I’ve seen in other ways like, I had some doubts about things and I was just moved along where I could look back and say oh, that was just a limited point of view. That’s why I say the God of my understanding today. My purpose here is not to overextend the analytical reach of this chapter by addressing doubt and faith, but rather to use this example to demonstrate the way that confrontations with the limitations of the subjective standpoint are imbued with the possibility of coming to a new level of understanding. As someone on the receiving end of an ostensibly unproductive attempt at healing, Debra has, as she notes, significant cause for doubt. Her response, however, is to stress the limits of her own understanding of the Spirit. It is that limitation that she turns toward in her narrative as it develops. When she defined what she meant by using the phrase “the God of my understanding today” she reframed the experience from what was at the time my own emphasis on tangible efficacy, to her own perspective on her finitude. Immediately following the portion of our interview displayed above, Debra drew on a number of other incidents in which she was at the time unaware what God was doing, only to feel later on that she understood the reason why her life course took the direction it had (cf. Luhrmann 2012a, ch. 8), or what a particular spiritual event had meant. Included in these events was her introduction to Charismatic Christianity. It is significant that throughout the interview whenever she made a point to this effect, she contrasted her perspective at the time not with an anonymous objective view, but with an alternate perspective identified with someone else in particular— her parents, her brother or others in the congregation. For Debra, these others demonstrated a level of faith that her past experience led her to believe she could eventually achieve. Consequently, she was not only saying that there are things that elude her sensibilities. She is also speaking to a pattern wherein contrasting perspectives enable personal progression. There was a story arc that Debra indexed with the phrase “the God of my understanding today.” By this she referred to a difference between her understanding at the

Intimate and Inaccessible

179

time of our conversation and her understanding before it. Like the other participants, Debra portrayed herself as on a spiritual journey that entailed ever increasing, but never complete knowledge of God. The conclusion that one can never fully understand God is thus offset by the experience of continually encountering opportunities to enrich one’s current understanding. Furnishing this experience, once again, are the observable differences in others’ experiences. Lastly, I would like to draw this paper to a close by speaking to how others’ alternative modes of experiencing or enacting the gifts of the Spirit enrich the Charismatic life-world by simultaneously presenting revelations about God’s general characteristics and confirming the possibility of a unique and personalized relationship with Him. Quite frequently, interviewees pointed out individual variations in the way the gifts were experienced. Often these conversations would focus on the way the Spirit would be expressed differently in each person, as if each individual was a kind of filter. In those regards these Charismatic Christian respondents were highly attuned to the nuances of their own and one another’s experience. Not only was there a range to who operated in what gifts of the Spirit, there was person-to-person variation in the manners or situations in which a particular gift would be expressed. Rather than drawing purely subjectivist conclusions, participants frequently used narratives of these instances to illustrate how others’ reactions to God’s power could make them aware of ways in which the Spirit was working that they would otherwise have missed. To some extent this apprehensible diversity was stable over time and seen as useful. Asymmetrical experiences could often be received as supplementary to one’s own. Close friends would be aware of one another’s tendencies to experience the Spirit in imagery, thought impressions, auditory perception, physical sensation or emotional responses. In some cases they would recruit one another precisely because of these differences—especially when someone was known to have a gift of healing, or have special clarity in hearing God’s voice. When it came to making prayerful decisions or confirming a word of prophecy, it was very common that adherents had close friends to call on whom they considered valuable counterpoints to their own experiential styles. Tanya Luhrmann (2011) has recently used a review of the literature on sensory hallucinations to underscore the point that cultural emphases on one or another sensory modality will influence the frequency in which supernatural encounters occur in that mode; a complementary point would be that the range of modalities assumed to have validity and the amount of individual variation tolerated together make up a practical repertoire in which individuals will have varying proficiencies and may see one another’s experiences as more or less relevant and supplementary to their own. In the Charismatic setting where everyone has an equal shot at a personal encounter with the Holy Spirit, individual variation is often the basis for

180

Christopher Stephan

long-term partnerships in prayer and ministry. Mary offered a good example of such partnerships: Sometimes that’ll happen where I’ll be in the room or something and I’ll get the knowing at the same time that another person gets a knowing. And there’s certain people that I click with that way a lot. That happens to me with Rachel. But in prayer, if I’m doing deliverance prayer it happens with Peter. We work in tandem very well. Alright, you’re across the room. You got the same thing that I got, so that is what God’s saying right now. In her short description, Mary begins with instances in which a “knowing,” strong intuitions that are enabled by the Spirit, is surprisingly shared. Such conjunctive intuitions are relatively rare. Mary makes it clear, however, that they are more common in some domains and in some relationships than in others. In statements that do not appear in this excerpt she goes on to describe how they will much more rarely occur with mere acquaintances and even strangers. In all of these instances it is the surprise that two people’s impressions would ever coalesce that is the basis for partnership and the default validation that the “knowing” came from God. Just as importantly, this practice of partnership highlights the fact that variation is thought to reveal aspects of the supernatural that might escape the perceptual grasp of one individual. While participants continually recognized variation amongst themselves they never framed variation as a product of limitations in one’s own or the other’s capacity to experience God’s power. Instead, it was yet another kind of asymmetry that they understood to be evidence of God’s omnipotence and individuated attention to all believers. An excerpt from my interview with Rachel sums this perspective up well: God develops this individual relationship with each of us. And that’s why you’ll hear how He, how God talks to Peter is different than me. And, and I’ve watched in amazement—to me, it’s one of the most delightful things—as people press in to know God, he knows them so well that he develops this relationship with them individually. . . . The senses are very important to me. What I see, what I hear, what I touch. And so he talks to me many . . . from many things that would mean something to me but not necessarily to someone else. Individual variability in perception and practice is endemic. It is, she attests, a great source of wonderment. This individualization perspective, I argue, bears the mark of asymmetries between individuals. When I spoke earlier about Rachel confronting her own limited access to what others were experiencing when they were “Slain in the Spirit,” I noted that she gradually learned to see some of the opacity of those moments as stemming from the

Intimate and Inaccessible

181

deeply personal nature of the work that the Spirit was doing within the people who fell as she was praying. To some extent, I would like to suggest, we can see echoes of that same pattern here. Even as Rachel is pointing out the reality of God’s personalization, she is relating it back to her own perceptual style and the unlikelihood of anyone else being able to understand what God is doing for her in moments when it is her experience that presents idiosyncrasy and opacity to others. Accordingly, she suggests that incongruent experiences have an important role in the Charismatic experience of coming to know God more deeply and personally. Circling back to the story that opened the chapter, perhaps now we can understand what is implied for someone like Mary when she recounts her remarkable experience of sharing a vision with someone who nonetheless saw it differently, and why, when asked about that asymmetry, she speculates that it was what her counterpart “needed to see.” Mary, like the others I spoke to is persistently confronted with recognizable differences between her experience of events and those of others. It is through this continuous recognition of asymmetry that she experiences God as transcending her full apprehension. Concomitantly, as intersubjective asymmetries reveal to her that God is irreducible to a single experience, she and her fellow believers tended to emphasize the open-endedness of the Holy Spirit’s influence. However, while asymmetries reveal the limits of the subjective standpoint, they simultaneously afford the experience of a kind of privileged, idiosyncratic vantage-point that serves as the grounds for discerning a personal relationship with God. Correspondingly, some idiosyncrasies were taken up by Mary and others as bespoke spiritual experience, adapted to their persons.

Conclusion One of Hallowell’s innovations was introducing the idea of concomitance. Cultures provided orientations toward the self and its behavioral environment, but these could not vary independently. Rather, they were phenomenally linked. The archetype of this linkage was the self/Other divide. In Hallowell’s conception self and non-self were co-revelatory. However, the entities making up both ends of the relation had to be fulfilled by culture; neither had any inherent properties. A fully phenomenological approach must intervene in that formula. The concept of intersubjectivity, entailing as it does the non-coincidence but inherent relatedness of each individual (see Desjarlais and Throop 2011; Throop 2012), advances Hallowell’s formulation significantly by suggesting that, rather than one’s way of experiencing self and Other being arbitrarily patterned by culture, patterns of cultural experience are responsive to the foundational intersubjective and intercorporeal conditions in which our life-worlds are given. The broader appeal of this chapter to anthropologists is to take more wonder in the banal manifestations of otherness in everyday life. The ways in which non-coincidence with others shapes cultural experience is, I believe,

182

Christopher Stephan

a significantly underdeveloped field in anthropology (cf. Hollan 2012). That every community has its patterns of experience means that we can expect each one to develop its own way of informing how persons understand their relations to one another, but just as essentially, cultural and personal meanings continually evolve in response to the otherness that cannot but be revealed in every social experience. Resultantly, intersubjective asymmetry, as an inexhaustible driving force of experience, can be a significant ingress for anthropologists. Drawing from narratives shared with me during my time in the field, I have argued that the recognition of intersubjective asymmetries informs the meaning Charismatic Christians derive from their experience of the gifts of the Spirit. Coming from the insights provided by phenomenology, phenomenologically oriented anthropologists have argued that the singularity of each person plays an important role in structuring cultural phenomena. Our own embodied experience of the world never matches its fullness and complexity, nor is it coterminous with the way that others may experience it (Desjarlais and Throop 2011). Correspondingly, I have argued that recognizing the difference in another’s embodied mode of being in the world can instigate intentional modifications that, in the idiom of Charismatic Christianity, constitute experiential evidence of God’s simultaneous intimacy and inaccessibility. In the performance of any of the gifts of the Spirit, otherness is often revealed in discrepancies between what one believes is occurring through the use of one’s gifts and what is experienced on the part of the person for whom the gifts are being used. Because performances of the gifts of the Spirit are directly empowered by God, participants experience acting in a gift of the Spirit as being a moment of great intimacy with God. However, incongruence between one’s own and another’s experience of God’s power during a gift’s enactment reveal this felt intimacy to nonetheless be an incomplete revelation of the work that God is performing through that gift. Thus, while participants experience the most direct and clear expression of God’s will and power in the enactments of their gifts, the revelation of asymmetries between their own experiences and those of others ensure that they are concurrently confronted with the fact that even this intimacy is a partial and imperfect manifestation of that will and power. However, the discrepancies that individuals discover between their experiences also provide them opportunities to access aspects of God—those manifested in the experience of others—that would otherwise have escaped their awareness. Thus in the Charismatic Christian context, encounters with one another’s otherness provide access to the manifold characteristics of God. This attitude toward the incompleteness of any individual experience of God is the reflection of a particular cultural objectification of the non-coincidence between persons; in this cultural framing, others are not merely, I argue, reminders of believers’ own limits, but also of God’s limitlessness. It is important to note here that this cultural framing of asymmetry reinforces Christian sociality. The supplementarity of others’ experiences reveal

Intimate and Inaccessible

183

aspects of God at the same moment as they reveal the uniqueness of each person’s relationship with God. This uniqueness, in turn, becomes the basis for special forms of mutual dependence between believers. Of course, this is not the only significance of asymmetry available to Charismatic communities, nor is it the case that there was no limit to what the individuals at Life Church would accept as a legitimate spiritual experience. I have limited my discussion to what I earlier referred to as “benign difference” both because it was these differences that manifested most commonly in the lives of Life Church’s members and because it was these differences that seemed to exhibit the most influence on their lived experience. Turning again to the project of anthropology more generally, I believe that these findings should encourage us to focus on the uses to which our subjects’ put their encounters with otherness as an ingress for anthropological inquiry. What is recognizably absent, or other, not only forms the ground against which our experience figures as contrast, but is instrumental in the constitution of experience and will be instrumental in its explication.

Notes 1 Alter here, as in “alternate” and “alternative,” is being used for both its sense of “being other” and “amending.” 2 The Vineyard churches are, by some accounts, the origins of the “Third Wave” of the Charismatic movement. 3 Intercession receives various definitions that range between mediation and advocacy. Most fundamentally it is intensive prayer regarding the needs of another person.

References Burgess, Stanley M., ed. 2006. Encyclopedia of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. New York: Routledge. ———. 2011. Christian Peoples of the Spirit: A Documentary History of Pentecostal Spirituality from the Early Church to the Present. New York: New York University Press. Corwin, Anna I. 2012. “Changing God, Changing Bodies: The Impact of New Prayer Practices on Elderly Catholic Nuns’ Embodied Experience.” Ethos 40(4): 390–410. Crapanzano, Vincent. 2003. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.” Ethos 18(1):5–47. ———. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8(2):135–156. ———. 1997. The Sacred Self. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2001. Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2004. “Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion.” Current Anthropology 45(2):163–185.

184

Christopher Stephan

Desjarlais, Robert and C. Jason Throop. 2011. “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40(1):87–102. Duranti, Alessandro. 2006. “The Social Ontology of Intentions.” Discourse Studies 8(1):31–40. ———. 2009. “The Relevance of Husserl’s Theory to Language Socialization.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2):205–226. ———. 2010. “Husserl, Intersubjectivity and Anthropology.” Anthropological Theory 10(1–2):16–35. Hallowell, Alfred Irving. 1955. Culture and Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hayford, Jack W. and S. David Moore. 2006. The Charismatic Century: The Enduring Impact of the Azusa Street Revival. New York: Hachette Book Group. Hollan, Douglas. 2012. “On the Varieties and Particularities of Cultural Experience.” Ethos 40(1):37–53. Leistle, Bernhard. 2014. “From the Alien to the Other: Steps toward a Phenomenological Theory of Spirit Possession.” Anthropology of Consciousness 25(1):53–90. ———. 2015. “Otherness as a Paradigm in Anthropology.” Semiotica 204: 292–313. Lindhardt, Martin. 2011. Practicing the Faith: The Ritual Life of PentecostalCharismatic Christians. New York: Berghahn Books. Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2004. “Metakinesis: How God becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity.” American Anthropologist 106(3):518–528. ———. 2011. “Hallucinations and Sensory Overrides.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40(1):71–85. ———. 2012a. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2012b. “A Hyperreal God and Modern Belief: Towards an Anthropological Theory of Mind.” Current Anthropology 53(4):371–395. Miller, Donald E. and Tetsunao Yamamori. 2007. Global Pentecostalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Poewe, Karla O. 1994. Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Robbins, Joel. 2004a. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2004b. “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33(1):117–143. Throop, C. Jason. 2009. “Intermediary Varieties of Experience.” Ethnos 74(4): 535–558. ———. 2012. “On Inaccessibility and Vulnerability: Some Horizons of Compatibility between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis.” Ethos 40(1):75–96. ———. 2015. “Sacred Suffering. A Phenomenological Anthropological Perspective”. In Phenomenology in Anthropology. A Sense of Perspective, edited by Kalpana Ram and Christopher Houston, 68–90. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Westerlund, David. 2009. Global Pentecostalism: Encounters with Other Religious Traditions. London: I.B. Tauris. Zahavi, Dan. 2003. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge: MIT Press.

9 Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain C. Jason Throop

Introduction In this chapter I reflect on the relationship between pain and otherness. Building upon an example drawn from a corpus of videotaped interactions between a local healer and one of her patients on the island of Yap, Federated States of Micronesia,1 I ruminate upon what it might mean to feel another’s pain. In the case in question, the healer claims to discern the quality, intensity and trajectory of her patient’s pain by means of her clinically honed tactile engagements with her body. Her tactile-based empathic discernments, she claims, evidence pain in a way that her patient’s overt expressions often do not.2 Phenomenological insights into the asymmetrical inversions inherent in intersubjective encounters, as well as ethnographic descriptions of local orientations to suffering, will provide the analytical lenses through which to address the problem of pain and otherness posed in the context of these concrete therapeutic interactions. As I have detailed in the context of my broader ethnographic work on the experience and expression of suffering in Yapese communities (see Throop 2008, 2010a, 2012a), local ways of bearing pain virtuously are complexly intertwined with practices of secrecy, concealment and mental opacity, as well as with expectations that individuals should ideally contribute to their family, village and community by means of engaging in various forms of service without complaint. Enduring work-borne suffering in an effort to contribute to the well-being of others, is deemed a positively valued form of self-sacrifice that defines a range of moral possibilities for being and belonging on the island. In this context, efforts to hide aspects of one’s selfexperience from others, particularly experiences of suffering and pain, are held to be a means of enacting moral modes of being to the extent that they enable individuals to keep going in the face of the struggles and hardships associated with work that is undertaken to care for various, more and less, intimate others. Habits of concealing intentions, thoughts, goals, feelings, emotions and moods from others run deep and are complexly motivated, however. They are, as a result, thoroughly interwoven into even the most quotidian of

186

C. Jason Throop

interactions that constitute the landscape of everyday life (see Throop 2010a). It is precisely against such a communicative and moral backdrop that local healers work in their efforts to diagnose, treat and care for those who come to them suffering with various forms of pain, illness and hurt. Knowing full well that their patients are hiding crucial aspects of their self-experience from them, healers are recurrently confronted with the inaccessibility of their patients’ pain, while at the same time making efforts to access and assess perceptible traces of pain in efforts to diagnose and treat them. The problem at hand for local healers is thus the problem of feeling, or more precisely in the specific case that I will discuss below, of touching another’s pain.

“We Had No Choice But to Come Here” The therapeutic encounter I have chosen to examine in this chapter is drawn from a corpus of videotaped interactions between a local healer who I call Lani, and her patient, a young ten-year-old Yapese girl named Tinag. Lani, a highly skilled and renowned manual medicinal practitioner and bonesetter who hails from one of Yap’s so-called “Outer Islands”3 had been living and working on Yap for more than fifteen years when I first met her in the fall of 2002. At that time, Lani had just begun treating Tinag for a compound fractured forearm, dislocated wrist and shoulder. Tinag had sustained the injury to her arm after falling from a tree while playing with some of her friends after school (for a more complete discussion of the event see Throop 2010a). Immediately following the accident, Tinag was brought to Yap State Memorial Hospital for treatment, the primary biomedical facility on the island. It was there that the bones in her arm were first reset and where she was fitted with a plaster cast. After receiving treatment, the pain in her arm continued to intensify over the course of the next few days. When it is was clear that the pain was becoming unbearable for Tinag, her parents returned to the hospital for a second time. When the cast was removed and another set of x-rays were performed, Tinag and her family were informed that the bones in her forearm had been reset incorrectly and that the doctor would have to reset them again. Additionally, they learned that during the original procedure her wrist had been dislocated. Deeply frustrated and upset by this news, her parents refused any additional treatment from the hospital, taking Tinag instead to see Lani. When I later asked Tinag’s father why he had not thought to take Tinag to Lani in the first place, he explained that he had received treatment from a local healer when he himself was in his late teens for a broken leg. The pain associated with the treatment was the most intense pain that he had ever experienced. He did not think, quite frankly, that a young girl like Tinag could handle the intensity of pain associated with traditional bonesetting. Upon being informed that the hospital had botched the job and that her arm needed to be reset again, he decided, however, that they had no other choice but to bring her to someone who really knew what they were doing. Later

Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

187

when Lani explained to us that not only had the doctor failed to reset Tinag’s forearm properly, dislocating her wrist in the process, but he had also dislocated her shoulder, Tinag’s father turned to me and nodded, “You see,” he said, “we had no choice but to come here.” All told, Lani treated Tinag for over two months, from November 2002 through February 2003. Tinag’s treatment regime consisted of coming for massages every day except for Sundays, taking various local medicines that were meant to treat her bones, blood, veins, nerves, muscles, swelling and pain, and bathing and exercising in the ocean every morning and evening. Each massage lasted anywhere from 15 to 40 minutes. With the exception of the session in which Lani first reset her broken arm (which I observed but did not record), and three other sessions that I was not able to attend, I managed to videotape all of the sessions that Tinag underwent during her treatment. The specific interaction that I will describe here occurred about three weeks after Tinag’s treatment had begun. Lani had already reset the bones in Tinag’s forearm in their first session three weeks previous, and was now working to realign her wrist joint.

“Be Truthful!” As the video recording of the session in question begins, Lani and Tinag can be seen facing one another with Tinag slouched over staring down at her hand. Lani, who has just finished applying coconut oil to Tinag’s arm, turns her head up and stares briefly out into the distance over and above Tinag’s head. As she does so, she applies pressure with her right index finger and thumb to an area close to the carpel bones just below Tinag’s extended thumb. As Tinag pivots her head and shoulders slightly toward Lani, Lani looks down at her own hands and continues to grasp Tinag’s arm, now using her fingers to steady the forearm while applying pressure with her thumbs at the point where the dislocation occurred. Continuing to look down at her hands, Lani begins pressing down harder with her thumbs, which causes Tinag to slouch over closer to her injured arm (see Figure 9.1), before moving her shoulders and torso in a rolling motion away from Lani. Without looking up at Tinag, Lani begins to speak, “When you feel pain you tell me, hmm?” Before Lani’s voice trails off, Tinag lifts her torso up and pivots back toward Lani. Just prior to articulating the words “you tell me,” both Lani and Tinag look up at each other and engage in a very brief moment of mutual eye contact (see Figure 9.2). Tinag responds by nodding affirmatively, Lani then looks back down at Tinag’s wrist. Still looking down, Lani runs her thumbs along Tinag’s forearm while Tinag remains sitting upright looking down at Lani’s hands. Lani’s gaze remains on Tinag’s wrist for a few seconds before she looks up again to stare out toward a distant spatial horizon above and behind Tinag’s head. Looking down again for a fraction of a second, Lani then raises her eyes to briefly meet Tinag’s before asking, “Pain?”

Figure 9.1a

Figure 9.1b

Figure 9.1c

Figure 9.2a

Figure 9.2b

Figure 9.2c

Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

191

Figure 9.2d

Holding mutual eye contact for a moment, Lani glances back down at her hands. As she does so Tinag moves her head back and forth from left to right to indicate that she is not currently experiencing pain. Continuing to apply pressure with her thumbs, Lani pauses for a moment before lifting her head and quickly moving her torso toward Tinag. As she does so, Lani says forcefully, “Be truthful!” A mere moment later she smiles and the two of them begin to laugh.

Touching Another’s Pain What can we make of this brief interaction? By telling Tinag to be truthful, are we to assume that Lani has directly discerned, tactilely or otherwise, evidence of pain that Tinag is making efforts to hide from her? If so, how is this possible? Could it not also be the case that Lani is explicitly using the challenge to socialize Tinag into becoming a better patient (the type of patient who overtly and explicitly expresses her pain)? Why do the two of them laugh when Tinag is apparently caught hiding her pain from Lani? And finally, why would Tinag not express her pain directly to Lani through talk or other nonverbal embodied gestures? To begin working toward answering some of these questions, it is important to note that throughout this interaction we find Lani regularly looking away from Tinag’s face and torso, sometimes looking off into the distance, sometimes

192

C. Jason Throop

looking down at her own hands, as she uses her well-honed tactile sensibilities to discern the extent, intensity and trajectory of Tinag’s pain. Even though Lani asks Tinag at critical moments whether or not she is feeling pain as she performs a particular manipulation of her wrist and arm or as she applies pressure to those same areas, she does not take Tinag’s explicit responses at face value. After Tinag denies that she is feeling pain, Lani, who is looking down and continuing to touch and manipulate the injured area, appears to sense a bodily response that indicates a nonverbalized but tactilely evidenced manifestation of pain. It is at this moment that she somewhat forcefully, but also playfully, admonishes Tinag to be “truthful.” Despite Tinag’s attempts to deny and thus conceal her pain, Lani has been able to somehow “touch” her pain, a pain that Tinag overtly denies experiencing. Again, how could this be?

The Otherness of Pain There is, as many before me have noted, an inherent ambiguity to pain. To see a person in pain is to be presented with an opportunity to feel suffering for the suffering of another (Levinas 1998). In this capacity, pain can potentiate the most empathic connections we have with others. It may motivate us to care about and for them. It may compel us to act, to help, to be concerned and to give aid. It is always possible to doubt another’s pain, however. The other could be “faking” or “exaggerating” pain. Conversely, the other could be concealing the intensity of his or her pain from us. For this reason, Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks, “The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself” (2001, sec. 246). Despite its ubiquity and palpable presence in peoples’ lives, the expression of pain can present a fundamental problem of certainty for the one who witnesses the suffering of another. “To have pain is to have certainty,” Elaine Scarry remarks, echoing Wittgenstein, while “to hear about pain is to have doubt” (1985:13). The ambiguity of pain is not merely restricted to asymmetrical intersubjective experiences, however. Indeed, experiencing my own pain might very well mean that I have “certainty” regarding my own self-experience—that is, the pain exists for me, I am in pain; it is not, in any simplistic sense, however, a pain that arises precisely from me. It is both my pain and not my pain. It inhabits my body. And yet it comes from elsewhere. It does not belong to me. I did not create it, nor do I control it. My pain escapes me. And yet, it is still of me. Indeed, pain experienced as “mine” often evokes a sense that my body is no longer now precisely my own. When afflicted by pain, a body may thus become transformed from the transparent constellation of capacities through which I engage and affect the world to a body now conspicuously pained and to which I must attend thematically (see Leder 1990). And yet, again, it is still my body, although my body now modified through the pull of my affection and attention to its pained condition toward which I (and perhaps others) must now respond (see Throop 2010a, 2014; Throop

Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

193

and Duranti 2015). Finally, and especially significantly for the question I am addressing here, in touching my own pain, rubbing a cramp in my leg for instance, I directly encounter alterity within the expanse of my being. The “painful body,” Leder argues, “emerges as an alien presence that exerts upon us a telic demand” (Leder 1990:73). As Waldenfels puts it, albeit in reference to the example of fatigue, in the context of such an encounter “My own body thus acquires the traits of an alien body” (2011:49). In its capacity to evoke alien experience, pain is, as Elaine Scarry (1985) has famously argued, “world destroying.” In the intensity of its lived immediacy it is a phenomenon that “occurs on that fundamental level of bodily experience which language encounters, attempts to express, and then fails to encompass” (Kleinman et al. 1992:7). According to this view, pain is understood to disrupt a sufferer’s habitual orientation to time as past and future concerns are often constricted in the face of a painful “long-standing now” and of space, as pain intrudes upon the body and restricts a sufferer’s usual range of mobility (Good 1994; Honkasalo 1999, 2000). Arising in such a way, pain is thus, in Leistle’s phrasing (Introduction, this volume; see also Leistle 2015), a manifestation of “radical otherness” that discloses an existential potentiality common to our various modes of being-in-the-world as humans. The “radical otherness” of pain is, for instance, evident in what the physician and philosopher Drew Leder has argued to be pain’s potential impact on an individual’s lived experience of time, which can be distinguished according to two basic modalities, a “centripetal mode” and a “centrifugal mode.” In its “centripetal mode” Leder notes, “pain calls us incessantly back to the here, so that we are drawn to the now by the aching tooth, the cramping stomach” (1985:256). In the face of extreme pain, “a painless past is all but forgotten . . . [and] a painless future may be unimaginable” (1985:256). In this respect the everyday directionality of time in terms of its “focus and openness toward the future” is abruptly closed (Leder 1990). The experience of pain thus often leads to an “intentional disruption” whereby an open orientation from the present moment toward the future as “a center from which the rays of intentionality radiate outward” is arrested (Leder 1990). In contrast to this centripetal mode, Leder points out that pain’s aversive qualities may alternatively lead us to enter a centrifugal mode wherein our focus and attention is directed outward, away from our dysphoria. To this end, our embodied orientation to time may be transformed through the constant seeking for possible future cures or the obsessive dwelling on past causes. As Leder describes, we “can escape the riveting now of pain by an ecstasis into the farther reaches of time. Lost in imagination or memory, we elude our current suffering. Our temporal home becomes everywhere but the present” (1985:258). Pain then, in short, evidences a range of temporal manifestations that bear traces of its uncanny excess. Altering our experience of time, transforming our comfortable attunement to our surrounding world, unsettling our bodily capacities, shifting our possibilities for being and

194

C. Jason Throop

acting, pain alienates us from familiar modes of engagement and experience. Pain is other, alien. The “radical” otherness inherent in pain persists even despite the fact that such existential features are necessarily interlaced with a diverse range of “empirical” modifications that shape the various ways that pain is experienced and expressed (see Introduction, this volume; see also Throop 2008, 2010a). Regardless of its various manifestations, there is thus, as Levinas famously argued, an inherent basic “unassumability” to experiences of pain. Pain is never simply something I possess without remainder. It is of me but it is not precisely mine. Pain exceeds me at the same time that it may also engulf or capture me. As a “datum of consciousness,” Levinas explains, painful suffering is not only the consciousness of rejection or a symptom of rejection, but this rejection itself: a backward consciousness, ‘operating’ not as ‘grasp’ but as revulsion. A modality. The categorical ambiguity of quality and modality. The denial and refusal of meaning, thrusting itself forward as a sensible quality: that is, in the guise of ‘experienced’ content, the way in which, within a consciousness, the unbearable is precisely not borne, the manner of this not-being-borne; which paradoxically, is itself a sensation or datum . . . Contradiction qua sensation: the ache of pain—woe (1998:91–92).

Pain and Otherness If experiencing my own pain can evoke a sense that my body is no longer precisely my own—a sense that my body is now other, alien—what of a situation where I am confronted with another’s pain? Is the otherness of another’s pain comparable to the otherness that is my own pain? Given the careful thought he gave to critically examining possible relations between the expressive and experiential dimensions of pain, it is worth returning again to Wittgenstein who opens one possible path toward an answer. In order to see that it is conceivable that one person should have pain in another person’s body, one must examine what sorts of facts we call criterial for a pain being in a certain place . . . Suppose I feel that a pain which on the evidence of the pain alone, e.g., with closed eyes, I should call a pain in my left hand. Someone asks me to touch the painful spot with my right hand. I do so and looking around perceive that I am touching my neighbour’s hand . . . This would be pain felt in another’s body. (Wittgenstein 1960:49) For Veena Das (2007), who has thought with care about this passage from Wittgenstein, the problem of an instance of my pain being located in your body is one that might signal the fact that shared pain, if it was to be

Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

195

truly shared, is only, in the end, a product of the imagination and not something ever directly experienced. A reading that Das does not consider, but one which follows more closely on Wittgenstein’s fascination with pain as a phenomenon that presents a particular sort of problem for the internal consistency of propositional truth claims, might hold instead however that this situation reveals the particular existential conditions that would necessarily entail if a strictly representational theory of pain’s locatability and ownership as a sensation were the only means by which linguistic practices could hook into the experience of pain. And yet, the fact that this utterance can be evocatively made without these conditions holding true, that is, I can say that I feel pain when touching your body, without a pain sensation of mine literally being located in your body, suggests for this reading of Wittgenstein then the significance of understanding the non-representational ways that language intertwines with particular forms of life. Additionally, in a third framing, and this is the interpretation that Das herself favors, such a situation could also signal the possibility that beyond the grammar of pain there always still exists the possibility for there being an openness to the other’s pain, as she puts it, an instance in which we are able to let “the pain of the other happen to me.” Another way to pose the question that motivates this chapter then might be, following Das’ interpretation of Wittgenstein: how can touch render palpable the happening that is another’s pain’s impress upon me? Whether we are focusing on Wittgenstein’s problem of my pain being found in your body, or its inverse, a case of your pain being found in my body (putting aside for now the question of how the experience of the otherness of my own pain relates to the otherness of another’s pain), there are two aspects of Wittgenstein’s provocation that are particularly important for understanding the complexities at play in thinking through relations between empathy, pain and tactility as evidenced in the interaction between Tinag and Lani described above. First, there is the problem of “sharing” pain. Or more precisely, what it could mean to share another’s pain. Second, there is the fact that it is in the concrete act of “touching” another’s body that the conditional parameters of a particular language game of internalized pain sensations are made legible. That touch, often construed as one of the most proximate and intimate of the senses, is used by Wittgenstein to show the problematic ambiguities and asymmetries of pain, is not, I think, merely tied to the specificities of this particular language game. It is tied instead to the existential symmetries between the asymmetries of tactility as an embodied sensory engagement with self/others/world (see Throop 2012b) and empathy as a disclosing of the shifting asymmetries of intersubjectivity that are always already underway (Throop 2012b; see also Duranti 2010). This is also what may have led phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty to view touch as a potential embodied precursor to more complex forms of perspective-taking, mutuality and empathy (see Zahavi 2001, 2003).

196

C. Jason Throop

Tactility and Empathy From a phenomenological perspective, the dual responsivities of touching and being touched in relation to one’s own body are held to reveal a unique point of articulation of the dual horizons of the body as object (Körper) and the lived body (Leib). As Edmund Husserl observed, a hand that is touching, which for its part . . . appears as a thing, likewise has its touch sensations at the place on its corporeal surface where it touches (or is touched by the other). . . . Hence the Body is originally constituted in a double way: first, it is a physical thing, matter, it has its extension, in which are included its real properties, its color, smoothness, hardness, warmth, and whatever other material qualities. Secondly, I find on it, and I sense ‘on’ it and ‘in’ it: warmth on the back of the hand, coldness in the feet, sensations of touch in the fingertips. (1989:152–153) According to Husserl, the asymmetries inherent in touching and being touched disclose an asymmetry between an experiencing subject and a subject who is experienced by others. Touch in relation to one’s own body, Husserl argues, anticipates possibilities for recognizing other experiencing subjects (1989). As Zahavi explains, the “conditions for the possibility of empathy” are directly implicated in “the unique subject—object status of my body that permits me to recognize another body as a foreign embodied subjectivity” (2003:113). For example, “When my left hand touches my right, I am experiencing myself in a manner that anticipates both the way in which an Other would experience me and the way in which I would experience another” (Zahavi 2003:104). What is anticipated here is not, however, the possibility of “sharing” or “merging” with the other’s experience. From a Husserlian perspective, even in empathy, individuals are never granted unmediated first-person access to another’s lived experience. We do not live the other’s experience. We experience their experiencing by means of their expressions. Our individual streams of experience interlock by means of such expressions but they do not merge together as one (Schutz 1967). In this light, Husserl views empathy as a disclosing of another’s primordial experience that remains in its disclosing a “primordial non-primordial” experience from the perspective of the empathizer. It is never the first-person experiences as lived through by another that are “seen” or “shared” by an empathizer in an act of empathy. Nor is it their expressive acts qua acts that are. Instead, it is the disclosed experiences of the other “shining through” (Husserl 2001a) such expressions that constitute an empathic experience of another. While asymmetrical, empathy is not primordially inferential however. That is, we do not first simply take notice of slumped shoulders, a grimace and tears and then afterward infer pain. Pain immediately radiates through

Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

197

the bodily expressions as they occur. The other’s experience of pain made manifest through such expressions is not, and can never be, identical with our own experience of the pain being lived through by the other. It is not, then, the merger of subjectivities but a foundational and irreducible embodied intersubjectivity that is at the basis of human modes of coexistence. If it is not ever possible to truly “share” the other’s pain, even in the context of touch which is arguably one of the most intimate and proximate forms of sensory engagement, what do we make then of Lani’s understanding of the possibilities for empathy as mediated through touch in the context of her manipulative medicine and bonesetting practice? Let us examine more closely her own take on her practice and the place of empathy and pain within it.

“In Massage You Need to Feel the Pain for It to Work” As one of the local healers who I worked with most extensively, Lani was recognized by many Yapese as a healer with special gifts. Indeed, I had heard of Lani’s practice long before I had the opportunity to meet her in person. Due to her reputation, patients came from all over the island to seek out treatment from her at her family’s home, which at the time of my work with her in the years 2002–2003 was just outside the main port town of Colonia. Throughout the nine months I spent observing, videotaping and talking with Lani as she treated her patients, it was evident that her diagnostic and therapeutic skills were deeply rooted in the use of the haptic sense. To practice massage and bonesetting, one must develop a feel for joints, tendons, muscles and bones to cultivate a sensory-based familiarity with the way that they interconnect and the way they feel when they are out of place, swollen, misshapen or distended. As Lani pointed out to me, the hospital has x-rays, tests and various other means for assessing what is going on beneath the skin for a given patient. In contrast, “All I can do is feel what the problem is.” Given her reliance on “feeling,” Lani held the perception and communication of pain on the part of her patients to be a crucial component to her therapeutic practice. As she explained in the context of one our interviews together, “The problem with the hospital is that they do not let the patient feel their pain. They use those pictures from the x-ray.” When she massages a patient, in contrast, the patient’s experience of pain serves as his or her “own personal x-ray.” “It is his body and he will feel everything,” she observed. “You can find out from the patient if they feel something move, if they feel more or less pain, if it feels like the bone has been returned to the right place.” As a case in point, while working with one young boy who had broken his arm, she recounted how he was able to “feel by the pain that the arm is back in place.” That is, while Lani is able to feel what is going on from the outside-in by means of touch, only the patient can feel what is happening from the inside-out through his or her experience of pain.

198

C. Jason Throop

Accordingly, when one of her patients asked her why she did not use painkillers like the hospital did, she replied, “This type of medicine is no good for massage.” For Lani, the patient “needs to feel the pain.” It is pain that allows her to assess whether or not the adjustments and manipulations that she is performing are effective. As she observed, if a patient’s pain stays the same while she is massaging them, this is a good indication that the massage is not working. If a consistent quality or intensity of pain persists for a few days it may mean that the person in question cannot be helped with massage. In contrast, if the pain changes, if it weakens or gets stronger, then this suggests that the massage is in fact working. As she explained it to me, “Massage is different than the hospital. They want the pain to stop, for there to be no pain. In massage you need to feel the pain for it to work.” To discern accurate intensities and qualities of pain in order to ensure therapeutic efficacy, Lani also needed to know what the person she was treating was like (cf. Buchbinder 2011). For instance, it was crucial that Lani be able to determine whether or not a given patient was the type of person who would readily complain about pain. This knowledge importantly informed her efforts to properly adjust her evaluation of the patient’s expression of pain so that it resonated as closely as possible with what it was they were in fact experiencing. Lani had to know when to push harder or when to pull back so that she did not further injure her patients or make them wish to discontinue their treatment. Such evaluations, however, could only be made against the backdrop of understanding how a given patient tends to orient to suffering, pain and illness. For instance, if a particular patient was not expressive, not readily willing to show his or her pain to others, Lani needed to look carefully for other signs, no matter how attenuated those signs might be, providing indications that the individual in question was experiencing pain during the massage. If she was not able to read these signs correctly then there was a very real danger that she could do more damage than good when working on a broken bone or a misaligned joint. Feeling for the slightest muscle twitch, or tension, any indication that the person was feeling pain or not, and being able to judge the extent to which the pain was something that was serious enough to warrant lessening the intensity of the massage, were considered by Lani to be crucial skills of her craft.

Moral Orientations to Suffering and Pain in Yap To make matters more difficult still, when treating her Yapese patients Lani was often confronted with the fact that even despite the very real range of variation associated with personal proclivities and abilities to express and/ or withstand pain that her individual patients evidenced in the context of treatment, local moral orientations to suffering often significantly amplified her Yapese patients’ efforts to hide or conceal their pain from her. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter (see also Throop 2010a), in Yapese

Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

199

communities individuals are expected to bear their suffering with dignity, hiding or concealing it from others, as they effortfully work to contribute to their family’s and community’s well-being. Forms of mental opacity and secrecy thus potentiate possibilities to virtuously suffering for others. No matter how well an individual conceals his or her pain from others, however, such efforts of self-sacrifice seldom go completely unnoticed. Recognizing that someone has suffered for you by working or sacrificing on your behalf is yet often still legible, even if subtly so. To witness another’s suffering, especially when that suffering is a moral form of suffering arising through self-sacrifice, work and efforts to care for others who are in need, elicits what is locally termed runguy: a culturally organized affective response that resonates with what English-speakers term feelings of “compassion,” “pity,” and “sympathy” (see Throop 2010a, 2012a). To express one’s suffering subtly, as a mode of suffering for others, and to have others be responsive to that suffering in the form of compassion or care, is thus a counterbalance to deeply sedimented habits of concealing pain (as well as other subjective experiences) from others. Not all suffering can be translated into such morally valued forms of suffering for others, however. When an individual experiences “mere-suffering” (Levinas 1998; Throop 2010a)—the kind of suffering that arises in the wake of an accident or an unpredictable illness for instance—it may be quite difficult, if not impossible, to render that pain in moral terms through work and self-sacrifice on behalf of others. In such cases, suffering may still yet be rendered a moral experience, however, as aims to “suffer well” are realized in acts of self-governance in which efforts are made to actively conceal pain from others. The result of such efforts to “suffer well” are found in individuals’ recurrent attempts to hide their pain, even when others, like Lani, may be making explicit efforts to help and care for them. For Lani, touch was thus deemed a critical means by which to discern her patients’ pain even when they were actively working to conceal it from her. In situations where facial expressions were managed to be minimally expressive and bodily movements deliberately stilled, where explicit descriptions of affliction were few and often untrustworthy, Lani relied upon touch as a way to “feel through” her patients’ managed efforts of self-composure to discern otherwise hidden bodily responses. To this extent at least, Lani’s skill as a practitioner rests upon an ability to maneuver through an ongoing and recursive “doubling” of otherness, as the otherness of the patient as a person and the otherness of the person’s pain are complexly and dynamically intertwined with each other.4 As mentioned above, to know that her patients hide their pain from her, that particular patients may have particular ways of doing this, and that individuals vary in their abilities to express and/or withstand pain, are each deemed essential aspects of her diagnostic and therapeutic tool kit. Each of these discernments rests, however, on the existential fact that the radical otherness of pain exceeds her patients’ capacities, no matter how well cultivated, to conceal it.

200

C. Jason Throop

While there are multiple pathways through which pain may disclose itself, Lani relied most often on those that are haptically discernable. When the radical otherness of pain breaks through her patients’ efforts to hide it, Lani is thus given a tactilely mediated impression of not only pain’s possible presence, but also the background against which it is set, which includes the personalistic, dispositional and moral dimensions of her patients’ embodied experience.

Reversibility and Asymmetry Given the asymmetries inherent in empathy, the ambiguities of pain and local moral orientations to “suffering-well” in Yapese communities, what again can we make of Lani’s claim that she is able to touch another’s pain? To follow the path that this question opens for us, we need to examine more carefully, I would argue, the phenomenological attributes and existential asymmetries operative in the sensory modality of touch (see also Throop 2012b). “One remarkable aspect of touch as a mode of communication/semiotic production,” Engelke (n.d.) observes, “is that it has an inherently dialectical character in that the object being ‘touched’ is in fact also touching back.” This twofold tactile potentiality Merleau-Ponty (1968) called the coupled reversibility of passive modes of being touched and active modes of touching. In touching another and being touched by them, in the case of a handshake for instance, the experience “is reversible, I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching” (Merleau-Ponty 1968:142; cf. Gieser 2008). And yet touching and being touched never in the end coincide. This is true even in the case of a caress, a form of touch that has been argued by Emmanuel Levinas to lie halfway between touching and being touched, in which there yet always remains an irreducible asymmetrical relation at work. According to Levinas (1987:89), the caress does not aim to grasp the Other as “object,” “theme” or “thing,” as positioned over against the self. Instead the caress exceeds such typifications in its anticipatory animation of the very relationality of self and Other. And yet, the intimacy and proximity of the caress is itself founded upon a form of non-disclosure, a mystery, the secrecy of the Other as still unfolding and “not yet.” There is, in short, an intrinsic existential asymmetry evidenced in various modalities of touch that mirrors the asymmetries disclosed in empathy (see Throop 2012b). Such existential asymmetries are not limited to strictly tactile and empathic experiences, however. They are also a constitutive feature of the temporal unfolding of various modes of being-with others. As Levinas explains, my present thoughts, feelings, emotions and moods are held to arise for me in a moment that can only be recognized by you in the modality of an after. That is, the expressions you take up as indications of my subjective state are already at that moment retentions or past recollections for me of my previously experienced intentions, goals, plans and desires. My anticipatory

Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

201

horizons, while attentive to your responses, are also feeding forward to the horizons of my own desires, wishes and hopes for what is next to come. That the synchronization of our two beings in even the most intimate of “werelationships” (cf. Schutz 1967) is one of a delayed asymmetry constituting an interhuman time that is neither precisely mine nor yours is, Levinas (1987) argues, a basic fact of human existence revealing the necessary “excess of being.” There is another side to such existential asymmetries that is not captured in Levinas’ account, however. It is found instead in Schutz’ (1967) discussion of the “we-relationship.” According to Schutz, in dynamic moments of face-to-face attunement that characterize the co-presence of a “we-relationship,” there are moments of possibility in which another may perceive aspects of my own self-experience that I am not yet aware of myself. In such cases, the Levinasian asymmetry is reversed. The dynamic flux of my field of expressions is palpably available to you in a way that it is not available to me. Indeed, it is immediately present for you, while for me it may only be made available through my ability to notice and track your expressive responses to my expressions. As Schutz explains, in the face-to-face situation my observations keep pace with each moment of his stream of consciousness as it transpires. The result is that I am incomparably better attuned to him than I am to myself. I may indeed be more aware of my own past . . . than I am of my partner’s. Yet I have never been face to face with myself as I am with him now; hence I have never caught myself in the act of actually living through an experience. (1967:169) Again, a temporal delay, or a space of disjuncture is centrally placed in even the most closely attuned of human encounters. It is within this space of temporal disjuncture that ongoing phenomenological modifications to our own and others’ existence are triggered not only by our mutual expressive fields but also by the sentiments that arise within them (see Throop 2012a, 2014). As Schutz explains, “If I know that you and I are in a face-to-face relationship, I also know something about the manner in which each of us is attuned to his conscious experiences, in other words, the ‘attentional modifications’ of each of us. This means that the way we attend to our conscious experiences is actually modified by our relationship to each other.” (1967:171; see also Throop 2003, 2010a, 2014; Duranti 2009, 2010). There are in short, asymmetrical inversions available as existential potentialities in the context of any intersubjective encounter (see Throop 2010b, 2012a). That the sensory field opened by touch is one that both inhabits and reveals such asymmetrical inversions is again a key insight that opens up a way to understand the paradoxical problem of touching another’s pain.

202

C. Jason Throop

Attention, Alienness and the Pull of Pain In honing a mode of tactile attention that is sensitive to discerning forms of pain that are otherwise hidden by her patients, Lani has cultivated her sensorium in response to the particularities of the intersubjective and intercorporeal situations she finds herself recurrently thrown in as she struggles to care for them. Through touching and manipulating her patients’ bodies, Lani attunes her attention by means of a variously prominent field of tactile experiences that arise in the wake of her patients’ embodied responses to her touch. In short, the organization and focus of attention through tactile experience (in its twofold potentiality as touch and touching) is thus centrally implicated in her efforts to trace the contours of her patients’ pain (which exceeds their efforts to conceal it). As I have argued elsewhere (Throop 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010a, 2012a; see also Throop and Duranti 2015), when “speaking of the articulation of experience it is crucial . . . to take into account the role of attention” (Throop 2010a:9; see Throop 2003). Significantly this includes, as Csordas has conceptualized it, “somatic modes of attention” which entail various “culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others” (Csordas 1993:138). As Csordas makes clear, to “attend to a bodily sensation is not to attend to the body as an isolated object, but to attend to the body’s situation in the world . . . Attention to a bodily sensation can thus become a mode of attending to the intersubjective milieu that gives rise to that sensation. Thus, one is paying attention with one’s body” (1993:138). Our embodied sensory experience may thus be directly implicated in revealing modes of intersubjective engagement with others, as well as the contours of our lived social and physical environments. As reflective of the “body’s situation in the world,” somatic modes of attention are thus never simply modes of experience that we have complete control over. There is, Waldenfels (2011:59) reminds us, tension (Latin, tensio) in attention (Latin, attensio). Our attention is, in other words, always responsive, affected and attuned. Accordingly, while we may willingly focus our attention on a particular aspect of our world, our noticings may also always be directed and redirected by the actions or responses of others who variously engage that world with us, by the objects, events and activities that transpire within it, by the affects, sensibilities and moods that we inhabit and that inhabit us, and by our habitual orientations, dispositions and expectations. The multiple ways in which we become attuned to the world is accordingly a process that transforms and modifies, ebbs and flows, comes in and out of focus, as we actively seek out or find ourselves pulled toward the various objects, events, entities, others, aspects and actions that constitute the expanse of what is. Husserl termed the “allure” or “pull” that various aspects of the world have upon us “affection” (Husserl 2001b; see also Throop and Duranti 2015).

Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

203

As a case in point, while Lani’s manipulative medical and bonesetting skills played a crucial role in opening up possibilities for her to access indications of various forms of pain that her patients may be experiencing in the context of any given therapeutic encounter, her attention was pulled as much by her patients’ pain as it was involved in allowing her to remain openly attuned to it. Lani’s haptic attunements to her patients’ bodily responses to her various therapeutic manipulations and interventions, are thus, to use Waldenfels’ language, pathic modes of responding to the alien demand of another’s pain and suffering. That such a demand is disclosed tactilely as the otherness of another’s pain emerges against the backdrop of the otherness of another person, and that the coupling of these distinctive forms of otherness resists any simple conversion in their mutual intertwining, speaks to the complex interweaving of affection and attention mediating such encounters (see Husserl 2001b; Throop and Duranti 2015).

Conclusion Returning to the interaction that framed this chapter, it was often only tactilely evidenced discernments of warmth around a swollen joint or the twitch and tightening of a muscle that guided Lani in her efforts to assess Tinag’s experience of pain. There was then much more going on in the therapeutic interactions I observed between Lani and Tinag than a straightforward tactile assessment of the physiological nature of the problem at hand. Through touching her patients’ bodies, Lani was able to perform a tactilely mediated form of empathic engagement with them. This is not ever a straightforward “sharing of pain.” Nor is it a simplistic registering of tactile sensations only then afterward inferentially interpreted as indications of pain. When Lani touches Tinag’s pain, she experiences pain empathically “shining through” such tactile sensations. In this respect, the felt realities discernable in Tinag’s bodily responses to Lani’s touch and therapeutic manipulations are not simply indications of the first-person qualities of pain as experienced by Tinag. They are instead embodied indications of Tinag’s responsiveness to the otherness of her pain as disclosed by the touch of another. In other words, such felt realities are tactilely discernable manifestations of Tinag’s bodily responsiveness to pain’s claim upon her being as both experienced and evoked by Lani. Significantly, such a tactile disclosure of Tinag’s somatic response to pain is made manifest by means of Lani’s affective embodied attunement to it. Again, that Lani is able to attune to Tinag’s bodily responses highlights the existential asymmetries at work in this intersubjective encounter. On the one hand, the pain that is discerned by Lani is never taken to be merely a figment of her imagination. It is always, in the end, an indication for her of the existence of another’s pain. As such, it is Tinag’s pain. It could never be otherwise. And yet, it is also a disclosure of Tinag’s pain, or more precisely her embodied registering of its otherness to her, that is from the vantage

204

C. Jason Throop

point of its singular discernment by means of touch, only ever evident as such to Lani. It is, to this extent, only ever Lani’s pain. While Lani makes efforts to enfold her assessments of Tinag’s experience of pain within a particular medical practice that takes into account not only individual differences in pain tolerance but also culturally mediated moral dispositions—a medical theory that in relying so explicitly upon haptic sensibilities stands in stark contrast to longstanding Western biomedical practice and its emphasis on vision—what is particularly notable in this regard are the various ways that Lani’s practice relies upon an attuned openness to the emergence of radical forms of alienness. As Waldenfels maintains, we “are touched by others before being able to ask who they are and what their expressions mean” (2011:53). By touching her patients’ bodies, Lani opens up possibilities to be touched by their pain, a pain that exceeds even their most deeply sedimented dispositions to conceal it. In looking down and finding herself touching Tinag’s arm, while still being able to call the discernment of pain hers, Lani shows us something important, I think, about the possibility of touching the otherness of another’s pain that can never in the end coincide with our own.

Notes 1 The island of Yap is located in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia, about 1,100 nautical miles east of the Philippines and 450 miles southwest of Guam. Although it is much larger than its neighboring coral atolls, Yap proper is still a relatively small island with a land mass of only approximately 38.6 square miles and a population estimated at 7,391 (Yap Branch Statistics Office 2002). Having endured four waves of colonial governance (Spanish, German, Japanese and American), today Yap proper is the administrative capital of Yap state, one of the four states that comprise the Federated States of Micronesia, an independent nation that holds a compact of free association with the US. For the past fourteen years I have conducted over nineteen nonconsecutive months of research in Yapese communities examining the cultural and personal patterning of experiences of both chronic and acute pain sufferers. 2 Although, it is also quite clear from the examples discussed below that the healer’s visual access (both focal and peripheral) to her patient’s embodied reactions, including her facial expressions and bodily movements, also plays an important role in such discernments. 3 Lani was born and raised on the island of Fais, which is located 150 miles northeast of Yap proper. 4 I would like to thank Bernhard Leistle for suggesting this particular line of interpretation.

References Buchbinder, Mara. 2011. “Personhood Diagnostics: Personal Attributes and Clinical Explanation of Pain.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25(4):457–478. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain

205

Duranti, Alessandro. 2009. “The Relevance of Husserl’s Theory to Language Socialization.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2):205–226. ———. 2010. “Husserl, Intersubjectivity, and Anthropology.” Anthropological Theory 19(1–2):16–35. Engelke, Christopher. n.d. “Multi-Modal Communication in Rapid Prompting Method Mediated Interaction.” Unpublished MS, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles. Gieser, Thorsten. 2008. “Embodiment, Emotion, and Empathy: A Phenomenological Approach to Apprenticeship Learning.” Anthropological Theory 8(3):299–318. Good, Byron J. 1994. Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honkasalo, Marja-Lissa. 1999. “What Is Chronic Is Ambiguity: Encountering Biomedicine with Long-Lasting Pain.” Suomen Antropologi 24(4):75–92. ———. 2000. “Chronic Pain as a Posture towards the World.” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 41:197–208. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book. Translated by R. Rojcewics and A. Schuwer. Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Press. ———. 2001a. Logical Investigations. Vols. 1–2. London: Routledge. ———. 2001b. Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Translated by Anthony J. Steinbock. Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Press. Kleinman, Arthur, Paul E. Brodwin, Byron J. Good, and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good. 1992. “Pain as Human Experience: An Introduction.” In Pain as Human Experience , edited by MaryJo DelVecchio Good, Paul E. Brodwin, Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman, 1–28. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leder, Drew. 1985. “Toward a Phenomenology of Pain.” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 19(2–3):255–266. ———. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leistle, Bernhard. 2015. “Otherness as a Paradigm in Anthropology.” Semiotica 204:291–313. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1998. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Throop, C. Jason. 2003. “Articulating Experience.” Anthropological Theory 3(2): 219–241. ———. 2005. “Hypocognition, a ‘Sense of the Uncanny,’ and the Anthropology of Ambiguity: Reflections on Robert I. Levy’s Contribution to Theories of Experience in Anthropology.” Ethos 33(4):499–511.

206

C. Jason Throop

———. 2008. “From Pain to Virtue: Dysphoric Sensations and Moral Sensibilities in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia.” Journal of Transcultural Psychiatry 45(2):253–286. ———. 2010a. Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2010b. “Latitudes of Loss: On the Vicissitudes of Empathy.” American Ethnologist 37(4):771–782. ———. 2012a. “Moral Sentiments.” In A Companion to Moral Anthropology, edited by Didier Fassin, 150–168. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2012b. “On the Varieties of Empathic Experience: Tactility, Mental Opacity, and Pain in Yap.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26(3):408–430. ———. 2014. “Moral Moods.” Ethos 42(1):68–83. Throop, Jason and Alessandro Duranti 2015. “Attention, Ritual Glitches, and Attentional Pull”. Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences 14 (4):1055–1082. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1960. The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. ———. 2001. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Zahavi, Dan. 2001. “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7):151–167. ———. 2003. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

10 Otherness and the Underground Buried Treasure in the Sierra Tarahumara Frances M. Slaney

After my last morning of fieldwork in Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara, I was traveling homeward across the dry mountainous terrain of rocky outcroppings and pine forest when the truck’s way along the gravel road was blocked by a grading machine. As we edged past it, a man from the work crew called out a friendly greeting. No sooner had I responded cheerily from the cab of our dusty third-hand camper truck than he followed up with eager questions for my husband and me sitting up there above the road. Was it true that we had special metal detecting equipment? Had we found anything? Why, he seemed to suggest, would people like us be crossing the Sierra in a truck with Canadian license plates unless we were searching for buried treasure? Surely we wielded superior North American technology for detecting and extracting the local terrain’s hidden riches?

208

Frances M. Slaney

By then, I had learned that I was unlikely to satisfy this man by telling him that my own search in the Sierra had been an ethnographer’s quest for alternate “possibilities of being” (Ingold 2011:238), possibilities I had associated mostly with Tarahumaras (Tarahumara, Rarámuri) dwelling there. Local Mexican mestizos, or blancos (English, “whites”), in my fieldsite had already shown some difficulty seeing that explanation as an entirely sufficient explanation for my presence within the region. Like this man, they had been inclined to enfold everyone’s local presence within a vision of that terrain as a wilderness of hidden riches. Even though they had graciously supported my research project, their habitual perceptual horizons had nonetheless led them to feel that we had been dwelling in a landscape where we could more properly foment the sort of “movimiento” (Spanish), or “movement,” that either produces “new” wealth in the Sierra—or deploys scientific techniques to reveal its lost treasures. Given the celebrated history of the area as a “region of refuge” (Aguirre Beltrán [1967] 1979) and of colonial silver mines, it was reasonable for all these local blancos to pursue the Sierra’s legendary lost wealth, and for them to expect newcomers to be somehow complicit in such plans. Although functionally literate, these locals had no need of historical documents to know that a series of outsiders had extracted extraordinary amounts of wealth from the region. This had begun in the seventeenth century with Spain’s colonial silver mining (West 1949; Sheridan and Naylor 1979, eds.). Such regional wealth extraction had continued with nineteenth century cattle barons from the US, then mid-twentieth-century logging operators (Lartigue 1983) and railway engineers (Burgess and Burgess 2014). By the end of the 1980s, the new incursions were made by drug barons and the World Bank’s boost of local logging activity (Quiro Gómez 2008:158).1 But it was in the wake of that earliest Spanish colonial bonanza that local blancos like this road worker bore the highest hopes of benefiting from any lingering remains. By the time I encountered this road crew man, though, we and our toddler had already lived in that eight-foot camper for a year, and during that time, I had so frequently encountered Mexicans eager to find buried treasure in the Sierra that this roadside query was not entirely surprising. (Neither was treasure-seeking new to the ethnographic record for Mexico as a whole [e.g., Hrdlička 1903:386; Clews Parsons 1936:207, 420–421, 448; Foster 1964; Nash 1970:24, etcetera]). And in response, I continued to harbor mixed feelings about the way that my own presence in that landscape, along with my truck-dwelling family’s, seemed to serve as an unwitting trigger for “buried treasure” episodes like this one. The galvanizing force of those treasure hunters’ expressions of enthusiasm, though, continued to affect me in more empathetic terms, attuned as I was to identifying local things that mattered. And for a fieldworker, the friendly openness of those seekers and their willing inclusion of me and my household in their endless musings over their own search histories and current projects for improving their own households’ lot, were compelling. Even

Otherness and the Underground

209

in this drive-by encounter, the workman on the road invited us to join him on his exploration of a “really promising cave” (cf. Ferry 2006).

Townspeople and Tarahumaras Back along the road behind us, in the remote town of Panalachi, blanco villagers had discussed buried treasure with relish, either to explain others’ outstanding good fortunes or to wonder at their own close misses. And they too had invited us to tag along while they actively pursued valuables awaiting them underground. One of those friends had even managed to garner sufficient funds to buy his own metal detector, an impressive and enterprising feat in that region where paid labor was scarce, logging contracts small, and food crops failed to sustain most local households the year round. Conditions of scarcity applied to most people I met in Panalachi and were addressed by diverse means. Fertile ground supported farming in that dry sierra uplands region only in occasional stretches along valley bottoms or on small plateaus, but the town site was in an unusually wide and flat valley that was fertile and had a small stream of good water. The Tarahumaras with whom I became acquainted all lived in widely dispersed horticultural homesteads beyond that fertile valley, while blancos who dwelled in the village tried to orient themselves toward Western material culture and markets instead. In this, blancos implicitly self-identified as descendants of the Spanish colonists whose imperial program of reducción had aspired—but failed— to resettle aboriginals into centralized villages clustered around Catholic churches (see Salmón 1977). Centuries later, it seemed, I had entered into a landscape where that ancient plan remained visibly resisted by Tarahumaras dwelling in Mexico’s perpetually “wild” northwestern frontier. Neither way of life readily assured having enough to eat for the majority of their adherents. Yet the town site offered everybody some patronage and occasional jobs, partly from local logging. Like others, the village blanco couple I visited most chose to downplay their horticultural baseline by hiring Tarahumaras from beyond the village to work the small corn fields beside their house. Meanwhile, the man sought small logging contracts or trucking jobs. Their meager cash was invested in a satellite dish and trucks, and their idle time was spent watching telenovelas or drinking locally distilled “rum” over domino games. Although they tended to be parsimonious with electricity during the daytime—treating their unplugged fridge like any other cupboard—the younger generation were more likely to keep their televisions on all day, staying in touch with life beyond the Sierra. Electricity reached the village, but it bypassed the dispersed Tarahumara homesteads where radios and cassette players were all battery-run. So the mostly cash-strapped Tarahumaras had to extend the power of their batteries by lightly braising them over open fires. But this endlessly colonizing spatial and material order of things was lived with some degree of improvisation and tacit cooperation.

210

Frances M. Slaney

One day, for example, while having coffee in the village with another young mother in her small adobe living room, I felt a presence behind me that I found increasingly difficult to ignore. I was sitting on this blanca’s couch with my back to the window while we had an intense discussion about her young child’s health challenges and past medical interventions. But that nagging sensation kept pulling at my back while her television was emitting a stream of programming in front of me. Finally, I became so curious about what was pulling at my attention from behind that I turned to look. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with a small cluster of Tarahumaras with their eyes “glued” to the television. Swiveling back to face my hostess, I noted that she was unperturbed and carrying on with her personal narrative, just as the small crowd outside had steadily maintained their gaze at the television from outside the window. My shoulder-check discovery was remarkable only to me. Everybody else maintained their regular village pattern of shared—yet separate—television watching. Their unanimous response was no response (Waldenfels 2007:29). Seldom traveling out of the Sierra, they were all interested in seeing how humans lived beyond it. Through the course of my fieldwork I also came to understand that such culturally segregated television watchers usually belonged to the same local political factions and did periodically share interior blanco spaces, not only to watch television together, but also for friendly chats and exchanges. Nonetheless, our closest blanco friends—some of whom spoke Tarahumara, and all of whom had quite close relations with individual Tarahumaras— distinguished themselves as more civilized than the local indigenous population. The elderly couple who generously played the role of honorary grandparents to my young daughter, for example, appraised local Tarahumaras as cleaner and less lice-infested than in the past. And the man (whose features, corporeal stances and cowboy wardrobe, would have qualified him as an ideal model for the “Marlboro man” in those famed cigarette ads) stipulated that the indigenous population was “100 percent ignorant.” By contrast, my closest Tarahumara friends adhered to a historical horizon that didn’t highlight the colonial encounter as a significant phase in their own cultural development (see Slaney 1991, 1997). For although my fieldsite was a political-economic ejido,2 with a large territory and town site cohabited by blancos and Tarahumaras, their inter-tangled spatial and temporal horizons were nonetheless incommensurate and undergirded by separate cultural trajectories for their local livelihoods (Ingold 2000; see Slaney 1991, 1997). They inhabited different “lifeworlds” (Schutz 1966). And all this mattered for making treasure-seeking either desirable or inappropriate, and even dangerous, within the same terrain. This bi-cultural lay of the land was specified within my first week there. When the Tarahumara governor granted us permission to park our camper in his valley beyond the town, our new blanco friends repeatedly expressed concern for our happiness and safety out there. Their affective response to the isolated Tarahumara homesteads located within the many square miles

Otherness and the Underground

211

of pine forest outside the town site was clarified by their description of it all as triste (Spanish), or “sad.” There was no “movimiento” there, they said. Within those same days, by contrast, the governor offered a glimpse of his counterpart spatio-temporal orientation by voicing concern about the negative environmental impacts imposed by increasing numbers of blancos living in the area. Their swelling population, he said, had imposed dampness. Whereas the area’s climate used to be reasonably balanced, the town site’s chavochis (Tarahumara), or “hairy ones,” he claimed, had thrown off that equilibrium. From this viewpoint, blancos were a burden suffered by all life forms dwelling in the local landscape. The Tarahumara governor’s orientation toward maintaining a healthy climate for sustaining local life-forms revealed much about how Tarahumaras dwelled through the landscape and how their ontological orientation differed from that of the townsfolks. Without any clear boundaries of separation between the two cultural communities, their different approaches to the lifeforms co-present within their shared politico-economic territory were readily felt as fundamentally distinct, and often conflicted.3 The governor was the first of many Tarahumaras I would encounter who helped me to see how this inter-species and practical orientation for living in the Sierra precluded Tarahumaras from participating in the townsfolks’ pursuit of buried treasure. It turned out that the Tarahumaras described as “ignorant” by our blanco friend had educational levels comparable to the townsfolks’. And neither were my Tarahumara friends ignorant about money and market economics as blancos routinely supposed. An enterprising shaman’s apprentice, for example, had once run a soft drink business, buying in bulk from a larger town center and then selling each bottle at a higher price to fellow Tarahumaras gathered for major annual rituals. And all men in the ejido (blancos and Tarahumaras) did shifts at its collectively owned and run sawmill on the edge of town. Many of them also worked together as fruit and vegetable pickers for agribusinesses beyond the Sierra. But whatever difficulties Tarahumaras endured in their struggles to feed their families and maintain their lives, they showed no conviction that those challenges could be solved by abandoning their burden of maintaining horticulture through a “sacrificial economy” (Gose 1986)—let alone rummaging underground in pursuit of unclaimed wealth like blancos were inclined to do. For my friends in town, by contrast, interest in buried treasure was not only a financial calculation, or entrepreneurial gamble; it was also a kind of cultural or inherited right acquired through their position as descendants of those who had long ago colonized the local indigenous population. And they doggedly pursued a sense that financial gains from that long-ago era awaited them in the wilderness. What drove them to venture into the region’s forests and rocky plateaus beyond the town has been characterized by Ann Stoler as “the enduring quality of imperial remains and what they render in impaired states,” “what people are ‘left with’ ” in “the aftershocks of empire . . . The material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities,

212

Frances M. Slaney

and things” that “reside in the corroded hollows of landscapes . . . and in the microecologies of matter and mind” (2008:194). In the case of Spain’s extensive colonization of the Americas, its spectacular gains—and losses— of silver and gold in the early colonial era remain legendary. And the Sierra Tarahumara has been enveloped in that storied dynamic of spectacular gains and losses ever since colonial Spain established silver mines there (see Traven 1927; Sheridan and Naylor 1979).4 Those mines had functioned up until the early twentieth century under the control of an American family in the barranca town of Batopilas (Shepherd 1938). And Sierra blancos had lived out the “aftershocks of empire” ever since, pursuing lost colonial ruins and riches through a corporeal attunement to the local landscape remarkably similar to Gastón Gordillo’s ethnographic accounts of “imaginaries of wealth” in Argentina’s Gran Chaco region (Gordillo 2009, 2011; cf. Slaney 1991, ch. 4). This chapter, though, recounts a series of encounters through which I learned about the conflicting expectations and values attributed to what’s hidden underground in the Sierra Tarahumara, and how the presence of human otherness was related to subterranean realms. Here, I also attempt to move toward a more phenomenological perspective on human experiences of the Sierra underground. In this regard, I adhere to Edward S. Casey’s refusal to endorse the “dichotomy” of thinking whereby “place” is divided into “space and time” (Casey 1996:36). For as he insists, “the phenomenological fact of the matter is that space and time come together in place.” (Casey 1996:36–37). And I explore how this plays out in a terrain shared by two cultural communities where, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, each person’s body “inhabits” this conjunction of space and time, rather than just floating “in space” or “in time” (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012:139). For one might say, with regard to the colonial past so deeply associated with the underground by blancos, it simultaneously bore other social, temporal, climatic and inter-species forms of “otherness” for Tarahumaras. As Waldenfels has pointed out, “Responding takes place here and now, but it begins elsewhere” (Waldenfels 2007:31). Thus individuals from each cultural community embraced that terrain through corporeal practices oriented toward its material potentialities and looming dangers as presented by their own historicized “cultural world” and “habitus” (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012:141). Those separate worlds had long since become entangled. Nonetheless, it was upon the basis of their distinct practical orientations in that co-habited landscape that the underground became either an alluring realm of hidden treasures from the historical past—or not. For my fieldwork dealt with two cultural communities, each responding to the underground through a distinct sense of its “alienness” (see Slaney 1991, 1997; Waldenfels 2007:7). Furthermore, in exploring the hopes and fears that these two cultural communities directed toward the Sierra’s underground, I find it useful to take into account Waldenfels’ observation that “alienness” is experienced as something that “surprises us” because it “goes beyond our expectations, it

Otherness and the Underground

213

is not easy to grasp, it enters unsummoned” (2007:2). For in the Sierra Tarahumara, I would discover not only that these qualities of experience applied to both blancos and Tarahumaras despite their differing approaches to the underground, but also that their distinct cultural ways of seeing the underground as “alien” were inclined to clash, and sometimes with sickening consequences.

Buried Treasure Among the Townspeople Looking back, I can see that my entire Sierra fieldwork was enveloped by this issue of the underground, particularly among the sporadically employed villagers who felt that their landscape harbored treasures awaiting those with the good fortune to unearth them. Not only did the road worker bring this expectation to my attention on my final day, but it was also introduced to me during my first days in Panalachi. No sooner had a pair of elderly villagers welcomed my small family into their community and their fine adobe home perched on the town’s edge, than they promptly introduced us to the local scene from their viewpoint, invoking buried treasure as a means to explain a puzzling shift in the prosperity of local priests. Whereas a certain priest had spent his first three or four years in the neighboring community of Tewerichi in abject poverty, the woman noted, he had suddenly adopted a more luxurious lifestyle. This had become clear when he started driving a brand-new truck. And he had gained this change of lifestyle, she said, by persistently asking Tarahumaras in that area to tell him where to find buried treasure. After some time, they had finally told him. It was a Tarahumara woman, specified our new friend, who had shown him a cave with a long tunnel leading to a steep drop where the treasure was located. And from that cache, the priest had removed “pure gold.” Apparently, the highlight of his find was an old trunk filled with antique coins. This treasure trove, divulged our hostess, was the real reason the padres did not want anybody going into that remote village.5 The priests took the treasure and now they are ashamed of it, she said. But it was no use trying to hide the situation, continued the woman, because people already knew about it. They had seen traces of the trunk being dragged along the cave floor. What is more, they had intercepted nuns and priests going back and forth every day to their treasure. This was what was really happening down there in Tewerichi, she alleged, and the real reason why the clergy had such splendid new trucks. And in view of that, she continued, some people speculated that American donors had stopped funding that Catholic mission. When the Americans had taken the trouble to visit it, they had been surprised by the priests’ evident wealth. The clerics’ life of luxury obviously contradicted any piteous claims to have been starving at the end of the road. In summary, concluded our host, who had remained silent while his wife had recounted these recent events, rather than simply being vehicles for taking priests into their mission, those new trucks were key to taking out the priest’s unearthed treasure.

214

Frances M. Slaney

Recognizing this dramatic account as ethnographically significant, I duly entered it in my fieldnotes. Such is the power of local knowledge and life in the field, though, that empirical records do not stay compartmentalized in notebooks and computers. In unpredictable ways they later seep into our lived experiences in the field. So whenever I saw those flashy black trucks with their inscrutable smoked glass windows whiz by along the dirt road, my impression of them was somehow tinged with the afterglow of this woman’s account of them as evidence of discovered treasure. (Similarly, I also felt the resonance of a teasingly proposed alternative explanation for those inscrutable new black trucks: that the priests were chutameros [Spanish], or marijuana-growers).6 Our friend’s report on the priests’ treasure trove positioned local aboriginals as the gatekeepers to hidden riches. Not only had she specified that a “Tarahumara woman” had told the Tewerichi priest where to find buried wealth, she had also explained that knowledge about the location of such treasure was passed on from generation to generation within the local indigenous population. And she held on to this expectation throughout subsequent discussions about her own personal brushes with treasure in the region’s wilderness. On one visit I made to her well-kept kitchen, she told me more about this extraordinary indigenous historical memory as we chatted about her many decades of living in the region. By then a rather depressive person, she had once been a more important figure in town life, but like many people I met there she found village politics increasingly difficult to endure (cf. Greenberg 1989). Between sips of Nescafé, she elaborated on the workings of local history and memory by relating how she had almost struck rich from buried treasure herself. Decades earlier, in the days when she and her husband had been so poor that they lived in the back of a truck while eking out a living from logging, a Tarahumara had shown her where to look for buried treasure. But she had failed to act on it! For several days, while her husband was working in a remote forest location, she had taken daily walks to a “pretty hill” nearby, she told me. And each time, she had seen a Tarahumara man there, looking down at her. He made no sound or move—just looked at her, she said. From her account, it was unclear to me whether she thought this man had been an apparition or a living person. But I felt that the crucial point of the situation for her was that she had failed to act on an indexical sign of buried treasure that the silent indigenous figure had offered her: arrows on the rocks beneath him, pointing down to where treasure awaited her discovery. Clearly, this had been privileged access to knowledge and potential property appropriations from another realm of being, possibly involving a spirit world intermediary (cf. Waldenfels 2007:5–6). For some inexplicable reason, though, she had failed to visit that spot one day. And that had turned out to be the very day, she sadly told me, when the Tarahumara man had decided to remove all the gold bars buried there. So when she returned to the spot, prepared to collect the treasure, it was no longer there (see Slaney 1991:192–193).

Otherness and the Underground

215

Like many others, this account of failed treasure-hunting was a poignant tragedy hinged on incipient blanco knowledge of local and colonial history, combined with a conviction that Tarahumaras held more specific and practical historical knowledge of the region’s entire subterranean sequence of human activities accrued from preceding centuries. The wealth forms mentioned by this woman, and the arrows used to indicate their location, drew upon a much earlier, historic phase of Spanish colonialism, and of Tarahumara material culture, as if to authenticate her conviction that—unlike blanco villagers—Tarahumaras were perpetually aware of any significant past events that had occurred inside the sierra’s earth. In Waldenfels’ terms, it was as if their refusal to be spatially colonized into town sites had lent them a “fremde”-like quality in the eyes of blancos who perpetually yearned to recover forms of property lost long ago by Spanish colonials. Here we see how alienness revolves “around problems like having something, taking into possession, being the individual or collective owner of property” (Waldenfels 2007:5). Yet this incident adhered to a persistent configuration: while blancos unquestionably claimed any historical Spanish property lying underground, Tarahumaras merely located it. Never was there any suggestion that Tarahumaras held any claims to underground treasure, for it was persistently characterized as Spanish-made and thereby a historical resource to be freely accessed by their cultural descendants, the local blancos. Without recourse to written histories or archives, this woman—like other villagers—knew that since Spanish colonial rule in the seventeenth century, sierra mines had yielded abundant wealth, and that some of that wealth had been lost or stolen. Also, Catholic mission priests were known to have secretly buried church treasures for safe-keeping (e.g., Dunne 1948:182), and only occasionally recuperated them later (e.g., Neumann 1969:87), at various points across the centuries. The blancos’ fondest prospect was of finding the gold and silver (coins and bullion) cached by bandits who had held up mule trains on the Spanish camino real during the colonial era of silver mining in the western Sierra Tarahumara when precious metals had been taken out of the sierra by crossing through its eastern side where Panalachi is located. To gain access to this loot within Panalachi’s extensive undomesticated lands in that eastern sierra, though, villagers were convinced that Tarahumaras could provide the quickest and surest historical record of any of these riches lying underground. This meant that when villagers sought treasure in the wilderness, they were inclined to reason that Tarahumaras could—and really should—provide assistance (i.e., topographical directions and digging labor). Townsfolk further reasoned that this was not an unfairly greedy expectation because Tarahumaras were not astute enough to appreciate the value of those hidden goods. For as my woman friend vividly impressed upon me on another occasion, Tarahumaras simply had no ability to recognize the value of precious things. They wouldn’t know what to do with them. And to illustrate this, she pointed out that sometimes when Tarahumaras stole household

216

Frances M. Slaney

objects from townsfolk, those things ended up littering the roadside because the thieves just abandoned them as they walked home. From this, she concluded that Tarahumaras were incapable of recognizing the value of the material things appreciated by townsfolk and those accustomed to something resembling urban life. In summary, then, she felt that although the indigenous population was completely aware of the terrain’s precious things, both in the wilderness underground and in the town site’s households, they were too ignorant to profit from their access to those material advantages. Instead, she and her husband seemed convinced that it was local priests who profited most handsomely from hidden treasure. Not only had they benefited from the trove revealed to them in Tewerichi by a local indigenous woman; but in their own village of Panalachi priests had grabbed all of the gold coins exposed when the old church had been razed in order to build the town’s new church building. Her husband, who claimed to speak Tarahumara fluently, further elaborated on the Tarahumara’s particular ability to identify the locations of buried treasure by informing me that the Tarahumara “word for buried treasure” was “anayáwari” (Slaney 1991:192). And he noted sadly that priests had “taken all the ‘anayáwari’” from around their Sisoguichi mission centre. This I noted down with interest in my early days of fieldwork.

Tarahumara History and Landscape As my experience with Tarahumaras beyond the town accumulated, I discovered that this word had a very different meaning for its native rarámuri speakers. A Tarahumara woman translated it for me as “ancient ones” and used the term to refer to the remote ancestors of contemporary Tarahumaras who, she said, had been so ignorant and immoral that they had eaten each other and therefore failed to qualify for the “world above” (or heaven) upon their deaths (Slaney 1991:171). Stuck on earth, those ghosts of the violent and uncivilized cannibals sometimes made a lot of noise at night in their cliff-side caves. To quieten them down, tiny offerings of stew from animal sacrifices (Tarahumara, tónari), along with samplings of the corn beer (Tarahumara, batari), were taken up to them during ritual feasts. Instead of being treasures worth seeking, anayáwari were a lingering irritation that cost ritual food and vigilance to mitigate. A young Tarahumara man corroborated the woman’s view that those ancient ancestors had been cannibals, and he added that they lacked any knowledge about how to make fires or how to carry out the rituals required by God (and his wife) in the world above. He also explained to me that it had been a young anayáwari boy who had established the current era of water-baptized Christian Tarahumaras when he had baptized himself while fetching water from a stream for his family household. That boy, in other words, had initiated Tarahumara water baptism without any intervention from Catholic priests (see Slaney 1991, 1997).

Otherness and the Underground

217

What is more, said this man, any lingering presence of those ancient ones in the sierra landscape was a hazard requiring careful management. When their bones fell onto the cornfields growing beneath their cliff-side burial caves, for example, a shaman had to be called to carefully remove them with sticks (i.e., without touching them) for fear of the bones’ drying effect upon live flesh. From these explanations, it was difficult to see how those hazardous lingering material presences from past cannibals could be considered “hidden treasures” as our blanco friend had claimed. Rather like the aquatic invasion of local mestizos, the Tarahumara viewpoint on those ancient ones was that they upset the balance of conditions required to sustain healthy lives on earth. In this case, the ancient ones imposed excessive dryness, rather than the excessive dampness the governor had complained about suffering from chabochis’ (i.e., blancos’) presence. The same Tarahumara woman who clarified the meaning of anayáwari for me also spoke of their high cliff-side cave dwellings as places where errant sheep and goats could readily get lost and meet an untimely end. And she added that those places could become frightening for contemporary Tarahumaras, whose language was sometimes seductively spoken by anayáwari ghosts who might thereby lure the living into hanging around with them. Close association like this could endanger the living by dragging them unwittingly toward the realm of the dead. Of course, these conditions didn’t apply to the many caves at lower levels that Tarahumara households continued to inhabit. And at the same time, those caves higher up on the cliffs were nonetheless valued by shamans for their curing potential. In fact caves in the Sierra Tarahumara are generally associated with positive qualities of regeneration (Levi 2012:185–189). And in this regard, the Tarahumaras’ windowless houses built of stone or wood bore some resemblance to them (Levi 2012:188). In all my discussions with Tarahumaras about the “ancient ones,” or their cliff-side cave dwellings, though, there was never any suggestion that they were associated with buried treasures, or that there was any sort of gain to be made from digging inside their cliff-side abodes for treasures to remove. (I did hear tell, however, that one local Tarahumara household was displeased that a museum collector from the US had removed a skeleton from a cliff-side cave above their homestead.) In other words, contemporary Tarahumaras completely rejected these dead ancestors because of their moral and ritual ineptitude.7 Indeed, the extreme alienness of them was, in many regards, comparable to the blancos’ moral and ritual ineptitude, leaving the local Tarahumara population struggling to maintain the vitality of the local landscape despite disruptive forces from both of these earthbound alien populations: anayawari and chabochi (blancos). The blanco man’s faulty translation of the Tarahumara word anayáwari, then, and his treasure-seeking insistence on pursuing his own understanding of it in practical terms, demonstrated his limited sensibility about how individual words from the Tarahumara language worked within the indigenous cultural landscape. He lacked a sense of their resonance with local

218

Frances M. Slaney

practices carried out from within the indigenous culture and its particular landscape orientation toward maintaining a coordinated web of human, plant and animal life on earth. Although equipped with a good repertoire of Tarahumara words, that blanco’s bilingualism seemed to illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that knowing more than one language is inevitably limited by our human inability “to take up the world” in more than one cultural habitus. This, claimed the philosopher, is because corporeally, “we never belong to two worlds at the same time” ([1945] 2012:193). Being able to speak more than one set of words and to apply all the rules for combining and enunciating them does not automatically yield access to the, “several ways for the human body to celebrate the world and to finally live it” ([1945] 2012:193). This, he explained, is because “culture here offers what nature does not provide . . . a common world between speaking subjects,” so that the “full sense” of such a word “intends a mental landscape that is not straightway given to everyone, and it is precisely its function to communicate this landscape” ([1945] 2012:193).8 In other words, there was an orientation gap between this blanco and the Tarahumaras whose language he had learned, but whose cultural habitus was not his own. This gap was cultural, corporeal and practical. It arose between the local terrain’s two very different social projects for world-making, along with their sets of corporeal habits, taken-for-granted understandings about the place, and the value of Tarahumara bodies—past and present—that were materially intertwined with local topography, let alone their positions among earthly life forms, human or otherwise. And all this significantly impeded him from understanding how indigenous perspectives were geared toward particular forms of ritual care for coordinating the proper balance of conditions necessary for sustaining life-forms on earth (animal, plant and human). Even if I had recounted to him what I had learned about the dangerous dryness of anayáware bones, for example, I doubt that he would have taken it very seriously. In any case, he seemed to be proudly aware of not sharing “a common world” with the local indigenous population, even as he daily shared his life with them. Yet both his definition of anayáwari and the Tarahumaras evoked a longpast historical moment through which current human lives navigated the local landscape; for both blanco treasure-seekers and Tarahumara horticulturalists recognized the sierra’s higher-elevation caves as somehow otherworldly or alien enough to provide direct access to their respective historical forebearers. In this sense, the two definitions were arguably the same, and could be said to “belong to two worlds at the same time” in ways that support Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology even while apparently defying that particular passage from his major opus. For whatever their respective understandings about the word “anayáware,” blancos and Tarahumaras could all “take up the world” presented by those upland cliff-side caves as eerie local repositories of their own cultural histories.

Otherness and the Underground

219

Blanco Treasure-Hunting in a Sierra Cave Given that Tarahumaras had spoken to me about high rock cliffs as dangerous places, and that I wanted to avoid being perceived as another scholarly skeleton robber, my participation in a townsfolks’ cave-visiting expedition was somewhat conflicted. I felt torn between the two interlocking and conflicting ways of dwelling in the sierra and all their subsequent—and diverging—intentionalities toward it. Yet all those people—both blancos and Tarahumaras—had themselves to deal with these local conditions of cohabitation. And their co-existential human condition was curiously absent from the ethnographic record that had persistently described Tarahumaras as if they lived isolated lives with only occasional disruptions from the intrusion of local blancos (a condition that might well have applied to pueblos elsewhere in the Sierra). And at the same time, ethnographers had abstained from providing any account of blanco lives. Given what I was encountering in the Panalachi ejido, though, I became increasingly aware that the established ethnographic record was empirically skewed by perpetuating this two solitudes approach to regional ethnography. Although opting for the more ethnographically intriguing (i.e., “good to think”) way of dwelling in the Sierra, as well as the ecologically and politically more oppressed one, the records also seemed to provide an inadequate sense of how human lives were unfolding there. So on a clear spring morning, I clambered into a blanco’s pick-up, along with my husband and child, and the blanco’s wife, best friend and friend’s adolescent son, to pursue treasure in a place they referred to as the “priest’s cave.” The village man drove us all along the main road for a while and then pulled off the gravel to park his truck so that we could all get out and walk the rest of the way. Not long after we had started into the woods, we were greeted by our driver’s son who was already there and guided us around the cornfields of a Tarahumara homestead. His mother was keen to procure some prepared food from the Tarahumaras living there. She wanted to sample the early spring season of Tarahumara cuisine. But the Tarahumara man said that he had already taken to town the food that his wife had prepared earlier in the morning. In fact, he had sold it to the blanca’s daughter-in-law. So our expedition was kept on task, and I learned another small lesson along the way about how both men and women from these Tarahumara and blanco households were interconnected through such small exchanges of local goods and services. It was Lent, when eating sacrificial animals was prohibited, and when young Tarahumara boys—whose quotidian task was to herd household flocks of sheep and goats—sounded drums as they moved across the land. Altering the local “soundscape” (cf. Feld 2003), they heralded the season’s suspended inter-species conditions for co-dwelling and a lengthy ritual review of the local landscape’s regenerative forces in relation to various categories of the dead (Slaney 1991, ch. 6). The goal of my treasure-hunting

220

Frances M. Slaney

guides, however, was to reach a shallow rock shelf that was high above the Conchos River, and perhaps this was a propitious moment given its ties to past lives. The treasure-seeker had already tried to explore it on an earlier occasion. He was convinced that Catholic priests from the Sisoguichi mission centre had hidden church treasure there during the “era of persecution,” a popular term assigned by local Catholic clergymen to the Mexican Revolution. Probably unknown to the treasure-seeker, his hidden treasure scenario complied with historical records of priests temporarily having resorted to hiding church treasures in sierra caves during moments of conflict, and of having lived in them themselves during the Revolution. During the 1697 Tarahumara rebellion, for example, Jesuit priest Father Joseph Neumann wrote that he had overseen the bundling up of sacred vessels and their temporary caching in caves—although he also recorded recovering them afterwards (Dunne 1948:182; cf. Neumann 1969:87). The leader of our expedition, though, explained that the era of persecution had lasted nine years, and he apparently felt that this duration assured that some lingering material trace of the priests’ habitation and forgotten caches of wealth must still be lingering there. Impressed by how difficult it was to reach the cave, he took this too as a sign that it was a promising prospect. After leaving the truck on the road, we had a long hike uphill from the road to reach its cliff face, and then a steep descent into the shelf. The priests’ fear must have been great, he said, to keep them in that remote and uncomfortable lodging for so long. Upon arrival in the long rock shelf, which he referred to as a cave, I could see that its white-washed dividing walls of stone had been smashed by earlier treasure-seekers and that the ground underfoot had been disturbed by previous visitors (cf. Hrdlička 1903; Wyndham 2011). At first a pile of white human bones on the shelf floor were identified by our guide as ancient Tarahumara remains, but through the course of discussion they were reinterpreted as priests’ bones. And a splash of redness on the cave wall was taken as evidence of the priests’ murder by the army. That red splash looked to me, though, as the sort of red ochre (Tar. shitaka) used by Tarahumara women potters to decorate their hand-built vessels. It was also used by Tarahumara men to decorate their handcrafted drums used both by ambulant boys during Lent and by Tarahumara men during the week of Easter rituals centred around the village church, for which additional ritual paraphernalia were also painted with this material (Slaney 1991:253). The ochre was locally sourced and described to me as a substance used for certain shamanic cures. What is more, that red ochre was used for rock paintings located inside sierra caves and on certain rock faces (see Wyndham 2011). All during these speculations about what the cave’s current conditions might indicate about its historical place as the scene of past human suffering or about its role as an unofficial vault for safeguarding spectacular wealth, the young adolescent scanned its entire length and breadth with his metal

Otherness and the Underground

221

detector. Despite the youth’s thorough and attentive manipulations of the instrument he so proudly wielded, it offered us no beeps of confirmation that the cave harbored precious metals beyond our eyes’ reach. The importance of returning to the priest’s cave so that the youth could subject it to scientific testing, though, was explained through a verbal account of the two older men’s earlier attempt to extract buried treasure from it. On that occasion, explained the man who had given us a ride partway there in his truck, he and his friend had come with a Tarahumara man hired to help with digging. But that arrangement had proven a disaster because the indigenous laborer had started seeing various types of venomous snakes as soon as they had neared the cave. In fact, he had been so frightened by the sight of those snakes that he had become paralyzed and they had had to carry him all the way back up the hill to the spot where they had left their horses. Only after the stricken man had reached that distance from the cave did he regain his ability to walk. And so the two blancos had been obliged to leave him there with the horses while they did all the treasure-hunting work themselves. The results of their own efforts had been three small pots filled with nothing but dust. According to a Tarahumara man I spoke to about snakes, they are evil because they grow in water. And while I lived in the sierra, I noticed that they did appear mostly in the warm rainy season. What is more, in my conversations with Tarahumaras, they sometimes associated snakes with priests and the underground, which I figured might have triggered the man’s fright (Spanish, susto; Tarahumara majajame) upon his arrival at the “priests’ cave” (Slaney 1991:195–196). Fright was a condition common to both blanco and Tarahumara communities, although its triggers and corporeal conditions differed. Among Tarahumaras, it was a common cause of illness and could be prompted by anything, a curer told me. And because water was the most common cause, children were sometimes given beads of a particular wood to wear for protection against neighborhood streams they might go near while playing or herding family flocks. Fright disabled normal bodily functions. Whereas this hired man at the priests’ cave had lost his corporeal mobility, for example, a Tarahumara woman suffering from fright during my fieldwork had become unable to speak. A significant aspect of this affliction suffered by the Tarahumara man accompanying the blanco treasure-seekers, though, was that none of the blancos saw the snakes, and neither were they affected by susto themselves. While blancos and Tarahumaras are both susceptible to susto, they are not subject to the same environmental triggers for it. Like their divergent understandings and responses to the word anayáwari, their divergent corporeal responses to the priest’s cave revealed to the blanco treasure-seeker that reality gap which he habitually regarded as a consequence of the Tarahumaras’ ignorance of science and technology, but which might be recognized differently in phenomenological and cultural (or ontological) terms as evidence that Tarahumaras and blancos were not living through entirely the

222

Frances M. Slaney

same “worlds at the same time” (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012:193). Yet they did share certain corporeal maladies such as susto—a condition foreign to me—even if their triggers for it varied. Sierra blancos spoke to me only about experiencing susto as a result of witchcraft caused by envidia, or envy (see Slaney 1991, ch. 4), but elsewhere in Mexico and in Latin America as a whole susto is also taken as a sign of buried treasure (e.g., Gordillo 2009). When sierra blancos did talk to me about susto, they recounted feeling it while witnessing a great ball of fire in the night sky caused by flying witches. Rather than a sign of buried treasure, then, susto was for sierra blancos a sign of moral and material violence shining through the nighttime darkness. In a middle-sized town merely two hours’ drive from the Sierra region, though, I encountered a cobbler who enthusiastically recounted his own treasure-seeking exploits in the sierra while he resoled my shoes; and his account revolved around susto as a trusty sign of buried treasure. While waiting for my new soles, I idly asked him about a battered-up metal oil lamp on his shop counter. And that lamp, it turned out, was key equipment that he was going to take with him when he and his friend returned to the sierra that very evening after work. Although its light would guide them, he explained, the most crucial guide to buried treasure was balls of fire in the night sky. But, he explained, only some people were able to see those flying fires, and he illustrated this with a story about two treasure-seeking friends. Only one of them was capable of seeing such signs while the other remained blind to them even while walking alongside his friend who shouted out warnings like, “We’d better watch out or we’ll get burned!” (Slaney 1991:193). The cobbler then likened his friend’s ability to see those fire balls to being able to feel susto by pointing out that both were sensory responses to the presence of the dead. Then he went on to say that the significance of this for treasure-seekers was that ghosts were necessary as guides to the places where troves could be found (cf. Foster 1964). Like blancos in the sierra, though, the cobbler believed that living Tarahumaras were able to say where treasure was buried; but he forthrightly maintained that since they weren’t willing to tell blancos, it was necessary to resort to communications with their ghosts instead. This he explicated without any mention of the word “anayáwari.” During my fieldwork among Tarahumaras, by contrast, their lingering ghosts were seen as a threat to their well-being rather than any sort of material advantage. In fact, much of their ritual work (which is how they saw their ceremonial efforts on such occasions) was dedicated to assuring the proper completion of their recent deads’ transitions into the world above, or to the quelling of dangers from lingering historic ghosts like their anayáware. What is more, when Tarahumaras spoke of seeing balls of fire in the night sky, they had not welcomed them as indices for finding buried treasure. Instead, they had feared their blood-sucking attacks, as if they perversely reversed the normal, orderly, passage of sacrificial animals upwards to the world above in return for propitious living conditions and new lives received on earth.

Otherness and the Underground

223

Tarahumaras and the Underground As for indigenous visions of the underground, an elderly Tarahumara man recounted to me his experience of visiting down there. He had been walking home late one night after being at a drinking party, he said, when the sand in the arroyo at the edge of a stream had parted beneath his feet and he had slipped into the world underneath. Down there, he said, he had seen many Tarahumaras from the Sierra who had moved away to the city, particularly women. And he had also seen men who looked like priests. At this point, my narrator pointed in the direction of the local church, stipulating that those male figures were, “like the ones who give mass” (Slaney 1991:131). Apparently, though, he was in some sort of temporal time warp as well as spatial one, for the underground priests, he said, were wearing old-fashioned wide-brimmed hats with round crowns, like they used to wear long ago. After about two hours, he said, he returned to the earth’s surface with women below crying to see him go. And his wife reiterated this last point about how reluctant the urban-bound subterranean women had been to see him depart from their underworld.9 This Tarahumara account of underground experience is comparable to Irving Hallowell’s Anishnabe account of visiting people inside a rock (1955:97–98). For like the Anishnabe people who sometimes offered such experiences as dream sequences, or things that happened during altered states, the Tarahumara always related such occurrences while maintaining a strong sense of environmental continuity (1955:97). Despite this man´s successful visit underground, though, I was advised by a couple of individuals that destructive forces lay hidden underground. Of particular concern in this regard were the lost metal crucifix portions from rosaries, referred to as rosarios (Spanish), or “rosaries.” On separate occasions I was instructed about these by a Tarahumara man and a woman. The problem with these, explained my woman friend, was that left to their own devices, these detached metal pieces “walk.” Not only that: they walk underground where people can’t see them, causing sickness to humans living in the households on the earth’s surface all along their subterranean path. Unlike the blancos’ enthusiasm for lost metallic possessions hidden underground, then, Tarahumaras looked upon the possibility of lost and buried metal possessions as dangerously unhealthy. The only way to restore the health of one’s household was to consult a shaman who was capable of detecting and extracting the sickening things. With such expertise, the sound of the metal crucifixes travelling underground could be heard. The woman I spoke to had preferred to hire a woman curer to deal with this problem, while others preferred local men who were recognized shamans. In both cases, the cure was a matter of carefully listening so that the specific location of the errant rosary could be pinned down. Then it could be extracted and either returned to its proper owner or safely disposed of. If the owner was unknown, then the appropriate recourse was to simply

224

Frances M. Slaney

give it back to its source: local priests, for they were the origin point of those powerful instruments. Certainly, finding these metal objects underground was no bonanza (except, perhaps, for a shaman hired to take on the task). Rosaries, though, had the potential to become such a potential threat precisely because they were normally such propitious material possessions and served as key instruments for important shamanic cures. Connecting Tarahumaras to God the sun, and his wife, Mary the moon, in the world above, these metal crucifixes figured prominently in annual ritual processes as well as the life-cycle of individuals. Rosaries (complete with the beads, for example) were used to secure newborn human Tarahumaras on earth. After using some smoldering corncobs to burn off the long white threads still attaching a newborn to its origin point in the upper world (Tarahumara, rumugá), a personal name was accorded to him or her. And a watery concoction of upland and lowland medicinal substances administered to the infant. Then, in a gesture that completed this transference of new human life from the world above to its new condition as a Tarahumara individual living on the earth’s surface, the shaman placed a rosary around the infant’s neck for a brief while, as if in recognition that even while remaining on earth it would still be in communication with the world above (Slaney 1991:120; cf. Pintado 2012; Rodríguez 2013). Not until later would this child be taken to church for a water baptism at the local Catholic church, on one of the rare occasions when a priest came to town. Wearing a rosary, the priest would then confer a second personal name and a second set of godparents upon the new (Tarahumara) rarámuri pagótame, or “baptized Tarahumara” (see Slaney 1991, 1997) that had already been secured to its earthly existence. Although the apprentice shaman told me he considered both baptisms necessary, it was the first one that established the new Tarahumara’s reception into the local landscape, and the second, watery baptism was a less urgent matter. Metal crucifixes, or rosaries, then, were key to the process of forming new Tarahumara persons, as well as to many other life-sustaining ritual processes throughout the year. And for this reason, they had to be handled with care. Even between adults, a man told me, rosaries could not be just passed on from one person to another without particular precautions and consequences (see Slaney 1991:178–181). Certainly, I was instructed, young children should never be given such things as personal possessions. For children were too inclined to lose such things. Unprepared for the serious consequences of errant crucifixes, they might set in motion a trail of destruction. Through the worst-case scenario of these metal objects becoming lost and errant underground, then, I gained a further sense that Tarahumaras were not inclined to entertain prospects of getting rich quick through a bonanza discovery of somebody else’s buried treasure. For their persistent attention was—as blancos so derisively pointed out to me—not directed as much toward marketable goods and detachable wealth forms as to the interconnection and health of life-forms living on the surface of the sierra landscape.

Otherness and the Underground

225

As the governor had signaled to me on my first days in the Panalachi ejido, their greatest concern was to maintain a propitious balance of forces and material conditions for their horticultural livelihood. By undertaking this exemplary local responsibility and the close communications with the world above that it required, they worked for the good of every living being on earth: plant, animal or human.

Conclusions As cultural anthropologists, our ethnographic habit is to write about how “a people” live within their own community without considering their sustained entanglements with others and otherness. But in this world where few populations are free of colonial pasts and their ever-unfolding aftermaths— topped off by our current mode of international destruction and cultural genocide passed off as “globalism” and “drug wars”—this tactic avoids the experiential realities of those whose lives we ethnographers work so hard to describe. The key to overcoming this tendency is no longer a matter of resorting to the “postmodernist turn” that focused more on “identities” than lifeworlds, but to consider more seriously the phenomenological aspects of how people dwell in their landscapes (Hallowell 1954; Casey 1996; Ingold 2000, 2011; Slaney 2009; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012). For this better reveals to us the cultural, or ontological worlds through which radical otherness matters locally, how its demands are felt and responded to in affective, corporeal, practical and material terms. As Merleau-Ponty foretold, “The problem is to understand these strange relations which are woven between the parts of the landscape, or between it and . . . [the] incarnate subject” (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012:61). More than a matter of hidden material remains from the ruins of empire, then, my Sierra Tarahumara fieldwork forced me to consider how even co-habiting humans can become folded into distinct cultural landscapes, or ontologies.

Epilogue Cleaning out the camper several years after our return to Canada, I came upon a metal rosary that a nun visiting the Sierra Tarahumara had given me for my daughter when we lived there. At the time of rediscovery, my daughter was older but still not of an age that Tarahumaras would deem sufficiently responsible to possess it. What, I wondered, should I do with it, knowing what I did about such things.

Acknowledgements I thank Bernhard Leistle for his collegial efforts to promote further explorations in phenomenological anthropology, and particularly for his editorial help fine-tuning this chapter. I also thank Peter Gose for his incisive

226

Frances M. Slaney

comments and Sandra Vandervalk for her proofreading. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research funded my 1989–1990 fieldwork. And I remain thankful to everyone in the Sierra Tarahumara who generously engaged with my exploration of how they lived their lives at that moment.

Notes 1 The “World Bank, in the years between 1989 and the middle of the 1990s, contributed 93 million dollars for the production and exploitation of 8 million hectares of forest in Chihuahua and Durango in support of the cellulose and paper industry” (Quiro Gómez 2008:158, my translation). In recent years, mining operations—particularly ones registered in Canada—have become a preferred form of extractive investment in the Sierra (see Hernández Pompa 2011). 2 The ejido was a political unit established by the Mexican Revolution and in the case of Panalachi was simply a new name for the colonial pueblo unit in the region. Panalachi was the name of both the town and its surrounding region of forests and dispersed Tarahumara settlements. Mexico’s collective ejidos maintained the colonial political structure of recognizing an indigenous governor, stipulating that he must be elected by his community to be recognized as such by the state and national governments. (In the case of Panalachi, there were actually three governors, with one who normally took the lead.) 3 Admittedly, my own perception of all this was based on more than my experiences there because in preparation for fieldwork I had read the established ethnographic record’s reports on Tarahumara animal sacrifices to God, the Sun, as a means to assure favorable weather from the world above for the maintenance of their horticultural livelihood on the earth’s surface (see Basauri 1927; Bennett and Zing 1935; Kennedy 1978; Lumholtz [1902] 1987; Merrill 1988, etc.). 4 John Huston’s 1948 movie based on Traven’s (1927) novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was filmed in Mexico, although not actually in the Sierra Tarahumara. Humphrey Bogart starred in the leading role and the film won three Academy Awards. See Meyers (2011, ch. 10). 5 Indeed, a priest at the monastery in Sisoguichi, whom we had met en route to Panalachi, had advised us not to continue on to that town, saying that the Tarahumaras there were too shy of foreigners and would find our presence intolerable—although he also informed us that an Italian anthropologist had been working there (see Bonfiglioli 1995, 2008). 6 See Muehlmann (2014) for an ethnography that vividly describes how this trade is lived by rural populations further north in northwestern Mexico during the current decade. 7 Such rejection of their ancient ancestors was both explained and justified by the story about the anayáwari boy who introduced water baptism. For it was through his exceptional behavior that he had provided a significant turning point in Tarahumara history and culture by converting himself into the first contemporary rarámuri pagótame. Water baptism was not the only baptism required for such contemporary Panalachi Tarahumara personhood, however. Children were first baptized by fire in a shamanic ritual performed on Tarahumara homesteads, and their later Tarahumara water baptisms were not necessarily performed by Catholic priests. See Slaney (1991, 1997). 8 Here, Merleau-Ponty apparently denies anthropologists any expectation that they could become functionally bi-cultural during fieldwork, a position later echoed by Bourdieu (cf. [1980] 1990, ch. 4). To illustrate this, though, MerleauPonty cites T. E. Lawrence’s admission that years of dressing like an Arab and

Otherness and the Underground

227

trying to think like one had almost driven him mentally unstable (2012:193, 531). Perhaps such separation of self, though, was a torment linked to Lawrence’s mission as a spy, a bilingual position radically different from that of the child of immigrants, an ethnographer in the field, or bilingual blancos in the Sierra Tarahumara? 9 I refer to these women as “urban-bound” because the underground is not necessarily rural like the upper world. Or, at least, this is what I came to assume from this conversation and others. In the case of this Tarahumara man’s experiences, it seemed that the Tarahumara women in the story who had gone to make a living in towns outside the sierra had ended up becoming somewhat like blancos, a category that included priests. An elderly village blanca in Panalachi, however, who had spent her entire life in the sierra and often in the company of Tarahumaras, also alluded to a vision of underground urban dwellers when she told me that in a regional town to the east people claimed that entire cities were underground, streetlights and all. Apparently harboring some doubts, she asked me to confirm or deny it.

References Aguirre, Beltrán. (1967)1979. Regions of Refuge. Washington: Society for Applied Anthropology Monograph Series, No. 12. Basauri, Carlos. 1927. “Creencias y praticas de los Tarahumaras.” Mexican Folkways 3:40–47. Bennett, Wendell C. and Robert M. Zingg. 1935. The Tarahumara. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bonfiglioli, Carlo. 1995. Fariseos y matachines en la Sierra Tarahumara: entre la pasión de Cristo, la transgresión cómico-sexual y las danzas de conquista. Mexico: INI-Conaculta. ———. 2008. “El yúmari, clave de acceso a la cosmología rarámuri.” Cuicuilco 15(42):45–60. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1980)1990. Ch. 4 “Belief in the Body.” In The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice, 66–79. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burgess, Glen and Don Burgess. 2014. El Reto de la Sierra Tarahumara: La construcción del Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacífico. Taos: Barranca Press. Casey, Edward S. 1996. “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena.” In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 13–52. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Clews Parsons, E. 1936. Mitla Town of the Souls: And Other Zapateco-Speaking Pueblos of Oaxaco, Mexico. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunne, Peter M. 1948. Early Jesuit Missions in Tarahumara. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feld, Stephen. 2003. “A Rainforest Acoustemology.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 223–239. London and New York: Berg. Ferry, Elizabeth Emma. 2006. “Memory as Wealth, History as Commerce: A Changing Economic Landscape in Mexico.” Ethos 34(2):297–394. Foster, George. 1964. “Treasure Tales, and the Image of the Static Economy in a Mexican Peasant Community.” Journal of American Folklore 77:39–44. Gordillo, Gastón. 2009. “Places That Frighten: Residues of Wealth and Violence on the Argentine Chaco Frontier.” Anthropologica 51:343–351.

228

Frances M. Slaney

———. 2011. “Ships Stranded in the Forest.” Current Anthropology 52(2):141–167. Gose, Peter. June 1986. “Sacrifice and the Commodity Form in the Andes.” Man (N.S.) 21(2):296–310. Greenberg, James. 1989. Blood Ties: Life and Violence in Rural Mexico. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Hallowell, A.I. (1954)1955. Ch. 4 “The Self and Its Behavioral Environment.” In Culture and Experience, 75–110. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hernández Pompa Isidro. 2011. Minas de la Baja Tarahumara. Bloomington, IN: Palibrio. Hrdlička, Ales. 1903. “The Region of the Ancient ‘Chichimecs,’ with Notes on the Tepecanos and the Ruin of La Quemada, Mexico.” American Anthropologist 5(3):385–440. Ingold, Timothy. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge. Kennedy, John. 1978. Tarahumara of the Sierra Madre. Arlington: AHM Publishing Corporation. Lartigue, François. 1983. Indios y Bosques. Políticas forestales y comunales en la Sierra Tarahumara. México: Editiones de la casa chata. Levi, Jerome. 2012. “Chicomoztoc, cuevas, agricultura y el número siete: siguiendo un hilo cosmogónico desde Mesoamérica al suroeste de Estados Unidos, a través de la sierra tarahumara.” In Hilando al Norte: Nudos, Redes, Vestidos, Textiles, edited by Arturo Gutiérez del Ángel, 177–232. México, DF: Ediciones y Grñaficos Eón. Lumholtz, Carl. (1902)1987. Unknown Mexico. Vols. 1–2. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945)2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Merrill, William. 1988. Rarámuri Souls. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Meyers, Jeffrey. 2011. John Houston: Courage and Art. New York: Random House, Inc. Muehlmann, Shaylih. 2014. When I Put on My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Nash, June. (1970)1985. In the Eyes of the Ancestors: Belief and Behavior in a Mayan Community. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, Inc. Neumann, Joseph. 1969. Révoltes des Indiens Tarahumars (1626–1724). Translated by R. Louis Gonzalez. Paris: Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique Latine. Pintado, Ana Paula. 2012. “El Tejido de la Vida: Riuwaka y la Creación de la Humanidad.” In Hilando al Norte: Nudos, Redes, Vestidos, Textiles, edited by Arturo Gutiérez del Ángel, 89–107. México, DF: Ediciones y Grñaficos Eón. Quiroz Gómez, Julio G. 2008. Resistencia y Dominación: Los efectos de la modernización en la Sierra Tarahumara. M.A. Thesis. Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Sede Académica México. Rodríguez, Abel. 2013. Ch. 4 “El bautismo de los pagótuame.” In Praxis religiosa, simbolismo e historia de los rarámuri del Alto Río Conchos, 107–138. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala.

Otherness and the Underground

229

Salmón, Roberto M. 1977. “Tarahumara Resistance to Mission Congregation in Northern New Spain, 1580–1710.” Ethnohistory 24(4):379–393. Schutz, Alfred. 1966. “Some Structures of the Life-World.” In Collected Papers III Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, 116–132. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Shepherd, Grant. 1938. The Silver Magnet: Fifty Years in a Mexican Silver Mine. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc. Sheridan, Thomas E. and Thomas H. Naylor, eds. 1979. Rarámuri: A Tarahumara Colonial Chronicle, 1607–1791. Flagstaff: Northland Press. Slaney, Frances. 1991. Death and Otherness in Tarahumara Ritual. PhD. Thesis. Québec: Laval University. ———. 1997. “Double Baptism: Personhood and Ethnicity in the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico.” American Ethnologist 24(2):279–301. ———. 2009. “Tarahumara Witchcraft and Shamanism with Merleau-Ponty: A Tarahumara Landscape of Lives in Co-Motion.” Session on Philosophy and Anthropology, AAA Annual Meetings, Philadelphia. Stoler, Ann. 2008. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23(2):191–219. Traven, B. (1927 in German)1935. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. New York: MacMillan. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2007. The Question of the Other. New York: State University of New York Press. West, Robert. 1949. The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral Mining District. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wyndham, Felice S. 2011. “The Semiotics of Powerful Places: Rock Art and Landscape Relations in the Sierra Tarahumara, Mexico.” Journal of Anthropological Research (New Mexico) 67(3):387–420.

11 The Limits of Understanding Empirical and Radical Otherness in the Andes Marieka Sax

Indigenous peasants in the Peruvian Andes describe abnormal and unsettling bodily experiences as encounters with place-based spirits. While community members expect they can make sense of their experience in terms of their own frameworks of understanding, in some instances neither this nor any other cultural rationality is enough to order what has happened. These types of situations can be analyzed in terms of alienness not simply because of the apparent presence of a spiritual entity, but because the cause, consequence and significance of the event remain elusive, and in this sense strange, foreign and other to the individual. Drawing on the philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels, this chapter contrasts empirical otherness and radical otherness (or alienness) in ethnographic situations in the community of Kañaris. This distinction allows us to understand the observable Other not merely as different, but as in relation to something which cannot be brought into an order. Radical otherness provides a conceptual tool to understand an experiential event in terms of its affective strangeness rather than objects of perception. Waldenfels’ theory of alienness can be applied to sociocultural analysis because it provides an alternative account of why it is necessary to respond once one feels addressed by a situation, even when the origin of this feeling and the appropriate reply are unknown.

The Interpretive Problem Kañaris (or Cañaris) is a town of about 500 people in the Northern Peruvian Andes, almost all of who are Quechua-speaking, interrelated subsistence farmers who consider themselves to be members of a distinct ethnic group politically united under a collective landholding association. I began visiting the town and surrounding area in 2010 to carry out my doctoral research on the practice known as “sorcery” (brujería).1 This is a genre of both traditional healing and malicious witchcraft, in which ritual specialists direct the power of spirits embodied in mountains, high-altitude lakes and waterfalls towards specific individuals to either cleanse and cure, or contaminate and sicken. Northern Peru in general is famous for sorcery (see for example Sharon 1978; Joralemon and Sharon 1993; Glass-Coffin 1998). A distinguishing

The Limits of Understanding

231

characteristic of sorcery in the rural highlands, in contrast to coastal cities, is that indigenous peasants find themselves addressed by place-based spirits in the course of their everyday activities, such as planting and weeding food crops, bringing cattle and sheep to pasture, or walking on footpaths outside of town. Each of these types of entities engenders unusual distress or illness in the people who encounter them, which can only be resolved through local curative practices that respond to the condition’s underlying causal factor. The souls of the dead, malos espíritus (“evil spirits”), and encantos (“enchantments”) are local variations of spiritual entities widely represented in the anthropological literature of Andean Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.2 These three general types of place-based spirits are associated with particular geographical areas and landforms in the rural highlands. The souls of the dead do not have a permanent physical form or place of residence, but are clearly associated with cemeteries, uninhabited spaces such as mountain roads, and the night. Malos espíritus also lack a visible form, but reside in particular rocks, streams, gullies or hillsides that people walk by between their homes and fields. Encantos inhabit the least domesticated spaces of all: heavily forested mountains outside of towns and villages, prominent waterfalls visible from a distance, and high-altitude lakes in the sparsely populated grasslands above the tree line. In contrast to the other two types of placebased spirits, community members attribute each encanto with an individual name and identity, and say the spirit can take a human form when exiting the landform it embodies. My inquiries into the institution of sorcery in Kañaris produced a number of perplexing questions: Why does sorcery persist despite community members’ stated incredulity and demonstrated desire to distance themselves from a practice that both they and outside observers regard as morally questionable and irrationally superstitious? What does a person do when they apparently encounter a spirit they do not want to believe in? What happens when even local explanations are not enough to account for what has happened? The more I thought about it, the more I realized these questions pointed to issues that were not just problems for cultural outsiders, but also for community members themselves. How does a thoughtful, articulate and reasonable individual from Kañaris come to terms with undeniable bodily experiences that contradict “rational” truths acquired over a lifetime of learning? What does one do with the apparent manifestation of mythic beings perceived through one’s own senses of sight, smell, hearing and touch? What happens when the round hole of conscious belief does not fit the square peg of pre-reflective experience? And what happens when even one’s received anticipations of understanding are not enough to make sense of what has occurred? Place-based spirits in Kañaris are interesting because the souls of the dead, malos espíritus, and encantos draw attention to people’s experiences of the uncanny and foreign, what they suggest does not belong to themselves, and what resists being incorporated into their ownness by becoming satisfactorily

232

Marieka Sax

understandable to them. The interpretive problem is not about the reality or symbolism of these spiritual entities in the Andes, or the diagnosable illnesses that community members say these entities cause. Rather, the problem is that people in highland communities such as Kañaris find themselves in situations that unsettle them because they can neither wholly believe nor disbelieve in the existence of such spirits and the efficacy of their corresponding medical treatments. The following sections present distinct incidents not with the intention of using ethnography to illustrate theory, but rather to apply theory to find a path through the twofold interpretive problem. On the one hand, the outside analyst grapples with reconciling their interlocutors’ verbal rejection of place-based spirits alongside their acceptance of these entities in practice. On the other hand, sometimes the situation is so strange and disturbing that a cultural insider can understand their situation through neither the local interpretive script nor scientific rationalization. While a theoretically grounded conceptualization of alienness does not explain away the tensions between experience and belief, it can be helpful to describe the process of perceiving what is foreign or strange not just for cultural outsiders, but also community members themselves.

Theoretical Framework Waldenfels’ concept of alienness widens the analytical perspective from being limited to the otherness of “things” such as spiritual entities, traditional medicine and ritual healing, to also encompass the strangeness of an experiential “event.” All people have the potential to experience phenomena that contradict one’s knowledge of the physical world; most of us are at one time or another afflicted by bodily conditions whose origin and reason evade our present understanding. Sometimes all conceivable accounts are inadequate to fully explain something that has occurred, either in the event’s immediate sensorial acquisition, or its wider contextual significance over time and across fields of practice and meaning. Did we pass by a ghost, or was the sudden drop in temperature due to an environmental process of which we are ignorant? Was a situation of exceptional good luck or misfortune the result of divine intervention, or a complex series of circumstances that we could not control? For both cultural insiders and outsiders, such experiences can be difficult to come to terms with, lingering in the ambiguous spaces between belief and disbelief, pre-reflective sensation and positing perception, process and thing. Waldenfels’ philosophy of alienness can be usefully applied to situations like these, since the concept includes what resists being incorporated into any one order or framework of understanding. As elucidated by Bernhard Leistle earlier in this volume, alienness (Fremdheit) encompasses more than the English concepts of otherness, strangeness and foreignness (see also Waldenfels 2007:5–6). “Alienness” and “the alien” encompasses that which is not only other than and outside ourselves, not only strange or foreign to our present understanding and received cultural order,

The Limits of Understanding

233

but also that which resists being understood according to whatever methods we may employ (“we” here being humans in general). Despite our best attempts at explanation, interpretation or reasoning, despite even our very own bodily experiences, some aspects of the world and ourselves remain strange, unsettling, unknown and unknowable. This type of alienness can never be brought into a relation of selfhood, as in: “I am what I am in contrast to not being that” (e.g., Husserl), or, “I can understand that strange thing a little better because it is somewhat like this other thing I do know” (e.g., Gadamer 2004), or even, “This other is in some way a part of myself” (e.g., Merleau-Ponty 2002). As soon as we identify a thing, person, non-human being, experience or phenomenon as an object of perception—as soon we name it at all, whether material or immaterial, thing or event—we have already drawn the “alien” into the sphere of the “own,” and therefore lost the alien as alien (see Leistle Chapter 1 this volume; Waldenfels 2007:6–8). While “otherness” marks sameness and difference, “alienness” presupposes that at least one of the contrasted parties also has a sense of self. By virtue of this self-awareness, the other party becomes not just a different being, but existentially strange or foreign to one’s “ownness.” In Phenomenology of the Alien, Waldenfels asserts that alienness is distinguished by this self-generated sense of what does and does not belong to the self: Selfness and ownness are the results of drawing boundaries that distinguish an inside from an outside and thus adopt the shapes of inclusion and exclusion. Ownness arises when something withdraws from it, and exactly that which withdraws is what we experience as alien or heterogeneous. This separation of the own and the alien, effected by no third party, belongs to a different dimension than the distinction between same and other, which is backed by a dialectically created whole. Or to put it in the mother tongue of Western philosophy: the other [έτερου] and the alien [ξέυου] are two different things. (2011:11; emphasis in the original) The self’s sense of ownness gains meaning in distinction to what is outside the self, that is, what is other. As Waldenfels indicates, this sense of ownness—and thus also its asymmetrical correlate, alienness—cannot be generated by a third party. For example, apples and oranges are similar in some ways and different in others. We can say that apples and oranges are “other” to each other as distinct species of plants, but this is only possible because of our participation in distinguishing the two types of things. We do not say apples and oranges are “alien” to each other, for we do not attribute fruit with selfawareness. On the other hand, people do distinguish themselves from both other types of people (e.g., as German or French, man or woman) and other types beings (e.g., as human, not fruit), because they are self-aware, conscious and therefore compelled to distinguish themselves (see Leistle Chapter 1 this volume; Waldenfels 2011:11–12, 15–17).

234

Marieka Sax

A key distinction here is between “empirical” otherness and “radical” otherness (which, as Leistle established in the introduction to this volume, is considered here a synonym for “alienness”). While the former corresponds to the nameable Other that is an object of perception and meaning, the latter refers to what precedes or is outside of any cognitive process, cultural system or form of reasoning (see Leistle, Introduction, this volume). Alienness is a non-thing that we cannot make fully intelligible and meaningful; it is what slips through our fingers even after we identify the empirically Other in a situation. Thus Waldenfels describes it as a “surplus of experience” and “divergence” from “pre-given senses and laws” (2011:18, 81). With empirical otherness, the objects of discussion gain factual existence in contradistinction to one another (e.g., species, nationality, gender). Empirical otherness can be defined as that which we identify as foreign, strange or other. It is the thing, person or situation that we identify and name as thing, person or situation, and in contrast to which we distinguish ourselves. This is the Other that has already been drawn into an order by being thematized as something, thus put in a relation to self. Radical otherness, or alienness, on the other hand, is the inchoate sense of foreignness, strangeness or otherness that occurs before we recognize something as something. Alienness precedes our identification of an object of perception as such-and-such a thing, or naming an experience as such-and-such an event. That is what it means to say that radical otherness is the Other as other, and that the alien is what we respond to (see Leistle, Introduction, this volume). We are presented with alienness through a disruptive or disturbing experience that affects us with astonishment or anxiety, which we can neither anticipate nor order (Waldenfels 2011:81). What does this mean for an anthropologist trying to make sense of what her interlocutors say and do? The concept of alienness can be used to shift the analytical focus to an individual’s indeterminate sense of being thrown into a situation he or she could not anticipate, choose or refuse. The individual finds him- or herself in an existential relation on the cusp of understanding. For example, a person may be suddenly thrown to the ground by an unseen force. What caused this to happen? Did the person trip, is there a physiological explanation, or is a spiritual entity acting upon him? Does the person feel alarmed, embarrassed, excited or untroubled by his situation? Once it becomes a notable event to the individual, he or she cannot help but react to it in some way. As soon as we perceive ourselves to be addressed by the alien, we cannot evade responding. The call may have been made by an observable other, whether another person or a non-human entity, but the central insight of alienness is that the experiential event of already having “heard the call” or having otherwise “been addressed” comes from a sphere beyond our embodied selves, intention and will, and indeed capacity to act as conscious, agential beings. The situation of perceiving ourselves to be addressed—by a verbal appeal, a passing glance, an outstretched hand, an ambiguous feeling

The Limits of Understanding

235

of being watched, or a disturbing corporeal sensation—occurs independently of both volition and belief. Once we find ourselves to be interpellated or addressed, we cannot help but reply or react in some way, for “no answer is also an answer” (Waldenfels 2011:38). It is this unintended process of perceiving oneself to be called, not simply from who or where the call comes, that can usefully be analyzed through Waldenfels’ notion of alienness. Even so, every attempt at naming and describing alienness changes it into something other than what Waldenfels means in the strict sense of the term, as that which resists being incorporated into an order. A certain degree of concretization is inevitable when employing the concept of alienness to analyze the underlying phenomenological and interpretive processes in specific situations. The “spatiotemporal shift” in the perception of alienness is key to understanding this formation: hearing the call does not occur at the same time as the call itself (Waldenfels 2011:18). While hearing the call is itself a response, the response refers to a moment that has already passed. Yet the event has happened, and somehow one has to reply, which concretizes it. Responding to the call which experience cannot encompass, which is “elsewhere,” is a relation to alienness. This is not to say that the relationship between call and response is “really real” according to either a scientifically universal all-encompassing cosmos, or a plurality of cosmological orders of the like proposed by Philippe Descola (2013); that is beside the point. Rather, it is to say that “we invent what we respond, but not what we respond to” (Waldenfels 2011:42). Not just anyone will hear just any call, for the ways in which we direct our attention, even unconsciously or unintentionally, are heavily influenced by the historically contingent and socially reproduced “anticipations” of understanding that are part of the fundamental conceptual ground of sociocultural action, interpretation and experience (see Gadamer 2004:291–299). Our anticipations of understanding are the meanings we expect to find in a word, text, concept or event, whether the situation or thing is familiar or novel to us. These naturalized “prejudices” of understanding are part of the pre-reflective order by which we unconsciously organize sensation into the sensation of something, within the bounds of culturally structured possibility (see Gadamer 2004:268–273). For example, a visiting anthropologist can imagine what it would be like to encounter a place-based spirit, but because she does not occupy the same cultural “horizon” as her interlocutors, the same life-world with its interconnected network of implicit understandings received from her predecessors (see Gadamer 2004:299–306), she will not feel herself to be addressed by souls of the dead, malos espíritus, or encantos. On the other hand, people in Kañaris, even those who explicitly repudiate the existence or reality of place-based spirits, do find themselves addressed by these entities in situations not of their choosing. In the following ethnographic cases, people in Kañaris find themselves compelled to locate the origin of this call in a place-based spirit, even as they search for other explanations. Community members frame this experience

236

Marieka Sax

of call and response as an encounter with a spiritual entity because of the cultural horizon within which they are situated. This received tradition of understanding posits the existence of a spiritual world that parallels the human one, as well as sympathetic relations between distinct aspects of the person inhabiting each world. For example, an injury sustained by the part of the person in the spiritual world will produce a similar injury in the person’s body in this world. Implicit in this is the anticipation of understanding that bodily conditions and sensory experiences index real events not only in the visible world inhabited by humans, but also in the hidden, inner, parallel spiritual world. From this perspective, bodily and embodied sensations are particularly compelling not just because of the immediacy of the experience, but because the pain, discomfort or abnormality points to something other than itself. The corporeal condition is an outcome of a chain of events whose cause must be uncovered in order to identify the appropriate response. This interpretive movement, which can be fruitfully conceptualized in terms of medical etiology, indicates that in Kañaris the response to the alien can take the form of a diagnosis of illness, in addition to an encounter with placebased spirits. Once a person perceives such-and-such a sensation and places it in such-and-such a frame of understanding, the otherness or foreignness he or she has been presented with gives way to an identifiable cause of the event or namable condition that is its outcome. Sometimes, however, an individual is unable to satisfactorily understand what they have been presented with; sometimes the strangeness of the situation resists incorporation into a whole. Nevertheless, the individual has heard a call and must provide a response. In this way, alienness has been encountered, but it cannot be grasped.

Local Understandings “Oh, sweet Virgin Mary, be thou my intercessor, that we may be worthy of the joyous promises,” Andrés sang.

It was November 2, the Day of the Dead, and the cemetery was full of people offering prayers, food and drink upon the graves of their deceased grandparents, parents, siblings and children. People in Kañaris say the souls of the dead return to the land of the living on this day. They hurry to finish sowing their corn, beans and potatoes because, as the old people say, the dead will walk on the fields and help them grow. People pray so that their loved ones are at peace, and they ask specific individuals for beneficial intervention in their own lives, such as good health or success in their work. They also pray for the souls of forgotten people, such as orphans, and for those who are in purgatory. If not prayed for, the souls of the dead remain in this world, causing illness and distress to people who happen to meet them.

The Limits of Understanding

237

Andrés continued: Like this, mother, we hope, And we ask you, lady, We your ungrateful children, The cause of such grief. Amen, Jesus, with whom you reign, Crowned with victory; Pray for us sinners, For your pain, lady, amen. Mary, mother of grace, Mother of mercy, In life and death, Protect us, great lady, amen. Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We have prayed three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, For the blessed little souls in purgatory, May they rest in peace forever more. May it be thus. Amen.3 As Andrés finished the prayer, he carefully poured distilled sugar cane alcohol at the base of the two crosses marking the graves of his family members. The white candles he had lit earlier flickered in the afternoon breeze, and the highland sunshine warmed the garlands of yellow marigolds adorning the crosses. He placed an orange beside each candle, and sat gazing upon the offerings for several minutes, beside the quiet contemplation of his wife and daughters. In Kañaris, people refer to two fundamental non-corporeal parts of the person: a “soul” (alma) that is associated with their moral worth, and a “shadow” (sombra) tied to their consciousness, will and health (for the notion of multiple souls in other Andean communities see Gose 1994:115ff.; Polia Meconi 1996:153ff.; Allen 2002:43ff.; Orta 2004:158ff.). A person can survive for a time without their shadow, as when dreaming. But the soul cannot become temporarily separated from a living person’s body, for this only happens upon death (see Polia Meconi 1996:161, 165). When a person dies, their soul immediately leaves this world and goes on to the next, the distant and vague realm of the Christian God. At least that is the case in normal circumstances. If a deceased person does not have relatives to properly pray for them, or if they committed incest when alive, their alma is condemned to stay in this world, wandering around at night and attacking people who happen to be out, particularly in undomesticated areas outside of town before sunrise and after sunset. A lady once told me of such a haunting. She said a “monster” was going from one hamlet to the next attacking women and children. It could reach inside their bodies and eat their intestines. So people were leaving it food like corn and potatoes to eat instead, which were always gone in the

238

Marieka Sax

morning. The monster looked like a person, but half of its face was burnt, exposing the muscles and bones. It came on the wind, and would appear and disappear suddenly in the night, coming even through doors that were shut tight. When I told Andrés about this, he wryly commented that it was a “superstition.” Nevertheless, he later described how he had had several encounters similar to the one described by the lady. In Andrés’ own experiences, he could not find any rational explanation for his bodily reactions, such as an inability to walk, being knocked to the ground, and hearing, smelling and seeing strange things. He concluded that they must have been encounters with the souls of the dead or other evil spirits. “It is powerful when you see these things for yourself,” he said. Once, Andrés explained, he was making the eight-hour hike home from the nearest highway. As he passed a certain mountain, he heard a wail from the hillside, like a child crying. When the sound was around his feet, he was unable to take a step further. Andrés sat down and smoked a cigarette, which everyone in the Andes knows helps in the mountains, not because it calms the nerves, but because the strong smell and smoke protect one from evil spirits. He knew that according to local folklore, the sound was coming from a haunting soul of a dead person called a “kaw.” This person is condemned for having had sexual relations with a parent or sibling, and so their soul cannot make the journey to the afterlife. Instead, the soul is doomed to persist in this world, where it attacks small farm animals and vulnerable people at night. At first Andrés was unwilling to accept this traditional explanation. Perhaps he was sleepy or frightful while walking alone on dark and abandoned roads. Yet after several additional instances accompanied by even stronger bodily sensations, he was compelled to re-evaluate his understanding of what had happened. Another time, Andrés was again walking on a mountain road alone at night. Suddenly something violently knocked him over. Yet no one was around him. It was, he said, “as if in a dream.” He tried to get up, but he was knocked over again, this time falling down a steep hillside. The only way Andrés could account for this experience was that he had been attacked by the disembodied soul of a dead person or some other evil spirit lurking about the hillsides in the pitch blackness of the night. In these and other examples, Andrés described auditory, olfactory, visual and tactile phenomena that he found disturbingly unusual and difficult to explain in the terms of his everyday, commonsense knowledge of being in the world. Despite his general rejection of interpretations based on myth and hearsay, which he considered simplistic, in the end the only explanation he could think of was that he had encountered spiritual entities that are normally imperceptible. I know Andrés would have liked to provide an empirically verifiable account for his sensory experiences, since he had been trained as a schoolteacher, purposefully positioned himself as a modern subject and

The Limits of Understanding

239

not a “superstitious Indian,” and consistently demonstrated himself to value logic and reasoned thinking. Yet he found it difficult to remain skeptical of traditional explanations when faced with the undeniable reality of his own bodily experiences. Perhaps these experiences disturbed Andrés not just because they contradicted the normal course of events (in which hillsides do not cry out, and people are not suddenly thrown to the ground by unseen forces), but because he found himself accounting for them by falling back on what he would prefer to regard as mythical beliefs. Like each of us, Andrés is situated in a structure of symbolic meaning that is, in its essential aspects, not of his own making. He was born and raised in Kañaris, and grew up with stories, anecdotes, commentaries about the souls of the dead, malos espíritus, and the encantos from his elders and fellow community members. As indicated by the Day of the Dead vignette, he also participates in practices that acknowledge and respond to these other-than-human entities. Andrés is emplaced in the pre-reflective understanding that encounters with spiritual beings are sometimes possible. This is part of the massive underwater iceberg of sociocultural meaning that comprises the anticipations of understanding we have each received from our predecessors. This cultural horizon includes ontological assumptions whose possibility persists even when an individual consciously tries to disavow them. For a person from Kañaris to interpret an abnormal event as an encounter with a place-based spirit, at least some of the following anticipations of understanding must be held by them, however unconsciously. The most basic assumption is that other-than-human entities do indeed exist, here identified as the souls of the dead, malos espíritus, and encantos. These nonhuman agents are normally invisible to lay people, but in times of liminality or heightened danger (e.g., nighttime, when travelling, Holy Week, the Day of the Dead), or through sorcery (in both its healing and cursing modalities), people can come to know of these spirits through their bodily senses. Spiritual entities are normally invisible because they exist in a hidden, inner world that parallels this one. The parallel world is also where the shadows (sombras) of people and other agential beings exist. Actions that take place in the parallel spiritual world affect associated material aspects in the everyday world. Certain sacred objects (e.g., rocks, swords, staffs) act as conduits mediating between the everyday world and the parallel shadow world. Physical contact with these objects transfers invisible substances between a person’s body and the place-based spirit, and these substances can engender health or illness. Encounters with the wandering souls of the dead and malos espíritus who reside in rocks, streams and hillsides always result in distress, misfortune and illness. As the following example illustrates, these conditions can be effectively treated only through curative practices that address the underlying causal factor affecting not just the body, but also the immaterial parts of the person.

240

Marieka Sax

When Local Explanations Are Enough “When my son was a few months old, he had susto de agua,” said Hernando. Hernando and Carina are a young couple living in a hamlet outside of Kañaris. They just returned from their fields with baby potatoes and fresh manioc, and as Carina lit the fire to prepare supper, her husband sat on a log while their two young sons played in the grass. Women learn about medicinal herbs from their mothers and can treat common pains and minor infections. The illness called “susto,” however, must be cured by another genre of healing that calls the person’s lost shadow (sombra) back to them. It most commonly afflicts infants and young children, such as Hernando’s infant son. Hernando said that for eight months, he took his son to doctors who prescribed conventional medicines. The boy would initially improve, but after a couple of weeks the symptoms of nighttime stomach pain, diarrhea and fever would return. When his son was eleven months old, Hernando brought him to a traditional diviner who determined the cause of the child’s illness by reading playing cards. The diviner told Hernando that a malo espíritu residing in a nearby river or pool of water had kidnapped his son’s shadow. He told Hernando to mix certain herbs together, blow them over his son through pursed lips, and call the boy’s sombra back to the body. Hernando did this, and his son recovered. “Now look at him!” Hernando proudly declared. “He is three years old, and completely healthy.” Children are more vulnerable than adults to evil spirits because their sombras are soft and pliable, “green or unripe like a plant.” A child’s shadow can be easily captured by a malo espíritu, who consumes this animating part of the person. For example, a boy can be startled when he passes by a place where an evil spirit resides, suddenly crying out or falling down. The spirit living in the stream, hillside or rock has grabbed the child’s shadow as its food. A child with this diagnosable illness of “susto” (commonly translated as soul loss or soul fright) is unsettled, especially at night. He may cry, talk or walk in his sleep; have persistent stomach pain, fever or diarrhea; or have trouble eating and be overcome by anxiety or listlessness. Knowledgeable parents can cure the child themselves, or bring him to a local specialist such as a “remediera” (herbalist), who diagnoses illness by rubbing a guinea pig over the client’s body and then interpreting the animal’s inner organs. One woman cures susto by taking the kernels of five different types of corn in her hand, which she rubs over the person. Then she traces a cross in the ground where the child was frightened, taps it with a kitchen knife, and says, “get up little shadow, this is your owner” to call the sombra back to the body.4 Community members said biomedicine cannot effectively treat “soul loss” and related conditions such as “the wind of the dead.” “Doctors don’t know about it,” they told me. “Doctors can’t see it, and they can’t cure it.” It is

The Limits of Understanding

241

not simply that biomedical doctors do not recognize cultural syndromes such as susto. It is that biomedicine only treats the person’s body, and not their shadow. The local cures for this class of illness involve providing the evil spirit with a consumable offering to assuage its insatiable hunger, and vocally calling the shadow back to the victim’s body. Without this vitalizing part of their person, the victim will continue to weaken, and eventually will die. Like many communities throughout the Andes, people in Kañaris accommodate medical pluralism, or the co-existence and validity of multiple medical traditions (see Crandon-Malamud 1991:23–24; Koss-Chioino, Leatherman, and Greenway 2003). Thus people can draw upon a range of curative options for minor illnesses and advanced specialists for more serious conditions. From an analytical perspective, the most important distinction is between illnesses attributed to “naturalistic” and “personalistic” factors. “Naturalistic” illness can be treated by pharmaceuticals and other biomedical interventions, or herbalism and the local genre of healing called “cleansing with guinea pig.” This class of illness results from exposure to environmental elements or, implicitly, microscopic organisms—that is, “natural forces or conditions” rather than intentional action (Foster 1976:775). The causative agent is not internally motivated to produce illness in a particular person, and the person can prevent the condition by avoiding those behaviors or contexts that are known to result in illness, such as bodily exposure to environmental extremes of hot and cold (see Foster 1976:775, 778–780). “Personalistic” illnesses, on the other hand, have been caused by the purposeful intervention of a spiritual entity, or the intentionally harmful ritual actions of other people through malicious witchcraft. This class of illness is not a result of “accident or chance” (Foster 1976:775). The afflicted person is a victim of aggression “directed specifically against him,” and this particular person suffers a specific illness at a specific time because a human or other-than-human entity has attacked, punished or otherwise addressed the victim (Foster 1976:775). In Kañaris, “personalistic” agents include the lost and wandering souls of the dead, malos espíritus, and encantos. Biomedical doctors do not acknowledge these spirits as causative agents, and since biomedicine does not recognize conditions people in Kañaris attribute to these place-based spirits, doctors cannot help the victim. Hernando accepted the diagnosis of susto in his son not because of faulty logic, or cultural symbolism and his self-positioning as an indigenous peasant, or even because in the end what really mattered to him was that a treatment worked and his son recovered his health. While the father tried both the biomedical and traditional cures that were appropriate according to the local medical system, and while he perhaps would have interpreted the illness as a naturalistic infection rather than personalistic soul loss if the first treatment were successful, the relevant point is that the very recognition of an illness is itself an indication that a process of understanding something as a particular thing is already underway. Instead of asking, why susto and not

242

Marieka Sax

another type of illness (e.g., Crandon 1983), I ask, why illness and not some other type of experience? Why did the family understand their son’s nighttime pain, diarrhea and fever over six or more months as symptoms of one overarching condition rather than a series of independently occurring events? Why did Hernando and Carina anticipate an illness at all, rather than an acceptably normal stage in their infant’s development (e.g., colic)? I propose it is because of the anticipation of understanding of people in Kañaris (and throughout the Andean cultural area) that infants and young children are particularly vulnerable to having an immaterial part of their person kidnapped by malicious and hungry spirits residing in the local landscape. The parents directed their attention with the implicit expectation to perceive illness, and this is a perfectly normal process in their community. As the case of Hernando and Carina illustrates, the interpretation of an experience as an experience of a particular kind is not predetermined, even if it seems obvious. The possible ways to understand a given phenomenon exceeds individual learning, reasoning and conscious discernment. This is in part because what we expect to find takes shape in a social and cultural context that precedes any one individual. Moreover, as the following example indicates, our interpretation of the event’s significance is neither definite nor static, but instead ambiguous and changeable.

When Local Explanations Are Inadequate I didn’t believe in brujería before,” said Andrés. “Until my daughter died.” Andrés explained it happened about ten years ago, at the same time that his father had an operation to treat his cancer. Andrés spent all his savings to bring his father to a hospital in Lima to remove the tumor on his neck. The family had to cover the cost of travel, as well as the hospital bed, food and various tests and medicines. Andrés accompanied his father to attend to him in the hospital. A couple of days after his father’s surgery, Andrés received a telephone call. His two-year-old daughter was very sick. He rushed back to Kañaris with great difficulty. When he finally arrived home after two arduous days, Andrés took his daughter to a medical clinic in Ferreñafe, a small city on the coast. The medical doctors said that nothing was wrong with her, except that she needed more vitamins. But she was growing weaker daily, and Andrés knew his young daughter’s bodily condition was not normal. “I was desperate, so I took my daughter to a maestro in Ferreñafe,” said Andrés. At the time, he was determined not to believe in sorcery. But nothing else was working, so he tried a “master” or sorcerer. “I held her in my arms throughout the night of the mesa.”5 The sorcerer attended many other clients at the same ritual healing session. Evidently the specialist had some renown, but he was not able to cure Andrés’ daughter. Finally, Andrés took her back to the hospital. People from Kañaris avoid hospitals for several reasons: they are expensive, one cannot know what the

The Limits of Understanding

243

doctors are actually doing to the patient, and it is a place people associate with death. A month or two went by. Andrés was distraught. His daughter was not improving, despite the medicines the doctors prescribed. One night he had a dream about a certain flower called “aya rosa” (soul flower).6 It is a yellow or orange-colored marigold. People in Kañaris use garlands of these flowers to adorn the litters of saints during their festival days, ritual tables during the wake for a recently deceased person, cemetery crosses during the Day of the Dead, and crosses placed over the lintel of the front door of houses during Holy Week. In his dream, the flower was dry, and fell apart in his hand. He knew this was a sign of impending death, but whose? His daughter lying in a hospital bed in Ferreñafe, or his father, whom he had left in Lima? “I sat with my daughter day and night.” He did not want to leave her alone for a moment. She was so young. Nevertheless, one day Andrés had to go to an office in Ferreñafe to apply for a job. While he was waiting in line, he felt uneasy. He left for the hospital, and when he arrived the doctors told him his daughter had just died. It was a terrible story that Andrés told with his characteristic composure and calm. He never definitively told me what his daughter died of. On one occasion, he suggested that she was attacked by a malo espíritu. This makes sense in the terms of the local medical system, since young children are vulnerable to having their sombras kidnapped by malos espíritus, as illustrated by the case of Hernando’s infant son. On another occasion, Andrés suggested that his daughter had been attacked by a more powerful spiritual entity, an encanto. This is the most likely conclusion one could reach by local understanding, especially if advanced biomedical specialists were unable to diagnose or effectively treat the individual’s condition. Only sorcerers are able to cure illnesses attributed to encantos. Andrés once recounted this story to a sorcerer in the morning after a mesa healing ceremony. The sorcerer solemnly agreed that when one has certain illnesses, medicine will do nothing, for one could die without the curative treatment of brujería. Encantos are the most powerful non-human entities people in Kañaris expect to meet. These charmed spirits simultaneously inhabit the lived material world, and the hidden parallel world mirroring this one, where sombras are manifest. The encanto is not inherently good or evil, but it is the source of a power that can bring both life and death. Community members most commonly told me about encantos as individualized spirits inhabiting particular mountains, lakes and waterfalls. Based on the wider context of my research, I know that an encanto is also the landform itself, a materialized reflection of its own sombra that is the seat of the entity’s consciousness, will and agency. These shadows are invisible in this world, but they take a visible form in the parallel world “below” or “within” daily life. This parallel spiritual world is not an abstract heaven or hell, but rather another type of

244

Marieka Sax

existence corresponding to our received phenomenal reality, yet distinct from it: the verso to our recto of a sheet of paper. As supreme place-based spirits, encantos are repositories for a sacred power that has the equal potential to bring increased production, health and good luck on one hand, and loss, illness and misfortune on the other. In other areas of the Andes, this power is circulated between people and mountain spirits through ritual offerings and payments (see for example Gose 1994; Allen 2002). In Kañaris, however, lay people cannot communicate with the encantos themselves, and instead must consult a sorcerer to direct this power to desired outcomes of health, luck and productivity. The special capacity of the sorcerer is to voluntarily detach his sombra from his body to enter the parallel spiritual world, where he can talk with the encantos to learn what has caused his client’s condition and how to heal it. By virtue of his innate ability, learned technique and sacred pacts, the sorcerer calls upon “his” encantos to either cure or cause illness, and to augment a client’s good luck or contaminate them with bad luck. He does this during the already mentioned all-night ritual event called the mesa. In Andrés’ account, neither traditional sorcery nor biomedicine cured his daughter’s mysterious illness. He took her to both a sorcerer and a hospital on the coast, but still her condition worsened. There are four distinct ways Andrés could account for his daughter’s condition and ensuing death: it was due to a naturalistic agent but the biomedical doctors were inadequate; it was caused by a personalistic agent called a malo espíritu but the proper treatment for susto was not sought; it was caused by a personalistic agent but the sorcerer was incompetent or lacked the required ritual objects; it was caused by the power of an encanto but the proper treatment specifically for witchcraft was not sought. Maybe Andrés’ daughter had an illness that biomedicine could indeed recognize and treat, but the doctors were not attentive or competent enough to diagnose it. Perhaps they thought her illness was “psychosomatic” or “sociosomatic” (see Kleinman and Becker 1998), and therefore not worth taking seriously. Nevertheless, her illness had undeniable, material consequences and eventually resulted in her death. After this event, Andrés re-evaluated his understanding of his daughter’s illness. He had hoped that biomedicine would cure her, yet it failed. It seems he came to believe that her illness was not due to a “naturalistic” cause after all, but instead a “personalistic” agent. At one point, he suggested a malo espíritu had kidnapped an invisible part of her person, her sombra. Yet Andrés did not tell me that he had attempted to call his daughter’s shadow back to her body, as Hernando had done for his son. In my understanding, Andrés told me this story in part because he wanted to demonstrate that he did not believe in the existence of mythical spirits and the efficacy of sorcery before he faced this crisis. Yet although Andrés took his daughter to a healing sorcerer on the coast, the child’s health did not improve. Perhaps the sorcerer was incompetent or inattentive, and did not

The Limits of Understanding

245

properly diagnose his daughter’s condition. A person who consults a sorcerer hopes the practitioner is genuine and trustworthy, but they also expect that some sorcerers can be inauthentic or nefarious—incompetent fakes who accept money without bringing about healing, or evil brujos who use their esoteric knowledge to harm instead of help clients. The logic of sorcery in Kañaris also provides implicit explanations for why sorcery did not work to heal a condition even if the practitioner was genuine and trustworthy. Perhaps the sorcerer did not possess the specific rock, sword or staff that provides the material connection with the particular encanto who caused a given client’s condition. Without this sacred object, the sorcerer will be unable to extract the power of the encanto from the body of the client, where it has been festering in its sickening form, and send this invisible substance back to its origin in a specific mountain, lake or waterfall. Perhaps the encanto chose not to help the sorcerer by telling him the specific ritual actions he would have to perform for his client. Or perhaps the client needs more than one treatment through sorcery to be fully healed. For example, the participants in one mesa ceremony I attended told me that the sorcerer was able to help each of them “a little bit,” but that no one was “cured completely” because the practitioner ran out of time during the night. Andrés did not tell me what he thought of the particular sorcerer who treated his daughter. But based on what other people told me about their suspicions of sorcerers, insufficiency or fraudulence are likely interpretations of why the coastal sorcerer did not cure her. Perhaps Andrés became convinced that his daughter’s illness and death was caused by malicious witchcraft, which he later told me he suspected in reference to other situations. In witchcraft, an individual who envies the success and prosperity of a specific community member contracts an unscrupulous sorcerer to use the power of the encantos to bring misfortune and loss to their rival. Andrés would have been too polite and conciliatory to openly accuse a fellow community member of such a morally transgressive action. He may also have been too shrewd to want to vocally admit the dual possibility to either himself or me that sorcery can produce an effect in the material world, and someone used it to intentionally harm his family. It is likely that family members had already tried to help Andrés’ daughter with all the medical options available in Kañaris before he took her to the most advanced specialists in the city. He evidently favored the curative powers of biomedical doctors, as he had just taken his father for an operation in Lima, and by his own admission he did not believe in sorcery at the time. That he took his daughter to a sorcerer indicates how desperate he was to find an effective treatment for her illness. But the narrative outcome of his account suggests that rather than falsifying one or another medical approach, the overall event reinforced the reality implicit in the pluralistic medical system in Kañaris. In Andrés’ received cultural understanding, biomedicine can treat conditions caused by naturalistic agents such as bacteria and cancerous cells, while only the traditional healing of sorcery can

246

Marieka Sax

cure illnesses caused by personalistic agents such as malos espíritus and encantos. It is revealing that Andrés said, “I didn’t believe in brujería before,” and not something like, “biomedicine failed us, because of underfunding, or incompetence, or ethnic and class-based discrimination.” Nevertheless, a decade after the tragedy, he still seemed uncomfortable with the provisional conclusion he had reached as a result of this situation and similar experiences: that the encantos, the parallel spiritual world, sombras, and bringing about healing and cursing through sorcery are all somehow real. In my educated guess, Andrés would prefer to believe that unseen spirits cannot attack children, and people cannot use magic to bring about material effects. Yet his daughter died while receiving the best biomedical treatment she had access to. Thus despite his education, urban travels and self-positioning as a modern citizen, Andrés found himself persuaded that the traditional beliefs he had grown up with have an ontological basis in reality. As Andrés said earlier with a deliberate half-laugh, “These things are powerful when you see them for yourself.” Thus far, my analysis of Andrés’ situation has followed the familiar anthropological tracks of description, social contextualization, cultural interpretation and dialectical reasoning. But this analysis is incomplete because Andrés has been confronted with the unbridgeable spaces between his received anticipations of understanding, consciously learned rational convictions, and undeniable material experience. What caused his daughter’s wasting condition? What else could he have done for his child? Why did her death foster his belief in sorcery, even when the sorcerer could not cure her? Perhaps biomedicine was insufficient for Andrés because it does not allow for the ambiguity and paradox his daughter’s illness and death has left him with. People in Kañaris expect biomedical doctors to definitively know the cause of an illness, and therefore the appropriate cure. Sorcery, on the other hand, accommodates more indeterminacy. This is all to say that paradox and ambiguity are integral to sorcery for community members themselves. It is secondary that sorcery responds to a place-based spirit or illness, or even an experience as such-and-such an event. Although this may be what feels most immediate to the individuals involved, it is a trace of a more fundamental process that has preceded the identification and naming of whatever object of perception. The individual has been presented with a disruptive experience that he could not predict, control or fully understand: A young child fell ill and died, but the father does not know why. He is certain there is an explanation, but he cannot quite grasp it. Why did it happen? There must be a reason for this deeply disturbing event, a reason that refers not to the event’s cause, but rather its significance or meaning. This search for meaning is open to multiple, coexisting levels of interpretation, including causal connections, divine intervention, individual will and various personal and cultural narratives. This search for meaning is a response to the call of the alien.

The Limits of Understanding

247

Call and Response When an individual responds to the alien, this presupposes that an appeal, request, demand or claim has been made of him or her (see Waldenfels 2011:37). This is what Waldenfels means by the “call” of the alien. The call does not necessarily originate in a person or entity. The relevant thing is that the call comes from outside the individual, in the dual sense of being other than the person’s corporeal and non-corporeal sense of self. Hearing a call from the alien occurs independently of an individual’s intention and desire. The call of the alien is not limited to aural and auditory modes of communication, as when we hear a passerby on the street ask us for the time of day. An individual can also perceive that a request or claim is being made of them through concrete means such as a gesture, glance or printed sign, and more nebulous or vague modes such as a feeling, thought or sense of necessity. For example, on the Day of the Dead, people in Kañaris pray for the souls of their deceased relatives, as well as the forgotten dead. Community members have a moral responsibility to help their loved ones reach the afterlife. It is also prudent to take ritual action to move the immaterial parts of the person onto the next world, so that the souls of the dead do not harm the living in this world. For people in Kañaris, the dead continue to make claims on the living. Just as a call from the alien can be perceived through multiple sensorial modes, an individual’s response to it can take many forms. Regardless of the answer or reaction an individual provides, it will have three key characteristics: the response is unavoidable, the response makes the call a fact, and the response produces a certain reality. The response is what is said or done in reaction to the call. It can be as simple as looking or directing one’s attention in a certain way. Even not answering or ignoring the call is a response, for this is what an individual does in reaction to having already heard it. Once an individual hears or otherwise perceives a call, it is impossible not to make a response. I cannot hear the imperative “Listen!” without listening to it. The command “Do not listen to me!” leads to the famous double bind: regardless of how one reacts, one always does it in the wrong way. (Waldenfels 2011:37) Providing a response is inescapable, even if the individual does not know what it should be. The phenomenon of call and response is an “event” in the sense of a situation that an individual does not create, and over which he or she can never have absolute control. It is not something one makes happen, but something that happens to oneself. As an event, the encounter is what the person responds to (Waldenfels 2007:34, 39ff.). For example, when Andrés was thrown to the ground by an unseen force on a mountain road, he was also thrown into a situation which he did not

248

Marieka Sax

expect or intend to happen, and which he could neither avoid nor deny. The cultural setting he grew up in provided him with a template of interpretation for the uncanny and strange event. For people in Kañaris, spiritual entities can have an effect on the bodies of living people, such as an inability to move, suddenly falling to the ground, or hearing, smelling and seeing strange things. Encountering a place-based spirit is a disturbing experience, particularly when the spirit attempts to appropriate something that an individual needs in order to live, such as their sombra or shadow, which is connected to an individual’s vitality and life, and which the souls of the dead and malos espíritus steal out of envy and malicious desire. Andrés did not want to encounter a place-based spirit. By his own admission, he did not even believe they could act to produce an effect in the living until he experienced it himself. Yet once he perceived himself to be addressed by a spiritual entity, he could not escape responding in some way. Ignoring the eerie feeling and walking on, or seeking protection through prayer and pungent cigarette smoke are both reactions to this call of the alien. Regardless of his ambiguous view on the truth or reality of the souls of the dead and malos espíritus, once Andrés had “heard the call” (that is, felt himself to be addressed), he could not avoid responding. As Waldenfels suggests, however, this is not to say the call exists in and of itself. The factualization of a request is not a prerequisite of hearing a call (Waldenfels 2011:37). The call is like the feeling of being watched, which may or may not correspond to the fact of actually being watched, and of which one may or may not be aware. In other words, call and response are inseparably intertwined with each other: “the call only becomes a call in the response which it causes and precedes” (Waldenfels 2011:42; emphasis in the original). This is the case even though the call does not arise from the individual’s intention or desire to hear (and respond to) the appeal or claim. For example, when Hernando’s son became ill with a condition that biomedicine could not cure, the father sought out a second opinion and concluded that his child was afflicted with susto. What is the reality-status of this claim from the perspective of responding to the alien? It does not necessitate accepting the interpretation that the boy was literally attacked by a place-based spirit. But neither does it mean that susto is a psychosomatic cultural syndrome, or that malos espíritus are based on superstition and false belief. Rather, it is to say that the spirit’s claim became one in the father’s eyes only once he began to respond to it. In the process of perceiving the boy’s illness, diagnosing it as susto, and carrying out the actions to restore the child’s health, Hernando organized various pieces of observational and experiential information into a situation that made sense to him, and allowed him to respond in a culturally appropriate way. His son’s illness presented the father with a situation he could not control, and that was alien in that it eluded his grasp. Hernando’s various responses (seeking out a biomedical doctor, visiting a traditional diviner) were motivated by the necessity to establish control and restore order. As long as the response fails to

The Limits of Understanding

249

accomplish this, the call remains indeterminate, alien in a threatening, uncanny sense. When Hernando found the “appropriate” response to his son’s condition, he also identified the call as a call of a particular kind, that is, as “susto.” This determination of the call as a particular demand is distinct from the positive outcome of a successful cure. It refers to the constitution of meaning in experience, an interpretation of an event that provides satisfaction, a sense of orderliness, or, as we say, “closure.”7 This is also to say that the culturally influenced process of hearing and responding to a call from the alien produces a certain reality (see Leistle, Chapter 1 this volume). For example, Hernando carried out the logical steps that a caring and sensible parent in Kañaris does when their child is ill, and this reinforced his implicit understanding of being in a world in which such actions make sense because they correspond to reality. In the medical pluralism of Kañaris, people first try the treatments that are easiest to access and require the least investment of time and money, and progress to more specialized services only when the simpler actions do not resolve the condition. People also consult both traditional healers and biomedical practitioners because they know that each medical tradition specializes in treating different types of illnesses (those attributed to naturalistic or personalistic agents). The first line of defense for an illness is typically home remedies such as herbal teas and rest. If the symptoms worsen or persist, family members try one or more local treatments they hope will be effective, including taking over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, visiting the local medical post, consulting a traditional diviner, and visiting a remediera who does “cleansing with guinea pig.” If none of these methods cures the illness, the cure being indicated by the cessation of symptoms and return to normal life, then family members seek out a reputable sorcerer to perform a healing mesa, or travel to a city to consult a more advanced biomedical specialist. Hernando followed this local logic when he took his son to a doctor for several months of treatment through pharmaceuticals. When he observed the prescribed medicines did not cure his son’s illness, Hernando suspected this was not because biomedicine is false, but that the cause of the condition could only be addressed by traditional medicine. His suspicion was supported by the local diviner, who said Hernando’s son had been attacked by a malo espíritu, and the diviner’s diagnosis was confirmed when the father carried out the prescribed actions to call his son’s sombra back to his body. Hernando’s narrative indicates he came to believe his son’s sombra in fact had been kidnapped by a malo espíritu, because he observed that the ritual actions he performed were followed by the cessation of the boy’s symptoms and return to normal behavior. The father reached this conclusion not because he holds irrational cultural beliefs, but because he systematically carried out the logical steps that tested the possibilities of what caused the boy’s illness. The validity of both Hernando’s received ontological assumptions and the method for testing them were reinforced by his actions. That a malo espíritu was the causative agent in this case was not predetermined

250

Marieka Sax

or inevitable to Hernando, even though this possibility was indeed particular to his cultural setting. Rather, he came to understand that the spiritual entity caused his son’s illness only when he observed the curative treatment to have worked after biomedicine failed. Like most of us, people in Kañaris are pragmatists who by and large just want to resolve their problems and get on with daily life. Hernando’s conclusion is shared by many community members: spiritual entities and traditional medicine are real because the ritual actions work to heal certain illnesses when nothing else does. His cultural horizon provides him with a repertoire of responses to alien demands. The responses that provide a solution to the problem at hand are validated for the context in which they are applied. The case of Andrés and his daughter’s illness is not so clear. Like Hernando, Andrés sought a cure for his child through both biomedicine and traditional healing. Despite the failure of both medical approaches to save his daughter, Andrés came away from the situation with the understanding that doctors and sorcerers can each treat specific kinds of illnesses. Yet his daughter still died, and Andrés does not definitively know why. It is insufficient to say that the family missed exploring the appropriate treatment, or that the practitioners were corrupt or incompetent, or that the girl’s death comes down to uncontrollable factors such as luck or the will of God. Indeed, Andrés’ entire cultural horizon is not enough for him to make sense of the world-shattering event that is the death of his daughter. The father is left with something that he cannot incorporate into his framework of understanding, even after years of reflection. He has been presented with a situation that exceeds the bounds of his knowledge, belief and understanding. Despite Andrés’ statement that he came to believe in sorcery after his daughter’s death, in the end he neither believes nor disbelieves that a place-based spirit caused her illness. Instead of the surety that he knows what has happened, he is left with the impression that he does not have the whole picture, and never will. This ambiguous and indeterminate state of (dis)belief—and not the illness, causal agent or experience per se—is a trace of a radical alienness. The father is forced to acknowledge that there is something about his daughter’s illness and death that he does not understand. For example, Andrés did not say, “My daughter died of susto, and that is why I believe in spirits and sorcery now.” On the contrary, he has come to believe in the ontological basis of sorcery against his conscious will, and he still does not know why his daughter died. Like the gravitational pull of a black hole, the mysterious death of his child has exerted an inexorable force that has drawn Andrés into a relation with alienness. This alien is not an observable and nameable other, such as the malo espíritu in Hernando’s case. Rather, Andrés has been presented with alienness through a pathic experience that precludes the identification of an object of perception or the thematization of an event. He has a general sense of being in relation to alienness, and this feeling is not reducible to

The Limits of Understanding

251

cognition. Andrés can identify and explain parts of the situation, such as the emergent fact of “an illness,” the actions practitioners undertake to bring about “healing,” and the strange entities that may have caused the condition, such as “malos espíritus” or “encantos.” But there is still something about the situation that resists incorporation into any one order of understanding. This is the “surplus of experience” that Waldenfels speaks of with respect to aliennness.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried not to simply use ethnography to illustrate a theory of alienness, but to also use Waldenfels’ theory to elucidate an interpretive problem I observed in Kañaris, when my interlocutors indicated that all the explanations available to them were not enough to account for what had happened to them. I have framed this in terms of place-based spirits and illness partly because these are themes I paid attention to in my research. But spiritual entities are also strategic entry points, because the situations that involve them disclose both empirical and radical otherness. Place-based spirits are indeed strange and foreign to people in Kañaris, for the souls of the dead, malos espíritus, and encantos belong to the mysterious, hidden, non-human world that parallels this one. Nevertheless, encounters with spirits entail the same basic structure of interaction as in exchanges with other people. Both situations necessitate an individual to respond once she finds herself addressed by the Other; the exchange is patterned according to the relevant cultural script, and the ensuing practices reaffirm the place of this type of Other in the individual’s horizon of understanding. However, unlike everyday interactions with other people, the alienness of the Other is not so readily forgettable in encounters with spiritual entities, for the individual is aware of having to respond to a call that comes from elsewhere, beyond the realm of the human (see also Leistle 2014). Nevertheless, the perception of alienness that prompted this process has been domesticated, ordered within the individual’s comprehension and thus sense of ownness. The radical otherness or alienness the individual was at first presented with is circumvented by an empirical other: “a spirit,” “an illness,” “an encounter.” Yet sometimes the local explanations are not enough for an individual to make sense of what has happened to them. Maybe the individual remains unconvinced by the traditional account of place-based spirits and illnesses caused by naturalistic agents. Maybe the scripted responses enacted by the individual have not resulted in the expected outcomes. Or maybe the individual simply cannot integrate everything about their situation into a whole. This alienness remains unnamed, unordered, uncontrolled. The call comes from beyond the reach of the self, and in this foundational sense is alien. It transcends every possible set of rules and system of significations, and in this sense is radical.

252

Marieka Sax

Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was made possible with a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship and Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and funding provided by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. I am grateful to Bernhard Waldenfels and the participants of the “Anthropology and Otherness” conference for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter; to David Sax, Don Swenson, Daniel Tubb and Juan Javier Rivera Andía for providing feedback on later drafts; and to Bernhard Leistle for his editorial patience and perspicacity.

Notes 1 I spent a total of eighteen months over a period of two years living in Kañaris, accompanying community members on their daily tasks, and conversing with whoever would talk with me, without conducting formal interviews or surveys. A Peruvian anthropologist working in the area introduced me to key community members, who in turn presented me to local leaders, residents and farmers. I participated in public festivals and accepted invitations to household events, visited with people in their homes, and helped with agricultural tasks by using hand tools to turn over soil, weed corn, and harvest potatoes. I rented a room from a young family, ate meals alongside their school-aged children, practiced basic Quechua and improved my Spanish, and became closely acquainted with the rhythms of everyday life throughout the year. 2 While there are significant differences between the encantos of Northern Peru and mountain spirits found throughout the Andean cultural area, these differences are not important to the present argument. 3 This song excerpt is loosely based on the Salve Regina, or Hail Holy Queen, a Catholic prayer devoted to Mary, the Mother of Christ. I am grateful to Juan Javier Rivera Andía for the transcription of the Spanish voice recording. 4 In this and similar examples, my interlocutors used the Quechua word pichqa for the phrase I have translated as “little shadow.” Pichqa means “five,” and also refers to the fifth day after a person’s death. The word is associated not simply with the five days of a wake, but also with the person’s sombra. 5 Mesa is the Spanish word for “table.” The pronunciation of Quechua speakers renders it very close to misa, the Spanish word for “mass.” In the Andes, the linguistic connotations and performative actions of a mesa evoke both a ritual table and a religious mass. 6 Aya is the Quechua word for “soul”; this is the term my informant used on this occasion. Alma is the Spanish word for “soul,” and this term was more commonly used by my informants to refer to the immaterial part of the person that travels to another world after death. 7 I am indebted to Bernhard Leistle for this phrasing.

References Allen, Catherine. (1988)2002. The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community (2nd ed.). New York and Washington: Smithsonian Books. Crandon, Libbet. 1983. “Why Susto?” Ethnology 22(2):153–167.

The Limits of Understanding

253

Crandon-Malamud, Libbet. 1991. From the Fat of Our Souls: Social Change, Political Process, and Medical Pluralism in Bolivia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Descola, Phillippe. (2005)2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Foster, George. 1976. “Disease Etiologies in Non-Western Medical Systems.” American Anthropologist 78:773–782. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1975)2004. Truth and Method (2nd ed.). Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London and New York: Continuum. Glass-Coffin, Bonnie. 1998. The Gift of Life: Female Spirituality and Healing in Northern Peru. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Gose, Peter. 1994. Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains: Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an Andean Town. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Joralemon, Donald and Douglas Sharon. 1993. Sorcery and Shamanism: Curanderos and Clients in Northern Peru. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Kleinman, Arthur and Anne Becker. 1998. “‘Sociosomatics’: The Contributions of Anthropology to Psychosomatic Medicine.” Psychosomatic Medicine 60:389–393. Koss-Chioino, Joan, Thomas Leatherman, and Christine Greenway, eds. 2003. Medical Pluralism in the Andes. London: Routledge. Leistle, Bernhard. 2014. “From the Alien to the Other. Steps toward a Phenomenological Theory of Spirit Possession.” Anthropology of Consciousness 25(1):53–90. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945)2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. Orta, Andrew. 2004. Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the “New Evangelization”. New York: Columbia University Press. Polia Meconi, Mario. 1996. “Despierta, Remedio, Cuenta. . .”: Adivinos y Médicos Del Ande (2 volumes). Lima: Fondo Editorial del Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Sharon, Douglas. 1978. Wizard of the Four Winds: A Shaman’s Story. New York: Free Press. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2007. The Question of the Other. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Translated by Tanja Stähler and Alexander Kozin. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

12 “The Order of the World” A Responsive Phenomenology of Schreber’s Memoirs Bernhard Leistle

In this chapter I propose a new interpretation of one of the most fascinating, yet also most inaccessible texts of the twentieth century, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, translated into English as “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.” Drawing on Bernhard Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology, I read Schreber’s text as a performative effort to create order in his experience through responding to alien forces that threaten to overwhelm and destroy him. Schreber’s responding takes place on several levels, correlating with a variety of ordering processes: the psychological, the social-historical and the epistemological-ontological. The concept of a responsivity to the alien allows us to treat these levels as intertwined and, consequently, to address Schreber’s text as a whole, creating a unity between its heterogeneous elements.

The Case of Schreber Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911) is quite possibly the most famous psychiatric patient of all time. The major figures of twentieth-century psychiatry have all used Schreber’s case as supportive evidence for their respective approaches to psychic abnormality. Interestingly, Schreber even gained prominence beyond psychiatric circles: the writer Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981, devoted a long essay at the end of his book Crowds and Power ([1960] 1973) to Schreber, thereby making a larger audience acquainted with his case. After Canetti, the interest in Schreber proliferated and numerous attempts at interpretation were published by scholars of the most varied preoccupations. Schreber was even used as evidence in the anti-psychiatry movement, being cited, for example, in Deleuze and Guattari’s classic manifesto, Anti-Oedipus. The fascination with Schreber has to do partially with his personal and social background.1 He was born in 1842 into an illustrious Leipzig family. His father, Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, was a renowned medical and educational reformer.2 He published pedagogical literature in which he stressed the importance of bodily activity and discipline for the development of mind and personality. 3 Some of his writings, like the

“The Order of the World”

255

Zimmergymnastik (lit. “Indoor Gymnastics”) became bestsellers and he ran an orthopedic clinic for the treatment of children with spine deformations. After the death of Moritz, “Schreber” became a household name in Germany as the little plots of recreational land in urban areas came to be called “Schreber-Gärten.”4 Having completed his law studies in 1863 and his doctorate in 1869, Daniel Paul Schreber embarked on a distinguished legal career as judge. After appointments to several provincial courts, Schreber served from 1879 to 1884 as Landgerichtsdirektor (administrative director) of the District Court in Chemniz. He also ran, on the ticket of the National Liberal Party, for a seat in the German parliament, the Reichtstag, in October 1884 but was defeated in Chemnitz by a popular socialist candidate. Shortly after this defeat, at the beginning of November 1884, Schreber suffered a first breakdown, which was diagnosed as “hypochondriasis” by the head of the Psychiatric Hospital of Leipzig University, Paul Emil Flechsig (1847–1929). He was released as cured from the hospital in June 1885, and after a period of convalescence at Ilmenau spa, returned to work in January 1886. The following seven years marked the apex of Schreber’s career, with appointments to more and more important courts, culminating in his nomination as Senatspräsident in Dresden, presiding judge over a panel of five judges at the Supreme Court of Appeals of the Kingdom of Saxony. But shortly after he took up office in October 1893, Schreber fell ill again and spent the next nine years of his life in custody. At first he was again treated by Flechsig in Leipzig, but when Flechig’s neurological approach to treatment failed to produce the desired results, Schreber was moved in June 1894 for a short stay to the asylum of Dr. Pierson near Coswig and finally to the Royal Public Asylum at Sonnenstein. Based on reports by the director of the Sonnenstein Asylum, Dr. Guido Weber (1837–1914), Schreber was declared legally incompetent in November 1894. From 1897 on, Schreber worked on an autobiographical account of his illness; he also expressed the wish to be released from Sonnenstein, arguing that he was kept there against his will and without juridical basis. From 1899 on, he fought his tutelage in court, first relying on a lawyer, later arguing his own case when appeals on lower levels proved to be unsuccessful. In July 1902, he managed to rescind his tutelage by verdict of the Oberlandesgericht in Dresden and was released in December of the same year to live with his wife. He had married Ottilie Sabine Behr in 1878, but the marriage had remained childless, a fact that Schreber lamented repeatedly. After his release from the asylum, Schreber consented to adopt a fourteenyear-old girl, Fridoline, with whom he had a good relationship. In the following years while unable to resume work as a judge or lawyer, Schreber handled the legal affairs of his family very competently, overall living an inconspicuous life without severe health troubles. In November 1907, however, after his wife suffered a stroke Schreber relapsed and was admitted to the newly opened Leipzig-Dösen Asylum where he remained until his death from cardio-pulmonary complications on April 11, 1911.

256

Bernhard Leistle

How Does One Read Schreber? His book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken), published in 1903, made its author famous, but not in the way in which literary products typically do, through their literary style and/or narrative originality. Although aesthetic qualities are not completely absent in the Memoirs,5 what fascinated early readers most about the book was the singular relation between author and text, how language became a symptomatic expression of the psychological state of the individual using it. To this day, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs remain a, perhaps the paradigmatic linguistic expression of psychotic experience. What made Schreber’s account so singular was that, unlike the vast majority of autobiographical descriptions of mental illness, it was not written in retrospect, that is, after a complete remission of symptoms, or even a cure, had occurred. While his condition had improved significantly from the stupor he was caught in at the onset of crisis, at the time of writing Schreber still experienced the full spectrum of psychotic symptoms, including hallucination and delusion. And unlike today’s psychiatric patients, Schreber’s mind was not numbed by psychopharmaceutic medication, nor was his experience or language structured by psychoanalytic or other forms of talk therapy. In other words: the Memoirs present the author’s attempt to describe psychosis from within; in them, madness tries to make sense of itself. Reading the text means to be immediately confronted with its alienness: it invites a plethora of interpretations, seems to contain a virtual infinity of references to psychological and external realities, only to contradict these references in other passages, destroying the outline of any coherent order the reader has painstakingly started to build. This elusiveness to interpretation only communicates itself fully when reading the Memoirs themselves; Freud in his equally famous psychoanalytic case study (the only one he ever wrote about a case of psychosis) explicitly advised his readers to seek out the text itself and judge his own interpretation on the basis of the material on which it was built (Freud 1958:11). Every interpretative treatment of Schreber’s text thus faces the problem of how to communicate the very specific quality of the Memoirs. There is no substitute to reading the text itself, but a passage like the following provides the reader at least with an idea of its uniqueness. In it, Schreber discusses his relationship to God, his feeling of being persecuted by Him, and why any divine attempt to annihilate him must ultimately fail: [But] Success could not be permanent, because God brought himself into conflict with the Order of the World, that is to say into conflict with His own being and his own powers. . . . Consequently, as I firmly believe, this irregular state of affairs will be finally liquidated at my death at the latest. In the meantime I find immense consolation and encouragement in the knowledge that God’s hostile opposition to me continues to lose

“The Order of the World”

257

in virulence and the struggle against me becomes increasingly conciliatory, perhaps finally to end in complete solidarity. This . . . is the natural sequel of the steadily increasing soul-voluptuousness of my body. Soulvoluptuousness lessens the antipathy to being attracted; this is because one regains in my body after a short interval, that which had to be relinquished owing to the attraction: namely the state of Blessedness or soul-voluptuousness, in other words complete well-being of the nerves condemned to find their ends in my body. This also shortens the periodicity of drawing nearer and appears to me to allow God to recognize at ever shorter intervals that “forsaking me,” “destruction of my reason,” etc. must come to nothing; therefore eventually it is only a question of making life as bearable as possible for both parties in the emergency which has arisen because of attraction. . . . The whole development therefore appears as a glorious triumph for the Order of the World, in which I think I can ascribe to myself a modest part. If anywhere, then the beautiful sentence applies to the Order of the World, that all legitimate interests are in harmony. (Schreber 1955:251–252) This passage finds itself at the end of a series of postscripts which Schreber added to the Memoirs proper for the purpose of further elaborating on themes he found important.6 It contains important aspects of what I refer to as Schreber’s cosmology: his concept of an encompassing order in the context of which God and Schreber himself are reciprocally related. In this essay, I will attempt to read the Memoirs from the perspective of a responsive phenomenology in the sense of Bernhard Waldenfels: as a performative effort to create a viable discursive and experiential order which enables the self to engage in reliable forms of communication, with itself, with others and with the world in an encompassing sense. The constitution of such orders takes place as a process of responding to demands that originate outside of the realm of the constituted order and are in this sense alien to it. My reading will discover traces of this responsivity to alienness on several levels of the text, thereby proposing a reading that is related to yet distinctive from other attempts of making sense of Schreber.7

Alienness and Responsivity Every interpretation is an attempt to find order in the material subjected to it. Interpreting is to establish coherence, discover themes and relations. As text, Schreber’s Memoirs elude this effort, their meaning escapes our grasp, they show us at the limits of our ability to make sense. According to contemporary phenomenological philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Bernhard Waldenfels, this resistance and withdrawal from the order of sense are key features of the phenomenon of the radical Other, or alien. While other interpretive objects might allow us to eschew the “question of the Other,”

258

Bernhard Leistle

which has recently become so prominent in philosophical discourse, the Memoirs affords us no such laxity. Virtually every commenter confesses at some point that their efforts do not capture the thing itself, that they somehow fall short of their goal, that the text eludes them.8 Most instructive in this regard is Freud’s response to the Memoirs: he does not so much doubt his interpretive powers but feels challenged by the text on the more profound level of his identity as master-theorist of the human mind. After noting an undeniable resemblance between Schreber’s notion of divine rays attracted by his body and Freud’s own theory of paranoia as withdrawal of libido from the world, he feels compelled to defend himself against the accusation of plagiarism: I can nevertheless call a friend and fellow-specialist to witness that I had developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents of Schreber’s book. It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe. (Freud 1958:79) There is clearly something about Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness that involves its readers in a play of forces of attraction and repulsion, suspends them between the demand to make sense and the inability to do so satisfactorily. In other words, as readers of Schreber’s text we are confronted with what the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels has called a demand of the alien to which we are compelled to respond (See Introduction and Chapter 1, this volume). For Waldenfels (1996, 1997, 2007, 2011), the phenomenon of the alien is inseparably connected with the phenomenon of order. The alien is defined as the “extra-ordinary,” as that which withdraws from the order by being excluded from it. Inclusion and exclusion, however, are two aspects of one and the same process of ordering. The phenomenon of order consists in the establishment of non-arbitrary, in this sense meaningful, relations between things. What becomes part of such an arrangement is included in the respective order and makes sense in terms of it. No order, however, can be all-encompassing; the validity of every order is claimed from somewhere, from a particular place and time, from a standpoint. In phenomenology the most fundamental order is that of perceptual experience. The validity of the order of perception, that is, perceptual reality, is claimed from the standpoint of the body. As Merleau-Ponty and others have shown, the body endows the perceiving subject with a perspective on the world from which things appear as meaningfully related to each other. The sentient body is the null point, what the linguist Karl Bühler called the origo, of the order of perception. Things appear in experience as something, in a sense related to the coordinates of one’s own body: “left,” “right,” “front,” “back,” “up,”

“The Order of the World”

259

“down,” “under,” “on top of,” etc. But Waldenfels points out that there is an irreducible flipside to this becoming present in experience, a becoming absent of what does not fall under the order of the perceptual field: “That something appears as something means at the same time that something appears in this way and not in another, that certain possibilities of experience are thus selected while others are excluded” (Waldenfels 1997:19–20, my translation). The body is always related to the world in a particular orientation, thereby excluding other orientations while remaining related to them. Orders are therefore necessarily partial, they exist only in the plural; the idea of one order, absolute and total, is a fantasy. These other orientations and possibilities, which are excluded by the order presently established, don’t simply cease to exist; rather, they disrupt the order as what is alien to it. The alien appears in experience as a challenge and an intrusion, as that which disturbs, surprises, fascinates, attracts, overwhelms, as that which questions us and to which we don’t have a readymade answer. The alien, says Waldenfels, is what we respond to. Responding is the relationship in which the Other retains its otherness, in which the alien remains alien. To what we respond is already in the past, and the answer we give is always a delayed response. Responding means that we can never control the exchange in which we are always already involved. Before we can answer, we are called; before we listen we have already heard; before we direct our gaze to a thing it has been attracted by something. Before we find sense and construct meaning, something has happened to us. In Waldenfels, experience is phenomenologically re-interpreted in terms of pathos, defined as an event that happens to someone: The antecedent pathos and the deferred response have to be thought of together, but only across a gap which cannot be closed and thus requires a creative response. Happenings not only lead us to think, they also force us to think. The gap in question is constitutive for the event as much as perspective is constitutive for perception; . . . The spirit of pathos is, in Pascal’s words, a “limping spirit,” or, more moderately, a delayed spirit. For this reason, we initially do not encounter pathos as something which we mean, understand, judge, reject, or affirm; rather it forms the timeplace from which we do all this by responding to it. Everything which happens to me and to which I respond does not have a sense as such and does not obey a rule. (Waldenfels 2011:31) In pathic phenomena like pain and trauma, birth and death, alienness makes itself felt in experience. In themselves, these pathic experiences have no sense; they appear precisely by defying our powers of comprehension, by escaping our control, by alienating us from ourselves. It is in responding to them that we endow them with meaning, that we create experiential orders of which they then become part as something that can be named, addressed, referred

260

Bernhard Leistle

to. The diagnosed illness, the objectified pain, the identified demon is not the alien itself but the products of a response to pathos (see Leistle 2014). What we can claim as our self and our own fundamentally results from a continuous process of responding to alien demands. This includes the more mundane, everyday aspects of our existence where we are more inclined to gloss over and sometimes repress our relationship to alienness and the vulnerability that comes with it. From the first moment of our lives on we develop our personal identities by responding to others who give us the names by which they call us and to which we listen. The language in which this exchange of demand and response takes place is not of our making but carries the voices of others, predecessors and contemporaries. We are not able to control the implications of what we are saying, nor the event of saying itself. The performance of speech always and necessarily transcends its content, something always escapes the order of communication. The sphere of the alien is ubiquitous, omnipresent, but in the mode of a withdrawal from the order, as present absence. Responding is not contained within any order. No set of rules of regulations, whether communicative or experiential can determine our responses once and for all. Responding is creative in the sense that we invent the response we give, that the alien as the alien does not dictate what we say or do when something happens to us. But for the same reason, responding is also never completely free, since it is performed in relation to something which it can never capture, never grasp, never completely make its own. Responding opens a genuine in-between sphere without which there would be no change and no innovation in human life, just the infinite reconstitution of the same orders. Waldenfels defines existence as responsivity, characterizes the human being as responsive on all levels of existence, from the organic—physiological to the social—cultural. Even social collectives and civilizations can be approached from the perspective of orders that originate, maintain and transform themselves in responding to an alien that they cannot encompass and that keeps placing demands on them. These various levels and movements of responding intertwine in the human individual. Conceived in terms of responsivity, the individual, as it actually exists in the concrete historical life-world, can never be a clean slate. From the moment of birth on, it responds to the surrounding world through the intentionality of the body but also in terms of a specific language of behavior, gestures and words. In other words, the individual lives in a cultural world, structured by specific orders of meaning. On the one hand, these cultural orders endow the individual with a “responsive repertoire,” pre-formulated modes of responding which are collectively accepted and positively sanctioned. Through socialization the individual is invited (or forced, depending on one’s perspective) to acquire these standardized responses and to constitute a self that is functioning in the world defined by those same responses. What sounds like a nice and unproblematic feedback loop is, however, itself subject to the interplay

“The Order of the World”

261

between demand and response, and therefore open to alien forces. The individual self acquires its responsive repertoire only through responding itself; this means, from the perspective of the self as order, the cultural rules and norms appear in form of demands and thus bear an irreducible aspect of alienness. While necessarily culturally informed and historically relative on the one hand, the self is on the other hand never completely at home in its culture. Social and cultural orders have the power of alienating the self, in the very same instant in which they provide the self with the means of self-constitution. In the specific case of Schreber, the responsive repertoire he was exposed to and forced to draw on can in very general terms be referred to as “Western Modernity” (see for example Santner 1996). In this repertoire, as in every cultural-historical formation, is manifested a style of responding to alienness. The “style of modernity” has frequently been described in terms of an attempt to appropriate the alien without residue (see also the chapters by Mire and DiNovelli-Lang in this volume). Waldenfels sees this process of appropriation taking place in form of various “centrisms”: an egocentrism, that sees in the other nothing more than a double of the self; an ethnocentrism, which is unable or unwilling to regard one’s own group and culture as one among others; and a logocentrism, which conceptually reduces the alien to the common (Waldenfels 2007:14–15). Presently, however, Waldenfels sees this process of appropriation as reaching a “dead-end”: Egocentrism has been increasingly undermined by a decentering of the individual and the collective ego. I shall never be able to say in a complete way what or who I am. There are always voices behind me of which I cannot take possession. The place from which I speak is always displaced; I am here and elsewhere, and that means there is no simple centre of speech. Similar things could be said about any attempt to feel completely at home in one’s own tribe or nation. Recent forms of tribalism and nationalism are, at best, to be interpreted as filling up a vacuum of sense or as an inappropriate reaction against various forms of overuniversalism. With regard to the process of logocentrism, according to Foucault and others we are confronted with a dispersion of reason. Reason is dissipated into rationalities, into forms and into worlds of life, which are not subject to one and the same standard and paradigm. There are heterogeneous and incompatible orders which cannot be realised simultaneously. (Waldenfels 2007:15) I suggest that Schreber’s text, besides being a testimony of a radical alienness that overwhelms the personal self, also provides testimony to a cultural and epistemological crisis of responsivity. In this point, my interpretation meets with those of others, in particular Santner, but, unlike them, does not sacrifice the personal-psychological to the contextual-cultural, or vice versa.

262

Bernhard Leistle

The Memoirs as Creative Response and Order The concept of responsivity has profound implications for the anthropological and psychiatric understanding of mental illness, which cannot be treated here in the detail they deserve. In the most general terms, illness in all its organic and psychogenic forms can be characterized in terms of disturbances of the capacity to respond (see also Fuchs, this volume). What expresses itself in psychiatric symptoms is the inability to respond in intersubjectively shared terms to what befalls the person. The patient’s responses fail to produce a stable and coherent order which would enable him or her to make experiential sense of their environment and to function in it in accordance to socially sanctioned norms and regulations. Different psychiatric labels would become describable as specific modes of a disturbed responsivity. In the experiential style that is commonly referred to as “schizophrenic” and for which Schreber’s text became illustrative, for example, we would be confronted with a “dis-ordered” experience, a communication with the world in which the self is not able to create boundaries between inside and outside, incapable of the processes of selection, inclusion and exclusion that are at the basis of any order. Such a self would be unable to separate a sphere of ownness from a sphere of alienness; it would be continuously besieged and permeated by alien forces. The voices that Schreber and other psychotic patients hear can then be understood as an expression of this permeability. Promising as this approach may be for psychiatric interpretation, from a perspective of a responsive phenomenology it must be remembered that alien demand and response are separate from each other, that the response lags behind, as Waldenfels says. In other words: the voices, spirits and phantoms of psychotic experience are not the alien itself; they are responses to this alien—efforts to transform pathos into order, to make sense of what happens to us. In this sense, dis-ordered as they might seem to us, psychotic symptoms are on the side of order, or, more precisely, a desperate effort to establish order. Psychiatry acknowledges this when it speaks of a “delusional system” that emerges after a temporary stage characterized by an atmosphere of uncanniness and indeterminacy. Interestingly, Freud seems to approach a reading of symptoms in terms of responsivity when he characterizes “paranoia” as a withdrawal of libido: The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; his subjective world has come to an end since his withdrawal from it . . . And the paranoiac builds it again, not more splendid, it is true, but at least so that he can once more live in it. He builds it up by the work of his delusions. The delusional formation, which we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction. (Freud 1958:70–71) If this can be said to be true for psychiatric symptoms in general, all the more it must apply to a text like the Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. Here we are

“The Order of the World”

263

clearly confronted with an effort to create order which bears witness to its own responsivity. While it might be justifiable to speak of an interlocutory collapse in the sense of Crapanzano (1998), there are undeniably ways in which the text succeeds in appealing to a Third, defined as consisting of the conventional rules of communication. The text is composed of grammatically and syntactically well-formed sentences, its vocabulary is that of Standard German, and where it deviates from this usage, Schreber marks this deviation through such accepted procedures as definition of terms. The Memoirs follow the conventions of academic writing: secondary literature is named and cited, additional information and references within the text are provided in the form of footnotes. Even the contents of the book as a whole are presented in a recognizably ordered form, for the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness are divided into three parts: the Memoirs proper, which contain the autobiographical account of Schreber’s illness; descriptions of the development of his condition; of the various clinics and asylums in which he stayed; and, in particular, of his subjective illness-experience. In all of this, an effort at ordering is unmistakeably present: Schreber dates new developments, for example, the emergence of new types of “hallucinations” (he rejects the term on grounds to be discussed later), or a move to a new asylum, as precisely as he can. He provides plans of the layouts of facilities, locates the rooms in which he stayed. In other words: he struggles to connect his experiences to an intersubjectively shared spatio-temporal order in the context of which they might disclose their meaning. His illness expresses itself in his incapacity to do so in a satisfactory manner; the possibility of a cure is preserved in his recognition of the importance of such positioning. The Memoirs proper, approximately 200 pages long and written in 1899– 1900 based on notes he began taking in 1897, make up the bulk of the text. They are subdivided into twenty-two chapters, which are, however loosely, devoted to specific topics referred to in corresponding headings. This text-body is followed by two types of addenda. The first of these are two series of postscripts containing elaborations and clarifications on topics which Schreber feels have not been sufficiently dealt with in the preceding Memoirs (their titles refer mostly to key notions or problems of the autobiographical text, e.g., “Miracles,” “Play-with-human-beings,” or “Hallucinations”). These postscripts are about fifty pages in total. They are followed by an appended essay by Schreber in which he contests his hospitalization on legal grounds and finally by approximately 100 pages of various texts from the court case at the end of which Schreber’s legal incompetency was rescinded and he was released from the Sonnenstein Asylum. Although Schreber separates his essay from the court texts, due to their affinity in style and content, I will treat them together as the third part of the book. In the remainder of this essay I will show how the different, heterogeneous parts of the Memoirs can be read as emerging from different levels of responsivity, and how their inclusion in the book has to be understood as Schreber’s

264

Bernhard Leistle

attempt to widen his responsive repertoire, to regain his ability to delineate a sphere of ownness. The various elements of the book, Memoirs proper, postscripts, medical/legal texts can be loosely related to the several domains in which his struggle for meaning takes place, the embodied self, the social order, the order of reason and rationality. Unlike the other approaches mentioned, I argue that the phenomenological concepts of responsivity and alienness as developed by Waldenfels allow for an interpretation of the whole text as one movement of responding, showing Schreber as a responsive being who fights courageously against an alien which continuously threatens to overwhelm and annihilate him.

Schreber’s Cosmology and “the Order of the World” It is not only the structure of the Memoirs where Schreber’s effort to “make order” and to communicate with others is clearly discernible. Quite to the contrary, his intention to make himself understood is at the center of the project of the Memoirs, as he describes their purpose on the first page of the Memoirs proper: I have decided to apply for my release from the Asylum in the near future in order to live once again among civilised people and at home with my wife. It is therefore necessary to give those persons who will then constitute the circle of my acquaintances, an approximate idea at least of my religious conceptions, so that they may have some understanding of the necessity which forces me to various oddities of behaviour, even if they do not fully understand these apparent oddities. (Schreber 1955:41) Religion is in the center of Schreber’s text; his vision has cosmological dimensions. It is important to sketch the outlines of that vision, all the while keeping in mind that the order suggested in this outline fails to stabilize. Schreber believed himself to be in direct contact with God through the so-called “rays” which embodied God’s creative powers. Men participate in God’s essence through their souls, which were themselves composed of “nerves.” After they die, human souls separate from their decaying bodies, and go to heaven. Due to their life on earth, the departed souls are tarnished and have to be purified until they can become part of God’s essence by being transformed into “rays.” Divine rays are pure, they do not have any memory, or identity; except for self-preservation they do not have any motivations or interests comparable to those of humans. They are indifferent towards the particularities of human existence and don’t care about the suffering of individuals. Consequently, neither does God; in the process of purification, God absorbs all the experiences of human souls, becoming in this sense omniscient. This, however, doesn’t mean that God’s knowledge or wisdom is all-encompassing: He only has access to the knowledge of dead people, the experiences of living human beings elude Him.

“The Order of the World”

265

This cosmological system, which Schreber calls “the Order of the World” has, however, been disrupted. The rupture consisted in the successful manipulation of God by a handful of impure souls which somehow had—Schreber is not sure how they were able to achieve this, only that they must have managed to—mixed themselves into God’s rays. Due to this mixing it is not clear anymore whether a specific sample of God’s rays are pure, or whether they are putrefied and in reality the agents of human souls. These souls— Schreber somewhat paradoxically calls them “tested souls” because they have not yet undergone heavenly purification—harbor evil intent against Schreber and appear as voices in his head. The voices are under the command of Professor Flechsig, his former doctor and one-time healer. At the climax of the crisis, Schreber simultaneously hears the voices of hundreds of people, even groups of people like a whole student fraternity, or “240 Benedictine monks.” All of them appear vaguely connected to the soul of Flechsig, who seems to direct them but is himself fragmented into up to “40 different Flechsigs.” Schreber feels that his existence is dependent on his ability to attract divine rays onto and into his body and soul. The voices try to portray Schreber to God as demented. Should they be successful in their attempt, Schreber’s soul would lose its attractiveness to the rays and God would abandon him for dead, withdrawing his rays altogether and leaving his body for others to fulfill their sexual desires on him. Schreber fights this process, which he refers to as “soul-murder,” heroically and spends all his energy towards demonstrating to God that he’s not demented. As long as he succeeds in this he continues to be attractive to the rays, pure ones as well as impure ones. The more “nervous” he gets, the more attractive he becomes; the effect of this attraction, which he calls his “soul-voluptousness” (Seelenwollust) is the transformation of his body into that of a woman. Schreber is convinced that this process is already underway and at certain points in the course of his illness he feels rudimentary female genitalia and even a moving embryo at an early stage of pregnancy. This transformation is in Schreber’s view nothing less than the rebirth of humanity out of his own body. Regeneration has become necessary since due to the crisis of the world order caused by the mixing of human and divine souls, human beings are not able to attain a state of bliss anymore and are therefore doomed to perish. In Schreber’s experience, this apocalypse has already happened: for years he is convinced that the individuals in his surroundings are not real people but “fleetingly improvised men” (fluechtig hingemachte Maenner) who serve the purpose of confusing him about the actual state of the world. Even when brought into an artificial order, these ideas seem bizarre, warranting characterization as a delusional system; and, of course, I don’t have any intention of portraying Schreber as analytical, a rational thinker, or even a religious prophet. I am pointing out, however, that Schreber is expressly concerned with the phenomenon of order and attributes causality to his condition in terms of what he calls “the Order of the World.” To be precise,

266

Bernhard Leistle

his nervous illness in all its absurd manifestations, is presented as a violation of and deviation from this order. Returning to the long quote at the beginning of this essay, we see that Schreber regards even God’s own behavior, the persecution of Schreber, first as violating the Order of the World, but ultimately as subjected to it: “success could not be permanent, because God brought himself into conflict with the Order of the World, that is to say into conflict with His own being and His own powers. ” In his struggle with God, Schreber appeals to an order which is so encompassing that it can include even an all-powerful being and regulate its behavior. In the end, no matter how chaotic and wondrous things might seem temporarily, how much Schreber is made to suffer, this order must restore itself and assign its place to everything—God, human being, animal, inanimate object:9 “The whole development . . . appears as a glorious triumph for the Order of the World, in which I think I can ascribe to myself a modest part. If anywhere, then the beautiful sentence applies to the Order of the World, that all legitimate interests are in harmony.” The “development” Schreber refers to here is the gradual improvement of his condition, which had become undeniable by the time of writing, at the end of his confinement at Sonnenstein, in late 1902. In other words, Schreber presents his illness and its symptoms in terms of a deviation, their remission in terms of a conforming to the “Order of the World.” The process of regaining his health is described as a process of reconciliation, a re-entry of Schreber into the order. This can be illustrated by the often-cited belief of Schreber’s that he is transformed into a woman. At the beginning stages of his illness, he describes how he experienced the impending transformation as a threat and fought it valiantly to defend his notion of male honor and dignity. Later, however, when talking about the “miracles” effected by God in Schreber’s body, he refers to the “process of unmanning” as “most nearly in consonance with the Order of the World” (Schreber 1955:132). And finally, Schreber comes to accept his feminization as necessary development: But now I could see beyond doubt that the Order of the World imperiously demanded my unmanning whether I personally liked it or not, and that therefore it was common sense that nothing was left to me but reconcile myself to the thought of being transformed into a woman. . . . Since then I have wholeheartedly inscribed the cultivation of femininity on my banner, and I will continue to do so as far as consideration for my environment allows, whatever other people who are ignorant of the supernatural reasons might think of me. (Schreber 1955:148–149) But, as Schreber readily admits, he doesn’t live in the same world as other human beings who know nothing about his struggle with God and “are ignorant of the supernatural reasons” for his behavior. Often he is not quite sure whether his reflective turn on his own experience, expressed in his

“The Order of the World”

267

writing is actually mirroring reality or is just a mirage. His own experience escapes him, the order he attempts to create fails to stabilize. Schreber exhibits an awareness of his inability to become “master in his own house”10 when he professes to the limitations of his own powers of expression and of human language in general: I cannot of course count upon being fully understood because things are dealt with which cannot be expressed in human language; they exceed human understanding. Nor can I maintain that everything is irrefutably certain even for me: much remains only presumption and probability. . . . To make myself at least somewhat comprehensible I shall have to speak much in images and similes, which may at times perhaps be only approximately correct; for the only way a human being can make supernatural matters, which in their essence must always remain incomprehensible, understandable to a certain degree is by comparing them with known facts of human experience. (Schreber 1955:41) “At times perhaps only approximately”—a whole series of relativizing adjectives signifies Schreber’s uncertainty regarding the order created by his text. At the same time, and dialectically related to his uncertainty, Schreber claims the existence of an “Order of the World” to which even God is subjected. He cannot demonstrate order through his text, so he implores it, he appeals to it. The “Order of the World” is the authority that embodies his hope for being healed from his affliction.

Various Levels of Responding: Self, Society, Reason If we regard the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness as one responsive effort carried out by an existence overwhelmed by uncontrollable pathos and alienness, we still have to demonstrate how this responsivity plays out in detail. Experience, we have said before, can be understood as an ordering process that takes place on multiple, overlapping and interlocking levels. Since orders emerge out of creative responses to an extra-ordinary alien, such levels of ordering can simultaneously be understood as levels of responding. While the possible number of such levels is theoretically infinite, for practical reasons it makes sense to distinguish three main types of responsive ordering: the order of the bodily self, i.e., the ways in which the sentient body responds to the environment; the order of sociality, in the sense of the ways in which an embodied self responds to a historically constituted, cultural world; the order of logos, here meaning the ways in which the self relates to a world governed by “reason.”11 As responsive beings, humans respond to an alien demand on all these levels, creating their world in the process. Before discussing responsivity in Schreber’s Memoirs in these terms, it needs to be stressed that the different

268

Bernhard Leistle

levels of responsivity can be separated as little from each other as can the different senses within perceptual experience. Just as the senses communicate with and translate themselves into each other within the unity of the body (see Merleau-Ponty 2012:230ff.), so the various levels of responding overlap and intertwine within the context of a selfhood which they simultaneously constitute. Schreber’s bodily responses to a physical world are thus inevitably permeated by a cultural responsivity and pose questions of an epistemological and ontological nature. These different dimensions are, however, accentuated in varying degrees in specific sections of the Memoirs. The Order of the Embodied Self: Body-Hallucinations and “Voices” By devoting a separate chapter (XI) to the topic of “bodily integrity damaged by miracles,” Schreber indirectly confirms phenomenology’s insistence on the foundational character of bodily experience. He regards the strange transformations occurring with his body as incontrovertible proof for the reality of what happens to him. In a footnote, he asks explicitly: “What can be more definite for a human being than what he has lived through and felt on his own body?” (Schreber 1955:132). And what he lived through with his own body truly deserves the attribute “miraculous”: organs disappear and reappear, several times he is forced to eat without a stomach, understandably making a terrible mess at the table; at other times, he eats his larynx; he feels foreign objects inside his body, like a “lung-worm” which causes a biting pain in his lungs; his body shrinks; his chest feels compressed by an inexplicable pressure; his eyelids are being opened and closed without his contribution by little men; his skeleton is affected by caries, et cetera. What expresses itself in all of these phenomena is an inability to demarcate an inside-sphere of ownness from an outside-sphere of otherness; the self remains without stable boundaries, thus permeable for all kinds of infringements. Being “here” and “now,” in effect, spatiotemporal orientation, has become impossible; he is unable to adopt a stable perspective towards the world. His own body is under the control of alien forces. Again, Schreber appears to possess some kind of awareness of what is going on with him: Altogether I was not allowed to remain for long in one and the same position or at the same occupation: when I was walking one attempted to force me to lie down, and when I was lying down one wanted to chase me off my bed. Rays did not seem to appreciate at all that a human being who actually exists must be somewhere. (Schreber 1955:139) This compulsive restlessness, based on an inability to situate himself, is also characteristic for Schreber’s relationship to the voices he hears. These voices, sometimes hundreds of them, continuously force Schreber to answer to their

“The Order of the World”

269

questions. This “compulsion to think,” as Schreber calls it, can manifest itself in direct questions as to the content of this thoughts; but it can also take a more taunting character, for example, when the voices challenge him: “Why don’t you say it (aloud)?”, providing themselves the answer: “Because I am stupid, perhaps.” (Schreber 1955:121). The compulsion to think is aggravated by what Schreber refers to as the “writing-down-system”: the voices keep Schreber’s mind in a state of restless excitation by incessantly demanding new ideas and thoughts from him. When he thinks about routine events or actions, like washing himself or eating, or when a conventional idea comes to his mind such as “that piano passage was beautiful,” the voices would proclaim: “‘we have already got this’, scil. written down; in a manner hard to describe the rays were thereby made unreceptive to the power of attraction of such a thought.” (Schreber 1955:122) And, as noted before, Schreber was dependent for his healing on his ability to attract divine rays: if God was regarding Schreber as demented he would withdraw from him permanently, leaving him for dead. The responsivity of Schreber’s compulsion should be obvious already, but, as is often the case in the Memoirs, comes uncannily close to the threshold of explicit thematization in another feature of the “nerve-language”—its elliptical character: From the beginning the system of not-finishing-a-sentence prevailed, that is to say the vibrations caused in my nerves and the words so produced contain not only finished thoughts, but unfinished ideas, which my nerves have to supplement to make up the sense. It is in the nature of nerves that if unconnected words or started phrases are thrown into them, they automatically attempt to complete them to finished thoughts satisfactory to the human mind. (Schreber 1955:172) The voices begin a sentence, leave it unfinished and Schreber has to complete it. He is literally bombarded by alien demands to which he has to respond. But the completion of the sentence brings no relief; the answer is already inscribed into the question, almost as if Schreber’s mind were the software of a computer that can only give programmed answers. His responses are not creative; they fail to produce the orders that so effortlessly emerge in the experiential process of the “healthy” person. In a way, Schreber’s account of his compulsive thinking thus contains a diagnosis of his illness in responsive terms: he is unable to produce an answer that is not already contained in the question; he is unable to create new orders, to break through the given into the new. Like a hamster in a wheel, he is caught in an ever-repeating circular movement, in a “system” whose only purpose is its own preservation. He is forced to respond but the answer doesn’t get him anywhere; his “compulsion-to-think” presents itself as a meditation on this disturbed responsivity.

270

Bernhard Leistle

The Order of Sociality: Asylum and Psychiatric Discourse It might seem questionable that Schreber’s voices are listed here among the sensory phenomena, since much of his experience is presented to him in the mode of hearing voices. This possible objection refers to the previously mentioned intertwining of different modes of responding within human existence. While it is true that the content of what the voices are saying bears reference to the social and historical context of Schreber’s life, I have discussed the voices as a mode of sensory communication. The foregoing reflections on the characteristics of that communication, compulsion-to-think, finishing-the-sentences, et cetera, referred to the form in which the world and its objects, including Schreber’s own thinking are presented to him. I regard this form to be a structural aspect of his perceptual experience;12 what appears to him in this manner is in multiple ways related to a concrete historical situation, a social and cultural context. It is, however, fundamentally important to keep in mind that the how and what of experience cannot be severed from each other in phenomenology. Therefore, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the voices and images in Schreber’s mind are full of people who can be identified in the external, intersubjective world. Schreber’s doctors and the asylum attendants are there, members of his family,13 acquaintances of his former life, but also whole groups of people, like the “240 Benedictine Monks,” and even whole peoples like the Germans and the Jews. A particularly prominent role in Schreber’s persecutory ideas was played by his former doctor Paul Emil Flechsig. For a long time, Schreber saw Flechsig as the major agent in the complot against him, manipulating God into regarding Schreber as an enemy. He hears Flechsig’s voice, even the voices of several “Flechsigs,” up to forty of them; on other occasions he feels parts of Flechsig’s soul in his body, in the form of nerves attached to his own nerves. A feeling of being conspired against by Flechsig still persisted at the time of publication of the Memoirs, which include an “Open Letter to Professor Flechsig” at their very beginning (Schreber 1955:33–36). Is this merely an obsession with a father figure, as Freud and other psychoanalytic interpreters have assumed? I would suggest that the figure of Flechsig in the Memoirs signifies an intersection between the order of embodied selfhood and the order(s) informing the socio-historical context of Schreber’s existence. As we learn from scholars like Lothane (1992:50–57) and Santner (1996:71ff.), Schreber’s perception of a threat coming from the direction of Flechsig taken by itself was not in itself delusional. For Flechsig was not just any psychiatrist—he was one of the first and most renowned advocates of a “neuroanatomical” approach to mental illness. In other words, he regarded all psychiatric problems as organically rooted in the brain (Santner 1996:71). When he was not able to cure patients in relatively short time through the administration of strong sleeping drugs, and when patients didn’t give any

“The Order of the World”

271

signs of impending death so that they could be autopsied, Flechsig tried to get rid of them by referral to other institutions. This is exactly what happened to Schreber when he was first moved to Dr. Pierson’s asylum and after a short stay from there to Sonnenstein. Santner sees a connection between Flechsig’s anatomical perspective and Schreber’s cosmological belief that “God only possesses knowledge of the thoughts of dead people,” concluding summarily: We might say that Flechsig’s brain science is the theory and Schreber’s delusions are the practice of the same traumatic collapse of the symbolic dimension of subjectivity, of the gap separating bodily cause and symbolic effect. Schreber’s point would seem to be that the elimination of that gap—the attempt to fill it with neuroanatomical knowledge—is nothing short of soul murder. (Santner 1996:75) In such formulations, Schreber’s mind starts to appear like a mirror of a historical context, in this case a particular variety of medical discourse. This impression is strengthened by the way in which Schreber’s language takes up styles, motifs and themes of the discourses prevalent at his time: the tendency to talk about social life, in particular urban life, in terms of decay, decomposition and degeneration; the medicalization of the social vocabulary, the concern with “nerves” and “excitation,” “attention” and “distraction” (cf. Crary 1999), all of this and more can indeed be detected in Schreber’s idiom. But from the phenomenological perspective developed here it needs to be pointed out that the contemporary social contexts, like the medical-psychiatric discourses mentioned, appear in Schreber’s text only in distorted form or as fragments. In Schreber’s mind they don’t function as ordering devices in the way they might have functioned in the mind of the psychiatrist Flechsig. Schreber’s experience is outside of the order, excluded from, but related to it—in other words, alien to the order. The change in perspective—from the world as alien to Schreber, to Schreber as alienated from the world—is not supposed to mean that the two perspectives are exchangeable. Waldenfels states adamantly that alienness is not a reversible relation. But here it is necessary to point out that Schreber is actively excluded from the social order, confined in an asylum against his will, declared legally incompetent, drugged and sometimes brutalized by attendants, at the mercy of his doctors; this form of social alienation will certainly inform Schreber’s experience of his own embodied self. One could say there is a certain realism behind the way he experiences his own body in form of a structural parallelism to how he is being treated by others and, by extension, society at large. In the form of the structures of a historical life-world, orders are always already established informing an individual’s experience from the moment of birth on. These structures never coincide completely with the individual; they have to be actively appropriated, measured for fit, so to speak. As I have

272

Bernhard Leistle

said before, this process of “fitting in” can also be described in terms of responding to an alien demand in functional ways. Schreber is denied this possibility, not just by his illness but also by the way in which he is treated by psychiatric institutions and authorities. The Memoirs contain numerous bits of information on the way Schreber felt at the hands of his guardians, mostly about his time at Sonnenstein: over years, he spent his nights in an isolation cell; he was deprived of physical exercise and of routine activities like playing chess or the piano; he was not in control of his own possessions, like cigars or money; he wasn’t allowed to read the newspaper or to take walks to gain new sensory input. The point is not that the asylum staff probably were of the opinion that Schreber was incapable of engaging in such activities, not even that they might have been right in their assessment. The point is that Schreber felt as if his whole world had perished and that he was the only person left on earth while everybody else was only “fleetingly improvised.”14 Considering the conditions of his confinement, defined by the order of the asylum, this belief cannot be dismissed as purely fantastic and “delusional” but is better interpreted in terms of responsivity. Unlike the alien on the level of sensory perception, which seems to be unanswerable due to its volatility and indeterminacy, the alienness of the asylum order poses problems by virtue of its rigidity and excessive determination. This time it is the order itself which seems to allow for only one answer, already inscribed in the question: compliance. From the perspective of society, psychiatric discourse can be described in the spirit of Foucault (2006): as an attempt to integrate into the social order what escapes it—in effect, madness. The madman or madwoman is marginalized, locked away, and thus excluded from social intercourse and discourse. The social practices of asylum and clinic have a conceptual counterpart which establishes an absolute difference between mad experience as delusional and hallucinatory and “normal” experience as real and objective.15 Schreber deviates from the standard of the normal, yet is assigned no position outside the psychiatric order; in other words, he is “othered,” but the alienness of his experience is not admitted. The Memoirs show that Schreber is sensitive to the function of psychiatric discourse to call him to order. Consequently, the concern to challenge the psychiatrists’ dismissal of his experiences as “hallucinations” appears again and again in the text. Many times, and although his reflections at the time of writing suggest to him that some of his previous experiences indeed qualify as “hallucinations,”16 he emphasizes the reality-character of what appears in his consciousness. Even in the portion of the book written earliest, the Memoirs proper, Schreber argues against the assessment of his revelations as pathological. He presents himself as a balanced, non-fanatical individual, neither excessively religious nor radically rationalist. He was also not given to poetic flights of the imagination, but characterizes himself as a “person of calm nature, without passion, clear thinking and sober, whose individual gift lay much more in the direction of cool intellectual criticism” (Schreber

“The Order of the World”

273

1955:80). If such a person suddenly receives the most esoteric and bizarre impressions, he contends, these can only be regarded as truly divine messages and religious revelations. A few pages after this self-presentation, Schreber engages the adversary directly, finding support for his line of arguing in Kraepelin’s famous Textbook of Psychiatry, which had been lent to him while working on the manuscript of his Memoirs. After referencing various passages from this authoritative source, Schreber concludes: It seems psychologically impossible that I suffer only from hallucinations. After all, the hallucination of being in communication with God or departed souls can logically only develop in people who bring with them into their morbidly excited nervous state an already secure faith in God and the immortality of the soul. This, however, was not so in my case, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. . . . If psychiatry is not flatly to deny everything supernatural and thus tumble with both feet into the camp of naked materialism, it will have to recognize the possibility that occasionally the phenomena under discussion may be connected with real happenings, which simply cannot be brushed aside with the catchword “hallucinations.” (Schreber 1955:90) Schreber knows he is being “framed,” categorized as “delusional,” caught in the conceptual net of psychiatric discourse. This conceptual positioning provides the foundation for his confinement and is correctly identified by Schreber as fundamental aspect of his alienation in the name of order. Schreber responds to this threat creatively, but, for the time being, without success. He borrows the terms and principles of the order that has got hold of him in order to escape from it. In many cases, not only in that of Schreber, this is an ineffective mode of resistance which tangles itself in its own contradictions. The Order of Reason In the second part of the quote above, however, a different form of resistance announces itself, when Schreber starts to portray psychiatry as partial and contingent order whose claim to validity remains limited to the boundaries it defines itself. This motif is pursued further and deepened in one of the postscripts, titled “Concerning Hallucinations,” dated February 1901. Here Schreber describes the difference in experience between persons with “healthy nerves” and those with a “morbidly excited nervous system” in terms of a difference in sensory organization: A person with sound nerves is, so to speak, mentally blind compared with him who receives supernatural impressions by virtue of his diseased

274

Bernhard Leistle nerves; he is therefore as likely to persuade the visionary of the unreality of his visions as a person who can see will be persuaded by a really blind person that there are no colours, that blue is not blue, red not red, etc. (Schreber 1955:224)

The “healthy” and the “diseased,” the psychiatrist and his patient live in separate worlds where one cannot presume to understand the other as it understands itself. Schreber’s response to the psychiatric order here gains the dimension of an epistemological and ontological criticism. This criticism comes to the fore in the third part of the Memoirs, the compilation of juridical and medical texts that Schreber has added to his book. Practically every Schreber-interpreter in recent times has emphasized that these texts have to be regarded as an integral part of the book,17 but to my knowledge none has convincingly shown how they are to be integrated with the rest of the book. Psychological interpretations have a hard time in relating the added materials to the symptomatology that expresses itself in the Memoirs proper and in the postscripts. Only two of the texts in question are written by Schreber himself, an essay outlining the legal basis of confining a mentally ill person against their will, or lack thereof, and the “Grounds for Appeal,” in which he argues once more for removal of his tutelage, which had been denied by two lower-level courts. In both texts, Schreber argues powerfully and coherently, obviously in full possession of his cognitive and rhetoric faculties. From a psychiatric perspective, the documents thus don’t seem to yield any new insights into his psychological condition. Interpreters like Santner, by contrast, who approach Schreber’s case from the perspective of its relations to the historical context, tend to regard the legal/medical appendices as factual documents containing objective information about the trial and the social climate in which it took place (Santner 1996:78–79). While this perspective should not be dismissed, the approach tends to overlook the fundamental fact that the texts have been selected by Schreber to stand in metonymical relation to his autobiographical writings. More than in any of the aspects of the Memoirs treated so far, the perspective of a phenomenology of responsivity shows its analytical potential in the way it allows us to make sense of these heterogeneous texts. Besides the texts written by Schreber, the third part of the Memoirs consists of three medical reports by the director of Sonnenstein Asylum, Dr. Guido Weber, and the text of the final verdict, in which Schreber’s legal incompetency was rescinded. According to Lothane (1992:56–57), Weber was crucial in having Schreber placed under tutelage and he stays true to that line in the first two reports, arguing that Schreber’s condition was too unpredictable and his behavior too disturbing for his environment to release him. Against this, Schreber maintains in his appeal that the psychiatric authorities fail to provide proof for his alleged dangerousness to himself and others, and that there is no evidence of his inability to manage his own everyday affairs. These, however, are the only considerations relevant for a decision about his

“The Order of the World”

275

detention. Schreber was walking on solid legal grounds here and yet was not content with leaving it at that. Fully aware of the risks he was taking he leaped into uncharted territory, when he decided to make his religious experiences a theme in the proceedings: I could not ignore the fear . . . that the attention of the court would be diverted from the decisive and only question in their competence, namely whether I possess the capacity for reasonable action in practical life. More recently however I have not been able to ignore the fact that it would be impossible for me to do so without a certain appreciation of my so-called delusions of my religious beliefs, and not only on the formal side of their logical sequence and orderly arrangement, but to a certain degree also regarding the question whether it is within the bounds of possibility that my delusional system, as one is pleased to call it, is founded on some truth. . . . Only in this way will it perhaps be possible to explain to the Court that petty considerations, ordinarily decisive for human beings, such as the sensibilities of others, fear of revealing socalled family secrets, indeed even fear of a penalty, can only carry very little weight in my case, where the achievement of a holy purpose is at stake, which I must regard as my life’s task. (Schreber 1955:290) Thus it is not just his physical freedom which he wants to see restored by the verdict of the court, but his right to define himself as “not mad” that was so persistently denied to him by Dr. Weber’s reports. Tellingly, in these reports Weber uses Schreber’s Memoirs, which Schreber had given him in draft, as his last line of defense. Schreber’s intention to publish the manuscript, which he passed on to the court in an ethically questionable move, provided the clearest indication for Weber that Schreber didn’t really know what he was doing (Schreber 1955:287, 326). In his appeal, Schreber held against this allegation that it was presumptuous of the court to follow this reasoning: It is clearly evident that when I first resolved to publish my Memoirs I had the fullest understanding of the possible consequences which might follow such a step, and this appears to me the decisive moment as to whether the question of my legal capacity is to be answered in the affirmative or negative. Should I wish to add the martyrdom of a threatened penalty to the burden of the untold suffering which has already been mine for a holy purpose, no human being in my opinion would have the right to prevent me. . . . In any case I refuse with due acknowledgment the protection planned for me: it would mean, in order to save me from a few months imprisonment at the most, locking me up in an asylum for a lifetime deprived of my person and freedom. (Schreber 1955:312)

276

Bernhard Leistle

Clearly Schreber is in the offensive here: he is able to respond to his critics in direct exchange; he is in a position to challenge them, demand an explanation from them. And for the first time, his adversaries and the order they embody have to answer to him, to Schreber. In terms of the dynamics of orders, alienness and responsivity, we can say that Schreber has managed to appeal to an order which can serve as a Third in his struggle with his psychiatrists; it is an order which he knows, in which he is well socialized, whose “responsive repertoire” he has mastered, the law. But, as I have said before, Schreber doesn’t only appeal to the law to regain his personal freedom and control over his assets; he aspires to a verdict in a metaphysical sense. By making the content of his experiences thematic in the court proceedings, Schreber demands from the court to judge whether psychiatry has the right to pass judgment on him, or whether the psychiatric order is contingent on a definition of reason as rationality, which cannot be declared universally valid. As is to be expected, the verdict remains ambivalent about this issue: It is true plaintiff’s way of looking at the world is falsified by the idea ruling him about his extraordinary position towards God, and Dr. Schreber suffers much from hallucinations. He acknowledges that the center of his life is his conviction that he is the continual object of the divine power of miracles. But only one single field of plaintiff’s mental life is affected, the field of religion. What in our views is connected with divine matters and our belief about the relation of man to God, plaintiff will never be able to judge correctly, because he lacks insight into the pathological nature of his mode of thinking. But it does not necessarily follow that his judgement in all other fields of mental life must be equally pathologically altered. (Schreber 1955:344) Given the circumstances, it is astonishing how close Schreber got the court to a declaration of the relativity of rational discourse. More than following Schreber’s juridical argumentation, the quoted passage seems to contain a contradiction, which can be read as a confession to the limitations of the order of reason itself. The verdict speaks of Schreber’s inability to judge correctly what “in our views is connected with divine matters and our belief about the relation of man to God,” but this can be said to apply equally well to a member of a different, non-Christian religion. In Schreber’s confrontation with psychiatric institutions and discourses, the court embodies the party of the Third that is to decide which of the contestants is right—a higher reason, so to speak. This higher order upholds the assessment of the medical expert that Schreber is mad, but regards his madness as limited to the religious domain. Doesn’t this allow for the possibility that Schreber isn’t mad at all, that, as he puts it at one point of his appeal, “in essence it is one assertion versus another” (Schreber 1955:294; italics in original)?

“The Order of the World”

277

The Memoirs as Rebuilding of the Self How then can we interpret the inclusion of the medico-legal texts in the Memoirs, and what is their function in relation to the autobiographical parts of the book? I have proposed that the whole text, including all the parts assembled in it, can be understood as an effort Schreber’s to put his own house in order, to make sense of his existence. This effort has become inevitable because Schreber’s experience is overwhelmed by pathos—things happen to him, to his own body, the objects and people in his environment, things so wondrous and strange that they are not only beyond his, but beyond all comprehension. He feels completely exposed to these happenings, defenseless, unable to give an answer to the assault by alien forces. Nevertheless, he responds,18 he must respond and he struggles for a language with which to express what happens to him. This language endows him with the fundamental means to make his experience his own, to demarcate a sphere of ownness in response to a world that showers him with questions and demands. The selfhood that arises in this movement of responding is the paranoid subject who sees himself as God’s adversary in a struggle about the “Order of the World.” In its grandiose, cosmological claim this order offers an indirect image of the pathos reigning in Schreber’s experience. In contrast to the common assumption, however, his fantasy of an absolute order is not Schreber’s madness but an attempt at recuperation, at self-healing in the literal sense of the word. While it remains present in the other parts of the book, the “Order of the World” and Schreber’s place in it are worked out in the Memoirs proper. Although Crapanzano (1998:745) states that Schreber doesn’t refer to the writing, or better, the composition of the Memoirs as therapeutic, from a perspective of responsivity we have to acknowledge their performative character. Experience itself, as well as its dimensions of selfhood and otherness, subjectivity and objectivity are results of ordering processes that take place through responding creatively to alien demands. Bizarre and incoherent as Schreber’s reflections about the “Order of the World” may be, his use of the term “order” is justified. The self that emerges in these efforts is more in control of itself and its environment than the Schreber at the onset of his illness, who often fell into catatonic stupor or behaved violently against himself and others. Even in these early phases when he was not able to write notes to himself, he was continuously responding, his consciousness reaching out beyond itself in ecstatic movement. But the writing of the memoirs proper marked a step towards stabilization, the emergence of an order which enabled Schreber to become active, to act cognitively as well as behaviorally. I regard the postscripts that form the second part of the Memoirs as simultaneously an expression and means of production of this extended field of action. “Delusional” as they might seem to the interpreter, they feature a more thematically focused and reflective approach to the order developed by the Memoirs proper. The postscripts also widen the perspective towards the

278

Bernhard Leistle

social and historical context of Schreber’s existence. In these texts, he doesn’t only respond to what’s going on “inside of him,” but he also exhibits a clearer awareness of an external world in which things happen to him. The last series of postscripts included in the book was written in October 1902, after he had won his case in court. He begins them with the following words: There is little to add to the foregoing. My outward circumstances, the rescinding of the order of my tutelage and my impending discharge from this asylum, have been discussed in the Preface. I note with satisfaction that my prediction at the beginning of Chapter XXII of the Memoirs was confirmed shortly afterwards. (Schreber 1955:246) The “prediction” Schreber alludes to is his conviction that God will not succeed in destroying Schreber’s reason since even He is ultimately bound to the principles of the Order of the World (Schreber 1955:211–212). What can Schreber mean by the event that confirmed this prediction shortly after it was written? He might be talking about a sudden insight into the infallibility of the Order of the World, but I propose that he is also talking about the court case which ended with the verdict in his favor. In restoring his legal competence, the court literally restored the Order of the World for Schreber. The cosmological, historical and psychological merge into each other within the whole of one existence. If that is the case we indeed have to acknowledge the presence of the legal and medical texts in the book as integral elements of Schreber’s experiential world. Schreber’s “psychology” expresses itself as much in the texts written by others, the medical reports and the verdict, as it does in the autobiographical texts. Conversely, the historical and social contexts, which are disclosed in the facts contained in the official court documents, are not restricted to them. Schreber’s delusional experience must be regarded as expressing these contexts in equal measure, although in different form. In other words, there is no way of separating in the Memoirs between the personal, private, subjective on the one hand, and the social, public, objective on the other. Schreber’s existence consists of one dialectical movement which takes up all of these aspects in a continuous process of performative expression. This, however, is not madness, but the structure of human existence in general (Merleau-Ponty 2012, in particular 172–173). Approaching Schreber as a human being who, besieged by pathos, struggles to find a response that creates a functional order in his experience, enables us to understand the presence of medical reports and verdicts as reflections of what he responds to. These texts are representations of alienness in the same sense as the voices he hears in his head. Like the miracles performed on his body, or the rules of asylum life, the reports and verdicts are something that happens to him, beyond his control. But Schreber responds, and in this manner regains, step by step, answer by answer, his ability to

“The Order of the World”

279

function. The Memoirs mirror this reconstruction of self and world through both their content and their structure.

Notes 1 A detailed account of Schreber’s personal life and illness can be found in Lothane (1992:13–105). 2 For a biography of Moritz Schreber, see Israëls (1989), also Lothane (1992:106ff.). 3 In a style not untypical for nineteenth-century medicine, Schreber Sr. designed orthopedic devices that forced patients to take up specific postures and to perform movements in a prescribed manner. Psychoanalytically oriented interpreters like Schatzman (1973) and Niederland (1974) have suggested that Schreber Senior applied these apparatuses to his own son from an early age on, torturing him and causing a trauma that later led to Daniel Paul’s psychosis. Other Schreber scholars, in particular Israëls (1989) and Lothane (1992) have rejected this portrayal of Moritz Schreber as sadistic torturer as lacking in evidence and distorting reality. 4 Gärten is German pl. for Garten, “garden.” English-speakers are familiar with the German word through the loaning of Kindergarten. 5 See for example Crapanzano (1998:740) and Louis Sass (1992), too, points out the structural similarities between Schreber’s writing and modernist aesthetics. 6 More on the structure of Schreber’s book will follow below. 7 The literature on Schreber is immense. Dozens of monographies and hundreds, possibly thousands of essays have been written about him; innumerable are the references made to his case in works dealing with all kinds of subjects, ranging from psychopathology to the history of modernity. There is a “Schreber literature” and scholars specialized in and publishing on the case can refer to themselves as “Schreberians” (cf. Santner 1996:XIV). Nevertheless, it seems possible to broadly distinguish between three different types of interpretations: (1) psychological/psychiatric interpretations like those of Freud (1958) and recently of Louis Sass (1994), who approach the text from a symptomatological perspective; (2) historical/anthropological interpretations, which regard Schreber’s text as an expression of the historical, cultural context, more specifically the atmosphere in Germany at the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century (e.g., Canetti [1960] 1973; Santner 1996); and (3) semiotic/discursive interpretations, which focus on the Memoirs as a text, an act of literary communication (e.g., Crapanzano 1998). While there is much that is interesting in all of these approaches, each of them focuses on specific aspects of what is, ultimately, an existential totality: the self expressing its particularity in the medium of a common language and in reference to a concrete historical situation. I argue that the interpretive stance of responsivity provides us with a more adequate perspective to conceive of such existential intertwining than the mentioned previous approaches. 8 See, for example, Louis Sass, who otherwise emphasizes the general possibility of comprehending psychopathological phenomena: “We seem once again, as so often with schizophrenic phenomena, to be bumping our heads against the limits of our language (as Wittgenstein would say).” (Sass 1994:100). Other commentators explicitly refer to the text’s alienness in relation to every attempt at translation and interpretation: “By declaring the author mad or a victim of some contemporary crisis or sensibility, diagnostic, symptomatic, and allegorical readings may alleviate the reader’s puzzlement or anxiety before a work whose reasoned pretense is constantly undermined by its unreason. One may have an edge on the text that is promoted by the text yet outside the text.” (Crapanzano 1998:741)

280

Bernhard Leistle

9 Schreber was able to read Greek and he was educated in the classics, so it might be more than a coincidence that his conception of the order resembles that of the cosmos in Greek antiquity. 10 This refers to a phrase from Freud, often quoted by Waldenfels: “Ego is not master in its own house” (Freud 1955:143). 11 An attentive reader will notice that these levels correspond to the different “centrisms” (egocentrism, ethnocentrism, logocentrism), which according to Waldenfels have become problematic in the present-day context. 12 See also the related discussion of Schreber’s compulsion-to-think, and in particular of the “insect-miracles” in Sass (1994:101ff.). 13 In act of self-censorship, but perhaps in realistic anticipation of scandal, Schreber deleted a chapter from the Memoirs in which he talked about his family. This was much to the chagrin of Freud, as is to be expected, who would have wished more information about Schreber’s familial relations, in particular to his father. 14 See also Lothane (1992:53–54). 15 In his Paradoxes of Delusion, Sass (1994) has argued that this distinction cannot be upheld, in particular not for patients like Schreber who display a remarkable, even though ambivalent consciousness of their own deficiencies. The phenomenological inseparability of hallucinatory and non-hallucinatory modes of experience has been demonstrated by Straus (1958, 1966) and Merleau-Ponty (2012:349–360). 16 See, for example, the passage on pages 163–164. 17 See Crapanzano (1998:744), Lothane (1992:71), and Santner (1996:79–81). 18 For the concept of “responsive difference,” see Introduction to this volume.

References Canetti, Elias. [1960] 1973. Crowds and Power. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1998. “‘Lacking Now Is Only the Leading Idea: We, the Rays, Have No Thoughts’: Interlocutory Collapse in Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.” Critical Inquiry 24(3):737–767. Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attnetion, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel. 2006. History of Madness. London and New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1955. “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17, Translated and edited by James Strachey, 135–144. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1958. “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 12, Translated and edited by James Strachey, 3–82. London: Hogarth Press. Israëls, Han. 1989. Schreber: Vater und Sohn. Eine Biographie. München und Wien: Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse. Leistle, Bernhard. 2014. “From the Alien to the Other: Steps toward a Phenomenological Theory of Spirit Possession.” Anthropology of Consciousness 25(1):53–90. Lothane, Zvi. 1992. In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry. Hillsdale: The Analytic Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945)2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Niederland, William G. 1974. The Schreber Case: Psychoanalytic Profile of a Paranoid Personality. New York: Quadrangle.

“The Order of the World”

281

Santner, Eric. 1996. My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sass, Louis. 1992. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1994. The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the Schizophrenic Mind. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Schatzman, Morton. 1973. Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family. New York: Random House. Schreber, Daniel Paul. 1955. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Translated and edited by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter. London: Dawson & Sons. Straus, Erwin W. 1958. “Aesthesiology and Hallucinations.” In Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, edited by Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger, 139–169. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1966. “Phenomenology of Hallucinations.” In Phenomenological Psychology, 277–289. New York: Basic Books. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1996. Order in the Twilight. Translated by David J. Parent. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1997. Topographie des Fremden. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden, Bd 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2007. The Question of the Other. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. Translated by Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

13 Photography Tears the Subject From Itself Robert Desjarlais

July 8. Arles. I am looking at a photograph. I have been looking at it for days now. The photo keeps calling me to take another look, and another after that. The image has taken possession of me like a restless spirit from elsewhere seizing hold of an unknowing mortal. I find myself swooning into the image much as I have fallen into deep afternoon sleeps after arriving jet-lagged in Paris: when I wake hours later into a funk of grogginess, unsure where I or who I am in the world or what day or hour it is, the sleep rears up and pulls me back down into the depth of dreams and murmured voices.

I took the photograph two years ago, while standing on the steps leading up to the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Paris, on the butte Montmartre, the highest point in the city. It’s a simple story at first glance, once you

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

283

know something of the parameters of the photograph’s production, in time and space. The man to the left had asked the man in the center if they could be photographed with each other. His friend, the man to the right, is taking the photograph. I photographed the three of them in the act of photographing, in a moment just before, while, or after the camera clicked an image. The man between them had been standing about the steps for some time, for as long as I had been there that day, at least. He was asking for money— begging, panhandling, mendier, to beg, solicit charity, call it what you will— in a quiet, understated way. He stood out amongst the others because of his appearance, because of his silent stillness. He had positioned himself by the steps, embraced by a dark winter coat, with his hand held out, softly, his hands held low, close to his waist, not assertive. He did not want to be there, his stance told me, but he was there, within the elements, to earn a keep for the day. Police were roaming about in those midday hours, asking beggars and street sellers to move on. They did not ask him to leave; he was not drawing attention to himself. He did not thrust out an empty hand, beseeching tourists passing by, as other beggars had been doing, until the police swept them away. He stood quietly, hands close to his sides. The man did not look like the alms-askers that wait outside the entrances to churches in France and elsewhere, le priant, the praying, who hope to receive charity from devout souls leaving or entering a church. He looked unsure of how to plead for money at this site of reverence and attraction. I had come to Sacré-Coeur that day to revisit a place I had known years back. The cloying rush of tourists, hovering about the scrub of land like ants treading a sand hill, was displeasing to me. Yet the scene made for easy photographs. Just about everyone had a camera. Friends and families were clicking high and low, making pictures of the Basilica straight on. They held their iPads aloft, they peered into their cell phones, they crafted snapshots of themselves, amongst friends or family, with the church as a majestic relief and the hazy arrondissements of Paris far below. I simulated joining in on the visual frenzy in seeking to procure images of all that moved about. I was a wolf among sheep, plucking images from the flock. I took photographs of children spinning about the ponies fixed into a carousel at the edge of Montmartre, of the miniature, glow-in-the-dark Eiffel Towers sold by men from Africa, of people relaxing in lunchtime sunlight on the steps leading up to the majesties of the church, and of a woman seated by its entrance, asking for alms. Camera in hand, I stepped inside the cool somber of the church, and then walked back to the sunlight near the steps. At some point I saw the man was standing next to another man, about to have a photograph taken. I must have acted quickly. It was easier that the man was not looking my way, occupied as he was with the methods of another camera. I raised the machine and clicked the button that triggered the shutter, which sparked the

284

Robert Desjarlais

twenty-three million image sensors in the camera’s cortex to ink their photographic work. I held onto the picture that now lies close to these words. I now have this image with me, along with a few other photographs, as I travel about in France. The image keeps coming back to me. It lies below the surface of my retina when I sleep at night. July 10. I now have a decent read on the photograph, I believe, after considering it for hours, walking about this city of images. Better and far more pleasing photographs are to be seen at the photography festival taking place this week, and yet my thoughts keep spinning back to an image taken two years before. Four figures stand most apparent in the photograph, or five if one counts what appears to be a girl, on the periphery; her image is fragmental, supplemental, easily overlooked. The four figures form a quartet of bodies: The man, potentially blind. The man standing next to him. The man taking the photograph. And the woman below those three, walking into the frame of my own secondary photograph. Whenever I look at the image I move from figure to figure apparent in the image, the two faces visible and the two persons near those visibilities. The perceptions are dispersed, thrown here and there. I keep coming back to the man in the middle of the image. The energy of the vision centers centrifugally on that central figure, his face especially. There is a gravitational force to his dark sun presence. The photograph as a whole is a rustle, a disturbance. Some experts speak of photography as a medium of death. For me, this photograph comes from a tumult far before death, or in the ferment before a birth. The man on the left is posing for the photograph. Apparently. In dim light I thought at first that this youngish man was holding another camera in his hands; the object now appears to be a pair of stylish, glare-resistant sunglasses. Presumably, their owner was wearing them earlier and he had taken them off. Better for the photograph to portray his eyes clearly, and his person more generally. Sunglasses can enhance vision by diminishing hazy sunlight. They can also hide the eyes and obscure the soul that sees through the eyes. Is this young man visiting Paris? He is probably not from France, or so I suspect. He hails from another land. He is traveling with his friend, the man taking his image. Or his friend lives in Paris and he is visiting him there. They are going about the town, seeing the sights, riding the Metro, snacking on crêpes smoldering with chocolate nutella. The image is rife with possibilities, you see; there are many lines of probability suggested by the imagery involved. Of nothing can we be certain. We tell ourselves stories. It’s a cold day in Paris. My thoughts go to this young man, to his face and eyes and the branch of veins and knuckles in his hands. I try to imagine what his life is like, what brought him to Paris and to the Basilica that day. What was the day after that like for him? Will he send the image to a girlfriend or a sister back home? Much of his life lies ahead of him; his minor history is behind him. I am in that vague uncertain terrain that lies indefinitely in the interface

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

285

between one person and another. We know so little about others. A flatness defines my comprehension of him. My perceptions hit a wall as dense as the dark, rain-resistant fabric of his coat. This youngish man is holding the faint line of a clipped smile, just a thin line, no beaming for the folks back home. Self-conscious before the camera, he is holding himself still and stable for the picture. In this one instant he is there, standing on the steps of the Basilica, he is in Paris on this fine sunny cold day in October. He wishes a photo to mark the occasion, a record of that small concrete fact. There may have been other pictures taken of him before this moment, and others after that. They might have surfaced on Facebook or Flickr or Instagram. You have to wonder about this, where the images get to, one way or another. Images travel, that’s a principle; they disperse like pollen in an April breeze. When I consider their many possible destinations, time opens up before me, present, past and future. I get lost within that swirl of time. I am taken outside of myself, once again. I am far from singular or finite. I try to come back to the present. It’s not easy holding onto a single moment. Each moment skips off into other moments, like stones skimming along the surface of ocean waters. The younger man is standing next to the blind man apparent. I was stunned when I saw that sudden pairing. He had asked the blind man to pose with him. How outrageous, I said to myself, to put the man on the spot in that way. The photographers wanted to have him become a freakish side show, to be a dramatic figure within a photo at a tourist attraction, a “selfie” with a twist: a man stands by the entrance to the basilica, a blind man by his side. Passion and suffering on the Mount. The blind man of Sacré-Coeur. We know of the photoerotic pleasure of coming close to the ground of suffering, of witnessing its presence, vicariously living the tale of it, of seeing and being seen close to its presence, but not too close. The two subjects of that brief instant are standing side by side a good foot apart from one another. There are no bodies leaning into one another, no arms embracing, no trace of a touch, no sensate contact. I see no shared looks, no real connection. They are others to each other, a “relation without relation.” The blind man appears to be looking down, away from the view of the camera, no smile or glint of joy on his face. He looks alone amongst others, head bowed. Why did they think this would make for a decent photograph, a good memory, un bon souvenir? We are left to wonder as I was that day if the two visitors had some particular notion in mind, unfamiliar to me, to the effect that it’s an auspicious matter to be photographed while standing next to a blind man. Would the image serve as a lucky charm down the road? Or was there something in the culture of the two visitors that encouraged them to enact a record of standing alongside a figure of abjection? The interpretations run rampant, you see, we can barely hold on. We are left to wonder. We are always left to wonder.

286

Robert Desjarlais

And yet the blind man went along with the arrangement. He agreed to be included within the frame, for a few centimes. Evidently. It’s hard to make a living these days. I cannot recall observing the two men’s request, their pitch to the blind man to be included in their photograph. What I do recall remembering, or imagine remembering, or remember imagining, is that once the photo was taken there was a release of the still pause, a dissipation of the tension of bodies held taught, their worlds ticked on, the young man retrieved a coin from his person and handed it to the blind man apparent. That older man held the coin in his hand; he looked down, checking its value. He looked up and nodded his head, signing off on the deal. The young man nodded in turn. Transaction completed, they parted ways. I cannot say that they looked each other in the eyes. I do not know about that. You see I cannot say if the blind man could see, or not. There was a careless, casual meanness to their intent, I thought. I was no better, perhaps. No worse, perhaps. I was prepared to picture the man’s unseeing presence in another form of visuality, when we were not standing face to face, no words involved. July 12. The photograph has been transporting me to an imaginary realm between the actual and the phantasmic. My eyes are drawn to the man in the center of the photograph, the blind or semi-blind man. He is looking down. His visage is one of humility, graveness and, perhaps, shame—or so I read his downcast expression. I do not think he is simply performing that humility, making a show of his abjection, better to make a buck. He is not pleased about being photographed with his visual deformation on display, because of that deformity. He has gotten used to it; it comes with the territory. He is required to sell his deformity, display himself, convert poor vision into hard cash. He needs the looks of others while dismayed by those looks. This is how I imagine him without knowing him at all. Such is my sympathetic leaning toward him. I have only his appearance to go by, and what my imagination weaves out of the silk of those fine details. The man’s face appears weathered, folds of surface skin moon-circled below his eyes. I have at times wondered if this man was Moroccan in origin, in proscribed or proclaimed identity, for in the photo he is wearing clothes that remind me of the djellaba that Berber men wear. That perception sets off a sea of possibilities, histories of fantasy and simulation. That perception appears to be a mirage. The man’s coat looks as though it could come from a bargain store in France. The thought occurs now that the man might have acquired that particular coat because it reminded him, subliminally or overtly, of the clothing that he and other men wore back home, and he found comfort in that enveloping resemblance. Perhaps. My fancy goes to this unknown man, if fancy is the right word for the imaginative inquiry I seem to be on. If the man is blind or semi-blind, how did he come to be this way? At what age did he sense something was wrong in how he pieced together the world? Has he tried to have his vision repaired? Where does he bed down at night? Does he have a family, any children, sons or daughters who worry about his welfare? Would he be back at the basilica the next

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

287

day, and the day after that? Would I be able to find him there again, two years since? We tell ourselves stories. Voyeuristic we can be in imagining the features of another’s life. He served in the military. He is transcendently spiritual, beyond the means of this current life. He lives with a roommate, a hobbled, unshaven man. He dreams on a mattress of cardboard. See how easily one’s thoughts venture half-blindly into the province of his subjectivity, the tragedy of his blindness, without stubbing a toe on anything concrete or certain. I cannot be sure of anything, nor can you, dear perceivers. A photograph can be at once crystal-clear in its substance and terrifically uncertain in its implications. Photography is a tangled play of surface appearances and infinite, uncertain depths. I believe the man was blind. Or, at the least, his vision was partially impaired, if not fully. It appeared as though a cataract, an opacity in the lens of the eye, seemingly pure white in its waxy substance, had come to cover over the pupil of one eye, the left eye at least, the one most visible in the image. With that unseeing left eye the occluding matter is flowing down, like the white foam of a waterfall, to use words that reach back to the etymology of the word for this optical disorder. Cataract, from the early fifteenth century, stems from the Latin cataracta, “waterfall,” and from the Greek katarhaktes, “waterfall, broken water; a kind of portcullis.” The water is “swooping, down-rushing” (from kata, “down”). The second element of the word has been traced either to arhattein, “to strike hard,” or to rhattein, “to dash, break.” The hard white foam of a downrushing waterfall resembles the hard white stone clouding the lens. He must be able to see a little, this apparent blind man, at least a little. Otherwise, he would not be able to get his bearings. He would not know if when or how he is being photographed. He needs to know where the camera lies, doesn’t he? He needs to see when he is being seen. I would like to zoom in on the quadrant of his eye with any photographs I have of him. I would like to focus in on the pixels that reflect a trace of his eye, disturbing as that action sounds, and try to assess the damage, to unravel what kind of disease disturbance came to impale his eye. I would like to ask an opthamologist, a physician wearing white who specializes in eyes, to know for sure, pin the question down. I have looked at images of cataracts online to see if there’s a resemblance to the marred eye in the photograph. It’s difficult to keep looking at those images of pained orbs of clouded yellow-white looking back at me. I look away. I shut down the screen, a pair of eyes closing their lids. A diseased, unseeing eye is disturbingly other to what I take an eye to be. The younger man is looking down as well. I can see that now, in the photograph, theirs or mine. His eyes are aligned with the sturdy midriff of his friend. Perhaps this too he finds appropriate, not to look directly at the camera, be it because of convention, deference, humility or shyness. I would like to think his lowered eyes indicate he felt some discomfort, if only unconsciously, in having asked the blind man to pose with him within the frame of the photograph. I wonder if there was with him some sense of the morally fraught, double-edged fact of the arrangement. Of this interpretation I cannot be sure.

288

Robert Desjarlais

There’s the bulky, partial presence of the man preparing the photograph. He might have his image taken, in turn. With the lunar globescape of his head tilted toward the viewfinder, it’s clear he is concentrating within the long moment of focusing the lens. He is inching to press on the release trigger at just the right, well-formed instance. I say “he is concentrating” in the present tense, and I know you think within that timing too, even though that present moment is now two years past, and counting. Photography implies a grammar of multiple tenses—past, present, future. The photograph carries

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

289

the trace of a once-ago present. It’s as though we’re in that moment, too. We are in many moments at once, you see. It’s difficult to hold onto just one. It’s conceivable that when the friend, pictured in the photograph, looked at the image later that night, or the next day, or a year or two after that, he was disappointed with his actions that day, for having asked the blind man to pose with him. Or a friend or a cousin asked him, What the fuck?! The young man felt a tinge of shame. He took down the photograph from Facebook. He tore up glossy prints. Perhaps. He tried to forget the moment. Perhaps. Nietzsche wrote of the arrival of what he called “philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps.” I have the photograph, still. Just now I am carrying a copy of this image, and a few others, while I am traveling. The original digital files, the RAW color versions of all the photographs I took that day, are on the hard drive of my computer in my home in New York, 6,000 kilometers away. I’ll have to wait until I return there at the end of the month, to see where the greater story lies.

July 13. Aix en Provence. I am now in Aix, staying for a few days with a friend and her husband on the outskirts of the city, close to the abandoned Bibemus quarries where Cezanne used to paint. My friend is also an anthropologist. This afternoon I told her about the photograph that has come to interest me. She looked closely at a copy of it. She told me that when she first saw the image, after I had sent a digital copy to her months before, she took the figure in the center to be an inanimate part of the statuary of the basilica,

290

Robert Desjarlais

like a stone figure from medieval times. “It was so immobile, so sculpted,” she said. “Right there are the strong bones, and sculpted face, down to the pools of the eyes.” I can see now how the man’s head could be perceived as one of those grotesques, those fantastic human and animal forms that look down from the heights of stonework built into facades of many churches in Paris (grotesque, as from grotto, “small cave,” the hidden “crypts” of rooms and corridors of an unfinished palace complex of Roman times, which had become overgrown and buried, until they were broken into again, mostly from above). “And sculptures like that do not have eyes,” my friend added. A medieval gargoyle, a blind man from Morocco. So many glances stir up images from the vast, unruly optical unconscious that lies within the sediment of our perceptual memories.

July 14. This afternoon, I read to my friend what I have written to date concerning my tentative understanding of the photograph. We sat at a patio outside her home on a fine summer day and she listened to the lines of interpretation while looking at the image. Once I had finished, she introduced another sensible reading, counter to the one I had put together. “The three men in the photo are probably Maghrebi,” she said, “from either Morocco or Algeria.” It’s possible, she proposed, that they are from the same village or the same region, and they wanted a photograph to mark the occasion of meeting in this faraway town. Perhaps they recognized him from somewhere

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

291

else. And even if they had no known connection with him, it must have been pretty interesting to encounter another Maghrebi standing on the steps of Sacré-Coeur. The two men might have wanted a souvenir of that odd occurrence. It’s also important for Muslims to do good works and to give alms to those in need. The two men might have combined a donation with the request of a photograph. The man standing between them might have also had that idea in mind when coming to the basilica, but he was unsure how to go about asking for alms in a Christian setting, and so he stood uncertainly along the steps leading up to the church. This all could well be true. There’s no way to know, for sure. We tell ourselves stories. July 15. We have yet to consider the fourth figure, the woman passing through the frame of the secondary photograph, perhaps because she seems incidental to the main action. Her presence in the image is apparently accidental. The accidental, the aleatory of chance, characterizes so many photographs. She is stepping into the frame of that moment. She is climbing up the stairs, apparently, bee-lining it toward the interiors of the basilica. The lofty ascent is fatiguing her, her feet are tired, the bag held by her right shoulder is growing heavy, and yet she is determined to witness the sacred beauty that lies just ahead. This is the line of need she is on, her immediate desire, alongside the trajectories of those around her. Would she remember that moment, at all, if asked about it again? That day at Sacré-Coeur. Her face is not visible in the photograph. There is no clear persona or identity apparent. Her grey winter coat is an agent of sorts. It obscures and enhances. The coat blocks any clear view. It continues a slashing line, right to left, which begins with the photographer’s coat. The blind man’s look seems to follow that downsloping line toward a lower ground, be it earth, rest, death or damnation. And then the line veers upward, following the line of the young man’s coat. The face of the man who appears to be blind is set within the virtual V that appears to a viewer’s eye. This arrangement helps in my present viewing to make the hood about his head look like a dusky halo, profane and nonecstatic. The arching crescent of that half-halo is echoed by the wrinkled curve crowning the top of the woman’s coat, which appears just below the incandescent glow of white in the space between. It’s almost as if the silent, unspeaking affinity between those forms points to the ways in which there can be instances of likeness and connection among different forms of life. It’s almost as if the straggly luminance in the between suggests the possibility of quiet beauty, transcendence even, within the knockabout arrangements of everyday life. Almost. There is no angelic transcendence here. It’s just a Monday afternoon on the steps of Sacré-Coeur. For some time I disliked the woman’s incidental presence in the secondary photograph. Not that I had anything against her. I simply thought this blank dull whitewash of a figure obscured any clear perception of the relations between the three men half visible. In my waking dreams I have tried to reach the image with my hand and claw it away from the camera’s line of sight, to see more openly what lies beyond.

292

Robert Desjarlais

I once showed the image to a friend of mine, a photographer. It’s a shame, I said, that all that stuff is there, in the foreground, the grey white coat and the white hair. She said she liked this blotchy disturbance. It made the picture less clear, less ordinary. I trust her judgment. It strikes me now that the occlusion caused by the woman’s presence fits well with what I have come to perceive within the elements of this picture. To photograph is to be partially blind. A photograph is hobbled perception. Like a cataract eye, the filmy substance lies obstructed, occluded. A photograph implies a hallucinatory phantasm of half-perceptions and partial, surface knowings. We see what is there, before us, at that moment, in that particular configuration of time and place, and the implications of this are what linger in time. We see so little, and we envision much more than that. A photograph stands as a combination of sure apparent surface and infinite uncertain depth. Beyond the man taking the photograph, past the camera held in his hand, stands an upper part of the cast-iron gate. Our eyes can make out the graceful swirls of the solid metal apparent in the picture, while the tip of the lance, the punctum that could prick a heart, lies unseen and unapparent. The rest of the metal remains to be seen. We sense a substance there and its incomplete, uncertain continuation. Much the same could be said of any given photograph. July 16. The picture keeps looking back at me. It brushes against me like that man in the streets of Arles that other night. Four figures animate the photograph, five if you count the hint of the girl. Six, if you include the person who took the secondary image. Countless other figures lie beyond the scene of the photograph, all the potential viewers of it, all the eyes and imaginative sensoriums that might chance a look at it, the many possible viewings of it, theirs, yours or mine. The moment and look of the image has the potential to expand infinitely into space. The photograph can be found on a website on the Internet. It has reached Seattle. It has rested on a kitchen table in Bucharest, and on an oak table in a restaurant in New York City. One place it probably has not appeared is in the home of the blind man or of the two men who photographed him. July 17. I wrote that the blind man is looking down, toward the ground or toward the vague space the woman occupies. Now that I have looked closely at the print, I’m not sure about this observation. I can see now that it’s possible that the man is looking at me, at the remote figure behind the camera taking the secondary photograph. He might have noticed, in the act of being photographed, another camera pointed his way, and he glanced toward that second optical presence. I cannot be sure of this. I will never be sure. Looking close, I can see that the pupil in his left eye is completely covered over by a milky white cataract, the size of a small fingernail. There’s no mercy in that. It’s as if that cataract eye is looking at me, though I know that can’t be the case. It would be crazy of me to really think that, wouldn’t it? A blind eye cannot see. It’s a lookless look. Still, that eye appears as if

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

293

chastising me, scolding me for my photographic yearnings. Shame on me for wanting to take a picture of a blind man on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, and for free, no less. His right eye is seen unclearly. There is a dim dulled squint to that vision. Perhaps that eye, too, is affected by cataracts, not as much as the left. This makes me think that the man could see partially from that eye. His vision might have worsened by now. I feel for him, infinitely so. He is looking at me, the man in the photograph, and he is not looking at me. I did not see that in the time of photographing. Now, I can piece together a timeline of events, tentative, relevant looks and motives included. He was on to me, I can see that now. He knew I wanted his image. Perhaps I had gathered that, if the two men could take his image, then another picture from me would not hurt matters more. I stayed close, waiting for a decisive moment. He must have seen me, if palely and obscurely. He was not sure, either, what he was seeing. His look toward me was an interrogative.

July 17. Or, or, or, my head is getting filled with alternate possibilities, neural pathways are lighting up with the transmitters of plausible occurrence. What fecund epistemology, what abundant ways of knowing would embrace a logic of assorted, possible alternatives? And what if many of those alternatives, if not all of them, are imagined, or the result of conjecture, a “casting together” of facts, impressions and lines of interpretation, all of them spread out in dizzyingly multiple planes of time? Perhaps one that is truer to life, to what most people encounter in their everyday lives, than the finest, smartest lines of reasoning that learning can buy. So much in life, so

294

Robert Desjarlais

many improbable conversations and probable scenarios, are imagined, not concretely real, and an anthropology attuned to the imaginary—a fantastical anthropology, an anthropology of the phantastic—needs to account for the force and tenor of the imagined, the possible, the conjectured, the feared and dreamed of, specters of memories and apparitions, within the filmic flow of thought and expression. Or, alternatively, we could stick to an anthropology of the empirical, of the facts only, the data right before our eyes, earnest to a fault, and ignore all the imaginings swirling about any moment of encounter—though that would seem the true madness. July 18. The more I look at the photograph, the more I doubt what I know or could possibly know for sure. The “I” of myself and of others is undermined. There is a dissolution of a stable self. I am taken outside of myself, into a field of partial bodies and obscured consciousnesses. There are no bounded, neatly packaged forms of perception. There are no coherent selves to speak of. We are brought into a coarse, dense, intricate mosaic of sociality, composed of an infinite dynamic patchwork of precepts and sensations within the image. That uncertain, ever-changing mosaic is pointblank within everyday life as well, though we might not always see it that way. It’s as if the photograph slows time to a charged pause, so slow, so gradual, and a careful regard of its composition unravels elements that we often take for granted, like a sure sense of what is going on in this moment or that, or who we take ourselves to be, or how we regard others close to us. Once we’ve stepped into that space of perception and adopted a certain optics of attentiveness, the world tends to emerge increasingly complicated; it becomes multiple, ambiguous, uncertain, and, at times, illuminated. The tangled interplay of otherness and sameness in everyday life becomes evident. Every detail matters, each wrinkle in time. Looking at a photograph can offer a vexed phenomenology of perception. The closer we look, the more appearances grow strange, uncertain. The photograph leaves me uncalmed, unsettled. It tears me from myself. July 19. I am now in Besançon, where I once lived. Another scene of encounter keeps coming back to me. The image of it is right there, in my mind, it’s there in the spaces beyond, hovering like a fleshless ghost. It’s from those finite hours that I wandered about the steps of the basilica that October day, though I cannot locate it in a specific time, try as I might. I was looking at the apparent blind man looking back at me, ten to fifteen feet away, a few steps below the solid stone level step upon which he stood. I am not sure when that moment occurred, I have no way to name the precise timing, though much depends on it. Others passed between the man and me. I looked his way, held the camera in my hand. He turned and looked in my direction as though he was looking back at me. As though is a tricky phrase, a trickster of a phenomenon. In English, the words are used to describe how a situation seems to be, whether true or not. As though suggests a possibility, a scenario that could be true or not so true, real or conjectured. Like something was actually so, as one

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

295

grammarian puts it. A photograph is likewise an “as though, as if,” phenomenon. A visual image is like something that was actually so. I could not tell if the man saw me at that point. If he could not see me, I wondered, then why was he looking directly at me? Wonder lies at the root of a photographic image. He had to have seen me, I thought, otherwise why would he hold his gaze steady in my direction for those long slow seconds. It’s a disturbance, you see, to look into the eyes of a blind person. We often take the eyes of others to carry a glint of the soul revealed within. Plato, for one, insisted that it is not the eyes that see, but rather our soul that sees by means of the eyes. When the eyes are impaired, gone, damaged or blunted, something has been altered. “Their eyes, from which the divine spark has departed,” wrote Baudelaire in his poem The Blind. We’re left unsure where to look. We face a certain disconcerting optical resistance. We cannot look into the eyes, in the same way, and we do not know where to glimpse the soul in relation to our own. We cannot rely on the conventional, time-tested means of communing with the living self of the other. If we do not know if the other can see, or not see, or to what degree, we are thrown off further. Everything comes into doubt. We proceed hesitantly, within unsteady hazards of time. This might help to explain the frequent use of shaded glasses over unseeing eyes, for those shiny obscurities can disguise erratic vision. I saw him seeing me seeing him. At least I think I did. He had me in his sights, or he did not. Or he saw me through an obscure and milky film and he was trying to glean what I was up to, and gauge if or when I sought to photograph him. Perhaps. He was not sure himself. The situation was equivocal. Like so much of life, it was open to more than one interpretation. It could go either way, or many ways at once. The ambiguity in his look was in itself disturbing. His look back, and the uncertainty of what it entailed or did not entail, ruptured my steady gaze upon him. That he could see me, and could not see me, broke down my coordination. I lost my photographic rhythm, thrown off in my desire for the pure image. I could not take the easy shot. I could not photograph him at will, blissfully, blindly, with the complete freedom to spring one digital picture after another. Any clear turn of the camera his way risked a vigorous response from him. He might yell at me, or berate. Condemn. Cast a curse. Give me the evil eye, l’oeil mauvais. I could not be sure. I am always a little blind. If he can see me, I thought, he is looking at me to see if I am going to try to capture his image, for free. He would want to be compensated fairly, a Euro piece placed in his hand or coins drawn from a side pants pocket. That was the exchange implied, economic and moral. He deserved remuneration for the lifting of his image. How much is a person’s resemblance worth? He had me in his sights. He was impairing my movement, obstructing my vision. I am deadly aware of the irony: I wanted to have an unfettered regard of a blind man, much as we would like a clear view of a photographic image. His look my way disturbed that comprehension. Most often, the excitements of voyeurism, the pleasures of looking, imply that the looker is not seen or

296

Robert Desjarlais

noticed by the subject of his gaze. A look back disturbs the purity of the equation. If you are going to peek through a keyhole, chances are you won’t want to encounter another eye blinking back at you. A blind eye peeping back at you would be even more unnerving. A seeming blind eye countering one’s gaze throws things off entirely. I could not acquire the man’s image just then. The encounter was too direct. His face was straight onto mine. It wouldn’t be fair. I could only release the tension, relax the grip on my camera and walk away. I took a few steps down the stairs and turned my attention elsewhere. The man might have watched me for a while, his head swiveling in tune with my movements down and across a set of steps. I did not want to look back at him and find his eyes trailing me. I suspect he turned his attention elsewhere. I do not have a photograph of that long uncertain moment when the man was looking my way, or not, while I was looking his way, camera in hand. If I had a picture of that arrangement I could study it closely and try to assess if he was, in fact, looking at me. I would tenderly survey the features of his face as they appeared just then and scan for any glint of recognition. I’d search for that moment shown in the eyes when a person realizes that someone, a creature he does not know, is staring straight at him—and that other person has a camera in his hands and looks primed to trip the aperture. Without a steady, lasting visual picture of that sort I have only a mental image on which to rely. This is an abstract memory, vague and changeable. I lack the image in the concrete form of a semi-gloss print and yet the picture is still hauntingly there, in my mind; it lingers on those drifting steps of that moment, my eyes looking at him possibly looking at me. July 19. I have decided to go to Sacré-Coeur next week when I am in Paris again for a few days, before my flight home. I can revisit the place and try to piece together what occurred that October day. The rush of tourists will be tiresome, no doubt, shouts and antenna cravings on an anthill, but I need to be there and look about and learn if he is still there. July 21. When I bring a camera to my eyes I cannot see well through the lens. There are smudges on it. I can’t clear them away. I can make out some figures, details in the image, some children on bicycles on the street below, while other figures are obscured. I can see, and I cannot see. July 22. My fear is of growing blind myself, of losing the trade of clear vision until I have to manage without, relying on sound and touch to make my way down trafficked streets or within the intimacy of a home. “One day you’ll be blind like me,” runs a line in Beckett’s Endgame. “You’ll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark, forever, like me.” I worry that, in photographing the man’s blindness so cheaply, and writing about him with sharp-edged words, I risk bringing a similar wound into the sockets of my own. July 23. What is one to make of the fact that, soon after writing the above paragraph, my eyeglasses broke on me? This happened last night, in the rented apartment where I am staying for the week. I began to clean the lens

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

297

of my eyeglasses with a piece of smooth, clean cloth, as I had done countless, absentminded times before. This time, the force of the pressure from my thumbs against the lens caused the frames of the eyeglasses to snap into two pieces, midway along the fine metal bridge linking the two lens. Broken, cassé. This morning I brought the broken eyeglasses to an optician’s shop in town and asked if there was any way to repair them. A woman working there said that there was not, as the metal was “titanium,” incapable of being glued back together. She was kind enough to try to mend the break by using tape and some glue to form a makeshift encasement holding the two steps together. For a few hours I walked around with the glasses held together that way, then the cast lost its grip on the right side and the two halves fell apart, slipped from my face, and fell to the ground.

July 24. Last night I woke into the darkness of an early hour and sleepily became aware that my hand was touching the eyelid of my right eye. The sharp, jagged edge of a fingernail was digging into the epidermis. Perhaps in my dreams or in some unconscious state I was trying to clear out an irritating disturbance. This non-conscious action, undertaken while I was asleep, is alarming to me. I could have easily harmed that eye, or the other. I fear that worse can happen. I have asked my body not to do anymore damage while I was asleep. I nodded off with the prayer that I would awake unharmed and clear-sighted. Sleep should be a safe haven, a refuge from the brittle onslaughts of the day, though dangers clearly lie there. “We surrender to sleep,” wrote Blanchot, “but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who

298

Robert Desjarlais

serves him.” Strange to think that my body could have motives of its own, foreign to my conscious self, an alien body which could harm the organs on which this very self so tenderly relies. Meanwhile, I have taken to wearing a pair of prescription sunglasses that I have with me. These lens work fine enough, though I’m worried that I appear a bit suspicious, “shady,” méchant, when walking into cafes and restaurants with the dark shades on, or when I am wearing them in twilight hours, or at night, walking about with the camera in my hands.

July 24. More curious still. I have just lost the sunglasses. I now have nothing with which to see the world clearly. This happened around nine tonight, in the dusky hour after the sun had set to the west of Besançon. I was standing along the side of the Pont Battant. I leaned over the railing there to take some photographs of a linked series of buildings along the side of the Doubs. When I went to look at this image on the LCD screen, I took off the sunglasses to see better, as I had done countless times before. I lost hold of the glasses. They fell down and away from me, with the force of an object jettisoned from the self. I heard the glasses hit sharply against the metal edge of the bridge, and silence, only, after that. I looked down to see if I could spot them still on the bridge. They were nowhere to be seen. They must have fallen into the opaque swirling depths of the river. My first thought after losing the sunglasses was that I was close to blind. I worried that I would face difficulties in finding my way back to the apartment, unlocking the door, climbing the darkly lit stairs, stepping into a strange place, finding my footing on the creaking wood floors of the living

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

299

room and kitchen. I soon realized that I could still see much of the world, vaguely so. I could not make out the details of signs set along the roadways, and I could not pick up the telling features on the faces of those walking past me. I entered a market to pick up some food for that night and the next day, and found in walking about the store that I was as half blind, half seeing— not far, perhaps, from how the apparent blind man perceived the world. Once home, I returned to using the regular eyeglasses, severed into two. While moving about the place, I held the right side close to my eye, like a nineteenth-century monocle, whenever I needed to view words or materials up close.

July 25. Just now I am on the train to Paris, seated in a window seat in second-class coach, looking out at the passing towns and farmlands. This morning I realized I have a pair of contact lens with me, lodged into a corner of my suitcase. I purchased a set of them back in March, before a trip to Morocco. Acuvue® Oasys® brand contact lenses, for astigmatism, with Hydraclear® Plus. I have seldom used them, as I found that they strained my eyes if I wore the lenses for any length of time. It took a while to fit the concave sides onto my cornea. My eyes are not used to such plastic intimacies; the cornea looked crystal pure, innocent of harm, before the contacts intervened. The lenses seem to be working well enough now. I will have to rely on them during my waking hours, and trust that they will stay in place during the trip to Paris, train and subway, while carrying a suitcase and heavy bag. The lenses consist of flexible plastics that are pliable and hydrophilic,

300

Robert Desjarlais

“water-loving.” This keeps the lenses soft and supple, and allows oxygen to pass through to the cornea, enabling the eyes to “breathe” while blanketed in plastic. With the contact lenses on, my eyes cannot see well words or elements up close. And so I picked up a pair of inexpensive “reading glasses” at a pharmacy, + 1.50, to read texts, write with the laptop, and regard photographs on the screen. I am using them now, as I write. My eyes are adjusting to these new prosthetics of vision, one glare-resistant lens layered atop another. Remarkable it is how many optical devices we rely on in this contemporary world. With each lens, my vision is at once enhanced and partial. I am always a little blind. July 26. Paris. A return is never a circling back to the same. I made my way to the basilica last night and again this afternoon. The scene before the church had changed with the alternate season, and with the shifts in memory. The place was other to how I had remembered it. The area before the church now appeared smaller, more scrunched together. It took a while to regain a sense of proportion. Nothing is ever the same. A woman was seated close to the church, her hand held out toward the people passing by, her voice pleading for alms. Outside, men were selling water bottles. I heard them talking with each other in Hindi, and soon learned that they are from India. Other men were carrying boxes of Heineken beers with them, selling the bottles one by one to thirsty tourists, while keeping an eye out for any police officers intent on fining or arresting them for selling wares without the appropriate permits. There was no sign of the blind man. July 27. This morning I returned to the basilica. When I arrived at the steps I noticed a man seated by the entrance to the church. Around my age, he sat facing the passing crowds, a box of hospital documents by his side, testifying to his medical needs. I walked close and gave him a one Euro coin, though my intent was directed less toward him than toward the man with the cataract I had encountered two years before. The present man was, to me, a surrogate, the recipient of alms virtually given to someone else, not there. The coin was a metal of symbolic compensation, or penance, perhaps. I walked over to a clear area on the steps and stood and watched the man beckon to those walking past. He wore a long brown coat, semblant of a monk’s robes, and a large Christian cross looped around his neck. Bearded, bespectacled, he had a professorial look to him, in another context I could have taken him for an instructor at the Sorbonne, fallen from grace. His right hand twitched with slight nervous spasms, enough to induce sideway glances from those walking past. I thought I saw the muscles on his hand tremble more when clumps of people were approaching. In this theatre of the malade, real or ruse, the man saw me watching, and he watched me more whenever I looked at the twitching in his hand. The camera lay in my hand but I dared not lift it toward my eyes. Our volley of looks and counter looks were making us both uncomfortable, I suppose, and I turned my regard elsewhere.

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

301

By the end of the day’s excursions my eyes were sore and tired. I suffered an excess of keen vision, while the cornea must have been adjusting to receiving slightly less oxygen from outside air. I had to go back to the apartment and dig out the contact lens from the glaze of my eyes, thirteen hours after layering them onto those watery orbs. I stumbled my way about the apartment with the use of the broken eyeglasses. The frames kept collapsing into two parts and so I resorted again to holding up one of the lenses close to my right eye. I peered through that glassy makeshift monocle while squinting the other eye shut. I went out to buy some groceries, carrying the single lens with me, held on its broken stick. Navigating poorly, I bumped into someone, a burly young man, our shoulders colliding near the yogurt section. I returned his angry, bothered look.

July 28. This morning it took twenty minutes to place the contact lens properly over the watery curves of my corneas. I had to keep taking the instruments out, inserting them again until they felt fine and clear over the surfaces without sharp irritation. My body is a reluctant cyborg. I went to the basilica twice today, this afternoon and again around nine at night. Within the field of intersecting sights and sounds close to the steps, busy with human interests, stood a man with a guitar, singing a bluesy version of the song, “I want to know, have you ever seen the rain?” Still no trace of the blind man. I’ve gotten on friendly terms with the men from India who are selling the water bottles. I’ve told them I have spent a lot of time in Nepal, and can speak Nepali, though our brief exchanges have been in French. I’ve

302

Robert Desjarlais

purchased several waters from them, one Euro a bottle, the beginning of amity, and they now nod to me when they notice me by the steps. I’ve taken to sitting there for an hour or two, while reading a novel (Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, just now), or sketching random notes. They had become curious as to my reason for returning, day after day. I told them I was a photographer, writing about travels in France. Tomorrow, I think I’ll bring the photograph of the blind man with me, with the intent of asking one or two of the water sellers if they recognize him at all. Perhaps they’ve seen him around.

July 28. He was there today, the blind man. He stood by the steps to the basilica, much as he did when I saw him before. This afternoon, on my last day in Paris, I approached the hilltop from the northwest, walking up from Place des Abbesses and through those uneven streets crammed with tourists, their fine antennas alert to the biochemical scent of wondrous impressions, Manets and Monets. A legion of artists carrying blank white canvasses sought to draw the portraits of charmed tourists, “pour le souvenir,” for a fee. Most of the artists began their drawings by first sketching in the eyes. In my bag lay the black-and-white photograph. Upon arriving at the basilica, I expected to encounter much the same scene as the past few days—the carnal pulsations of tourists, the dazzling mechanics of cameras, men selling their bottles of water. I turned toward the entrance and glanced at a woman seeking alms. That’s when I saw him standing by the gate. He was still there, reasonably well, still on his feet, at the clutch of it. He had assumed much the same pose as in the photographs. His hand was held

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

303

out, gently. A light metal walking stick lay in the nape of his wrist. He was standing directly in the sun’s heat. Sweating, he wiped his brow free of perspiration. He wore a heavy coat, light brown in color, with a large hood, possibly the same coat he had on when I had photographed him two years before. The lower parts of the coat appeared darker in color than those above, suggesting that the darkening resulted from an accumulation of sweat. I sat on the steps a few feet above and away from him; we felt the heat from the same sun. I could not fathom why he would be enveloped in such a thick and heavy coat on a summer day in July. Perhaps the expanses of its coating lent him a sense of protection, and kept part of him hidden from the stares and flesh of others. He had to expose himself each day, put himself by the gates and demonstrate his blindness. Did the coat serve as an eyelid, protective and soothing? Clouds passed above, bringing relief for a minute or two, the searing heat returned. He shook his head at times, as if throwing off a fit of lightheadedness. He retrieved an inhaler from inside his coat and drew breaths from it. Coagulates of people passed. Very few of them gave him any money, one in fifty, at best—women, chiefly. Any coins received he measured and then deposited in his right coat pocket. “Voleur!” I heard him say at one point. Thief! His word caught my eye and I watched as he turned and looked toward the crowd of people below, as though sighting or sounding someone who had snatched a few coins from his hand—or to indicate to others the sensed direction to which the thief had taken flight. Perhaps he heard someone running off. Nothing came of his alert. No one responded, as far as I could tell, his words fell without consequence. He returned to his stance by the gate, hand held out. He must have been terribly thirsty. I sat and watched, taking in the day’s sensorials. I looked into my wallet and saw that I had three twenty-Euro bills, nothing smaller than that. A twenty would be too much to give him, I reasoned—he might not discern the amount, or he could lose it later that day. Or someone would see me giving him the money, and rob him of it later on. I reached into my backpack, past the photograph, and felt for any change scattered about, ten- or fifty-centime pieces. I came up with a handful of coins. I walked down the steps and approached one of the men selling the water bottles. “Ça va?” “Ça va.” “C’est chaud aujourd’hui.” “Comment? Oui. C’est chaud.” The man had two bottles remaining in his bucket. I bought one of them and held it in my left hand. In my right hand was the grab of coins. I opened the bottle and took a sip of the cool water. I walked along the fence, toward the blind man, and stood close to him. He did not see me standing there. “Monsieur,” I said.

304

Robert Desjarlais

He looked blankly. “C’est pour vous. C’est un peu de la monnaie.” He turned toward me and held out his hand. I placed the coins in the palm of his hand. My hand touched his. “Merci,” he said. “Merci,” I said. “Est-ce que vous voulais d’eau?” Would you like some water? “D’eau?” “Oui. Une bouteille d’eau.” “Oui. L’eau. ” I doubt he could have known or recognized me from two years before. How could he be aware, at all, that I had been intensely concerned with his specular image, and the condition of his eyes? Or that I had been hoping to locate him again. He must have been oblivious to the black-and-white photograph that lay in the heated confines of my shoulder bag. I turned back to where the man selling the water had been, but he had gone. I had been counting on that last, remaining water still being there. I looked toward the blind man, still by the gate. I gave thought to giving him the opened water bottle, from which I had already drunk. If I gave it to him, he would have no way of knowing that I had already taken a few sips. He would hold the bottle to his lips and drink the liquid and the fluids of our saliva would have interwoven in a brief fine stream of comingled time. There would be a consubstantiation of frail, separate bodies now together linked, unknown to him, cognizant to me. It would not be right to give him a water I had already sipped from, without informing him of this; he could get sick, he would be consuming something tainted, unwanted, beyond himself. He should know about this. I brushed past the gate, past his open hand, and located a man selling water by the concourse below the gate and stairs. I gave him a Euro coin and brought the water to the gate. “C’est de l’eau, Monsieur.” “L’eau?” “Oui. Un boteille d’eau.” He reached for the bottle, sensed its shape, and took it in his hands. “Merci.” “Merci.” He looked at me, and said, “Vous êtes gentil.” You are kind.

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

305

I am not sure of that. He looked at me with a gesture of caring regard. He did not have to see me in order to show his regard of me. His voice was rich and grave and tender and sane—and, dare I say, wise and knowing, as if he had seen a lot. In those moments I saw not a blind beggar but a person standing before me, within a moment of mutual regard and respect. His damaged eyes were there, in the pools of his sockets; they did not matter much. His eyes were no longer monstrous. I could have stared at them, and the ugly, distorting cataracts looming there, but there was more to his presence before me. We had spoken, face to face. He was greater than me. He was greater than my impression of him, vaster than the picture I had accrued. His presence before me, and the immediacy of the encounter—it happened so quickly— nearly overwhelmed me. He took the water, and he turned, I suppose. I walked away, back up the steps. I realized I still had the cap to the bottle I had given him. I held the milky white plastic, nearly translucent in appearance, in my hand. I thought of returning and letting him know I had the cap, but this would have been too confusing an exchange to force upon him. I watched as he took a few sips of the water. He drank much less than I thought he would—he looked so terribly thirsty, sweat saturated his coat. With care he placed the bottle on the ground, close to the metal bars of the fence, and he felt his way back to the entrance to the gate. The bottle laid there, on the hard ground, the lid crucially open, precarious. Anyone walking past could knock it over with a quick, unknowing swipe of a foot, and the water would spill to the ground. I sat on the steps as he continued to ask for money. I took out my notebook and began to write out notes and observations. I wanted to remember as much as possible, the look of him, his gestures and movements, my thoughts—so much is lost after just a few minutes. He looked my way, toward me seated on the steps, watching him, writing down words in the space between us. I trusted he could not see me. There was an invisible relation between us. It was as if we were keeping each other company, biding time together, as friends might do. I took a few photographs. There were nine steps between him and me, and a small flat surface—this I counted. We sipped from the waters at the same time, tuned to the same rhythm of thirst. He reached for the fence behind him and touched it with his hand. Sensing it still, he moved slowly along the fence, feeling for each metal bar, equidistant from its neighbors. When he came to a larger, more massive bar, the one bearing a protruding spike, he motioned his body downward, toward the ground. He reached for the lidless bottle of water, touching it with his fingers, and grabbed hold without spilling its contents. He brought the bottle close to his mouth and took a few brief sips. He placed it back on the ground. I worried anew that the bottle would tip over, with so many walking past. I gave thought to walking down the steps and standing close to the water, to protect

306

Robert Desjarlais

it from spillage, but thought that my body’s presence along that pathway would cause further turmoil. The man relied on his hands to feel his way back along the fence, back to where he had been standing before, four posts and then the larger post. So this was his topography on the steps, his method of siting where he stood or wished to go. His hands and walking stick worked the fence as a prosthetics of sight, an extension of his unseeing eyes, reaching out, anticipating, always hesitant, never more than half certain. I worried how he would fare once apart from the count of steps and posts.

I wished to stay there, watching continuously. I had to leave the hilltop and walk down to where I was staying, to check in on a scheduled conversation by Skype with a friend. That call never happened. Back at the apartment I located an assortment of change that I had accumulated during my recent travels in Europe, small units of Nordic gold or copper-covered steel held in a plastic zip-lock sandwich baggie. I put the bag in my knapsack, left the apartment and climbed the steps to the Basilica. I wanted to give the man this collection of change and talk with him more though I wasn’t sure how well I would be able to strike up a conversation with him, introduce myself, ask about his concerns, in French no less, and without him having the capacity to see me talking to him, my gestures, expressions, the light in my eyes. I returned to the basilica, breathless from a quick jog up stone stairs. He was nowhere to be seen. Another man had taken his place by the gate, the professorial looking one. The box of hospital documents sat by his side, his hand twitched slightly. Perhaps the alms-seekers have arranged shifts, I

Photography Tears the Subject From Itself

307

thought, like buskers at a subway station. Or the subsequent, more ablebodied man had muscled the blind man off. Could it be that someone, a friend or an aide, came and met him by the gate to the basilica, and helped him to climb down into the streets of Montmartre? In one sense, I felt relief he was gone. If he happened to leave while I was there, I would have been tempted to trail a few steps behind his uncertain progress. I would learn how he managed his movements once away from the terrain of the church, where he went to, what he did next, where he lived. I would have photographed him as he crossed a busy avenue and tapped his way around a street corner. I could have arranged to interview him, a digital recorder scooping up his words. I could have drummed up a life history and conveyed his plea for life. I’d contribute to the annals of medical anthropology, and launch a new theory of suffering, for the betterment of humanity. I would have finessed a phenomenology of blindness, while bringing attention to his plight and glory to my name. If I had the opportunity to talk with him again, I would ask for his name, only. And leave it at that.

Contributors

Bernhard Leistle is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa. Bernhard Waldenfels is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, Germany. Vincent Crapanzano is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Victor Li is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Danielle DiNovelli-Lang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa. Amina Mire is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Carleton University, Ottawa. Thomas Fuchs is Karl Jaspers-Professor of Psychiatry and Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Christopher Stephan is a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. C. Jason Throop is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Frances Slaney is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa. Marieka Sax has obtained her Doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from Carleton University in 2014. Robert Desjarlais is Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.

Index

accident: and otherness 12; in photography 291 adolescence 18, 148; identity in 154–6 Africa 18, 90, 91, 141; as absolute Other 136–7; alienness of 52; see also albinism; skin whitening African Americans 127–9, 137–9; in colonial America 129–33; see also albinism; race/racism; skin whitening Agamben, Giorgio 109 Alaska 18, 107; colonial history of 112–13; native people of 118–21; otters in 114–18 albinism 126, 127, 129; in Africa 133–35; as biological condition 126; among black slaves in America 129–33; through skin whitening 141–42 alien/alienness 35–9, 57–60, 102–5, 149–50, 232–6, 247–8, 257–61; alien experience 193; as alluring 136; annihilation of 136, 145; degrees of 37; as different from otherness 35–6, 167; as extra-ordinary 16, 36–7, 258; and identity 150–4, 161; in psychiatry 148; as threatening 149, 156, 160; 262 as radical otherness viii, 12, 234, 250–51; representation of 50–2, 66–7 alienation see alien/alienness alterity see Other/otherness anachronistic space 137; see also chronopolitics anayáwari 216–18, 221, 222 animals: difference to humans 108–11; as Other 115–18; see also otters; posthumanism anorexia nervosa 18, 157–8 anthropology: history of 5–11, 51; as objectifying 307; of otherness 15; of the phantastic 293–4; and

phenomenology 25, 27–8, 30–3, 34–5, 182–3; as science of the alien 2–5, 22n9, 40–1 anti-miscegenation laws 128–30; see also race/racism appeal 14, 33, 39, 40, 54, 234, 247, 267, 276; see also responsivity Aristotle 79–83, 85–6, 110 attention 151, 152, 193; and affection 192, 202–3; ‘attentional modifications’ 201 Bakhtin, Mikhail 46, 64, 65, 103 Baudelaire, Charles 295 Baudrillard, Jean 89, 90–1, 101, 104 Beckett, Samuel 296 begging/giving alms 283, 291, 300 Berg, Eberhard 46, 50, 51, 57, 58, 62, 67n1, 70n25 bilingualism 218 biomedicine: and local traditions 197–8, 240–6, 249–50; see also healing; medical pluralism birth: and alienness 37, 38, 66, 259 Blanchot, Maurice 297–8 blancos 20, 208, 213–16; 219–23 and Tarahumara 209–13; see also Tarahumara blindness: blind eye 295–6; as deformity 286–7; fear of becoming 296–300; and photography 292; Schreber on 273–4; see also sight body: alienation of 157, 160, 192–3, 194, 256–7, 297–8; as basis of identity 150–6; phenomenology of 28–30, 36, 196–7, 212, 218, 258–9; racialization of 126–33; of Schreber 268–9 body image 155; in anorexia nervosa 157–8; see also body

310

Index

bonesetting 19, 186–91, 197–8 borderline personality disorder 18, 156 Bühler, Karl 43n15, 48, 49, 64, 258 call: of the alien 247–51; see also responsivity cannibalism 108, 117, 216; against albinos 133–5 capitalism: and subalternity 95–6 Charismatic Christians 19; experience of 164–5, 174–81; history of 171–2; practices of 173 Casey, Edward S. 212 cataract 287, 292, 293, 300, 305 chiasm see intertwining Chinese writing: otherness of 94 Chopin, Kate 129, 139 Chow, Rey 94, 101 chronopolitics 93; see also temporality Clifford, James 7, 49, 51, 57, 61, 64 colonialism: in Mexico 208, 212, 215, 226n2; in North America 112–13, 129–33; and whiteness 137–9, 144 color line 127, 130–2, 138–9; see also race/racism companion species see Haraway, Donna compulsion: “compulsion to think” 269–70 conservationism 114–15, 118–21 cosmology 257, 264–7; see also “Order of the World” Crapanzano, Vincent 170, 263, 277, 279n8 Craven, Allison 142–3 crisis: of anthropology 4–5, 7–8, 50–52, 69n23; of identity in adolescence 154–5; psychosis as 256, 265 Crowell, Stephen Galt 6–7, 11, 42n8 Csordas, Thomas 22n10, 28, 166–8, 202 culture: Husserl on 27–8; and ontology 10; as responsive repertoire 19, 260–1; as webs of significance 55–7 dead: Day of the Dead 236–7; souls of the 231, 236, 238, 239, 248 death: and alienness 37, 38, 259; anonymity of 109–10; of a child 20, 242–3, 250; and friendship 80, 84–5, 86n9; and photography 284 Derrida, Jacques 49, 84–5, 86n8, 94; on animals 115–16 Dolezal, Rachel 127–8

egocentrism 261 empathy 28, 196–7 encantos see spirits Enlightenment 124, 125, 142, 145 epistemology 10, 47, 75–6; in anthropology 60–1, 293–4 ethnocentrism 89–91, 94, 102, 117–18, 261 ethnographic authority 51 ethnographic representation 6–8, 45–6, 50–7; as response 66–7 ethnology see anthropology eye: eye contact 187, 286; evil eye 295; as mirror of the soul 284, 295–6; see also blindness; sight/seeing excentric position see Plessner, Helmuth Fabian, Johannes 8, 21n4, 43n10, 48, 57–8, 65, 77, 92 Fausto, Carlos 107–8 Fish and Wildlife Service (US) 114, 119 Flechsig, Paul Emil 255, 265; as Schreber’s persecutor 270–1 Foster, George 241 Foucault, Michel 41, 109, 272 fremd: translation of viii, 22n6, 35, 43n11; see also alien Freud, Sigmund 151, 161; on Schreber 256, 258, 262, 270, 280n10 Friday (literary character) 95, 100 friendship 16, 72; Aristotle on 79–83; between non-equals 84 ; Montaigne on 83–5; Plato on 78–9; in politics 81–2; and subjective experience 86 Fuchs, Martin 46, 50, 51, 57, 58, 62, 67n1, 70n25 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 56–7, 235 gaze see sight Geertz, Clifford 2–3, 55–7 genealogy: as fabrication 127–8; of knowledge 110; of morals 124; racial 125–6, 128, 138; of the radical Other 25, 42n2 ghosts see anayáwari globalization: of beauty ideal 140; and subalternity 96, 98, 99; as Western phenomenon 94; of whiteness 137–44 God 34, 216, 224, 237, 250: of Charismatic Christians 165, 169–70; inaccessibility of 175–6; Schreber’s relationship to 256–7, 264–7

Index Goon, Patricia 142–3 grotesques 290 Hacking, Ian 125 Hallowell, Irving 166–7, 181 hallucinations 179, 268–9, 272–3 Haraway, Donna 116–17 healing: emotional 178; healer-patient relationship 187–92, 197–200, 203–4; ritual healing 240–6, 249–51; self-healing 277–9 Hegel, G.W.F. 74–5, 136–7 Heidegger, Martin 42n8, 57 hermeneutics 55–7, 235–6 Holocaust 109, 111 Holy Spirit see God human-animal relationship see animals humanism 110, 135–6 Husserl, Edmund: on intentionality 42n3, 168–9; on the Other 26–8, 60, 69n21; on touching 196 illness 18, 20, 37, 199, 221, 260; caused by spirits 231–2, 236, 239; as defective responsiveness 43n15, 160, 262, 269; “naturalistic” and “personalistic” 241, 244–6; see also medical pluralism; mental illness image 21, 48, 68n11; advertising 142; mirror 159–60; photographic 282–3, 295; of self 153–4 imagination 47, 179, 286–7; and alienness 67; and anthropology 7, 293–4; of the Other 9, 91, 101, 125; of tradition 120 impartation 164, 176–7; see also Charismatic Christians incompossibility 65 indexicality 54, 64, 73–4, 78, 214 India, Indians 98–9, 300, 301 indigeneity 19, 108, 118, 216–19; as sign for the Other 94–101 indirect speech 67 intentionality: of the body 28–9; of consciousness 2, 11–12, 25–6, 168–9; and the Other 32, 36, 38–9 intersubjectivity 19, 69n21, 158–60, 166–8; asymmetry of 165, 168–70, 182, 192, 200–1; transcendental 27–8, 43n5; “vertical” 65 intertwining: in anthropology 54, 56, 62; of empirical and radical Other 4, 14, 19; of levels of responding 37,

311

260, 267–8, 278; of self and Other 18, 29, 34, 101–4, 203, 248 Jebens, Holger 4 Jefferson, Thomas 131–2, 137 Johnson, David 5 Kant, Immanuel 95 Kohl, Karl-Heinz 22n9, 51–2, 62 Kooshdakhaa 17, 107, 111–12, 118 Kraepelin, Eric 273 La Boétie, Etienne de 83–4 Lacan, Jacques 73, 74 landscape 112, 208, 216–28, 225 lateral universal 31; see also Merleau-Ponty Latour, Bruno 112 Leder, Drew 193–4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 30–1, 90, 93 Levinas, Emmanuel 42n8, 65, 85, 194, 200–1; and anthropology 21n3, 34–5; philosophy of 32–4, 42n9; and Waldenfels 35–6, 104 Life Church 170–1, 173–4 life-world: and alienness 37; and culture 27, 37, 165, 168, 181, 235, 260; as order of sense 38, 271 liminality 20, 111, 239; adolescence as 18; and alienness 36, 103–4 logocentrism 17, 261 logos 31, 37, 53, 64; and alienness 55; of anthropology 62; as order 64, 273–7; of responsivity 39 Los Angeles 170, 171 Luhrmann, Tanya 179 Lyotard, François 89, 90–1, 101, 104 madness 272, 276; see also mental illness magical power: of crucifixes 223–4; of places 231, 243–4; of whiteness 133–4, 142; see also witchcraft Malinowski, Bronislaw 3, 53, 54 malos espiritus see spirits Maranhão, Tullio 21n3 Marcus, George 7 Marine Mammal Protection Act (US) 114, 119, 120 master and slave dialectic see Hegel, G.W.F. Mauss, Marcel 30–1 Mbembe, Achille 109–10

312

Index

Mead, George Herbert 152 medical pluralism 186–7, 197–8, 241, 249 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness: and self 277–8; structure of 363; see also Schreber memory: historical 214–16; uncertainty of 296, 300 mental illness 148, 270; as disturbed responsivity 262; experience of 256; see also psychiatry Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 50, 63, 212, 218, 225, 226n8; philosophy of 28–30; on anthropology 30–2; on touching 200; see also body Mexico 207ff.; Mexican Revolution 220 Michaelsen, Scott 5 misrecognition 76 modernity: and the Other 9, 94, 98, 100, 121n3, 125, 261; and race 125–6; and rationality 136 Montaigne, Michel de 83–5, 91 Morocco 75, 93, 286, 290, 299 Musée du Quai Branly 17, 91–3 naming: and alienness 2, 234–5, 250; Spivak on 96–7 narrative/narrativity 78, 85–6, 113–14, 136, 145, 179; “grand narratives” 90 necropolitics 109, 117 neo-primitivism see primitivism Nietzsche, Friedrich 110, 124–5, 289 ontological turn 10–11, 121 ontology 10–11, 29–30, 211, 225, 239, 246, 250; and the Other 32–3, 42n8, 111, 136, 274–6 optical unconscious 290 order 11–15, 36–7, 232, 234; of perception 268–9; plurality of 43n13, 64, 67, 259; of reason 273–6; of sociality 270–3 “Order of the World” 264–7; see also Schreber Orientalism 40, 94–5 Other/otherness: absolute 34, 36, 90, 102, 161; abstract 72–8; in anthropology 5–11; empirical and radical 1–5, 14, 19, 234, 251 othering 18, 51, 124, 135; in anthropology 57–8 otters 17, 113–15; killing and selling of 118–21 ownness see alien/alienness

pain 19, 259; cultural articulation of 187–91, 198–200; otherness of 37–8, 185–6, 193–7, 202–4; and pathos 259–60; therapeutic use of 197–8 paradox: of anthropology 3–4, 40–1, 45–6, 58; of expression 50; of friendship 81, 83; of the Other 2, 59–60, 94, 100, 153, 161; of representation 66–7 Parham, Charles 171 Paris 91–2, 283–5, 300–7 participant observation 16, 52–5, 66–7 passing: racial 127–8, 130, 138 pathos 38, 203, 259–60, 262, 277–8; see also Waldenfels, Bernhard Peiss, Kathy 138–9 penance 300 Pentecostalism 171–2 performativity: of language 73–4, 254, 257, 277 personal identity see self/selfhood Peru 230ff. phenomenology 1–2, 182, 258, 268, 270; of the alien 46, 69n21, 102–5, 149–50, 233–4; the Other in 25–6; see also Husserl, Edmund; Levinas, Emanuel; Merleau-Pony, Maurice; Waldenfels, Bernhard photography 282ff.; as medium 284, 287; as phenomenology of perception 294; possession by 282; and subject 294; temporality of 288–9; uncertainty of 287, 292, 295, 296 Pirandello, Luigi 155 place: as nexus of space and time 212 Plato 63–4, 78–9, 80, 85–6, 295 Plessner, Helmuth 159 polylogue see polyphony polyphony 51, 54, 64–5 possession 73, 75, 167, 282; and subjectivity 34; see also spirits postcolonialism; and anthropology 6; the Other in 9, 17, 89, 94–101, 104–5, 111; see also colonialism; Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty postcolonial studies see postcolonialism posthumanism 17, 115–18; see also animals postmodernism 17, 89–93, 104–5; in anthropology 9, 46, 51–2, 61–5, 70n25, 225; and borderline personality disorder 156

Index prayer 297; among Charismatic Christians 164, 174–5, 178, 179–80; for the dead 236–7; as response 248 Price, Sally 92 priests: and treasures 213–16, 219–21, 223–4, 226n5 primitivism 17, 89–90, 135–37; in anthropology 108; in museum 91–3; in postcolonialism 94–101; in postmodern theory 90–1; see also “savage slot” psychiatry 18, 254, 262 ; as response to the alien 37, 148; as discursive order 270–6 psychoanalysis 74, 75; of Schreber 256, 262–3, 279n3 psychopathology see psychiatry psychotic experience 256; responsivity of 262; see also Schreber, Daniel Paul Quechua 230 “question of the Other” 1, 9, 25, 257 Rabinow, Paul 47, 58, 62 race/racism 18, 76–7, 126, 127–32 Rancière, Jacques 102 reciprocity: and alienness 36; and friendship 82 representation: ambiguity of 46–50; in anthropology 6–11, 16, 45ff.; crisis of 50–2; of non-European cultures 136–37; of the Other 58, 94; as response 66–7 responsive difference 14, 39 responsive phenomenology see responsivity responsivity 11–15, 235–6, 247–51, 257–61; of anthropology 40, 66–7; creativity of 39, 260; levels of 267–8; of speech 67; see also Waldenfels Sacré-Coeur 282, 283, 291 Santner, Eric 270–1, 274 Sartre, Jean Paul 69n22, 152, 155, 158 “savage slot” 91, 110 Scarry, Elaine 192–3 schizophrenia 158–60, 262 Schreber, Daniel Paul: feminization 265–6; life of 254–5; memoirs of 256–7; and psychiatry 270–3; tutelage trial 274–6; see also Memoirs of my Nervous Illness Schreber, Daniel Gottlob Moritz 254–5, 279n3

313

Schütz, Alfred 54, 201 self/selfhood 26, 32–4, 35–6, 52, 103–4, 233; anthropological 6, 8, 14–15, 31–3, 54–5, 60–1; bodily foundation of 28–9, 150, 268–9, 297–8; and cultural objects 166; development of 38, 151–4, 260–1; dissolution of 21, 294; and knowledge 111; and pain 192–3; pathologies of 148, 156–60, 262; reconstruction of 277–9 self-reflexivity: in anthropology 6, 41, 51, 62–3 senses/sensory modalities 28, 150–1, 195, 239, 268; see also hallucinations Seymour, William 171 shaman 107, 111, 211, 217, 223–4; see also witchcraft shame 152, 155 Sharpe, Jenny 96–7 sight/seeing 77, 282ff.; eye contact 295; prosthetics of 300, 306; reciprocity of 159, 292–3; see also vision skin whitening 124ff.; and albinism 141; health risks of 134, 140; industry and marketing 135, 137–44; and tanning 144 slavery: in America 18, 129–33 socialization 260–1 Socrates 78–80 Sonnenstein Asylum 255, 272 sorcery 230–1, 242–6 ; see also healing; witchcraft “soul murder” 265, 271 South Africa 76, 77 spirits 166–7; ancestors as 20, 216–17; attack by 238; place-based 20, 230–2 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 89, 94–101 Stagl, Justin 69n23 subalternity 17, 94–101, 104–5, 105n1 subjectivity 26, 62, 136, 154, 196, 277, 287; and friendship 75, 82; in Levinas 33–4; in Merleau Ponty 29, transcendental 27, 28 susto 221–2, 240–2 tactility see touch Tanzania 133, 134 Tarahumara 19–20; and landscape 216–18; relationship with blancos 208–13; and underground 223–5 Tedlock, Dennis 61, 65

314

Index

television: as social practice 209–10 temporality: of Western modernity 137; in the Musée du Quai Branly 92–3; of the Other 12, 77–8, 200–1, 259; of pain 193–4 Theunissen, Michael 69n19 third party 35–6, 65, 233, 276; in anthropology 54; as social convention 75, 263 threshold see liminality time see temporality Tlingit 107, 111, 120 touch: as diagnostic instrument 199–200; and empathy 196–7; from God 176; and identity 151; and pain 191–2, 194–5, 203–4; reversibility of 30, 196, 200–1 tourism 302: and conservationism 115, 120 tradition: in hermeneutics 57; invention of 119–21 traditional medicine see medical pluralism Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 91 Tyler, Stephen 61, 63–4, 70n29 universalism: and human rights 36, 43n13; and logos 55; and ontology 10, 30; and posthumanism 115–18; Western 90–1, 125, 135–6, 144–5 violence: against albinos 133–5; and representation 96, 97, 110, 111–12; as response to the Other 18, 33, 136, 145; skin whitening as 143–4 Virginia (colony) 129–30

vision: religious 164–5, 176, 181, 264, 273–4; Tarahumara 223, 227n9; see also sight/seeing vitiligo see albinism voices see hallucinations voyeurism 295–6 Waldenfels, Bernhard 73, 121n3, 149, 193, 202, 203, 204, 212, 215, 232–6, 247–8, 251; and anthropology 14–15, 16, 21n3, 40–1; concept of alienness 35–9; concept of responsivity 11–15, 257–61; and neo-primitivism 101–5; phenomenological context 25ff.; on representation 45ff.; and universalism 125, 145 wealth extraction: by hunting 113–14; by mining 208, 215, 226n1 Weber, Guido 255, 274–5 Weinbaum, Alys Eve 126, 129 “we-relationship” 201; see also Schütz, Alfred “White Negro” 131–2; see also albinism; race/racism whiteness see skin whitening Williams, Peter 118–20 witchcraft: and African witchdoctors 133–5; and blancos 222; in Peruvian Andes 241, 244, 245 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 168–9; on pain 192, 194–5 “writing-down-system” 269; see also Schreber, Daniel Paul Yap 186, 204n1; suffering and pain in 198–200 Young, Don 115