Against Hybridity: Social Impasses in a Globalizing World 9780745690698, 9780745690704, 0745690696

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Against Hybridity

For my grandchildren: Anna, Bar, Alex and those to follow . . .

Against Hybridity Social Impasses in a Globalizing World

Haim Hazan

polity

Copyright © Haim Hazan 2015 The right of Haim Hazan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2015 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9069-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9070-4(pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hazan, Haim. Against hybridity : social impasses in a globalizing world / Haim Hazan. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7456-9069-8 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-7456-9070-4 (paperback) 1. Culture and globalization. 2. Anthropology–Philosophy. I. Title. HM621.H393 2015 303.48′2–dc23 2014027254 Typeset in 10.5/12 Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Contents

Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction: Zones and Discourses of Cultural Sturdiness

1

1 Terms of Hybridity: (Non-)Hybridization and (Anti-)Globalization

10

2 Becoming a Non-hybrid: The Very Old as Deadly Others

46

3 Impasses of Hybridity: From Liquidity to Quiddity

91

Conclusion: Bringing the Extra-Cultural Back In

131

References

144

Index

165

Acknowledgments

Against Hybridity is about recognizing social impasses in a world swamped by faith in the sweeping forces of globalization; about refashioning the age-old idea of otherness in a new anthropological form; about rethinking the sources of dread and anxiety in a highly hybridized era; and last but not least, about enlisting the hitherto marginal study of old age as a key clue to the understanding of contemporary predicaments. Indeed, the book is, to a large extent, an emergent scholarly property of decades of searching and researching aging, and a few of its sections reflect and adapt some of my previously published materials concerning the end of life. To those elderly persons whose cooperation and wisdom molded the ethnographic studies that inform the book, I am immensely grateful. Along the way of writing and revising the manuscript, I greatly benefited from the generous and constructive critique of several friends and colleagues who took the trouble to peruse various versions of the texts. I am particularly indebted to Professors Gil Eyal, Nigel Rapport, Aviad Raz, and Ido Yoav for their thorough reading and reviewing. I am also thankful to Ms Ayala Raz for her dedicated assistance in preparing the manuscript, and to the Minerva Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of the End of Life at Tel Aviv University for being an intellectual hub for brainstorming ideas and



Acknowledgments

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for backing the successful completion of the project. My friend Professor Osvaldo Romberg munificently contributed one of his exquisite works of art for the book’s jacket, and for this kind gesture I am immeasurably obliged. Special thanks are extended to Professor John Thompson and to Dr Elliott Karstadt from Polity Press for their attentive understanding and efficient care throughout the process of publication. My wife Mercia, my children Gil, Lee, and Dana and granddaughters Anna and Bar enveloped me with love that empowered my conviction in the contents and contentions of Against Hybridity. Haim Hazan July 2014

Introduction: Zones and Discourses of Cultural Sturdiness

The cacophonic sounds of culture pervade all walks of life, while their polyphonic orchestration beguiles us into believing that no other music is audible. Thus, we seldom lend our ears to the faint, humming noise of other lives that might play on our fears and imagination as sirens of deadly passions. This book is attuned to listening to these illicit sounds. Let us begin by unfolding the genetics of the cultural that allow for the emergence of such muted mutations, offering alternative forms of life in the midst of the taken-for-granted. Cultural configurations embody a double helix composed of two central threads of discursive designation: the metaphoric and the metonymic, the learnt and the innate, the social and the natural, the constructed and the essential. The study of culture as practiced in the discipline of anthropology, for example, often hinges on a certain interpretation of the interplay of these dimensions. In its modernist heyday, anthropology contended that the unstable boundaries of culture, the sites of taboos, dangers, fears, and revulsions, are by and large an emergent property of in-between spaces delineated by mixed categories. This is indeed the well-known legacy of structural-functionalist anthropology and sociology, with its fixation on order and disorder that has generated a variety of modern discourses concerning the characteristics of the condition of otherness rooted in zones of such cultural

2

Introduction

uncertainty. Examples of major discursive tropes of this kind include the social form of “the stranger” (Bauman 1991; Simmel 1971 [1908]), the “roleless” state of liminality in rites of passage (Turner 1969; Van Gennep 1960 [1908]), the forbidden zone of taboos (Steiner 1967 [1956]), the mortified self of inmates (Goffman 1961), and generally speaking all that is anomalous, abominated, polluted, and contaminated (Douglas 1966). These are all, notwithstanding their vast differences, images of the cultural anxieties born and bred in the fold of “between-ness” (Crapanzano 2004). One of the major characteristics of a postmodern or late modern culture, in contrast, is a positive, almost banal, view of the transgression and disruption of cultural boundaries. Evidently, twenty years of critical social theory have taught us to be skeptical of any certainty about “the postmodern” itself; however, I shall continue to use it as a necessary scaffolding or construction for the cultural analysis that is at stake. Postcolonial natives, immigrants, and nomads are all welcome and encouraged to hybridize and assimilate into western, postmodern, midlife, neurotypical culture. This antithesis of the ethos of modernity was brought about by processes of globalization and its resulting pidginization, creolization, and hybridization. Where globalization processes are of prime importance, the first dimension of the two – the metaphoric and socially constructed – becomes dominant and prioritized. Indeed, in such a culture, perceived non-hybrid elements of social impasse, entities of indestructible quiddity, that are deemed belonging to the second dimension will be rejected, silenced, or exterminated from cultural discourse since they are regarded as disturbing the continuous flow of “liquid modernity” and consumerist culture. This book tells their story. The main narrative is that of aging and the Fourth Age, with subplots including additional repressed and silenced topics such as pain, the Holocaust, autism, fundamentalism, and death. In discussing these various cases, I highlight a common biopolitical denominator explaining their social positioning. In a nutshell, the argument is that the social perception of non-hybrids results in aversion, distancing, and rejection, while the residual layers of these “non-hybrids” are staged and graded to create a dynamic spectrum on which hybridization can still take place. It is important to stress that



Introduction

3

I am not arguing for the actual existence of non-hybrid essences, such as in the form of old age, pain, or autism. My claims are all made within the epistemological realm of social constructivism. When analyzing something as a non-hybrid, my guiding rationale is that it is constructed, in contemporary postmodern western, midlife, neurotypical culture, as being non-hybrid. My aim is to examine how, due to the sensibilities and fixations of the so-called “postmodern” culture we live in, those elements considered as “non-hybrids” become the targets of specific social strategies designed to distance, reject, stage, and (de)grade. The discourse of the essential and the hybrid was dominant among western intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In its earlier form, it defined the hybrid as the residual, subordinate “other” to modernity’s rational, secular, and progressive tenets. In retrospect, the binaries of the essential versus the hybrid can also be connected to other dichotomies of modernity, most notably the enchanted/ modern as well as the reified/porous. In the colonizing and imperialistic European approaches, the hybridization of modern society (as well as the enchantment of modernity, or the porousness of reified reality) was often viewed ambivalently and with dread. European society, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, made a fetish out of “the pureblood.” This meant that unhomely categories of no fixed cultural address that did not fit the scheme – like gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, and mestizos – were expunged from the lists of normality. Whereas the hybrid was previously viewed as atavistic and marginal in relation to the rational and secular tenets of modernity, the approach of the late twentieth century posits postmodernity itself as inherently hybrid – a global, fluid, amorphic construct constituted by hybridization. In the “postmodern” approach, hybridization or porosity, referring to a state where nothing was simply itself and everything was in principle interchangeable, is seen as a value of, indeed a prerequisite for, global modernity. For the Frankfurt School, there was some relief to be found in the porous as a potential antidote to the self-enchantment of Enlightenment; however, I intend to show that porousness, or hybridity, has its own blind spots, pitfalls, and drawbacks. As the pendulum swings

4

Introduction

to its postmodern emphasis of hybridity, it also becomes dangerously intimidating, oppressive, and inhumane, furnished and exacerbated by the political correction of everything which is readily perceived as non-hybrid. The argument of the book is that the social perception of non-hybrids results in aversion, distancing, and rejection, while the residual layers of these “non-hybrids” are staged and graded to create a dynamic spectrum on which hybridization can still take place. That which resists hybridization is also labeled as politically incorrect, and thus in need of correction: the postmodern fears the unyielding absolutism of the pure. This argument thus offers a new reading of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1947]), indicting western, midlife, neurotypical modernity as a globalizing enchantment whose reliance on the instrumental reason of hybridization abolishes non-hybrid individuality, distorts human nature, and represses autonomy. It sheds new light on the classic criticism of the Frankfurt School that modernity becomes a self-legitimizing force transcending its own properties of self-criticism. This claim will be elaborated by looking at the cases of the elderly, Holocaust survivors, patients in pain, and people on the autism spectrum. This book joins other scholars who in the “third space” of postcolonialism seek to replace previous approaches by the recognition that our time is characterized by tensions between seemingly irreconcilable forces and ideas. We should look beyond binaries arranged in an implicit hierarchy, and go even beyond the dialectical transformation of one term into its opposite, facing the unresolved contradictions and oppositions or antinomies. The modern sources of “purity and danger” and cultural pollution (Douglas 1966) have become largely obsolete in the globally constructed postmodern universe of hybrids and cyborgs (Haraway 1991). The synthetic products of consumer society and the mixed, uni-age and uni-sex codes and practices of socialization have turned into liberating celebrations of border crossing rather than into rituals of containing transgression. The postmodern specter of otherness is now being lodged in mixture-proof categories: cultural entities that resist the liquid touch of postmodernity. In a postmodern world of cultural



Introduction

5

compounds, cultural rudiments – those elements that defy globalization, hybridization, and glocalization through their perceived fundamentality – constitute the real danger. Contrary to the perils posed in the modern era by the interstitially mercurial figures of the migrant, the nomad, and the transgressor who spread anomie in a boundary-bound social order, these very figures have become the celebrated antiheroes of our culture. The subversive forces in a boundaryless era lurk in the presence of those perceived as unmitigated universals. A few examples should provide a provocative illustration of how such perceived universals may threaten the hybrid culture of postmodernity by virtue of their resistance to cultural change, mutability, and incorporation. Consider, for example, the finitude of secularized life as manifested in the terminality of old age and consequently in the de-cultural position of the old.1 The hard core of old age is thus fervently distanced by its grading and sequencing into stages such as “the Third Age,” “the Fourth Age,” and so forth. Aging bodies are manipulated through “anti-aging” techniques until this is no longer possible, a point in which they become nonmarketable objects and hence commercially (and socially) invisible or masked. The image of ultimate evil, the Holocaust, has similarly raised attempts to assimilate the nontranslatable, locating the banality of evil within Hitler’s executioners or otherwise placing the Holocaust as the final realization of one of the possibilities inherent in the very project of modernity, thus positioning the perceived singularity of the Holocaust at the end or apex of an historical spectrum (Bauman 1989; Foucault 2003; Moses 2008). “Fundamentalism,” another example perceived in the postmodern as a non-globalizing, non-hybrid essential, is often designated in terms of mutual exclusivity resulting in inevitable warfare. Because of its perceived uncompromising, 1

 Throughout the book I will refer to “old age” in various ways. In some places, the argument refers to old age generally (as in the social masking of “old age” by middle-aged society); in other places, the argument refers to specific groups within old age, such as extreme old age. In other places, I refer to Alzheimer’s patients, who are usually (but not necessarily) correlated with old age.

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Introduction

unyielding non-hybridity, fundamentalism is seen as the real menace of otherness in today’s world and the real source of “the clash of civilizations.” Framed in this manner, the clash is not between West and East or Christianity and Islam per se but between two incommensurable imaginaries – the western hybrid in the eyes of Islam versus the fundamentalist, non-compromising Islam in western eyes (Michalis 2013). The theory of the non-hybrid can thus explain the link between insecurity and non-hybrid otherness and the moral panic of the post-9/11 war on terror (Shafir, Meade, and Aceves 2012). It is that “non-hybrid otherness” of Islam – perceived and articulated within western, neoliberal, secular, middle-aged, socioeconomic, and political circumstances – which engenders a sense of fear and aversion. Said’s (1978) original argument concerning orientalism can thus be recontextualized, reflecting one case among others of the postmodern repugnance toward perceived non-hybrids. Consider, along the same lines, the unshareable experience of pain that renders it into a private language in need of muting sedation; the non-communicative realm of autism that is being reconstructed into scaled stages on the spectrum of pervasive developmental disorder; the unbridgeable biological sex distinctions undermined by gender malleability; the conceivably abominable notion of race whose mention immediately releases criticism of racism; as well as the idea of genetic essentialism which is countered by condemnation in the form of geneticization. All of these discourses seem to have nothing in common, and yet they all provoke similar reactions of criticism, terror, abhorrence, and moral indignation. It is that which is perceived as non-hybrid that is also labeled as politically incorrect, and thus in need of correction. In his seminal work We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour poses very similar queries: What link is there between the work of translation or mediation and that of purification? This is the question on which I should like to shed light. My hypothesis – which remains too crude – is that the second has made the first possible: the more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes – such is the paradox of



Introduction

7

the moderns, which the exceptional situation in which we find ourselves today allows us finally to grasp. The second question has to do with premoderns, with the other types of culture. My hypothesis – once again too simple – is that by devoting themselves to conceiving of hybrids, the other cultures have excluded their proliferation. It is this disparity that would explain the Great Divide between Them – all the other cultures – and Us – the westerners – and would make it possible finally to solve the insoluble problem of relativism. (Latour 1993: 12)

At once cryptic and revealing, Latour’s questions focus our attention on the importance of hybrids, locating the defining trait of modernity and its social study in the dialectics of the “work of purification” and the “work of translation.” I would like to offer my own take – which evidently also remains too crude – on Latour’s propositions and the important issue they address. I see the “exceptional situation in which we find ourselves today” as the result of the proliferation of hybrids, followed by the challenge posed by perceived non-hybrids labeled as unfit for assimilation. This book continues and extends Latour’s search by stressing not only the work of translation and the propagation of hybridity, but also the problem of non-hybridization that emanates from the social impasse of the inability to translate. The work of purification, in contrast, has become outmoded and degraded: the postmodern fears the absolutism of the pure. While Latour argues that our social system has become clogged by the proliferation of hybrids, I would like to examine how the system redesigns its flow by designating these clogs as non-hybrids. The dis­ parity that could explain the Great Divide between Them – all the other cultures – and Us – the westerners – could actually stem from the perceived inability of Them to hybridize with Us. Latour’s hypotheses, at once coarse and elegant, thus provide a point of departure for the ensuing discussion.

The book’s composition The first chapter of the book unfolds the general argument regarding the dialectics of the translatable and the nonhybrid in culture and in anthropology. This argument has

8

Introduction

implications for the rise of regimes of biopolitics and moral justification in a proclaimed relativistic reality, as well as for the plausibility of translation, the treatment of extra-cultural spaces, and the demarcation of boundaries of humanity. I provide a substantive examination of this argument in the book’s second chapter through focusing on the perceived condition of the very old as essentially beyond culture and constituting an extra-cultural materiality. As such, I will argue, the old-as-other does not answer to the anthropological dictum of representing the “native’s point of view” and cannot fit the contemporary hermeneutics of postmodern relativism, nor does it tally with the ethos of subjectivity posited at the core of the project of modernity. Current anthropology, which resists essential, de-subjectivized objects such as the savage and the old, thus ignores the raw materiality of old age as reportedly experienced by the old, while producing ethnographically informed commentaries on supposedly transformative eldercare. The second chapter explores the epistemological career of this socially contrived category of “old age” as it unidirectionally travels from the homely cultural sphere of the Third Age/third space to the extracultural unhomely regions of the Fourth Age/fourth space. In fact, this part of the book is set to track down the process through which a nonhuman category depleted of subjectivity both as an individual autonomous agency and as a generalized political identity is formed to become, in turn, an extracultural presence. The third and last chapter of the book extends the argument by describing potential research directions for anthropology using the interplay of the liquid (hybrid and postmodern nomads/barbarians) and the immutable (nonhybrid savages) as a key scenario in global culture today. Central examples used for this illustration will include the cultural site of the Holocaust as a void of unadulterated evil, as well as discourses of pain and autism. In the conclusion, I elaborate on the moral and amoral ramifications of the argument, conflating three moral views: the view “from nowhere” (neoliberalism); the view “from here” (communitarianism); and the view “from there” (the non-hybrid). The study is partly based on reflections on original ethnographic studies and partly on secondary analysis of cultural



Introduction

9

texts. It draws on socio-anthropological scholarship of cultural translation, hybridity, otherness, globalization, biopolitics, risk, embodiment, boundary maintenance, and the management and control of human populations. An array of conceptually aligned case studies will bring out the processes through which capacities and potentialities of translatability, negotiability, temporality, and reversibility are denied, thus counteracting the very global spirit that bred them.

1 Terms of Hybridity: (Non-)Hybridization and (Anti-)Globalization

For many observers of postmodern globalization, this condition is best characterized by the flattening of national and geographical borders. According to this logic, if the vertical hierarchies of nation-states were the hallmark of modernity, horizontal flow and neoliberal privatization would be the signs of the postmodern. Critics of this process of globalization regard it as creeping homogenization, sometimes also referred to in the context of popular culture as McDonaldization, Disneyfication, or – what better than another hybrid – McDisneyization (Ritzer and Liska 1997). This process is critically seen as an American-led (and often owned or franchised) production of generic international content and style that transcends national borders. Built on the transmutable and flexible elements of post-Fordist, late capitalistic popular culture, global postmodern society seems to be replacing vertical national cultures with their different languages and religions – give or take a few persistent islands of fundamentalist resistance. Otherwise, cultural difference and uniqueness are being displayed, commodified, and marketed in the form of touristic sites, theme parks, “national geographic” magazines, and “discovery” channels. This process has also been called de-differentiation – the flattening of high/low cultural differences so that massproduced, popular culture feeds on and replaces both high



Terms of Hybridity

11

and low (Lash 1990). Categories like “folklore” and “high art” that have been created in order to maintain social hierarchies are quickly confounded in the marketing and consumption of tradition and indigenous identities (Canclini 1995). Literature is thus no longer regarded as the sacred bearer of high culture. Even Hebrew, once the language of the intellectual and orthodox study of religion, which at the turn of the twentieth century was transformed into and reborn as a vessel for nation-building by ideologically driven Zionists, has now become an ordinary language, and its literature a normal literature, no longer the exclusive province of high-minded ideals and nationalistic fervor. Indeed, the work of sociolinguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann (2003, 2006, 2009) examines how Israeli Hebrew was “reinvented” over the course of the twentieth century by responding to the social demands of the newly emerging state, as well as to escalating globalization, with a vigorously developing lexicon, enriched by multiple foreign-language contacts. This view of language highlights the key role of hybridization by regarding “language” as an ensemble of idiolects, sociolects, dialects and so on – rather than an entity per se. Similar to the sociolinguistic study of neologism and language contact, hybridization has also become the model for the socio-anthropological study of tourism, for example in the context of the staging of “the exotic” in familiar modes of reproduction. Carnivalesque experiences of tourism are defined by academic scholars as “sites of ordered disorder” which encourage a “controlled de-control of the emotions” (Featherstone 1991). The touristic hybridization of the exotic and the familiar, the authentic and the commodified, is encapsulated in performances that are toned down by a self-regulating of the body and the passions, and despite the allure of the illicit, the other or the extraordinary, they are uncluttered and clean, and contain no exciting “antisocial” elements (Gottdiener 1997). These kinds of postmodern stagings may be seen to proffer a dystopian future for global culture where every potential space becomes intensively stage-managed and regulated as part of the commodification of everything (Edensor 2001). Nevertheless, alongside this homogenizing process which works its way through hybridization, there is an unceasing proliferation of practices which open up the

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Terms of Hybridity

world, invade the everyday, and expand the repertoire of performative options and the range of stages. This is why non-hybrids are apprehensively perceived as dead ends of social impasse that stand in the way of globalization. Thus, contrary to the modern attribution of disgust, abjection, abomination, taboo, and otherness to impure or hybrid symbolic configurations, the post-postcolonial untouchable and incorrigible that the book discusses lie in apparently irreducible, irreconcilable, immutable, and unadulterated non-hybrid/pure forms of life. Such atomized constructs hold in store the prospect of their own destruction as cultural units beyond transmutation, transcendence, and transaction. This book describes the West’s reluctant encounters with culturally manufactured extra-cultural spaces populated by savage-like entities deemed beyond moral domestication. Contemporary social anthropology is no exception to that anxious reluctance to admit “savages” into its epistemological fold; hence its self-assigned and socially harnessed commitment to the cultural task of manufacturing “tamable others” whose digression from unmanageable savagery ensures a discursive standing within the discipline. This is accomplished by detecting, exposing, representing, construing, and defending the rightful autonomy of others to be different, alongside their privilege to be ushered into the company of the civilized. This two-pronged javelin eliminates the possibility of unadulterated savagery with no prospect of disciplined incorporation. As economic processes of globalization are espoused to cosmopolitan ethics in promoting identity politics of relativistic multiculturalism, no leeway is left for the emergence of uncultivated fiends descending from some inexplicable beyond. In this manner, the task of anthropology – as well as of cultural studies in general – has become one of rendering the wild “savage” a tamable “barbarian.” When savages cannot be tamed, they are socially quarantined and avoided, as in the case of “old age,” “autism,” “pain,” “fundamentalism,” and so on. I will discuss in the following section how this is also part of the biopolitical governmentality of hybridization, in which the task of medicalization is similarly performed to tame the deviant. Conditions that are part of us but also impede what is perceived as normal assimilation are hence medicalized



Terms of Hybridity

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– hyperactivity treated by Ritalin, depression by Prozac, and impotence by Viagra (Conrad 1975, 2007). In a globally regulated world, fraught with mass media and impregnated with a declared transnational desire for ubiquitous human communication, there are still quite a few uncivilized spaces; islands that evade “the civilizing process” (Elias 1994 [1939]), resist assimilation, escape diagnosis, defy pluralism, and negate the plausibility of change. Global, postmodern society considers these islands’ failure to assimilate to be subversive, deviant, ominous, and intolerable. As information technologies, labor migration, tourism, international commerce, and consumerism develop to embrace and pervade the experience of contemporary living (Bauman 2000; Beck 2002), the need for cultural devices to create a common language of assimilation – also referred to as “pidginization” and “creolization” – is constantly on the rise (Hannerz 1996). The processes of globalization were generated by the claim for universalization and standardization as the general logic of converting the indigenous into the global, followed by a demand for hybridization. Our modern-day economic discourse is one of the dominant examples of this all-engulfing process. Neoclassical economic theory assumed that all people, across nations, cultures, and backgrounds make economic judgments in essentially the same rational way. In the past three decades, psychological and behavioral economic research has demonstrated the contrary – namely that people depart quite frequently and systematically from the neoclassical economic model (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). This behavioral critique of rational economic choice has led, in the terms used here, to a demand for hybridization; most researchers (including those advocating an accurate behavioral model) still assume that all people will be susceptible to the same cognitive bias or heuristic causing deviation from rational economic decision-making (Etzioni 2011). As a result, the potential that cultural differences systematically influence economic decision-making has generally been overlooked, or – in times of economic trouble, as in the recent cases of Greece and Spain – deemed in need of governance and correction. The postmodern passion for an omnipresent vehicle for transferring and transforming cultural and economic capital

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Terms of Hybridity

is challenged by the emergence of such sites of aborted translatability. They are viewed as unsettling epistemological voids, exposing the notion of globalism to the threat of being rendered arbitrary, superficial, shallow, nihilistic, indeterminate, patently anomic and uncivilized itself. The fear of impasses of symbolic exchange induces the globalized world to devise various cultural means of leveling cultural differences while facilitating common denominators. This may be the common motivation behind the thrust to rationalize souls through allegedly universal therapeutic language that transgress the boundaries of the person, the family, and the workplace (Illouz 2008); to homogenize bodies via scientifically legitimized practices of medicalization (Conrad 2007); and to replace individuality with fashioned logos and virtualized consciousness through cinematic and electronically interactive media. Our postmodern, global society is all about assimilation and networking; if you cannot or do not want to assimilate, if you are out of the network, you are increasingly considered socially dead. This zeal for networking underpins even the more sophisticated forms of cultural analysis, such as the new theory advanced by science and technology studies, entitled ANT (actor-network theory). The underlying premise of ANT is that in a globalizing world the topography becomes flat as a result of processes of mass communication. The lingua franca of this flat topography, where differences can meet, hinges on cultural metaphorization for the symbolic linking of different cultural entities and meanings: “To do so we have to invent a series of clamps to hold the landscape firmly flat and to force, so to speak, any candidate with a more ‘global’ role to sit beside the ‘local’ site it claims to explain, rather than watch it jump on top of it or behind it” (Latour 2005: 174). By submitting to the flattening effect of globalization, ANT may be blind to the biopolitical governmentality such flattening requires and entails. If global premises of uninhibited conversions are to be safeguarded, the disturbing presence of cultural voids calls for “clamping” – measures of remedial and corrective treatment. In the absence of a recognized language to gloss over the opacity of such spaces, the populations inhabiting them often remain uncivilized, marked by attributes of incurable savagery. In either case, bereft of



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globally approved appropriate means of signification, the civilized is incapable of transforming the savage into its own ilk. Specters of ultimate, indestructible others, uncontained but nevertheless engendered by the global scene, haunt and undermine its very foundations (Agamben 1998; Appadurai 2006). This book sets out to explore these zones of cultural sturdiness.

A genealogy of hybridity Even though my interest is primarily in non-hybridity, the context of hybridity – whose proliferation provides a crucial backdrop for our discussion – should also be deconstructed and its genealogy of power/knowledge explained. Hybridity has been discussed by anthropologists and sociologists of culture as an all-engulfing process both compatible with globalization and a necessary means for the spread of globalization, offering foreign media and marketers transcultural wedges for forging affective links between their commodities and local communities (Hannerz 1992, 1996). Hybridity, then, is the cultural logic of globalization. In the words of Kraidy: Hybridity is one of the emblematic notions of our era. It captures the spirit of the times with its obligatory celebration of cultural difference and fusion, and it resonates with the globalization mantra of unfettered economic exchanges and the supposedly inevitable transformation of all cultures. At a more prosaic level, since its initial use in Latin to describe the offspring of “a tame sow and a wild boar” [. . .] hybridity has proven a useful concept to describe multipurpose electronic gadgets, designer agricultural seeds, environment-friendly cars with dual combustion and electrical engines, companies that blend American and Japanese management practices, multiracial people, dual citizens, and postcolonial cultures. (Kraidy 2005: 1)

In contrast to either the “modernization” or homogenization of culture worldwide, or the rigid cultural resistance from outside influences, this view of hybridity stresses “glocalization,” namely, the dynamic intermix of the global and

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Terms of Hybridity

the local (Nederveen 2004). While neo-Marxist “world system” theories, as well as functionalist accounts of global modernization, developed in the context of Third World countries (usually Africa and Latin America), are more loudly proclaiming the status of a “theory” (Sklair 1991), hybridity as glocalization is providing a complementary and complex conceptualization of local adaptations (Kraidy 2005). Both “cultural imperialism” and “cultural adaptation” occur as part of globalization. The convoluted cultural history of hybridity is important for understanding its present polysemy. Before the concept of “hybridity” rose, via the reception of Bakhtin (1986), to become one of the key concepts of cultural theory in recent years (Burke 2009), there was a long history of the racist use of this concept, from the race theories of the nineteenth century all the way to the anti-Semitic and National Socialist writings of the twentieth century. In the heydays of colonialism, hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation which should be a concern for racial purity. Young’s (1995) historical analy­ sis of hybridity as “colonial desire” provides a thorough genealogy of the term, tracing its elaboration in various Victorian discourses of race and miscegenation, combining attraction and repulsion. The question of the fertility of racial hybrids was crucial to Victorian theories of empire and colonialism: “The claim that humans were one or several species (and thus equal or unequal, same or different) stood or fell over the question of hybridity, that is intra-racial fertility” (Young 1995: 9). Hybridity thus started its semiotic-cultural career as a hallmark of the colonial opposition of race versus culture, and later on – with the advent of postcolonialism – lent itself to the discourse of essentialism versus constructionism. Hybridity started with racial theory, and then turned against colonialism, finally becoming a pillar of global popular culture (Kapchan and Strong 1999). It thus interconnects the racially oppressed and postcolonial with the popular and playful: “Subaltern agency creates informal venues of disavowal and affiliation that create pleasure within hybrid conditions. Theories of hybridity allow for invisible negotiation with structures of domination through style politics, for instance, or



Terms of Hybridity

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elusive economies of consumption” (Joseph 1995: 12). But even in the “old” texts of racial theory, the use of hybridity ipso facto questioned and disrupted the unyielding essence of racial categories. In the words of Young (1995: 27), “hybridity here is a key term in that wherever it emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism.” The appropriation and redefinition of the hybridity concept on the part of cultural theory authors such as Stuart Hall or Homi K. Bhabha was not only linked to a rejection of the assimilation ideas originally connected to this concept, but also to the idea of mutual penetration – in the interaction of center and periphery, the oppressed and the oppressor, hegemonial and subversive forces (Bhabha 1993; Young 1995). Thus, Bhabha places translation centrally within “the third space” of hybridity: the act of cultural translation [. . .] denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture [. . .] hybridity is to me the “third space” which enables other positions to emerge [. . .] the importance of hybridity is that it bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it, just like a translation so that hybridity puts together the traces of certain other meanings or discourses. (Bhabha 1990: 211)

The postcolonialists also reappropriated hybridity in a manner that instilled in it vigor and value. Consider, in order to understand this shift, the sense of tragic futility characterizing the non-hybridity of the African-American as expressed at the turn of the twentieth century by W. E. B. Du Bois in his The Souls of Black Folk: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength keeps it from being torn asunder. (1961 [1903]: 16–17)

This futile sense of being ever torn as a result of unreconciled “twoness” has become a source of effective agency in the

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work of postcolonialism, and a source of vitality and consumerist celebration in the postmodernist perspective. Hybridity is now seen as the positive transformation that comes with “new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world” (Rushdie 1991: 394; emphasis in original). Ingrained in this model is the assumption of hybridity as the paramount cultural logic of globalization, facilitating its incessant dynamics of mixing, fusing and converting. Hybridity encapsulates the demand for interactivity, which has become the new form of neoliberal, individualized governmentality. In that sense, the hybrid has shifted its cultural position from the menacing territory of the witch, the monster, the impure, the stranger, the unhomely (Bhabha 1992), the abjection (Kristeva 1982), and the taboo to the home space of everyday cinematic and other media imagery of hyphenated cultures (Lavie 1996), mixed races, humanized animals, vampires, sociality of objects, cyborgs, and aliens – all legitimate and welcomed sojourns of the postmodern. The growing legitimization of transgenders (Judith Butler’s victory) is yet another testimony to the abolition of nonhybrid categories by welding them into transformable hybrids. Similarly, the public preoccupation with animal rights reflects a conviction that the divide between human and animal is no longer valid. This hybrid construction is nothing short of an epistemological turn – see for example the enormous impact of Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (2009). Foer hybridizes “human” and “animal” by arguing that “to ask ‘what is an animal?’ is to ask ‘what is a human?’ ” (Foer 2009: 41). Alongside this popular trend, one can find similar arguments in bioethics and moral philosophy, whose earlier expressions can be found in Peter Singer’s (1975) defense of animal liberation (not to mention bestiality), or Mary Midgley’s (1973, 1978) concept of beastliness, about how we mistakenly cut ourselves off from other animals, trying to avoid recognizing that we have animal natures. These assertions made Midgley one of the main targets for Geertz’s (1984b) criticism in his famous “anti anti-relativism.” For Geertz, Midgley’s meditations on the roots of human nature



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were indicative of a return to essentialism or anti-relativism, to which he objected as the revival of “ ‘it all comes down to’ (genes, species-being, cerebral architecture, psycho-sexual constitution . . .) cast of mind” (Geertz 1984b: 270). I agree that such considerations of “human nature” can be found almost anywhere within anthropology these days. However, if we look at them for what they are, rather than making them into straw men (and women), these ideas actually represent a desire for hybridity, border-crossing, and transgression of dichotomies. The previously feared, hence marginalized hybrid, the perpetrator of moral panic and disorder, has moved to the legitimate core of social interaction. Subsequently, formerly disdained domains of deemed irrationality, savagery and arbitrary unpredictability are transformed into a naturalized order of culture. This inversion could be described as a globally generated reversal of cultural fortunes. The once pro­ hibited haunted house of despicable ghoulish ghosts of abomination and horror (Douglas 1966, 1992) is now turned into a desirable temple of consumerism and mass media, whereas the hallowed ground of the pure, primordial, unadulterated becomes a forbidden land of unmanageable extracultural fiends whose immutable presence is against the grain of liquidized life in a global age. In a nutshell, if hybridity is about a space of negotiation of discourses and interactivity of subjects (and objects), then non-hybridity is a social impasse where discourses cannot be negotiated and any dialogue is halted. This book thus ventures to go beyond the all-engulfing discourse of hybridity, bringing back the power relations that hybridity always cover. This is indeed part of a pendulum shift swinging back to the “third space” of Bhabha and other postcolonial critics who saw the hybrid as the desired yet repugnant shadow of the colonial. As Kellner suggests in his review of how hybridity is currently seen in cultural and communication studies: The concept of hybridity [. . .] may cover over existing conflicts and struggles by stressing hybridized mixing and overcoming, or suppressing, of differences, and thus is ultimately part of the ideological repertoire of liberalism. Clearly global culture, and most national and local cultures, are riven with

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relations of power and domination in which hierarchy and inequality abound. The concept of hybridity ignores or covers over these divisions and multiple struggles against oppression. Hence, while hybridity is undoubtedly a key feature of many local and national cultures, and certainly global culture, it needs to be articulated with difference, oppression, hierarchy, struggle and hegemony. One needs a Gramscian notion of hegemony to articulate the multiple forms of struggle, as well as cultural fusion and hybridization, going on in specific contexts. In addition, critical analyses of media and globalization should valorize voices of the oppressed and their struggles against domination. (Kellner 2007: 50)

Kellner points out the limits of hybridity as a common and contemporary perspective in media and communication studies. Such approaches, despite their critique of corporate or US domination of global culture, fail to articulate key struggles of the epoch and how the oppressed or oppositional groups and voices develop alternative media to communicate within the struggle. Indeed, for this one should be attentive to the non-hybrids, which is precisely my aim in this book. To go beyond the current neoliberal rule of hybridity by employing the “third space” critical approach of postcolonialism, we must enter into a “fourth space” where alternative non-hybrid discourses can and should be delineated and understood in terms of their own spatiotemporal configurations. Continuing and extending the binarism of previous hybridities (oppressed-oppressor in postcolonial hybridity, global– local in contemporary culture studies), the (non-)hybridity of the “fourth space” is shot through with paradox. This time it is the paradox of social flow versus cultural sturdiness and of the translatable versus the immutable. The book tells about the inevitable and unending attempt to resolve these oppositions. This process consists of masking the non-hybrid – for example, the mask of aging (centered on external age-related stereotyping and labeling, see Featherstone and Hepworth 1991). This process also includes the aligning of the translatable and the immutable by subdividing the gray zone of the perceived non-hybrid into grades and stages in order to establish some sort of culturally constructed gradient by which some of the non-hybridity can be translated, mitigated, diagnosed, treated, and controlled.



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In the world of globalization, where hybridity is expected and celebrated, danger and power reside (to paraphrase Douglas) at the margins where global, midlife, neurotypical culture is stopped in its tracks by a radical otherness that cannot easily be absorbed into its machines remains itself and not an amalgam of other things. The remainder of the book will substantiate this argument by drawing on the examples of extreme old age, autism, the Holocaust and pain as nonhybrids. Sometimes it may seem difficult to determine whether these examples are simply, essentially, non-hybrids – or are constructed as such. I therefore want to clarify: in the realm of culture, everything is constructed, even essences. Physical essences per se evidently loom behind culture and beyond social constructionism; there is a real world out there where things possess an actual quiddity. However, the reality we know of is already delimited or enabled by our socially prescribed senses and mental faculties. This is my point of departure as a cultural anthropologist, although what follows goes a long way in deconstructing many of the premises of cultural anthropology. If everything is social construction, why do either hybrids or non-hybrid fundamentals exist? How can something “lack constructible commonalities”? We could have constructed them differently in the first place. It therefore must be either because there is a reality beyond social construction that keeps intruding; or because we wish to have these things in our symbolic classification for their specific (dis)functionality. Both answers are true, and together they constitute a never-ending dialectic. In various periods, there has been a different cultural balancing of the essential and the constructed, and the section on “traditional, modern and postmodern anthropology in search of its other” unfolds this genealogy. In a similar manner to the cultural dialectics of the constructed and the essential, sometimes it may seem that the very movement of hybridization, as it eats away at otherness, constructs what is left over as radically other, non-hybrid. Even the social process of staging and grading that I analyze may be part of this movement that creates radical otherness just as it attempts to domesticate it. Indeed, I am going to discuss how autistic self-advocates are reappropriating the social practice of staging and turning the social designation of “those on the spectrum” into a

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self-designation of radical otherness owned by “those of us on the spectrum.” Elderly people, chronic pain patients, Holocaust survivors, their carers, and the rest of midlife, able-bodied society can be described as involved, in different ways and terminologies, in fashioning similar forms of negotiated orders, facilitated communication, and staged translation. When translation is done in midlife, western, neurotypical language, it is legitimized; hybridization takes place. To avoid this trap of dominant translation, the “other” becomes subversive. It is a constant negotiation of “the spectrum” of translation. This is also where we enter the “third space” of postcolonialism, which is framed by the biopolitics of hybridization.

The biopolitics of hybridization, medicalization, and cultural brokering Biopolitics, the field that Foucault uncovered more than thirty years ago, has become for contemporary social sciences what Foucault himself once termed as an “order of things,” an episteme and an undisputed source of paradigms (Lemke 2011). My own take on the biopolitics of hybridization, and the ensuing view of medicalization as an important agent of this process, should be explained. What is the relevance of discussing the biopolitics of medicalization in the context of old age, pain, autism, and other non-hybrids? This will become clear if we define biopolitics, following Foucault, as the study of “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault 1990: 143). Since this book focuses on the contemporary neoliberal rule of hybridity, it is also relevant to look at the relation between biopolitics and neoliberal forms of capitalism, carrying forth the task set by Foucault to “study liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics” (Foucault 2004: 24). This task is defined by some of Foucault’s post-Marxist proponents as investigating the ways in which biological life, rather than labor power, becomes (or fails to become, in my take) the source of surplus value (Cooper 2008). After Foucault, biopolitics designates the inseparability of biological



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life and political life in late modernity. This is equivalent to hybridization and can be regarded as the biopolitical aspect of the logic of hybridization in late capitalism. When biological life and political life hybridize, this can be regarded as a postmodern hallmark of the constructivist, metaphorical discourse. Biological life thus ceases to be part of an unchangeable, natural presupposition, while politics becomes a matter of governing the living. The goal of governmentality, under which biopolitics is subsumed, is to construct individuals as “docile bodies” that are furthermore endowed with a subjectified sense of responsibility and accountability. Subjects are accountable; this nexus is the potent venue of governmentality, of the postmodern secular form of pastoral power. In their perceived bare essentiality, old age, pain, the autistic, and the Muselmann,1 surrender to and challenge governmentality. Those in these categories present an intriguing paradox: they are the subjects of governmentality, yet they can no longer be subjectified. They are subjected to considerable, even extreme, measures of societal control from the outside, yet their subjectivity remains largely private, cryptic, beyond the reach of society. Subjectification often works through responsibilization, a mechanism of bio-power serving to subjugate and discipline the “somatic individual” so that normative control becomes second nature and so internalized that it is regarded as emanating from the individual’s needs and desires (Rose 2006). However, the very old, the chronic pain patient, the autist, and the Muselmann are not and cannot be made accountable or responsible for their condition. They stand alone within the discontinuity between accounts and accountability, and hence outside the social flow of dialogic narrativity. They are beyond shame and therefore beyond subjugation. In their 1

 Muselmann (German for Muslim, ironically enough) is a deathcamp slang word for prisoners on the edge of death who have surrendered to their fate, i.e., who show the symptoms of the last stages of hunger, disease, mental indifference and physical exhaustion. This term was mostly used at Auschwitz. According to Primo Levi (2000), the Muselmann was often the target of anger from fellow prisoners, who avoided them lest they too be overcome by despair at the conditions they faced.

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controlled disengagement, they are the resident aliens of our postmodern culture. In all these examples, social masking encounters cultural sturdiness as the zeal for translation faces what it cannot translate, what it perceives as immutable. These others amongst us are therefore locked in their untranslatable embodied subjectivities. The very old, those in chronic pain, those with autism, and the Muselmänner are all very different, of course. However, in all of them a common social designation is at work. In all of these cases, the subjects’ minds are deemed treacherously divorced from their bodies, and are thus incapable of normalization. They challenge the normalizing discourse of biopolitical governmentality because they cannot be made accountable and responsible. These subjects are not the site of somatic individualization but rather of immutable corporalities. This, evidently, does not mean they are free of governmentality. On the contrary: they become the focus of increased external governmentality to the extent of non-negotiable sequestration in “heterotopic” enclaves (Foucault 1986) or annihilation of human categories that are consigned to a state of exception (Agamben 1998). Old age homes, hospices, hospitals, prison camps, and special education institutions all have a biopolitical function. They are furthermore constructed as sources of symbolic danger. Western, midlife, able-bodied, neurotypical subjects are imprinted with a sense of moral responsibility to conduct a healthy lifestyle (otherwise we will age faster), not to show pain in public (or we will lose our dignity), and to constantly partake in social networking and communication (or we will be deemed “autistic”). As soon as a genetic diagnosis for autism is found, its use as part of prenatal diagnosis will arguably be immediately perceived and promoted as responsible parenthood. This biopolitical technology of the self is often, however, concealed behind the neoliberal rhetoric of “reproductive autonomy.” Contemporary repro-genetics is seemingly predicated on individual choice rather than bio-governmentality; is this in fact the case? Does the so-called “individual” use of repro-genetics for prenatal diagnosis that leads to selective abortion always meet the criterion of autonomy (Agar 2004; Duster 2003; Remennick 2006)? Importantly, however, it is not



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people with disabilities in general, but their prospective parents who are considered responsible and accountable. The biopolitical attributes of this practice are revealed once we lend an ear to the criticism of people with disabilities, feminists, and sociologists, who argue that selective abortion following prenatal diagnosis of mild or probable embryopathies carries an insulting and discriminating message for people with disabilities (Parens and Asch 2000), and also extends men’s regulation of women’s bodies (Ettore 2002; Franklin 1997).

Medicalization as cultural brokering and staging The reaction of biopolitical governmentality to elements of “bare life” (Agamben 1998), perceived as immutable nonhybrids, is to detain their hard core while breaking down layers of their unyielding essence into translatable pieces, pieces that can be reconfigured into our everyday symbolic exchange. This task often boils down to creating a gradient of subcategories which serves as a buffer zone between the civilized and the wild – a process of brokering I call here “staging.” In contrast to our postmodernist discourse of metaphors where staging is about display, performance, and enactment, my use of this concept is literal and metonymic, denoting the stages, or the categories, that are constructed in this process. Medicalization has a paramount role in this process of staging as it incessantly carves translatable pieces out of these perceived immutable corporalities. Consider, for example, how the condition of autism – previously regarded as a socially vacuous mental/corporeal disorder, sufferers often being described in nonhuman metaphoric terms such as “feral” or “fairy children” – is currently being placed on (or staged into) a behavioral continuum. “Autism” is thus labeled as an extreme category on the spectrum of PDD – pervasive developmental disorders. While PDD is the target of ongoing further medicaliza­ tion, those on the spectrum have to find alternative venues for sounding their authentic voices. Many groups of

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high-functioning autistic people – otherwise silenced by the normalizing discourses of society – use the internet as a self-controlled and hence comfortable technological venue for self and mutual communication that is subversive of what they term the “neurotypical” hegemonic gaze (Davidson 2008a, 2008b; Gevers 2000). Another example is the dilemma of encountering the very old in a secular society which dreads the impasse of death. Old age is thus being graded, in postmodern consumerist society, into the “third” and “fourth” ages. The new construct of the Third Age serves as a buffer zone between midlife civilization and the wilderness of extreme old age, at least as long as the illusion can be sustained through the anti-aging maintenance of aging bodies. As Vincent et al. note in their editorial to a special issue of the Journal of Aging Studies concerning “the antiaging enterprise”: The Third Age social movement has attempted to create a positive image for old age as a period of personal development. While this movement has to some extent been successful in establishing the idea of a new positive stage in life, it has failed to overthrow the dominant image of old age as one of illness and decline. The concept of the Third Age can be seen in some circumstances as an attempt to prolong youth, not necessarily to create a new attitude to old age as a life stage valuable in its own right. But it is clear that despite the success of parts of the re-evaluation/emancipation agenda, the dominant contemporary cultural attitude to later life is that of “anti-”; predominantly western culture seeks not to celebrate ageing but to avoid it. (Vincent, Tulle, and Bond 2008: 292)

Similar mechanisms of normalized communication, which often amount to labeling, are employed to hold at bay chronic-pain patients and Holocaust survivors. All these examples and their intricate surrounding discourses will be explained in more detail in chapter 3. The majority of the examples analyzed here – such as old age, pain, and autism – are often known to “us” (western, middle-aged, able-bodied, neurotypical “us”) through medical terms of reference. It is therefore relevant to extend the argument presented here so that it includes a view of



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medicalization, as illustrated by these examples. Medicalization has for a long time been viewed and employed critically by sociologists and anthropologists. In Parsons’s (1951) pioneering formulation of the function of medicine, ill people were to seek medical care for restoring their social productivity, and “medicalization” was hence functional. The Parsonian notion of the “sick role,” together with functionalism, has fallen from grace. Medicalization is currently being used first and foremost as representing over-medicalization, for example in the context of “disease mongering” (Moynihan, Heath, and Henry 2002). Extending the argument presented here, I would like to make a positive (but not positivist) case for the functional role of medicalization as performing cultural brokerage between the increasingly distanced realms of nature and culture. Through medicalization, more and more pieces of the unknown “nature” also become the subject of man-made and man-centered worldview, terminology, diagnosis, and ultimately manipulation and treatment. “Nature,” after all, is “human made” insofar as we develop interpretations of it (Michalko 1998). Nature is not merely a unified object out there but also an object of our making. There is not one nature; rather, there are many natures (Macnaghten and Urry 1995). Seen in this manner, medicalization can be a powerful agent in the biopolitics of hybridization. This perspective extends the conventional socio-anthropological view of medicalization. Traditionally seen as the agent of objective and positivist bio-science, I would like to argue that medicalization also plays the role of cultural broker – promoting further staging and grading of non-hybrids. This is a less examined source of the importance of medicalization in postmodern society. Through medicalization, non-hybrids such as pain, autism, genes, aging, gender, even death, can become graded and staged. This is why medicalization has become such a major player in the politics of “life itself” (Rose 2006). In light of this argument, there cannot be “over-medicalization,” since the process of translating and subjecting corporalities into man-made and human-centered terminology and diagnosis is never-ending. It is precisely because non-hybrids are perceived as instances of “raw materiality” and “objective and unchangeable corporeality” that they become both

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objects of rejection and subjects of cultural manufacture and referencing. It is through medicalization, for example, that even death, that ultimate universal, is being translated and monitored. This provides an excellent example of how we often rely on medicalization to carve infinitesimal pieces off that great unknown darkness which is out there. The medicalization of death has created different situations in which a person can be considered dead by some and alive by others. It has created an ambiguous spectrum between meaningful life and death. The medicalization of death has also moved the authority of death from the home and the family to the hospital and doctors. Dying, which not long ago was viewed as natural and expected, has become medicalized and unwelcome in medical care (Aries 1981). Acceptance of the naturalness of dying directly conflicts with the medicalization and legalization of death that characterizes the culture of dying in twentyfirst-century America. The movement of dying from the home setting to institutions may indicate that medicalization is an irreversible process (McCue 1995). With this new authority, doctors have moved the valid notion of death away from traditional concepts such as the “last breath,” or “when the soul leaves the body,” toward the medicalized definition of brain death. This grading of death is made possible by the emergence of new developments in biomedical technologies, notably the artificial respirator (Kaufman 2006; Kaufman and Morgan 2005). By showing that the body can die one organ at a time, and by assigning the death of the brain as a legal standard for death, doctors have equated life with consciousness. Death has been clinically graded and staged into “pre-terminal” and “terminal” states, and into stages such as “neo-cortical death,” “brain-stem death,” and “whole-brain death” (Lock 1996). On the other side of the ride of our life, the medicalization of pregnancy has created a grey zone between conception and birth. Through ultrasounds, genetic testing, and the creation of embryology, scientists have created and obstetrics and gynecology have implemented a timeline of meaningful phases. These include (but are not limited to) implantation, heartbeat, viability, and birth. Assigning a point at which a



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fetus can be assigned personhood is constantly explored and contested by scientists, bioethicists, philosophers, and religious authorities. The most recent staging probably involves “brain birth,” or when the brain begins neocortical (higher conscious) cognitive processes (Jones 1989). In a symmetrical manner, therefore, medicalization is grading and staging not just the end of life but also its beginning, in the potent stage (yet to be scientifically operationalized) of “brain birth” as well as in the “pre-implantation” stage in which some would see the creation of the “pre-embryo” (DeGrazia 2012; Evans 2010; Evans and Hudson 2007). Traditionally, the body itself was treated by social scientists as a universal, biological entity which “falls naturally into the domain of the basic sciences and is therefore beyond the purview of social and cultural anthropology” (Lock 1993: 134). This traditional view of the body as a non-hybrid essence of biology underpinned Durkheim’s diligent efforts, at the turn of the twentieth century, to separate body from person and the innate from the learnt. Durkheim argued that “Man is double,” relegating the body to the realm of biology and psychology while “the person” is to be studied by sociology. Of course, the body was also social all along, but to be recognized as such it had to become cultured, assimilated, and hybridized. Since the late 1970s, probably in tandem with the growing influence of medicalization, bodily practices were put under the socio-anthropological gaze with respect to reproduction, sexuality, and gender (Foucault 1980; Jaggar and Bordo 1989; Martin 1987, 1991) the emotions (Illouz 2008; Lutz 1988), illness (Martin 1994; Turner 1992, 1994; Zola 1991) and lifestyle consumerism (Glassner 1988, 1989; Turner 1991). What then is the problem with applying to non-hybrids the grading and staging processes of medicalization and biopolitical hybridization? Put succinctly, it is the problem of translation: because this grading and staging is done in the strong language of western, midlife, able-bodied, neurotypical culture, it often further masks, distances, and silences its subject of translation. Put even more succinctly, grading can lead to degrading. To be able to hear the silenced voices of these deadly others, these graded and degraded essential

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barbarians, we need to be able to change our own terms of reference. True hybridization is about mutual recognition and transformation – it is about acknowledging not just the dominion of biopolitics but also the agency of alternative biosocialities (Hacking 2006; Rabinow 1992). However, in practice, hybridity has usually served to carry the biopolitical and neoliberal gaze of authority and hegemony of capitalistic society with its systems, corporations and institutions.

Traditional, modern and postmodern anthropology in search of its other The purpose of this section, which concludes the book’s first chapter, is to describe in more detail how the dialectics of the wild and the tamable has unfolded through four phases in the history of anthropology, moving from traditional, via modern, into postmodern and currently to post-postmodern or post-traditional anthropology. In his discussion of “unifiers” and “relativizers,” Tambiah (1990: 111–39) presented two respective modes of conceived rationality: the first is addressed as knowledge based on universally valid rules of logic and inference affirmed by an outside observer, while the second consists of context-bound multiple language games and styles of reasoning. In their extreme forms, both schemes of knowledge might verge on non-translatability since the former renders any notion of translation unnecessary, whereas the latter could forestall translation and communication altogether. Anthropology as a form of translation thrives in the range of opportunities that is opened up between these opposite extremes. In its nineteenth-century beginnings, traditional anthropology was suspended in time through its colonialist search for the pre-modern, namely the savage and the primitive. This marked the creation of “the anthropological machine,” as Agamben (2004) calls it, a machine used by the armchair anthropologists of the nineteenth century to highlight such categories as primitives, barbarians, and savages for the pur­ pose of distilling and advancing the civilized and the modern. However, as Agamben stresses, it is always the zones of in-betweenness, the states of exception (Agamben 2005b),



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that challenge and threaten to clog “the machine.”2 The following is an attempt to understand the reprogramming of this “machine” in the historical and epistemological changes of anthropology as it passed from the traditional, through modern, to its postmodern contemporary stage. Modern anthropology emerged through a crisis of representation – replacing the positivistic with the interpretive paradigm, only to find itself once again being suspended, this time in space. Structural anthropology and modernism discarded the supposedly universal tropes of the “primitive” and the “savage” with an emphasis on zones of in-betweenness as source of pollution and danger. The third phase, that of postmodern anthropology, is characterized by the hybridization of time and space, namely, by chronotopes, carnivals, and masquerades. In this phase, we find the proliferation, globalization, and glocalization of hybrids. This stage is marked by an ongoing transformation from sociobiology to biosociality (Rabinow 1992). It centers on the anthropomorphizing and humanizing of everything through hybridization and assimilation. That which cannot be subjectified, which is deemed beyond interactivity and which cannot be assigned a “social life,” is left outside the realm of contemporary anthropology. In other words, this phase also includes its own cultural contradictions. The anthropological machine of the armchair anthropologists of the nineteenth century no longer befits the postmodern quest for hybrids. Human and animals, culture and nature, are no longer held suspended. They are rather intermixed. The new “anthropological machine” is a machine of hybridization and interactivity. Ever since the postmodern, interpretive turn in anthropology, an anthropology of the 2

 “Clogging the system” is reminiscent of “culture jamming” that has been the primary strategy to resist and slow the globalization of consumerist culture. Unlike searching for the non-hybrid, culture jamming involves exposing that which is “behind the brand” (frequently labor exploitation). This strategy now appears to have failed to thwart global corporatization even remotely, and worse, it seems that jamming strategies are frequently co-opted by the brands themselves and used to attract the subculture of resistance to the brand (Klein 2002).

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non-hybrid has become inconceivable. As Paul Stoller (2009) summed up in his aptly titled book on The Power of the Between, the anthropologist’s fate has become identified with always being between things: countries, languages, cultures, even realities. But rather than lamenting this, this “fate” is celebrated by stressing the creative power of “the between,” showing how it can transform us, changing our conceptions of who we are, what we know, and how we live in the world. Like the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the odyssey of the anthropologist has become one of going “there and back again,” familiarizing the exotic while exoticizing the familiar. Everything for contemporary anthropology is hence translatable by default, otherwise it clogs the anthropological machine. This new machine is so effective it can even humanize objects (Latour’s actor-network theory, Knorr Cetina’s sociality with objects) and endow things with social life (Appadurai 1986). For example in her Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies, Karin Knorr Cetina (1997) presents the possibility that instead of perceiving a loss of social relationships, we might perceive the heightening of a different human relationship and experience with objects. What is the source of this infinite new tolerance for hybridization, accompanied by zero tolerance for non-hybridity? This book is about the cultural contradictions of the contemporary stage of anthropology, namely the blind spots of lateral reflexivity that are exposed as we witness the return of mixture-proof categories: cultural entities that resist the fusible and the confluent, thus being seen as the new source of danger. A complementary perspective on this guided tour of the evolution of anthropology concerns the duality of otherness and translation. The proverbial anthropologist has rightfully acquired a reputation as a producer and ringmaster of others. Anthropology is assiduously dedicated to seeking the “other,” not only by virtue of the pursuit of human diversity but mainly through the quest to recognize the human as distinguishable from the animalism of the nonhuman (Agamben 2004). Under the guise of nomenclature such as “the savage,” “the primitive,” “the native,” “the indigenous,” or “the subaltern,” the “other” keeps re-emerging in various cultural



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constructions, constantly sustaining its epistemological function as a marker and indicator of social boundaries. Yet throughout its existence, the role of anthropology was to translate these “others” to “us.” This anthropological desire for forging a mutually transformative shared discourse is dependent on the application of “modern equipment” (Rabinow 2003: 11–12) which in the case of classical fieldwork consists of devices converting the space of encounters in the ethnographic present into a series of temporally disciplined sequences of memorized accounts in the form of natives’ narratives elicited, adapted and edited by the anthropologist. Such guided revisits of previous life interlock the situated context at hand with an assumed model of cumulative causality reproducing a hetrotopic enclave of temporary others whose residence in the ethnographic space is confined to the moment of recording their presence, but justified by their past and their looming future. Thus both anthropologist and native become captives of their jointly delineated heterotopia (Foucault 1984), governed by the reigning images of the discipline as a “modern science of man.” Perhaps the major feat of anthropology is to touch the authentic, the thing-in-itself, the “native’s point-of-view,” and bring it home through translation – to go there and back again with a token of the dragon’s treasure. However, this challenge inevitably becomes a double bind for a postmodern, interpretive anthropology whose premise is that everything is constructed and nothing is authentic or essential. In a moment of honesty, anthropologists would have to confess that their discipline’s expectations are usually satisfied through a narrative formula. Succinctly put, this narrative formula hinges on a symbolic deal between anthropologist and native in which the latter agrees to provide the former with authentic life stories to be rendered in the anthropological jargon, including much ado about the anthropologist’s lack of ability to perform such authentic rendering. It should now become clear why in the context of old age, autism, pain, and the Holocaust, this deal cannot be fulfilled. These non-hybrids are deal-breakers: they clog the anthropological machine and subvert the anthropological discourse. Because of this, they can also teach us a lot about anthropology. The undisciplined

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discipline of gerontology (Katz 1996) will thus be brought up as an appropriate case in point to demonstrate the emergence of such a heterotopic trap. The preliminary purpose of this section is to sketchily trek down the path of otherness in anthropological thinking, to stop at a number of turning points and to follow the process of the dissipated concept of the “other” as it becomes translatable. The starting point of these deliberations rests with anthropology’s heritage as a “science of man,” namely, an intellectual enterprise endeavoring to objectively unravel the common denominators of human behavior in the form of human universals (Brown 1991). The origins of such universals and the dialectics of their operation and social performance are at the core of anthropology (Ingold 1996). Such debates are continuously reopened in the light of new advancements in genetics and neurobiology (Martin 2004), alongside approaches emerging from the reinvention of nature in science studies (Latour 1993), feminism (Haraway 1991), or reproductive technologies (Strathern 1992). Anthropology has begun its quest for others with an essentialist outlook. The original, indeed primordial, anthropological “other” was a culturally unprocessed human matter – the savage. In the beginning was the image of an unadulterated savage – a pre-cultural creature of questionable humanity, adopted and invented by a handful of anthropologists like Robertson Smith and Levy-Bruhl. They erected an impregnable divide between a speechless mentality incapable of distinguishing mythos from logos, and therefore devoid of ethical faculties and bereft of occidental pragmatic rationality. The place of the savage “other,” this dubious human, was inherited by the primitive, who was indeed placed at the bottom of the social evolutionary ladder, but could nonetheless set his sights higher and climb its rungs to rise to the rank of a civilized westerner. A currently much disdained term, the concept of the savage nevertheless pervaded, afflicted, and prompted the anthropological imagination as well as many anthropological debates, as it suggested an unbridgeable gap between what was considered to be civilization as opposed to animalism or barbarism. Theories of “pre-logical mentalities” (Lévy-Bruhl 1926) propounded the notion of an insurmountable divide



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sequestrating the beast-like savage from the supposedly rational, progressive European. Condemned and renounced though they were (Lloyd 1990), such conceptions are thought to have had an enduring impact on anthropological thinking (Fabian 1983; Horton 1982), as well as on cultural reflections concerning issues of racism and sexism and, in our case, agism. Hovering between images of nobility and ignobility, the savage – under various cultural guises – remains an icon of a doubtful human marked by a non-reflexive, instinctive, and unflinching awareness of reality. Representations of that “other” were abundant in midnineteenth century literature. As Street (1975: 6) epitomizes: “Primitive people are considered to be the slaves of custom and thus unable to break the disposition of their own ‘collective conscience’. Any ‘custom’ discovered among primitive people is assumed to dominate their whole lives; they are unconscious of it and will never change it themselves.” This generalization could apply just as well to the contemporary image of the old-as-other. Indeed, the old savage of traditional anthropology has been transformed to the savage old of postmodern anthropology. The essentialist view of the savage was presumably repaired in the nineteenth-century anthropological theory of social evolution. Scholars such as Morgan, Maine, Tylor and Frazer followed sociologists Comte and Spencer in a promise of bridging the currently dubbed colonizer and colonized by allowing the latter to emulate and eventually reach the rank of the former. Thus, while hierarchical order was sustained, it was transformed into a ladder-like sequence of progress. This redefined ethos of the “other” as potentially tame and civilized rather than a wild savage already eroded its metaphor as a distinct and discrete essence. Anthropological theories inventing primitive society as “composed of corporate exogamous lineages giving way eventually to territorially based statehood” (Kuper 1988) shifted the notion of the “other” from the level of the uncivilized image of the savage to the level of a structurally communal primitive, hence making the social into a vehicle for transforming the personal. Enter modernity and, with it, cultural relativism. The ensuing ethos of cultural relativism did in fact overturn that

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colonialist hierarchy by flipping the vertical axis of Familiarity–Otherness over into a horizontal plateau of cultural differences, upon which each culture exhibited its distinctive behavioral patterns, while all were deserving of equal value. Within this scheme, each culture, including that of the anthropologist, is capable of serving as the equivalent of every other culture. Communication and transfers across cultures were contingent on the version of multiculturalism espoused by the observer-researcher: from absolute and extreme epistemic relativism, where insurmountable barriers of language and consciousness divide cultural units from each other, to idioms capable of perfecting fluent commensurability and translatability. As a result of multiculturalism, the concept of the savage/ primitive has lost its devastating power of excommunication, dehumanization and, in extreme cases, extermination (Daniel 1994). It continues, however, to serve as a definitive reference point for ascertaining identity and recognizing culturally shared selfhood. Indeed, zones of collective memories and their corresponding imagined communities (Anderson 1991; Triandafyllidou 1998) engender politics of difference and identity that allow subaltern groups a voice and a claim for audibility, representation, and re-presentation. This trend was further strengthened with postcolonial regimes of knowledge. The pluralistic and polysemic paradigm of multiculturalism was dismantled and dissolved to see the proliferation of hyphenated identities endowed with double gazes of themselves and of others (Appadurai 1988; Clifford 1997; Lavie 1996). The “other” has thus become a stranger (Gurevitch 1988) and the dialogical space embracing the colonized and the colonizer has been constructed and deconstructed as the habitus for these labile and mercurial social entities (Bhabha 1990; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). This kind of ideology found one of its most foundational and forceful expressions in Said’s (1978) critical analysis of the orientalist stance ingrained in the Eurocentric worldview. Said’s analysis illustrates how the trope of the essential “other” (the savage) has given way to the trope of a socially constructed “other” (the oriental) since in his analysis there are no essences, only social constructions of “the Orient.”



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Enter postmodernity and its denunciation of essentialist as well as hierarchical dichotomies. If we are all potentially strangers, as Kristeva (1991) suggests, and since strangeness surrounds us in reality and fiction, the only way to reconcile with that ubiquitous presence of images of aliens, foreigners, refugees, transsexuals, transnationals, nomads, zombies, chimeras, and cyborgs is to acknowledge and live that embodied otherness within our own selves (Ahmed 2000). The dissolution of otherness hence underscores a move toward re-culturation of aliens, while abandoning any notion of inhu­ manity (Latour 1995) and animalization (Agamben 2004: 75–7). This is a transnational space of hybridism, translation, mimicry, interactivity, and cultural reversibility, transcending boundaries and dissolving distinctions. Ingrained in this model is the assumption of hybridity as the main cultural logic of globalization, facilitating its incessant dynamics of intermixing, fusing, and converting. In that sense, the hybrid has shifted its cultural position from the menacing territory of the witch, the monster, the impure, the stranger, the unhomely, the abjection and the taboo to the homely space of everyday cinematic and other media imagery of transsexuality, hyphenated nationalities, mixed races, human­ ized animals, cyborgs, and aliens – all legitimate and welcomed sojourns of the postmodern. The previously feared, hence marginalized, hybrid, the perpetrator of moral panic and disorder, has moved to the core of social interaction. Subsequently, domains of deemed irrationality, savagery, and arbitrary unpredictability are transformed into a naturalized order of culture. One of the most blatant examples of this transformation of the hybrid can be seen in popular culture. Vampires, halfdead, zombies, ghouls and monsters have all become the new fad. They feature in films, popular TV series, comics, manga, and anime. A cursory list of examples runs the gamut from such B films as Curse of the Undead and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula to A-list features like From Dusk till Dawn and Jonah Hex, as well as animated films (Rango) and television programs (The Walking Dead, Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Twilight series). Previously feared and shunned as abominated aberrations, they are today’s

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beloved household items. “Monster High” is a popular fashion-doll franchise released by Mattel in July 2010 and quickly followed by TV specials, a web series, DVDs and software. The characters are inspired by monster movies, sci-fi horror, and thriller fiction. Characters of Monster High include the daughters of Frankenstein, a werewolf, Dracula, Mummy, Medusa, zombies, and the like. In a recent book, literary critic Virginia Nelson (2012) argues that the popularity of these characters, which she calls “Gothick,” represents “the ultimate mongrel form,” which is furthermore marked by unorthodox spirituality, medievalisms, and Anglo-American Gothick motifs (the haunted environment, the evil older man, the monster, the shape-shifter, the persecuted heroine), showing ordinary people achieving divine status through transformative relationships with the very creatures – zombies, vampires, and werewolves – that would previously have been the object of horror and revulsion. Given the cultural logic of the transformation described here, this popularity is not a coincidence. The hybrid-as-taboo was the hallmark of vertical, modern culture, where high/low differences dictated the structure of class, power, and prestige. The abolishment of that system was carried out by horizontal, glo­ balized postmodern culture. It also paved the way for the hybrid-as-celebrity, produced and marketed in postmodern popular culture, that all-engulfing culture industry of de-differentiation. However, the “real” living dead, namely the very old and the Alzheimer’s stricken, are devoid of any popularity. Books with titles such as Alzheimer’s Disease: Coping with a Living Death (Woods 1989) and The Living Dead: Alzheimer’s in America (Lushin 1990) clearly link patients with ghouls. The very old and Alzheimer’s patients demonstrate in a very real sense the destruction of the person and the animation of the corpse. However, in their case, these attributes lead only to stigmatization, institutionalization, and social invisibility (Behuniak 2011). These essential limbo people (Hazan 1980) are masked and medicalized, rather than consulted for the answer to what it means to be human. The construction of the very old as “living dead” in popular and scholarly discourse does not join the commercialized discourse on hybrids but, quite on the contrary, masks the painful existence of



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real people, constructing them as animated corpses without subjectivity, and their disease as a terrifying threat to the social order. Here we find a postmodernist return to the traditional, nineteenth-century racial politics of revulsion and fear directed at the hybrid. Otherness, within the postmodern “third space,” is no longer conceived of as indestructible, but as malleable to domestication, colonization, and transformation. Stripped of its foundational validity as a key for setting categories of unadulterated meaning and counter-meaning, the fabric of alterity in the “third space” is frayed into hybridized embodied forms such as the carnivalesque, the hyphenated, the racially mixed, and the transsexual. Such hybridization echoes what Bhabha (1994) termed as the “in-between-ness” embracing colonized and colonizer in a mutual mirroring act of enchantment and subjugation, mimicry and translation, reversibility and fluidity. This apparent breakdown of dichotomies engenders a discourse of hybridization and ambivalence that seemingly dissolves categories of power and domination but, nevertheless, retains and maintains the politics of cultural dependency camouflaged as symbolic exchange, while reinforcing the mastery of the colonizer as a knowledge producer of otherness. The postmodernist phase in the discursive evolution of otherness is also a reflection of political displacement, labor migration, international tourism, multinational corporations, the decline of the nation-state, the spread of information technologies and the omnipresence of western-style mass media (Hannerz 1996). Postmodernism, as a currently prevalent cultural ethos of fragmentation, carnival-like masquerading and unauthorized non-hegemonic texts (Wikan 1996), reinforces these trends by disqualifying the “other” as an essential referent. Networking society and post-national flows (Featherstone 2001) cast further doubt as to the constitutive role of oppositional otherness in identity formation. In its most extreme form, this cultural medley is altogether devoid of essences, purities or “originals,” emphasizing instead the pervasiveness of copies and simulations (Baudrillard 1983 [1975]). Having lost its essentialist properties, the “other” is no longer effective for forging identities and delineating boundaries. Subsequently, the “other” – the main object for

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anthropological inquiry – ceases to furnish the discipline, even though its absence continues to tease and challenge anthropology. Indeed, in its extreme manifestation postmodernism critiques the possibility of commensurability and comparability of cultures. This postmodern stance, often termed epistemological relativism, casts doubt on the very feasibility of social research (Rosaldo 1989; Winch 1958). In other words, it questions the foundation of the constructionist project, namely the intersubjective transmission of intelligible messages though vehicles of cultural translation. Conscious of the need to avert such prospects of deconstructing the anthropological feat, Clifford Geertz (1984a) developed the aforementioned “anti anti-relativistic” critique that, although anchored in local knowledge, transcends cognitive diversity and nevertheless enables translation (Geertz 1983: 36–54) through the vagaries of the “moral imagination.” This kind of poet­ ically geared cross-cultural channel has been canonized and problematized as one of anthropology’s regimes of selfjustification with the advent of the literary turn in the annals of the discipline (Clifford and Marcus 1986). The act and art of authorship of culture as textualized in ethnographic accounts has hence once again become the authority for narrating and deciphering the poetics and politics of the process of constructing experienced reality under the guise and license of “going native” and “othering.” The voices of postcolonialism, feminism, postmodernism, and anti-globalization have greatly expanded the register of sounds emanating from the recognized and authorized regions of otherness. Therefore, illegitimate otherness is that whose voice remains absent rather than mute, not necessarily due to silencing and repression, but because the frequencies of its audio transmissions are not tuned to the auditory receptors of potential listeners, namely the licensed producers of the canonical anthropological discourses of otherness. It is perhaps against this most recent crisis of representation and translation that anthropology has entered its “posttraditional” moment, coming back to the colonialist fascination with the uncivilized, namely those essential tropes that seem beyond hybridization. Such essential tropes and prototypical carriers of unembodied selves include, for example,



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the very old, the autistic, the terminally ill, the Muselmann, the homeless, the refugee and other ilk of selfless otherness inhabiting what I will refer to as the “fourth space.” Recognition of unembodied selves and selfless corporali­ ties requires a relinquishment of phenomenological percepts reverberating from the soundboard of shared experiencebased knowledge. Thus, current ethics of deconstructing the divide between self and other have to be suspended in favor of a return to the rudiments of the much maligned voice of anthropology in which otherness was kept at bay as an object for hearing and observing, without assumed participation in its production. What seems to be a self-contradictory term – unembodied or non-native anthropology – could offer a way out of our conventional, midlife, neurotypical epistemology. Anthropology of the “fourth space” must employ nonparticipant observation, disengaged observation, taking role distance from the field, considering categories rather than individuals, and looking at deep structures rather than at surface rules. These seemingly positivistic feats might sense the extra-cultural more than attempts at moralizing, assimilating, domesticating and colonizing it against its nature. Such feats, however, invariably lead to a road not taken by today’s anthropologists; for dealing with selfless corporeality might risk producing an amoral corpus of research composed of seemingly dehumanized others – something that a decent, socially committed scholar cannot afford to contend with. The immutable forms populating the “fourth space” appear to challenge the translational authority of postmodern anthropology in a global world (Rubel and Rosman 2003; Valero-Garces 1994). In terms of translation, we have here yet another dual opposition, the metonymic and the metaphoric, which follows and extends the duality of the wild and the civilized. In the wake of Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work on the predominant role of metaphor in constructing and construing social and interpersonal experience (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), awareness of the place of symbolic exchange in interaction has been profusely advocated in sociological thinking, gaining further ground and almost reducing the perspective on communication to varieties of that trope. Anthropology, however, has always been attentive to the presence of other meaning-forming representational

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devices such as metonymy, synecdoche, the literal, and evidently, ultimately, also silence. While metaphoric language enables associative openminded creativity, the use of metonymical signs is selfreferential and bound to one closed domain of meaning. Literal language goes even further, inasmuch as it unequivocally denotes the positively natural and resists multivocal symbolism (Hazan 1996; Turner 1991). The impregnability of the literal to the transcendental, the abstract and the metaphoric, aligns its referential scope to an unadulterated descriptive activity of material, tangible objects such as body parts, bodily inputs and outputs, tools and functions with no adumbration of embodiment of the type ascertained by the proliferating scholarship of embodiment (Scordas 1990). It would seem that the discrepant modes of reference and understanding of the multifarious metaphoric versus the unilateral literal might be accountable for yet another breach of translation, one that reflects fundamental differences in existential conditions. When a category of the population is subjected to severe measures of stripping off social identity through forfeiting civil rights and cultural standing to a sovereign power, its subsequent bare life (Agamben 1998; Bauman 2004) is also robbed of any symbolic significance. Bare life, an Aristotelian-based term anchored in ancient Roman law which distinguishes zoe from bios, the pre-social from the social, was employed by Agamben to denote pure, real experience, mute infancy, “something anterior both to subjective and to an alleged psychological reality” (Agamben 1998: 37). Human being is always before the human, proclaims Agamben who (in his later writings) developed the idea to analyze the biopolitics of modernity as an epoch where the corporeal is entirely usurped by the social to the extent that bare life is at once excluded from and included in the political order (Agamben 1998). It would seem that the concept of bare life could serve our understanding of the social position of immutable “savages,” such as the very old, the autistic, the chronic-pain patient and the Muselmann, in two respects: first, the self-evident biopolitical somatization of such “savages” could be fathomed as a form of an a-cultural state of consciousness caught up between the limits of speech and bodily experiences. Second, the double position



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of contemporary “savages” as both excluded and included in modern settings – outside the social order, candidates for euthanasia, displacement, and avoidance, invisible untouchables on the one hand, while being subject to regimenting forces of the biopolitical on the other. This locates the category of the contemporary savage well within the realm of bare life and renders it a homo sacer. The social gaze that constitutes the category of the very old, comprised of “bed and body work,” leaves no room for dialogical exchange. Resorting to bodily anchored literal language is thus a common form of self-expression among those whose symbolic world is dissipated. The bedridden sick, children, inmates in total institutions, the homeless, the slave, and the refugee are but a few examples of categories of people whose forced preoccupation with somatic needs and properties submits and confines their construction of reality to templates of the here and now of a total experience of existence and survival, rather than to a self-indulgent teleological quest for meaning. The literal, here-and-now utterances of bare life greatly hamper cultural translation. As already argued, the refutation of that central practice may amount to a denial of anthro­ pological authorship and authority and to grinding the constructionist movement to a halt. The presupposed position of the translatability of cultural text is embedded in the hub of the anthropologist’s research site – the “field,” where the familiar is exoticized and the exotic is familiarized to create an in-between cultural meeting ground ripe with sprouting novel experiences for both anthropologist and native (Crapanzano 2004). But is there a “field” for phenomena that refuse such hybridization, phenomena that are too “exotic” to be familiarized? Breaking the magic circle of self-affirmed cultural translatability would arguably require a paradigmatic shift or twist in discursive commitment, to the extent of subverting the anthropological credo of knowledge as an emergent property of a dialogical moment embracing all actors (Holquist 1991). The limits of translation could be tested and ascertained when disciplinary tautological arguments are suspended and the pledge for constructionist intercourse as a source of knowledge is put into question. Such case studies verge on what

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might be suspected as a dialogue of the deaf between interlocutors partaking in a research situation often construed as a misunderstanding, a breach in communication, or an impregnate silence. Anthropology has never ceased to be occupied with cultural universals (for example in the context of race and gender), but in this post-traditional moment, this has become a preoccupation. Unbridgeable discourses could be portrayed as immutable and immune to one another and, as such, representing respective ultimate others, beyond reconstruction and reversibility. This view, of holding mainly biologically based categories as discrete impregnable entities, has been applied to racial separation (Fanon 1967 [1952]) that annuls linguistic capabilities of communication between different skin colors; or to gender differences construed as mutually incommunicable by virtue of nature rather than culture (Irigaray 1992). If “men are from Mars and women are from Venus,” then how can they really expect to communicate? Contrary to the performative ethos advocated by Butler (1990) or the dialogic production of self through others (Mead 1934), this uncompromising stance allows for neither conversions nor transformations, thus maintaining essential divides beyond translatability. However, since essentialism is also a strategic hermeneutic product of interpretive deliberations, the cleavage between assumed entities could be logically mobilized to any socially selected phenomenon conceived of as looming beyond cultural construction. The human obsolescence of the moribund old (Henry 1963) or the loneliness of the dying (Elias 1985) are examples of such exclusive otherness. Even though death is presumably an extra-cultural non-hybrid, it impinges heavily upon constructed symbolic orders in the form of gerontophobia and other social devices for denying death (Bauman 1992). Such non-representational relations could be locked in bubbles of hyperreality (Baudrillard 1993 [1976]) or in pregnant silences resonating in discourses such as unverbalized Holocaust experience (Bar-On 1998). The postmodern zeal to hybridize, assimilate, and make everything interactive, even death, has recently received a new technological incarnation in the form of digital/virtual cemeteries. In this intriguing blend of hyperreality and symbolic



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immortality, the gravestone can act as an interactive computer, complete with photos and blogs, providing what some consider would be the best way to keep the memory of a loved one alive. These “TV tombs” are interactive memorials that allow mourners to upload pictures, video clips, and articles about their dearly departed. With a touch of the screen or by scanning a barcode into their smartphone, visitors can not only learn about loved ones, but also see them as they once were. They will also be able to leave video messages with the help of a webcam, thus rendering the experience truly interactive. All these cases amount to an ontological difficulty in translating one materiality to another, due to unshareable properties and through lack of constructible commonalities. Our western, midlife, neurotypical norms and expectations prescribe that identity will be communicative and dialogical at moments of expression, listening, and speaking. Hybridity, as a struggle over identity positions, is interactive, discursive and dialogical. In Bakhtin’s (1986) terms, because the self is the nexus of a flow of activity in which it also participates, it cannot be finalized. When this no longer takes place, when there is a breach in communicability and meaning can no longer be negotiated, identity and the self become non-hybrid and thus final, or in other words socially dead. Setting a human category as an ontological “other” thus entails farreaching epistemological repercussions. The incompatibility of space and time between two cultures upsets the plausi­ bility of managing otherness (Fabian 1983). The following chapter of this book turns to substantiating the criticism regarding the anthropological casting of non-hybrids as nontranslatable and extra-cultural. This book, evidently, is itself an anthropological analysis of the frame of meaning around these cultural practices, and it is ensnared in that circle as deeply as the rest of us. A potential way out will be pointed at in the conclusion.

2 Becoming a Non-Hybrid: The Very Old as Deadly Others

Psychological anthropology used to promote the so-called “ageless self” (Kaufman 1986) as reflecting the well-wishing, humanistic, modern, midlife and neurotypical western notion of continuity and “ego-integrity.” Against this notion we find the complementary, dark and devastating notion of the selfless age, in which the very old are devoid of their interpretative authority, debunked of subjectivity, and assigned the questionable, non-hybrid category of “wasted lives” (Bauman 2004). This notion of the so-called “selfless age” fits perfectly with the postmodern aversion toward nonhybrids. However, the postmodern condition itself embodies attributes of a “selfless age” and in that sense the old could have been the vanguard of postmodern globalization. Being constructed as biological beings debunked of a specific cul­ ture, the very old could be seen as the perfect postmodern pioneers transgressing social space and personal time; but they are not recognized as such due to their non-hybrid association with death. One could perhaps try to argue that extreme old age is threatening and shocking not because it is a non-hybrid, but because it is constructed as neither quite living anymore, nor dead yet; neither self-possessed, nor manipulable; audi­ ble, but not meaningful. However, this is exactly my point. Extreme old age, being neither quite living anymore nor dead



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yet, does not become a hybrid as a result of such “social death” or ascribed liminality. Hybridization requires translation, and it is precisely when two non-translatable epistemic systems (such as life and death) confront each other that nonhybridization takes place. There is another important lesson here. Those who are perceived as “very old” can also be perceived as “the other within” since many of us can reasonably anticipate becoming very old one day. However, my argument is that there is a huge, indeed unperceivable gap between such anticipation and the actual experience of being very old. It is a gap of non-translatability which precludes most forms of talking “across” lived experience, even if “they” are also our parents, grandparents, and friends. This part of the book describes our midlife myopia regarding the very old.

Before taking the plunge Conventional wisdom has it that the final words attributed to a person emit an aura of immortality by transcending the circumstantial time and place of their utterance. Edward Said’s last unfinished book, posthumously published in 2006, not only confers a sense of such ultimate truth, but in its contents and contentions offers a powerful key to enter the unfathomable realm of the atemporal territory of the “fourth space.” The book, entitled On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain, follows Theodor Adorno’s inquiry into Beethoven’s late style of composition and in his wake Said develops a concept of timelessness detectable in the last works of great musicians and writers. Contrary to the culturally set congruity between life stages and styles of art prevailing along the penultimate phases of the life course (which Said refers to as “timeliness”), the final burst of artistic expression is irreconcilable, discordant, contentious and timeless. It is an ahistorical moment transcending the annals of epochs and breaking down normative conventions to the extent that, in his words, “The artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. His late works

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constitute a form of exile” (Said 2006: 5). That exile of lateness is hence the inspiration for the exploration of the uniqueness of the type of banished existence in the land of the “fourth space.” A glimpse into that domain could be initially taken, like in so many other cases of probing anthropological substances, through stumbling upon a supposedly mere methodological hitch. As Said and others have shown, late works of art can sometimes articulate the literal, timelessly transcendental experience of existing in the inaudible Fourth Age. For example, in Roden Noel’s poem “The Old”: They are waiting on the shore For the bark to take them home: They will toil and grieve no more; The hour for release has come. All their long life lies behind Like a dimly blending dream: Therein nothing left to bind To the realms that only seem. They are waiting for the boat; There is nothing left to do: What was near them grown remote, Happy silence falls like dew; Now the shadowy bark is come, And the weary may go home. By still water they would rest In the shadow of the tree: After battle sleep is best, After noise, tranquility.

The case of the very old on the brink of death indeed offers an intriguing testing ground for revisiting our western, midlife, neurotypical views. The voice and gaze of the very old, or rather their inaudible and invisible characteristics, challenge our normative discourses of reason, causality, sense of purpose, well-being, and temporality. It also calls into question the basic tenets of academic disciplines such as



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gerontology and anthropology, which are supposedly directed toward comprehending the aging process as part of the human condition. Above all, it offers an opportunity to expose the arbitrary limits of cultural configurations of narrated and performed selves and ages. Before diving into the extra-cultural material embodied in “old age,” a heuristic note is in order: I treat “old age” as a cultural object, a cluster of symbols, myths, meanings, and signs. In this respect, “old age” does not mean “the elderly.” The elderly, according to my perspective, is a category of people perceived as the carriers of old age; and this may change from one situation to the next, and from one context to another, thus sharpening the distinction between the objectified cultural categorization of old age and the subjective phenomenology of aging as experienced by the elderly. It is necessary to note this point in order to understand why I am not providing specific answers to questions such as: who are these people? How do we know who is “very” old and “extremely” old? What does it mean to be “very old”? In my view, these questions should first and foremost be regarded as representing the masking of old age by middle-aged society. They should be deconstructed rather than “answered” by a purportedly “empirical” designation which is yet another social construction. The elderly as such function as signifiers of a universally renounced referent, at least in modern secular society, namely death. Once again, I would like to reiterate that the conflation of old age with death is not meant as an objective, empirical statement and should not be mistakenly interpreted as such. It connotes the negative (midlife) stereotype of being old. Similarly, when discussing “Alzheimer’s” in the context of old-age imagery, I am well aware (and the reader should be too) that this association is not objective but rather designates blanket stereotypes. My point of departure is that the very old, a category I will describe as the Fourth Age, are usually avoided or described through the dominant discourse of middle-aged society, in both social and academic discourses. The social death of the very old is thus accompanied by their anthropological and gerontological death, namely lack of authentic voice and presence. I begin with a few concise illustrations of these breaches in communication in order to highlight the need for a

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theoretical turn in gerontological understanding. Let me begin with the case of Alzheimer’s disease, which has become a major matter for public concern and is widely narrated in the mass media. But do we really understand what “Alzheimer’s” is? We freely refer to the very old, who are cognitively and physically challenged, as having “Alzheimer’s,” even though the clinical diagnosis can only be ascertained postmortem. Gubrium’s (1986) discussion of the professional management of the blurred border between the “normal” and the “pathological,” the “old-timer” and “Alzheimer’s,” is a telling metaphor for scaling the old between “old people as people” or succumbing to the Alzheimerization of aging and society (Gilleard and Higgs 2000). The trope of senility and dementia, as medicalized in Alzheimer’s disease, is indeed the demarcation line between including or excluding aging in or from the canonized codex of anthropological debate. “Alzheimer’s” as a label for modern savagery is indeed deemed as the antithetical pole to the civilized. The “old savage” who was exiled from anthropology has become a popular, albeit abominable, “savage old” in contemporary culture, making the discipline banning it more socially irrelevant than ever. It should once again be stressed that while Alzheimer’s disease is usually treated as pathology, my intention here is to use it as an example of the pathological labeling of the very old in our society. First described by the German psychiatrist Dr. Alois Alzheimer in 1906, “Alzheimer’s disease” (AD) was originally a terminology largely used to describe young-onset dementia. In the second half of the twentieth century, AD replaced “senility” as a specific late-life disease-event. This change in the social construction of AD as a sickness was due to a range of cultural forces – most notably an increase in longevity in developed countries, advances in scientific research, and astute political advocacy. Gerontology itself is becoming increasingly aware that there is something wrong with the ambivalence surrounding the social construction of AD. As an article in The Gerontologist recently stated, Some prefer a clinical approach that medicalizes memory loss; others do not feel as comfortable with biomedical jargon and would benefit from a less medicalized approach, for instance speaking about the condition as “brain aging” or “senility”



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rather than a specific disease. In moving society away from the “You have it or you don’t” paradigm of AD, the guidelines validate the uncertainty and contingency of clinical diagnosis. Out of this ambiguity can emerge a renewed understanding that illness narratives matter.” (George et al. 2013: 385; my emphasis)

The label of “Alzheimer’s” can in some cases reflect an overarching stereotype of old age as socially unaccountable and “beyond culture.” It is therefore a midlife metaphor for and an indication of the failure to introduce novel benchmarks for reappraising the life span, a failure to distinguish between the later phases of life not in sequential terms but via substantive criteria of the capacity to survive as mentally challenged in the age of reason. An emphasis on illness narratives, as advocated for in the above-mentioned quote, rather than on the medicalization of sickness, spells out a return to the subjective voice of the person and the need to listen to it and not just to diagnose/construct the syndrome. The metaphor of Alzheimer’s is enthrallingly depicted in John Bayley’s (1999) best-selling account of his late wife’s Alzheimer’s onset and progress. Bayley’s wife was Iris Murdoch, the eminent philosopher and writer, a paragon of mastery of words and intellect. Her life is described by her husband as tossing between interchangeable contrasting episodes of then and now – lucidity and confusion, alertness and dimness. To illustrate the abyss of his situation, he recounts a simile by a friend in his position, who compared the caretaking of an Alzheimer’s-stricken beloved spouse to “being chained to a corpse.” Bayley repels the metaphor; anthropology and gerontology appear to live by it. I would like to explore further the proposition that our fear of very old age stems from the disruption of midlife concepts of self and body. In extreme old age, these are dissociated. Alzheimer’s is evidently an extreme illustration, but one could argue that such dissociation is a biological characteristic gradually accumulating in the process of “normal” aging. If extreme old age signifies a functional as well as an attitudinal departure from midlife linear temporality, then any definition of identity or self in terms of past-bound future orientations and choices is patently aborted. The resulting convoluted self of the very old is therefore no longer lodged

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in the realm of temporal constructions of scripts of pro­ spective options and opportunities, but in spatial ad hoc arrangements of making do under pressing constraints and present exigencies. The potential loss of sense of self, incurred by that shift from living to existing, heralds critical transformations in identity, including abandoned gender distinctions (Silver 2003), dissolved cross-generational bonds (Hazan 2003; Phillipson 2003), disappearing adaptive alternatives (de Medeiros 2005), and silenced life-story narration (Hazan 2006). All these do not necessarily mean that self-conception among some of the old is rendered defunct, but rather that it becomes increasingly untenable as a reflectively anchored discourse. Thus, gerontologists are left with little choice but to consider the often malfunctioning, observable body as almost the only template for relating to the beingin-the-world of the elderly subject (Gubrium and Holstein 2002). This amounts to adopting a monistic mode of understanding old age through its performed corporality under the guise of claiming to view it as a holistic entity (see also Heikkinen 2004; Leibing and Cohen 2006; Taylor 2008). Myerhoff (1978b), marveling at a dying old man who prepared his own ritualistic posthumous continuity, entitled it “a symbol perfected in death,” suggesting that death in and of itself is of no meaningful importance. Unless death is annulled by investing it with socially constructed meanings, terminality – at least for secular society – is culturally unfathomable and thus out of bounds for anthropological paradigms. The very old is thus turned into “bare life” or “living corpse.” Stripped of any symbolic embellishments, the very old as a metonymic representation of death impedes the anthropological pursuit of otherness in forms that can be reconstructed, negotiated, revoked, and re-inherited as one of “us” humans. Hence, the unadulterated old has no recognizable culture nor is it even displayed as a spectacle for mimicry or mockery (Hall 1977). The following vignette, taken from an anthropological study based on interviews with a group of very old people, also highlights the collapse of known coordinates of meaning and the resulting monologue of old age. What should an anthropologist addressing an “other” make of the following repartee?



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Anthropologist:  Would you tell me your life story? Old respondent:  I don’t know. Everything that happened just happened in its own right. No connection whatsoever between this and that.

I will continue to discuss these interview excerpts with the very old, using them to consider some of the general, rather than situational, issues involved in the failure of the two texts to correspond with each other in cultivating a common ground for the emergence of a research field. This vignette illustrates what can superficially perhaps be considered as a “non-interview.” An anthropologist trying to lead such an interview may indeed feel, like Bayley, that s/he is symbolically “chained to a corpse,” namely a non-communicative partner. The question is, evidently, whether the partner is indeed not communicating – or is it us who are not using the proper code for deciphering what is being communicated from the other side? The purpose of our discussion is to move beyond the “ends of ethnography” (Clough 1992) through the elucidation of one of the key problems embedded in the construction of ethnographic opportunities, that is, the dilemma of translating one culture into another. The following section elaborates on these breaches and gaps in communication, translation, discourse, and theory concerning the very old. The articulation of this crisis of translation will then lead us to the exposition of alternative terminology, discussed in the last section of this chapter.

Social theory and extreme old age My review of the literature concerning the very old will be organized around three categories: theory; academic discipline; and methodology. The crisis of representation and translation regarding extreme old age is critically discussed in each of these domains. The social oblivion of old age juxtaposed with death in a youth-centered culture is well expressed, for instance, in the gerontophobic assertion by the French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard who describes the redundancy of old age as generating a taboo which is “a marginal and ultimately asocial slice of life – a ghetto, a

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reprieve and the slide into death. Old age is literally being eliminated. In proportion, as the living live longer, as they win over death, they cease to be symbolically acknowledged” (Baudrillard 1993 [1976]: 163). One of the reasons for such symbolic elimination is the lack of relevant theoretical coordinates of meaning stemming from the perceived nonhybridity of old age. As in other cases that are perceived as non-hybrid, such as autism, pain, or the Holocaust, the normative social reaction is one of fear and distancing, followed by attempts of staging and grading. In the case of old age, this also breeds gerontophobia and agism. The elderly are often socially positioned as “others” within their own society in a way which promotes and legitimizes agism and disengagement. Age itself becomes an outcast that needs to be fought against and kept as far away as possible. However, the failure of battling against age is well known in advance, making it a priori futile because of the very perception of age as a non-hybrid natural given which is beyond negotiation and therefore beyond change (Hazan 2009). The postmodern Zeitgeist of hybrid globalization cannot tolerate such non-hybridity in its midst, thus it seeks to expel it. Agism can be defined as the functional outcome of these social strategies (Agich 2003; Phillipson 1998; Vincent 2003). I focus here on two major theoretical issues: the concept of identity and of translation. These concepts are prominent in all the social sciences, but carry specific implications for those social disciplines dedicated to the study of old age, namely anthropology and gerontology, to be explored in the following section. Our taken-for-granted western, midlife, neurotypical assumptions about identity and the “self” embrace both the socially subjugated, that is, the disciplined “me,” and its complementary opposite, the individually subjective, namely the “I” (Mead 1934). The inconsistent ravages of old age, however, often separate body from mind, and their respective trajectories are no longer effectively synchronized (Archer 2000). This discrepancy spells a theoretical paradox for those who grapple with current holistic discourses of the nexus of the social and the corporeal. The theoretical handling of this age-dependent Cartesian dichotomy of body and self/soul could be theoretically



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addressed from two diametrically opposed theoretical angles which are split between modern and postmodern narratives. The first dismisses the body as an active agent of beingin-the-world. It reflects an idealistic celebration of the prevalence of the integrity, continuity, and solidity of the self, overriding any disruptive breach in its enduring experiential presence. This is the so-called “ageless self” (Kaufman 1986) reflecting modern western notions of continuity and egointegrity. The second angle, in contrast, disregards the interpretative authority of subjectivity, consigning “wasted lives” (Bauman 2004) to the scrap heap of bio-power processed populations which, to use Agamben’s (1998) terminology, could be killed but not sacrificed, thus being devoid of any cultural significance. This is the so-called postmodern “selfless age.” Gerontology seems to be torn between the two contingencies of viewing old age as first and foremost mentally molded or, secondly, as somatically determined. The second angle, that of the “selfless age,” is more difficult to accept as it emphasizes biological essence over cultural constructs. A selfless old age is deemed beyond translation and reversibility. This view of holding mainly biologically based categories as discrete impregnable entities has been applied to racial separation (Fanon 1967 [1952]) that annuls linguistic capabilities of communication between different skin colors, or to gender differences construed as mutually incommunicable by virtue of nature rather than culture (Irigaray 1992). Contrary to the performative ethos advocated by the Butler school (Butler 1990), this uncompromising stance allows for neither conversions nor transformations, thus maintaining essential divides beyond translatability. Such perceived essentialism impinges heavily upon constructed symbolic orders in the form of gerontophobia and other social devices for denying death (Bauman 1992).

The academic disciplines of anthropology and gerontology in the context of extreme old age Flooded by the limelight of the postcolonial era, the front stage of contemporary anthropology accommodates previously invisible actors emerging from the corners of various

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Table 2.1  The proportion of research articles, divided by thematic categories, published in 1963–2002 in five major anthropological journals (American Anthropology; American Ethnologist; Current Anthropology; Cultural Anthropology; Man) Subject

Gender

Childhood

Gay

Aging

Number of articles

170

95

16

7

gendered and decolonized regions. The old are, however, glaringly absent from the front stage of a discipline bent on exploring diasporas, contact zones, transcultural borders, and routes of transition. Old age is a living example of all these terms of reference, which have recently become so popular in anthropology and cultural studies; and yet old age is at the same time almost completely vacant from major journals of social and cultural anthropology (see Table 2.1). Only one journal specializes in cultural aspects of aging (International Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology). Similarly, the growing socio-anthropological literature on the “somatization of society” almost precludes the aging body from its discourse (Oberg 1996). The interface between gender and medicalization is a much discussed topic in contemporary anthropology, yet with almost no mention of the aging female body (Lock 1998).1 Forced role relinquishment, relocation, identity depreciation, and increased dependency surely invite the scrutiny of anthropological gatekeepers of disciplinary inclusion or exclusion. Why is it, then, that anthropologists show favoritism toward the Third World and ignore the Third Age? Or, put more bluntly, why does the study of mankind avoid the study of the old kind? This story is about the unconsummated marriage between anthropology and gerontology. On the face of it, the humanistic perspective presumably shared by both areas of knowledge should have ensured a common ground of concern and interest in the status and behavior of the culturally 1

 However, for a sociological discussion of the process of turning the old into medical objects of power-knowledge see Turner (1995); for ethnographic accounts of reducing the old into objects of nursing care, see for example Diamond (1995) and Foner (1994).



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underprivileged, silenced, displaced, oppressed, and exploited. However, the fringe site occupied by gerontological anthropology attests to the contrary. It would seem that the marginalization of the subdiscipline is contaminated by the general agist attitude toward the old, which leaves the overall arena of sociocultural anthropology impervious to the study of old age and the elderly excommunicated from anthropological mainstream discourses. My focus here is on the most extreme features associated with aging: frailty, dementia, Alzheimer’s, and death. I focus on old age as a category which is ever present, yet seldom enters academic discussion. The following aims at disentangling this paradox by deconstructing the master narrative of anthropology while demonstrating why and how some major themes of gerontological anthropology have not been interwoven into that academic yarn. Furthermore, it is argued that the spirit of gerontological anthropology is patently subversive to its mother discipline. The culprit is the celebrated hero of both discourses – the trope of the “other,” whose appearances in the two disciplines seem to be diametrically opposed. Studying the old-as-other reveals two types of alterity: that which is culturally constructed as different versus that which is essentially different. There is a schism between these two types of alterity. The “other” that dominates the agendas of contemporary anthropology is the product of a negotiable cultural construction. Otherness, in contemporary anthropology, serves as a measure for appraising the distance between sameness and difference, the familiar and the exotic, the known and the unknown. The otherness of the old, however, rests on a premise of unknowability. Socially constructed others contain within them a suggestion of selfhood and subjectivity, supposedly reflexive and constitutive and hence changeable and constructible (Archer 2000; Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985; Morris 1991). The condition of being old contradicts these parameters. It is objective and unchangeable. Frail people in advanced years, particularly those confined to institutions, are deemed as the carriers of that condition of extreme old age. For them, individual accountability can be undermined by physical constraints and the social authority of professional carers, and personal development is

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generally seen as no longer possible. Such old age is essentially beyond social discourse. It constitutes an extra-cultural, non-hybrid materiality which hardly answers to the basic anthropological dictum of representing the “natives’ point of view” (Geertz 1984a). Such raw materiality does not befit the contemporary hermeneutics of anthropological relativism. Furthermore, old age is uncontrollable and hence socially and existentially intimidating. Contemporary anthropology, fixed on studying the construction of social reality, thus ignores the raw materiality of old age while producing ethnographically informed commentaries on varieties of eldercare and the management of their ensuing experiences. I do not intend to offer here a systematic account of the wealth of research on sociocultural aspects of old age and the immense scholarship accrued in that field of study. My purpose is rather to describe a genealogy of loci of knowledge in order to expose an agenda that has hitherto been largely unnoticed. Evidently, there can be many versions of reading; my reading is but one road taken. The gerontological nomenclature devised to handle the issue at stake speaks for itself in its built-in drawbacks and inadequacies. Thus, terms such as “de-culturation,” “disengagement,” “disintegration,” “invisibility,” “rolelessness,” “role exit,” and so forth constitute self-evident pejorative language testifying to the presence of absence of conceptual substance in the attempt to recognize old age. Two contradictory, yet complementary, reasons are responsible for this lacuna of affirmative scientific knowledge of old age. The first is the age-centric origin of writing about old age by middleage consciousness, extending lifestyles and desires attributed to prime years to aspired images of later years, thus masking the multiple realities of old age (Hazan and Raz 1997). This expectation for an uninterrupted continuation of prowess and standing is incarnated in the prevalent language of good adjustment and worthy living expressed in locutions such as optimum, successful, productive, and meaningful aging. The presumed pursuit of these goals extrapolates middle-age values and norms to old age. Prolonged life expectancy intertwined with compressed morbidity (Fries 1980) stretches the agist anti-aging consumerist culture embedded in the peak of wealth and power in contemporary western society to the



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ominous brink of gerontophobic awareness of the undiscovered country of the oldest old. This unavoidable realization of final decrepitude and senseless senescence leads to the second reason for the intellectual bankruptcy involved in the reluctant endeavor to identify the Fourth Age. It is the adherence to the chief paradigm under which all ages are perceived, namely the modernist perspective of progress and development subjectified in an integrated selfhood driven by intentional experience. However, if the Fourth Age is indeed a quintessential phase in the aging process, as some of us would have it, two core dilemmas pertaining to the very foundation of geron­tology ought to be considered and elucidated. The first is the subsuming of the robust old, existentially indistinguishable from midlifers, into one academic-cum-public distinguishable category denoting an indivisible human condition stamped as old age. Dovetailed, yet contrary, to this misnomer is the second dilemma of propounding an alternative language appropriate to the analysis of that exceptional state of existence dubbed the Fourth Age. Unqualifiable as well as unquantifiable, seductively obscure terms such as empowerment, resistance, gerotranscendence, and spirituality are amply employed in recent gerontological discourse as indulgences absolving the moral panic stirred by the unsettling presence of the socially disenfranchised oldest old as against their culturally accepted younger contemporaries. For a considerable period in the annals of gerontology, the already discussed theoretical dilemma of self and body in old age did not exist. In sociology, through the rise and fall of the theory of disengagement (Cumming and Henry 1976), and in anthropology by its observations in simple societies (Glascock and Feinman 1981), self and body in old age have been synchronized as part of a process of social withdrawal. However, growing awareness of the ambivalences and contradictions built into the project of modernity (Bauman 1991) prompted gerontologists to consider the option of setting discourses of self and body apart. As already mentioned, this resulted in a disciplinary split between the ethos of continuity of the inner, ageless self (Kaufman 1986) and the mask of aging centered on external stereotyping and labeling (Featherstone and Hepworth 1991).

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Lately, a significant shift turning this dual discursiveness into one has been introduced into gerontology by the pervasiveness of feminist studies (Twigg 2004), advocating the embodied unity of the physical and the mental. Subscribing to this ethos is stipulated and encouraged by the assumed familiarity between the two socially underprivileged categories, women and the old, thereby setting the scene for enacting the feminist theme: “our bodies – ourselves” – by removing the mask of aging that renders innermost selfhood and outer appearance mutually exclusive. To accomplish that embodied incongruity between desires and performance, elderly people often participate in what Woodward (1991, 1995) and Biggs (1999, 2004) call a masquerade of role reversals, where bodily modifications intertwined with corresponding lifestyles project externally and internally contrived images of personal choice rather than rules (Blaikie 1999). As long as the postmodern enables and allows that carnival-like spectacle of agelessness to be staged, age boundaries will continue to erode, while the costumes worn by the old actors throw into relief the shunned presence of their absent backstage identity.

The old-as-other in anthropology and gerontology The category of “the old” is not equivalent to the elderly themselves. “Old age” is a symbolic space instilled in everyday language and demeanor, perpetuated by organizations and social policies and embroidered in popular culture (Blaikie 1999). Gerontology is no doubt an important source of views on old age. Gerontological views are caught up between their pledge to give audience to the natives’ point of view and the social constraints obliging them to subscribe to the scope and spirit of the public, middle-age sphere. This Janus-faced look could turn into a double bind since societal structures and cultural configurations concerning old age do not necessarily inform personal accounts by elderly individuals whose expressed attitudes often generate academically charted narratives, unrelated to the dictates of the elderly’s local “social worlds” (Gubrium 1993; Hazan 1980, 1996;



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Kaufman 1986; Keith 1982; Savishinsky 2000). The gerontological old-as-other is therefore not a projection of embodied subjectivities (Biggs and Powell 2001; Foucault 1980; Rose 1990) but of the practices and strategies by which such subjectivities are socially designed and engineered (Gubrium, Holstein, and Buckholdt 1994). In other words, old age as a cultural construct seldom represents or promotes the soughtafter essential, experienced reality of being old. “Continuity” and “discontinuity,” “activity” versus “disengagement,” “role taking,” and “rolelessness” are all major terms constituting the gerontological lingo – as well as facets of the same dilemma which prevaricate between treating the old as “us” or segregating it as “them,” struggling to survive in “the last frontier” (Fontana 1976) while questioning the worth of this very struggle (Butler 1975). These two optional stances reflect the duplicity of attitudes toward the old which is made up of taboos concerning death, incapacitation, and senility (Fiedler 1996) alongside haloed values of liberal civil society and the welfare state (Gilleard and Higgs 2000). The blatant contradiction between the two engenders a built-in ambiguity in the image of the old, who occupy overlapping cultural spaces of the reassuring familiar and the dangerously demonic. It is intriguing that, despite the disturbing inadequacy of common socio-anthropological terminology to make sense of old age, concepts of marginality and strangeness were barely applied to the understanding of aging. With a few exceptions (Dowd 1986; Hockey and James 1993; Myerhoff 1978a), the avoidance of this frame of analysis could be construed as a denial of fuzziness, suggesting the plausibility of transformation and reversibility while adhering to socially endorsed, run-of-the-mill portrayals (Hazan 1994). Liminality, as a state at the brink of humanity, enables a venture into a kind of essentialism otherwise avoided by anthropology as well as gerontology. At the same time, liminality holds in store the comforting promise of a return to culture. However, such a round trip (namely not only leaving culture but also returning to it) is too often inconceivable for the old. In The Role of the Aged in Primitive Society, Simmons (1945) described the status of the elderly in pre-industrial settings, with the conclusion that the “other within the other,”

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namely the old within the primitive, is invariably consigned to the social dump of neglect, abuse, and at times hastened death. Subsequent comparative works, such as those drawing on the theory of modernization (Cowgill and Holmes 1971) elaborated on Simmons’s findings by conceptually framing them within models of inevitable progress inversely corresponding to inexorable deterioration in the fate of honorable elders turned oppressed elderly merely wishing to die with dignity as “winners” rather than “losers” (Simic 1978a). The conviction that old age is a quintessential common experience of bare humanity is shared by anthropologists of different schools, such as Anderson (1972), who observed the process of de-culturation in old age, Colson (1977) who recognized the importance of mere age as a total index for identity, Simic (1978b) who sought the order of needs in later life, and Myerhoff (1978a) as well as Kaufman (1986), who pursued the continuity of cultural themes distilled in the agelessness of selfhood. These works are all examples of modern anthropology, a discipline committed to the social construction of reality. Yet, when dealing with old age, these anthropologists become essentialists. My explanation to this riddle is that it represents the gap between ideology and practice. While contemporary anthropology may assert that it is committed to constructionism and relativism, in practice we see essentialist studies of old age such as those mentioned. In that sense, the study of old age is somewhat reminiscent of the nineteenth-century hunt for the primordial primitive at the embryonic stage in the evolution of humanity’s life cycle. Verging on infancy, the primitive, like the old, are at the cusp of culture displaying socially uncharted behavior euphemistically branded as “human universals” (Brown 1991). Thus, as culture implies diversity, the universally human looms beyond it and draws on the purely physical – the organic, or the metaphysical-transcendental.2

2

 In the absence of ancestral worship and beliefs in the afterlife in modern society, gerontologists and anthropologists preserved the imputed quest for continuity among the aged by exploring a growing proclivity in later life toward the metaphysical, thus circumventing terminality (Gamliel 2001; Tornstam 1997).



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The juncture intersecting nature and nurture is the point of metamorphosis between the hierarchically immutable savage and the transformable primitive. This is also where the analogy between the primitive and the old ends and the two cultural concepts diverge as the old-as-other is not capable of socially reverting into the “us” category of middle age (Hazan and Raz 1997; Hepworth and Featherstone 1982). As a result, all that gerontological anthropology is left with is the old as un-person, robbed of subjectivity and a haunting source of awe (Kitwood 1990) – in short, a savage. The reader can now appreciate the tremendous burden of representation which anthropologists of old age must confront. While in contemporary anthropology, the “others” are multiple cultural constructions, the old-as-other is incommunicable, inaudible, invisible, and irreversible. Having to take charge of such academically illicit objects does not credit gerontological anthropology with the desirable halo of the major discourses of the mother discipline, even though it touches upon some of its most fundamental concerns and addresses a few of its poignant anxieties. Thus, gerontological anthropology is enclaved within social problem-orientated areas of research or cocooned within the personal-cumcultural worlds of life review and life stories.3 Gerontological anthropology is furthermore inadvertently pushed back to the much-maligned colonial position of anthropology before Fanon (1967 [1952]), Said (1978), Bhabha (1994) and other postcolonial writers, who unchained the discipline of anthropology from the fetters of accusations of “primitivism.” It would seem that gerontological anthropology has not adopted a postcolonial age-free gaze upon its subjects so as to offer a 3

 The narrative turn in the social sciences has been well received and employed in gerontological anthropology and has yielded numerous studies based on in-depth interviews with elderly researchees (see, for example, Gubrium 1993; Narayan 1989; Savishinsky 2000; Shenk 1998). The genre befits anthropology’s quest for reporting “authentic” experience as an act of participation while exonerating it from the tasks of observation and authenticating accounts. This compromise is particularly comfortable in the case of the elderly whose social isolation and alienation makes the split between agency and context almost unbridgeable.

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reading of old-age experience while stirring clear of social subtexts of assumed identities (Palmore 1990; Todd 2002).

Third World and Third Age: a tale of two hybrids In a published series of dialogues on aging conducted between a self-declared middle-age anthropologist and an elderly physician, the latter insisted that old age is a state of consciousness unfathomable by younger contemporaries, including his interlocutor (Shield and Aronson 2003). Why has this intellectual position been de-legitimated in anthropological gerontology? The denial of old age as a distinct experience is a normalizing device. The result is a meta-discourse of the essential otherness of the old, opting for a bureaucratically administered jargon such as “relocation,” “case management,” “placement,” “functioning,” “activities of daily living,” “mini-mental” tests of “adjustment” and “optimum” or “successful” aging – rather than the anthropological alternative of postcolonial locution employing nomenclature of dispossession, displacement, oppression, and diasporic experiences. The latter language, however, surely befits the particular intensity of the regimenting bio-power that disciplines the elderly according to taxonomies of otherness. However, the medicalization of this process exemplifies the need to look away from the bare experience of aging, as cultural concepts of dementia and Alzheimer’s are also powerful symbols of modern savagery. The rebuttal of that nascent form of otherness seems to be a yardstick for joining the growing club of otherless anthropologists where, unless served as a testimony to anthropological substance such as kinship, wealth transfer, social classifications, or life-course transition, old age as “other” is denied entry.4 4

 The difficulty in anthropologically encompassing a lifetime term in complex settings was well recognized by Moore (1978) and others as a consequence of increasing social differentiation in industrial society. Thus, with the exception of a few ethnographically informed reflections (Turnbull 1983), the life span in its entirety has not been the subject of anthropological enterprise.



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Gerontological anthropologists working on the Third Age in the first world unwittingly find themselves portraying society’s non-hybrid others and thereby alienating their work from the current tongue of their mother discipline which rejects their potential offer of a surrogate prototype of an essential “other.” The reluctance to consider the extrapolation of the discourse of the Third World to that of the Third Age as a like arena of invisibility, inaudibility, exploitation, repression, and colonization could be linked to the unparalleled image of the “other” inherent in the latter – that is, an “other” who is incapable of transforming itself into the “normal” “us,” not even through mimicry (Bhabha 1994), “aping” (Taussig 1993), and hybridity, suggesting a spatiotemporal implosion into an increasingly restricted universe where differences and distances may shrink (Lash and Urry 1994). Even though there is ethnographic evidence that ritual (Myerhoff 1984), play (Handelman 1977), and drama (Lev-Aladgem 1999/2000) are enacted by the aged to reverse roles and time, anthropological gerontophobia defies that possible turn. It is the consequence not only of the modern fear of death unattenuated by symbolic immortality (Bauman 1992; Becker 1973; Lifton 1983; Walter 1994) but also pro­ bably of a non-critical objection to the return of the wild, essentially untamable “other” who negates the civilizing process (Elias 1994 [1939]) of transforming beast into man (Eisler 1978). To illustrate my claim, I will use the well-known anthology edited by James Clifford and George Marcus (1986), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. This book was appraised as standing “at the core of a new movement [. . .] that takes the ethical stance that we must be willing to change and we must be honest in marking what we impose on the other and the other’s voice” (Birth 1990: 551). My reading of this book focuses on the glaring absence of old age from its pages. In each chapter, the reader can observe the postcolonial, self-critical, constructivist, and relativist gaze that has made contemporary anthropology what it is; while old age, although clearly meeting the standards of that gaze, is never seen or mentioned. For example, in his introduction Clifford (p. 23) states, much like this book, that “ethnography [. . .] once looked out at clearly defined others, defined as

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primitive, or tribal, or non-Western, or pre-literate [. . .] Now ethnography encounters others in relation to itself, while seeing itself as other.” The encounter with old age, although clearly a case in point, is not mentioned. Similarly, Crapanzano (in Clifford and Marcus 1986: 52) claims that “the ethnographer [. . .] must render the foreign familiar and preserve its very foreignness at one and the same time.” This could have been a very relevant point of departure for discussing old age and ethnography, yet the author favors instead “native” examples such as the Mandan Indians and the Balinese. Talal Asad’s contribution to the book focuses on the place of “translations of culture” (ethnographies) within relations of “weak” and “strong” languages. The case of old-age ethnography, which often translates the weak language of the elderly into the strong language of middle-aged, able-bodied, and neuro­ typical society (Hazan and Raz 1997), is once again very pertinent yet nevertheless absent. Renato Rosaldo, in his contribution (1986), also deals with the ethical problem of inequality between ethnographer and subject – a problem apparent in many (if not all) old-age ethnographies. Michael Fisher, who examines in his contribution the notion of “enacting alternative selves,” focuses on black autobiographies, although the subject is similarly relevant to old age. My point, it should be clarified, is not to make all contemporary anthropologists into gerontologists. It is to be expected that each contributor would look in the anthropological canon for examples that interest him or her. My point is to highlight the absence of old age from the results of that search. Rather than taking sides in the debate over “the crisis of representation in contemporary anthropology,” on which Writing Culture is premised, I merely contend that such a crisis of representation – although it goes unmentioned in the pages of Writing Culture – has existed for a long time in the context of old age. Social anthropology has moved a long way from its earlier queries as to the distinction between the human and the nonhuman and subsequently from its preoccupation with meta-cultural universals. Instead, it has embraced cultural relativism as its epistemological core and hence sanctified the quest for diversity of values within equality of rights. When



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humanity is in doubt, as both values and rights are debatable due to an apparent gross dissimilarity between the idea of acceptable personhood and its stark negation, freaks, monsters, and other humanly challenged beings are seldom the subject of anthropological interest. When ethnography does visit the lives of those elderly branded as mentally frail, the description is often targeted at the rational remains of their behavior – extolling as it were the virtues of the vestiges of logic within madness (Beard 2004; Golander 1995; Gubrium 1997), hence rendering the senile sane and the ultimate “other” humanly recognizable. The metaphorical choices of ethnographers of aging in coining their findings concerning cognitively alert researchees are often an expression of the blurred divide between life and death. Titles such as The Limbo People (Hazan 1980), The Ends of Time (Savishinsky 1991), or Uneasy Endings (Shield 1988) evidently reflect the difficulty of reconciling the relativistic dictum of assigning a cultural space for any human field with the realization that its inhabitants are about to disappear as accountable vehicles of lived experience. A comfortable if not comforting solution for allocating such a territory is perhaps inherent in the institutional segregation of the old, termed the culture of long-term care (Henderson and Vesperi 1995). Implicit in the notion of that murky culture of “between humans and ghosts” (Barker 1990) is the anthropological desire to apparently play brinkmanship with the parameters of a “given” sociality, where the evolving “we-feeling” sentiments forging old-age homoge­ nous communities (Keith 1982) are nurtured by the state of marginality of the old (Hockey and James 1993) and, as such, touch upon the presumed essence of being human and its ensuing otherness. These findings of apparent age solidarity do not constitute, however, transitional communitas transforming whole identities. Conversely, they spell a conscious effort by the elderly concerned to question, at times to challenge, the turbulent social order so as to hold it still by adhering to survivorship as the pith of existence. This reinterpretation of community creation among the aged should have reclaimed anthropological interest, but is more often enunciated in terms of narrated meanings of life without considering the possible emergence of a counter-language exposing solitude,

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disintegration, and de-cultured life. Hence, “speaking of life” (Gubrium 1993) is not turned to speaking of death, silence, dementia, and other unshareable experiences. Old age, therefore, once again evades (or is avoided by) the anthropological gaze.5 The end of memory, which could be associated with the post-civilized state phrased by Elias (1985) as the “loneliness of the dying,” gives a sense of otherness beyond the articulated reach of anthropologists or even those approaching old age. In one of my earlier studies (Hazan 1996), I describe a group of self-proclaimed Third-Agers whose dread of the Fourth Age of infirmity and final demise was unequivocally demonstrated by their refusal to be involved in any project of gaining knowledge of nursing homes or offering assistance to their residents. In another ethnography (Hazan 1992), I show how residents of an old-age home blatantly delegitimize the more incapacitated by assigning to them feral-animal images hence con­ signing that category to the realm of savagery. However, when the ultimate exclusionary marker of absolute otherness in the form of Alzheimer’s imagery is culturally unrecognized (Cohen 1998), such attributes are glaringly absent from the discourse of the old. The anthropologist is ideally considered an omnipotent translator whose main preoccupation is with the linguisticmetaphorical devices employed to successfully transmute one culture into another (Rubel and Rosman 2003; Valero-Garces 1994). Why and how is a dialogue aborted and what prevents two discourses from forging a shared arena of mutually intelligible symbolic exchange? The following offers a number of possible conditions for being lost in translation. The foremost condition is the inability to cogently transfer one set of metaphors to another. Such critical incommensurability might occur when the tropical foundation of the two cultures reflect diverse spatiotemporal imageries and hence are cognitively mutually exclusive (Alverson 1991). The incompatibility of 5

 Some recent ethnographies of old age do provide a welcome exception to this generalization. See, for example, Degnen (2012), whose ethnography – conducted in a former coal mining village in South Yorkshire, England – challenges the idea of a universalized middleaged self, describing how older people can come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people.



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cultural consciousness is at the level of schemes of thought, rather than at the level of connotative association and, as such, a miscarried translation could be generated and precipitated by the unbridgeable gap between two separate lifeworlds. In that respect, it does not have to be stipulated by a dyadic relationship, as the multifaceted structure of the self could follow the protean principle of “doubling” (Lifton 1976) to produce incoherent expressions uninformed by one another. Postmodern thinking would probably part with the modern view of an integrated self in search of identity, and instead subscribe to a reading of reality consisting of multiple constructions emitting unrelated, non-synchronized voices (Gergen 1994). In the absence of a recognizable authoritative subject, translation loses its addressee and is hence rendered futile. This follows another possible failure subsumed under the former, which applies to the cultural gap contained within cross-generational relationships. The splitting force of the cohort effect creates “cultural autism” (Melucci 1996), a state of intergenerational misunderstanding that cripples any attempt at exchanging and translating historically conditioned cultural paradigms. A case for untranslatable generations (Sheleff 1981) rests not only on linguistic discrepancies, but also on structures of dependence (Hockey and James 1993) that reflect and engender parallel discourses. Discourse as the nexus of knowledge and power could form a cultural unit impervious to modes of understanding ingrained in other discourses whose dominance or subjugation might prevent any form of balanced translation. This postcolonial condition could ideally have been the subject for academic interest and scrutiny, as it is in other cases, but not – as I have explained in the previous section – in the case of old age. All these arguments amount to an ontological difficulty in translating one materiality to another due to unshareable properties and to lack of constructible commonalities (Fabian 1983).

Research methodology and extreme old age The recognition of the epistemological and disciplinary inaccessibility of the very old, as discussed in the previous

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sections, also carries far-reaching implications for research methodology. Under such a priori circumstances of incommunicability, the research act is rendered methodologically inept since it fails to translate one reality into the terms of another. Be it a questionnaire, an interview or a conversation, they all ought to be formatted in terms of a shared, pervasive experience rather than of fixed discrepant positions. The ethnographic method of participant observation seems to offer the most experience-near opportunity for accomplishing this mission, but the impossibility of translation between two such distant voices doggedly aborts any cogent interpretation of dialogues fractured by diverse temporalities (Fabian 1983). However, it is the very challenge of confronting this problem of temporal incommensurability that might facilitate any attempt at addressing the crucial question of the feasibility of gaining access to that apparently unique world. Notwithstanding this failure to reconcile the two, it provides an observation point that holds a promise of recognizing the contours and distinct otherness of that self-less age category. This experiential and theoretical void could turn a disciplinarian bane into a refreshed knowledge boon, thus putting a new complexion on the face of research about “extreme” or “very” old age by transforming the advent of compressed morbidity into an adventure in compressed gerontology. Traditional, positivistic-oriented approaches focus on the interview as an occasion for eliciting empirical information from a respondent’s answers. Respondents are basically perceived as “passive vessels of answers . . . Repositories of facts and related details of experience” (Holstein and Gubrium 1995: 7–8). From this standpoint, the objectivity or truthvalue of the interview might be assessed in terms of reliability and validity. In contrast to this traditional approach, the “interpretive turn” in the social sciences has generated new theoretical insights and methodological frameworks regarding the interview. Ethnomethodology, for example, considers the interview as an ongoing, interpretive accomplishment, a collaborative construction of meaning (Garfinkel 1967) that furthermore imposes particular ways of passing and accountability (Cicourel 1964). Ethnographic analyses have similarly come to emphasize the interview as a site for dialogue where



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cultural members are seen as ethnographers in their own right (Atkinson 1990; Clifford and Marcus 1986). In their different ways, ethnomethodology, constructionism, postmodernism, post-structuralism and feminist studies all relate to interviews as social productions. In analyzing the interviews that serve as empirical illustrations for the following discussion, I would like to use the “social production” perspective as a formative frame of reference. Interviews with the very old should be interpreted as more than a naive opportunity for inter-viewing. Given all the breaches in translation and communication just described, these “inter-views” should be rather considered as “intergazes.” What is being socially produced within the silences and lacunas of such “inter-gazing”? What is being negotiated in an arena for interaction that has no common definition of the situation? These are the questions that confront us as we begin our journey for alternative terminology.

Surrogate terminology Is there a way for anthropological gerontology to hear the authentic voices of old age? I have suggested that the experience of extreme old age is perceived as essentially beyond culture, and hence beyond discourse. This can be a paralyzing assertion since it leaves us with no options, save for the recognition of our own limits. This is exactly why the nonhybrid is so frightening. On the other hand, the potential for substituting the traditional gerontological preoccupation with people, problems, and images with the logics inherent in the inimitable state of being terminally old could put the study of that category at the forefront of the intellectual pursuit of sensing the edges of the social, the cultural, and the psychological from within and from without. Aiming at the nebulous summit of the Fourth Age might reveal a special panoramic view of all ages. I would like to suggest two complementary steps that should be taken. First, the analysis presented here may be seen as part of a pendulum effect. Classical anthropology was premised on a positivistic and essentialist order of things, from the primitive savage to the modern European. This

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premise has come to be considered as the antithesis of modern anthropology, which hinges on a constructivist and relativist worldview – regarding “others” as reflections of ourselves. The sequence of antithesis (classical anthropology) through thesis (modern, contemporary anthropology) has led us to the contemporary stage of synthesis. This synthesis, described in the introduction, dismisses the essential in favor of the cultural, and focuses on hybridization, a key scenario in contemporary cultural studies (Hannerz 1992, 1996; Wilson and Dissanayake 1996). Alongside other discussions of cyborgs and hybrids (Balsamo 1995; Haraway 1991), the elderly could also be studied as part biology, part culture – a blend already becoming more and more prevalent in anthropology (Franklin 2003). In tandem with this synthesis, the language of anthropology could also change to become a hybrid of academic distinctions and expressive writing, resolving to sensuous information as a data source (Stoller 1997). The second step to be taken is to make sure that the hybridization of old age is mutual and authentic. This should start by conceiving old age as not a monolithic entity. Importantly, however, we should be careful not to fall into the trap of hybridization through the medicalized gradient of old age. Instead, our journey behind the mask of aging and its monolithic stereotypes should lead us to explore the paradoxical terms of reference used by the elderly for the construction of time and space from within. A guiding premise in this journey should be the realization that there are also parts of old age that we can relate to. After all, we are all mortal. A humanistic approach premised on the ability to feel empathy, already a leitmotif in gerontology (Woodward, Van Tassell, and Van Tassell 1978), will have to continue to guide our inevitably myopic observations of old age. In Oedipus Rex, the old prophet Tiresias declares as he appears before the fate-stricken king: Alas, alas, what misery to be wise? When wisdom profits nothing! This old lore I had forgotten; else I were not here. (Sophocles 1912: 4)



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We should listen with empathy to this voice crying in a cultural wilderness that offers no prospect of social engagement and accountability; but also remember that “the wise old man” is a cliché used by middle-aged society to pay lip service to the disengaged presence of the elderly. We should be careful not to replace one mask of aging (for example, the bedridden and senile) with another (the wise old prophet). Even though the latter has a charming appeal to it, it is still a mask. In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot uses the figure of Tiresias as a link between the modern and classical worlds. Tiresias is there because he provides Eliot with a proper mythological figure to relay Eliot’s criticism of modern-day mechanized and standardized industrial society. We should be as wary about turning the old into prophets as we should about turning them into the senile. This would be returning gerontological anthropology to its current state of ventriloquism. The elderly may not be genuinely interested in passing prophecies; they may have more pressing concerns to deal with. The trope of unmitigated alienation acts as a catalyst for the ensuing discussion, which is propounded as an invitation to reflect on the state of the end of life in extreme old age as an amoral depersonalized category both from without and from within. To do this, I identify an academic communication failure and link it with the existential logic of remembrance and forgetting that ultimately sketches out the contours of culturally excluded categories of discarded humans.

Recognizing the extra-cultural Deep old age lies beyond the corrective power of therapy as well as of prevention. It is thus often spurned by postmodern culture and its constructionist devices, and regarded as a form of Human Obsolescence (Henry 1963). In other words, it is a socially deemed extra-cultural, non-hybrid category at the brink of humanity. What are these translation-resistant extracultural realities? Can they be recognized and monitored? Are we dealing with a kind of exclusion which cannot be subject to inclusion by any means, an anthropological blind spot that obscures the unknown by rendering it unknowable?

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Anthropologically speaking, this conundrum could be phrased in terms of the discourse of the boundaries of otherness: the contemplation of which categories are acceptable and which are rejected – whose voice is heard, and whose voice must be elicited and made audible. The prevailing winds of postcolonialism, feminism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization have greatly expanded the range of sounds emanating from the recognized and authorized regions of otherness (Spivak 1987; Taussig 1993). Illegitimate otherness is that whose voice is mute, not necessarily due to repression and silencing, but rather because the frequencies of its audio-transmissions are not tuned to the receptors of the listeners. To inquire into some of the seemingly extra-cultural characteristics embedded in certain manifestations of old age as a prime example of otherness, we can invoke the testimony of what is called the Third Age. It should first be reminded that the experience of the Third Age, like that of all ages, is multivariate; age boundaries are blurred and people struggle individually to manage identities and categories of being. However, some of the more reluctant occupants of the Third Age can be seen to reject every distinctive sign of old age that might have touched and contaminated their public appearance by adopting youthful-appearing lifestyles and leisure consumption patterns, as well as niche brands suited for middle age, while turning to medical technologies which are supposed to stop the gears of biological time from spinning (Katz 2003). Some of those in the so-called Third Age, refusing to wear the death mask of old age, construct it as a space of mimicry, of masquerading, and of inter-age hybridism (Biggs 2004). The Third Age is regarded in this manner as a “second adulthood” during which people are constructing their lives in new patterns (Bateson 2010). These are all strategies to prevent the jeopardized self from being relentlessly eroded by the ravages of time through losing control, becoming an unbridled savage, crossing the boundaries of culture, and being denuded of social defenses. Newspaper advertisements display an abundance and variety of anti-aging products offered by late capitalism to a society terrified of being consigned to that extra-cultural zone of an absent self. The resulting tension involved in the proximity to old age while resisting it has been recognized by philosopher Jean



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Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death as similar to colonialist oppression: “Recently colonized old age in modern times burdens society with the same weight as colonized native populations used to. Retirement, or the Third Age, says precisely what it means: It is a sort of Third World” (1993 [1976]: 163). Or, as Biggs (2004: 44) put it, the Third Age represents “the colonization of the goals, aims, priorities and agendas of one age-group by another. . . . This may be consciously done for reasons of political and economic expediency, or unknowingly as if these priorities are simply common sense.” Unlike the Third World, however, which might become a First or Second one, the Third Age is irreversible, and, as Baudrillard (1993 [1976]: 163) added, “it lies on the scorched path of death that has no meaning.” Thus, contemporary old age is related both by Baudrillard and by Bauman (2004) to a modernity that leads the pilgrim of progress to an undesirable destination robbed of meaning or justification – and indeed Baudrillard dubbed older people “cultural residuals” (1993 [1976]).

From the Third to the Fourth Age: a hybrid turned non-hybrid The main academic preoccupation with the “otherness” of the old has been placed in the turf of what is sometimes described as the Third Age, namely the folk category populated by extended midlifers whose mental, social, and physical functioning are still largely intact. The construction of the Third Age has provided a relatively safe – although somewhat limited – territory for anthropological gerontology since the Third Age is culturally constructed. Therefore, it is an “other” that befits the conventional scrutiny and translation of midlife concerns. The study of the Third Age thus advocated supposed universals of “normal,” “successful,” and “optimal aging” epitomized in Ryff and Singer’s (1998) modernitygeared integrative concept of “posture health.” The Third Age thus avoids the complexities of postcolonial criticism and has constructed for itself a research agenda viewing old age strictly within the visible and readable discourse of modern middle age, gerontophobic norms, and values of integration,

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self-realization, sense of coherence, and personal development. In this manner, the gerontological study of the Third Age was disciplined (Katz 1996) by being chained to the grand midlife project of managing old age. My point of departure for the ensuing analysis is that, in order to make way for alternative terminology, we must distinguish between the cultural space of the Third Age and the existential space of the Fourth Age. The Third Age is characterized by its confrontation between self and “other,” the quest for dialogue and translation, and the emergence of hybrid entities. It presumably generates a culturally prescribed sense of meaning in a postmodern era. The liminal geography of the Third Age stretches between the face-lifted edges of midlife dreams and the murky terrains of lived-in and feared old age. The Third Age is all about inter-age hybridism which cultivates the natural body relentlessly degraded by time. This is a body in danger of losing control, of turning savage, of transcending culture while being denuded of it. A glance at the world of newspaper advertising suffices for an impression of the abundance and variety of anti-aging products offered in late capitalism to a society consuming itself to the abandonment of the dialectic of subject and object, self and “other,” within and without. The accelerated thrust of inevitable aging constantly shakes the defenses of that post-middle-age, pre-old-age bastion, and ultimately transforms the Third Age into a fourth one. The moral panic of being amorally submerged into such cultural residue delineates the fine line between the third space/Third Age and the fourth/Fourth. One illustration of this is the designation that residents of an Israeli old-age home reserved for their non-functioning members, who were to be moved to a geriatric home: “vegetables and animals.” This, too, explains how active and lucid seniors, who took part in a research group of the University of the Third Age in Cambridge, England, refused to visit or even to study those whom they perceived, in distinction from themselves, as “Fourth Agers,” namely infirm old people whose bodies or minds had become incapacitated, and who were kept in old-age homes and geriatric wards. When such imagined lines could no longer be drawn, those at the brink of



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vanishing into the “fourth space” might see themselves as rubbish to be dumped, as shown for example by Hockey’s (1990: 125) description of a geriatric ward: “Seeing staff empty rubbish into plastic bags, or sweep remnants of food from the floor onto a shovel, residents joke, saying: ‘You can put me in there too’ or: ‘Sweep me up too. You might as well.’ ” What these comments reveal, according to Hockey (1990:124), is “residents’ awareness that life is transitory, that the timeless, repetitive routine of institutional care imposed upon them can create only an illusory sense of permanence.” It also reveals, as I am suggesting here, the personal experience of non-translatability and its consequences for social identity. Shifting the anthropological gaze from third- to fourthspace mode constitutes an interpretative watershed. Ostensibly, it resonates with the standard ethnographic problem of bridging gaps of translation and understanding between field categories and participant observation resolved in the above skit by resorting to construal devices such as joking, medicalizing or metaphorizing. However, in the case of relating exclusively to fourth-space argot, this gap is often an abyss, an epistemological void that separates one type of consciousness from another. The first type, that of the “third space,” is oriented toward cumulative time; it sanctifies and is sanctified by memory and meaningfulness. The second type is attuned toward space; its centralizing principle is the singularity of the moment, living in its own right, the here and now of unmediated and immediate existence, referring only to itself, circumscribed by and focused on the present, and nothing more. The Fourth Age is populated by the very old – people whose impending death is foreshadowed by blunt cognitive and physical deterioration. The Fourth Age harbors neither reminiscing nor forgetting. It consists of untranslatable fragmented texts, pure extra-cultural categories of sheer existence, inarticulate voices, subverted engagements and, consequently, a sense of being-in-the world which might be incomprehensible to the observer. Identifying the indications of this “fourth space,” therefore, cannot rest on culturally accessible prior knowledge. This is a metonymical domain,

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devoid of historical time, depleted of memory, not amenable to translation or to mimicry, deemed irrevocable and beyond social construction. Above all, while the possibility of conducting a metaphorically based dialogue with its denizens is patently denied, it nonetheless casts a formidable existentially essential shadow on the transience of culture. Such an approach could make non-metaphysical sense of the following observation made by one of those considered by middleaged society as “very old” as to his place in the world: I am already ninety something. Two years ago I went to a rabbi at the synagogue and said to him: Look here, Mister Rabbi, listen, my friend, the Torah says the span of our life is seventy years, or, given the strength, eighty years, but I have already passed ninety. What? What can this be? What am I?

Or, as phrased by another outlandish elderly dweller of the “fourth space”: “I am no longer on the ladder; I am above it.” The onset of the Fourth Age is not discretely marked off by age, infirmity, or institutionalization. Rather, it is gradually and subtly signaled through the continuous process of constructing aging, highlighted by landmarks such as retirement, resignation to socio-psychological disengagement, the rise in structural dependency, and the growing awareness of agist exclusionary messages. The cumulative effect accrued throughout that experience of aging is the harbinger of radical transformations in spatiotemporal orientations shifting the linearly narrated plot of a meaning-driven life course to a lateral, present-bound world governed by activities of daily risk management. So foreign to modern conceptions of the sense of worthwhile living are such changes that some scholars ponder the academic and professional faculties at our disposal to account for the arguably unfathomable life of Fourth Agers. Baltes and Smith (2003: 114), while vacillating between a population-based and a person-based definition of the Fourth Age, submit that under any definition “the Fourth Age threatens some of the most precious features of the human mind such as intentionality, personal identity and psychological control over one’s future, as well as the chance to live and die with dignity.”



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Embedded in this existential wonderment is a fundamental uncertainty as to some taken-for-granted tenets underlying the established discourse of interpreting aging. It is, indeed, a poignant critique of the desire to contain old age within known and tested schemes of cultural repertoires, be it Swidler’s cultural tool kit (Swidler 1986) or Boltanski and Tevenot’s regimes of justification (Boltanski and Tevenot 1999). Such repertoires ignore extra-cultural situations governed by drives and considerations implying a mode of rationality incongruous with familiar measures and criteria supposedly determining choice, risk-taking, decision-making, prioritizing means and goals, and, ultimately, rethinking ethics in terms of mere existence. On entering the existential space of the Fourth Age, we therefore need to take a few instructive steps. One step is to acknowledge the disjuncture between sources of interpretive agency and the preconditions of structure – what Anderson (1972) identified as the de-culturation of the old, and Hazan (1980) depicted as a limbo state. A further step in the direction of this discursive process of “humanistic dehumanization” can be detected in the silence surrounding concerns associated with extreme old age. This silencing reflects a social denial – a recognition of which everybody is aware, but nobody dares mention (Zerubavel 2006). However, reminders of such “cultural residuals” invariably become conspicuously and unavoidably evident and noted, while glossing devices of jest, mimicry, humor, deference, and avoidance are no longer effective. The mortification of self in total institutions as described by Goffman (1961), and the bare life of concentration camp prisoners as analyzed by Agamben (1998) are but two attempts at framing the parameters of the “fourth space” where communication with inmates is usually conducted through channels of authoritarian management and processing from which subjectivity, reversibility, and negotiability are expunged. In dealing with the Fourth Age, we thus have in front of us not just a form of biopolitics but also a new and unique “biosociality.” When Paul Rabinow (1992) coined the term as a play on the once-fashionable “sociobiology,” his fascination with this concept was fueled by the new genetics and the advent of biotechnology. In contrast to the flourishing

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industry of testing the fetus, genetic diagnosis is not relevant in old age. Nevertheless, the focus on biosociality highlights a significant symmetry between these two extreme points of “bare life” (namely the fetal and the terminal) on the life cycle. The fetus and the very old bring something rather new to the anthropological discussion of identity; in both of them, identity is a mystery. In the absence of direct communication, the emphasis is put on medical tests, diagnosis, and imaging, hence the necessary shift from midlife metaphorical language to a literal/metaphysical language. Built into this ambiguous identity, which is split between body and mind, is the idea that one’s essential features, not accidental (learnt) characteristics, should constitute one’s identity. As Ian Hacking (2006: 88) recently argued, “Those words ‘essential’ and ‘accidental,’ reek of high metaphysics . . . [which] has gone underground, at least among English-language secular philosophers, ever since John Locke trashed essences over three centuries ago. [. . .] But those who wish to talk identities ignore the surreptitious idea of essence at their peril.” Hacking wrote about DNA, but his words are equally relevant in the case of the Fourth Age. In the biosociality of the Fourth Age, the concrete materialization of reality also shapes the management of the environmental boundaries within which physical mobility and bodily maneuvering is restricted. The emphasis on the body literal, while de-emphasizing the body metaphorical, is submerged into the materiality of daily coping with existence to introduce a split between the redundant and temporal versus the exigent and spatial. The divorce between time (life robbed of its past and future) and space (life centered on its present-bound location) depletes memory of its constructive and constitutive reservoirs, and is therefore expected to convert retentive faculties for imagined identity into a preservative economy consumed by the business of practicing survival. I have thus far used the terms “Fourth Age” and “fourth space” interchangeably. However, the picture is complicated since the two are usually split under midlife prescriptions. The spreading of the therapeutic discourse, with its legions of professional custodians, creates medical, judicial, and media environments, where fourth-space categories are con-



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fessed and cleansed to be reborn from victims of social castigation and exclusion into tokens of cultural sacrifice on the altar of collective guilt. This is a simulated “fourth space,” divorced from the existential incommensurability of the Fourth Age. Curative, corrective, incarcerating, and decimating social facilities provide a “fourth space” for controlled voyeurism and organized peep shows that allow glimpses of pedagogical morbid curiosity into the unknowable, confirming the proscription of interaction, communication, and exchange between the gaze of the observer and that of the observed. Under these structural circumstances, almost all the pitfalls of translatability funnel to impede any attempt at transferring knowledge of the “fourth space” to more familiar areas of cultural cognizance.

On the incomprehensibility of the category of the Fourth Age The fear of a metamorphosis into a disposable cultural residue is what defines the stark demarcation between the Third Age and the Fourth Age, namely deep, incapacitated end of life. It explains why active and lucid retirees, members of the University of the Third Age in Cambridge, England, refused to visit or even to study those whom they regarded, in distinction from themselves, as Fourth Agers – damaged old people whose infirm bodies or minds are confined to old-age homes and hospitals (Hazan 1996). The undesirability of their presence has been described by Gubrium (1993) as a threatening encroachment on personal space, which can be taken as a trespass on the fragile security of constructing a horizon of meaning in old age. To understand this communicational impasse, it is worth to return to Shield and Aronson (2003). Throughout their conversation, the physician reiterated that an outsider to the uniqueness of old age, including the anthropologist who specializes in studying strangeness, would be incapable of understanding the experience and the language of that universe. This is how the elderly doctor described the narrowing horizon of this timeless space:

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There is though an interval between full maturity and the decline of aging [deep old age], a twilight zone, when shadows lengthen and images blur, when time is no longer limitless – when – in the words of one elder citizen – one no longer buys green bananas, and when anxious people confine their leisure reading only to summarize lest they waste their shrinking supply of hours. (Shield and Aronson 2003: 186)

Ostensibly, such an articulation of the anthropological “other’s” temporality (Fabian 1983) is a standard ethnographic problem of representation, translation, and understanding. In practice, the breach in communication is an abyss, an epistemological vacuum between a consciousness oriented toward cumulative time which sanctifies memory and is sanctified by it, and a consciousness that is geared toward space, whose organizing principle is existence in and of itself, the here and now of culturally unmediated and immediate living. The retired doctor’s metaphoric depiction of a present-bound experience reflects the properties of a category whose socially disavowed position forfeits its right to be built into a temporal construction based on the meaningfulness of past and future. Or, put differently, a structural configuration reflects an extra-cultural state, which seems to match the subjective world reported by its inhabitants. If this is the case, then a breakdown in dialogue with such persons is expected, and it lends itself to be problematized in terms of a self-ascribed state of inhumanity, rather than by deficiencies caused by pathological deprivations.

Self-excommunication The research reported below examined a dialogical impasse in which the very old could be seen as an offshoot of the respondent’s self-ascribed excommunication. It draws on a series of interviews with 164 elderly people, with a mean age of 93 years, that were conducted by the Herczeg Institute on Aging at Tel Aviv University. The sample of respondents represented the population of Jewish older people in Israel, and the interviewers were asked to elicit life stories through unstructured narrative renditions. All of the interviewees



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were psychologically tested to affirm sound cognitive functioning. My interest in analyzing these data was vested in looking for similarities that evince expressions of bare existence and cues of apparent deconstructed meanings and memories. The challenge of lending an ear to such language, and moreover of transferring it into narrative writing, has been recognized by several scholars of old age, among them Baltes and Smith (2003) in their longitudinal and multivariable study of aging in Germany. The final years of the research led them into “the planet” of extreme old age, which in contrast to their expectations was revealed as disconnected and different from what had preceded it. They found themselves facing this world disarmed of a conceptual arsenal to decipher it. They formulated the hermeneutical threat to the standard discourse about aging – a discourse of memory, of continuity of identity and meaning – as follows: “The Fourth Age threatens some of the most precious features of the human mind such as intentionality, personal identity and psychological control over one’s future as well as the chance to live and die with dignity” (Baltes and Smith 2003: 124). The question then arises: what sort of interpretive frame can be offered to settle this paradigmatic breach? And especially: is it possible, and how, to confront this challenge in an attempt to propose a credible argument regarding the reality of extreme old age? And how can this be done without becoming trapped in the iron cage of concepts and methods customarily employed to comprehend aging? The key issue, as Baltes and Smith (2003) identified, is the question of the psycho-social uniqueness of this stage of life: can we bear witness to a language, culture, perception, and worldview that are fundamentally distinct from those that usually guide and direct the course of research? Do the maps that represent this peculiar research territory allow for a reasonable orientation within them?

On abortive dialogues with the Fourth Age The texts gleaned in the above-mentioned Israeli study were strewn with question marks, silences, truncations, splinters of speech, and fragments of sentences. Faltering

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dialogues, imprisoned in the superimposed narrated life-story perspective of which they were supposed to be an example, failed to deliver adequately intelligible research findings. They were more enigmatic than revealing, and included more hushed intervals than flows of conversation. Nevertheless, six conclusions as to the inner space of the Fourth Age could be drawn from the garbled linguistic mass. First, extreme old age seems to signify a quantum leap in the life course of a person. This is to say, the implicitly embedded developmental approach that assumes lifelong continuity of selfhood does not apply to the existential reality of the old-old. Rather, that peculiar language involves a radical break with whatever preceded it. As argued by Baudrillard (1993: 163), the oldest old are indecipherable because they are “asocial culture residuals” – beyond and outside of culture’s symbolic systems; or, as Sankar (1987) put it, “living dead,” deemed to occupy a present contingent state of dependent neediness. Second, the Fourth Age is indeed an extra-cultural condition but not one singular to old age. All states that qualify as existence rather than survival, such as extreme old age (Johnson and Barer 1997), are in the category called in the sociological literature “civil death.” In Erving Goffman’s (1961) terms, these are individuals disenfranchised of their rights and privileges as social beings. In Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) terminology, this is “bare life,” no more than biological existence – the implication being that the groups are excluded from society and that their right to a culturally protected life is denied. They can be killed, but not sacrificed, since sacrifice signifies symbolic importance. Such groups can be sinlessly condemned and their non-negotiable end is predestined. Extreme old age – interpreted as that where inevitable biological-cum-social death is proximate – is perceived in secular societies as at a point beyond which there is no cultural salvation. Such attitudes are even held by some sick and frail older people, as evident in the following “dialogue of the deaf” between an interviewer (I) and a respondent (R): I:  What do you hope for in the future? [repeated] R:  I hope for nothing. I don’t know why the doctors do everything in order to prolong the life of a person, and I think that’s nonsense.



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Third, despite the personal and cultural differences among the subjects, there was a common denominator, one that transcended their interpersonal and intercultural differences. It placed the body at the core. What emerged from all the interviews is that bodily experience represents a major preoccupation with somatic concerns. This constitutes what sociologists Gubrium and Holstein (2002) call a “discursive anchor,” although, contrary to their view, the reference to the body in our case does not serve as a source for constituting self-image and self-identity. This Fourth Age body is the concrete body – a mundane, literal essence, total and monistic, devoid of communicable meaning and depleted of selfhood or sublimations. To illustrate, I quote a typical, almost clichéd exchange, one that was fatalistic and apparently selfless: I:  How is your health this year – better than last year’s or worse? R:  We’re going downhill. I:  Downhill? R:  No point expecting any better, must [just] ask that it doesn’t become worse. I:  And does it worry you, your health? R:  It doesn’t worry me, I know one must die, it’s the final path.

Fourth, the gap between the metaphorical-narrative perspective of the “I” and the lack of such a standpoint among the interviewees led to epistemological blankness, to parallel lines of consciousness that did not meet or intersect, to separate discourses that created eventual silence. Indeed, the linear-narrative approach, soliciting life stories and reported comparisons of “before” and “after” life events, traumatic turns, and subjective over-time evaluation that dominate the qualitative study of old age, avoids encounters of patchy, disjointed exchanges. This observation is supported by ample testimonies that the reported lived experience of older people might become atomistic and fragmented, sliced into singular temporal units that are not articulated into a plotted story. In the absence of a future, the past disappears too, and the present converges in on itself, becoming the be-all and endall, and thus contravening the researcher’s goal of weaving a yarn with a mutually acknowledged coherent meaning. One

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interviewee expressed such nihilism when asked to tell her life story: R:  There isn’t much to tell, everything is disconnected. I:  What do you hope for in the future? R:  Nothing, the future is over. I:  If you had the opportunity to tell your life story, how would you label the chapters? R:  Empty, empty. I:  All your life? R:  All of life.

Fifth, the cultural autism ascribed by social psychologist Alberto Melucci (1996) to any generation gap acquires special markers when applied to communicating with a Fourth-Age person who favors adhering to the lowest common denominator of being human, verging on the inhuman, namely the unadulterated satisfaction of momentary exigencies. To get to grips with such a mode of consciousness, it behooves the interlocutor to abandon the principles of the “sciences of memory,” as Hacking (1998) labeled psychology, sociology, and anthropology which are founded on the assumption of the quest for continuous identity, the integration of the self, and first and foremost the recognition of the hegemony of memory as the agent of constituting meaning. Only when these stipulations are met can the following aborted dialogue be fathomed: I:  What is the most important thing that you learned in your life? R:  I don’t know, I can’t express, I don’t know how to express it. I remember many things that I didn’t tell. I:  Can you tell me what they are? R:  I’m not interested, not interested. I:  Only one thing? R:  Can’t tell you.

The paradigmatic change needed in order to remedy such cultural autism is none other than a radical conceptual move. Thus, for example, instead of the terms “story,” “narrative,” and “memory,” one might borrow from Hayden White



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(1987) the concept of “annals,” which are supposed to indicate an ahistorical, atemporal outlook on the course of events. According to this perspective, people dispassionately report archives of events as if there is no emotional, logical, ethical, aesthetic, teleological, or causal connection between them. This discontinuity between accounts and accountability in fact phases out the status of the subject as narrator, a master of cumulative memory juggling snippets of past, present, and future to display a facade of a life span.

On meaning and memory in the Fourth Age What appears as a lack of meaning seems rather to be the grist of the meaning of existence in the unattainable and nonconceptualized reaches of extreme old age. The enactment of this inscrutable core is a refusal of speech, and it is this that must be seized upon in order to say something of the unspoken. The speaking interviewee releases herself of the narrative obligation forced upon her, and declares, perhaps unconsciously or perhaps with full cognizance, the death of the author, i.e. her own death as an accountable self while rethinking her position as active agency (Tulle 2004). In fact, she indifferently lets listeners expropriate ownership of the meaning of her life to do with it what they please. This is apostasy – the rejection of the anthropological doxy that sanctifies authentic witnessing, the voice of the “other,” her right to speak and be heard, and thus to serve as a proof-text for the interpretation of her world. But do we have the justification and authority to convert Shylock to Christianity, or to foist unwanted memories and bits of lore on the prophet Tiresias? What appears as a rhetorical question is not such in anthropological discourse that is based on the feasibility and necessity of the dialogic moment that connects elements of memory, and on tying past and present to the future by way of metaphorical binding, thus unremittingly stringing cultures and contexts together. In Imaginative Horizons, anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano invokes the Sufi concept of barzakh, which designates the point of convergence of oceans and is used as a key metaphor for his argument that the main project of

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anthropology should be focused on the time and space of in-betweenness: “What would a theory of metaphor look like were we to start with the between, the barzakh, that metaphor supposes? Indeed what would a theory of memory look like that started neither with the remembered event nor with the remembrance but with the gap between them?” (2004: 157). Paraphrasing Crapanzano inversely, one may ask, how would a theory of memory look without the barzakh – the impact of the interface, the power of the between, as anthropologist Paul Stoller (2009) lauds it – the cradle of metaphor and the spring of morality? As modern anthropology is preoccupied with social interstices, liminal states, transitional processes, and cultural contact zones, one might very well ask: could a discipline founded on the sanctification of the “betweenness” offer an alternative epistemology predicated on a recognition of the possibility of non-hybrid alterity lurking behind impermeable boundaries? A beginning of an answer to this question might arise out of the space of the Fourth Age, a space that, in contrast to that occupied by the Third Age, contains no hybridity forged by the between; it has no acculturation, nor can it have any translation or mimesis, nor does it even contain forgetting because memory has no place in it as a generator of meaning. This is a space that the outside observer senses but cannot experience, an unknowable, apparently extra-cultural landscape. Like the elephant in the room that everyone sees but whose presence no one explicitly acknowledges (Zerubavel 2006), this portentous otherness is the invisible-but-present hand, which also draws the cultural contours that are meant to obscure and conceal it.

The amoral journey toward the Fourth Age The notions of the elephant in the room or the emperor’s new clothes are indeed first steps on our path into the realm of the mute Fourth Age. The second phase is heterotopic, to borrow a Foucauldian term for a space that excludes others (Foucault 1986: 22). Here the elephant is removed from the room and exiled to an enclosure of things forbidden and



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unseen, or tabooed: old-age homes, geriatric wards, and sheltered enclaves for the aged. Here, too, the conspiracy of silence is unraveled and turns into euphemistic speech, and therapeutic, self-righteous caregiving. The more corporal and mental infirmities intensify among the cultural carriers of old age, so the need to renew contact increases with “those nominated as others” in order to indulge in the solace of societal moral order. This unilateral relationship reproduces the vanished elephant and demands that its needs and the room it takes up are recognized. Here, too, is where the third phase on the road to the Fourth Age might begin – the phase of defilement and transgression, or, as anthropologist Michael Taussig (1999) called it, “defacement,” vilification, victimization – an act of cultural shaming that magnifies the public weight of the disclosed secret at the same time that it tries to make it disappear. Thus, any harm inflicted on the object of the secret instigates a motion that turns the old person from a victim of social calamity into a sacrifice, to whose care lip service is paid in order to absolve cultural scruples. Social supervisory mechanisms of medicalization, infantilization, and guardianship are often practiced in this performance of perfunctory accountability. The entirety of an elderly person is thus imploded into a disciplined, docile body expropriated from its embodied self, implying that time is now up. Such practices are absorbed into the hub of a biopolitical and managerial, moralistically coated, discourse that ushers deep old age toward an extra-cultural no man’s land. This is a space that might be populated with autistic people – the entrenched homeless, refugees, and others of untranslatable humanity whose existence is often perceived as irreversible, and therefore cannot serve as common currency in a world premised on exchange and conversion. In the absence of moral engagement between martians and scouting anthropologists, no system of mutual accountability based on common humanity can be ascertained, and no tenable dialogical intercourse is likely to be sustained. In conclusion, the recondite, much maligned, strong version of the theory of disengagement between older people and the rest of society (Cumming and Henry 1961) is not only cogent but also an invitation to drive a wedge between two separate

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types of morality and outlooks on the preferred properties of a life worth living. It argues the case for an imagery of bifurcated humanity, but the shadow cast by political correctness and liberal ethics curbs any further discussion along this vein, exposing the relativistic visage of morality beyond the presumption of a universally acknowledged humanity.

3 Impasses of Hybridity: From Liquidity to Quiddity

This chapter describes potential research directions for the anthropology of the non-hybrid “fourth space,” drawing on the interplay of the fluid and the immutable as a key scenario in global culture today and as a structural cue for juxtaposing distant relations. I will examine for this purpose the cases of the Holocaust, autism, and pain. In all these “fourth spaces,” communication and interaction are rendered defunct and are often described in terms of mutual exclusivity. In the context of fundamentalism, yet another instance of the non-hybrid “fourth space” in our times, this perceived mutual exclusivity results in warfare and possible elimination through extermination. It is the untransformable pure, such as fundamentalism, which is seen as the real menace of otherness in today’s world. In this vein, “the clash of civilizations” could be understood as a hopeless war because it involves a confrontation between two incommensurable imaginaries – western hybridity in the eyes of Islam versus the Islamic “other” as a non-hybrid, non-translatable fundamentalist in the eyes of the West (Michalis 2013). Indeed, the theory of the non-hybrid can explain the linkage between insecurity and otherness that has made possible the aggressive measures that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and which continue to dominate contemporary geopolitics. It is yet another example of how

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it is not merely “otherness” but rather “non-hybrid otherness” that, perceived and articulated within western, neoliberal, secular, socioeconomic, and political circumstances, engenders a sense of fear and aversion. Said’s original argument concerning orientalism can thus be recontextualized to reflect not some specific western aversion toward Islam but rather one case among others of the postmodern abhorrence toward perceived non-hybrids, in this case targeting and designating, within western relations of (re)production, Muslim fundamentalism as a non-hybrid. Since the dwellers of such uncivilized spaces are polluted by the overall dehumanized nature of that category, the personal fate of the consequently depersonalized is of no consequence to those who act in the name of belonging to another category, one that is potentially hybridized and hence does not resist globalization.

Beyond debate? The cultural void of the Holocaust Paraphrasing Adorno’s famous dictum regarding the impossibility (or barbarism) of poetry after Auschwitz, we can ask: Can there be a “science of man” after the Holocaust, namely, without understanding the Holocaust? In answer, postmodern anthropology has largely been mute, believing that the Holocaust must remain outside of the anthropological project of cross-cultural translation and hybridization. The widely quoted title of Primo Levi’s book If This is a Man has become an adage signifying the puzzlement instilled in any discourse of the Holocaust. Knowledge and notions of civilization, humanity, and morality are stretched to the limits when trying to comprehend the Holocaust, and the plausibility of translating experience into communicable nomenclature is put in question. This much-discussed epistemological rupture generates conceptual voids in the public sphere and in academia in which it figures as an active and potent actor liable of disconcerting set cosmologies. The cultural devices with which these uncultured spaces are negotiated and cultivated constitute the main concern of the following analysis. As with



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any intellectual discordant discourse, the thrust of the argument is spurned by recognizing a contradiction, which in our case is the apparent incongruity between the two leading themes of our current debate, namely the ascribed centripetal authority of the existentially essential category of “the Holocaust,” as opposed to the centrifugal diffusing forces attributed to the process of globalization. By virtue of its widely perceived essentiality and metonymy, the Holocaust resists translation by and incorporation into postmodern globalization. Notwithstanding the calls for invoking post-Holocaust ramifications as templates for revisiting and reframing anthropological interests in the understanding of violence, stratagems of exclusion, systems of classification, and boundary maintenance, it is intriguing to observe that scholarly pleas by non-anthropologists for anthropological involvement in deciphering the Holocaust have remained unheeded. As historian Dan Diner asserted: The phenomenon of the crime against humanity experienced by the Jews [. . .] can be split and regarded from [. . .] two opposing perspectives: one that argues historically and that is above all adopted by the victims, while the other is an anthropologically inclined perception of the events which rather reaches further into a universal domain. The latter focuses on the significance of the events for the species as such. These perspectives are necessarily unequal. They may even work against each other. (Diner 2008: 95)

The allocation of “the universal domain” to anthropology reflects a conventional image of the discipline as the study of humanity. But what can the Holocaust tell us about “the science of man”? Rather than turning the Holocaust into a reference point for assessing and testing the limits of culture and of human civilization, attention has been chiefly directed to cases of ethnic cleansing, colonial oppression, and racial discrimination to the exclusion of the Holocaust from any comparative scale. How can this seemingly deliberate lacuna of anthropological knowledge be explained? Three complementary heuristic explanations might be proffered in dealing with this dilemma.

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The first explanation brings us back to the prevailing ethos of postmodern anthropology that centers on translating hybrids. If the Holocaust is to retain its unique status as a rupture in civilization, it cannot be incorporated into any hierarchical order of suffering, victimization and malevolence. If the Holocaust is marked off as perpetrated by ultimate, indivisible evil, then it defies any notion of anthropological translation. In this vein, the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust is encapsulated in the unshareable suffering of the Muselmann. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben defines the Muselmann as an example of bare life, in which existence has been reduced to a kind of living death, or inhuman humanity (2005a: 44, 48). The second filtering device responsible for edifying anthropological knowledge of the Holocaust is grounded in the temporal constitution of the discipline. Couched within the concept and precept of the ethnographic authenticity set in fieldwork time, anthropological accountability is presentbound. Discussing the disengagement between history and anthropology, anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot commented in his seminal book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, on contemporary cultural products designed to represent the Holocaust: The illuminating value of the Holocaust Museum in Washington may be as much tied to the current situation of American Jews as to the real bodies in and around Auschwitz. Indeed, many Holocaust survivors are not sure that such a museum would be illuminating at Auschwitz itself. The crux of the matter is the here and now, the relations between the events described and their public representation in a specific historical context. (Trouillot 1995: 147)

Hence the proliferation of ethnographic studies of commemoration ceremonies, simulated enactments of past events, memorial monuments, sites, and artifacts associated with the Holocaust – to the abandonment of direct encounters with past-anchored personal testimonies. The crisis of witnessing, which is a crucial element in anthropology, is heightened by the conviction of so many Holocaust survivors that caution against comparisons between the Holocaust and other human



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behaviors.1 The proliferation of commemorative strategies and sites for the Holocaust thus accentuates the distinction between “commonplace death” which can be interacted with, for example through the digital tombstones I mentioned before, and the “exceptional death” of Holocaust victims. Thirdly, and in tandem with the impossibility of either translation or witnessing, we find the futility of doing fieldwork concerning the Holocaust. Since no anthropologist can “go native” and experience the Holocaust, this phenomenon remains in a cultural void that cannot be filled by participant observation. It is thus deemed a form of savagery beyond human discourse. This extra-cultural position does not lend itself to negotiating terms of coexistence, thus consigning the unbridled savage to an uncivilized space – the “fourth space.” The exception that proves the rule are the survivors that can be colonized through dubbed translation, letting the anthropologist process their shared dialogue as an account of indigenous authenticity while bemoaning the crisis of representation. It could be argued that testimonies by Holocaust survivors harbor within them something of the first category of savagelike otherness inasmuch as their hard core is often culturally rendered inexplicable and untranslatable. Furthermore, such socially induced reported memories could be publicly displayed as self-declared experiences from “another planet.” This was the case with the dramatic court appearance during the Eichmann trial of Auschwitz survivor Yechiel Di’nur (also known as ka-Tzetnik), who fainted while trying to relate his present ordeal of being hounded by past ghosts flooding his life. Possessed by the spirit of the unexpected, unrestrained, unruly savage, the distraught witness for the prosecution withdrew from the orderly codex of giving testimony, as he was returning to his own “fourth space” of horror devoid of any scholarly recognized cultural regime. This class of embodied evidence from the heart of darkness 1

 For example, the attitudes of Israeli Holocaust survivors to euthanasia were found to be opposed to those of professionals. The survivors saw euthanasia, in contrast to the Holocaust, as something which can be morally and ethically justified, and therefore cautioned against comparisons between the Holocaust and other human behaviors (Leichtentritt, Rettig, and Miles 1999).

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is hard to negotiate by anthropologists, whose critical discourse is set to give precedence to the present over the past and not otherwise.

Shoah-business The Holocaust has become a global idiom, sometimes to the point of being Shoah-business (Shoah is Holocaust in Hebrew, used in this expression as a play on “show business”). It is composed of cross-nationally recounted and enacted stories that draw on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, while rendering it ubiquitous. These globally sanctified tales,2 woven from historical evidence, political interests, philosophical deliberations, and moral teachings, offer to their captivated, at times captive,3 listeners a quasi-theological-pedagogical dogma of recognizing truth, evil, guilt, confession, judgment, retribution, and penance. Alternatively, albeit complementarily, therapeutic nomenclature, such as trauma, post-trauma, psychological identification,4 depression, resilience, and rehabilitation, is cited to suggest an ego-based discourse summoning all survivors to a supposedly universal fold of theory and practice to manage Holocaust repercussions. However, the enormity of this all-embracing grand project only stresses its built-in improbability. The two intertwined components – globalization5 and the non-hybrid trope of the Holocaust – are starkly and inherently opposed. As we shall see, it is the dynamics generated by this gulf that furnish the ever-increasing circles of the unfulfilled globalized 2

 For example, International Holocaust Remembrance Day held on January 27 declared by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005. 3  Such as in Israeli state-sponsored school tours of Auschwitz. For an ethnographic study of the tours, see Feldman (2008). 4  For example in Alexander’s work on the universalization of the Holocaust (Alexander 2009). 5  Among the many studies of the interrelation between Holocaust and globalization, see, for example, Levy and Sznaider’s work (2006) in which the role of the Holocaust as a cue to the spread of human rights in a global age is emphasized.



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preoccupation with Holocaust resonance. Unfulfilled, for accrediting global attributes to the assumed quiddity of the Holocaust implies contradiction in expressive terms. This is a contrast that emerges out of the divergence in the descriptive practices commonly and academically employed to articulate both constructs. Thus, ineffability, silence, and unintelligibility are often enlisted to circumvent areas of incommunicability with and among survivors, thereby marking them off as dwelling in impervious, closed, selfreferential systems of a metonymic nature whose perfidious comprehension could be performed through staged testimonies and induced reminiscing.6 Conversely, the meandering or direct discourses of the Holocaust abide by the rules of communicating through metaphoric channels of speech and action that are capable of attributing shared modes of understanding and meaning to the unspoken and inexpressible. The logic of global codification is unreservedly dedicated to muffling the cacophonic sound of the singular for the sake of the orchestrated general. So compelling is the globalized appropriation and cooptation of the Holocaust as an intelligible, omnipresent phenomenon that any trace of a claim to its unprecedented exceptional standing is culturally cleansed. Hence, both framing the Holocaust within a graded index of genocide events and shrouding any occurrence of perceived discontent in Holocaust terms are tacit denials of the uniqueness of the Holocaust.7 The pervasiveness of this form of renunciation is far more effective than blatant declarations denying the very incidence or magnitude of the Holocaust. The following is intended to detect a few themes in the reasoning of globalized Holocaust which have led to there remaining almost no similarity, except for the name, between the two concepts of the Holocaust. Like the Cartesian wax argument,8 transformations of form and matter divorce the authentic Holocaust from its globally convoluted manifestations. The thrust of 6

 See, for example, Felman and Laub (1992) on testimony, or Arendt (1992 [1963]) on the staging of the Eichmann trial. 7  An example for this growing trend of framing the Holocaust within postcolonial context and nomenclature is Moses (2008). 8  In Descartes’s Second Meditation (Ariew and Watkins 1998).

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that transformation, however, is not hinged on one particular case of wax or Holocaust, but on a move from one cultural state of matter to another, namely from quiddity to liquidity. The understanding of that critical change would facilitate an extrication of the debate on the Holocaust as a unique human condition peculiar to World War II European Jews, while not relinquishing the gist of it, which is the quest for a general rule for distinguishing the original from its representations. Drawing on the Foucauldian premise regarding the surveillance properties of any discourse,9 it may be acknowledged that forms of talk and performance surrounding the Holocaust are definitional acts of disciplining the unbridled reverberations of what is considered to be its muted essence. Foucault’s own take on the Holocaust lends itself to such Foucauldian reflection. When Foucault suddenly refers to Nazism in 1976, he asserts that: “After all, Nazism was in fact the paroxysmal development of the new power mechanisms that had been established since the eighteenth century . . . murderous power and sovereign power unleashed throughout the entire social body” (2003: 259). This view of the Holocaust and of Nazism as the final realization of one of the possibilities inherent in the very project of modernity, or even the Enlightenment itself (cf. Bauman 1989) reflects yet another attempt of positioning the perceived singularity of the Holocaust at the apex of an historical spectrum. This is also how I understand Agamben’s (2005a) contested argument that the Muselmann is not merely an extreme possibility of radical political exploitation; rather, we are all (virtually) Muselmänner. The discipline of anthropology is no exception and in fact presents an outstanding example of that dictum. As such, it could be a case study for other disciplines caught between a politically incorrect passion for authentic essentialism and a socially mandated churning out of infinite interpretations. The view of the Holocaust and of Nazism as the final realization of one of the possibilities inherent in the very project of modernity finds a telling example in the 9

 Foucault’s (1977 [1975]) writing is rife with references to this relationship.



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Agambenian (1998) concept of homo sacer, that outcast sacred whose excommunicated bare life prevents his killing from being credited with propitiatory sacrificial value. Extending this to whole populations, peoples such as the Jews can be excluded on the pretext of emergency measures to be mass murdered with impunity. However, to avert the dire solution of extermination, culturally engineered ways of handling such threats to the momentum of ever-increasing transactional circles are made available in the form of normalizing therapeutic practices or humanizing institutional decisions. These are designed to displace the singularly indissoluble essential from being transfixed in an ahistorical point of time to a negotiable construction befitting the effervescence of globalized temporality and rationality. Thus, the Holocaust could be framed as genocide which, in turn, is construed in terms of the logic of modernity (Bauman 1991), colonial conflict, or the upsurge of psychoanalytic forces – all subject to reasoning, understanding, and, at times, condoning forgiveness or forgetfulness leading to redemptive therapy.10 All these substitutes for cultural voids qualify as their denial. The Holocaust is no exception, for any discursive deconstruction of its distilled untranslatable residuals would question the very feasibility of turning it global. In fact, Holocaust deniers, who refute the empirical or logical contingency of the event, view the phenomenon as humanly implausible, hence acknowledging its objectionable quiddity. Tacitly inherent in both implicit and explicit modes of denial is the current growing premise that perpetrators and victims alike ought to be construed in human terms, however inconceivable this might seem. Looking at that joint, humanly dubious, space from the angle of the relations between the two categories partaking in its creation, it becomes apparent why anthropology provides a singular opportunity to harness the Holocaust in the service of unraveling some of its principal concerns, for a war of taxonomies exceeds the limits of disciplinary mandate. 10

 A cue for this process can be found in Illouz’s analysis of the works of therapeutic culture in modernity (Illouz 2008).

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I opened this section by asking the question what does anthropology, or “the science of man,” look like after the Holocaust. We begin to answer this question once we realize what anthropology cannot do after the Holocaust: it cannot tolerate the idea of people, any kind of people, as nonhumans. This is the universal lesson of the Holocaust as applied to and implemented by a self-proclaimed universal science of man. Dehumanization evidently existed before the Holocaust in the form of slavery, victimization, human sacrifice, and other instances of bare life. The Holocaust, however, made unbearable any idea or act of dehumanization. As a result, any mention of dehumanization is banished, denied, and replaced by an all-embracing discourse of human rights. In this new discursive regime of signification, the rhetorical declaration of rights for everyone (from children to terrorists and from patients to animals) often serves as a post-Holocaust cleansing act. In contemporary Germany, where this regime of signification is most blatantly expressed, it has created various biopolitical paradoxes of “over-humanizing.” For example, consider the German case – unique in the world – of regulatory policies derived from the law protecting embryos. A new genetic technology called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is used to detect the DNA of a fertilized egg as part of in vitro fertilization. PGD was completely banned in Germany until 2010. In 2010, the Federal Court decided that extra-corporeal fertilization (meaning IVF) and testing for severe genetic defects should not be seen as illegal. In 2011, parliament decided that PGD should continue to be forbidden with the crucial exception of negative selection against severe illnesses. This means that PGD can be used to select against severe diseases, but not to select for certain traits. The issue nevertheless continues to be debated in the German National Ethics Council, the Medical Assembly, religious bodies, and various public and academic circles, with a range of different positions taken on the moral status of an embryo, the social impact of genetic testing, and concerns about repeating abhorrent eugenic practices (Valkenburg and Aarden 2011). The German law thus permits sibling donations (for example, in the context of anemia) from already existing siblings, but prohibits the use of PGD to select for donor siblings.



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The in vitro fertilized egg, which – objectively speaking – is a cluster of cells in a petri dish, is thus humanized and overprotected by German law. It is humanized in this manner not because of the Catholic doctrine of donum vitae but because of a secular sensitivity to eugenics. Indeed, many in Germany prefer to stress the more universalistic lesson of the Holocaust as making a commitment to human life and dignity that had been so horribly shattered by Nazi politics and Nazi medicine (Hashiloni-Dolev and Raz 2010; Weindling 2005; Winau and Wiesemann 1996; Wuerth 1997). While practicing reprogenetics and selective abortions as “pro-choice” options, many German geneticists (as well as the German state itself) cling paradoxically to positions and regulations which ban potentially beneficial genetic tests such as population screening or PGD. To re-view the Holocaust and its impact on humanity in this manner is certainly provocative. However, not only might the study of the Holocaust benefit from such academic entrepreneurship, but the discourse of anthropology itself could be re-inherited as a contact zone between various domains of the human and inhuman condition. Should this challenge remain unmet, the propositions propounded by titles such as Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (Patterson 2002) might surf the waves of globalization to further obscure the boundaries between the categories of human and animal. Based on a phrase by Bashevis Singer, suggesting that “For the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka,”11 Holocaust scholar Richard Patterson’s book equates the industrialized slaughtering of animals to that of the Jews. This would seem a mandatory conclusion of an anthropologically uncritical approach to the conceptual fusion binding the oxymoron of “Holocaust and globalization,” a union of opposites that might be the harbinger of the ultimate form of an acceptable transcultural form of denial12 – one that calls for no apology, documentation, or even malice.

11

 Quoted from his epigraph on Patterson’s book.  Unlike other forms of denial critiqued from a historical (Lipstadt 1993) or philosophical point of view (Finkielkraut 1998; Yakira 2009). 12

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Translating the Holocaust: The “rebel” vs the “lamb to slaughter” Being faithful to the meaninglessness of the extra-cultural can lead one to be incommunicable – hence silence is a preferred option among those who are reluctant to bear witness to the Holocaust. Holocaust “talk” is enabled, however, by circumventing the presupposition of the non-representational. This is accomplished through surrendering Holocaust-related discourses to the logic of everyday symbolic exchange. Indeed, once “the Holocaust” entered the everyday sociopolitical discourse of Israeli society, it also stayed there by becoming a form of cultural capital. The Holocaust was also constructed as the stigma of Ashkenazi Jews, the legacy of the veteran, dominant class. Some of the Mizrachim (Jews immigrating from North Africa and Asia), in contrast, developed a form of “Holocaust envy,” representing the desire to have a stake in the elitist, authentic, moral ideology of victim superiority. Subscribing to constructionist principles of unequivocal translation is one way of avoiding the experience of uncivilized spaces. In this manner, the unfathomable experience of the Holocaust is often translated through the use of commonplace cultural stereotypes or tropes. The attenuation and dissemination of witnessing incomparable anguish stem from the logic of globalization inasmuch as it is not set to contain and tolerate insoluble totalities. However, when non-hybrids are exposed, the reaction to that insufferable presence in the midst of a highly differentiated society is invariably an attempt to split the phenomenon into discrete constituents. Once again, we encounter the process I have termed “staging.” These stages could be amenable to trivialization, compared to and assimilated into remotely similar events. Thus, the component of evil is banalyzed, the camp is colonized, the extermination is industrialized, and the bare life is rendered non-sacrificial. By globalizing different aspects of the inseparable total whole, three of its defining dimensions are forfeited: categorical boundedness, arbitrariness, and non-negotiable irreversibility. The abstract, yet potent, idea of reducing an assumed collectivity to some attributed categorical properties that in turn subject it to



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possible obliteration is abhorrent to the pursuit of everexpanding cosmologies of universally inclusive cosmopolitanism. Thus, inimitability is replaced by an unbounded and unconditional conception of humanity as globally manifested in the rise of social, political, and legal concerns over the safeguarding of human rights. In the Zionist translation of the Holocaust, we can see the manifestations of a strong drive to hybridize the Holocaust by drawing particular lessons from it. While there is no singular, “national” Israeli view of the Holocaust, Israelis appear to focus more on the dual aspects of Jewish victimization and heroism (Firer 1989; Raz 1994; Segev 1991), and the Israeli public often downplays the non anti-Semitic aspects of Nazism. Hashiloni-Dolev and Raz (2010: 97), who studied the views of German and Israeli geneticists on the Holocaust, found that “For most of our Israeli respondents, Nazi history was scientifically and morally interpreted through a relatively particularistic worldview, stressing the importance of national strength and survival, while downplaying the more universalistic lessons regarding the potential dangers of science, medicine and genetics.” Holocaust experience has been often reduced either to the negative view of the “lamb to slaughter,” expressing the ultimate consequence of Jewish vulnerability in the diaspora, or to the overemphasized heroism of the ghetto uprising (Hazan 2001). Yet the majority of Jewish Holocaust victims proved to be a persistent problem in historical interpretation and commemoration. Shortly after World War II, the pre-state’s reactions to the Holocaust reflected, to a large extent, a sense of resentment about the behavior of Jewish victims. These, according to widely held belief, passively accepted their fate and subscribed to the traditional, passive Jewish role in the diaspora (Liebman and Don-Yehyia 1983; Porat 1986). An Israeli paratrooper returning from Hungary in 1945 reported that in Tel Aviv he was repeatedly asked “Why didn’t the Jews rebel? Why did they go as lambs to slaughter?” (Palgi 1978: 243). It was around this period that the nickname “soap” was coined and used widely by Sabras (native-born Israelis) with reference to Holocaust survivors (Firer 1989: 53; Segev 1991:167). This stance, representing an Israeli desire to dissociate from Holocaust victims, emerged from

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the socialist Zionist ideological rejection of the Jewish diaspora, together with ideas of militarism and state sovereignty turned into a way of life in Israel (Ben-Eliezer 1998; Zerubavel 1995). In a Kibbutz Haggadah, written just after the Holocaust, it was argued that “not only Hitler is responsible for the death of the six million – but all of us – and first and foremost these six million. Had they known that a Jew has power too, they would not have all gone as lambs to slaughter” (Reich 1972: 393). The central metaphor of “lamb to slaughter” employed in this translational context denotes a negative ideological predilection rather than a factual state of affairs. Originally a biblical metaphor (Jesiah 53:7), “lamb to slaughter” became, for Israelis, the cumulative conception of what was considered to be the Jews’ passive acceptance of their victimization, from the Middle Ages crusades to Kishinev’s pogroms. Some prayers of kaddish (traditionally said by Jews on the grave of the deceased) written especially as memorials to the victims of the Holocaust formerly included the words “lamb to slaughter.” Some of these texts were given to school delegates in the Israeli Ministry of Education to reading in ceremonies (Segev 1991: 453). Alongside the passivity of a “lamb to slaughter,” an opposite image of the Holocaust Jew also emerged during that period – the Jew as rebel. Holocaust Memorial Day is held annually on the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and is officially titled “Holocaust and Heroism Day,” heroism referring to the militant act of uprising. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was an overemphasis on active resistance, and those who resisted were usually represented as belonging to Zionist youth movements. The Holocaust was absent from the standard curriculum until the 1970s; after that, early Israeli educational texts dealing with it, when referring to the rebels, replaced the word “Jews” with “Hebraic” (Ivrim) and “sons of Israel” (Firer 1989). In this first period, beginning in 1945, Holocaust Jews were therefore perceived as the “antithesis of the self-image that has been inculcated into Israeli collective identity” (Carmon 1988: 76). The Holocaust, respectively, was seen both as a culmination (for diaspora Judaism) and a point of departure (for Zionist Israelis) from Jewish history, a



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culmination of the diaspora from which Israel has broken away and dissociated itself. The diaspora, which culminated in the Holocaust, represented one history line; Zionism represented another. The major proponent of this stance was David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. Ben-Gurion’s doctrine of state sovereignty rejected the Holocaust, seeing it as irrelevant to Israeli reality. For Ben-Gurion (Zertal 2005), the Holocaust was something which “happened to the Diaspora Jews because they were Diaspora Jews,” and “antiSemitism, the Dreyfus trial, Jewish persecutions in Rumania . . . are for us events from foreign history and sad memories of the Diaspora Jews, but not a spiritual experience nor life facts of instructive value.” In an interview for the New York Times (December 18, 1960) before the Eichmann trial, Ben-Gurion justified the trial as “proving to Israel’s younger generation that Israelis are not like lambs to be taken to slaughter, but a nation able to fight back.” The Israeli-Zionist complementary discourses, both of the “lamb to slaughter” and “the rebel,” hinge on a particularistic, rather than universal, lesson of the Holocaust. The particularistic lesson of the Holocaust, the lesson stressed by the victims, is that the Holocaust should never again happen to the Jews, thus legitimizing and indeed requiring a Jewish homeland in the form of a strong and militaristic Israel. Such a “lesson” situates the Holocaust and reconstructs its memory on the stage of political history. Indeed, this per­ ception of the “post-Holocaust” Jew, a Jew with a vengeance, has stirred criticism and controversy amongst left-wing Israelis and concerned diaspora Jews. This critical reading of “post-Holocaust” Judaism thus led Loshitzky to argue that: Revenge, it should be noted, even if delayed or unsatisfied, has become a dominant (though not always open and/or conscious and acknowledged) theme in post-Holocaust Jewish life – especially in the imaginative space of desire that the State of Israel occupies for many Diaspora Jews, who perceive it as a tool of revenge against the Goy (conveniently displaced onto the Arab and particularly the Palestinian). (2011: 79)

The stereotypes of the rebel and the lamb to slaughter, which characterized the Israeli translation of the Holocaust from the 1950s to the 1980s, represented a local staging of that

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unfathomable event. These stereotypes enabled the interpretation of the Holocaust through the modern project of nationbuilding. With the weakening of national ideology, novel forms of translation that follow global consumerist forces have become apparent. In 1990, the Holocaust Memorial Day was for the first time marked by the memorial project of “to everyone there is a name.” Instead of the stereotypical and generalized images of the “lamb to slaughter” and “the rebel,” this project invited passersby to read, through a loudspeaker, the names of Holocaust victims at various posts erected throughout Israel. It was only since this stage, and with the third generation, that Israeli society has reconsidered the Holocaust predominantly in global terms – namely the suffering of the individual. This phase of translation is characterized by pluralist approaches to the Holocaust, rather than a monolithic ideology of rejection/integration. Other signs of the multi-vocality of the third phase are, for example, the plurality of literary poetics of the Holocaust (Raz 1994) and the upsurge of critical historical/sociological readings of the relationship between Israelis and Holocaust Jews (for example, Porat 1986; Segev 1991; Sivan 1991). We need to remain sensitive to the dialectics of the wild and the civilized, the immutable and the hybrid, in order to avoid the banalization of the Holocaust. The logic of postmodern globalization is not set to contain and tolerate insoluble totalities. These, when inescapably thrown into relief, are confined and sequestrated in heterotopic camp-like enclaves for modern untouchables, in which evil is diluted and made banal, the void is colonized, and bare life is rendered sacrificial to the media. The abstract, yet potent, idea of reducing an assumed collectivity to some attributed categorical properties subject to possible obliteration is abhorrent to the pursuit of ever-expanding cosmologies of universal cosmopolitanism. Thus, inimitability is replaced by an unbounded conception of humanity. Present-bound arbitrariness, which renders memory redundant while forestalling action, interaction, and planning, is extricated from its irrational paralyzing state by rationalizing and mobilizing it at any intellectual cost, albeit at the expense of pondering other existential options such as life depleted of sense. The



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exploration of the open limits of humanity has been taken up by a number of anthropologists, but seldom, if ever, with reference to the issue of the humanity of the beings populating uncivilized spaces.

The case of autism, or those on the spectrum Another instance of the biopolitical ramifications of nonhybridity is the changing contemporary definitions of the condition of autism. I have already mentioned the staging and grading of autism on the spectrum of pervasive disorders; in addition to gaining deeper insights into this phenomenon, this process can also be seen as a means of attenuating its otherwise incomprehensibility and immutability. The two are of course complementary. But autism is much more than that. Autism constitutes a particular case, in which connection to others and shared meanings are put to the test (Melucci 1996). Rather than giving short shrift to the issue of humanity and being human, the cultural treatment of the syndrome of autism, as construed by philosopher Ian Hacking (2009), distinguishes that category from other forms of existence. Drawing on neurologist Oliver Sacks’s (1995) account of the vagaries of autism as an unaccountable experience from the perspectives of both the afflicted and onlookers, Hacking resorts to the image employed by an autistic woman describing her sense of the condition as being “an anthropologist on Mars”; that is, an alien in the land of humans. Hacking elaborates on this self-image by claiming that contraries illuminate what they are not. Aliens, typically from outer space, are almost by definition not human. Current portrayals of aliens may reveal more about who we, the humans, are than they do about our extra-galactic contraries. In the portrayal of opposites, there is often a large dose of fear, for example, that we may all be too like the aliens we imagine. That leads to a paradox about autism and aliens. A persistent trope in some autism communities is that autistic people are aliens, or, symmetrically, that non-autistic people seem like aliens to autistic people. Some autistic people are attracted to the metaphor of the alien to describe their own condition, or to

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say that they find other people alien. Conversely, people who are not autistic may in desperation describe a severely autistic family member as alien. This bold and honest admission of the baffling standing of the cultural enigma of autism as a case of a different kind of humanity is diametrically opposed to the staunch social resistance to views that uphold such a distinction. Indeed, global ethics seem to be intolerant to irreversible and untranslatable phenomena because these are seen as incommensurate with deep-seated assumptions about the value of change, conversion, and transmutation; all within a globally acknowledged humanity that assumes transcultural transience, translation, and exchangeability (Bauman 2000; Ritzer 2007). In order to cope with this contradiction, an autistic spectrum has been proposed (Newschaffer et al. 2007), a social construction that privileges the idea of autism as constituting a continuum of experience over an image of the disorder as an indivisible discrete condition that separates those with it from the rest of humanity, thus rendering it patently inhuman. The ominous perils inherent in this standpoint of refuted humanity are that it might spell a denial of personhood and consequently of morality, possibly with ensuing horrifying consequences. Autism then becomes a state which could be presented as being at the limits of the cultural and that encroaches on the realm of “bare life” or “life in the raw” usually associated with animals. Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s exposition of this problematic juxtaposition of humanity and animality is as follows: We are now in a position to resolve a paradox at the heart of Western thought, which insists with equal assurance both that humans are animals and that animality is the very obverse of humanity. A human being is an individual of a species; being human is to exist as a person. In the first sense humanity refers to a biological taxon (Homo sapiens), in the second it refers to a moral condition (personhood). The fact that we use the same word “human” for both reflects a deep-seated conviction that all and only those individuals belonging to the human species can be persons, or in other words that personhood is conditional upon membership of the taxon. “All human beings”, as Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “are endowed with reason and



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conscience”. By implication, all non-human animals are not. (Ingold 2002: 23)13

Indeed, while animals, machines, and virtual imagery could be considered nonhuman categories, as anthropologists Bruno Latour (1993) and Donna Haraway (1991) have observed, they can be incorporated into ostensibly humanlike domains such as the worlds of pets, robots, laboratory animals, and cinematic figures – all vested with suggestions of moral accountability as emotional, instrumental, or pedagogical cultural actors. In this way, the principle of sustaining a logic of morality blurs categorical boundaries, by according something of a human quality to the manifestly inhuman. The resulting hybrids are potent, viable forces in molding interactions, it is claimed, and in forging engagements, thus defying Ingold’s (2002) conception of a species-dependent morality while dovetailing Midgley’s (1978) and Singer’s (1994) ethical continuum that embraces animality and humanity. We are bound, therefore, to revert to Hacking’s species-free outlook, which hinges on seemingly unbridgeable metaphorical distinctions between human and nonhuman in the social imagination. Placing autism in an interplanetary space curtails the possibility of intelligible communication with members of that category, to the extent of conjuring them up as another species, despite their unquestionable membership of humanity. This effectively divorces the morally accountable denizens of Planet Earth from the morally unaccountable dwellers of Mars who appear to occupy a separate terrain of lived experience and a distinct mode of existence. Recently, there has been a small but growing body of work presenting the world of autism from the inside out. Such work includes autistic autobiographies such as Somebody, Somewhere (Williams 1995) and Thinking in Pictures (Grandin 2005). These books led to a renewed interest in autism in the popular media, with several documentary films on the subject, including Her Name is Sabine by Sandrine Bonnaire, which was made in 2007; Autism: The Musical by 13

 See also Ingold’s elaboration of this argument in his 2000 and 2011 books for powerful accounts of how he thinks, using animistic principles to reveal western assumptions.

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Elaine Hall; and the fictional dramatization of Temple Grandin’s life entitled Temple Grandin (2010) by Mick Jackson, which presents the life history and eventual success of the title character. However, these encodings of autism in popular culture attest more to its pervasive status as a nonhybrid than otherwise. Autism is medically seen as disrupting how we “make sense of communication” and challenging “our everyday way of understanding people” (Baron-Cohen 1995: 25–6). It was previously regarded as a socially vacuous, discrete mental disorder, its subjects often described in nonhuman metaphoric terms such as “feral” or “fairy children.” However, autism is currently placed on a behavioral continuum labeled “the autistic spectrum,” along which most usual suspects of cognitive-cum-emotional aberration can move forward or backward, thus apparently humanizing all its socially approved actors.14 One of the major obstacles in the understanding of autism through medicalization is that, although there are many theories about what causes autism, none have been proven. This is one of the primary sources of the puzzle of autism. From its very beginning, in fact, its origin has been a matter of dispute. Asperger believed it was a biological defect, whereas Bettelheim argued it was a result of poor parenting, while Kanner (1943) stressed the role, in this context, of a cold and distant mother (the infamous “refrigerator mother” hypothesis), a blaming diagnosis that was commonly accepted far into the 1960s. Nowadays, with the advent of geneticization, autism is generally considered to be biological, with proponents of this view pointing to its higher prevalence in twins (Anderson 2012). However, Liu, Zerubavel, and Bearman (2010) show that autism is far less heritable than previously thought, not 90% as claimed by some, but only 19% for boys and 63% for girls, with a lot of de novo mutations, i.e. not inherited from parents. Autism has been placed on a behavioral continuum labeled “PDD” – pervasive developmental disorders – of which the most common are autistic disorder, Asperger syndrome, and a “pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified” 14

 For the two poles of this epistemological spectrum, see on the one hand Hacking (2009) on “aliens,” and on the other hand Eyal et al. (2010) on the growing inclusive taxonomy of autism.



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(American Psychiatric Association 2000), the latter providing an example of a pristine essence as though the others were completely “specified.” The new DSM-V abolishes these two other diagnoses, and simply has autism as a spectrum. The PDD staging joins the contemporary struggle between the culturally dominant metaphor of autism as disease and the emergent counter-narrative of autism within neurodiversity. While the latter would appear to be an attempt to integrate the non-hybrid into the politically correct neoliberal paradigm of diversity, there is still a long way to go from regarding it as anecdotal. Within the autistic community, the questions of belonging and identity are matters of constant dispute between parents and activists, with opposing views framing autism within a (neurotypical) disease model versus a neurodiversity model (Eyal and Hart 2010). In a short (eight-and-a-half-minute) viral video titled In My Language (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1h I2jc), which is about autistic communication, we first see a woman rocking in front of a window and waving her hands. We hear a woman’s voice singing the sound “e,” almost with­ out melody. The encoding is of complete non-communicative loneliness. The person is making sound but not meaning. The first half of the video follows this woman’s activities: a shot of her hand rhythmically scraping a looped wire against the surface of a door, or repetitively stroking a keyboard, or listening to the sound of a book’s pages as she flips through them. Halfway through this short video, some text appears: “A Translation.” A voice-over and subtitle then present a translation of the autistic woman’s actions just observed. It is a manifesto revealing and protesting the assumptions often made about people with autism and how those assumptions have led to institutionalization and the exclusion of people with autism from the category of persons. The unexplained, seemingly inexplicable repetitive movements accompanied by the singsong, wordless voice are very likely to be interpreted as evidence of cognitive deficit.15 However, director/protagonist Amanda Baggs’s voice-over explains that her 15

 But see Eyal and Hart (2010) about radical translation, joint embodiment and the role of parents in the translation of their autistic children.

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repetitive movements and sound-making are part of her complex interactions with her environment, a mode of communication that is multidimensional compared to verbal language. Rather than being in a “world of her own,” Baggs claims to experience our world in a highly intensive way, through touch, taste, and smell, as well as vision and language.16 Indeed, a recent scientific study (Baron-Cohen et al. 2009) reports that the association between autism and talent originates at the sensory level, includes excellent attention to detail, and ends with hyper-systemizing (also referred to as synesthesia). Baggs comments on the irony that her verbal interaction – which she sees as relatively limited in scope compared with the interaction of all her senses and other faculties – is perceived by others as the autistic person “opening up to true interaction with the world.” She protests the limits of people who are neurologically typical and how that restricts their view of people with autism, so that “the thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn your language. . . . It is only when I type something in your language that you refer to me as having communication.” In a similar manner to understating old age on its own terms, autism should also be approached by lending an ear to the genuine voices of autism. One way of doing this would be to incorporate autistic researchers in early intervention inquiry (Twachtman-Cullen 1997). Donna Williams, who has written an autobiography about living with autism, has already been able to offer some significant insights into what it was like for her as a young, nonverbal child experiencing interventions that forced her to comply with an acceptable norm: “It was this fear of having ‘my own world’ taken away from me that resulted in behavior that forced me to deny ‘my own world’ in place of a more presentable, well mannered, sociable, though emotionless, shell” (Williams 1995: 70). Compared with earlier eras, autism now speaks more freely than ever. In the past, there was nothing resembling the 16

 See Grandin 2005, Thinking in Pictures – where she compares herself at one and the same time to a computer (she has software and hardware, a central processing unit, etc.), to a video camera, and to animals, which she claims think in pictures, which is why she is able to understand them.



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self-advocates of autism and their discourse of neurodiversity. Some kind of translation is taking place; there is a process of building scaffolding with which to represent the inner states of autism and therefore to begin/maintain a dialogue. Those who are more critical of such “facilitated communication” may wonder whether it is really about what is in the head of autistic people, or whether facilitated forms of communication do not allow autism to speak freely because its language is a non-hybrid – evading translation through hybridization, thus threatening to expose the limitations of our normal midlife theory of mind. Much like the dilemma of encountering the extra-cultural state of old age in a secular society, where no promise of immortality is offered, autism reminds us of our own fragile dependence on neurotypical communication and social interaction. Joyce Davidson (2007, 2008b) draws on her study of autistic autobiographies, blogs, and posts in order to explore distinctive autistic styles of communication which she conceptualized in Wittgensteinian terms as “language games” because their understanding is based on their context and meaning-in-use. It appears that autism speaks not through verbal utterances but rather through electronic words and pictures. Since the 1990s, people with autism have been communicating via chat rooms, email lists, and online forums (Gajilan 2007). This is evidently a more sophis­ ticated, and hopefully also more emancipating, form of nonverbal communication than the picture-exchange communication systems used before (and still being used today) to facilitate communication through and with the parents of autistic people. Much of the work of self-advocacy for autism takes place in virtual arenas. One author has even claimed that “the impact of the Internet on autistic people may one day be compared to the spread of sign language among the deaf” (Singer 1999: 67; see also Singer 2003). This is an intriguing case of selective assimilation – namely, hybridization – conducted by the perceived non-hybrid, in which the technology (internet) is familiar yet its users are not. High-functioning autistic people are making specific use of the internet for their own separate community activities. Autism subculture is alive and kicking in the internet, hiding in the electronic light under the “very long tail” of

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the internet17 (Anderson 2006; Dekker 2006; Prince-Hughes 2005). Camille Clark, creator of the “Autism Diva” blog, explains: “Of those autistics on the internet who discuss its use, we all agree that it’s an amazing tool . . . Because of the way that it allows for a delay in a response that is almost never allowed in real life” (quoted in Davidson 2008b: 796). The views expressed by internet-savvy autistic people (and we have to remember this is but one group amongst people with PDD) are often subversive and counter-hegemonic. For example, a lot of them communicate their criticism of the notion of a “cure” for autism, including the well-known Cure Autism Now Foundation, founded by the parents of an autistic child. The very existence of such “neurotypical” campaigns and sites is seen by these autistic people as offensive in the extreme. Much like hearing-impaired people who advocate Deaf (with a capital D) culture, autistic people use their internet communication to call for recognition of difference (Padden and Humphries 1988). One autistic blogger with a prominent presence on the web regularly argues that “The parallel between deaf people and autistic people lies mainly herein that both populations have a communication style that is different from the norm” (quoted in Davidson 2008b: 798). It is interesting to note that a common term for self-referral among many autistic people is “those of us on the spectrum.” This self-designation embodies a sense of the unfinished, dynamic non-definition of autism. It is a non-definition for the non-hybrid, where the very plasticity of the range and diversity of possibilities (“the spectrum”) is chosen for selfdesignation. It is a sign without denotation. In a sense, those on the spectrum are reappropriating the neurotypical strategy of staging (the “PDD”), turning it into a limbo of opportunities beyond artificial stages and prescribed assimilation – the 17

 Basically, the “long tail” is a way to describe niche marketing and production and the way it works on the internet. Traditionally, mass-produced capitalist commodities have been geared toward creating “hits.” The internet changed that by blurring the distinction between producers and consumers and allowing these “prosumers” to thrive in niches under the “long tail” of the internet (Anderson 2006).



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spectrum. Online communication by autistic people describes the possibility of cure as a threat faced by those on the spectrum: I won’t use the term “disability” to describe AS [autism spectrum] . . . I do not feel disabled or impaired. I am not broken and I do not need to be fixed or cured. If I were to become NT [neurotypical], I would not be “me” anymore, and a lot of my good qualities would disappear. (Person 5 with autism, in Brownlow and O’Dell 2006: 319)

It is also true that autism is a wide-ranging spectrum including “Kanner’s” and “Asperger’s,” high functioning and low functioning, those with additional disabilities and those without. Those most adamant about the existence and importance of autistic culture are perhaps also those who are most acutely aware of the marked diversity among those on the spectrum (Baker 2006). At the end of the day, the logic of globalization is also at work in the context of the newly established internet community of those on the autistic spectrum, and their strategy is therefore one of selective hybridization, as the following quote from an autistic blogger illustrates: In a sense, autistics are constituting themselves as a new immigrant group on line, sailing to strange neurological shores on the Internet, and exchanging information about how to behave upon arrival. They want to be able to blend in, to pass, and are intently studying the ways of the natives in order to do so . . . Yet, in trying to come to terms with an NT-dominated world, autistics are neither willing nor able to give up their own customs. Instead, they are proposing a new social compact, one emphasizing neurological pluralism. (Blume 1997, quoted in Davidson 2008b: 802).

The following section, dedicated to pain, adds yet another piece to the puzzle of non-hybrids analyzed here. The primacy of pain, its unshareability, may provide insights into its social masking in a similar manner to the case of the Holocaust and autism. In this section, I also make a direct connection between old age and pain. I will discuss how, compelled by such sense of exclusion and realizing that pain is no longer a

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transactional asset, some lucid elderly resort to reflecting on the inherent merit of being in pain as a form of being-in-the-world.

Pain, the old barbarian Why is it considered shamefully undignified to express pain in public? Why is it that in our culture, unleashed demonstrations of gripping pain call for the instant administration of a regime of pain alleviation? What is the common denominator between the introduction of painless methods of execution, the pharmaceutical industry’s proliferation of analgesic drugs, the widespread resort to epidurals during labor and, similar but a thousand times different, the rise of the hospice movement? Why is the Swiss organization that arranges for painfree death for the terminally ill called Dignitas? The answer to all these divergent issues lies in the inverse relation that exists in modernity between dignity and pain. I wish to argue that, following the work of sociologist Norbert Elias, particularly his seminal work The Loneliness of the Dying, pain is conceived of as an extra-cultural force, a non-hybrid defying the modern project of disciplining and modifying nature. Pain thus presents itself as an unbridled barbarian wreaking havoc in the secure domain of civilized order, while shattering the modern fantasy of biopolitical regimentation. Pursuant to that is the proposition that, unlike in a culture of sanctified martyrdom where personal torment is transcended by ritualistic performances of collective suffering, self-indulgence in pain is condemned as an antisocial act committed by so called “deviants” whose excommunicated status exonerates them from complying with demands for a public display of dignity. In other words, pain is conceived of as an outlandish invader, an ultimate “other,” to be eliminated or banished from the land of dignified civility. Following that, metaphorically embellished pains and aches of the heart are also deemed subjected to the ameliorating effects of the thriving and complex apparatus of modern therapeutic culture that identifies self-respect with selfcontrol (Illouz 2008). In modern secular society, there is an



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ambition to prevent all suffering. Theological scholars, coming from a distinct perspective of Christian ethics, have criticized this modern aversion to pain, arguing that – following the example of Jesus – human beings are mutually dependent, and suffering is a logical facet of such mutual dependency and need. Suffering should therefore not be regarded as an unwanted accident in life but as an essential part of it (Hauerwas 1986). However, it appears that such claims only serve to highlight the dominant, aversive view of pain and suffering in modernity. This tenor of the time translates the mitigation of pain into modern credos and practices such as psychoanalysis and other languages that talk sense into existentially meaningless distress. These social devices ensure the containment of undesirable pain, at all conceivable or inconceivable cost, within a framework of a communicable language that replaces instinctive “natural” reaction with culturally set rationalizing articulation. This language is embedded in cosmological precepts denying the capacity of culture to contend with the category that Charles Peirce calls “radical otherness,” of which pain could be a terrorizing example of barbaric incommunicability. As anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel, a student of political violence, observed: Pain too has a present, immediate, uncategorized, and prereflective aspect to it. But this “Firstness” of pain is overwhelmed by what Peirce calls “Secondness” – the experience of radical otherness in which ego and non-ego are precipitated out against each other in unique and absolute opposition . . . “Thirdness” is Peirce’s phenomenological category of mediation, mainly through language and culture. It is in Thirdness that semeiosis resumes its continuity, its movement. Thirdness is the domain of meaning. (Daniel 1996: 152)

That “thirdness” is indeed the foundation of culture and a reflection of its intolerance to extra-cultural experiences such as intractable pain turning a dualistic or a holistic subject into a self-absorbed monadic body whose entire being is seized and possessed by the consuming totality of the seamless signal of pain. For that signal to become a sign, namely a unit of shared signification, the intervention and mediation of cultural knowledge is needed to undo that oxymoronic sensation deemed “an unshareable universal,” as coined by

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sociologist Arthur Frank who was himself afflicted by chronic pain. Pain is at the same time totally universal and completely personal. Pain, like Man itself, is Double, as Durkheim argued a long time ago – in the biological body but not merely of the biological body, at once absolutely located in the individual, and yet not identified with the individual but connected to what is common to all individuals, at once substantial and abstract. Or, as van Hooft observed more recently: Pain relief is considered a scientific and objective discipline administered by experts on the basis of objective regimens rather than that of patient needs. Perhaps one of the causes for this approach is that pain is thought of as not directly communicable. As a result, clinicians must use an objectifying diagnostic form of judgement in relation to it and the treatments that they prescribe are based only upon such judgement rather than upon the communication of pain on the part of the patient. (van Hooft 2003: 255)

We can thus conclude that pain is essentially incommunicable. Because bodily pain resists objectification in language, it is marked by a strong element of unshareability. In other words, pain offers itself to be constructed, metaphysically, as something that silences and actively destroys language. On the other hand, pain is also believed to be communicated and measured by simple emoticons, those Likert scales with smiling and frowning faces, allowing for a crude yet practical way of facilitated communication. Releasing pain from the throes of self-absorbing solipsism sometimes submerges it in a discourse of joint suffering which Albert Schweitzer phrased as the brotherhood or fellowship of those who bear the mark of pain. The members of this fellowship are those who have learned by experience what physical pain and bodily anguish mean. In Albert Schweitzer’s own words, they are: United by a secret bond. One and all they know the horrors of suffering to which man can be exposed, and one and all they know the longing to be free from pain. He who has been delivered from pain must not think he is now free again, and



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at liberty to take life up just as it was before, entirely forgetful of the past. He is now a “man whose eyes are open” with regard to pain and anguish, and he must help to overcome those two enemies (so far as human power can control them) and to bring to others the deliverance which he has himself enjoyed. The man who, with a doctor’s help, has been pulled through a severe illness must aid in providing a helper such as he had himself for those who otherwise could not have one. He who has been saved by an operation from death or torturing pain must do his part to make it possible for the kindly anesthetic and the helpful knife to begin their work, where death and torturing pain still rule unhindered. The mother who owes it to medical aid that her child still belongs to her, and not to the cold earth, must help, so that the poor mother who has never seen a doctor may be spared what she has been spared. . . . Such is the Fellowship of those who bear the Mark of Pain. (Schweitzer 1948: 173f.)

There is perhaps no stronger claim equating pain with bar­ barism. Such assumed fellowship or brotherhood, based on a common cause of seeking relief, converts the monadic body into a dualistic agency capable of hybridization, of associating with others in pursuit of succor. This form of cooperation and communication is geared toward satisfying a corporeal need rather than fulfilling a desire. As we shall see, this present-bound, atemporal moment of relief, of an end justified by means, might turn into a transcendental quest. However, for now it should be noted that the turning point between the irreducible subjectivity of pain and the social relatedness forged to collectively dispel it constitutes the first step on the road of waiving the authenticity of the unquestionable, yet incommunicable, truism of the inseparability of having pain and knowing it at once. Indeed, upon proclamation of pain as embodied cultural knowledge, a wedge is driven between known and knower to the extent that the very act of expressing pain renders it social rather than personal, hence constructible and construable, negotiable and translatable. This shift from the component of the self that sociologist George Herbert Mead termed “I” – namely, the spontaneous, inner, creative, subjective, and authentic – to the “Me” – the organized attitudes of others that make up the social – forfeits the former to the

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conditionally contingent discourse of the latter. Thus, the veracity of pain is appreciated and validated in terms of its applicability to the pragmatics of social language as a sensemaker of the world. In other words, pain is only acknowledged and recognized as a cultural sign or it is nothing, as Jonathan Miller – British neurologist, opera director, author, TV presenter, humorist, and sculptor – asserted: “If someone insisted he had a pain he couldn’t feel, we would say that he had not learnt to speak English properly.” Notwithstanding the Wittgensteinian rudiments of such observation, it raises the issue of those claims for pain unsubstantiated and unqualified by the assumed inextricable interplay between the “I” and the “Me,” spontaneous experience and socially imposed dignity. The socially uncharted cry, scream, moan, or groan, when unexpectedly emitted and heard, unleashes the speechless barbaric “I” that threatens to undermine the safeguarded domain of the hearer’s verbalized “Me.” Subsequently, this “Me” is robbed of its expected capacity to regulate the appropriate practices by which a socially endorsed interpretation of pain is negotiated. Unless such barbarism is contained and quarantined in designated precincts, it risks a confrontation with certain human conditions deemed insufferable. The state of the terminally sick, whose pain is perceived as unending, liable to increase, apparently meaningless, and totally preoccupying (Hockey 1990), is one manifestation of pain depicted in extra-cultural terms. In that respect, this kind of pain does not subscribe to the cultural assimilation of pain advocated by theologian and social critic Ivan Illich, who claims that culture makes pain tolerable by integrating it into a meaningful system, and cosmopolitan civilization detaches pain from any subjective or intersubjective context in order to annihilate it. The unwanted surge of immediate, unintended, and unintentional subjectivity lays bare the blurred boundaries between humanity and inhumanity, the dignified and the undignified, that twilight zone that once again throws into relief the working of “the anthropological machine.” Under certain political circumstances, the working of the anthropological machine is perfected in practices of de-subjectivization by abolishing the dualistic or holistic trope of the self in favor



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of a monadic mode from which pain as a signal of pronounced authenticity is expunged. The extermination camp and its horrors, notably medical experiments conducted without anesthesia on prisoners’ bodies, is an arena where the victim’s painful subjectivity, together with his or her dignity, was eliminated from the cosmology of perpetrators. This form of “bare life” existence dooms those consigned to such extra-cultural categories to being killed at will without the solace of serving as a dignified sacrificial offering. These classes of people denied any cultural-ethical protection can be identified by the social inaudibility of the sound of patently produced, albeit mute, pain. One such category is the culturally constructed old, particularly those circumscribed within old-age designated settings such as daycare facilities, residential homes, and geriatric wards. Other elderly, at the brink of agist excommunication, might temporarily escape this social destiny by resorting to anti-aging masks and other masquerades to obscure visible markers branding them as denizens of that country of the disavowed. The rest of the old, however, are made symbolically invisible through acts of concealment, sequestration, and removal to out-of-sight enclaves where their supposed savage selves are mortified, trimmed, and regimented to the abandonment of any vestige of a genuine elicitation of free expression. That subcategory of the outcast old invariably consists of those whose experience produces a split between mind and body, leaving them incapable of bearing true and honest witness to somatic information such as pain. For the purposes of characterizing the nature of the barbarian in modern times, the demented old occupy this archetypical slot in the age of reason. Branded by the etchings of incontinence, disorientation, unintelligibility, uncontrollability, and irresponsibility, the mentally frail old are committed to an extra-cultural space as well as placed in a post-linear point of time beyond teleological and intentional consciousness. Moreover, this type of assumed barbarism that calls for containment and discipline differs from other transient forms of being out of bounds, for the unmanageable stage of old age is irreversible, untranslatable, incurable, and hence, like pain, quintessential and incommunicable.

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Compelled by such sense of exclusion, and realizing that pain is no longer a transactional asset, some of the lucid elderly resort to reflecting on the inherent merit of being in pain, irrespective of its dubious extrinsic value in the form of secondary gains of empathy and attention. Thus, a member of a Jewish daycare center in Southern California spells out his deliberations concerning the intrinsic role that pain consciousness plays in his current life: So I’ll tell you how I survive, but you won’t like it. Every time I say anything about it, people shudder. But you couldn’t get away from it, the thing I am talking about. The word is “pain.” Pain is the avenue to getting a soul, getting quality from yourself. This is how you get a life that’s really on the essence. You got to go about pain the right way. You couldn’t escape, so you go into it. Then it melts. You get from this the whole thing, the idea of life itself and the result is you’re able to take pain in and ignore it because you’re so full of living. When you learn to do this – and believe me, it took me a very long time – you get a clarification, I would say. Now if you would like to hear a little more, I could give you an example. When I start to talk about pain, it leaves me. That’s why I don’t like to talk so much. All that I got to say is painful, and when I tell somebody about it, then I feel better. But that’s no good. It comes back at you when you are not looking, woosh, it jumps out from behind the stove and grabs you. So when the pain comes, I am patient. I shut up. Active silence. I bear it, wait. Even overnight. But I mean bear it. I don’t take a tranquilizer, a sleeping pill, some schnapps or watch television. I stand before it, I call the pain out. After you go through this you discover you got choices. You become whole. This is the task of our life, so I can be alive every minute. I want to know when I’m awake, I’m altogether awake. When I’m asleep, I’m asleep. It’s not masochistic. It’s not stoical. In fact, if you want to know, it’s Jewish. One of our prophets said, “In quiet confidence shall lie your strength.” In this way you can make suffering something positive because it’s part of human life. In old age, we got a chance to find out what a human being is, how we could be worthy of being human. You could find in yourself courage, and know you are vital. Then you’re living on a different plane. To do this you got to use your brain, but that’s not enough. The brain is combined with the soul. Do you know what I’m talking about? I don’t



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think you could get to this understanding too young. But when you get to it, then you couldn’t go before your time, because you are ready. (Myerhoff 1978b: 197)

This monologue is a self-reflective statement about being in pain as being-in-the-world. “Active silence” is thus the vehicle through which these two states of being merge into one all-embracing experience. It captures the ambivalence of lived-in pain as a state of liberation from the restraints and obligations of communicating it to others, alongside a condition of total absorption of the mental into the clamping grip of the physical. The speaker, however, perceives this double bind as a boon rather than a bane to the extent that it enables him to unreservedly re-inherit his socially contaminated subjectivity in its pure entirety, and thereby seize upon the long lost “I.” This freedom from commitment to communication resolves the in-built tension in the epistemology of pain as an unshareable universal; for without the onus of explaining the unexplainable, there is no need to be answerable to the dictates and expectations of the cultural. This self-aware extra-cultural standpoint abandons the social call for dignity for the subjective exigency of accomplishing self-integrity. Thus, the indignity of socially exposed pain is inverted to serve the integrity of a self-sufficient subjectivity. This split places the two concepts as diametrically opposed to each other, if not mutually exclusive, with the former – dignity – being an emergent property of what Elias calls sociogenesis, while the latter – integrity – stems from what he dubs psychogenesis. Dignity, or honor in anthropological locution, therefore, means the active suppression of the latter for sustaining the predominance of the former. The diverse paths of pain management attest to the need to critically revisit dignity as a default concept for accounting for essential morality. In fact, the double language of pain – omission or emission, silence or utterance – spells an existential choice between submitting to the social under the guise of dignity, or else entering the free spirit of integrity under no guises whatsoever. The imposed freedom of being exiled to the extra-cultural, uncultivated land of old age might sprout an opportunity for making that choice. Dignified painlessness, therefore, remains an option reserved for those whose

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subjugation to cultural dictates is uncompromisingly total and unadulterated.

Surviving pain The barbarism of pain draws on widespread portrayals of raging pain as a form of uncontrollable savagery, feral wildness, merciless brutality, uncivilized conduct, uncompromising domination, invasive impregnation, and subjugating colonization. No culture could and would abide by such unruly chaos lurking, as it were, on its borders in an elusively seductive menacing poise. Like in Constantine Cavafy’s poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians”: “The Barbarians are due here today . . . Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating . . . and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.” To confront those unspeakable, unapproachable, halfexpected aliens who might never come, disciplinary measures and stratagems ought to be taken to curb the ominous invasion. Consequently, no outrageously invasive pain is spared alleviation, so much so that medical suppression of pain has been accorded an autonomous specialized status within the profession in dedicated clinics and qualified expertise. This destination reaches its distilled peak toward the end of life in the ethos and practice of the hospice movement, set to relieve pain for its own sake. Not only physical pains but also emotional pain – the “aches of the heart” – is subject to the ameliorating effects of the thriving apparatuses of therapeutic culture, notably psychoanalysis and other palliative languages. These social devices ensure the containment of undesirable pain, at all conceivable or inconceivable cost, within a framework of a communicable language. Even though the ethos of subjectivity as the origin of agency reigns supreme in modern cosmology, bereft of a corresponding social regime of justification, it is denied the right to testify to its own authenticity. Thus, even the witnessing of explicit expressions of pain does not suffice to corroborate its reality as an intelligible language game. This is the vortex beyond which the claim for being truly in pain may be rendered null and void as a legitimate call for attention, and



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where the alarming barbarism of an undisciplined sensation has to be avoided using all forms of denial such as elimination, suppression, silencing, ignoring, sublimation, or dismissal. A noteworthy example of repudiating the subjective validity of pain is the nineteenth century’s Victorian grading of pain as a measure of civilization. Thus, “savages” such as blacks and Indians were thought to be immune from sensing pain, and hence at the bottom of the scale, occupying a position very near to animals. The unwanted surge of immediate and unintentional subjectivity lays bare the blurred boundaries between humanity and inhumanity, once again highlighting the shortcomings and clogging of the anthropological machine. Under certain political circumstances, the working of the anthropological machine is perfected in practices of objectification by abolishing the dualistic or holistic trope of the self in favor of a monadic mode from which pain, as a signal of pronounced authenticity, is expunged. The extermination camp and its horrors, notably medical experiments conducted on prisoners’ bodies without anesthesia, is an area where the victim’s subjectivity is eliminated from the cosmology of perpetrators by rendering the victims “nonhuman.”

Old age and the mark of pain A similar process of social masking and stigmatizing is at work in the context of the very old who are made socially invisible through acts of concealment, sequestration, and removal to out-of-sight enclaves, where savage selves, to use Erving Goffman’s phrase, are mortified, trimmed, and regimented to the abandonment of any vestige of genuine free expression. For the purposes of characterizing the nature of the barbarian beast in the age of reason, the demented old occupy this archetypical slot. It is instructive to return to Schweitzer’s words on the mark of pain in order to grasp the non-hybrid condition of the old in relation to it. Chronic pain is indeed often a condition of old age, but it does not necessarily provide the aging with “a secret bond.” Even though “one and all they know the horrors of suffering to which man can be exposed, and one and all

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they know the longing to be free from pain” (Schweitzer 1998), chronic pain for many elderly becomes a state of being-in-the-world, rather than something that they can be delivered from. In old age, “the eyes are open” with regard to pain and anguish, but no remedial objective would be served by overturning such a state of being. The result is that all properties embodied in that unbridled corporeality stagger into the semiotics of radical, unfathomable otherness. Pain in old age is a relentless savage rather than a tamable barbarian. It can be stigmatized but not tamed. This ordering category subsumes an array of fuzzy codes of savagery like indefinable pain, impenetrable anguish, and incomprehensible language. Unintelligibility in and of itself could indicate and construct the condition of dementia since only observable symptomatic evidence is credible when evaluating a person’s mental capacities. In the absence of reflective discourse, the monadic body of the demented is turned into the sole measure of selfhood. As such, it leaves pain and other inestimable behavioral impressions to somatic interpretations uninformed by the authority and authorship of a contemplatively cumulative self. Pain without reason, consequence, or meaning implodes into a momentary spot of existence that invites no dialogical understanding, intervention, or empathy. The following piece of ethnographic description taken from fieldwork in a nursing home illustrates the node binding the pain signal to the label of dementia: When a carer ignored a resident’s call for help, explaining it as a “false alarm”, this no doubt contributed to the resident’s label as a demented person. In the private talks we had, many of the carers complained about the unreliability of communication with “demented” residents, who often “say one thing and meant another.” One carer illustrated this with the following dialogue she had had with a “demented” resident (male, age 84). This resident used to moan loudly and repeatedly, making the other residents angry. One time, when the moaning became particularly loud, the carer approached the resident saying: Carer:  Your cries made a hole in everyone’s head. All day long you cry. What is it that hurts you so much? Resident:  Nothing!



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Carer (taken by surprise):  If there is nothing the matter with you, why do you keep moaning all the time? Resident:  Do I have anything better to do? Oy, oy, oy . . .

However, in advanced dementia, this pointless expression of pain could indiscernibly fade into a scarcely detectable sign of distress. A recent review of the nursing literature (McAuliffe et al. 2009) claims that pain is frequently undetected, misinterpreted, or inaccurately assessed in older adults with cognitive impairment. Pain in elderly persons with dementia is often undetected because they have lost the verbal skills to articulate it, and because the nature of their disorder can prevent them from identifying it. For caregivers, identifying pain in persons with moderate to severe dementia is complex due to the interactions of several factors, including the possibility that pain is often chronic, that it is not recognized by the person experiencing it, and that persons may frequently be subject to simultaneous discomfort from several conditions. To those carers for whom pain relief is a professional task and a vocation, spotting hidden clues in such invidious circumstances requires reliance on reflected devices of assessment to recognize signs of pain. In our case, the above study suggested that inferred indicators of pain could emerge from monitoring residents’ conduct and others’ assessment of painrelated behavior and by administering analgesic medication, regardless of demand, in order to evaluate its before-and-after effect on what might be seen as pain-triggered bodily ciphers. In fact, it was through the contrivance of a signified that a signifier was reproduced and arguably invented. The freedom from commitment to communication resolves the built-in tension in the epistemology of pain as an unshareable universal, for without the onus of having to explain the unexplainable, there is no need to be answerable to the dictates and expectations of the cultural. Thus, when the extracultural is not juxtaposed with the cultural, the barbarian is rendered null and void as, gingerly and innocuously, it dissipates into the oblivion of an auto-telic, self-contained inner core. Our respondent-cum-anthropologist from the Jewish old-age home in California, whom I quoted before, found a

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way of bridging the gap between the universal presence of pain and the culturally specific knowledge of its meaning. Nevertheless, this important lesson in how old age provides an opportunity to find out what a human being is, and how we could be worthy of being human, has not achieved wide popularity. Nor has it become a central research direction for gerontology or anthropology. Instead, it is instructive to examine how anthropologists prefer to study “social suffering” rather than pain. Settling in the cultivated land of suffering is indeed safer ground for culture-geared anthropologists than being trapped in the iron cage of a non-reflexive, unshareable bodily sensation. It is, therefore, no surprise that most anthropological references to the phenomenon of pain address issues of cross-cultural interpretation of the experience of suffering. Coupled with moralistic teachings anchored in colonial guilt, preoccupation with suffering complies with the proverbial pledge to acknowledge the voice of the “other,” while at the same time satisfying cosmopolitan agendas promoted to allay anthropological self-castigation. In that respect, pain is diametrically opposed to suffering: the former is pre-symbolic, resists language, and shatters one’s world, to use anthropologist Elaine Scarry’s (1985) language in her study of the body enduring pain and torture, whereas the latter is socially constructed and communicated in terms of moral order and corresponding ethics. However, the concept of suffering could be construed as a convoluted and metaphorical elaboration of pain, releasing it from irreducible literality, while crossing its boundaries into perilous regions of existence and ethics. Such is the culturally unhindered extrapolation from the medical assuaging of pain among the terminally sick to the biopolitics applied to other categories of those presumed socially dead. As asserted by sociologist Shai Lavi, whose conclusion in his study of the history of euthanasia draws an extended analogy between euthanizing the dying and eliminating the otherwise hopeless: Pain, as we have seen, was reinterpreted to include social suffering as well as physical pain. In a similar manner, hopelessness gained a slightly new meaning. It no longer addressed the terminal condition of the dying patient but rather the social



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condition of the unfit person, who became a burden to himself as well as to society. Hopelessness was expanded to engulf the whole existence of the unfit, and was no longer limited to the final stage of life. Euthanasia, which originated as a solution to the problem of the dying patient (literally, a good/easy death), was expanded to solve the new social problem of pain and hopelessness. (Lavi 2004: 113)

The implied association embedded in this text between pain and social stigma exposes it to the risks of open-ended metaphorization with untoward consequences. To avert such dangers, metonymical systems of cultural signification that fuse the idea of physical pain with a transcendental vision of communal solidarity through shared suffering are culturally configured. Thus, as in the case of the Catholic faith, stigma is transformed into stigmata, and pain is transformed into the suffering of distant victims. In today’s global world, mediascreened distant suffering provides a measure of psychological identification and moral absolution for those who indulge in non-committal empathizing with publicly celebrated victims of barbarism. Once again, we are faced with the global postmodern aversion to savages yet a propensity for barbarism. Yet, when the sense of suffering is no longer distant and, in the absence of communal expiation, becomes the intimate presence of mere agony, culturally unauthorized pain is rampant. Suffering is thus debunked of its symbolic packaging and is experienced as just plain riveting pain. This reverse shift from suffering to pain leaves the individual robbed of cultural armor against the barbariancum-savage who is set to usurp an indefensible subjectivity. Faced with the choice between an ecclesiastically disciplined, civilized barbarian and a personally bridled one, the paininflicted person has to decide whether to turn to cultural analgesics or to succumb to the centrifugal forces of bare existence that unite pain with self to the abandonment of any attempt at anthropological comprehension. In either case, however, pain, the portentous barbarian, looms large on the dim horizon of its socially disarmed, haunted victim. Such a dead end could perhaps be circumvented should the advent of pain be turned into an opportunity to revisit life and to reassemble the social by bending rules and breaking down order. Two films portray this duality of pain in old age:

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Alain Resnais’s (1977) Providence and Denys Arcand’s (2003) aptly titled Les Invasions Barbares (The Barbarian Invasions). Providence undermines the possibility of deliverance, stressing the eternal, cyclical return of nightmarish memories and physical pain, and the loneliness of the elderly protagonist who fails to come to terms with his past and disengages himself from offered family ties. The “taking leave” scene at the end of Providence is perhaps unique in capturing the bare, savage pain of an old person who fully and wholesomely acknowledges his need for close contact with his kin, yet at the same time understands his being alone in the world, preferring that state over false intimacy (Cohen-Shalev 2012: 27–39). The opposite existential option is cinematically narrated in Les Invasions Barbares, where the terminally sick hero experiences his final ordeal when invaded by inexorable pain. Against the “barbarian invasions” of cancer, the aging protagonist enlists the support of family and friends in creative strategies (Cohen-Shalev and Marcus 2009). When his pain overwhelms him, and morphine does not help any more, the daughter of one of his mistresses, a junky, agrees to find some heroin to help him. Mustering his past and present kith and kin to form a socially bounded instance of memento mori, he turns his vanishing life course into an enduring cycle, thus putting up the last defenses in the lost battle against pain, that barbarian which can (sometimes) be tamed by social ties that support and suspend one’s joie de vivre.

Conclusion: Bringing the Extra-Cultural Back In

The languages of the very old, of pain, of the Holocaust, or of autism all defy our western midlife notion of language as a means of articulating experience since they are deemed extra-cultural, cloistered, and hence ineffable and socially silent. What then are we, as anthropologists sensitive to these islands of non-hybridization, to do with these extracultural elements of our global society? Are we to remain silent, as in the early Wittgensteinian proposition that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”? Or are we to finally abandon the powerful notion that language, thought, and the world are all isomorphic? As is always the case in hermeneutic interpretation, when language has gone over its own limits, it is in danger of being nonsensical. The second option, explored by Wittgenstein (1988) in his later philosophical investigations, is therefore to recognize the plurality of languages, or language games; to recognize that which is unsayable, that which cannot be put into words, and come to terms with the nonsensical. Arguably, the former option of passing over in silence has already been (ab)used by too many in postmodern society and anthropology. The silencing of the non-hybrid has become a major political corrective in the service of the politically correct. It is therefore the second option that we must pursue. But how?

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Conclusion

The picture of language as representation is at the base of the whole of traditional philosophy, but it has to be shunned in favor of a new way of looking at the anthropology of the non-hybrid. We need to shift our hermeneutic interpretation from the paradigm of language as representation to the paradigm of presentation of meaning as use. The “language game” of the very old, for example, is still answerable to their life experience, described (in midlife academic language) as physical dysfunction, psychological deterioration, and lack of intentionality, and the content of the knowledge of that experience which sets it apart from other forms of cognition is thus part of the Fourth Age, an expression of “other-wise” personhood (Mitchell, Dupuis, and Kontos 2013). Testimony to the omnipresent effect of this argument is the marginal academic turf charted by attempts to establish a counterlanguage, namely the view that dementia is culturally constructed and thus could be integrally assimilated into the life course (Cohen 1998; Lock 2013). One important way to subvert the dominance of the language-as-representation paradigm is to recognize the power relations underpinning all forms of representation. When the very old are constructed as a state of consciousness caught between the limits of speech and bodily experiences, they are construed as being beyond “the civilizing process.” Candidates for euthanasia, displacement, and avoidance, invisible untouchables on the one hand, the very old are at the same time subject to regimenting forces of the biopolitical. The biopolitical representation of the very old is comprised of “bed and body work,” activities of daily living, tests, and other insignia of extreme materiality, leaving no room for dialogical exchange. Instead, communication is reduced to a faint voice, counter-gaze, or simple silence perceived as perfunctory compliance, feeble resistance, or masquerading. Hence, the very old become a body with no embodiment, namely a body literal devoid of metaphor and robbed of symbolic value, a site for norm-cleansing and denial of experience, a ground for tacitly negotiating terms of existence rather than modes of survival, the former arresting and preserving the moment, the latter suspending bare-life for a future bios – i.e. re-engagement with the social. In this respect, the old-old dramatically differ from



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the captive, the condemned, and the sick whose fortunes might yet be reversed. What we need to remember is that the language of bare life is the reverse of our dominant language of representation – non-metaphorical, unembellished, straight, curt, and parsimonious. Its time is “so brief, so instantaneous that it cannot be experienced or observed” (Lash and Urry 1994: 242). It eludes arabesque and pomp and, unlike the symbolic configuration of the first language, is bent on emitting signs made up of discrete units of unequivocal targeted information. Personal interpretation and subjective meaning are not just irrelevant to the effective transmission of such signaling acts, but might prevent a clear and untarnished reception. The modern ethos of individual subjectivity only interferes with the need to economically universalize and epitomize the signs of bare life to form a one-track, noise-free system for convening the otherwise impenetrable moment. Whatever is of no practical value to the immediate welfare of bare life is self-muted. What is left for intelligible communication is a vocabulary of signals that could be easily understood and responded to in a rational manner with minimal risk-taking and bargaining. If not, losses through misunderstanding could be irretrievable, for the next moment might never come. Thus, no long-term balances, or risks versus possible gains, can be pre-calculated in this costeffective equation of immediate returns. As the experience of bare life is articulated merely for the short-lived purpose of existing in the moment and to the abandonment of other matters, the social is not at stake here. “Wasted lives,” to use Bauman’s book title (2004), cannot afford to expend superfluous energies and store residual resources to ensure their existence. In the introduction, I argued that the problem in applying to non-hybrids the grading and staging processes of medi­ calization and hybridization is actually the problem of translation: because this grading and staging is conducted in the strong language of western midlife culture, it further masks, distances, and silences its objects of translation. We have come back to the critical question of whether and how we can hear the silenced voices of these deadly “others,” and see the true colors of these essential barbarians. For that, we

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need to be able to change our own terms of reference. True hybridization is about mutual transformation. However, in practice hybridity has usually carried the gaze of authority and hegemony (political, medical, and liberal) of capitalistic society with its systems, corporations, and institutions. The domination of biopolitics often hides the prospect of biosociality. We are trapped in our own social stereotypes, gestalts, and schemes of interpersonal perceptions. There is nothing new in this hermeneutic assertion. However, this myopic hermeneutics looms large when we try to reach into and beyond the social impasse of our aborted communication with the non-hybrid. This requires thinking about our first principles and checking our premises. We need to tilt our worldview, much like the kōan (in Japanese) or gongan (in Chinese) in Zen or Chan Buddhism, where a succinct paradoxical statement or question is used as a meditation discipline for novices. The effort to “solve” a kōan is intended to exhaust the analytic intellect and the egoistic will, readying the mind to entertain an appropriate response that goes beyond normative dualisms. A characteristic example of that style is the well-known kōan: “When both hands are clapped a sound is produced; what is the sound of one hand clapping?” When attempting to go beyond normative dualisms/ dichotomies of the hybrid and the essential to reach into the world of the non-hybrid, we should work through these paradoxes. For example, we need to understand that the aged are seen as being at a social standstill, but that the changes occurring in their lives are extraordinarily rapid and extreme. We then need to ask ourselves what kinds of changes are taking place in old age? Understanding that such changes do take place but in a spatiotemporal phenomenology that is very different from our own midlife world would be a necessary though not always sufficient step to glimpse a world where time accelerates and slows, condenses and elongates, just as space envelops and shrinks. We furthermore need to remember that the fragmented utterances made by non-hybrids have a narrative. Similarly, the well-known “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” was not a free-standing puzzle but, rather, part of a case. Sharf (2007) argues that these narrative-embedded questions,



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which have long been construed by western scholars and devotees as apparently meaningless provocations to spontaneous realization, are in fact [P]art of a quite systematic approach to teaching how to apprehend and wrestle with theological or philosophical issues on the contingency of knowledge, the vagaries of interpretation, and the nature of representation. Like ours, it was a broader narrative of linguistic relativism – the perception of a gap between signifier and signified, between the contingent and the absolute, or, to use a common Buddhist motif, between the finger and the moon [toward which it points]. (Sharf 2007: 214)

In research conducted in England, some old people justified their refusal to enter old-age homes on the grounds that they would no longer be able to prepare a cup of tea for themselves (Hazan 1987). Clearly, they were not referring to the drinking of the tea, which they would certainly be able to do in the institution; rather, they were implying that on entering the institution they would lose control of this last private area of cultural sanctuary. This suggests that custom and habit serve to connect an individual to past and future. Through constant repetition, the elderly person reenacts the past, thus maintaining and reinforcing an identity and at the same time symbolically “arresting time” – denying access to change or decline. The repetitive performance of activities such as tea making creates a sense of security based on changeless reality. The simple act of drinking tea serves to halt the march of time by implying that what was, is, and will remain the same. Sometimes, it is also about drinking tea from an empty cup. Similar fragmented narratives may be apparent in breached communication with autistic children, with people in pain, and with Holocaust survivors. For autism to be understood on its own terms, as McGuire and Michalko (2011) recently argued, we need to relinquish our taken-for-granted midlife and neurotypical “theory of mind” in order to understand autism not merely as a problem in need of cure/prevention, but as a way of being-in-the-world – a way that can also teach us about intersubjectivity and our relations with others. To do this:

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It is vital to orient to this story of “autism as mindblindness” not as an individual story about the solution to an inherently puzzling disorder, but as a social story that, itself, exists as a puzzling space of questions, a mystery to which there is no solution. This interpretive act opens up a space for autism, not as some-body that can be identified, known, solved, but rather as a disruptive, puzzling space of questions, and, as such, a space to theorize, a space of teaching and a space that must continually be returned to, over and over again. (McGuire and Michalko 2011: 175)

This book also tried to open up a space, what I called the “fourth space,” which must continually be returned to, over and over again. The boundaries between the non-hybrid and their sociocultural environment are neither territorial nor personal but conceptual. In the “fourth space” of the nonhybrid, time may stop, body may be separated from mind, and life meet death. It offers no direction or orientation but only constant perplexity as to the nature of the world and its order. It is a futureless universe in which resources do not aggregate toward any goal. Since the organization of resources in the reality of the non-hybrid is governed by its own rules, the structure of interpersonal relationships among them can be expected to be qualitatively different from “normal” relationships. In other words, the argument that the non-hybrid occupies a unique cultural-symbolic space should be corroborated by the way in which these non-hybrids construct their world. Can moments of embarrassing silence and miscommunication with extra-cultural non-hybrids ever turn into moments of empathy? Agamben’s take on the Muselmann reveals the insufficiency of our standard moral categories, as well as the way to a new ethical posture better able to bear witness and attend to the suffering self. Levinas (1998) has developed this line of reasoning by emphasizing that in such moments we come into contact with the mystery of another’s subjectivity. However, can such contact be achieved when the other’s subjectivity is “unassumable,” being defined in other parameters of space, time, and meaning – in fourth-space parameters? Levinas claimed that the other person is always “other” in the radical sense that he or she cannot be appropriated by me in my understanding or perception. In the words of Butler,



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“The other approaches the I as an excess that is an unwelcome superfluidity – an unforeseen surprise, always beyond us, always ‘yet to know’ ” (Butler 2004: 49). This seems to be a relevant point of departure for approaching the “fourth space.” If I classify others by putting them into a predefined category, and if I relate to them just and only as structured by that classification, then I act unethically. Does it mean that the ethically proper comportment that I ought to adopt toward the “other” is that of letting their mystery be? Or, worse still, should this baffled attitude lead to moral disengagement and consequently apathy? Returning to the trope of the Alzheimer’s patient as zombie might provide an intriguing option for hybridizing the “fourth space.” As Behuniak (2011: 87) argues, one way to undermine the zombie metaphor is to become an expert on popular zombies. The popular depiction of zombies is that they feel nothing for anyone. They are independent to the extent of totally lacking any sort of human connection and human emotion. In contrast, the very old, the Alzheimer’s patient, the autistic, and the chronic pain patients are dependent on others, and elicit as well as experience emotional responses. The challenge, evidently, is to reconstruct their dependence in a way that is built on sympathy and respect. This is a task that boils down to questions that are both commonplace and profoundly philosophical. Can we listen to others who speak a different language, a language born of a different phenomenology? Can we listen to them with patience and empathy? This task requires turning “dependency,” from its connotation of burdensomeness, lack of agency, and inferior power, to “dependency,” as associated with connectedness among people (Fine and Glendinning 2005). Behuniak (2011: 88) suggests that what may help to dislodge the zombie metaphor is to replace a “minoritizing” view with a “universalizing view.” The anthropology of old age, autism, pain, and the Holocaust should return to anthropology’s formative question of what is it that makes us and them human. The answer will not be single and parsimonious as once expected, yet it will expand our anthropological perspective to include the voices of the “fourth space.” The journey to hybridizing the “fourth space” begins with realizing and accepting its essential universality. Such realization

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acknowledges, for example, that Alzheimer’s and dementia in old age should not be construed as diseases of the unfortunate few but as diseases that affect us all, sometimes referred to as “the Alzheimerization of society” (Gilleard and Higgs 2000). This point is actually echoed in zombie scholarship, captured in the succinct argument that “in a literal sense, we are all, as living beings, ‘Undead’ ” (Greene and Mohammad 2006: xiii). Given this, socially compassionate responses to those in the “fourth space” should not be limited to those similarly affected, but expanded to include all of society. Is it too optimistic to hope that, in such a way, the “politics of disgust” (Nussbaum 2010) will be replaced by a “politics of humanity”? Humanity against all odds is indeed at the core of the recognition of the culture of extra-cultural spaces. The presence of impregnable bastions of solid otherness embedded in dehumanized categories devoid of subjectivity stands in the midst of the effervescent global. It challenges modern conceptions of living as becoming, hence rendering the apparent inanimate inhuman. As aging is conceived of, in and of itself, as a process of losing human qualities, it lends itself to imageries of human fragility. In this sense, old age in its extreme ending serves as a prototype for all other indestructible “others” whose inherent parameters signify a transformation from the temporal to the spatial, from sequentially plotted lives to a here-and-now existence, and from moral obligations in the form of systems of mutual accountability to freedom from such commitments. Denied shared experience and devoid of corresponding ethical codes, these territories of unknowability spell the death of sense and sensibility, understanding and explanation, self-justification and inbred mean­ ing. Ignored or destroyed, circumvented or subjugated, they weigh on our consciousness as a blocking force that disables its transformational mechanism and ends the incessant production and reproduction of dynamic temporalities. This is a pure and unadulterated concept of death. Contrary to culturally laden representations of death that embody a sense of preservation, memory, transition, and promise of another physical or metaphysical life, the domain of deadly others is an uncompromising annulment of life. Paradoxically, though, when bodies are released from the categorical



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cage of deadly otherness, they re-inherit personhood, subjectivity, and acknowledged agency. Such cases include coming out of pain, the revival of Muselmann, recuperation from life-threatening disease, placement on the PDD spectrum, or posthumous commemoration following extreme old age. In all these instances, a rehumanization occurs, that is, a reverse transformation from belonging to an expunged spatial category to a subjectivized temporal appearance. This mercurial magic of “now you see me, now you don’t” suggests the transitory, unpredictable nature of all nonhybrids, and subsequently the precariousness of being considered human. In fact, the risk of being swallowed by the extra-cultural forever looms on the horizons of the “naturalness” of everyday life in a global era that assumes the false certainty of ever-increasing circles of universal culture. While the encounter with biological death could be tackled either through the growing promise of the hybrid androidization of humanity offered by modern medical technologies to the extent of conquering terminality (Kurzwiel 2006), or by resorting to the age-old cultural techniques of symbolic immortality (Lifton 1983), the state of belonging to the planet of deadly “others” is, when inside it, beyond interaction, negotiation, and redemption. This common denominator constitutes a necessary rationale for grouping together all those non-hybrid disparate conditions. However, it is the unraveling of the logic of the diversity rather than the general rule that provides a sufficient interpretative model for justifying the use of the concept of the culture of the extra-cultural as an effective analytic tool. It may seem that this book has been very critical of both the actual and symbolic abandonment of those designated as non-hybrids, as well as of the attempts to find meaning in their non-translatable experience. Indeed, attempts at “facilitated communication” can sometimes be trite and infantilizing, or impose mid-age categories on an experience that is profoundly different. In this context, the book’s advocacy for dialogue, however difficult and halting, may seem futile and frustrating. To put it bluntly: the argument that the extremely old or autistic people are constructed as non-hybrids, as radically “other,” may be self-defeating. It may contribute to the same abandonment that it advocates against. This has indeed

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been demonstrated by the academic perspective of “disengagement theory” advocating the disengagement of the elderly from the rest of society. On the other hand, the opposite stance, which seeks dialogue based on one or other version of Terence’s saying that “nothing that is human is alien to me,” could easily be oversimplistic. How to walk this tightrope? The purpose of this book is to serve as a polemic, not a manual. However, it is also too easy to end with the Wittgensteinian nostrum describing “meaning in use.” Let me therefore briefly point to the constructive change implied by my criticism. The guiding question is how should we study old age, the Holocaust, autism, and so on differently and yet conjointly, relativistically but globally? Anthropologists should venture into the border zones where the constructed meets the essential, but they should not go there as carriers of the gaze of western, middle-age, neurotypical society. There is always more to learn and to say if we start by listening. Working at the interstices of hybridized non-hybridity, anthropological translation should turn the respondents into brokers, doing more empirical research amidst people who are phenomenologically between worlds – people in early-stage dementia, people on the highfunctioning end of the autism spectrum, and so on. Many patient organizations, for example, are made up of activists, relatives-cum-carers, patients/people with disabilities, clinicians, and researchers, and as such are “assemblages” where heterogenous elements come together. While these patient organizations are generally regarded as representing their autonomy as well as the best interests of the patients, in some cases there have been processes of internal conflict that led to the separation (as well as regrouping and networking) of organizations for patients (established by and for the patients’ relatives-carers) and organizations of patients (composed of patients themselves).1 Well-known examples exist in the context of autism, Alzheimer’s disease, 1

 These comments on patient organizations and self-advocacy are based on conversations with Aviad Raz, who together with Silke Schicktanz is working on a research project concerning organized patient participation in health care.



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deafness, and mental illness. As I have already discussed, much of the work of self-advocacy for autism takes place in virtual arenas, and many members of the autistic spectrum community are critical of the notion of a “cure” for autism, embodied in the well-known Cure Autism Now Foundation, founded by the parents of an autistic child. The very existence of such “neurotypical” campaigns and sites is seen by these autistic people as offensive in the extreme. Much like hearingimpaired people who advocate Deaf (with a capital D) – culture built on sign language as an alternative form of communication (Padden and Humphries 1988) – autistic people use their internet communication to call for recognition of difference. Listening to these self-advocates can be a starting point for an anthropology of the non-hybrid. Alzheimer’s disease (AD), as already discussed, is another area where the issue of representation and advocacy is very pertinent. Advocacy for AD is dominated by relatives-carers, reflecting the prominence of the biomedical-disease model of AD, even though associations for AD, the majority of whose members are relatives, also comprise self-help groups of patients. Approximately one-third of members of the International Dementia Advocacy and Support Network have dementia themselves (www.dasninternational.org). The AD movement was initiated by and originally intended for the carers rather than the patients (Beard 2004). Now, however, associations for AD publicly identify themselves as carers’ and patients’ organizations, reflecting a process of hybridization in terms of their cause (O’Donovan, Moreira, and Howlett 2013). Alongside advanced-stage AD patients, who have been deemed incapable of self-advocacy and self-care, patients in the early and even pre-clinical stages of the disease are increasingly involved in health activism and in challenging the social disenfranchisement that frequently accompanies a diagnosis of dementia. In Germany, alongside the association for Alzheimer’s disease, there is an association of people in the early stages of dementia. As diagnostics of early-stage dementia become more accessible and sophisticated, and with the increase in the numbers of pre-clinical Alzheimer’s patients (also as a result of apoe genetic testing for Alzheimer’s), it is expected that the debate on self-advocacy will proliferate. While some AD associations have moved to include people

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with dementia in their formal decision-making structures, others have not (O’Donovan et al. 2013). As the patientempowerment movement increasingly provides an alternative worldview to the biomedical model, and “disease” is reconstructed as a source of solidarity and identity, this previously non-hybrid zone of signification opens up to ethnographic research. Indeed, some of the organizations we call patient organizations may debate the very designation “patients.” Future research may reveal parallels between those on the PDD spectrum who are reappropriating the spectrum in autism, with those on the spectrum of dementia who are also reappropriating it. These questions loom large in the context of frailty, vulnerability, and social participation and continue to present ethical, social, and political challenges for an inclusive society. A scaffolding upon which to erect a common language should thus be sought in the context of the extremely old (Hazan 1980, 1996, 1998), the autistic (Eyal et al. 2010), and other cases discussed in this book. Such scaffolding may take the form of first-person narratives by self-advocates; practices of radical translation and joint embodiment; or certain therapies and prosthetic devices. How do we know when these are really engaging with the radical otherness of the non-hybrid, or are merely a form of domestication? This is evidently also a big debate among self-advocates and others. It is the old hermeneutic dilemma of translation, of the umwelt, and of “participant observation.” Philosophically speaking, my advocacy focuses on active listening. On a concrete level, there will be scaffolding, some kind of translating devices, for better or worse, involving carers, academic professionals, and “facilitated communication.” This book does not go into the practical details because this book is not a research paper or a cross-ethnographic account. Nevertheless, it is hoped that it will inspire and encourage such research. Since the only overt yardstick for tapping the difference between being in a hybrid zone of others and inhabiting the life course of the familiar is the former’s (in)audibility and (in)visibility, it is that fine line of non-communication that ought to be scrutinized. In that sense, the variety of resonant silences could serve as an index for differentiating between



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diverse forms of the boundary separating the hybrid from the non-hybrid. The kind of silence addressed is not of the eloquent type, that is, a muted form of expression; nor is it a colonial suppression of the voice of the subaltern. Rather, it is an inadvertent consequence of an unbridgeable gap, unilaterally produced by the hybrid consciousness cultural lag; it is a void depleted of the possibility of exchange and dialogue. Different means of producing an extra-cultural stillness could be employed appropriate to the various manifestations of non-hybridity. Thus, the pre-cultural sound of pain is transmuted to culturally intelligible articulation, or else it is muted and ignored; the voice of the Holocaust survivor who experiences a post-cultural welter is considered ineffable unless processed as testimony to a therapeutically controlled trauma or as corroboration of the politics of identity; the autistic unique worldview undergoes a regulatory transformation into the world of “normal” or neurotypical views of awareness; and the self-referential metonymic language of the very old is misconstrued as self-evident gibberish. Still, notwithstanding the observation that the globally translatable prevails over the non-sense of the nonce, the undercurrents of the indestructible continue to damage the foundations of the astute and confident appearance of omnipresent mutability.

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Index

Page numbers followed by n indicate a footnote. Aarden, E. 100 absolute relativism 36 absolutism of the pure 7, 18 Aceves, W. J. 6 active listening 142 actor-network theory (ANT) 14, 32 Adorno, T. 4, 47, 92 Agamben, G. 15, 24, 25, 30, 32, 37, 42, 55, 79, 84, 94, 98, 99, 136 Agar, N. 24 ageless self 46, 55 agency 17–18, 30, 87, 124, 137 Agich, G. 54 aging female body 56 agism 35, 54, 57, 58, 78 see also gerontophobia Ahmed, S. 37 Alexander, J. C. 96n alien metaphor 107–8, 109 Alverson, H. 68

Alzheimerization of society 138 Alzheimer’s disease 38, 49, 50–1, 137 biomedical-disease model 141 “savage old” 50, 64, 68 self-advocacy 141–2 social construction of 50–1 zombie metaphor 38, 137 Anderson, B. 36, 62, 79 Anderson, C. 114 Anderson, G. 110 animal rights 18 animality 18, 32, 34, 68, 108–9 anthropological machine 30–1, 120–1 clogging of 31, 32, 33, 125 anthropological relativism 58

166

Index

anthropology 1, 30–45, 49 accountability 94 anthropology of the non-hybrid 31–2, 33–4, 41, 45, 140–3 constructivist and relativist worldview 72 cultural 21 essentialism 62, 71–2 fieldwork 33 gerontological 55–64, 64, 65, 73, 75 modern 8, 31, 32, 72, 88 non-native 41 postmodern 31, 33, 39–40, 41 psychological 46 sociocultural 12, 57, 66 structuralist-functionalist 1, 31 traditional 30, 71–2 as translation 30, 33 universalizing view 137–8 anti anti-relativism 18, 19, 40 anti-aging enterprise 5, 26, 58–9, 60, 74, 76, 121 anti-globalization 40 Appadurai, A. 15, 32, 36 Arcand, D. 130 Archer, M. S. 54, 57 Arendt, H. 97n Aries, O. 28 Ariew, R. 97n Aronson, S. M. 64, 81–2 Asad, T. 66 Asch, A. 25 Ashkenazi Jews 102 assimilation 14, 17, 31, 113 see also hybridity Atkinson, P. 71 autism 3, 6, 21–2, 24, 25–6, 91, 107–15, 135–6 alien metaphor 107–8, 109

autistic spectrum 6, 21, 25, 108, 110, 111, 114, 115 communication styles 26, 111–12, 113–14, 115 cultural autism 69, 86, 89 cultural enigma 107–8 disputed origins 110 encodings in popular culture 109–10 facilitated communication 113 genetic diagnosis 24, 110 medicalization 110 neurodiversity model 111–12, 113 neurotypical model 111 online communication 113–14, 115 recognition of difference 114, 141 selective hybridization 115 self-advocacy 21–2, 25–6, 113–14, 141 staging and grading 6, 25, 27, 107 translation 113 Baggs, Amanda 111–12 Baker, D. L. 115 Bakhtin, M. 16, 45 Balsamo, A. 72 Baltes, P. B. 78, 83 banality of evil 5, 102, 106 Bar-On, D. 44 bare life 25, 42, 43, 52, 79, 80, 83, 84, 94, 100, 102, 108, 121, 133 Barer, B. M. 84 Barker, J. 67 Baron-Cohen, S. 110, 112 barzakh 87–8 Bateson, M. C. 74



Index

Baudrillard, J. 39, 44, 53–4, 74–5, 84 Bauman, Z. 2, 5, 13, 42, 44, 46, 55, 59, 65, 75, 98, 99, 108, 133 Bayley, John 51 Beard, R. L. 67 Bearman, P. 110 Beck, U. 13 Becker, E. 65 Behuniak, S. 38, 137 being-in-the-world 43, 52, 55, 77–8, 80, 82, 85, 123, 126 Ben-Eliezer, U. 104 Ben-Gurion, David 105 Bhabha, H. 17, 18, 19, 36, 39, 63, 65 Biggs, S. 60, 61, 74, 75 bioethics 18 biopolitics 2, 8, 22–3, 27, 134 biopolitical technology of the self 24 of hybridity 12, 14, 22–5, 29, 30 of medicalization 22 of modernity 42 of non-hybridity 107 biosociality 30, 31, 79–80, 134 Blaikie, A. 60 Blume, H. 115 body cultural assimilation 29 social-anthropological gaze 29 body/self dichotomy 54–5, 59 Boltanski, L. 79 Bond, J. 26 Bonnaire, S. 109 border crossing 4, 19 Bordon, S. 29 brain birth 29

167

Brown, D. E. 34 Brownlow, C. 115 Buckholdt, D. R. 61 Burke, P. 16 Butler, J. 18, 44, 55, 136–7 Butler, R. 61 Canclini, N. C. 11 capitalism 23, 30 Carmon, A. 104 carnivalesque 11, 31, 39, 60 Carrithers, M. 57 Cartesian dichotomy 54–5 Cavafy, Constantine 124 chronotopes 31 Cicourel, A. 70 “civil death” 84 Clark, C. 114 “clash of civilizations” 6, 91 Clifford, J. 36, 65–6, 71 Clough, P. 53 Cohen, L. 52, 68, 132 Cohen-Shalev, A. 130 Collins, S. 57 colonialism 16, 75, 93 Colson, E. 62 Comaroff, J. 36 communitarianism 8 community creation among the old 67 concentration and extermination camps 23n, 79, 121, 125 Conrad, P. 13, 14 constructionism 3, 16, 21, 40, 43, 62, 71, 72 consumerist culture 2, 4 Cooper, M. 22 cosmopolitanism 74 Cowgill, D. 62 Crapanzano, V. 2, 43, 66, 87–8 creolization 2, 13

168

crisis of representation 31, 40, 66, 95 cross-generational relationships 52, 69 cultural adaptation 16 cultural anthropology 21 cultural autism 69, 86, 89 cultural boundaries, transgression of 2 cultural consciousness 69 cultural dependency 39 cultural difference 10, 14, 36 cultural imperialism 16 cultural metaphorization 14 cultural pollution 4, 31 cultural relativism 35–6, 66, 67 cultural sturdiness 15, 20, 24 cultural translation see translation cultural uncertainty 1–2 cultural voids 14 culture jamming 31n Cumming, E. 59, 89 Cure Autism Now Foundation 114, 141 Daniel, E. V. 36, 117 Davidson, J. 26, 113, 114 de Medeiros, K. 52 de-culturation of the old 5, 62, 68, 79 de-differentiation 10–11, 38 de-subjectivization 120–1 death 44 “civil death” 84 conflation with old age 49 culturally laden representations of 138 fear of 65 gerontological 49

Index

grading and staging of 27, 28 medicalization of 28 social death 47, 49, 84, 128 socially constructed meanings 52 deconstruction 15, 21, 36, 40, 41, 49, 57, 83, 99 Degnen, C. 68n DeGrazia, D. 29 dehumanization 36, 41, 79, 92, 100, 108, 125, 138 Dekker, M. 114 dementia 64, 138, 142 cultural construction 132 pain and 126–7 social disenfranchisement 141 see also Alzheimer’s disease depression 13 Diamond, T. 56n digital tombstones 44–5, 95 Diner, D. 93 disabilities 25 disease mongering 27 disengagement theory 54, 59, 73, 89–90, 140 Disneyfication 10 Dissanayake, W. 72 dissociation 51 Don-Yehyia, E. 103 Douglas, M. 2, 4, 19 Dowd, J. J. 61 Du Bois, W. E. B. 17 duality of otherness 32–3 Dupuis, S. L. 132 Durkheim, E. 29, 118 Duster, T. 24 dystopian future for global culture 11 Edensor, T. 11 ego-integrity 46 Eichmann trial 95, 105



Index

Eisler, R. 65 eldercare 8, 56n, 58, 67, 121, 126–7 the elderly 49 see also old age Elias, N. 13, 44, 65, 68, 116, 123 empathy 72, 73, 136 epistemological relativism 40 essentialism 3, 16, 17, 19, 34, 35, 37, 44, 55, 61, 62, 71–2 ethnic cleansing 93 ethnographies of old age 66, 67, 68n ethnomethodology 70–1 Ettore, E. 25 Etzioni, A. 13 eugenics 101 Eurocentric worldview 36 euthanasia 95n, 128–9, 132 Evans, J. 29 extra-cultural spaces and materiality 8, 12, 13, 14, 45, 58, 73–5, 117 see also non-hybrids extreme old age (Fourth Age) 2, 5, 8, 24, 26, 46–90, 132, 143 amoral journey toward 88–9 bare life 52, 62, 84 being-in-the-world 43, 52, 77–8, 80, 82, 85 biopolitical representation of 132 biosociality of 79–80 communication in 53, 79 communicational impasse 81–2, 83–5, 85, 132 convoluted self 51–2 crisis of representation and translation 53

169

disciplinary inaccessibility 55–7, 65–6, 69–70 dissociation 51 emphasis on the body literal 80, 85 existential space 78–9, 84 extra-cultural state 73–5, 82, 84, 89 foreign to conceptions of worthwhile living 78 incomprehensibility of 81–2 life-story narration, silenced 52, 53, 84, 85 loss of sense of self 52, 74, 83 meaning and memory in 87–8 metonymic representation of death 52 midlife discourse of 47, 49, 51, 68 nihilism 85–6 onset 78 “the other within” 47, 61–2 psycho-social uniqueness 83 research methodology 69–71 social death 44, 47, 49, 53 social invisibility 121, 125 zombie metaphor 38–9 Eyal, G. 110n, 111, 142 Fabian, J. 35, 45, 69, 70, 82 facilitated communication 113, 139 Fanon, F. 44, 55, 63 Featherstone, M. 11, 20, 39, 59, 63 Feinman, S. L. 59

170

Index

Feldman, J. 96n Felman, S. 97n feminism 40, 74 feminist studies 60, 71 Fiedler, L. 61 Fine, M. 137 Finkielkraut, A. 101n Firer, R. 103, 104 Fisher, M. 66 Foer, J. S. 18 folklore 11 Foner, N. 56n Fontana, A. 61 Foucault, M. 5, 22, 24, 29, 33, 61, 88, 98 Fourth Age see extreme old age “fourth space” 20, 41, 48, 77, 80–1, 91, 95, 136, 137, 138 see also autism; extreme old age; fundamentalism; Holocaust; pain fragmented narratives 77, 83, 134, 135 Frank, A. 118 Frankfurt School 3, 4 Franklin, S. 25, 72 Fries, J. F. 58 functionalism 16, 27 fundamentalism 5–6, 91 Muslim 92 non-hybridity 6, 91, 92 Gajilan, A. C. 113 Gamliel, T. 62n Garfinkel, H. 70 Geertz, C. 18–19, 40, 58 gender difference 44, 52, 55 gender malleability 6 genetic essentialism 6 geneticization 6 George, D. 51 Gergen, K. J. 69

gerontology 34, 49, 50, 55 gerontological anthropology 55–64, 64, 65, 73, 75 gerontological nomenclature 58, 59, 61, 64 humanistic approach 72 old-as-other 60–4 surrogate terminology 71–3 gerontophobia 44, 53–4, 55, 59, 65 see also agism Gevers, I. 26 ghouls and monsters in popular culture 37–8 Gilleard, C. 50, 61, 138 Glascock, A. P. 59 Glassner, B. 29 Glendinning, C. 137 globalization 2, 10, 13, 21, 46, 74, 92 flattening effect of 14 functionalist accounts of 16 and the Holocaust 96, 101, 106 hybridity as cultural logic of 13–14, 15, 18, 37 glocalization 5, 15–16, 31 Goffman, E. 2, 79, 84, 125 Golander, H. 67 Gothick motifs 38 Gottdiener, M. 11 governmentality external 24 goal of 23 Grandin, T. 109, 112n Greene, R. 138 guardianship 89 Gubrium, J. F. 50, 52, 60, 61, 63n, 67, 68, 70, 81, 85 Gurevitch, A. 36



Index

Hacking, I. 30, 80, 86, 107, 109, 110n Hall, E. 110 Hall, S. 17, 52 Handelman, D. 65 Hannerz, U. 13, 15, 39, 72 Haraway, D. 4, 34, 72, 109 Hart, B. 111 Hashiloni-Dolev, Y. 101, 103 Hauerwas, S. 117 Hazan, H. 38, 42, 52, 54, 58, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 79, 81, 103, 135, 142 Heath, I. 27 Hebrew language 11 Heikkinen, R.-L. 52 Henderson, N. 67 Henry, D. 27 Henry, J. 44, 73 Henry, W. E. 59, 89 Hepworth, M. 20, 59, 63 Higgs, P. 50, 61, 138 high art 11 Hockey, J. 61, 67, 69, 77, 120 Holmes, L. 62 Holocaust 5, 44, 91, 92–107, 143 commemorative strategies and sites 94, 95 crisis of witnessing 94–5 cultural void 8, 92–6, 99 epistemological rupture 92, 94 extra-cultural state 95 “lamb to the slaughter” metaphor 103, 104, 105, 106 pluralist approaches to 106 “post-Holocaust” Jew 105 postcolonial framing 97n

171

and the project of modernity 5, 98–9 quiddity 97, 98, 99 “rebel” discourse 104, 105, 106 relationship between Israelis and Holocaust Jews 103–4, 105, 106 Shoah-business 96–101 staging 105–6 survivors 26, 94, 95, 103–4, 143 translating 92, 93, 95, 102–7 Holocaust deniers 99 “Holocaust envy” 102 Holocaust Memorial Day 104, 106 Holquist, M. 43 Holstein, H. 61 Holstein, J. A. 52, 70, 85 homo sacer 43, 99 homogenization 10, 11, 15 Horkheimer, M. 4 Horton, R. 35 hospices 24, 124 hospitals 24, 28, 81 Howlett, E. 141 Hudson, K. 29 human rights discourse 100, 103 humanity and animality 108–9 boundaries of 8 politics of 138 Humphries, T. 114, 141 hybrid-as-celebrity 38 hybrid-as-taboo 38 hybridity binarisms 20 biopolitics of 12, 22–5 as “colonial desire” 16, 19 genealogy of power/ knowledge 15–22

172

Index

hybridity (cont.) as glocalization 15–16, 31 inter-age hybridism 74, 76 limits of 3, 20 neoliberal rule of 20, 22 politics of revulsion and fear 3, 18, 19, 37, 39 postmodern zeal for 4, 13, 18, 19, 32, 37, 44 propagation of 7 racist discourse 16–17, 39 semiotic-cultural career 16 and struggle over identity positions 45 transformation of the hybrid 18, 19, 37–8 hyper-systemizing 112 hyperactivity 12–13 hyperreality 44 hyphenated cultures 18, 39 hyphenated identities 36 identity 12, 36, 45, 54, 80, 86, 111 identity formation 39 Illich, I. 120 Illouz, E. 14, 29, 99n, 116 impotence 13 in-betweeness 1, 2, 30, 31, 32, 39, 43, 88 infantilization 89 Ingold, T. 34, 108–9 institutionalization 38, 67 inter-age hybridism 74, 76 interactivity 18, 19, 31 interpretive turn in the social sciences 31, 33, 70 interviews with the very old 70–1 Irigaray, L. 44, 55 Islam 6, 91, 92 otherness of 6, 91

Jackson, M. 110 Jaggar, A. 29 James, A. 61, 67, 69 Jewish diaspora 103, 104, 105 Johnson, G. 41 Johnson, L. C. 84 Jones, D. 29 Joseph, M. 17 Kahneman, D. 13 Kanner, L. 110 Kapchan, D. 16 Katz, S. 74, 76 Kaufman, S. 28, 55, 59, 61, 62 Keith, J. 61, 67 Kellner, D. 19–20 Kitwood, T. 63 Klein, N. 31n Knorr Cetina, K. 32 kōan 134 Kontos, P. 132 Kraidy, M. 15, 16 Kristeva, J. 18, 37 Kuper, A. 35 Kurzwiel, R. 139 labor migration 39 Lakoff, M. 41 language gerontological nomenclature 58, 59, 61, 64 hybridization and 11 literal language 43 as representation 132 therapeutic 14 language games 113, 131, 132 Lash, S. 11, 65, 133 late works of art 47–8 Latour, B. 6–7, 14, 34, 37, 109 Latz, S. 34 Laub, D. 97n



Index

Lavi, S. J. 128–9 Lavie, S. 18, 36 Leibing, A. 52 Leichtentritt, R. D. 95n Lemke, T. 22 Les Invasions Barbares (film) 130 Lev-Aladgem, S. 65 Levi, Primo 23n, 92 Levinas, E. 136 Levy, D. 96n Lévy-Bruhl, L. 34 Liebman, C. 103 Lifton, R. 65, 69, 139 limbo people 38, 79 liminality 2, 47, 61 Liska, A. 10 literary turn in anthropology 40 Liu, K. 110 Lloyd, G. E. R. 35 Lock, M. 28, 29, 56, 132 Loshitzky, Y. 105 Lukes, S. 57 Lutz, C. 29 McAuliffe, L. 127 McCue, J. 28 McDisneyization 10 McDonaldization 10 McGuire, A. 135–6 Macnaghten, P. 27 Marcus, E. 130 Marcus, G. 40, 65, 71 marginality 61, 67 Martin, E. 29, 34 martyrdom 116 masquerading 31, 39, 60, 74, 121, 132 Mead, G. H. 44, 54, 119 Meade, E. 6 medicalization 12, 14, 22, 25–30, 133 of autism 110 cultural broker 27 functional role 27

173

gender and 56 grading and staging processes 28, 29 of death 28 of old age 38, 64, 72, 89 of sickness 51 sick role 27 social-anthropological view of 27 taming the deviant 12 Melucci, A. 69, 86, 107 memory end of 68 theory of 88 metaphor 25, 41, 42, 51, 68, 88, 107–8 metaphysical, the 62n metonymical signs 42 Michalis, L. 6, 91 Michalko, R. 27, 135–6 Midgley, M. 18–19, 109 Miles, A. 95n Miller, Jonathan 120 Mitchell, G. J. 132 Mizrachim 102 modernity 2, 3, 8, 10, 31, 35, 59 dichotomies of 3 enchantment of 3, 4 Holocaust and 98–9 as self-legitimizing force 4 Mohammad, K. S. 138 Moore, S. F. 64n moral imagination 40 moral philosophy 18 Moreira, T. 141 Morgan, L. 28 Morris, B. 57 Moses, D. 5, 97n Moynihan, R. 27 multiculturalism 12, 36 Murdoch, Iris 51 Muselmann 23, 24, 94, 98, 136, 139 Myerhoff, B. 52, 61, 62, 65, 122–3

174

Index

Narayan, K. 63n narrative turn in the social sciences 63n nation-building 11, 106 nation-states 10, 39 Nazism 16, 98, 101, 103 Nederveen, P. J. 16 Nelson, V. 38 neo-Marxism 16 neoclassical economics 13 neoliberalism 8, 10, 18, 20, 22, 24, 30 neologism 11 networking 14, 24, 39 neurological pluralism 115 neurotypical culture 24, 26, 29, 48, 111, 113, 114, 115, 135, 141 Newschaffer, C. J. 108 Noel, Roden 48 non-hybrids anthropology of 31–2, 33–4, 41, 45, 140–3 clogs in the anthropological machine 31, 32, 33, 125 conceptual boundaries 136, 143 external governmentality of 24 non-hybridization, point of occurrence 47 non-translatable 7, 45 otherness 12, 92, 142 postmodern repugnance towards 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 19, 28, 32, 46, 92 raw materiality 27 silencing of 131, 133 social construction of 3, 21, 28 social impasse 7, 12, 19 staging and grading 2, 4, 20, 29–30, 133 transitory nature of 139

see also autism; fundamentalism; Holocaust; old age; pain non-native anthropology 41 nonsensical, coming to terms with 131 Nussbaum, M. C. 138 Oberg, P. 56 O’Dell, L. 115 O’Donovan, O. 141, 142 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 72 old age 2, 3, 5, 26, 138 Alzheimerization of 50 conflation of illness and death with 26, 46, 48, 49 crisis of representation 66 as cultural construct 49, 56, 61 de-culturation of the old 5, 62, 68, 79 disengagement from society 54, 73, 89–90, 140 extra-cultural materiality 8, 51, 58, 73–5, 121 medicalization of 38, 64, 72, 89 normative social reaction to 54 old-as-other 8, 35, 54, 57, 60–4, 75 outcast old 121 and pain 115–16, 121, 122–3 pre-industrial settings 61–2 raw materiality of 58 “savage” old 35, 68 socially contrived category 8 staging and grading of 5, 26, 27, 50, 54, 78 subjective phenomenology of aging 49



Index

“wasted lives” 46 “wise old man” cliché 73 see also extreme old age (Fourth Age); Third Age old-age homes 24, 68, 76, 81, 135 online communication 26, 113–14, 141 orientalism 6, 36, 92 “the other within” 47, 61–2 otherness 1, 4, 21, 34, 39–40, 44, 57, 67, 68, 74 boundaries of 74 cultural construction 57 discursive evolution of 39–40 dissolution of 37 duality of 32–3 illegitimate otherness 40, 74 non-hybrid otherness 12, 92, 142 in the postmodernist phase 39 socially constructed others 36, 57 subversive “other” 22 temporary others 33 see also savage “other” “over-humanizing” 100, 101 Padden, C. 114, 141 pain 3, 6, 24, 26, 91, 115–30, 143 barbarism of 116, 117, 119, 120, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130 as being-in-the-world 123, 126 cultural assimilation of 120 as cultural sign 120 and dementia 126–7

175

duality of 129–30 emotional pain 124 extra-cultural force 116, 120, 123 grading and staging 27, 125 mark of pain 118–19, 125–6 misinterpretation 127 mitigation of 116, 117, 118, 123, 124, 127, 128 modern aversion to 116–17 old age and 115–16, 125–30 pain–dignity relationship 116, 123–4 radical otherness 116, 117 social relatedness 119, 123 and social stigma 128–9 subjectivity of 6, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125 surviving pain 124–5 Palgi, Y. 103 Palmore, E. 64 Parens, E. 25 Parsons, T. 27 participant observation 70, 142 patient self-advocacy 140 Patterson, R. 101 Peirce, C. 117 pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) 6, 25, 110–11, 114, 139, 142 see also autism Phillipson, C. 52, 54 physical essences 21 pidginization 2, 13 Porat, D. 103, 106 post-structuralism 71 postcolonialism 4, 16, 17, 18, 22, 36, 40, 74

176

Index

postmodernism 2, 3, 4, 13, 18, 37, 39–40, 71 assimilation and networking 14 cultural ethos of fragmentation 39 hybrid culture of 3, 5, 14 postmodern relativism 8 Powell, J. L. 61 pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) 100–1 pre-industrial settings, the elderly in 61–2 pre-logical mentalities 34–5 pregnancy, medicalization of 28–9 prenatal diagnosis 24, 25 primitivism 63 Prince-Hughes, D. 114 prison camps 24 Providence (film) 130 psychogenesis 123 purification, work of 7 quiddity 2, 21, 97, 98, 99 Rabinow, P. 30, 31, 33, 79 racial purity 16 racial separation 44, 55 racism 6, 35, 93 rationality 30, 79 Raz, A. 58, 63, 66, 101, 103, 106, 140n re-culturation of aliens 37 rehumanization 139 Reich, A. 104 relativism 7, 8, 12, 62, 72 absolute 36 anthropological 58 cultural 35–6, 66, 67 epistemological 40 postmodern 8 Remennick, L. 24

representation, power relations underpinning 132 repro-genetics 24, 101 reproductive autonomy 24 Resnais, A. 130 resonant silences 142–3 responsibilization 23 Rettig, K. D. 95n ritual and drama 65 Ritzer, G. 10, 108 Rosaldo, R. 40, 66 Rose, N. 23, 27, 61 Rosman, A. 41, 68 Rubel, P. G. 41, 68 Rushdie, S. 18 Ryff, C. 75 Sacks, O. 107 Said, E. 6, 36, 47–8, 63, 92 Sankar, A. 84 savage “other” 12, 14, 15, 19, 30, 31, 32, 34–5, 36 biopolitical somatization of 42 essentialist view of 34, 35, 36 homo sacer 43, 99 and social evolution 34, 35 social quarantine 12, 43 taming of 12, 35, 43 Savishinsky, J. J. 61, 63n, 67 scaffolding 113, 142 Scarry, E. 128 Schicktanz, S. 140n Schweitzer, Albert 118–19, 125–6 Scordas, T. J. 42 Segev, T. 103, 104, 106 selective abortion 24, 25 self and body discourses 54–5, 59 selfless age 46, 55



selfless corporealities 41 senility 50, 61 see also dementia September 11 2001 terrorist attacks 91 sexism 35 Shafir, G. 6 Sharf, R. H. 134–5 Sheleff, L. S. 69 Shenk, D. 63n Shield, R. R. 64, 67, 81–2 Shoah-business 96–101 sick role 27 Silver, B. S. 52 Simic, A. 62 Simmel, G. 2 Simmons, L. 61–2 simulations 39 Singer, B. 75 Singer, J. 113 Singer, P. 18, 109 Sivan, E. 106 Sklair, L. 16 Smith, J. 78, 83 social death 47, 49, 84, 128 social evolution 35 social flow 20 social impasse 2, 7, 12, 19 social invisibility 38, 121, 125 social masking 24, 38, 49, 59, 60, 125 sociobiology 31 sociogenesis 123 sociolinguistics 11 special education institutions 24 species-dependent morality 109 Spivak, G. C. 74 staging and grading 2, 11, 20, 21, 25, 27, 28, 29, 102, 105–6, 133 standardization 13 Steiner, F. 2

Index

177

stereotyping and labeling 20, 49, 51, 59, 102, 106 stigmata 129 stigmatizing 38, 125, 126, 128–9 Stoller, P. 32, 72, 88 Strathern, M. 34 Street, B. V. 35 Strong, P. T. 16 Subaltern, the 16, 36, 143 subjectification 23, 31 subjectivity 6, 8, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 133, 136 suffering 117, 128, 129 social construction of 128 see also pain Swidler, A. 79 symbolic exchange in interaction 41 synesthesia 112 Sznaider, N. 96n taboo 1, 2, 12, 18, 38, 53, 61 Tambiah, S. J. 30 Taussig, M. 65, 74, 89 Taylor, J. 52 temporary others 33 territories of unknowability 138 Tevenot, L. 79 therapeutic discourse 14, 80–1, 96, 116–17, 124 thing-in-itself 33 Third Age 5, 8, 26, 64–9, 74–6 anti-aging enterprise 5, 26, 58–9, 60, 74, 76, 121 cultural construction 75 dread of Fourth Age 68, 74, 76–7, 81 inter-age hybridism 74, 76 liminal geography of 76 second adulthood 74

178

Index

Third Age (cont.) Third World discourse and 65 “third space” 4, 17, 19, 20, 22, 39, 77 timelessness in music and literature 47–8 Todd, N. 64 Tornstam, L. 62 tourism 11, 39 transgenders, legitimization of 18 transience of culture 78 translation 6, 7, 17, 30, 33, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 54, 140 autism and 113 Holocaust and 92, 93, 95, 102–7 miscarried 68–9 non-translatability 14, 24, 30, 47, 69, 77, 94 plausibility of 8 problems and limits of 29, 43, 45, 53, 133 staged 22 transsexuals 39 Triandafyllidou, A. 36 Trouillot, M.-R. 94 Tulle, E. 26, 87 Turnbull, C. 64n Turner, B. 29, 42, 56n Turner, V. 2 Tversky, A. 13 Twachtman-Cullen, D. 112 Twigg, J. 60 uncivilized spaces see extracultural spaces and materiality universals 34, 44, 62, 123 University of the Third Age 76, 81 Urry, J. 27, 65, 133

Valero-Garces, C. 41, 68 Valkenburg, G. 100 Van Gennep, A. 2 van Hooft, S. 118 Van Tassell, D. 72 Van Tassell, K. 72 Vesperi, M. 67 Vincent, J. 26, 54 Walter, T. 65 war on terror 6 Warsaw Ghetto uprising 103, 104 The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) 73 “wasted lives” 55, 133 Watkins, E. 97n Weindling, P. 101 White, H. 86–7 Wiesemann, C. 101 Wikan, U. 39 Williams, D. 109, 112 Wilson, R. 72 Winau, R. 101 Winch, P. 40 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 131 Woodward, K. 60 Woodward, M. 72 world system theories 16 Wuerth, A. 101 Yakira, E. 101 Young, R. 16, 17 Zertal, E. 105 Zerubavel, Y. 79, 88, 104, 110 Zionism 11, 103, 104, 105 Zola, I.K. 29 zombie metaphor 38–9, 137, 138 Zuckermann, G. 11

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