Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification 9781845458157

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Human Nature as Capacity

Methodology and History in Anthropology General Editor: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford Volume 1

Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute Edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen Volume 2

Franz Baerman Steiner: Selected Writings Volume I: Taboo, Truth and Religion. Franz B. Steiner Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 3

Franz Baerman Steiner: Selected Writings Volume II: Orientalism, Value, and Civilisation. Franz B. Steiner Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 4

The Problem of Context: Perspectives from Social Anthropology and Elsewhere Edited by Roy Dilley Volume 5

Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach By Timothy Jenkins Volume 6

Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s Edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch Volume 7

Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research Edited by Paul Dresch, Wendy James and David Parkin Volume 8

Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on the Social By N.J. Allen Volume 9

Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition By Robert Parkin Volume 10

Categories of Self: Louis Dumont’s Theory of the Individual By André Celtel

Volume 11

Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects By Michael Jackson Volume 12

An Introduction to Two Theories of Social Anthropology: Descent Groups and Marriage Alliance By Louis Dumont Edited and Translated by Robert Parkin Volume 13

Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau By Henrik Vigh Volume 14

The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice Edited by J. Solway Volume 15

A History of Oxford Anthropology Edited by Peter Rivière Volume 16

Holistic Anthropology: Emergence and Convergence Edited by David Parkin and Stanley Ulijaszek Volume 17

Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches Edited by David Berliner and Ramon Sarrò Volume 18

Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning Edited by Mark Harris Volume 19

Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology By David Mills Volume 20

Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification Edited by Nigel Rapport

Human Nature as Capacity Transcending Discourse and Classification

Edited by Nigel Rapport

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2010 Nigel Rapport All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Human nature as capacity : transcending discourse and classification / Edited by Nigel Rapport. p. cm. -- (Methodology and history in anthropology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-637-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Anthropology--Philosophy. 2. Human behavior--Philosophy. I. Rapport, Nigel, 1956GN33.H94 2010 301.01--dc22 2010006440

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-1-84545-637-5 (hardback)

how we live measures our own nature Philip Larkin

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

List of Contributors

x

Introduction: Human Capacity as an Exceeding, a Going Beyond Nigel Rapport

1

Part I: Beyond the Economy Introduction to Part I Nigel Rapport

29

1. Conversations with Eulogio: On Migration and the Building of a Life-Project in Motion Nelson Ferguson

31

2. The Limits of Liminality: Capacities for Change and Transition among Student Travellers Vered Amit

54

Part II: Beyond the Polity Introduction to Part II Nigel Rapport

75

3. ‘Crisis’: On the Limits of European Integration and Identity in Northern Ireland Thomas M.Wilson

77

4. Making the Cosmopolitan Plea: Harold Oram’s International 101 Fund-raising in the Early Cold War Laura Suski Part III: Beyond the Classificatory Introduction to Part III Nigel Rapport

127

5. Money, Materiality and Imagination: Life on the Other Side of Value Andrew Irving

130

viii

6. Acts of Entification: The Emergence of Thinghood in Social Life Tord Larsen

Contents

154

Part IV: Beyond the Body Introduction to Part IV Nigel Rapport

179

7. Embodied Cognition, Communication and the Making of Place and Identity: Reflections on Fieldwork with Masons Trevor H.J. Marchand

182

8. ‘Live in Fragments no Longer’: Social Dance and Individual 207 Imagination in Human Nature Jonathan Skinner Index

231

LIST OF Illustrations

1.1. 1.2. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5. 5.6. 5.7. 5.8. 5.9. 8.1. 8.2.

‘Working the fields away from home …’ ‘… and working the fields at home’ ‘My name is Denis Bete’ ‘How did we used to spend Christmas when our dad was alive?’ ‘Ahh, Diana. What are you cooking?’ ‘The other house was better, self-contained’ ‘This is the house where we used to live when our Daddy was living’ ‘You can see Denis is very tired’ ‘You know here in Africa we women we have to follow orders’ ‘If it is true Daddy is under the ground, watching us, he is crying’ ‘Where did you get the strength to go and have that HIV test?’ ‘In Guantanamo Bay’ ‘Same Sex Dancing World Championships, Nijmegen 2007’

31 46 139 140 140 141 142 142 143 144 145 207 208

List of Contributors

Vered Amit is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal. Nelson Ferguson has been a Fellow of the Concordia Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, Montreal, and is now a member of the Department of Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto. Andrew Irving is RCUK Fellow and a member of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, Manchester University. Tord Larsen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Trevor Marchand is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies, and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, at the University of St Andrews. Jonathan Skinner is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of History and Anthropology, Queens University, Belfast. Laura Suski is Instructor in the Department of Sociology at Vancouver Island University, British Columbia. Thomas Wilson is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Binghamton.

Introduction

Human Capacity as an Exceeding, a Going Beyond Nigel Rapport

The Nature of the Human The issue of human nature, what it is to be human, has been the central enterprise of an ‘anthropological’ science – nominally, at least – since Immanuel Kant’s (1996) first, modern formulation of the disciplinary endeavour in the late 1700s. At the same time it has been argued that in ‘human nature’ anthropology conjures with a concept compromised beyond redemption by its essentialistic, hierarchical and exclusionary history: its role in an imperialism of male over female, adult over child, advanced over primitive, Occidental over Oriental, rational over emotional, and conscientious over brutish, as representative of the essentially human. Others again would contend that its very unscrupulous usage, its ubiquity, makes the concept of ‘human nature’ necessary for anthropology to unpack, if not rehabilitate. Indeed, the impurity of the concept is perhaps an additional attraction: a fitting conceptualization for a human condition equally ‘impure’ in its complex amalgams of objectivity and subjectivity, knowledge and desire, science, morality and taste. Recently Maurice Bloch called for a rehabilitation of ‘human nature’ whose study represents anthropology’s ‘ultimate aim’ and ‘core concern’, its ‘anchor’ and its ‘centre’ (2005). The position adopted by the present volume is that the term deployed is not the fundamental issue. ‘We are all human’, Ernest Gellner urged shortly before his death (1993:3), and we should not take any ‘more specific classifications seriously’. Robin Fox (2005:7)



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has recently claimed a ‘nature/nurture’ dialectic as fundamental to an anthropological project and as remaining unresolved (2005:7). Marilyn Strathern (1980) has seen sense only in recognizing the simultaneity of ‘nature–culture’, with no possible either/or. The ‘cosmopolitan’ is a term to which a number of contributors to this volume turn, recalling Kant’s projection of inextricable links between human being in its local diversity (polis) and its global commonality (cosmos): the cosmopolitan was the general human being, ‘Everyman’, identifiable at once as possessing immediate, everyday attachments and as not limited or overwritten by these. More important than the particular term employed is the intent to address the generality of the issue of what it is to be human, the singularity of the phenomenon. An alternative title to the volume might be: ‘Claiming the Human: Anthropological Reflections upon a Complex, Cosmopolitan Singularity’. The core thesis of the volume is that anthropology apprehends the human as a complex singularity not on the basis of the substance of a human nature – ‘To be human is to be like this, to want this, to have this’ – but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, say, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. A focus on capacities rather than substance provides a way to bring the nature of the human again to the centre of anthropological deliberation without revisiting the culs-de-sac that some have felt arguments over the proportionate mix of nature as against nurture came to represent. One could frame the approach as follows: There is an intrinsic openness to animal life. The animal’s nervous system translates into the organism being at the centre of a two-way traffic of information and energy constantly crossing the integument of the skin. An organism is not made distinctive by the existence of a boundary, a skin, animal physiologist Scott Turner explains (2000), but by way of what its boundary does: exert an active, ‘adaptive’ control over the flows of matter and energy such that the organism’s internal state is regulated in the face of changing external conditions. More than this, regulating the flows of energy and matter across its boundary effects an ‘orderliness’ in nature such that the generating organisms may be described as ‘architects and engineers of their environments’ (Turner 2000:7; cf. Rapport 2003:220–6). To be human is to have the capacity to attend to the world in a particular way: to direct that traffic and have it directed with unique subtlety, complexity and flexibility. Beyond the animal necessity to be-in-the-world in specific ways is a human capability, and liability, to create diverse possibilities of attentiveness and to suffer diverse constraints. Human beings have unique capacities to become: they can be uniquely fulfilled and thwarted. A focus on capacities turns the anthropological attention to action and the ethnographic: to activities witnessed in the field and an intuiting of their causes and meanings. The volume comprises eight

Introduction 

contributions from anthropologists approaching the question of the human from the perspective of their various fieldworks. Questions of human being, becoming, and the origins of difference are, as David Parkin observes (1987), a universal component of the ethnographic record. In Maurice Bloch’s terms (2005:3), the question ‘What are human beings like?’ is universally asked, irrespective of cultural tradition, knowledge practices, intellectual school or educational attainment. If the present volume is to accede to abstractions concerning the singularity of ‘the human’, then it will be from a position of anthropological expertise and strength: amid a sense of the complexity and contingency of social interaction. Terms for human capability and liability such as ‘imagination’, ‘action’, ‘learning’, ‘suffering’, humiliation’ and ‘pain’ may avoid becoming reductive in the context of rich ethnography. The intuition or working assumption of the volume is that the human reveals itself as a kind of going beyond. Anthropologists most readily witness the human in a ubiquitous capacity to treat ironically a boundedness to identity: to go beyond present circumstances of being, their lineaments and seeming limits; to go beyond the categorial features of symbolic classifications – the boundaries between things and relations – that human beings at the same time invent so adeptly and defend so vehemently. The volume is structured, therefore, in terms of pairs of chapters, each of which interrogate one kind of going beyond: beyond the cultural community (economy and polity), beyond the classificatory system, beyond finite embodiment. On what occasions do these different kinds of going beyond become visible? To what particular human capabilities do goings beyond attest? To what do the varied and routine acts of ironical transgression or digression make us liable? Clifford Geertz has described as anthropology’s ‘recurrent dilemma’ the question of how to square the generic human rationality and the biological unity of humankind with the great natural variation of cultural forms. Witnessing the capabilities and the liabilities of a human going beyond the particularities of current categories of identity is a way for anthropology to claim the human as a complex singularity: the discipline’s unique insight into the nature of human being and the crucial lever of an anthropological science.

Being Humans In his collection Being Humans (2000), Neil Roughley allowed for an approach to human nature by way of plurality – ‘humans’ – and transitivity – ‘being’. He thus pointed the way towards a conceptualizing of human nature as a lived quality, and a capacity. Our nature



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includes, inter alia, the capacity to be open to the world, cosmopolitan – to transcend one’s self, place and time; also the capacity to make spatial sense of specific environments; also the capacity to understand the norms and constitute the cultures of particular places; also the capacity to satisfy one’s desires for an autonomy necessary to uphold the values one has set oneself and to avoid loss of self-esteem; also the capacity to gain interpretive insight into others’ aims and beliefs; also the capacity for communication and intuition; also the capacity to appreciate reciprocity and mutuality, symmetry, clarity and smoothness; also the capacity for hope and projection; and so on. If our nature is a plethora of capacities, an excessiveness, an overriding capacity to be open to the world and go beyond what it is made out to be at present, then, in the words of the poet, Philip Larkin, ‘how we live measures our own nature’ (1990:103). Our circumstance is a manifestation of our nature. We make our circumstance according to the particular deployment of our capacities. The variousness and changeability of our circumstances, their specificity and idiosyncrasy, make manifest our capacity to remain open to the world, and to attend to it in ways that reflect a deliberate and flexible intentionality (cf. Rapport 2003). One is led in the direction of considering a lived human nature as complex and impure, transitive and individual, by the work of Ernest Becker. Human being has no essence, Becker begins in The Denial of Death (1997), but it has an existential dilemma. The essence of human being is a paradox: being half animal and half symbolic. Human beings are creatures with names and life histories; creators with soaring minds, able to contemplate atoms and infinity, able ironically, imaginatively to consider themselves and their history and their planet from outside. Our dexterity, self-consciousness, ethereality afford us a god-like, transcendental capacity. At the same time we are food for worms, hopelessly embodied, bearing the evolutionary marks of single-cell organisms and fish. We are aware, moreover, that we stick out of nature with a unique, towering majesty. Our material casing is alien to us in many ways. It aches and bleeds and will decay and die and disappear forever; and yet it pleasures us physically, sexually, even scatalogically. We are split: individuality within finitude; transcendentalism amid morbidity (even the new-born, as Montaigne observed,1 is old enough to die). Where are we really? Lower animals, it seems, are spared this terrifying dilemma, this painful contradiction. They lack our self-consciousness and the symbolic means to project and express this. To have to live a lifetime haunted by bodily waste, fallibility, decay and death is uniquely human: a human constant.2 Body and self can never be reconciled seamlessly, Becker concludes. But to grow up and develop characters, as individuals, to develop cultural traditions, as societies, is temporarily, perhaps necessarily,

Introduction 

to repress the realization. The individual and the society succeeds in concealing a recognition of the intrinsically complex and split and transitive nature of human being. The realization throbs in dream and myth, nevertheless, in outbursts of madness and genius: a form of scar tissue. Everyday, ‘commonsensical’ character traits and culture traits are ‘secret psychoses’, in Sandor Ferenczi’s words: pyrrhic victories over our contradictory nature (cited in Becker 1997:27). What might anthropology say to this? Typically, that Becker’s universal thesis is itself culture-specific. That embodiment and conceptualization, notions of death and dilemma are social facts, culturally and historically specific. What would it be, however, not to be satisfied with the typical response and to wish to frame something more supra-cultural, cosmopolitan, to do with the existential domain of the universal–individual human actor? To accept that the capacity to know and to deny finitude, death and decay, for instance, are human capacities: human capacities which transcend cultural particularities; instantiation of a sameness over and against our inhabiting different cultural worlds? What does our being humans come to look like in a ‘post-cultural’ dispensation which confronts the common ‘embodiedness’ of an individual human being-in-the-world (Jackson 1989:135), beyond cultural-classificatory diversity and social history. Here is culture re-drawn not as the foundation or final cause of social life but as a synthetic medium, an idiom: a means of individual comings-together and exchange, a kind of surface or social skin. It is also the skein left behind from past efforts at meeting and sharing (and distancing) between particular interactants, the formal residue of acts of individual meaning-making, a skein always in the process of being sloughed off and re-worked, given new form and new meaning in particular situations (Rapport 1997a:30– 42). The cultural, in short, is one avenue – poetic, dramatic, rhetorical – by which individuals might hope to represent, to themselves and to others, features of their common human bodiliness – such as their intrinsic contradictoriness and contrariety. The ambiguity at the heart of all social existence concerns the indeterminate relationship between the flux of individual life and the seemingly frozen forms of ongoing cultural tradition. The personal is never translated fully into the social (Rapport 1993). No cultural discourse does more than create the practical illusion of fusion and balance between personal and interpersonal life-worlds. In this individuality of experience exists, paradoxically, a universality to our being humans, a singularity of condition over and above proximal differentiations of culture and society, nation, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and locale. Becker starts us in this direction – of contextualizing culture as one, particular modality of the existential – when he suggests that, ‘everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt



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to deny and overcome his grotesque fate [to deny death]’; that all cultural expression is, in some basic part, ‘a fabricated protest against natural reality, a denial of the truth of the human condition, and an attempt to forget the pathetic creature that man is’ (1997:33). We are taken further in this direction by an anthropology that admits of deliberate ‘existential’ or ‘phenomenological’ concerns. The question of being is universal, Michael Jackson observes (2005), only its symbolic expression differs, and it is properly the starting-point of an attempt to explore and compare human life-worlds. He continues: Albeit that individuality may be played down in the milieux where anthropologists often work, that identity and responsibility are taken to be primarily matters of community belonging, that meaning and fate are supernaturally lodged – these local, ‘cultural’ practices and habits of mind are not ontologies. Existence does not reduce to category terms, whether ‘society’ or ‘culture’, or ‘individual’, or ‘belonging’, ‘relationship’, ‘habitus’, ‘structure’, ‘ideology’, and these terms cannot be made foundational to a theory of human being. These terms are themselves rhetorical devices: some of the symbolical vehicles by which human beings have designated some of the modalities of their experience and sought solutions to the issue of existence; the terms have meanings inextricably connected to the experiences of individual subjects. Culture, race, tribe, nation, cosmos … such terms are instances of an intersubjective discourse that has in countless places and times reflected a human-individual struggle between contending imperatives: between being an actor and being acted upon; between furnishing the wherewithal of life through one’s own efforts and through one’s memberships; between a search for pure self and a search for belonging, for being through others; between being at home in the world through everyday attachments and through distant hopes. One possesses a fluid consciousness which oscillates between solitude and sociality, speech and silence, reflection and habit, aimlessness and purposiveness, bodiliness and cerebralism, passion and calm; between illness and health, the past and the present, futurity and limitation (Rapport 2005a). Society, Culture, Structure, Habitus or History, as isomorphs of the fluxional world, are illusions, forms of wishful thinking, with an indeterminate relationship to the lived experience they purport to concern. Human experience is not so systematized, but characterized by a ‘going beyond’: beyond structures, situations, statuses, roles, patterns, substances and things, in a constant becoming. It surpasses the environmental givenness in which it arises. This is not to downplay the dialectical nature of human experience, Jackson stresses (1989:1–18). Capacities for openness, and going beyond, operate in contexts that might be variably closed and constraining, and manifest themselves in a variety of ways of beingin-the-world. One protests against closure, constraint, limitation; one

Introduction 

seeks out and chooses bonds; one elects to acquiesce to custom and move with the collectivity; one strikes a balance between the freedom of autonomy and the isolation of anonymity. To do analytical justice to the human capacity is to do equal descriptive justice to this diversity of modes of being, of fashioning human life – including the ‘openingup’ of individuality to collectivity, of personal being to superordinate Being, of cosmopolitan connection to parochial insularity (cf. Jackson 2002:107–8). Important to insist on, is that here, too, are instances of intentionality and aspiration: the capacity to attend to the world so as to bring about new and particular states of affairs. ‘Everything decisive comes about “in spite of ”’, Nietzsche summed up (1979a:100), even as decisiveness is recognized as our common condition. If human practice is intrinsically decisive, going beyond the present in an extension of order (structure, habit, pattern) or of disorder (anti-structure, spontaneity, randomness) into the future, then there is a diversity to how such capacity manifests itself at different moments. An ethnographic approach lends itself to an elaboration of the dialectic between practice and prior conditions: an illumination that what may be brought about is not circumscribable or pre-determined. There is an excessiveness intrinsic to the human.

Theories of Human Nature ‘[I]t is no exaggeration to say’, Leslie Stevenson writes (1981:79), ‘that the main theme of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been th[e] problem of the relationship between scientific and other understandings of human nature’; ‘how a complete physical explanation of the workings of our bodies could be reconciled with our view of ourselves as free agents, and as having distinctively mental powers of rational thought’ (1981:79). Philosophical arguments have swung back and forth between varieties of materialism and of dualism without resolution.3 To Rene Descartes’s assertion of a body subject to deterministic, mechanical causation as against a mind (an incorporated soul) free to deliver explicitly human attributes of thought and rationality, Baruch Spinoza could retort that mind and body were the same, merely conceived under the different attributes of thought and of extension (occupancy of space): mind had no power to act independent of bodily activity, and all human phenomena were capable of explanation by way of the deductive methods of mathematics based in natural law. To John Stuart Mill’s assertion that psychology could not be derived from physiology, that there were laws of the mind – causal laws linking introspectable mental states such as thought, emotion and sensation – which could not (yet) be derived from physiological laws, J.B. Watson retorted that



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all behaviour was a matter of stimulus and response; the psychological may appear private but it was in fact an outward, public, behavioural domain, and so-called intentional activities such as writing were as much a determined bodily movement as were automatic reflexes. To Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that there were material things possessed of a being-in-themselves as against consciousness which was a beingfor-itself and a freedom, an intentional capacity to change the world from nothingness, to believe, consider, desire, fear what is not the case, E.O. Wilson retorted that instinct could always be regarded as fundamentally causative … There has been a tendency in anthropology to hold ‘human nature’ in a certain disdain, as we have observed. No entries under that designation are to be found in its recent, professional ‘companions’ or dictionaries.4 If post-Enlightenment, Western philosophy had been caught on the horns of a dilemma, between varieties of dualism and materialism, then anthropology’s response, as a newer discipline, a younger and more radical discipline, has often been to seek to change the terms of the debate. ‘Context’ could be brought to bear on the old dichotomy, such that the figure that human nature represented derived from the ground in which it was situated (Dilley 1999). Given the inexorably reflexive nature of human knowledge, the way in which materiality was constantly being colonized anew by the sociocultural, anthropology could endeavour to demonstrate ‘third options’ between the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ model of the self-created mind and the ‘Romanticism’ of environmental absolutism (Gellner 1998:79, 182– 91). Anthropology could ‘go meta’: elucidate how it was subsequent upon human activity-in-the-world – an individual and original and changing phenomenon – that our nature, as organisms-amidenvironments, was decided (Rapport 2003:74–88). (It was likewise the case that twentieth-century philosophical voices latterly urged similar complexifying or ambiguating departures. Hence, between dualism and materialism could be insinuated ‘anomalous monism’ (Donald Donaldson): while every mental event may also be a physical event in the brain, this did not mean we need accede to strict psychophysical laws because the two vocabularies could remain irreducible. Or again, between ‘empirical-analytic’ (scientific) explanation and ‘historical-hermeneutic’ (psychological) understanding could be inserted a ‘critical’ social-scientific insight which deconstructed the conditions of our knowing or understanding something to be true to our natures (Juergen Habermas).) In perhaps three main ways, anthropology has sought to change the terms of a debate over human nature. The first is cultural relativism: ‘the anthropologist’s heresy’ (Williams 1978:34).5 Relativism, as Clifford Geertz more approvingly described it, has been a major source of anthropology’s ability to ‘disturb the intellectual peace’ in the

Introduction 

Western academy; through its relativism, anthropology has asserted the illusionary nature of objective, ‘pasteurized’ knowledge, and insisted that provincialism is a greater danger (epistemological as well as political) than spiritual entropy (2000:42–46). Through the lens of culture one espied the ‘set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) – for the governing of behavior’ (Geertz 1970:57). In other words, claiming culture as foundational, anthropology approached mind and body alike as social constructions, and knowledge practices as phenomena of symbolic exchange. Culture represented a totality of symbol-systems (religion, ideology, common sense, economics, sport) in terms of which people made their worlds: made sense of themselves and their world, and represented themselves to themselves and to others. The imposition of meaning on life was the major end and primary condition of human existence, and culture provided the patternings ‘of ’ and ‘for’ social practice. Knowledge was a matter of an encompassing, collective, public and shared cultural context; hence anthropology’s ‘outdoor psychology’ (Geertz 1983:151). Considering ‘the impact of the concept of Culture on the concept of Man’, Geertz concluded that while ‘becoming human is becoming individual’, we nevertheless ‘become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems of meaning in terms of which we give form, order, point and direction to our lives’ (1970:63). Representing a ‘manipulation of cultural forms’, of systems of symbols of collective possession, public authority and social exchange, human thought was ‘out in the world’ (Geertz 1983:151). The symbolic logic of thought, and the formal conceptual structuring, may not be explicit, but they were socially established, sustained and legitimized. Affording meaning to the world was not something that happened in private, in insular individual heads, but something dependent on an exchange of common symbols whose ‘natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square’ (Geertz 1970:57). Meaning was something publicly enacted, tied to concrete social events and occasions, and expressive of a common social world. Hence, outdoor activities such as ploughing or peddling were as good examples of ‘individual thought’ as were closet experiences such as wishing or regretting: cognition, imagination, emotion, motivation, perception and memory were directly social affairs. A cultural anthropology insisted on human life as a matter of plein air proceedings, public, organized and collective: all always live in worlds of ‘group efforts, group clashes, and group commitments’ (Geertz 2000:44,164). Culture, society, psyche and organism should not be considered separate levels of being, Geertz concluded: one did not adhere to a stratigraphic conception of human nature. The human brain may subsist in individual heads, but ‘cabbages, kings

10

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and a number of things’ – including mind – existed outside it (Geertz 2000:204). Anthropology was not unique in its turn to relativism. Both Geertz and E.E. Evans-Pritchard drew heavily on the (revolutionary) ordinary-language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1978). Geertz was happy to acknowledge Wittgenstein as his ‘master’ (2000:xi), for the way in which he turned human knowledge into a language-game: not something accumulative but a series of positionings with regard to an assortment of ends. Evans-Pritchard adverted to Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘form of life’ famously to argue that people could not but think within the rubrics of their own cultural logic and the limits this set; the Azande affirmed witchcraft beliefs and practices which challenged the limits of Western rationality because this was all they could know: the rest was silence, or chaos (1976). Cultural relativism brought anthropology to possess a new kind of claim on human nature: ‘if one sees the behaviour of a living thing, one sees its soul’ (Wittgenstein 1978:#357). To be human was to behave under the aegis of particular, cultural forms of life. Similarly swimming in the currents of more radical ideas, this time the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, led to a second way in which anthropology found it could change the terms of a debate over human nature: an emphasis on relatedness. ‘[T]hings are epiphenomena of the relations between them’, asserted Gregory Bateson and Juergen Ruesch (1951:173), their nature deriving from the manner and moment of the relationship. The individual human organism, the human society and the larger ecosystem are, Bateson elaborated, but three levels of one cybernetic or homeostatic system: complex assemblages of interrelated parts that depend on internal feedback loops of communication to maintain certain truths about themselves. The elemental cybernetic insight is that to comprehend anything in human behaviour is always to deal with total circuits. ‘Mind’ itself can only be synonymous with cybernetic system: the total ‘informationprocessing, trial-and-error completing unit’ in which humanity dwells (Bateson 1980:434). When Marilyn Strathern (1990) employed the ‘cyborg’ – parthuman, part-machine; part-body, part-tool; part-self, part-other (the Six Million Dollar Man; the Cybermen; Robocop) – as a paradigmatic figure, she did so in order to overcome the false mathematic of seeing entities either as a series of discrete atoms or as parts of a monolithic, static whole. It was necessary to appreciate ‘the relation’ in identity (Strathern 1995): the nature of things in the world was an effect elicited by the ongoing (circuiting) reciprocal relationship between social partners at a particular point in time and space. It was the ‘cultures of relatedness’ (Carsten 2000) between people, between people and objects, the networks of effects, which afforded things their natures.

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The relationality of identity should also alert us to the crucial role that positioning plays in nature, Tim Ingold adds (1992). There is an embeddedness to being, not a distinctiveness. Mind is not distinct from body, species is not distinct from species, the organic is not distinct from the inorganic, in any absolute sense. All is a view from somewhere, attending to something. Attention gives identity. Nature in an absolute sense is the whole in which all dwells, but more nearly the competency accrued by a particular positionality, relationality, to achieve an effect. Technology provides a paradigmatic case: it is a mistake to abstract and objectify the techniques we use in relating to the world, to make an object out of our making of objects and relations. What the Greek word techne should alert us to how a world is at once made and attended to by way of a certain ‘craftiness’, bodily skill, and practice. A ‘technologist’, then, is not someone who mechanically applies an objective system of rational principles and rules, but more properly a being wholly immersed in the complex nexus of an instrumental coping-in-the-world and dwelling-in-a-landscape. For Maurice Bloch this translates into a ‘functionalism’ which he defines as an anthropological ‘commitment to seeing culture as existing in the process of actual people’s lives, in specific places, as a part of the wider ecological process of life’ (2005:12). For functionalism ‘the mental exists in the practical, and both are conjoined functions of bodies’; ‘ideas, representations and values [are seen] as occurring in the natural world of action and transformation, of production and reproduction’ (2005:12). In this way Bloch would see anthropology steering a path between materialism and idealism, between nature and nurture (the innate and the socially constructed), between evolutionism and diffusionism. The former held that a determining innate nature necessarily leads Homo sapiens along a single path of progress, with a unilinear history and an optimal cognitive and moral evolution. The latter recognized that human progress was a matter of acquired traits. The accidental history of diffusing ideas, of cultural transmission and revolutionary communication, made people what they were; because human beings learned from each other, human culture proceeded along no predetermined evolutionary line. There could be no predictable laws of history or society because the history of contact was ‘an entangled, disordered, infinitely complex mess’ (Bloch 2005:6). But while evolutionism or naturism led to an essential materialism, diffusionism or constructivism ushered in a whimsical idealism which gave complete power to cultural traits and beliefs, symbols and discourses. What was called for was an approach – ‘epistemological monism’ – which united biology and history, people and the environment, in ‘an inseparable totality created by the particularisms of the specificity of human history and the properties of natural being in the natural world’ (Bloch 2005:13). In short,

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relationality, an emphasis on the relation, allowed anthropology the new kind of claim that human nature was a matter of situational connectivity. To be human was to come to consciousness and identity amid a network of exchanges, of social and physical engagements. A third way by which anthropology has sought to change the terms of a debate over human nature has derived from what might be called an aesthetic sense, shared with literary modernism. Virginia Woolf (1938) critiqued the writing of her literary contemporaries – H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett – for the way that ‘life escaped’. They wrote with plot, characterization, probability, filling pages in a customary way, but such materialism was trivial. Life was not like this: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? (Woolf 1938:149)

An ordinary mind on an ordinary day received a myriad of impressions: frivolous, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. They came from all sides, incessant, shaping themselves into different moments from before. To give testimony to this experience was not to write with plot in the manner of an order exteriorly imposed, but to write out of feeling (not convention). ‘It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses’ (Woolf 1978:82). In other words, the nature of human life was an aesthetic consideration (the meaning of the world was a function of taste (Friedrich Nietzsche), of how feeling was interwoven with perception), and an authentic accounting should attempt to do justice to its taste: Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. (Woolf 1938:149)

No method, no experiment should be forbidden; only falsity and pretence. Every feeling, thought – everything was the proper stuff of fiction. No perception came amiss; every quality of brain and spirit was to be drawn on. Translated into an anthropological idiom, one finds James Fernandez describing the struggle against the ‘fundamental solipsism’ of other lives (1985:749): it is impossible to share another’s experience, its

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inchoate nature. Nevertheless, anthropology should see as its main objective ‘phenomenological subjectivity’: providing testimony for the ‘sensorium’ in which other human minds are enmeshed (Fernandez 1992:127). One endeavours to register what it might be like to have conceptions by way of a particular, individual sensory apparatus operating from a particular point of view. To this end the anthropologist works, above all, against reducing ‘the materials of expressive culture’, the ‘tropical’, whether in his own account or others’ accounts of themselves. Talk of ‘nature’, natural analogies, metaphors, metonyms, the poetic, the ironic – these are some of the literary tools by which one hopes to make more concrete, graspable, resolvable the inchoate condition of individual-human experience. The literary – anthropology’s (and fiction’s) main expressive culture – may be regarded as a kind of hypothesis brought to bear on inchoate subjects: a means by which to attempt to grasp the circumstances and selves of significant others. Being free, open, expansive, in his tropic endeavours, the anthropologist may hope to do justice to the ‘very rich sense of reality’ delivered to him by the character of fieldwork (Fernandez 1974:132). Michael Jackson concurs. The ‘personal and affective life’, he argues (1989:5), is not noise to be filtered out of an anthropological report. Experience is not reducible to objectivities. Conceptual orders, determinate structures, theoretical schemes, impersonal idioms – all external social patternings – are defences against our unsystematic experiences of social reality and its unmanageable flux. But orderly systems do not represent inherent orderliness in the world so much as instances of wishful thinking: consoling illusions in an instable world, neither accurate nor privileged. ‘Society’ and ‘culture’ may be properly regarded as ‘idioms or vehicles of intersubjective life, but not its foundation or final cause’: they have an indeterminate relationship to lived experience (Jackson 2002:125). ‘Society’, ‘community’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘culture’, and so on, are instances of intersubjective dialectic that have reflected the abiding human struggle to strike a balance between a wish for subjective autonomy and a fear of anonymity. The role of the anthropologist, according to Jackson, is to engage in edifying open-ended conversation with his data and to eschew the subjugating of lived experience: to avoid generalizations that deaden the essence of the lived-in purported underlying rules or overarching schemata, to welcome uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. The aim of the anthropologist should be to do justice to the lived complexity of experience, not reduce it to the conventional discursive idioms which commonly articulate it in social life. To this end what anthropology must endeavour to do is to annul the language of cultural essence, boundary and identity: pursue a pragmatist critique of culture so

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as to reveal ‘the issue of existence’: that endless experimentation concerning how the given world can be lived decisively, on one’s own terms (Jackson 2005). It is a form of inhumanity, Jackson concludes, to ‘elide the line that separates words and worlds, language and life’ (2002:115). The danger, the potential tyranny, of reification (collective nouns, identity terms, generalized category oppositions) is that it converts subjects of experience into objects of knowledge, ‘transmuting the open-endedness and ambiguity of lived experiences’ into something determinate, and false (2002:125). An appreciation of the richness, the ambiguity, complexity and flux of experience, in short, led anthropology to a distinct kind of claim on human nature: to be human was to practise an irreducible variousness both in terms of the drafts of self, other and world to which consciousness was home, and in terms of the routines though which self, other and world were addressed in everyday life. Relativism, relationality, ‘richness’ are three ways in which anthropology has added its own signature to the issue of human nature, its ontology and epistemology. The various contributions to this volume can probably be read under the dispensation of each of these paradigms, and likely more. It is under the last-mentioned, ‘richness’, that I personally have found it most appropriate to write in the past. The ‘diversities’ of personal world-view, the ‘contrarieties’ of individual interpretation, the ‘randomness’ of human consciousness, are some of the ways I have sought to draw attention to the rich nature of our experience, and our capacities for coming to terms with self, other and world – for deciding terms (Rapport 1993, 1997b, 2001). It is under this dispensation, too, that I think it most fruitful to regard the contribution of this volume as a whole: as concerning the richness of human nature, its capacity for excessiveness, for ‘going beyond’. There is an excessiveness intrinsic to the human.

‘Man is a giddy thing’ For Georg Simmel, excess was a condition of modernity (1950:409– 24). There was an excessive amount of information and sensation available, of opportunity and choice, an excessive call upon resources; there was an excessive amount of difference and strangeness pressed together in new metropoles, of momentariness, an excessive possibility of differentiation and change. I would locate excess within the human condition as such, and suggest that modernity was a significant stage in the releasing of excess from repression: of human beings coming to a more open recognition of themselves.6 Following the liberal

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and secular revolutions of modernity, there was an emancipation of the human, our excessive nature, an allowance in social spaces and cultural domains of capacities for idiosyncrasy, invention and multiplicity hitherto hidden by the despotism of closed, religious and hierarchical world-views, as of deprivation, hunger and injustice. Modernity has seen freer rein being given to human capacities for difference: for circumventing the customary and making difference in the world, for being and becoming different to oneself.7 An anthropology of the modern is, as Gellner says (1995:8), a matter of working through ‘the social options of our affluent and disenchanted condition’: ‘the fruit of our liberation from want and tyranny’. I take this coming to terms with human excessiveness, modernity’s admission of the excessive to public expression, to be a reason for that celebrated nineteenth-century emphasis in literature and the arts, philosophy and science, on individualism: the individual epitomized an excessive irreducibility to human being. It is not, à la Foucault, the creation of Man as an individual subject that we witness in these various ‘disciplinary’ discourses so much as the varied appreciation of the complex nature of human individuality, now more truly evidencing itself: The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. … [W]hatever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter what name it is called. … All good things which exist are the fruits of originality. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty The individual is something quite new which creates new things, something absolute; all his acts are entirely his own. Ultimately, the individual derives the value of his acts from himself; because he has to interpret in a quite individual way even the words he has inherited. His interpretation of a formula at least is personal, even if he does not create a formula: as an interpreter he is still creative. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes) Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

This was not an absolutely new admission. But with the evolution of modernity, the recognition of human excess, its public avowal if not vaunting, and its epitomizing in the paradigmatic figure of the individual – unique, multiple, transitory – became at once a literary, moral and scientific project of central import.

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I will not forget the effect on me of hearing Benedick’s words towards the end of Much Ado About Nothing (I admit it was the film version of the Shakespeare play, with Richard Branagh and Emma Thompson): ‘man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion’ (Act V, sc. iii, l. 109). What had been encapsulated in these few words, admitted and embraced by Branagh’s character speaking of his own contrariness, was the nub of a thesis I had come to as a result of my anthropological fieldwork in a village setting in northern England, ‘Wanet’, trying to come to terms with the individualities of behaviour exhibited by the likes of Doris and Sid, Fred and Florence (Rapport 1993). The individual was a container of a diversity of possibly contradictory selves. These emanated from the ongoing creative drafting of self, other and world at which individuals did not stop working. Contradiction was a ubiquitous form of cognitive and practical excess: a conscious playing with, and denial of, identities and relationships; a multiplying of symbolic classifications at the same time as each was assumed true. The deployment of particular constructions of self, other and world – their being lived – occurred at the same time as it being contradictorily appreciated (and willed) that there were any number of other possible ways in which things might be things in human life. Doris, Sid, Fred and Florence et al. brought to life for me another nineteenth-century observation: ‘Everything is true; only the opposite is true too; you must believe both equally or be damned’ (Robert Louis Stevenson 1995:359). When exchange took place between individuals in Wanet – verbal or behavioural – even of mundane kinds in habitual relationships and in terms of a native tongue, it increased this diversity exponentially. Social life was the stage for an expression of the multiple and contradictory, the inconsistent, random and gratuitous. Social life was not about neat, mechanical models, about orderly systems, whatever may be the conventional usage of explicatory terms such as structure and function, synthesis and consensus, coercion and coherence; social life was complex and contrary, chaotic, farcical, polymorphous, a muddling through (cf. Rapport 1997b, 2001). A compelling recent exposition of this thesis comes from George Steiner in an autobiographical text of his own (1997). Human life, Steiner begins (in an echo of Becker), is quintessentially bounded by finitude: it is an homage to infirmity, limitation, illness and decay. And yet we witness a human nature whose life is pluralistic to excess: a body whose substance is ‘turbulent, vulnerable, incessantly changing, pathetic, risible, and infinitely moving’; a consciousness whose impulses are mixed and uneven to an extreme: complaisant, libidinous, inattentive, mediocre, wasteful, sensual (Steiner 1997:39,65). Language, above all, manifests the infinite resources of human being (the above list of English descriptors could be vastly extended), each one affording ‘a wealth of exact discrimination’, a density which

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is psychologically, socially and materially responsive. Language embodies the escape we have manufactured from the constraints of the mortal. Its extensive resources are a testament to how bearable and fruitful we have made our ephemeral human state. In language we define and safeguard our humanity, we hope, and we imagine the future. Language embodies our obsession with being in defiance of bodily mortality, pain and decrepitude (Steiner 1997:93ff.). Even language, however, with all its wealth of reference and discrimination (and with no two languages offering the same worldly inventory), still cannot come to terms with (do justice to, encompass) the human capacity for experience: ‘cannot substantiate the existential circumstance’ (Steiner 1997:6). The life-force that is human nature continues to give birth to such a ‘teeming diversity’ – purposes, artefacts, customs, concealments – that the detail, particularity, ‘quiddity’ of this creativity always exceeds the resources of language to represent. Humanity thus exceeds itself, exceeds its ability to define its own capacity for invention. There may be any number of systems of classification – discourses, paradigms, cultures – each tailored to human expression in a particular way, but still the diversity escapes. No inventory, no encyclopaedia, atlas or index, however compendious, could ever be complete or comprehensive. The throng of human existence, the thingness, the detail without end, is incommensurable with a systematic knowing: excessiveness obstinately, obdurately, resists. The necessary response, for Steiner, is indicated by his characteristically profligate style. It is art and poetry which pay proper respect to the ‘holiness of the minute particular’ (William Blake). In treating human nature, the social sciences and the humanities should offer ‘narratives of intuition’ reflective of their authors’ personal engagement. The turn to theory, to an abstract and purportedly systematic reading, represents a failure of nerve: theory outside the exact and applied sciences is ‘intuition grown impatient’; theory ‘cannot alter or communicate the life-force of individuation’ (Steiner 1997:6). Clearly there are overlaps in Steiner’s response and what we earlier heard from Virginia Woolf – as from James Fernandez and Michael Jackson. I understand him to be saying that the general truth of human nature is to be found in the abiding capacity to create new particularities: details and distinctions, things and relations. No hermeneutic is sufficient for the comprehension of this paradoxical truth (even one, such as the anthropologist’s ‘culture’, which purports to attend to difference). Indeed, no sooner has a hermeneutic been construed that it becomes redundant, an anachronism, the differences it exhibits tame and over-written. For a hermeneutic is a rearguard action: a matrix for containing what experience has already thrown

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up, describing symbolically a world already known. The capacity for going beyond is always at the fore, drafting quiddity afresh: it is experience’s van, outpacing the customariness, the conventional and cosy fixity, of intellectual modelling (cf. Rapport 2005a). New things are always being said and sayable, being done and doable, new ways in which the present can be meaningfully lived, the past and future imaginatively constructed. ‘Life’, in Woolf ’s memorable phrase (1938:148), ‘escapes’.8 Finally, we are enjoined, the study of human excess might endeavour to reflect that nature. The ethos and style of a human science should be to respect that capacity for engendering difference and not try vainly to reduce it (circumscribe, systematize, determine, predict). Any such ‘will to a system’, in Nietzsche’s summary judgment, displays ‘a lack of integrity’ (1979b:25). One celebrates difference, lets it be. In their seminal work on intentionality, Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl emphasized its transitive character: intention was always an addressing of a particular something beyond itself; one always intended vis-à-vis. This need not be taken to mean, however, that intention as a capacity cannot be distinguished from the occurrence of particular acts of intending. The nature, the power of intending is not limited by the sum of all the particular instances of intention on record. Intention as a capacity, one may argue, is distinct from what it intends. Intentionality is made visible by its intendings but it is not the same as them: it has its own nature. Man, one can claim, is an intending creature, and a human science can predictably set itself the task of pursuing particular acts to draw up a richer (though not necessarily systematic) portrayal of the underlying capacity. By the same token I would contend that the human capacity for excess is not limited to all the excessive acts it perpetrates. It is, in any case, impossible to comprehend these. The capacity for excess might be materially known by its substantives but it exists beyond them: it is, indeed, the means to go beyond: always to attend to the world gratuitously, in novel terms. Besides a celebration of the substantives that human capacity produces – the excessive differences – what more might a science of human nature endeavour to inscribe? This book is a beginning. The contributions to this volume tread a fine line; they celebrate ethnographic detail while also adverting to something beyond themselves: the trace of the general in the particular. The anthropology of human nature distinguishes between the substance of excess and the abiding capacity to go beyond, hoping through a fine-grained accounting of the substantial to accede to an insight into the capacitous. It is a challenging work. How might it even be prefigured?

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Georg Simmel offered the figure of Human Being as a ‘differentiating’ creature. The physical anthropologist, John Buettner-Janusch (1973), envisaged Human Being as the ‘symboling’ creature. From Johan Huizinga (1970) we have Homo ludens, Human Being ‘the player’, and from Karl Popper, Human Being ‘the problem-solver’. From the likes of Donna Haraway (1985) and Marilyn Strathern we have Human Being ‘the cyborg’. Arguably, all the above figures partake of a realization which goes back to Kant that human nature has a transcendental quality: humanity can gain leverage on itself, know itself as a self, and alter itself, to an extent, in a recursive, incremental fashion. ‘Human Being’ differentiates, symbolizes, plays, solves problems, acts upon the world by way of networks of mechanic extensions. The ‘excessive creature’ might be the figure offered by this volume: an oxymoron, in the spirit of pointing up what will always go beyond. The ‘excessive creature’ is a rewriting of a nineteenth-century figure (to which Simmel was also indebted): the ‘Overman’ of Nietzsche. ‘Man’, Nietzsche portrayed (1979c:#62) as ‘the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed’, also as ‘the questioning creature’. In the figure of the Overman, Nietzsche imagined the implications of a science of human nature whose knowledge was taken to heart. ‘Man’ would welcome the constant overcoming of himself by way of newness and excess. Instead of repressing knowledge of the paradoxes of the human condition (‘transcendence within finitude’ (Becker)), instead of the ‘psychoses’ of fixed character- or culture-traits (Ferenczi), ‘Man’ would affirm transition and becoming: Man would possess the psychic health to endeavour openly to make himself into what he can become – becoming the measure of himself. The Overman captures Nietzsche’s hope for a knowledgeable humanity (1979a:49): ‘My humanity is a continual self-overcoming’. Man is the creature who continually overcomes himself in living fully. One need not share Nietzsche’s value orientation to appreciate the aptness of his imagery. In the Overman is the fundamental human nature to go beyond, capacitated to effect a transcending of what is. The Overman is Everyman, this volume contends (‘Anyone’, better), whom anthropology might ethnographically illuminate in manifold acts of everyday becoming.

Envoi: Ethnographies of Human Capacity The book is in four parts. Each scrutinizes a different form of going beyond, interrogating the proposition that ‘the human’ exists beyond circumscribed notions of political structuration, of economic exchange, symbolic classification and embodiment.

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Part I of the book, ‘Beyond the Economy’, finds Mexican agricultural migrant labourer, Eulogio, on a Canadian fruit farm in Ontario: a part of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program instituted between Canadian, Mexican and Caribbean governments. In Nelson Ferguson’s ethnography, however, loyalty to life-projects of their own conceiving (including efforts at self-improvement and aims at familial security) place such actors beyond the bounds of merely economic relations and frameworks. Eulogio succeeds, at least in part, in overcoming the apparently alienating conditions of his low-status labour. Here too is Vered Amit’s ethnography of contemporary Canadian student travellers, encouraged to pursue the ‘cosmopolitan’ experience of working holidays abroad. Finding themselves between government departments, universities, housing agencies and labour markets, and beyond bureaucratic arrangements and programs, individual students evince capacities to make their way outside the national-economic arenas and agencies their experiences are expected to serve. Part II of the book, ‘Beyond the Polity’, finds voters in Northern Ireland refusing to operate by way of the terms prescribed them by national policies and politicians. In Thomas Wilson’s ethnography, inhabitants of Belfast and its hinterlands exhibit a capacity to construe identities beyond existing polities, both national and supranational. They locate themselves between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, as these might be simplistically formulated by policy makers for citizens to assume. Here too is Laura Suski’s account of the history of humanitarian appeals orchestrated by the American public-relations firm, The Oram Group. Focusing in particular on the firm’s founder, Harold Oram, the ethnography examines how notions of international injustice were formulated and communicated via appeal letters to elite social actors in a way that implied a moral bond of universal humanism but at the same time allowed for a selective practise of any ‘cosmopolitan’ impulse to help. Oram’s contributors operated in a complex moral space beyond particular polities and pure altruism alike. Part III of the book, ‘Beyond the Classificatory’, finds Andrew Irving comparing the plight of those suffering from HIV/AIDS in Kampala and the Western world. There is a knowledge of illness and death which exceeds any materiality of land and wealth, and yet it is within the classificatory schemata of geography and money that dramas of health and ill-health are often played out. By blurring the lines between ethnography, art and performance, however, Irving would demonstrate the power of imagination, and human capacities to enter into ironic dialogues concerning the links between bodies and surroundings. Everyday life with HIV/AIDS is continually mediated by imaginative performances, reverie and memory beyond categorical

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conventions; it may be an abiding irony that money is accorded more value than bodies, but it is within our imaginative capacity morally to transcend the material injustices. Here too is Tord Larsen’s reflection on the ubiquitous human proclivity to ‘entify’: to fill social spaces with ‘things’ – facts, forms, norms, institutions, habits and relations. In a wide-ranging ethnographic typology, however, where new things (‘night-eating’, ‘school-avoidance’ ‘Norwegian freshness’) are continually inserted into symbolic worlds, Larsen also chronicles the capacity and practice to supersede things. Entification concerns the human reinvention and going beyond any existing system of classification as well as the habitude and the structuration to which it can give rise. Part IV of the book, ‘Beyond the Body’, finds Trevor Marchand considering the knowledge possessed by stonemasons in Yemen, Nigeria and Mali. They are able both to know the cultural habits of constructing the environment according to norm-bound architectural designs, social relations and everyday performances, and to improvise upon these. To understand how stonemasons can both play the language-game of cultural reproduction and not be played by it, is to appreciate the body as a site where a non-propositional kind of knowledge is practised. It exists beyond the language faculty while yet taking the form of kinds of shared ‘behavioural utterances’. The stonemasons are able to undertake physical tasks in a coordinated, but not predetermined, manner which exceeds the bounds of bodily distinction. Here too is Jonathan Skinner’s account of the teaching and learning of ‘social dancing’: salsa, jive and ballroom, practised as a hobby by men and women in Belfast, Gothenburg and San Diego. The dance class is a site of new dance translations and fusion where individuals adopt and adapt dances to suit their imaginative needs. Indeed, it is the imagination that takes centre stage in the ethnography. In connecting with another body and another self on the dance-floor – an otherness which the individual finds within himself or herself as well as without – it is the imaginative capacity to transcend – to go beyond existing social and physical realities, even beyond possible realities – which is put into practice. Dance is the execution of individual imaginations, possibly ‘in sync’ with one another but not necessarily so. On the dance-floor, Skinner concludes, the body as a site where terms of gender and sexuality, class, nationality, modesty and beauty are ordinarily manifested is exceeded. Kant’s (1996) originary formulation of ‘anthropology’ as a science was at once an ontological, an epistemological and a moral-cumpolitical venture: the science could give on to a ‘cosmopolitan’ peace amid a community of humankind. Ethically, ‘humankind’ embodied an opposition to the ideology of an ancien regime which insisted on

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essential differences of nature and of worth between patrician and plebeian, man and woman, French and German, Christian and Jew. Scientifically, ‘humankind’ embodied a premise and a promise that a knowledge which transcended the despotism of the merely customary, commonsensical and revelatory was an appropriate goal. Reacting ‘romantically’ and conservatively against such notions, Kant’s philosophical successors such as Johann Herder and Joseph de Maistre declared there was no such thing to know as ‘humankind’, only Germans and French and so on: humans ensconced in communities of blood and soil. According to George Stocking (1992:347,361), the discipline of anthropology has been dialectically torn between ‘the universalism of “anthropos” and the diversitarianism of “ethnos”’ throughout its modern history. Are human beings to be regarded as the same insofar as they all inhabit different cultural worlds or over and against their inhabiting such worlds? Do they only become human within culture or does their humanity (consciousness, creativity, individuality, dignity) transcend cultural particularities? Ernest Gellner’s stand on the issue was customarily forthright. Even between ‘consenting adults’, classifying human beings in bounded social or cultural domains was a dangerous practice (1993:3), while the ideology of relativism – cognitive and moral – was tragic nonsense (1995:8). This Introduction sets the scene to a volume that hopes to be equally forthright in its claims for an ‘enlightened’ notion that ‘the human’ comprises a complex singularity – which might be better known, whose lot might be bettered, and whose existence is the guarantor of that very communitarian (sociocultural) diversity which mediates between the human and its superficial apprehension. One does not intend a master-trope or panacea, but the notion of human nature is workable for identifying a certain anthropological agenda: claiming a particular history and a future project. A Kantian anthropology remains extensively unwritten. Here is the ontological project of defining the human, its capacities and liabilities as universalities beyond the idioms of social, cultural and historical difference. Here is also the epistemological project of finding ways best to approach the human in its individual irreducibility, to apprehend the objectivity of subjectivity; and here is the moral-cum-political project of endeavouring to secure the human, to nurture the opportunities of individual expression above and beyond the contingencies of social, cultural and historical circumstance. Globalization, it can be argued, makes the singularity of the human more apparent (as well as more vehemently repressed). It makes a communitarian rhetoric of historically determined, collective and coercive cultural identities – and the related claim that individuals who exit such a collectively secured life-world must find themselves

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ontologically devastated, without social anchor or cognitive guarantee – more visible as ideology. The idea that selfhood is constituted and then limited by, forever tied to, particular cultural milieux, particular beliefs and practices, particular histories, habits and discourses, is refuted. The contributions to this volume differ in focal scale: from individual bodies to international institutions. What characterizes them alike is an ethnographic focus on the human capacity to exceed the limits by which identity is currently formulated in sociocultural milieux and to engender and suffer the gratuitous and new. The conundrum becomes to find ways to accede to a comparative anthropology which does not itself limit the conception of the human that is inscribed.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Andrew Irving and to Michael Jackson for reading drafts of this Introduction and for offering constructive commentaries, in particular on the works of Ernest Becker, of Sartre, Freud and Marx.

Notes 1. 2.

Cited in Steiner (1997:93). Becker (1997:69) cites Eric Fromm to the effect that awareness of the contradiction between the capacity for transcendence and morbidity represents an identifiable constant through the history of human mythology and social representation: a quasi essence. The Garden of Eden myth can be read, then, as a recognition of humanity’s union of opposites: a ‘fall’ into the self-consciousness of fallibility, the birth of ‘dread’ and ‘anxiety’ (Kierkegaard 1970), or of ‘nausea’ (Sartre 1967). Likewise the cultural anthropology thesis that there is no such thing as nature that is not already simultaneously culture. 3. I am indebted to Stevenson (1981) for this summation. 4. For instance, Seymour-Smith (1986), Ingold (1994), Levinson and Ember (1996), Barnard and Spencer (1996), Barfield (1997). 5. ‘[P]ossibly the most absurd view to have been advanced even in moral philosophy’, Bernard Williams opines (1978:34). 6. Simmel himself can be read in this way, describing multiplicity and manifoldness as going to the essence of man’s being (1991:15). 7. This depiction of the emancipatory quality of modernity owes to Karl Popper (1980). The open societies that grew up in the West after the Enlightenment, the secular and liberal democracies, allowed not only for a scientific exploration of the human but also for a possible alignment between social institutions and cultural mores on the one side and the potential capacities for individual responsibility, autonomy, creativity and fulfilment, on the other. This is not to say that modernity delivered a victory for an uninhibited expression of ‘human nature’, or that the latter was free from all manner of efforts, from the philanthropic to the fascistic and totalitarian, to channel or ‘improve’ it (cf. Rapport 2005b).

24 8.

Nigel Rapport Alternatively, in the words of Michel Henry (1993): ‘the watchword of this theoretical objectivism [which misrecognizes individual experience as an effect of language], whether it knows it or not, whether it likes it or not, is one which has been more explicitly formulated on a political level: Long Live Death!’.

References Barfield, T. (1997), The Dictionary of Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell). Barnard, A. and Spencer, J. (1996), Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (London: Routledge). Bateson, G. (1980), Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Glasgow: Fontana). Bateson, G. and Ruesch, J. (1951), Communication (New York: Norton). Becker, E. (1997), The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press). Bloch, M. (2005), ‘Where did anthropology go? Or: The need for “human nature”’, mimeographed lecture, London School of Economics, 24 February. Buettner-Janusch, J. (1973), Physical Anthropology (New York: Wiley). Carsten, J. (ed.) (2000), Cultures of Relatedness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dilley, R. (ed.) (1999), The Problem of Context (Oxford: Berghahn). Evans-Pritchard, E. (1976), Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Fernandez, J. (1974), ‘The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture’, Current Anthropology 15(2): 119-45. (1985), ‘Macrothought’, American Ethnologist 12(4): 749–57. (1992), ‘What it is like to be a Banzie: On sharing the experience of an Equatorial Microcosm’, in On Sharing Religious Experience, eds J. Gort, H. Vroom, R. Fernhout and A. Wessels (Amsterdam: Rodopi). Fox, R. (2005), ‘A Life in Anthropology’, Anthropology News, 7 January. Geertz, C. (1970), ‘The impact of the concept of Culture on the concept of Man’, in Man Makes Sense, eds E. Hammel and W. Simmons (Boston: Little, Brown). (1983), Local Knowledge (New York: Basic). (2000), Available Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Gellner, E. (1993), ‘The mightier pen? Edward Said and the double standards of inside-out colonialism’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 February: 3–4. (1995), ‘Anything goes: The carnival of cheap relativism which threatens to swamp the coming fin de millenaire’, Times Literary Supplement 4811: 6–8. (1998), Language and Solitude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Haraway, D. (1985), ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Socialist Review 80: 65–108. Henry, M. (1993), The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Huizinga, J. (1970), Homo Ludens (London: Paladin).

Introduction

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Ingold, T. (1992), ‘Technology, Language, Intelligence: A reconsideration of basic concepts’, in Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, eds K. Gibson and T. Ingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (ed.) (1994), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (London: Routledge). Jackson, M. (1989), Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). (1996), ‘Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique’, in Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology, ed. M. Jackson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). (2002), The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press). (2005), Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects (Oxford: Berghahn Books). Kant, I. (1996), Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press). Kierkegaard, S. (1970), The Concept of Dread (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Larkin, P. (1990), Collected Poems (London: Marvell/Faber). Levinson, D. and Ember, M. (1996), Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (New York: Holt). Mill, J.S. (1972), Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government (London: Dent). Nietzsche, F. (1968), The Will to Power (New York: Random House). (1979a), Ecce Homo (Harmondsworth: Penguin). (1979b), Twilight of the Idols (Harmondsworth: Penguin). (1979c), Beyond Good and Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Parkin, D. (1987) ‘How Useful is Anthropology?’, in Cultural Anthropology, eds E. Schultz and R. Lavenda (St Paul: West). Popper, K. (1980), The Open Society and its Enemies (Volumes 1 and 2) (London: Routledge). Rapport, N. (1993), Diverse World-Views in an English Village (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). (1997a), Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology (London: Routledge). (1997b), ‘The “Contrarieties” of Israel: An essay on the cognitive importance and the creative promise of both/and’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(4): 653–72. (2001), ‘Random Mind: Towards an Appreciation of Openness in Individual, Society and Anthropology’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 12(2): 190–220. (2003), I am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power (London: Routledge). (2005a), ‘Nietzsche’s Pendulum: Oscillations of Humankind’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 16(2): 1–17.

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(ed.) (2005b), Democracy, Science and The Open Society: A European Legacy? (Special Issue: Anthropological Journal on European Cultures 13). Roughley, N. (ed.) (2000), Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Berlin: de Gruyter). Sartre, J-P. (1967), Nausea (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Seymour-Smith, C. (1986), Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology (London: Macmillan). Shakespeare, W. (1998), Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Simmel, G. (1950), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press). (1991), Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). Steiner, G. (1997), Errata: An Examined Life (New Haven: Yale University Press). Stevenson, L. (1981), The Study of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Stevenson, R.L. (1995), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume V (eds B. Booth and E. Mehew) (New Haven: Yale University Press). Stocking, G. (1992), The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). Strathern, M. (1980), ‘No nature, no culture: The Hagen case’, in Nature, Culture, Gender, eds C. MacCormack and M. Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (1990), Partial Connections (Savage: Rowman‑Littlefield). (1995), The Relation (Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press). Turner, J.S. (2000), The Extended Organism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Whitman, W. (1950), Song of Myself (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Williams, B. (1978), Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wittgenstein, L. (1978), Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell). Woolf, V. (1938), The Common Reader (Penguin: Harmondsworth). (1978), Jacob’s Room (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich).

Part I Beyond the Economy

Introduction to Part I Nigel Rapport

The two essays in Part I describe human capacities that locate actors beyond the economy; both in the sense of providing an ethnographic fullness to individual lives that exceeds the narrow determinisms of Homo oeconomicus, and in the sense of charting a course to individual lives that sees them escaping the logic of any one economic system or set of relations. Here are Mexican migrants in Canada (Chapter 1) and Canadian students working abroad (Chapter 2) whose ‘liminality’, alike, cannot be construed, conscripted, as serving purely economic calls, whether of nation, family, sector or even global marketplace. An understanding of these actors must rather attend to capacities and practices of making sense that are more idiosyncratic, more contrary, even capricious; here is human sense-making as a thing-in-itself, as its own thing, not reducible to economic terms. In ‘The Limits of Liminality: Capacities for Change and Transition among Student Travellers’, Vered Amit describes the promotion, by a wide range of Canadian agencies, of international student and youth mobility as a crucial tool for succeeding in a global economy. The Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Student Work Abroad Program, the Youth Tourism Consortium of Canada, and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada urge students alike to gain knowledge of other cultures and understandings of the world – ‘a cosmopolitan world-view’ – as an economic asset: means to provide a competitive edge to individual careers and to make Canadian national economies more globally competitive. Youth travel (including university semesters abroad) increased exponentially during the 1990s, Amit explains, and now constitutes the fastest growing segment of the travel market, accounting for over 20 per cent of tourism worldwide. Drawing on her recent fieldwork, however, Amit depicts a mismatch between the rhetoric of national

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agencies and institutional programmes and the intentions and experience of individual youth. The latter emphasize opportunism, and an escape or interlude from regular routines, more than a route to enhanced ‘cosmopolitan capacity’ or ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ as leaders of a global Canadian economy. Furthermore sojourns are more improvised than systematic as individual travellers find themselves between national immigration systems, government departments, universities, student travel agencies, housing agencies and labour markets, and beyond bureaucratic arrangements, negotiations, and programmes. As they bump up against the contradictions and incomprehensions of different institutional, local and national systems, Amit emphasizes the ingenuity with which individual youth carve out their own ad hoc paths. The cosmopolitan capacities they evince in making their own way operate in contradistinction to, more than in alignment with, the national-economic arenas and agencies their experiences are expected to serve. Amit’s essay is preceded by Nelson Ferguson’s, ‘Conversations with Eulogio: On Migration and the Building of a Life-Project of Motion’. Labour migrants are seldom given the same economic and civil rights as permanent residents. It is a common critique that they come to be mere ‘second-class citizens’ in their receiving countries. This chapter examines the criticism and praise given to Canada’s ‘Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program’ (SAWP) and considers the relative benefits and deprivations which individuals experience while involved in cycles of migration. The chapter considers the differing sets of ethical standards that can be deployed for evaluating the conditions of migrant workers in Canada. In determining migrants’ purported (second-class) statuses, the relation of expectations and standards between the receiving country and country of origin must be addressed; more precisely, the migrants’ experience and intention, their instrumental practice, must be appreciated. The chapter frames the Mexican, male migrant on the Canadian farm as an individual actor who places his efforts at self-improvement and aims at familial security between the economies of his homeland and his Canadian place of work. His loyalties to either are overshadowed by a loyalty to the life-project of his own personal (financial, familial) ambitions. It is these that take him beyond any particular economic (also social and political) spaces, relations and frameworks. How is his going beyond conceived of, by himself and others – his family, his employers, the governments involved? How does he secure for himself that space – cognitive, emotional – from where the confidence to go beyond is capacitated? Ferguson offers answers by giving an account of the life of one individual Mexican farm worker in particular, Eulogio, in the daily grind of an Ontario tree farm and in the Mexican domestic arena he continues to imagine.

Chapter 1

Conversations with Eulogio: On Migration and the Building of a LifeProject in Motion Nelson Ferguson

Figure 1.1: ‘Working the fields away from home …’

Laying Out a Plan On the other side of the thin polyurethane walls, the breeze is cool and sweet. But here, inside the greenhouse, the air is hot, the humidity stifling. Eulogio and I have been working in this mounting heat for hours, yet what feels like an eternity still lies between now and our

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lunch break. We work in silence, placing one potted tree after another onto the wagon. Dirt and run-off from the irrigation system mingle with the sweat on our skin until we are both coated with salty mixtures of grime and muck. We struggle to grip the heavy pots, each one containing a young four-foot-tall maple tree. The pots, for their part, have no interest in making our task easier; they attempt to escape from our slippery hands whenever our concentration falters. Throughout this task, Eulogio’s usual sly grin and callous wit have been replaced with an austere expression on his wrinkled face along with a silenced tongue. Eulogio is a Mexican migrant worker in the middle of an eightmonth contract here at Groesbeck Farms – it is his twelfth year at Groesbeck’s and in Canada. He, along with twenty-two other men, works and lives on this farm as a participant of Canada’s guest-worker project, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program. While here on the farm, he and his co-workers tend the dozens of greenhouses and hundreds of acres of trees – Groesbeck Farms is in the business of growing decorative deciduous and evergreen trees to be sold wholesale to garden centres and landscapers. Myself, it is my second season here. I have been on the farm for nearly a month now, living in an on-site bunk-house with Eulogio and ten other men, while doing fieldwork for an ethnography on working in the fields. At work, Eulogio is also my supervisor and foreman, a task he carries out with the utmost strictness and rigour. Today, our crew has been assigned the job of moving several hundred potted Crimson Maples out of one of the greenhouses to a nearby field to clear space for new saplings. Eulogio has organized the team into a chain, with him and me in the greenhouse, loading the potted trees onto wagons, while Julio and Agusto are outside, in the cool breeze, unloading these wagons in the field. This organization of labour is far from happenstance, however. There has been some background gossiping around the farm criticizing Eulogio’s leadership of late, accusing him of abusing his foreman position by reserving easier sets of tasks for himself and bestowing harder jobs on other workers with less seniority. I suspect that he has become aware of this chatter, which would explain why he has assigned himself the least desirable chore in this chain of tasks. By giving the other workers the lighter jobs today, he is amassing some political goodwill for himself on the farm. I suppose he has placed me with him in the sweltering greenhouse since I am more socially expendable than his other co-workers – I will be here for barely three months more, while he may be living and working with other migrant workers like Goyo, Julio, and Agusto for years to come.

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Eulogio and I heave two final pots unto the flatbed, filling yet another wagon. Goyo still hasn’t arrived with the tractor for a pickup, while our wagon sits proudly in the greenhouse displaying seventy trees, neatly standing row by row in their plastic containers. This signals a small victory; it means that we are loading the wagons faster than Julio and Agusto can unload them in the field. Taking advantage of this unexpected reprieve, Eulogio fetches his thermos full of cold water from the nearby corner of the greenhouse, and, as he walks back, pulls a dirty handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the streams of sweat from his balding crown, tousling the remaining patches of black hair on the sides of his head in the process. He leans up against the wagon, stretches back his neck and lets out a long sigh. ‘Pinchee basura, este trabajo!’ (‘Fucking garbage, this work!’) Eulogio curses in Spanish,1 as he twists opens the nozzle of his thermos bottle, and spills some water on the floor before tilting back his head and pouring a stream of the cool liquid into his mouth. ‘But it’s alright …’ Eulogio looks me intently in the eyes, ‘… I talk to Hans yesterday, and he tells me that we’ll be back staking by Monday.’ I nod in agreement, while also noticing how Eulogio has positioned himself as the active agent in yesterday’s exchange with the owner of Groesbeck Farms, Hans. Although Eulogio has managed to learn a basic yet functional level of English in his twelve years in Canada, he, like the other workers here, rarely talk to the farm owner. More precisely, then, I imagine that Hans has given Eulogio an order in regards to next week’s tasks. And, regardless of this word play, like most of the workers, I too would rather be outside in the cool air, placing support rods or ‘stakes’ next to the young saplings planted out in the fields. Eulogio pours another stream of water into his mouth before he offers me a drink. ‘No, don’t put your fuckin’ lips on it!’ he chastises me just as I’m about to take a sip. I’ve neglected the technique the workers here have shown me for drinking. Pesticides and other airborne chemicals can accumulate on the outside of our water bottles. To take a drink and avoid bodily contact with these contagions, you must pour the water directly into your mouth rather than allowing the mouthpiece to touch your lips. There are still no telltale sounds of Goyo’s tractor in the distance, meaning that we can take advantage of our impromptu break for several more minutes. For a stretch of time, we simply stare off into the distance, letting the blood rush back into our tired limbs. Then, Eulogio pulls a crumpled cigarette pack from his back pocket, dexterously extracts a cigarette, pushes it between his lips and lights it with a single, fluid motion. His actions momentarily astonish me – I’ve

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come to know him as a severe and occasionally tyrannical taskmaster of a foreman, devotedly passionate towards the work and expecting a similar fervour from his subordinates. Taking a momentary waterbreak is one matter, but formalizing this unsanctioned pause through the smoking of a cigarette is unexpected behaviour for my co-worker and supervisor. After taking a drag, he offers me a smoke, which I accept along with feelings of nervousness and tinges of rebellion. I become an accomplice to this work-place transgression. Eulogio puffs his cigarette before he makes eye contact once more. ‘You know what, Nelson? I’m only doing two more years here, this year, and one more after that, and that’s it … I’m going to get Hans to let me leave a month early. I’ll be goin’ home at the end of October, not November. And I’m going to work my land.’ ‘Your land?’ Eulogio nods, and looks off into the distance. ‘Yeah, that’s right … My land. I got a lot back home, for broccoli. But, the thing is, I’m here, I don’t have any time to work it. I get back home in November … no, the beginning of December, and I’ve got to be back here in March … That’s what, that’s barely three months and then some… That’s not enough time to plant anything… Right now, I got a lot of land, my brothers, too. The ones that are home, they work the land, but it’s too much work for them, to do it all … A lot of that land, it’s just lying fallow, growing weeds and looking ugly.’ Eulogio puffs on his cigarette. ‘Good idea, yeah? What’d you think?’ At this point in my fieldwork, I am still not used to operating in my second language. I stop for a moment to translate Eulogio’s conversation in my head before forming my phrase in response. ‘Yeah, for sure… But … You think Hans will let you go early?’ ‘Humph … See, Nelson, it’s a slow time, here in November. And, yeah, well, if he doesn’t, maybe I’ll do what Max did. I’ll say, “You won’t let me go? Well, maybe next year I won’t come back” …’ Eulogio nods his head, and pauses to flick the ashes off his cigarette. ‘It’s my wife, too, you know. She doesn’t want me to keep coming back. She’s sick of it … She tells me, just this one more year, and that’s it! No more!’ I nod as Eulogio draws on his cigarette and blows a cloud of smoke. ‘And me too, I’m sick of it. It’s what, eleven years … No, twelve years, with this one, that I’ve been here. That’s enough … I don’t want to be a grandfather workin’ here, like fuckin’ old Pancho … I’ve been here long enough … I’ve taken care of my family … What do I need more money for?… And I got a bit saved, anyway …’ Eulogio shifts his position, rests his sweaty elbow on the wagon, looking triumphant as he finishes describing his plans.

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‘So that’s that, I’m going to go home, work my fields this year, plant the broccoli. My brother said he’ll harvest it, sell it for me … Then, I’ll come back here one more year, and that’s it! No more Canada for me … What you think … Pretty good idea eh?’ Eulogio’s smirk spreads out from under his thick moustache. Just then, we hear the tractor’s roar quickly approaching. With a start, Eulogio’s contemplative demeanour dissolves. He jumps to his feet, flicks his cigarette out of the open door of the greenhouse, and reprimands me for not being quicker in hiding the evidence of our waywardness. ‘Get rid of that fuckin’ cigarette, and help me push this fuckin’ wagon out of here!’

Bricks in the Wall Eulogio is one of millions of transnational labour migrants who temporarily leave their homes and families for weeks, months, or years in search of an improved ‘quality of life’ (Kearney 1986). The labour of these migrants often becomes crucial, even a ‘structural necessity’ (Basok 2002) to the local, national, and transnational economies in which they operate. A predominant focus on the role such migrants play in national and international financial systems has led to studies which concentrate on the economic flows, institutions and social networks which facilitate migration (Olwig and Sorensen 2002). The unfortunate by-product of such conceptual lines of thought is that the personal motivations, decision-making processes, and individual idiosyncrasies of the very people who involve themselves and invest in these processes of migration become neglected and relegated, ignored and denied, and perhaps simply thought of as irrelevant to the ‘big picture’ of transnational movement. Although labour migration is ostensibly undertaken for economic reasons, as Olwig and Sorensen stress, this does not necessitate the use of a primarily economic framework for the study of such migration (ibid.). An aim of this chapter, therefore, is to underline the personhood of one such individual involved within cycles of migration. As mentioned in the prologue, Eulogio is a migrant labourer within the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program (SAWP), one of the nearly 20,000 individuals who annually voyage north to work legally in Canada’s fields and greenhouses through this government-mandated managed migration program. While in Canada as a participant of SAWP, Eulogio is exposed to a number of constraints and limiting circumstances. The structure of the program, to be explained in more detail below, is such as to demand and create worker compliance, to allow for a situation described as a state of ‘unfreedom’ (Basok 2002).

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Despite such limiting circumstances, Eulogio nonetheless reserves a certain capacity to be a sense maker within these systems, never a simple passive subject. It is this capacity which allows him to navigate the various structures in which his life is implicated. Through three conversations with Eulogio, I underscore one grouping of ways through which he has managed to afford himself a certain degree of purpose and directionality which allow him to operate within, between, and beyond the various structures in which he lives his life, the structures through which others may attempt to take advantage of him and control him. One way through which he manages this feat is through the formulation of a personal plan, a particular long-term strategy which allows him a path towards achieving the objectives to which he has given value. The first conversation, in the prologue, outlines Eulogio’s valued objectives and personal plan. His intentions are hardly novel, and shared by many other individuals – to ‘take care of his family’. For him, this has meant constructing a home for his wife, children, and mother to live in, to provide for them financially, and to lay the foundations of a better future for his children. The plan implemented to realize this goal of providing for his family has changed over the years, from working on the family broccoli farm, to a decade-long period working in a Mexico City manufacturing factory (which Eulogio refers to as a dark time in his life), to this current period as a migrant worker. As a SAWP guest-worker, Eulogio has realized the monetary aspects of his plan – he has built a house for his family, funded his daughter’s education as a lab technician (although he admits that he does not entirely understand his daughter’s career objectives completely, he hopes that she will find good employment in a hospital and enjoy a higher quality of life than she does now), and endeavours to do the same for his younger son should he want to continue his education. But this plan has not been without its costs. The irony is that while he has partaken in cycles of migration to provide for his family, these cycles of migration have also caused him to be absent for the majority of his children’s formative years – the distance between him and his family has become something more than simply geographic. Eulogio now realizes that the time has come for him to invest himself socially and emotionally in his family’s life, with his wife insisting that they are in a position to make do without Canadian remittances, an argument to which he himself finally agrees. Revitalizing the family farm, which has lacked the necessary investment to make it profitable, has become Eulogio’s new plan of becoming both economically self-sufficient and able to enjoy and revitalize life with his family. An effective way of articulating Eulogio’s objectives and changing plans is through the concept of the ‘life-project’ (Rapport 2003).

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‘The very possession of a life-project, the conception, intention, and practice of seeing one’s life in terms of a certain directionality, velocity and destination, serves as a source of self-control, the possession being instrumental in one’s continuing capability to be responsible for interpretations made, relations entered into and actions taken’ (Rapport 2003:6). As such, I perceive the life-project not so much as a singular strategy, but as a continuous production; an on-going construction that remains open to improvisation and renovations in the face of the various successes and failures which one encounters. In this manner, the life-project comes to be seen not as a realization but an on-going assemblage; not as a concrete goal, but a striving which allows one to pull one’s self into the future. We build our future as we move towards it.

Blueprints of Managed Migration: A Brief Explanation of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program Before continuing, it will be worthwhile to explore Canada’s guestworker program, which, by structuring the legalistic and bureaucratic frameworks in which Eulogio operates, ultimately plays a substantial role in the mediating of Eulogio’s migration experiences. The origins of this program can be traced back to 1966, when the Canadian government, in response to concerns among growers, established Memoranda of Understanding between the Commonwealth Caribbean countries (in 1966 and 1967) and Mexico (in 1974) (Greenhill and Aceytuno 1999) to allow workers to legally enter Canada to work under contracts ranging from six weeks to eight months in order to alleviate labour shortages within the agricultural sector (coincidently, 1966, the year the SAWP was founded, also happens to be Eulogio’s year of birth). Originally managed by Human Resources and Development Canada, administration of the program was privatized in 1987, with control given to Foreign Agriculture Resource Management Services (FARMS), a non-profit organization controlled and funded by Canadian growers. At the same time, quotas on the number of workers admitted (which had stood at around 4,000 since the program’s inception) were lifted, allowing the SAWP to operate on a supply-and-demand basis (Martin 2003). The program functions thus: Farm owners in Canada request a certain number of workers per season, typically eight weeks in advance. Recruitment is undertaken by sending-country government officials, who process the request, and present workers’ documents (including medical clearances and passports) to a Canadian Immigration office,

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which subsequently issues a temporary work permit for the requested time period. Workers are issued contracts which oblige them to work only on the particular farm of the grower by whom they were requested. Employers may facilitate this migration process by rehiring workers from the previous season. This practice, known as ‘naming’, is framed as being beneficial to both employer and employee: the farmer is able to retain experienced workers, while workers, as long as they remain satisfactory to their employer, can expect reemployment year after year. The mechanism of ‘naming’ is frequently applied – at any given time, around 70 per cent of workers are returning as ‘named’ participants (Verduzco 2004). Workers typically return for several seasons; the average stay being seven years (ibid.), with some participants having been involved in the program for over twenty years. Migrant workers are covered under provincial health care schemes and, as legal workers in Canada, pay into income tax and Canadian pension funds. Their housing is provided by the employer, usually on site at the place of work, while air-fare transportation is paid for in part by both employer and employee. Wages are set slightly higher than the provincial minimum wage. As of 2005, there were over 18,000 participants in the program, while in Ontario, there were 15,423 workers, up from 15,123 in the previous year (FARMS 2007). In any given year, 80 per cent of SAWP workers are employed in the province of Ontario, where the majority of Canadian horticulture (including the rapidly expanding greenhouse industry) is located. The high number of returning participants and the overall increasing number of farms and additional participants have been used as evidence of the program’s satisfactory nature to both employer and employee (ibid.). Proponents for the program have stated that SAWP serves a mutually beneficial role to both the migrant workers and the farm owners. Workers receive wages that are anywhere from twice to five times as much as what they would make in rural Mexico (Basok 2002, Binford 2003, Verduzco and Lozano 2003), while employers are given access to a seemingly unlimited pool of labour to fill work positions that are undesirable to Canadians. Meanwhile, migrant workers are able to use the remittances they earn to improve their housing and overall living conditions, while providing their children with an extended education (Basok 2002, Binford 2003, Preibisch 2003). The program has clearly not been without its detractors, however. On one hand, the SAWP has been charged with creating severe labourmarket distortions (Ferguson 2007). It does little to provide long-term, viable solutions to the perceived labour shortage while simultaneously removing the impetus for Canadian agriculture to review its practices

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to either make farm labour more attractive to Canadian workers or to invest in labour-saving technology. By having access to a virtually unlimited pool of labour, farm owners are able to expand their operations indefinitely without addressing the underlying causes of the antecedent labour shortage. As it currently stands, the Canadian horticulture sector is considerably reliant on government-managed circular labour migration from impoverished regions of the world, to the extent that the SAWP has become a ‘structural necessity’ for the industry’s continued existence (Basok 2002). The utility of migrant workers as against local workers lies not necessarily in the fact that their labour is cheaper than that which Canadian workers would demand, but rather that the structure of the SAWP requires that they be compliant workers. The program is structured to create what Wong describes as a ‘bonded forcedrotational’ system (1984:87). Participants are not allowed the choice of where to work or length of contract. Workers are placed on farms arbitrarily, and are not allowed to circulate freely within the labour market, but rather are tied to a particular employer for the duration of their contract. Competition to participate in the program is fierce; participants are not guaranteed a spot within the program unless they are ‘named’ (Basok 2002). Basok describes this as a condition of ‘unfree labor’ where ‘workers whose ability to circulate in the labor market is restrained through political and legal compulsion’ (2002:4), and expands the definition to include workers’ inability to refuse employers’ demands or dispute their working/living conditions, principally due to the mechanism of naming discussed above. The reality is that foreign workers in any circumstance represent a particularly vulnerable population. Yet SAWP participants enjoy protections that would not apply to undocumented (‘illegal’) migrant workers: access to provincial health-care regimes, a work contract with a guaranteed minimum number of hours, a pay higher than that of the provincial minimum wage, partially subsidized transportation to and from Canada, and free housing provided on site by their employer. On the negative side, the fact is that since the program is administered principally through FARMS by the same individuals who utilize migrant labor, a ‘trust the employer’ situation has been created (Martin 2003). As such, there is a substantial lack of proper checks and balances on employer powers within the SAWP. The program’s organization lacks worker representation or independent voices while its structure creates the conditions where less than ideal working and living conditions for migrant workers have the strong possibility of occurring. Migrant labourers, as evidenced by the very label which we use to categorize these groupings of individuals, are intimately tied to their

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role as workers while ‘away’. This is especially the case for SAWP participants, who find themselves living on the farm and, due to the geographic remoteness of most farms, combined with long working hours, having little chance for any social contact beyond their fellow co-workers. The divide between work and leisure becomes blurred in such circumstances; during their sojourn, migrant workers can be conceived of as being ‘at work’ for the majority of their waking life. Wallman comments that work ‘being (also) a psychological matter … is both more and less than economic activity; however instrumental or impersonal the attitude of others to his work, it is, for the worker, a personal experience, his relation to the reality in which he lives’ (1979:2). It is hardly a contentious claim that the act of work, and by proximity, the labour-migrant experience, is, for its practitioners, much more than simply an economic activity or an exercise in exploitation. To examine migration from the sole point of view of the surrounding power relations is to miss out on what work and migration entails and means for the labour migrant. Experiences of migration are governed by large- and small-scale processes, and it is these small, day-to-day processes that may be particularly evidenced by the anthropologist. A discussion of this program’s structure reveals that Eulogio, while gaining (albeit extremely limited) access to the Canadian labour market via the SAWP, is in the process placed in a position where he must operate under sets of conditions which severally curtail his individual freedoms; yet these same conditions are attached to circumstances which allow him to improve his lot in life, and that of his family. Yet, running through and beyond these structures and circumstances is his life-project, allowing him a certain intentionality in confronting these structures, and affording him a certain directionality. ‘We’re not enslaved by our situations’ (Massumi 2002:2).

Cracks in the Foundation: Eulogio’s Loss Another day of work has ended, and the three of us – Mike, a local resident, student, and summer farmhand; Eulogio, a migrant worker, father of two, and authoritarian foreman; and I, a student of anthropology and farm labourer – sit in the backyard of Eulogio’s bunk-house. For the past two months, we have been participating in our own small tradition. Every Thursday, the three of us alternate in buying a case of beer for this Friday after-work get-together. This is usually a time to air our frustrations about the work and certain co-workers while joking at the boss’s expense, or to listen to Eulogio’s stories of misadventures and bar fights from his youth growing up in a small village in Puebla.

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The mood today, however, is far from jovial. Eulogio, silent and withdrawn, sits on an old plastic crate under the oak tree, still wearing his filthy work clothes and his trademark straw hat. He fumbles with his lighter, lost in a world of thought, with a bottle of beer squeezed between his feet. Another, recently emptied, lies close in the grass. Mike is sitting cross-legged on the ground, staring down the neck of his bottle with a look of concern on his face. I sit nearby, leaning up against the wall of the bunk-house, similarly trying to find some comforting words in my mind to express. After a long interval of silence, I finally ask Eulogio if he will go back to Mexico. He doesn’t look up; he only listlessly stares at his fingers as he plays with the lighter in his hands. ‘Yes, I want to. I want to so much. The thing is … this is very … difficult for me. My brother, we would drink together, smoke together, talk together, just like we do, you, Mikey and me. We would do that a lot. We were … we were close.’ I had found out that morning about the death of Eulogio’s brother. Peter, one of the Canadian workers and a resident tractor operator, and I had been applying calcium nitrate on the fields. While waiting for Peter to return from the warehouse with a new wagon full of fertilizer, I began helping some workers secure saplings to support rods in a nearby field. Eulogio, acting in his position as crew supervisor, briefly showed me the correct way to tie the saplings to their stakes, correcting me curtly several times. He appeared haggard and preoccupied, which prompted me to ask if he was alright. He replied to my question, rather sardonically, ‘I talked to my wife this morning. My brother, he is dead.’ Those were the only words he spoke for the rest of the morning, as he kept to himself, working steadily. Now, away from the workplace, anxiously flipping his lighter from finger to finger, hands trembling despite his attempts to distract them, Eulogio looks at me with pained eyes. ‘I spoke with my family today, at lunch … They explained what happened. And the thing is that … he didn’t suffer. He didn’t suffer a lot … He had a problem, here [Eulogio gestures to the side of his own torso]. And the doctors didn’t know that he had a weak heart, too. So they think that he had a heart attack. You say that now, tell it to Mikey.’ I translate what Eulogio just told me, while Mike insists that he understands most of what has been said. Eulogio continues ‘So it was quick … He didn’t suffer. And that, that makes me feel a bit better. Maybe it is better this way, better than being in a hospital for months, on medications, being sick. Maybe it’s better to go fast like that, with no suffering …

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‘… But will I go back? I want to. But Hans [the owner and operator of Groesbeck Farms, who was vacationing at his summer cottage during this period], he’s not here … He’s not here, and I can’t get a ticket back home without him. I can’t get a ticket back to Mexico … ‘… And anyway, what if he doesn’t want me to come back? If he thinks that I’m going to go home early every year just’cause someone else dies in my family? … Maybe he’ll think that it’s just as easy to get another Mexican … and … I’m too old to start new somewhere else. I want to stay here …’ Another long moment of silence … I want to comfort Eulogio, but I am at a loss as to what to tell him. Yet Eulogio doesn’t need our words, and carries on expressing his thoughts. ‘But what can I do, Nelson? What can I do?… But … I worry for my mother. She’s old. I don’t know how this will be for her. That’s what worries me the most. My brother, he didn’t suffer. I can’t do anything for him, from here or from there. But my mother, she’s old, she’s over ninety, and not in good health … This, this isn’t going to be easy for her … If I go back, I would go back for her. I can’t reverse my brother’s death, but I worry for my mother … Right now, my family is all at home, they’ll help her.’ Mike speaks, explaining a plan of how we could contact Hans tonight, that if we call his secretary at home, we could get his cell phone number from her. Then, we could call him at his weekend cottage and have him arrange a plane ticket for Eulogio. Eulogio looks at Mike for a moment, draws in a breath, and begins talking once more, in an emotionless, flat voice, ‘The thing is, is that there’s a lot of papers. A lot of papers to fill out … When I go back, back to Mexico, there’s a lot of problems to come back here. I have a contract with Hans. And this contract is for eight months … If I go back, and then try to come back here, they will see it like I broke my contract, but that I still want to go back to the same boss, and they will ask why … And maybe they’ll give me some problems, and make it hard for me to come back here. They won’t understand why I came back to Mexico. And maybe I won’t be able to come back here … ‘… And … I don’t want to go anywhere else. One more year here, in this farm, and then that’s it. Eight months, eight months is too long. Maybe five, six months would be better, but no. One more year here, and I’m done.’ We have another moment of silence. Eulogio fumbles for his pack of cigarettes, pulls two out, putting one in his mouth and tossing another to me. He lights his cigarette, and throws me his lighter. I light mine, and lob the lighter back to his extended hand. Eulogio takes a moment to contemplate the glowing

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ember on the end of his cigarette before tipping his bottle to his mouth and taking a long drink. I exchange a glance with Mike – we are both silenced by the gravity of the situation. Eulogio continues. ‘Last night, I had the phone in my hand, to call my wife. But another guy’s wife called, right then, so I didn’t talk to her. If I had known last night, I would have told Hans right away, went to his house and told him right away. Then, maybe I’d be going to the airport with Max this morning, going back to my home. But now, I just find out this morning … And it’s too late … Tomorrow, he’ll be in the ground. There’s no way I can get a ticket today. Maybe tomorrow, I’m for Mexico, back at my house tomorrow evening. But by then, he’ll already be in the ground … And what’s the point of me going back? If I go back, it won’t reverse his death. He’ll still be dead. I can’t do anything here, and I can’t do anything there.’ Eulogio empties his bottle and motions to Mike to pass him another. Twisting off the cap, he continues. ‘This afternoon, I explain my situation to my family. I explain how I can’t come back, how I can’t do anything … And they all understand my situation. But … I feel … ugly. I feel bad … But that’s how it is for me … That’s how it is for me. I mean … if you were me, what would you do?’ He’s placed the bottle back between his feet, and has returned to nervously fumbling with his lighter. He raises his eyes from the ground to meet mine. The slow, laboured, almost emotionless tone in his voice is betrayed by the anguished look in his eyes and the contorted features of his brow as his stare burns into me. I find myself stuttering out an answer that if it had been my brother that died, I would feel like him, that I too would want to go back home. Eulogio nods. ‘Him, his sons were all in Houston. But now, they’re all back at home. But it’s different, it’s their father. There’s not one of his sons in the United States right now – they’re all at home. But my one brother, he’s in Niagara. You know where that is, Mike, the Niagara? … Yeah, he’s in Niagara, and he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that his brother is dead and that his funeral is tomorrow, because he is working and no one can telephone him where he is. My other brother, in Leamington, he can’t go either … ‘When my father died, a few years ago, I told Hans right away … I told him, and I was for the plane the next morning. Even then, I got back home in the evening. His burial had been in the morning … I didn’t get to see him one last time before he was in the ground. And then, I had to be home, but I couldn’t do anything … Now, I talk to my family, they’re all at home, they understand my situation. My daughter wants me to come back, but I can’t … That’s my situation, what else can I do?’

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Eulogio falls silent once more, then, raising his drink to his lips, quickly drains the bottle, and motions for another. His brother, who was to play a pivotal role in helping him with the arduous task of revitalizing the family farm, is dead. He has lost a close friend, and his present plans for ending his repeated cycles of migration have been lost along with him. We sit with Eulogio for the rest of the evening, trying to offer what little condolence we can, on this patch of grass thousands of kilometres from his grieving family, while watching him drink himself into a stupour.

Finding New Building Materials One’s life-project can become the locus for one’s energy and force, allowing the individual to make sense of the world, and to pull one’s self through the various structures which attempt to co-opt or limit one’s freedom and individuality. But this is not to suggest that such a life-project cannot be thwarted, derailed, or delayed. In Eulogio’s case, the untimely and unfortunate death of his brother was a worldshaking event, rattling him to his emotional core. It placed him in a position where he had to redefine the construction of his life-project. This event also highlighted certain constraints and limitations present in his life that suddenly weighed heavier than before. He was faced with a crucial decision of returning home to be with and to comfort his family, and potentially losing his position on the farm and the very right to work in Canada. The SAWP program has allowed him access to a relatively lucrative sector of the Canadian economy; yet this access and opportunity comes connected with a multitude of embedded constraints. His physical movements become limited, both by virtue of the remoteness of the farm and via the bureaucratic structures of this guest-worker program. Leaving the sphere of farm life becomes difficult without the prior mediation of his employer. Meanwhile, the advantages he has accrued due to his seniority at Groesbeck Farms become a double-edged sword. While his considerable track record of work experience have earned him a degree of status and the benefits that come with such status, through these same circumstances, he has allowed himself to become tied to the farm. He doesn’t want to ‘start over again’ on another farm, while he feels that he may still be an expendable resource at Groesbeck Farms should he become too problematic by requesting a leave of absence. Eulogio’s relatives who work as undocumented workers in Texas, by operating outside of the bureaucratic and legalistic frameworks, do not share these constraints, but operate in another realm of limiting circumstances. By circumventing conventional state-imposed

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thresholds, his nephews have access to a higher degree of movement than himself, a trade-off Eulogio rationalizes through the increased job security and safety he enjoys by operating within the framework of the SAWP. This discussion highlights the fact that the experiences of a migrant working away from home cannot be equated or compared to his experiences working within his home community: migratory labour represents a type of labour unique in its own right. A migrant worker may financially benefit from his time away from home, but is also separated from family and placed in a set of unique circumstances, and potentially finds his ‘home’ fundamentally altered upon return. In fact, the term circular migration is somewhat inappropriate, for it implies a returning, a ‘going back to’. The experience of migration changes conceptions of home, so that the home the migrant returns to is constructed differently than the one he left. ‘[R]eturning home is not to find oneself in the same place as before’ (Amit and Rapport 2002:33). Following the death of his brother, Eulogio was a mere shade of his former self, walking through life in an alcohol-induced haze. At work, he was withdrawn and ill-tempered, while in the bunk-house, he made a daily ritual of drinking himself to sleep by the early evening. Finally, after ten days of this self-destructive behavior, Eulogio was convinced by his wife and daughter, in a series of phone conversations, to come home. He eventually negotiated a two-week vacation during a slow period of work in early September, nearly a month after his brother’s death, with plans to return and complete his contract at Groesbeck’s afterwards. During this time at home, Eulogio found a way to remodel his aspirations. One of his dead brother’s sons, Antonio, who had come home from Texas for the funeral, was still in the village on an extended stay when Eulogio arrived. Eulogio, upon speaking with his nephew one evening, discovered that he, too, had desires to stay in the village, and was less than enthusiastic about returning to Houston. Together they made plans for becoming partners in the task of making the family farm profitable. Eulogio would provide the initial capital investment for the water-pump rental and the diesel fuel in order to irrigate the fields for the first planting, and together, they would plant the fields in between Eulogio’s contracts, during the months of December, January, and February. Antonio would then harvest the broccoli and take it to market while Eulogio was working in Canada, and they would split the profits accordingly. Eulogio reasoned that with the farm up and running, he would be able to end his cycles of migration to Canada in one or two more years, and devote his full time to his lands, finally becoming self-sufficient in his own community.

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To be candid, I often doubted the attainability of Eulogio’s plan, and still do. In the four years I have know him, I have seen him exhibit the all-too-human traits of complexity, contradiction, and dreaming; I have seen him discuss his grand plans in one moment, while lamenting how many more years abroad he will need to pay for his son’s postsecondary education the next. I question to what extent he himself believes in his ability to end his migratory cycles to Canada in just ‘one more year’, and to what extent this plan is personal rhetoric to give him the hope and optimism to continue. Yet, while I may question the feasibility of his project, I recognize the motivation and inspiration which having this project affords him, even if every year continues to be ‘the one before the last’.

A Return to Mexico, and the Constructing of a Life in Progress

Figure 2: ‘… and working the fields at home.’

Eulogio twists his old, beaten-up station wagon around another tight turn, narrowly avoiding a large rut in the dirt road. It is my third day in his village, and he has offered to take me on a tour of his home town. He himself has only finished his contract two weeks previously, and so he often stops to greet the friends and family walking alongside the road that he hasn’t seen since his return. The two of us are clean and well dressed, in stark contrast to our appearances yesterday, when we were muck-encrusted while planting

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broccoli in the mud of his family’s land holdings, along with his nephew and brother. Today, though, is a day off from work. Today we celebrate the baptism of Eulogio’s niece and god-daughter, with supper and a party with the extended family in the compound of one of Eulogio’s brothers to follow the service. Eulogio drives slowly through the streets, pointing out the houses of certain friends and relatives. Construction is rampant in his small village, with practically every home in some process of renovation, from additional rooms to entire floors being fashioned from cement and concrete block. ‘Everyone and their son go to the States, here.’ Eulogio tells me the source of capital for these building projects, with this rapid growth being fuelled by migration dollars from the United States, and, more recently, Canada. We pass a small concrete house, its size dwarfed by the lengths of oxidized steel rods protruding from its roof. Eulogio tells me how it is common practice to leave some rebar exposed to facilitate future construction, and that you can tell just how ambitious a family is by how much rebar they leave exposed. He chortles at the ridiculous amounts of steel rod projecting from this house. ‘Humph! This guy, he wants to turn his shoebox into a castle!’ We approach Eulogio’s home, passing a massive, two-storey house under construction. Eulogio stops the car in front of this colossal construction to bring it to my attention. ‘This guy here, he’s got a lot of years in the States. Five years ago, this house, it was just a little shack, the size of my kitchen … But then …’Bout five years ago, he starts building this thing … You see the brick he’s using? Fuckin’ expensive, that rock!’ The house is made from concrete blocks, and a façade of granite-brick facing is in the process of being installed along the front wall. ‘Ah, but that guy, he’s just showing off … He wants everyone to know how much money he’s got …’ Eulogio lets out a snort of contempt, ‘But once he’s done paying for that fuckin’ rock, he won’t have any money left!’ Eulogio remains parked, surveying the structure for a moment before asking me for the time. Following my answer, a brief moment of alarm seizes him. ‘Fuckin’ shit! We gotta be at the church in an hour! Let’s go!’ Eulogio speeds down the dirt road, and turns onto the small plot of land next to his house, skillfully manoeuvring the station wagon next to the row of pigsties, under a small structure made of scrap wood and metal, meant to protect his car from the elements. A concrete wall surrounds Eulogio’s compound. Eulogio unlocks the sheet-metal door and we enter the court-yard. His homestead consists of several structures of varying size. To my right lies the kitchen, while at my left, an outhouse sits, while the largest structure, a two-floor

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building housing the family’s bedrooms, borders the western side of the compound. The small courtyard is occupied by the open well that provides drinking and washing-up water for the family, alongside a pear tree Eulogio planted some time ago, while rows of chicken coups sit at the far end of the compound. My host jogs up the outdoor staircase and along the upper-level walkway to his bedroom to see if his wife, Maria, is ready for the church service. Meanwhile, Manuel, his seventeen-year-old son has come out of the kitchen, and begins asking me whom we had met during my tour of the village while leisurely chewing on a bun of bread. We hear the muffled sounds of husband and wife playfully arguing escaping from above, the sound of Eulogio’s anxious voice contrasted with the patronizingly soothing tones of Maria. Eulogio exits the bedroom, and, looking somewhat agitated, yells down at his son, ‘Hey! Manny, what time is it?’ Manuel, contrasting with the frantic nature of his father, takes a slow bite of his bread, roles back his sleeve, and glances at his digital watch. ‘Almost 12:10, Pa.’ Eulogio yells back, pleadingly, towards his bedroom. ‘Maria! It’s 12:10, c’mon, let’s move it!’ Coming back down the stairs, with a tangible air of impatience about him, he bemoans, ‘She’s still getting dressed – she hasn’t even started her make-up yet!’ Eulogio joins us, grumbles under his breath for a moment while tapping his feet on the hard earth underfoot, then reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his package of cigarettes. He fumbles with the pack for a moment, and finally extracts a cigarette, offering me one in the process. Lighting it, he inhales deeply, becoming noticeably less disconcerted. His train of thought having altered course, he moves towards the gate of the compound. ‘Hey, come with me, I’m going to show you something.’ Eulogio leads me outside onto the road, with his son following, and takes us around the corner to face the back wall of the two-story bedroom building. For the most part, the structures of Eulogio’s compound are coated with white stucco. However, this wall has been left bare – Eulogio justifies he didn’t feel any need to cover it since no passersby can see this side of the house from the street. As such, the back wall reveals the underlying building materials constituting his home, laying bare the myriad tones and colors of brick, concrete, adobe, plaster, and cement in various states and age. Eulogio points to the far right section of the wall, a large, brown square of weathered and pockmarked adobe. It was evidently once

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covered in plaster, but time and the elements have chipped and peeled all but a few patches of the former covering to reveal the mud-andstraw mixture beneath. ‘This was my parents’ house, where I grew up. When me, Maria, and our children moved in with them, it was real small … You know, I grew up in this house, with my brothers and sisters, but when I moved back in, it was too fuckin’ small for all my family.’ Eulogio points out a segment of the wall next to the adobe. ‘So, after my first year in Canada, I still had some money saved, and I bought some brick. I went back a second year, and same thing, after I paid for everything, the food and all, I used the money to buy some more bricks, and that year, I built another room onto my father’s house. Before that, all of us, me, my mother and father, my wife, the two kids, we were all living in here, in these two rooms.’ Eulogio runs his hand vertically down the centre of the square of adobe, indicating where the separation would have originally occurred. ‘My mother and father, they slept in this one room here, the rest of us in the other, and we have the kitchen over there [Eulogio motions to the kitchen complex on the other side of the building]. So, after my first few years, my brother helped me, and we build on another room, a bigger one, this one here, for my parents.’ Eulogio moves his hand over the red brick addition connecting onto the adobe. ‘And the kids, they go into their own room.’ He nods his head in recollection, and takes a puff from his cigarette before continuing. ‘Yeah … Yeah. But the house, back then … It was still very old-fashioned then. The roof, it was just thatched, it looked like the same stuff you feed the cows. It worked, but it leaked in the rainy season, and smelt bad after. So, the next few years I do the same as before, I go, and I work, and with the money I save, I buy more stuff, more building supplies. One year, some cement, next year some rebar… So, one year, two, no, no … three years after I did the brick, I put these in,’ Eulogio touches one of the concrete corner columns that support the slab of poured concrete overhead, ‘and I get rid of the old straw roof, and put this roof on.’ ‘And finally, a few years later, I do this here,’ Eulogio sweeps his hand upwards, where the concrete roof has acted as a platform for the second storey, providing two additional rooms overhead. The greys of the cinder blocks and concrete contrast with the reds and browns of the brick and adobe used in the earlier structure. ‘So we got the upstairs for my family, and the downstairs for my mother and father.’ Eulogio flicks his cigarette away. ‘It’s not much. We might be poor, but we are happy,’ a glint in his eyes, evidently full of pride in his story of construction.

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Building One’s Self Beyond the Economy Transnational migrant workers have too often been portrayed as ‘fodder in the traffic of globalization’ (Appadurai 2006:13), while a majority of anthropological studies have concentrated on institutions and networks which facilitate or seek to control aspects of migration. There is a need for a broader investigation of the ‘migrant experience’: to look beyond macroscopic approaches concerned with state and power dynamics; to see such movements as far more than simply physical movements across national boundaries, or the financial logic of economic systems, and rather as lived experiences with profound and diverse meanings to those involved. A facile tactic would be to focus on the overt power-plays of structure which impact upon Eulogio’s life; to examine the economic constraints which push a migrant worker out of his home community and to a distant country, as a victim of the economic circumstances within which he lives. Yet, my goal has been to show how one individual, Eulogio, is a being who is ‘self-motivated rather than socially driven’ (Cohen 1994:136, quoted in Rapport 2003:28), as a complex person rather than an allegory for simplified economic entities entwined within various market forces. The intentionality he exercises in pursuing his goals prevents him from becoming tied to one single social structure or set of structures; it is this purpose which allows him to assert a degree of control over his life. As such, I interpret Eulogio’s own personal life-project as intrinsically comparable to many individuals, husbands, wives, and parents across the globe: to secure a living for himself, to provide for his family, and to ensure that his children enjoy a better quality of life in the future than he himself has enjoyed in the past. Yet, while I state that his life-project has allowed him the directionality and intentionality to live with a certain, somewhat ironical, detachment from various social, economic and political institutions and structures of power, a riposte could be made from a very different school of thought. Eulogio’s life-project and the intentionality it grants him could be alternatively portrayed as something illusionary; so that the power dynamics which Eulogio apparently eludes actually run much deeper. It could be claimed that his life-project is, rather, a subscription to cultural convention and to ideals of status; and hardly the example of agency which I would have evinced. Certainly, the conventions, the forms, through which Eulogio lives his life are of importance, in that ‘forms specify the conditions under which it is possible to have a certain kind of experience and acquire a certain kind of knowledge’ (Rapport and Overing 2000:136). However, my argument would remain that, in utilizing the particular forms and cultural conventions

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at his disposal, it is Eulogio who is responsible, always, for filling the forms and conventions with meaning: for choosing to give these substantial value within his life. By way of the concepts of family and being a provider he affords himself a degree of self-fulfillment and achievement. ‘Individuals make and use forms so as to fill them with a diversity of personal meanings; they give them sense and significance particular to their own lives: their purposes, interests, desires, needs, beliefs, values, and so on’ (ibid:137). This is not to ignore the constraints or power dynamics which affect, and impact upon, his life. As much as I do not wish to portray Eulogio as a simplified victim of economic forces, neither do I intend to evoke his individuality as preternaturally eliminating life’s limiting conditions. Yet, a realization and sincere appreciation of the individual actor operating within systems of control may be the first necessary steps on the path towards overcoming such systems. ‘It has always baffled me why those most interested in understanding and changing the barbaric domination that characterizes our modernity often – not always – withhold from the very people they are most concerned with the right to complex personhood’ (Gordon 1997: 4). With this said, then, Eulogio’s home, the home of his family, is far more than a place of living. It also serves as both a physical history of his life before and during his cycles of migration, and a tangible manifestation and metaphor of the material and affective dividends of his own personal life-project. Each brick and concrete block holds a story for Eulogio, in his striving for a better life. It is a process, an assemblage of the present in anticipation of the future. Along his way, he has had to do some renovations, make some improvements, and improvise with the material he had to hand. Walls are torn down to make new rooms, windows are cut out and filled in. Certain elements no longer serve their intended purposes, or the original purposes themselves have been altered, necessitating a modification in the informal blueprints. Throughout this ongoing construction, a dynamic capacity for change and ability to generate sense and appreciate these accomplishments linger beneath the material surfaces. As Eulogio completes this narrative of his home, I notice one thing he hasn’t pointed out – the lengths of rebar jutting out from the roof of his house, and the future still under construction.

Note 1.

Unless otherwise noted, the conversations in this chapter originally took place in Spanish. For the sake of readability from here on, I have provided only the English translations.

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References Amit, V. and Rapport, N. (2002), The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity, and Collectivity (Sterling, VA: Pluto Books). Appadurai, A. (2006), Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press). Basok, T. (2002), Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press). Binford, L. (2003), ‘Migrant Remittances and (Under) Development in Mexico’, Critique of Anthropology 23(3): 305–36. Cohen, A. (1994), Self-Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (London: Routledge). Ferguson, N. (2007), ‘The Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program: Considerations for the Future of Farming and the Implications of Managed Migration’, Our Diverse Cities 3 (Summer): 189–93. Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services [FARMS] (2007), ‘2004/2005 Activity Comparison Statistics’, http://www. farmsontario.ca/Stat.htm, accessed 10 February 2007. Gordon, A. (1997), Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Greenhill, D. and Aceytuno, J. (1999), ‘Managed Migration and the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program’, paper presented at Fourth International Metropolis Conference, Washington, December. Kearney, M. (1986), ‘From the Invisible Hand to Visible Feet: Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development’, Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 331–61. (1995), ‘The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 547–65. Martin, P. (2003), ‘Managing Labor Migration: Temporary Worker Programs for the 21st Century’, Working Paper, International Institute for Labor Studies, Geneva. Massumi, B. (2002), ‘An Interview with Brian Massumi’, in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, ed. M. Zournazi (New York: Routledge). Olwig, K. and Sorensen, N. (2002), ‘Mobile Livelihoods: Making a Living in the World’, in Work and Migration: Life and Livelihoods in a Globalizing World, eds. Karen Fog Olwig and Ninna N. Sorensen (London: Routledge). Ontario’s Employment Standard’s Act (2006), Ontario Ministry of Labor, http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/guide/index.html, accessed 5 November 2006. Preibisch, K. (2003) Social Relations Practices between Seasonal Agricultural Workers, their Employers and the Residents of Rural Ontario, Research Report (Ottawa: North-South Institute). Rapport, N. (2003), I am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power (London: Routledge).

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Rapport, N. and Overing, J. (2000), Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge). Verduzco, G. (2004), ‘The Temporary Mexican Migrant Labour Program in Canadian Agriculture’, Working Paper, The Centre for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California. Verduzco, G. and Lozano, M. (2003), Mexican Workers’ Participation in CSAWP and Development Consequences in the Workers’ Rural Home Communities, Research report (Ottawa: The North-South Institute). Wallman, S. (1979), ‘Introduction’, in Social Anthropology of Work, ed. S. Wallman (London: Academic Press). Wong, L. (1984), ‘Canada’s Guestworkers: Some Comparisons of Temporary Workers in Europe and North America’, International Migration Review 18(1): 85–98.

Chapter 2

The Limits of Liminality: Capacities for Change and Transition among Student Travellers Vered Amit

The topic of student travel readily evokes two long-standing tropes of transition and change. On the one hand, youth is commonly regarded as quintessentially ephemeral. On the other hand, since the Grand Tour of the sixteenthth and seventeenth centuries, travel has often been associated with processes of self-formation and transformation. Both youth and travel also call to mind the interaction between change as a modality of personal as well as broader social formation. Thus the Grand Tour through Continental Europe was intended to serve as the basis for the cultivation of elite tastes among young British aristocrats. The transitions identified with the demarcation of youth as a recognized phase in the life course have often been viewed as denoting general issues of social reproduction and/or possibilities for social and cultural innovation. When youth and travel are explicitly conjoined as in the forms of student travel that I will be discussing in this chapter, the propensity to identify this type of mobility with processes of change and development is almost ineluctable. It is a propensity that is as likely to appear in the everyday reiterations of truisms such as ‘travel broadens the mind’ as in the concomitant conviction with which many university administrators, with or without much in the way of substantiating evidence, can assert that student mobility programs will inculcate new cosmopolitan competences and outlooks among its young participants.

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It is therefore not surprising to find that a concept of liminality first employed to analyse the transformations entailed in processes of lifecourse transitions (van Gennep 1960 [1908]) has also been imported into anthropological work on travel and tourism. According to van Gennep, rites of passage mark out the succession of socially recognized stages in a person’s life: that is, they commemorate life crisis events such as birth, ‘social puberty’, marriage, parenthood, death and so on. Part of that passage was a liminal or transitional period that intervened between separation from one state and incorporation into another. And it is this notion of transition that has especially resonated with the anthropological literature on tourism. One of the most common and enduring definitions of a ‘tourist’ to appear in the anthropological literature is that first proffered by Valene Smith in the introduction to her 1977 volume, Hosts and Guests. In this definition, the tourist is constituted as a ‘temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change’ (Smith, cited in Graburn 1983:11 and Stronza 2001:265). The emphasis on leisure, which occurred in Smith’s definition, helped to reinforce the notion of tourism as a temporary but thorough interlude from what Nelson Graburn called the ‘ordinary workaday, mundane life’ and in turn encouraged a conceptual turn towards paradigms of liminality that had featured previously in studies of ritual and ceremonial (1983:11). Indeed Nelson Graburn, a major proponent of this association, argued that tourism was a form of modern ritual, which featured a ‘separation’ from normal ‘instrumental’ life (ibid.) and hence could be analysed in terms of conceptual frameworks previously developed for the study of ritual. The theorization of liminality is however most notable for the spotlight that it has trained on the relationship between temporary states of transition and more enduring personal and social transformations. And on this point there has neither been consensus in tourism scholarship nor between earlier theorizations of liminality in the study of ritual. Thus two of the most influential theorizations of liminality, respectively by Arnold van Gennep and then later by Victor Turner, offered contrasting interpretations of its implications within broader processes of social reproduction. For Arnold van Gennep, the liminal assumed its significance not as an autonomous concept but as a subcategory of a broader set of ceremonials marking the passage from one social situation or status to another. ‘Our interest lies not in the particular rites but in their essential significance and their relative positions within ceremonial wholes – that is, their order’ (van Gennep 1960:191). And van Gennep viewed these rituals as serving an essentially conservative mission, mitigating the potential disruption

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of these fundamental alternations of the life course. ‘Such changes of condition do not occur without disturbing the life of society and the individual, and it is the function of rites of passage to reduce their harmful effects’ (van Gennep 1960:13). However in Turner’s treatment of the ritual process, the focus was on liminality as a state requiring attention in its own right, particularly in terms of its capacity to throw up alternative paradigms of social relations (1969:96). In this version, liminality was less a transitional threshold in a predictable sequence of socially recognized stages than part of an ongoing oscillation between structure and anti-structure (ibid.:97). Whereas van Gennep emphasized the stabilizing capacity of rites of passage, in their book on ‘celebration’ Victor Turner and Edith Turner were especially interested in the transformative capacity of liminality, as a domain beyond convention in which new possibilities and formulations of what ‘may be’, and not only what is ‘going to be’, can come to the fore, with potentially even revolutionary consequences (1978:2–3): For liminality cannot be confined to the processual form of the traditional rites of passage in which he [van Gennep] first identified it. Nor can it be dismissed as an undesirable (and certainly uncomfortable) movement of variable duration between successive conservatively secure states of being, cognition, or status-role incumbency. Liminality is now seen to apply to all phases of decisive cultural change, in which previous orderings of thought and behavior are subject to revision and criticism, when hitherto unprecedented modes of ordering relations between ideas and people become possible and desirable. (Turner and Turner 1978:2)

While in principle liminality can give rise to various forms of social modalities, Turner was most interested in its association with communitas, an intense, even transcendent experience of communion with ‘concrete’, equal individuals: ‘The bonds of communitas, as I said, are anti-structural in the sense that they are undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct, non-rational (though not irrational), I-Thou relationships’ (Turner 1974:53); ‘As a form of anti-structure however, the spontaneity and immediacy of communitas cannot be maintained for long before it assumes either structural or ideological properties’ (Turner 1969:132). The models of liminality offered by van Gennep and Turner are therefore quite distinct. But if van Gennep was concerned with delineating the processes facilitating continuities of social order in spite of cyclical transitions and Turner was instead concerned with identifying the kinds of transitions that might be capable of catalysing profound discontinuities, they appear to have implicitly shared some important assumptions about the interaction between social

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transformation and social embeddedness. They both presumed that temporary transitions between states of being have the potential to ramify more broadly. And they both seemed to relate this potential for destabilization to the relative autonomy of these forms of transitions: the more tightly integrated within ceremonial, institutional or social orders, the more restrained their effects; the more thoroughly liminal, the greater the potential for broader social disruptions or change. Similar kinds of linked but contrasting presumptions often occur in both popular and scholarly renderings of youth and/or travel. Thus youth have often been positioned as vanguards of larger social transformations of modernity, globalization, technological innovation, media consumption and so on (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Liechty 2003). Indeed, the very historical production of the concept of youth (and childhood) has been variously identified with anxieties about the need to extend social control over ‘undisciplined and unruly youth’ as much as with celebrations of youthful exuberance (Valentine, Skelton and Chambers 1998:4). In other words, youth itself has increasingly been constructed as an extended phase of liminality, and that definition has variously been embued with anxieties about the potential disruptions to the social order posed by the footlooseness of youth in Gennepian like terms, or excitement about their presumed greater capacity to assimilate innovation and change, an orientation more reminiscent of Turner’s musings. As I have noted earlier, travel and especially touristic travel has been represented as liminal and potentially both self- and socially transformative. Thus Nelson Graburn, who has argued that tourism can be construed as a modern, ritualized but also self-imposed and self-expressive means of marking ‘life’s progress’ (1983:13) has also noted the ‘pervasive trend towards modernization that tourism brings with it’ (1995:171). In contrast, Edward Bruner has argued that while tourist advertising and brochures promise that Western persons traveling to ‘Third World’ countries will be totally transformed by the experience, in most cases the tourists are little changed by their journeys while the effect on the people catering to them can be profound (Bruner 1991). In making this argument, Bruner also dismissed the distinction between tourism and travel (often identified with youthful backpackers) as a ‘Western myth of identity’ (ibid.:247). But in spite of Bruner’s scepticism, the entrenched identifications of either youth or travel with liminality have ensured a persistent tendency to view a linkage between youth and travel as portending both a new kind of subject and a new social and cultural landscape. Hence Ulf Hannerz has argued that:

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In age terms, it would appear that some young people are now among those most at home in the global ecumene itself, footloose and uncommitted enough to spread their period of liminality over two or three continents, quickly cultivating the desirable literacies when media technologies change and new symbolic forms become available. What happens to them when they get older? In a two-steps-forward, one-step-back fashion, they may become adults, too, but perhaps not quite the same kind of adults as their parents were. (Hannerz 1996:29)

In this chapter I therefore want to consider whether liminality is likely to engender more enduring forms of change in terms of the dynamics of two particular forms of international student and youth travel: university exchanges and working holidays.

International Student Travel In one key sense, neither form of travel with which we are concerned in this chapter conforms to the notions of leisure that Smith used to define tourism. Both involve some form of ‘work’. However both also involve a visit to a place away from ‘home’, with a view to experiencing some kind of change/difference. While in the first form, ‘working holidays’, participants are entitled to work temporarily in the country they are visiting (as the official title for this kind of travel indicates), this is a kind of mobility that is usually treated, both in terms of state regulation and patronage, as a variant of tourism. The second, international student exchanges, are usually regulated as a rather different form of cross-border youth travel, yet their allure is often associated with the opportunities they provide for ‘touring’ places away from home. As such it is possible to argue that they form the contemporary analogue of the European Grand Tour, which is seen as the precursor for contemporary forms of tourism. Hence it is not surprising that it is often treated as forming part of an international market of youth travel/tourism. The movement of youths and students across international borders is expanding and creating increasingly lucrative and competitive global markets in its wake. Thus an economic model developed by members of the Youth Tourism Consortium of Canada 1 estimates that ‘total youth travel expenditures in Canada in 2002 were approximately C$12.3 billion, representing close to 23% of total travel and tourism expenditures in Canada that year’ (d’Anjou 2004:14). International youth travellers frequently combine several economic roles: student, worker, renter, tourist and so on. Hence it is probably not surprising to find that while young travellers may spend less per day than their older tourist counterparts, they tend to stay longer and hence their

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total expenditure over the course of their visit is often higher (d’Anjou 2004). As longer-term visiting students or working holidaymakers, youthful travellers may also make use of a variety of other nontouristic services: apartments, utilities, tuition fees and so on. With the reduction of state support for post-secondary education in countries like Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, the income provided by higher international student fees has become an ever more critical source of revenue. While students visiting through an official university exchange usually pay tuition fees to their home rather than their host institution, it is also common for other visiting students to make more independent arrangements for a semester abroad at the cost of paying international fees. Meanwhile under the aegis of a proliferating series of reciprocal intergovernmental working holidaymaker agreements, in many affluent countries, the service and seasonal tourist sectors are becoming increasingly reliant on the recruitment of visiting students or youths as temporary workers. Given the potential profits accruing from these youthful movements, it is hardly surprising to find tourist, service and educational organizations urging competition for this lucrative clientele. But what has been interesting to us has been the proliferation of an institutional discourse that also represents student and youth mobility as being desirable because it is viewed as helping to shape a new kind of contemporary citizen. As in many other Western countries, across a variety of Canadian sectors and institutions, including those of government, tourism, and academia, an increasingly expansive set of rhetorical claims portray international student and youth mobility as a crucial tool of training which will impart a competitive edge to individual careers and by extension will make the national economies in which they are citizens more globally competitive. Work or study abroad is thus represented as having a capacity to constitute ‘global citizens’. This kind of reframing – which in Canada is promoted by a wide range of agencies such as the Student Work Abroad Program (associated with the Canadian Federation of Students), the Youth Tourism Consortium of Canada, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, the Canadian Bureau of International Education, among others – deliberately blurs the boundaries between work, education and leisure/tourism. Not only can you work or study while you tour, but supposedly all of these different impetuses for international travel can serve as career signposts, inculcating and denoting the kind of cosmopolitan capacity and ‘entrepreneurial spirit’2 demanded in a global economy. Thus the institutional promotion of youth and student mobility often constructs it as a socially recognized and valorized form of training consonant with contemporary globalizing contexts.

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In some respects this institutional construction is reminiscent of both Turner’s notion of liminality as providing a potentially transformative exposure to other ways of being and doing and van Gennep’s connotation of liminality as a transitional period marking the progress towards a new state. But in this institutional construction, ‘international experience’ is neither transcendent in Turner’s sense nor the neutral transitional space between two socially recognized statuses in van Gennep’s definition. Rather the institutions promoting these kinds of sojourns abroad are seeking to claim particular forms of peripatetic experience as an integral aspect of the training of modern young adults. However, as most of the officials and organizers involved in developing and administering these programs in Canada with whom I’ve spoken wryly admit, this perspective is not widely shared among the intended student and youth clientele. Only a small minority of Canadian youths participates in these kinds of extended sojourns abroad and among those who do, a rather different interpretation of liminality is more likely to hold sway.

‘It Just Seemed Like Something to Do’ The young travellers who had taken part in either working holidays and/or university exchanges with whom we spoke in Canada, Australia and Scotland3 varied widely in their views as to whether or not a stay abroad would be likely to enhance their career prospects. But the vast majority was clear that their primary motivation in travelling was ‘time out’ from, rather than an integral part of, the usual routines and pathways of school and career. Donald had spent a year at the University of Edinburgh on a university exchange. Why did he go? Umm, it just seemed like something to do, almost. You know, you’re there for four years at university and you’re sort of … I wouldn’t say stuck there because I’m actually having a really good time in Toronto, but it’s just, it’s an opportunity, I think, it’s – I mean, a lot of people do it, they say you know third year is the year that a lot of kids go, travelling. And since you’re there, I mean, I don’t know if I’m gonna get another opportunity to spend a year living somewhere else unless, my job takes me there and I don’t know what I really want to do. So, you know what I mean, it seems like I have an infinity of school and commitments that maybe I won’t get a chance to run away from. So that sorta motivated me to do it. And uh, so I thought it was just a good idea and also, sort of, just to get out of Toronto. It was kind of, I dunno, boring me, in a lot of ways. See another culture, go to another school, heard it was a good school. That’s really the only reason I …

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Philippe, who was completing a law degree in a Quebec university, went on an exchange to an Australian university because it would provide him with a break, a ‘vacation from everything’, a version of this kind of ‘academic tourism’ that corresponds most closely with Graburn’s notion of ritualized or programmatic opportunities for a break from regular routines and contexts. Had Philippe stayed at home, he would have worked in the summer, attended school and then proceeded onto a career in law withouta break. With two months off for travelling between the end of his courses in Australia and his return to studies in Canada, the exchange process would provide him with crucial ‘free time before I settle down for the next ten or twelve years working’. Hence, while the experience has elements that resonate with van Gennep’s notion of liminality as constituting a ‘neutral space’ between two worlds, it does not necessarily connote a socially recognized transition between two statuses. Indeed, its greatest attraction may be the convenient break it offers from the more conventional course of transition through school and career. The experiences recounted to us by youthful travellers also had resonances with Turner’s notion of liminality as a phase involving possibilities for intense but temporary sociality or communitas. Much of that possibility derived from the combination of encapsulation along with the relatively few risks entailed in the experience. If a stint of work abroad wasn’t enjoyable, you could always just go home. As Rosanne, a Canadian who spent time in Edinburgh on a working holiday, explained: You can’t really go wrong, it is, it is something that if you decide ‘I’m not having fun anymore’, you can be home in two weeks. There’s nothing really holding you down here, so it’s, it’s nothing with bad consequences. So it was easy to do. If I change my mind, I’ll go home.

With many exchange students subject only to a pass/fail system on courses they take abroad, there is little scholastically at stake in a semester abroad and more time available for touring, partying or just surfing. But this limited commitment and the transience from which it derives is also associated with the segregation of these young travellers. John, who was on exchange in Melbourne from a university in Western Canada, had made special efforts to find Australian roommates: Yeah, that was kind of the feeling when I got down here that I wanted to live with Aussies and, you know, hang out and do everything with Australian students, but then when I got here – like I really don’t do anything with my roommates – because none of them, they don’t surf, they don’t really want to travel, you know, around their country, you know what I mean, because it’s their country. So I’ve never gone on any trips with them. I’ve never

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surfed, I surfed once with my roommate, but that’s it. And so … most of my friends down here have been either Canadian or German, … like other exchange students because they’re all down here for the same reasons that I am, right, they want to go on road trips and travel and stuff.

However strong their desire to meet ‘locals’, young travellers on extended but temporary sojourns abroad have difficulty in meeting their resident counterparts precisely because they are transient visitors. They are passing through, not settling. As a result, they are likely to make use of different services – hostels, visitor centres, international student offices, backpacker pubs – and have different orientations to both place and time than resident youths. Away from their usual networks of family and friends, they are oriented towards meeting new people, even if only temporarily. Local residents, however, already have their own established networks and are less likely to take time away from familiars to invest in getting to know someone just passing through. Thus in her study of student mobility in Europe, Elizabeth Murphy Lejeune found that students on an Erasmus exchange were most likely to socialize with other ‘international students’: For a relationship to be personal, mutual interest is necessary. However in their vast majority, local students do not have time to devote to foreign students who are in the uncomfortable position of being on the ‘receiving’ end. The lack of symmetry is clear here. Josef strongly feels the inequality of the situation: ‘you want to have experiences, but the others, the Parisians for example, they are not interested at all’. Communication is one way. Members of the majority group, established in sedentary comfort, are heedless. (Murphy-Lejeune 2002:187)

In my own study, Melissa, a Canadian student from Quebec who completed a semester abroad in a Paris university, described a very similar set of social separations: The unexpected was not having as many French friends, I think. I was a little disappointed in the end. And I remember calling my mom and saying ‘I have no French friends,’ and she said ‘You’re going to be attracted to the people who are into the same thing as you, they live there, they’re from there, you’re going to be with people who are on that same path of discovery and travel and …’ – and that’s how it worked out.

In his research on British working holidaymakers in Australia, Nick Clarke noted the spatial concentration of services developed to attract and serve these kind of sojourners in Sydney. Working holidaymakers are welcomed by municipal officials, urban developers and businessmen because they are ‘“young, healthy, attractive” and because they “spill

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out” and “consume food and drink and souvenirs”’(Clarke 2005:316). But when they venture out from the hostels, bars and restaurants of Sydney Central to seek temporary housing in residential suburbs, their partying, crowding into apartments, spilling onto local beaches and nocturnal routines have elicited tension with, and opposition from, local residents (ibid.:315–16). So, it is hardly surprising that the young Canadians on work or study abroad who participated in our own project were often drawn to other young people in similar circumstances. In other words, they were away from home and familiar routines and friends but also, by virtue of their transience, they were not integrated within the local networks of the sites they were visiting. Rhonda, a bilingual native of New Brunswick, explained that she had come to work in Edinburgh on a working holiday visa, primarily: [to] learn about a different culture, or be in another city, and just see if I was actually able, you know, to be away from home, and’cause like I said, my family is, you know, we’re really close, and really, like, you know? And it was actually my first time that I was away from them. And I don’t know, it’s just curiosity, I guess. I really like meeting new people too and just different.

Rhonda felt she had indeed learned ‘new things’, made ‘new friends’, done ‘stuff that back home I wouldn’t do’. But on two different stays in Edinburgh, Rhonda had been accompanied by a friend from home. Although she had friendly relations with her workmates in a job she had acquired through a UK placement agency, she didn’t ‘hang out’ with them very often. ‘I find that I’ve become friends with a lot of other Canadians that are here. French Canadians. Mostly, yeah. Met a lot of them.’ Her four flatmates were from Canada, Australia, Portugal and Scotland. That situation of liminality could, and in some cases did, lead to the kind of intense sociality that Turner identified with communitas. Simon, a Quebec student who, unusually,4 completed an exchange program in Columbia, explained that: Obviously I made a lot of friendships. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll be friends with these people forever. But at the time they were really, really intense friendships because you’re in this situation with the other foreigners especially because you’re all living the same thing. And these friendships become so intense because you’re in this completely foreign atmosphere and all aspects of even daily life are so different from your daily life back home, professional or academic atmosphere.

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Similarly, Catherine, who was working as a receptionist in the hostel in which she had stayed when she first arrived in Edinburgh on a working holiday, described her relationships with co-workers as: Good. I think its, um, yeah, like we’re all friends. And I think the reason …’cause I don’t think we would all be friends if we were all from one, if we were all from the same place. Like I don’t think that we would all hang out by choice. But because we’re all in the same situation, we’re all backpackers and we’re all away from home, everybody bonds pretty quickly. Just’cause we all have the same sort of thing in common and we’re all, we all have the same sort of stories, stuff like that. So …

Unlike the institutional representations of student mobility as a socially valorized form of training for adulthood in a global economy, the sojourns of many of the young travellers who participated in our research project corresponded more closely to Graburn’s construction of tourism as an opportunity to get away from ‘it all’. But it is clear that in this context the ‘it all’ being escaped from is a particular pathway towards adult roles and involvements. Indeed, what drew many of these young travellers to international work or study exchanges was the temporary reprieve it seemed to offer from social expectations of a predictable progression through educational and career commitments. In that sense, the motivations of these young travellers for taking up extended sojourns abroad is virtually opposite to the ‘official’ promotions of this kind of experience as an integral part of that very progression towards particular kinds of adult roles. For many of these young travellers, this experience appeared rather more like an informal, unannounced means of stalling adulthood than of training for it. As Rhonda explained: Ah, well I went to, um school in French in an English city, so then I obviously learned English quickly, and then I went to, um, University of ­­_____, ah 2000 to 2004, graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Public Relations Journalism and I have a minor in linguistics, so I studied more social linguistics and ah, I had some jobs in my field. I did a lot of media relations, event coordination, but um, I came to Europe in 2000, and then I came again in 2004 to visit some friends. And I just absolutely fell in love with the city [Edinburgh] and the travelling, so um, I had a really good job back home and I just decided, ah, last year that it wasn’t the time for me to have that nine-to-five job and sign the government contract, you know, so I just decided to take up the working holiday visa and come to Europe and work.

Thus this form of travel is more likely to offer a detour from, rather than a bridge through, life transitions. John’s decision to undertake an

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exchange program in Australia upset his father who thought it would be an unnecessary and costly delay in the completion of John’s civil engineering degree at a Western Canadian university. Yeah, basically what happened was like, after my fourth year in university, like I’ve been at ______ for, like it’ll be six years before I get my degree in total – because I did a year of Civil and then I went into the coop program and then coming down to Australia puts me back half a term so basically what happened was after my fourth year, a lot of my friends went to law school, med school, you know, went out and got jobs and I realized I was going to be the only one at [my university] so I should take off to Australia … do you know what I mean?

In that sense, this form of mobility supplies the break from usual routines and commitments with which tourism is generally associated, albeit without the same respite from work or instrumental pursuits that Smith or Graburn assigned this form of travel. But the very liminality of this travel also acts as a hedge on its consequences, including its transformative potential. At the end of a limited period spent studying or working abroad, many of these young adults expected to return home, to go back to school or get a job, rejoin familiar friends and family. For Mark, the experience of working in a café in London had been a highly enjoyable summer sojourn from which he returned to resume his studies in Montreal. Since he had restricted his stay in London to the period of the regular summer break, it had not posed any real interruption to the course of his studies. When Peter returned to Edmonton after working in Edinburgh, he planned to: sleep for a month and then start looking for work in my field again. Put my portfolio together, get my resumé together, start applying for work again. Pick up some of my old clients.

After a semester in Paris on an exchange, Melissa returned to Montreal where she completed her university degree and took up her old parttime waitressing job. When she completed university, she didn’t feel ready to ‘start working’, so she took a job teaching English in Japan before eventually returning to Montreal where she found employment in a recreation centre. Since Melissa was employed in Montreal before leaving for Japan and a job teaching English was her principal modus for staying abroad, it is clear that the notion of ‘working’ after university is not tied to employment per se but to a long term commitment to a career. An explicitly transient term of employment abroad in a job, whether on a working holiday visa or a temporary work permit, can therefore be constructed, ironically, as time out from ‘working’.

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Peter had enjoyed the opportunity to play rugby during his university exchange in Australia. He wasn’t sure of his long-term plans after returning to Canada. No, I’m really not sure. I want to – I’ll do another semester at _____ taking like a short course load, like just a few courses, like I’ll try to work as much as I can. And then I’ll probably do another year at _______’cause then I can play another season of rugby for ________ and then I’ll try to work as well. And then at that point, after I have my BA, if I don’t know what I want to do and I don’t want to go back to school right away, or go into a career right away unless I’m really confident that there’s something I’m really interested in doing. So at that point I might travel again, or a working holiday visa would actually be really good, I was thinking, at that point.’Cause this is my student visa, like I’ve been on a student visa here, a twelve month student visa so I could be eligible to come back here on a working holiday visa or a working visa.

Ronald had decided to ‘see the world before college or university’. He had spent time in Ireland and then Edinburgh on working-holiday visas. Had his plans for the future changed as a result of his work abroad? I think so. I think I’d prefer to work in another country. I’d have to, like, search what country that would be. I’d have to travel a bit more to discover what country I would actually like. Um, UK is nice but I don’t really see myself living here for the rest of my life. Um, as for what I want to do, I never really knew what that was to begin with, that was one of the reasons why I came travelling, to see if I could find myself a little more. I think I want to be a teacher. Just coming over here,’cause I found myself being more of a cheeky, cheerful person and I think I could do a good job teaching. I have no idea. Still, that’s one thing I have not made my mind up on, what my dreams are for the future. At least when it comes to employment.

Thus travel abroad does not necessarily or even frequently resolve the ambivalences and uncertainties of planning school and work transitions, but it does provide a break from undertaking or continuing longer term commitments ‘at home’.

The Limits of Liminality For the young, middle-class Canadian travellers spending time abroad as working holidaymakers or exchange students with which this chapter has been concerned, their sojourns appear to have been treated as an interlude in a progression through critical choices about and/or commitments to education and career involvements.

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While this interlude has strong elements in common with other forms of more leisured tourist travel, it is thoroughly identified with a particular stage of the life cycle: youth. This correlation is underlined by intergovernmental agreements and regulations that restrict eligibility for the visas enabling these movements either in terms of age or student status. But it is also the running subtext for the repeated characterizations, by these young travellers themselves, of these forms of journeys as something that you do before you ‘settle down’. These definitions for, and interpretations of, this form of travel are therefore as revealing about the characterization of, and definition of, a particular stage of the life course as they are about the particular experiences enjoined in stays abroad. That this form of youth travel can variously occur in the course of studies, whether on an exchange semester or on a working holiday in the summer break, before or after post-secondary studies or even between jobs, that it can be a unique journey or one of a series of such interludes, is revealing variously of the ambiguities surrounding the definition of youth, the kind of roles and activities it may entail and its duration. For some of the young people we encountered, travel abroad was explicitly intended to stave off for a while longer choices about, entry into or continued involvement in, longer-term work or school commitments. For others, these forms of travel offered possibilities for smuggling in an extended ‘vacation’ without much delay in, or alteration of, the course of their educational and career plans. Thus in spite of the strong identification of this form of travel with a particular stage of the life course, the variability of the ways in which it can be individually interpolated into the navigation of life-course transitions provides a caution against viewing it as a ‘rite of passage’ in the van Gennep mold as a socially recognized ritual commemorating the transition between distinct roles and stages of the life course. Indeed it is the diversity of the kinds of situations and contexts in which these forms of journeys can be taken up which is often a good part of their appeal to their youthful consumers. And the ambiguity surrounding the status of this kind of youth travel is underlined by the variety of reactions by family and friends to this kind of interlude, running the gamut from support and encouragement to indifference, puzzlement or anxiety. What is more consistent is the pervasive tendency among the young travellers we encountered to interpret this kind of stay abroad as thoroughly liminal, a temporary interlude betwixt and between other kinds of involvements, relationships and localizations. In this sense, it has some of the attributes of the kind of autonomous status that Victor Turner attributed to liminality. And the kind of quick intimacy that some young sojourners sometimes reported experiencing with

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other young travellers has resonances with Turner’s emphasis on the anti-structural qualities of communitas. But I want to argue that it is the thorough liminality of this form of travel that also limits the transformative potential that Turner ascribed to this kind of experience. To the extent that its practitioners see this experience as disembedded from their more usual places, networks and relationships, they are also less likely to see it as having much implication and consequence for what they do when the interlude is over. What is enjoyable and/or useful about this kind of journey is that it doesn’t have much effect on what is to follow. As Rosanne explained, there’s not much at stake in this kind of experience. If it’s not fun, you can go home. In a previous publication, I cautioned against the analytical tendency to automatically assume that ‘the engagement of youths with new cultural forms, both as producers and consumers, [prefigures], however fitfully and unevenly, more comprehensive cultural transformations’ (Amit-Talai 1995:230). I noted that ‘the very tendency to view certain practices as specific to children or youths and to be discarded when individuals reach adulthood can enhance their insularity and specificity but also their cultural conservatism’ (ibid.). By the same token, the tendency to view certain forms of travel as specific to youth, something to do before you settle down, as opposed to something that you need to do in order to settle down, or something that might significantly change how or whether you settle down, also tends to limit their transformative potential at least in the succeeding lives of these young travellers. Edward Bruner’s observation that tourist advertising and brochures often promise that Western persons travelling to ‘Third World’ countries will be totally transformed by the experience is echoed in the claims made by the agencies and institutions promoting the transformative impact of opportunities for extended sojourns abroad, which are specifically oriented to young Western travellers. But while the movements of these young travellers have implications for the expansion and developments of global markets of tourism, education and even casual labour, they appear to have much less consequence for the future lives of many young people themselves. The young travellers described in this chapter have evinced a capacity temporarily to evade the normative conventions of settling down/’growing up’ by creatively exploiting the official opportunities for ‘escape’ made possible by these rapidly expanding markets. It seems less likely that these young people will be able to – or that they even necessarily wish to – transform or altogether reject these normative expectations. By definition liminality is associated with a state and experience of transition but is it likely, in and of itself, to foment change? Fundamental

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structural change is likely to incorporate some elements of liminality. But there is a difference between the liminality engaged towards purposive efforts at effecting change and liminality insisted upon as a temporary state of transition for its own sake. In other words, revolution has a liminal aspect but liminality is not, in and of itself, revolutionary. Thus one of the most effective means of curtailing the social impact of youthful activities has been to render them thoroughly liminal. Repeating the hackneyed but still ubiquitous axiom: ‘It’s just a phase s/he is going through’ is meant to comfort the parents of fractious teenagers with the transitoriness of this situation, not to alarm them with the promise that this will create even more upheaval down the road. Liminality constructed in this sense is associated with the dispensability of the phenomenon being temporally bracketed in this way. The activities of the young travellers recounted in this chapter had not achieved the broad social recognition or systematic commemoration linked to the ritual ceremonies with which van Gennep was concerned. The order and progression in which these journeys were taken up was far more elastic, individuated and voluntary than the rites of passage described by van Gennep. But the circumscribed nature of the liminality that young travellers tended to attribute to these journeys is more redolent of the conservative sublimation of van Gennep’s construction of this transitional phase than the revolutionary potential that Turner and Turner ascribed to it. As Graburn has noted, touristic travel is liminal by virtue of the separation it provides from the voyagers’ everyday routines and places. But precisely because of this disjunction, it is less likely to transform the regular involvements of those participating in these journeys. By extension, we might argue that the bracketing entailed in processes of social liminality is by its very parameters, and well beyond this particular case, more likely to limit the possibilities of radical change than to create them.

Notes 1. Joel Marier, National Executive Director of Hostelling International–Canada and the current Chair of the Canadian Youth Tourism Consortium (CYTA) and Michael Palmer, Executive Director of the Student Youth Travel Association, developed the model. 2. Citing a report by Goldfarb Consultants, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) has argued that study abroad ‘greatly improves students’ adaptability skills, creating in them an “If I can do this I can do anything!” attitude.’ In ‘the new economy, it is crucial to cultivate such an entrepreneurial spirit’ (AUCC: 3 June 2002). 3. This study is supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It involves a collaboration between Vered Amit and

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Vered Amit Noel Dyck and the assistance of several graduate students, particularly Heather Barnick, Meghan Gilgunn and Kathleen Rice. The names of respondents have been changed in order to preserve their confidentiality. The officials at Simon’s home institution were very concerned about his virtually singular decision to go on an exchange to a Columbian university. They were concerned about the potential risks to Simon posed by the uncertainties of Columbia’s political circumstances.

References Amit, V. (2001), ‘The Study of Youth Culture: Why it’s Marginal but Doesn’t Need to Be So’, Europaea VII (1/2): 145–54. Amit-Talai, V. (1995), ‘Conclusion: The “multi” cultural of youth’, in Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, eds Vered Amit-Talai and Helena Wulff (London: Routledge). Amit-Talai, V. and Wulff, H. (eds) (1995), Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (London: Routledge). AUCC (03/06/2002) “Study Abroad” www.aucc.ca/_pdf/english/reports/ 2002/innovation/study_abroad_e.PDF. Downloaded April 21, 2009. (Ottawa: Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada). Bruner, E.M. (1991), ‘Transformation of Self in Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 18: 238–50. Clarke, N. (2005), ‘Detailing Transnational Lives of the Middle: British Working Holidaymakers in Australia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31(2): 307–22. d’Anjou, A. (2004), ‘Youth Tourism in Canada: A Situational Analysis of an Overlooked Market’ (Youth Tourism Consortium of Canada. Creative Solutions Communications). Graburn, N.H.H. (1995), ‘Tourism, Modernity and Nostalgia’, in The Future of Anthropology: Its Relevance to the Contemporary World, eds Akbar S. Ahmed and Cris Shore (London: Athlone). Graburn, Nelson H.H. (1983) ‘The Anthropology of Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 10: 9–33. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds) (1976), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (London: Harper Collins Academic). Hannerz, U. (1996), Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge). Hockey, J. and James, A. (2003), Social Identities Across the Life Course (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan). Liechty, M. (2003), Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Murphy-Lejeune, E. (2002), Student Mobility and Narrative in Europe: The New Strangers (London: Routledge). Smith, Valene (ed.) (1977) Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press).

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Stronza, A. (2001), ‘Anthropology of Tourism: Forging New Ground for Ecotourism and Other Alternatives’, Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 261–83. Turner, V. (1969), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (New York: Cornell University Press). Turner, V. and Turner, E. (1978), Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press). Valentine, G., Skelton, T. and Chambers, D. (1998), ‘Cool Places: An Introduction to Youth and Youth Cultures’, in Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, eds Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge). van Gennep, A. (1960 [1908]), The Rites of Passage, translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee, introduction by Solon T. Kimball (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Part II Beyond the Polity

Introduction to Part II Nigel Rapport

The two essays in Part II look at human capacities that locate actors beyond the polity. In ethnographic detailing of the contemporary European Union (Chapter 3) and of a mid-century United States of America (Chapter 4) alike, an understanding of individual behaviour is to be gained only be setting the context of the polity against an awareness of kinds of social relations – duties, potential commitments, possible consociations – that lie beyond it. Actors have the capacity to deal flexibly, ironically, with the political institutions that seek to claim critical dues on their loyalty, their senses of belonging and compassion. More precisely, in ‘Making the Cosmopolitan Plea: Harold Oram’s International Fund-raising in the early Cold War’, Laura Suski examines the political space of international humanitarian action as part of a broader analysis of a human capacity to cause and to eliminate suffering. Suski uses archival research on a public-relations firm in the United States in the years preceding and following the Second World War – and in particular its energetic founder and chairman, Harold Oram – to examine how the discourse of international philanthropy came to be defined both by the political climate of the emerging Cold War and by a unique hope in the promise of international peace and prosperity to end global suffering. She focuses on appeal letters written in the 1930s and 1940s on behalf of organizations involved in causes like aiding refugees from fascist and communist polities, and supporting the early development of the United Nations. As the primary writer of the appeal letters, Harold Oram is given particular attention as an individual actor attempting to negotiate the conflicted emerging space of international humanitarian action. The chapter also engages with debates in cosmopolitan morality. As a moral framework, cosmopolitanism upholds the idea that we

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are morally bound to those beyond the more comfortable ethical spaces of our polity: family, community and state. A key question in the history of the practice of cosmopolitanism is how and why the suffering of so-called ‘distant strangers’ becomes meaningful. The chapter examines how international injustice was communicated via appeal letters to elite social actors in a way that implied a moral bond of universal humanism but at the same time allowed for a selective practice of this universal impulse to help. Here are philanthropic actors simultaneously construing the possibilities and the limits of a cosmopolitan humanity; they operate in a moral domain beyond particular polities and purely altruistic motives alike, a space characterized by its impure complexity. Suski’s essay is preceded by Thomas Wilson’s, ‘“Crisis”: On the Limits of European Integration and Identity in Northern Ireland’. There have been recent referenda in France and the Netherlands which have resulted in majority votes against the adoption of a mooted Europe-wide constitution within the European Union. The referenda votes have led to what some commentators have deemed a ‘crisis’ in the politics of European integration concerning how to frame the nature of cooperation and collaboration between Europe’s erstwhile discrete nation-states. Drawing on Wilson’s long-term field research in Ireland, a region renowned for its support for European integration, this chapter offers an alternative consideration of such electoral events based upon a sophisticated analysis of ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘Europe’ as variously, locally, conceived. The chapter examines changing notions of Europeanization, and national and European identity, in the borderlands of Northern Ireland and Eire by interrogating local, individual definitions of crisis, failure and success in European Union initiatives. Through a particular illumination of the ways and extents to which Belfast is understood to be a ‘European city’, the chapter challenges superficial conclusions concerning crises. The ‘No’ votes returned by French and Dutch constituencies appear to record negative evaluations of European bureaucrats’ plans for European expansion, even of the cosmopolitan project per se. However, values can be distinguished from institutions. Inhabitants of Belfast and its hinterlands exhibit a capacity to construe identities outside existing polities – both national and supra-national – and so locate themselves between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, as these might be simplistically understood by policy makers and superimposed on individual actions. Wilson’s chapter, like Suski’s, finds individual actors displaying the capacity to negotiate structures and spaces for the effecting of valued political visions that see beyond existing institutions.

Chapter 3

‘Crisis’: On the Limits of European Integration and Identity in Northern Ireland Thomas M. Wilson

We need a debate in Europe to decide where the limits of Europe lie and prevent these limits being determined by others. We also have to admit that currently we could not convince our citizens of the need to extend the EU’s borders still further east. (Prodi 2002, emphasis in original)

Romano Prodi, the then President of the European Commission, made the above statement at the Sixth ECSA-World Conference, Jean Monnet Project, Brussels, 5–6 December 2002. At the time it was clear that the European Union (EU) was expanding, and eastward, to first become a union of twenty-five member states in 2004 and then twenty-seven states in 2007, but the dilemma he posed concerned how to set the limits of the EU, metaphorically and geopolitically. Prodi queried the nature of public participation in the projects of expansion and consolidation – what in other circles has been called ‘widening and deepening’ the EU (see, for example, Bull 1993) – a dilemma that has been an integral part of the European projects since the inception of the European Economic Communities. But he was also challenging the citizens of Europe to play a part, perhaps a decisive one, in accepting the principles and actions of their political elites who were continuing to build Europe in political, territorial, economic, social and cultural ways (see Bellier and Wilson [2000a, 2000b] and Shore [2000] for anthropological assessments of ‘building’ Europe).

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Prodi’s pessimism regarding a lack of resolve or interest on the part of Europe’s citizens in the further territorial expansion of the EU eastward was well timed. Even at the start of the biggest territorial and political expansion in the EU’s history, it was troubling to the architects of expansion that they may have been creating an unwieldy Union, politically speaking, and one which may lead to ‘enlargement fatigue’ among the EU’s populace, with unpredictable effects. Prodi was in fact lamenting the lack of popular and elite commitment to securing a ‘ring of friends’ surrounding the Union and its closest European neighbours. This ring of friends later became enshrined in policy shifts in the EU that resulted in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a framework of cooperation between the EU and the Mediterranean border states of North Africa and the Middle East, the land border states of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova, and the states of the Caucasus (Russia excluded). In this ENP those neighbouring states that share core EU values, without sharing EU institutions, may benefit from a privileged relationship with the EU (Kelley 2006:30). But what Prodi could not have known then, in delivering a speech which led to the ENP as clearly as it prefigured other reactions within the EU to the expansion and transformation of the limits of ‘Europe’, was that in two major countries of the EU, in fact in two of the six original Western European core members, the citizens would not be convinced of the need to change the constitutional basis of the EU itself. In other words, European citizens of two historically important member nations were setting their own limits on European integration and expansion. Forget about the neighbours, inside and outside of the EU: voting publics in two heretofore staunchly supportive member states would not follow their leaders into another stage of ‘ever closer union’. In two startling and separate votes in the early summer of 2005, the citizens of France and of The Netherlands decided against ratifying the new constitution of the EU, which had been agreed by their leaders and those of the other EU member states just the year before (but which needed to be ratified by each member state’s citizenry through whichever means each state adopted, whether by a vote in parliament, the agreement of their government through treaty, or by a referendum). This was a resistance to change in the processes and structures of European integration that was unpredicted and precipitous. In both the initial and sustained reactions to these votes, wherein the entire process of adopting the new constitution of the EU had to be stopped because all of the member states had to approve it or it could not go forward, the French and Dutch votes were perceived as major impediments to much more than just the constitution itself. EU leaders and architects, as well as the scholars of the EU, began quickly to

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assess the causes and nature of these French and Dutch ‘roadblocks’ to the European project of integration, in which peoples who had been long-standing supporters of integration were registering their dissatisfaction with the overall European project (Taggart 2006:7). The votes were of course seen as a manifestation of what many inside and beyond the EU have noted as a rise in Euroscepticism, a feature of European politics that is an increasingly important aspect of each member state’s reactions to further Europeanization (and not, as had once been perceived, just the problem of a few member states, most notably the UK; for a review of widespread and varied cases of Euroscepticism, see Harmsen and Spiering 2004). But to many of these same scholars, these votes were also significant because of the timing of the votes, where they took place, the range and organization of opposition groups and interests in both countries, and the importance of that aspect of European integration, namely a constitution, which was being thwarted not only in France and The Netherlands but in the other twenty-three member states as well. In fact: ‘The reaction by many in the EU studies community has been to describe the 2005 referendum results as amounting to a crisis for the EU if not for the European project in general’ (Taggart 2006:7–8; for analyses of the referendum results, see also Harmsen 2005; Hobolt 2006; Marthaler 2005; Mény 2005). This ‘crisis’, which has been likened to an integration ‘train wreck’ (Pfaff 2005), was exacerbated by another crisis, that of failing to agree the next EU budget, at an EU summit called for that purpose. The ‘historic failure’ of the Luxembourg summit of June of that year followed close on the heels of the constitution impasse and was perceived, at the time, as being just as significant as the referendum votes a few weeks before. And while we now have a great deal of data on why the French and Dutch voters defeated their national attempts to approve the EU constitution, a subject to which we return below, we have rather less information as to how these votes, and the crisis they engendered, affected the lives of other Europeans, beyond France and The Netherlands, and whether indeed these events were seen to amount to a ‘crisis’ at all beyond elite political, journalistic and academic circles. Simply put, while the referendum defeats in France and the Netherlands in 2005 resulted in what many continue to call a crisis in European integration, in Northern Ireland, a region on an island often renowned for its support of European integration, these events were seen in much different ways, reflecting local identifications with nation, state and ‘Europe’, and suggesting how European events may have differential effects and meanings in the everyday experiences and political cultures of Europeans distant from the cosmopolitan

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centres of the EU’s core. This article, based on field research which I conducted just after the Dutch and French referendum results, uses the referendum crisis of 2005 as a point of departure in considering how people in Northern Ireland construe their local and regional identities in ways that liberate them from, and subvert the structures of, European polity and society as framed in Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam and London. One of the ways these local identities and identifications thrive is through their dialogue with ‘Europe’, wherein local definitions of crisis and failure, within European and national contexts, are often far removed from elsewhere. Nevertheless, these local manifestations of failure and crisis are often still perceived as being European in origin and in resolution, or at the least connected to the EU in local perceptions as one of the European effects of integration (Wilson 2006). This chapter is not concerned with exploring the nature of what constitutes ‘failure’ and ‘crisis’ in elite circles of the EU or in wider dimensions of European integration beyond the levels of the locality, region and province. Rather, through a consideration of events and perceptions in Northern Ireland, it is about the ways in which EU issues, at EU-wide levels and in core political arenas distant from most European localities and political domains, are perceived and articulated within local politics, society and economics. Moreover, this chapter also considers how ‘crisis’ and ‘failure’ in European integration delineate the dialectics of political rhetoric that are at work between and among such localities as the ‘village’, the ‘city’, the ‘borderland’, the ‘province’, the ‘nation’, the ‘state’ and ‘Europe’. Within these relational feedback processes there are local definitions of crisis and failure that are framing European integration in the lives of people geopolitically distant from the capitals and cosmopolitans of France, The Netherlands and the EU. In such local definitions of crisis there may be evidence of how the European project has been differently constructed in the lives of Europeans. This interest in notions of crisis, in places such as Northern Ireland, leads me finally to a more general consideration of the past and continuing dimensions of an anthropology of European integration.

Crises and Failures in European Integration European integration has continued despite what might be seen as a consistent history of crises weathered and overcome. From the early years of the Common Market the various European Communities have had to deal with crises so often, and in so many surprising ways

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and from so many surprising sources (surprising, that is, if the critical reactions and resulting rhetorical flourishes are to be believed), that it is hard to conceive of European integration being driven in any other way. In fact, since 1992 there have been no fewer than six referendums in EU member states that have resulted in ‘No’ votes to European issues (Taggart 2006:12). Despite such crises as the Danish Maastricht votes, the debates and agenda-stopping votes that followed other treaties and summits (such as the Irish response to the Nice Treaty), corruption scandals in the European Commission, and continuing budget standoffs (over, for example, funding the Common Agricultural Policy, or negotiating member states’ contributions to the EU budget, such as that of the UK), the EU continues to move forward. Even when it seems to be ‘dead in the water’, it is like a duck with its legs paddling furiously out of sight, strenuously stationary, constantly moving in order to stay afloat and to look calm and content (Sedelmeier and Young 2006:2). Despite these crises, and perhaps because there are so many of them, each crisis that develops or erupts is treated very seriously, and often as if it is sui generis. The articulation of EU-level crises as if each was unique is due in part to the fact that the EU is developing without any historical precedent, in spite of the rich scholarly literature that approaches its ontology as if it were a national state like others that developed in Europe since the Treaty of Westphalia. It was in this general narrative of crisis that the first public responses to the referendum votes of 2005 were voiced in the media in the UK and Ireland. These responses treated the ‘No’ votes as a largely unprecedented crisis for the entire EU project, because two core member states at roughly the same time refused to ratify a European document that their leaders had agreed, along with the leaders of the other twenty-three states, for the whole Union. In France, the vote against the Constitutional Treaty was in large part the result of so-called ‘punishment strategies’ which were meant to register dissatisfaction with national leaders, chief among them President Chirac, and ‘a way to give an unpopular government a “kicking”’ (Nielsen and Olsen 2006:16). Many of the public were also afraid of losing jobs within a more neoliberal Europe: fully 64 per cent of public sector employees who voted did so against the Treaty, in defense of their historically protected public service posts (Marthaler 2005:8). The spectre of a neoliberal Europe was in many minds as important a reason as any other for so many people to have voted against the Treaty (54.7 per cent out of a 69.3 per cent voter turnout) (Marthaler 2005:1). In this view the EU would impose an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic model, one that was so successful under the New Labour of Tony Blair, ‘which raised the prospect of the influx of “Polish plumbers” into France’ (Taggart 2006:16). The ‘No’ vote

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was also particularly high among the unemployed, in rural areas where reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy have hurt farmers’ livelihoods, and in regions distant from Paris (Marthaler 2005:8). The failure of the Treaty in France has multiple causes that are both domestic and European (Marthaler 2005:10). The Constitutional Treaty was written in language that was not as accessible as that of the French constitution, which carries so much weight in the symbolic definition of national identity. The Constitutional Treaty was also associated with a former president of France, who played a role in its original framing, and who did not have the support of the French Left. But in France the vote was also a commentary on the 2004 enlargement of the EU, ‘and a warning to the political elite about moving too fast with future enlargements, especially to Turkey’ (Marthaler 2005:10). The vote too was an indication of the inability of the political elites in government who favoured the Treaty to articulate a positive and engaging campaign; the vast turnout and negative vote demonstrated that the European project was seen to be leaving some of the people of France behind, in a rush to adopt principles and practices that were foreign to France; the European project was no longer as Frenchinfluenced as it once had been, and people were wary of EU-induced change at home. It was not just a ‘No’ to French and European elites, but to global forces as well. Underlying this is a sense of uncertainty about where the European project is going, together with concerns about immigration and outsourcing, about perceived threats to the secular republican model and to French as well as European identity. More broadly, this reflects an anxiety about the impact of globalization on France, symbolized during the campaign by the importing of cheap textiles from China. (Marthaler 2005:10)

In the end, the ‘No’ vote in France led to major changes in domestic French national politics, with parties and government losing leaders and with some more extreme and marginal parties and movements, such as the far right, the far left, sovereignists and communists, gaining credibility and momentum (Marthaler 2005:11). The Dutch ‘No’ vote (61.5 per cent of a 63.3 per cent turnout) (Harmsen 2005:1), on the other hand, had as much to do with Dutch fears about the course of European integration, which had never been led by the Dutch, as it had with Dutch domestic society and politics. As Harmsen (2005) has shown, the Dutch electorate was unused to referendums, and the failure of the national political elites, in government and in opposition, who were largely in agreement in their support of the Constitutional Treaty, was due more to a failure of the political class to manage the campaign than it was to the successful

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strategies of their opponents. Nevertheless, their opponents put together a ‘patchwork of protest’ (Harmsen 2005:5) drawn from the populist left and right and from traditional Protestant parties. These disparate groups succeeded in crafting a coherent critique of the Treaty that hit home with many Dutch voters who were not their traditional supporters. Populists on the left saw the Constitutional Treaty as a threat to the Dutch social model, much like France, but they also saw the Treaty as weakening their country’s position in the EU, as chipping away at their national identity, and as a ‘threat to the Dutch “crown jewels” of liberal policies on gay marriage, drugs and euthanasia’ (Taggart 2006:18). Populists on the right also highlighted the Treaty’s threats to Dutch polity and society by stirring fears about Turkey’s accession to the EU and its possible effect on Islamicizing Europe, which together might lead to more Muslim and non-European immigration that would dilute national identity and culture. Overall, the ‘No’ camp in The Netherlands ‘stressed the need for more tightly defined limits to be placed on the European integration project, portrayed as posing an increasing threat to core elements of both national interest and national identity’ (Harmsen 2005:5). This position was effective because it hit a raw nerve in an increasingly Eurosceptical Dutch public. In fact, no fewer than 55 per cent of those who voted against the Treaty in The Netherlands cited emotional factors as important in their voting decision (as opposed to 29 per cent of the ‘Yes’ voters who said that emotion played a part in their votes). The ‘No’ vote overall was a statement that to a sizeable part of the Dutch populace ‘Europe had gone “too far, too fast” – and that a “No” vote would restrain the (further) development of a European superstate’ (Harmsen 2005:5). The defeat of the referendum was a demonstration of ‘a growing “gap” (“kloof”) between the political establishment and Dutch society’ (2005:13). This gap that reflected a relatively new discourse concerning the ‘limits of Europe’ which questioned the geographical boundaries of the Union and the boundaries of its desirable policy competence. As Harmsen indicates, ‘it was this ‘limits of Europe’ debate which was given a sharper focus and a higher political profile by the specific dynamics of the referendum campaign’” (Harmsen 2005: 14). In comparing the results of the two referendums, it is also interesting to compare the reasons given by ‘No’ voters as to why they sought to stop the Constitutional Treaty in their country. The four most common reasons given by Dutch ‘No’ voters were: a lack of information; the loss of national sovereignty; opposition to national parties and government; and the idea that Europe was too expensive (Taggart 2006:19; see also Marthaler 2005; Flash Eurobarometer 2005). As with the French vote, there was the expressed need to send messages to national leaders in regard

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to state–society relations and state–Europe relations. Commensurate with whether France would remain with a perceived French model of a just and humane social welfare state or would adopt the neoliberal framework of Blair and Thatcher and Bush, was whether the Dutch government could stem the tide of non-Dutch immigration. It is obvious that most of the French and Dutch voters, of ‘No’ certainly but many too among the ‘Yes’ camp, were operating within decidedly national frameworks in what was seen outside of their countries to be a constitutional debacle. Most of the votes cast were not particularly the result of clear-cut responses to European integration and constitutionalism. On the contrary, they were votes cast for the future of France and of The Netherlands in terms of what each nation and state was to be, at home, for their citizens. This vote had clear consequences for Europe, but this was more about a Frenchinfluenced Europe, a Europe in France’s reflection, and about French and Dutch people expressing concern about European threats to their national identities, than it was about a Europe that was developing along its own axes. Thus, each of the ‘No’ votes was not in its particulars about Europe, per se, but about the nation/state in the proposed new Europe. Many, perhaps most, who voted ‘No’ in France and The Netherlands did so in order to effect specific changes at home, in national agendas, in which a consideration of the future of Europe played little role in voting preferences, except of course in terms of a particular country’s future in some configuration of Europe.

Crises and Failures in Northern Ireland’s European Integration How would these referendum events in France and The Netherlands affect both processes of European integration and the ways in which the EU figured in local, regional and national affairs? These were questions that concerned me in the summer of 2005, when I was working on issues of European integration in Wales and in Northern Ireland. Not surprisingly, the crisis in European integration, and the failures of the ‘pro-Europe’ interests in the two celebrated European cases, were prominently displayed in much public and private discourse in both the UK and Ireland at the time. And one of the tropes which emerged in all the discussions I had in Ireland, but also in Wales and in Brussels where I also conducted interviews that summer, was that the nature of ‘crisis’, at home and abroad, within European contexts and beyond them, needed to be better understood.

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For example, it was clear to my respondents in Northern Ireland that the demise of this particular 2005 effort at an EU constitution was a crisis to certain leaders and governments. But my respondents’ relative lack of concern or enthusiasm – very much unlike the reaction I had first heard among some academic colleagues – spurred me to also ask them about whether this ‘No’ to Europe was more than just a failure or setback to the EU, to European integration and to Europeanization? It was certainly a blow to the Eurocrats and national political and economic elites who proposed and supported the initiative. But in what ways was it a setback to the Europe imagined by masses of Europeans? The short answer to this question, which I asked in extended interviews with twenty people in Northern Ireland in summer 2005, twelve of whom have been long-serving respondents/informants, was: ‘Nothing – no significance, no impact’. As one farmer said in Armagh: ‘I am certain that it [the ‘No’ vote] meant something to the French, but not here, and even there it must now be yesterday’s news’. Here are some other responses, drawn from my field notes: If we had the vote here I would vote no, not because I am against Europe or a constitution, but because Blair and the British are for it. (Self-employed nationalist in West Belfast) Yes or no, it would not matter to my daily routine. But a constitution might undermine the British way of life, particularly the common law tradition. (Belfast professional, unionist) We want more Europe here in Northern Ireland; we just don’t want more government. (Nationalist shopkeeper in the County Down borderlands) Who can be interested in something that seems to have as its two main goals the provision of an efficient market and the prevention of something that was last experienced sixty years ago? (Unionist professional from Belfast)

This latter reference was to a nationalist war, which in itself might be surprising to people outside of Northern Ireland, because so many people external to Northern Ireland see it as a prime location of nationalist war, a view with which many Irish republicans would agree, but just as many unionists would disagree, preferring to see the conflict there as a fight against terrorism and for law and order. It also is an answer that alludes to how Northern Ireland events are often disconnected from those of the wider Europe, in ways that demonstrate some of the reasons for the reactions in Northern Ireland to happenings elsewhere in Europe. In Northern Ireland, most of the replies I received to my often rather pointed queries regarding the significance of the votes in France and The Netherlands, to Europe in general and to them in

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particular, revolved around three major themes. The first was that, in most cases and in most ways, these votes meant nothing to them. The referendum results were determined by votes cast by the electorate in their own countries in order to achieve their own internal results. In other words, these were not votes that needed to be seen as French men and women voting for ‘Europe’, or Dutch men and women voting for a common European project or future, but rather these were national men and women voting for their national futures, their national projects, their shared common national space. In one sense these ‘non-European’ responses in Northern Ireland were surprising, especially among nationalist and republican communities who have long supported the processes of European integration in the form of a Europe of the Regions that would allow more autonomy to a province they believe is still held under the imperialist yoke of the UK. But in another sense they are predictable answers, showing the importance to some Northern Ireland people of national liberation and sovereignty, and the rights of minorities and other disenfranchised people to define their own forms of citizenship and sovereignty. The second theme that emerged from the answers to my queries regarding the significance of the ‘No’ votes was one of instrumentalism. In this view Europe as a polity would survive despite these votes, as it has after every such crisis, and its leaders would find a way forward to a constitution for the EU, if they wanted it badly enough. As one local community activist from the Northern Ireland borderlands said to me that June of 2005: ‘Europe thrives on these bloody crises, and will rise from the ashes bigger and better, like the phoenix of Irish republicanism, please God’. A key aspect of this instrumental viewpoint was that crises were part and parcel of integration: if Europe did not have crises they would have to invent them, to push the project forward, to keep Europe and its effects stage front for Europeans. Another aspect of this instrumentalist view was that if leaders and countries wanted European integration, or any specific element of integration, such as a treaty, then they would find a way to make it happen, because it may suit the people with money and power, and the people who wanted some of the money and power, and perhaps even those without much of either but who just wanted to carve out a piece of security and comfort for themselves. There was also a bit of fatalism to this instrumental view: no fewer than five of the people I interviewed that summer expressed opinions that suggested that if there was never to be a constitution, then so be it: it was not meant to happen. They, and others, also volunteered that, anyway, it meant little or nothing to them. My respondents in Northern Ireland in this sense held much in common with the people in Wales with whom I first broached the significance of the French and Dutch votes. They

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spoke in clear and assured voices to say that the constitution was a European matter, and if it ever came to Ireland or the United Kingdom then they would deal with it on their terms. The third theme that emerged was that the rejection of the constitution in the referendums was a popular political democratic decision to say ‘No’ to national elites, ‘No’ to the political domination of the core, and ‘No’ to the fundamental transformation of the nation. In essence, using the language that often is more meaningful to the academics who seek to understand the impact of Europeanization and European integration on the lives of Europeans, among my respondents that summer there was a realization that the peoples of The Netherlands and France had voted ‘No’ to the privileged projects of political elites and ‘Yes’ to the rights of peripheral peoples, whether they be farmers, the unemployed, drug users, gays or others living in marginal and undeveloped regions in their countries. The quotes above, which are a sampling of the many opinions on Europe and Ireland that were elicited by my questioning, are suggestive of the ways in which ‘Europe’ is perceived from the vantage point of localities in Northern Ireland. There, in much popular consciousness, European integration and Europeanization have little to do with a shared heritage or a common European identity and culture, but they have a great deal to do with what the EU can do for people locally, and this means almost entirely in terms of economic and political support. This is largely why the ‘No’ votes were of little import to locals in Northern Ireland: they assumed that in France and the Netherlands these were manifestations of the same sort of processes that motivate people in Northern Ireland, and that at some point Europe would find a way forward to satisfy the needs of those voters, as it did in the many crises that followed each Treaty that drove the process along. The instrumentalist view of Europe in Northern Ireland is not solely about the wealth that can accrue to businesses, or the subvention that can benefit local and regional government, or the influx of capital and infrastructure that will transform economic and social Northern Ireland. It is also about the nature of fundamental societal and political change, in terms of values, structures and actions that are also seen to be tied to the Europe of the EU. But here too the notion of crisis plays a role, in that local notions of crisis also have European dimensions. In these local terms crisis and Europe are sometimes inextricably linked, as can be witnessed in locally perceived (‘real’) failures of European integration. Among these are the continuing crises in the attainment of some of the key components of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (1998), especially in regard to the successful establishment of a Northern Ireland Assembly, the failure of Europe to provide the proper impetus to fund and establish true cross-border

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governmental bodies, and the failure of Europe to sustain new ties of cross-border cooperation. These will be elaborated upon below.

Peace and Partnership Social partnership, a new form of governance in much of Europe and one increasing in importance in Ireland since the late 1980s, is a mix of governmental and non-governmental actors in a mutually agreed effort to meet their economic, social and political needs and those of the wider society. While its origins in Ireland are as homegrown as they are European, it is widely held that as a principle in solving the problems of social and economic divisions, social partnership is a product of European values of social justice and political order. At EU levels, the principle, which many perceive as being first and most successfully applied in the Peace Programs (EU Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation) that were funded in Northern Ireland by the European Commission, is one which fosters civil society and non-governmental organizations’ participation in government. In Northern Ireland, social partnership is intended to lead to equality and parity between nationalists and unionists. But local perceptions of social partnership in Northern Ireland also hold that it is a new form of local and national governance that reflects the global forces that are at the heart of Europeanization, forces which demand ‘the interconnectedness of regeneration decisions taken at the local, regional and international levels’ (Hughes et al. 1998:49; for a broader consideration of partnership and Europeanization in Ireland, see Wilson and Donnan 2006). These interconnections are clear within INTERREG, the European Commission’s Community Initiative to support cross-border economic and political linkages between peripheral border regions of EU member states. In Ireland, INTERREG is often seen as a successful EU program, yet one that has in some important ways failed local border constituencies, especially when viewed over the longer term of three funding cycles (Wilson 2000; see also Laffan and Payne 2001 for an assessment of INTERREG successes and failures). INTERREG supports cross-border cooperation; if a project is to be funded it must be based on cooperation among the government, voluntary and private sectors as well as between the governments of the EU, member states and regions. This sort of cooperation is a key plank in the EU’s project of regional development and integration. At the start of the INTERREG program in Ireland (1991–93) there was a real need for cross-border communication, cooperation and funding, because there had hardly been any formal political and economic cross-

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border contact for seventy years. And while INTERREG was initially welcomed in its target areas of Northern Ireland and the six border counties of the Republic of Ireland, problems in its implementation quickly emerged. From the start the two national governments jointly managed INTERREG through their departments in Belfast and Dublin. However, on the Northern Ireland side of the border the central government favoured local government projects, thereby weakening their ability to achieve the broader aims of the program as set out by Brussels. Local community groups and NGOs were hindered in their efforts to qualify for the program because they were required to raise at least a quarter of their costs from state and private funding sources in order to be eligible for INTERREG aid. This gave governmental applications an edge, since in effect they were competing with non-governmental actors for governmental matching funds! The government also administered the program from Belfast, in a centralizing control of information, decisions and funding, which made difficult the achievement of the program’s aims of building political, administrative, economic and social partners in the border regions. The centralization of INTERREG presented particular problems for voluntary and community groups in Northern Ireland, who saw the government departments in Belfast as distant and uninterested in local borderland concerns, despite the fact that the British government in London and Belfast, only an hour away, publicly supported INTERREG. Many local people perceived that civil servants were often sympathetic but overworked, and that the application procedures were too difficult for people who were not civil servants or other legal and political professionals. As a result a new culture of consultancy bloomed in Northern Ireland in a matter of a few years, in which economic and legal specialists set up accountancy and other consultancies to help local individuals and groups to qualify for new grants and programs. These consultants helped locals to negotiate government circles that they distrusted as a result of generations of conflict. However, from their start, many local borderlands people supported INTERREG and other EU funding programs because they were seen to be European policies that intended to support social partnership. These problems in implementation and reception did not stop the government from proclaiming INTERREG’s first round a success, and in INTERREG II, which closed in 1999, more attention was paid to local community groups in the borderlands regions through a new funding provision which decentralized the process and devolved it to intermediate funding bodies. But while this brought the funding decision physically closer to the border, it did little to alleviate the pressures on those groups without formal ties to national and local

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government and to technoeconomic specialists. As a result, while millions of pounds of EU funding flowed into Northern Ireland, local community groups grew increasingly frustrated. Many border people consequently felt excluded and marginalized, and have talked often in terms that suggest the EU has let them down. Borderland peoples’ distrust of the government continues to be a serious obstacle to any European funding scheme. While INTERREG in all of its forms is supposed to be about partnership among the EU and local, regional and national governments and civil societies, partnership is difficult to achieve without a history of effective regional government and with a wide dissatisfaction with government in general. Now, after the implementation of INTERREG III, the issues of how and why European programs are not working have been compounded by the failures, some would call them crises, of the European-influenced structures and functions of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and its related institutions. The new Northern Ireland Assembly was set up as a result of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998, in what was the start of a process that may very well lead to devolved government in Northern Ireland. From its inception the Assembly was touted as the product of an agreement that was seen to be a compromise of European dimensions, i.e., it was steeped in a language of equality of esteem and parity of representation between Northern Ireland’s warring communities that had little precedent in either Northern Ireland or the wider UK. In fact the Agreement itself goes beyond the provision of new institutions and political rights to the inclusion of human rights, on a level and in a language unheard of in the UK. The parity of esteem model was hailed as a European solution to the problems of inequality in Northern Ireland. Moreover, the reaching of this momentous political agreement was seen in some circles to be a fitting attainment of what many in the mainstream nationalist parties saw as the culmination of a pragmatic approach to a ‘Europe of the Regions’ (for a review of some of the European dimensions to the Belfast Good Friday Agreement, see Meehan 2006; Laffan and Payne 2002). However, while the intentions of the Agreement were supported by all parties who signed, the achievement of the major elements of the Agreement has proved elusive, as unionists and nationalists have battled over the nature of the new police force, the destruction of republican weapons, and the composition of the new Assembly executive. For much of its history since 1998 the Assembly has been inactive, often suspended pending resolution of the outstanding differences, thus forcing the British government to intermittently renew its direct rule from Westminster.

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The Agreement also stipulated the setting up of a North–South Ministerial Council between the Irish Government and the new Assembly to develop consultation and cooperation on matters of mutual interest. ‘Modelled along EU lines’ (Pollak 2001), the North/ South Ministerial Council meets in three formats: plenary (between the Irish prime minister and the first minister of Northern Ireland, and their cabinets), sectoral (involving sectoral ministers) and crosssectoral. The Agreement also set up cross-border ‘implementation bodies’, cooperative governmental and specialist committees to discuss and decide matters related to specific and delimited functions of crossborder interest, in agriculture, education, fishing, tourism, strategic transport planning, environmental protection, inland waterways, entitlements of cross-border workers, urban and rural development, and accident and emergency services and other related cross-border issues. All of these cross-border government bodies, and all of the crossborder business and development schemes supported by EU-funded INTERREG and the Peace programs, are often portrayed in the Northern Ireland border regions as events and processes that could not have taken place without the EU. In the case of European Commission funding schemes that are directly targeted at Northern Ireland, this continues to be patently obvious. In fact, it is also clear that the EU through its Commission has been the driving force behind a coherent strategy of cross-border cooperation. ‘Hence, the Commission has had more impact on local cross-border co-operation than has more centralized Anglo-Irish policy: firstly, it seeks to empower local actors; secondly, EU economic policies have created incentives for local collaboration’ (Tannam 2006:268). However, in the research I have conducted there for over a decade, the argument about the EU goes much further than one about coherent strategies of cross-border cooperation, to suggest that the EU changed the conditions on the island to allow such cross-border cooperation, which in itself may lead to other forms of integration and cooperation. The possibilities of peace and cooperation were products of European-influenced conditions: These were conditions of Irish economic prosperity, in the so-called Celtic Tiger. These were new conditions of trust and international confidence, between Ireland and the UK, which filtered down to the contesting parties in Northern Ireland, largely though the pressure of the two national governments. These were conditions which led unionists to withdraw opposition to certain forms of institutionalized cooperation with the Irish state (McCall 2002). And these were conditions of broad Europeanization, where tourists and other travellers, as well as new migrants drawn to the prosperity of a peaceful Ireland, might provide new forms of

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culture and identity to enhance and revitalize many aspects of the old. But if the EU is to take much of the praise for these changed conditions, it must also bear the brunt of the disappointment when such conditions do not seem to yield the results expected. Tourism and trade have not increased markedly in Northern Ireland since the onset of peace (Tannam 2006:269­72). Civil servants and local government cooperate in new ways and at levels unheard of even a decade ago, but even there the central government still thinks that local councils need to develop competence in financial management and have not developed the political networks necessary to foster productive cooperation (Tannam 2006:269; Laffan and Payne 2001:113, 129). While it is clear that the EU plays an important role in providing new opportunities and policy models to parties and government, the ability of local political actors to take advantage of these opportunities is seriously curtailed by domestic politics (Laffan and Payne 2002). At higher levels of government the North–South Council and its implementation bodies have been in limbo, awaiting the return of an elected Assembly, which itself seems still paralysed due to a lack of progress on the Agreement. Unionist parties bicker as much with each other as they do with nationalist ones, while loyalist violence, among loyalists, rises. And despite all of the public support of the EU, Europeanization and European integration in the Northern Ireland borderlands, it is still very difficult to find anyone who champions European causes and effects over against the national discourse of identity, culture and politics (Wilson 2000). The upshot of this tangle of support and blame for European forces at work in Northern Ireland is that when matters of importance stall, when progress is not made, or not as quickly as hoped, then words like ‘failure’ and ‘crisis’ are used to characterize the momentous nature of new obstacles to peace and political and economic development. In Northern Ireland, Europe has its own brand of home-grown crises, which have nothing to do with a Constitutional Treaty. They are crises of economic development, of peace processes, of government compromise and political devolution. They are also crises of European identity, as when Belfast’s failure to become the UK’s European Capital of Culture was suggested to be in part the fault of those who thought that Belfast was not European enough, according to criteria set somewhere external to Northern Ireland, somewhere beyond the limits of Irishness and Britishness (Wilson 2004). The ironic and contradictory elements of these perceived local crises and failures in European integration in Northern Ireland are many, yet nonetheless potent in local political terms. Despite the rhetoric, the EU has had little to no direct involvement in any of the

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governmental and aid programs considered in Northern Ireland to be quintessentially European. These programs are administered by national and regional government. Both nationalists and unionists have decidedly instrumentalist notions of European governance and identity: they support both when it suits their nationalisms. Disinterest in the EU Constitution among nationalists is surprising, in that the EU’s constitution would go a long way to supporting human and other minority rights in Northern Ireland, thereby supporting the nationalist community. Moreover, a federal Europe would increase the chances of a regionally devolved Europe, and would change the playing field for funding there, in an age when Northern Ireland is no longer the British priority it once was. These ironies notwithstanding, Europe has its own forms of crisis in Northern Ireland that come and go. Moreover, local ‘European’ crises should not be just seen as examples of Northern Ireland’s marginality, but rather as a caution that all of Europe is local when a new European political entity is attempting to win their affective support, and is making the attempt in part on the basis of common culture and identity. In Northern Ireland and in many more places in Europe, the EU is not an emotional concern: it does not engender sympathy. But it does get support when its goals are filtered through the programs and practices of local and national groups and institutions, when the EU is made locally significant. Yet social scientists still know so little about the significance of Europe in local society. It is to the lack of anthropological knowledge about Europe in the local lives of its citizens that we now turn.

Limits to the Anthropology of European Integration There has been a dearth of scholarly case-studies of European integration whose focus is beyond the halls of administration and politics and European elites. Unlike so many other approaches in contemporary anthropology, most of the studies of European integration have started at the top, answering persistent calls to ‘study up’ (see Wilson 1998; Bellier and Wilson 2000a for reviews of anthropological studies of European integration). But there have been relatively few studies of the impact of European integration in the dayto-day lives of non-elite Europeans, now to be found in twenty-seven EU member states. The limits placed on the anthropology of European integration and Europeanization are products of forces internal and external to anthropology itself. There are problems of method and research design to deal with: the EU seems to operate more on the level of

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rhetoric in localities, since it seldom has a direct connection to its citizens, with most of its decisions and rules being implemented through national and regional government. How then does an ethnographer study European integration in ‘everyday’ life beyond asking people to characterize its impact on their lives? This alone would just engender an anthropological narrative of their narratives, and would be deficient in other ethnographic data and experiences. If an ethnographer wants to investigate how Europe is made real in local lives, then an examination of political practice and policy would have to be considered. Yet, in these still heady days of postmodernist debate about the issues of power and authority in ethnography and ethnographic writing, there are fewer studies of local-level politics being done, especially those that relate to government, policy and party. Such studies of local level politics have given way to the studying of politics implicit in interpersonal and inter-group relations, in particular the study of power in social discourse. Moreover, in efforts to theorize globalization, transnationalism and hybridity, among other theoretical formulations that seek to transcend past scholarly concerns and structures, there has been a diminished anthropological interest in both the nation and the state (although not in the anthropologies of borders, frontiers, borderlands and margins of the state; see, for example, Donnan and Wilson 1999; Das and Poole 2004). Anthropologists also increasingly ask questions that demand multi-sited research; while the research topic of the impact of European integration lends itself neatly to such research designs, it is also true that the EU is of such major significance to Europeans, in all walks of life and at all levels, that research on it in multiple localities will of necessity involve the analysis of economics, administration, law, politics and other institutions and processes that may prove to be prohibitive tasks because of the time needed to conduct such complicated work. Or perhaps to many sociocultural anthropologists today such multidisciplinary work may be seen to be beyond the anthropological domain, in research that may be perceived as too applied in focus and too difficult to do. These limits aside, the increasing importance of European Union policies and practices, their economic and political impact, and their overall effects, direct and indirect, on every level of social and political life in the member states, make the study of European integration and Europeanization top priorities in many social sciences. How much more so is this true for anthropologists and other ethnographers who seek to understand changing local cultures and identities within wider social formations, all of which have ties to the EU, and all of which may be seriously affected by Europe-wide and national crises of European integration?

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In this chapter I explored, with reference to events and reactions in Ireland, some of the ways in which the people, ideas and political domains of the local, national and the European intersect, at times enabling some achievements to be perceived as failures, obstacles and crises, and at other times allowing major setbacks to be seen as trivial and perhaps even valuable strategies or opportunities to achieve local or European goals. In my analysis I have taken local peoples’ notions of the related levels of government and governance at face value, in their efforts to chart what has often been a difficult and sometimes violent course through the civil and ethnic struggles of Northern Ireland in the twentieth century. There are sound ethnographic reasons to utilize these categorical notions of local, regional/provincial, national and European politics, societies, cultures and economics. They are of course strategic constructions among my respondents in Northern Ireland; if they did not see and act on things through these categories, based on hierarchical levels of government and the dispensing of resources, I would be extremely surprised, particularly as they would have great difficulties in getting these resources without the necessary mastery of the organs and rhetoric of funding. But there are other sources of these categories of politics and political analysis which they and I have employed in this chapter. Among these sources are the historical forces that give meaning to place and nation in a divided Ireland and a unionist province, and the policies and practices of contemporary government and governance which privilege the same categories. But I have chosen also to use these levels in my analysis of the changing dimensions of Europeanization in Northern Ireland in order to suggest that these are extremely valuable ways still to understand the intersections of culture and politics within the changing member states of the EU. The ‘local’ to the ‘European’ are not solely or even mainly categories of discourse and narrative, or of imperfect symbolic appreciations of the complexities beyond the quotidian in a localized community. They are also levels of power and process that must be understood by ethnographers of Europe as social and political arenas of decision making, where processes such as accumulation, appropriation, inclusion and exclusion, among many others, are institutionalized. The emphasis on local reactions to European integration reflects changing dimensions of the anthropology of Europe and the European Union, in ways which allow us to focus on the changing political and social natures of ‘Europe’. This turn to the dialectics of polity and society, and of levels of sociocultural integration and criticism, that inform this chapter also, in turn, makes the anthropology of Europeanization both more complicated and more satisfying. It is increasingly clear

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that the dialectics of identity at the heart of Europeanization and European integration cannot be adequately approached either as topdown mechanisms of elite ‘Europe building’, or as bottom-up support for or resistance to an externally induced ‘Europe’. The anthropology of Europeanization and European integration is in fact situated in the intersections of these processes. This chapter has thus examined notions of European integration among ‘European’, ‘Irish’ and ‘British’ citizens in Northern Ireland by interrogating local definitions of crisis, failure and success in European initiatives, and relating these crises and achievements to local peoples’ perceptions of more distant crises in a Europe of which they are as much a part as they are apart. Changes like these in the focus and direction of anthropological studies of European integration and Europeanization parallel those that have been called for in political studies of the same processes. Recent scholarly analyses of the changing dimensions of political integration are moving to wider frames of governance (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006), and still others are asserting that past ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approaches to politics in the EU should now be integrated to show how the levels intersect (Borzel 2002). One way to avoid bipolar analyses is to better integrate the study of domestic politics with the study of the politics of the EU, a move made necessary because: as the European project permeates domestic institutions and as plebiscitary pressures seem to drive the European project to seek domestic legitimation, we can no longer understand the process of European integration in isolation from domestic politics. The uncomfortable reality seems to be that a full understanding of European politics in its widest sense means an understanding of at least 26 distinct and often messy processes. (Taggart 2006:8)

The same is also true of attempts to understand the transformations of ‘social Europe’: it is a messy process of approaching societies and cultures which cannot be constrained as distinct ‘national’ entities, with clear and precise boundaries, that neatly fit within twentyseven or twenty-eight frames. On the contrary, it is messier but just as necessary for social scientists to continue to study the processes of social and cultural integration in Europe, within forces of European integration and Europeanization, but also as part of wider global transnational and international forces. It is often said that there are many ‘new Europes’ within the changes wrought by the European project as it emanates from Brussels and other cosmopolitan centres of the continent. The truth of this statement does not relieve social scientists of European integration

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from the responsibility to understand how these changes and plural definitions of Europe set new and often shifting limits to the project itself, limits of Europe that are often first delineated within national and more local domains. Romano Prodi (2002) in the same speech that is quoted at the beginning of this chapter suggested that, in having a good-neighbour policy with countries external to the EU, ‘[t]he aim is to extend to this neighbouring region a set of principles, values and standards which define the very essence of the European Union’, which he termed as ‘sharing everything with the Union but institutions’. What have we to offer our new neighbours? What prospects can we hold out to them? Where does Europe end? These are the questions we have to answer. The European public is calling for such a debate. I know: This debate will heat up after the accession of new members. Therefore it is our duty to start finding some answers.

In Northern Ireland, France and The Netherlands, and across the continent perhaps, people are supplying their own answers to these questions and are not waiting for those of Eurocrats and other leaders. The crises of the Constitutional Treaty, among other national and local crises that are seen to be European in definition or origin, suggest that while the EU succeeds in creating institutions within wider fields of changing governance, it may be making little headway in creating and sharing sets of principles, values and standards with its own citizens and residents – unless of course these values are those of instrumentality and nationalism. No wonder the French and Dutch nationalists, socialists, anarchists, communists and Europeanists voted ‘No’, setting off their own limits of the nature of their societies and nations from those of ‘Europe’.

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Wilson, T.M. (1998), ‘An Anthropology of the European Union, From Above and Below’, in Europe in the Anthropological Imagination, ed. S. Parman (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall). (2000), ‘The Obstacles to European Union Regional Policy in the Northern Ireland Borderlands’, Human Organization 59(1): 1–10. (2004), ‘Belfast, European Capital of Culture: Whose Capital? Whose Culture?’, unpublished invited lecture, Department of Anthropology, Memorial University, Newfoundland. (2006), ‘European FX/European Union Effects in Northern Ireland: Locality, Order and the Ideas of the State and Europe’, unpublished invited lecture, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University. Wilson, T.M. and Donnan, H. (2006), The Anthropology of Ireland (Oxford: Berg).

Chapter 4

Making the Cosmopolitan Plea: Harold Oram’s International Fund-raising in the Early Cold War Laura Suski

Many commentators might agree with Ulrich Beck’s claim that the ‘human condition has itself become cosmopolitan’ (2006:2). There is, however, little agreement as to how this impacts upon the ethical relationship between cosmopolitan subjects. If there is an increase in the transnational flows of people, commodities, labour, and information, and if these trends are accompanied by the declining role of the state and the emergence of international institutions, what does this mean for our moral obligations to those beyond the traditional spaces of family, community, and particularly the nation? My interest in cosmopolitanism lies specifically at the intersection of what could be called an anthropology of cosmopolitanism, and cosmopolitanism as a moral outlook. Using Scheffler’s language, we can say that cosmopolitanism entails a ‘thesis about identity’ and ‘a thesis about responsibility’ (as cited in Brock and Brighouse 2005). The renaissance in academic inquiry around cosmopolitanism has produced more critical and nuanced versions of both of these tenets of cosmopolitanism; however, the account of the moment where cosmopolitan identity meets cosmopolitan responsibility has received comparatively less attention. What is the relationship between these two tenets?

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One dominant description of the intersection between the social and political reality of cosmopolitanism and the ethical assumptions that characterize it is to posit that social experiences of cosmopolitanism produce more cosmopolitan outlooks: we think globally because we live globally. The rise of a hope in the ability of a global civil society to address global human suffering reflects this notion. Global civil society, as both ‘feeding’ on and ‘reacting’ to globalization, is described as a space where distance is broken down by the growing interconnectedness of economic, social and political spheres and by an accompanying ‘global consciousness’ (An-Na’im 2002:55). However, others have questioned whether when faced with the reality of transnational experience we are necessarily predisposed to a cosmopolitan moral view (Roudometof 2005:127–28). Undoubtedly we are living in a political and social landscape which often urges us to think beyond the nation, but the relationship between transnational social and cultural experiences and the development of a more globalized morality is not a simple cause and effect relationship; not all global travellers are global ethical actors, nor is it necessary to live globally in order to think globally. As such, cosmopolitan outlooks may be positioned as human capacities that can be inspired or thwarted by the historical conditions and cultural practices in which they emerge. In an effort to open up the analysis of cosmopolitan ethics, this chapter explores American philanthropy during the contentious historical cosmopolitan space of the Cold War era. Philanthropists are often ignored in explorations of international humanitarianism as they are seen as not working in the interests of social justice, but rather, aiding causes which are socially and politically conservative. Similarly, they are often seen as contributing to causes, however generous and charitable, that ultimately serve their own financial and political interests. Foundations like the Carnegie Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, for example, have been exposed as key players in the spread of the Americanized modernization project (see for example, Parmar 2002). The analysis of international philanthropy allows for an exploration of how and why social actors are drawn to international causes, and in turn, how they are key players in the discourse of cosmopolitan ethics. Historical philanthropic actors are not the typical ‘hybrid’ or ‘nomad’ actors that have come to animate contemporary scholarship around cosmopolitanism; they are not inherently defined by their global travel, immigration, or multiculturalism. Instead, their social and cultural experience of cosmopolitanism is defined by the philanthropic practice itself. Those philanthropists and fund-raisers engaging in international humanitarian work in the post-Second

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World War years began to expand their ethical imaginations from the national to the global. As social actors, they offer a window into how this shift was made meaningful and possible, and similarly, how the leap into the space of cosmopolitan ethics was often tenuous, imperfect, and uneven. The Cold War era offers its own challenges to the analysis of cosmopolitanism. Analysts of American hegemony have shown comparatively little interest in the role of philanthropy in the building of global capitalism and international political power (Vogel 2006; Wala 1986). It is, however, important to ask whether the work of international philanthropy merely intends to ‘do good’ and to investigate how it contributes to the building of empire. Contemporary proponents of global civil society, for example, embrace the Kantian cosmopolitan promise of universal law and peace, while remaining ‘keenly aware of the imperial pedigree’ of the concept (Malcolmson 1998:236). Still, I argue that the exploration of the culture of philanthropy cannot be bound by the analysis of global power, whether labelled hegemonic or imperialistic or capitalistic in form. Philanthropic actors in the Cold War era, in their attempts to end suffering, are often subjected to what could be called overly rigorous ‘altruism tests’ in that those who work to help those in international spheres are often presumed to be acting solely out of the political self-interest of a foreign policy mandate of anti-Communism. When we employ a narrow analytical frame of anti-Communism, it is as if any authentic attempt to end global suffering was suspended during the Cold War era. The key analytical task, I argue, is to engage in the project of viewing philanthropic actors as grounded in complex and often conflicted social, cultural and political realities, and also as transcending these. In adopting this frame, I attempt to take up Scott Malcolmson’s challenge to explore the practice of ‘actually existing cosmopolitanisms’ (1998:238). The chapter draws on archival research that is based on a collection of papers from The Oram Group, a New York public relations and fundraising firm established by Harold Oram in 1939 and still in existence today.1 In the late 1930s to the 1950s, Oram was not concentrating on raising money for hospitals, or schools, or health issues. Oram raised money and support for causes that were often radical and highly political. These causes were quite diverse, although they became more mainstream as the firm developed. On the domestic level they included clients like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Sharecroppers Fund, on the international level they included the Citizens Committee for the Marshall Fund to build war-torn Europe, the World Population Emergency Committee, and the Committee on Africa, which numbered

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among its campaigns a protest against apartheid in South Africa. The work of the Oram group in post-Second World War America not only moved beyond traditional philanthropic causes into the realm of the overtly political, but moved beyond the local into the international. Harold Oram was an innovator in some of the appeal methods now commonly used in fund-raising, in particular the mass direct-letter campaign. As this was the period of the telegram, Oram also pioneered the use of mass telegram appeals. Often sent overnight, these appeal telegrams impressed upon the receiver a feeling of urgency. One of Oram’s central appeal tactics was to write a compelling letter and have it signed by someone well-known and respected and who supported the cause. In the case of groups like The American Association for the United Nations, this was Eleanor Roosevelt. In the case of National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, this was Martin Luther King Jr. In the case of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, established in 1946 around the concern for the misuse of atomic energy, this was Albert Einstein. In a 1946 memorandum to one of his clients, Oram explained that the general fund-raising strategy was to try and establish a personal relationship between the organization and the member-supporter by using a personal letter from a trusted committee head which spoke to an emergent issue of the day (Oram 1946). As he noted in one client letter, ‘fund-raising is not simply a question of getting a lot of names of people with money and asking them for it on behalf of a worthy cause’ (Oram 1950). Contributors needed a sense of the urgency of the issue and that the issue was of importance to a person they respected and trusted. Oram’s experience showed him that while mail campaigns were comparatively more expensive than personal solicitation, they did contribute to a more balanced fund-raising campaign that secured wider public participation (Oram 1949a). Letters were also important aspects of the campaigns because many of Oram’s clients of the period were engaged in issues that required public education and awareness in order to garner greater financial and popular support. For example, one of the ‘social missions’ of a 1949 campaign of The American Association for the United Nations was to launch an educational campaign to ‘interpret the significance’ of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for American citizens. Its appeal letter explained that ‘We want every school child to possess for himself a copy of this precious document’ (Oram 1949b). In a memorandum, Oram explained to one of his clients that the bulk of his work was with clients whose efforts appeal to only a small group within the public as the clients are engaged in issues that are usually ‘controversial or verging on controversy’. Thus, in these cases, fund-raising relied on broadening the base of support and using a public relations program

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to ‘get the message to the general public’ (Oram, n.d., International Relief and Rescue Committee). Using the fund-raising and public education appeal letters written by the Oram group for various international causes during the Cold War years of the late 1930s to the late 1950s,2 I examine how the discourse of international philanthropy was being defined both by the political climate of the emerging Cold War and by a unique hope in the promise of international peace and prosperity to end global suffering. I approach the collection of the appeals letters as constructing a dialogue around global ethics. Critics may suggest that such a form of analysis downplays the aim of the letters to raise funds and support, and thus ignores how such letters manipulate or even hide aspects of clients’ activities or intentions. However, I argue that as examples of a public discourse around cosmopolitanism, they communicate a complex narrative of how private citizens were challenged to aid those in nations other than their own. Thus, I seek to move beyond the category of the polity to show how philanthropic actors simultaneously faced the limits and possibilities of a cosmopolitan humanity. Philanthropy has now spread to the middle classes (Vogel 2006), and the existence of thousands of international non-government organizations has made for a thriving and often powerful global civil society, but the work of the Oram firm during the post-Second World War era reveals preliminary attempts to make distant suffering meaningful through the discourse of cosmopolitanism at a time when cosmopolitanism was much less of a lived social and cultural experience among Americans.

The Making of a Cosmopolitan Appeal Harold Leon Oram had a background in law and journalism and moved into the field of public relations and fund-raising as a result of his interest in the Spanish Civil War. Oram was involved with a group called the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. His activist interest was of a more liberal, although left-leaning, bent, and his involvement was later channelled into Spanish refugee relief. The Oram firm began modestly with a few employees in New York and was left under the guidance of two female employees when Oram served in the army from 1942 to 1946. Harold Goldstein, an employee in the firm since the 1960s, bought the firm in 1978. Oram remained involved with the company until his death in 1990. My goal is not to conduct a biographical exploration of Harold Oram nor an assessment of his successes and failures as fund-raiser and public relations expert. Still, in examining the cosmopolitan appeals that he crafted, I also

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explore the nature of his cosmopolitan character. While Oram did a lot of international travel and moved in international circles, the bulk of his cosmopolitan social experience was his work: fund-raising and public relations for international causes. His work in New York City involved a daily exercising of his own cosmopolitan imagination in an effort to make such an imagination compelling to both elite and middle-class Americans. Over the years, the firm represented many causes which span the field of liberal social justice: poverty relief, refugee protection and relief, civil rights, and the defense of the United Nations. Oram’s clients, however, were not exclusively progressive. When Oram’s colleagues were asked about his political leanings in a series of oral history interviews in the 1990s, and indeed about why his domestic clients seemed left-leaning and radical – such as the NAACP – and his international clients sometimes more conservative – for instance, the organization The Committee for One Million, which worked to keep China out of the United Nations – his colleagues Henry Goldstein and Marvin Liebman called Oram ‘anti-totalitarian’ with a ‘strong antiStalinist bent’ (Goldstein 1991; Liebman 1992). Goldstein emphasized that Oram’s central mission was to ‘do good’ and ‘save the world’ but that he was ‘strongly anti-communist’ (Goldstein 1991:15). Oram’s aim to create a better world was a liberal, largely flexible vision, and this paved the way for a disparate list of clients. Many international clients were linked to each other through shared board members and contacts, and Oram appeared to garner many clients in this fashion. The fact that some of his domestic clients adopted nearly opposing world views to his international clients was explained by Oram’s colleague Marvin Liebman as resulting from the fact that the international enemy was seen as Soviet-style communism, not socialism. Anti-communism did not surface as an objection to more socialist, left-leaning domestic ventures, nor a necessity to embrace McCarthyism (1992:39). The archives document that Oram severed some client relationships when it was felt that no further fund-raising or public-relations help was needed or when accounts were long overdue, but not because of ideological conflicts between the firm and its clients (or potential clients).3 As noted, I focus on the appeal letters written and sent by the firm on behalf of its clients working on international causes. It is difficult to trace the authorship of all the appeal letters as Oram had several employees working for him on various campaigns and the appeal materials are not signed by Oram employees. In the 1930s and 1940s, the archival correspondence shows that Oram was the central figure with regards to international clients in the firm. If Oram was not the original writer of a particular appeal, his editorial approval

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was always sought (Loeb 1991:66–7). It is also worthy of note that the appeals from the different organizations share a similarity in tone and content. As a collection, they communicate a sense of the cosmopolitan philanthropic appeal of the era. During the period under examination, the firm was engaged in elite philanthropy in that appeals were directed at possible large contributors, although many campaigns were largely educational and attempted to create a larger broad appeal. The firm compiled a list of possible contributors and appeal letters were sent out to these contributors. Clients, therefore, paid for the services of the firm but also for access to the list.4 Oram was also critical in bringing groups to work together on causes and in shaping organizations.5 The language of emotion is not particularly accentuated in the Oram appeals of the period. Unlike most contemporary humanitarian appeals, the letters rarely draw on the visual to elicit sympathy or outrage. Some of the appeal letters were accompanied by copies of newspaper articles or pamphlets, but the standard appeal letter did not contain photographs. I would describe the general style of the appeal letters as intellectual but passionate. The language is pressing and dramatic, but not sentimental. This style is evidenced in the opening paragraph of an appeal letter for the Committee on Africa, signed by Eleanor Roosevelt, James Pike, and Martin Luther King: We are writing to you in the conviction that the time has come for a worldwide protest against the organized inhumanity of the Government of the Union of South Africa. We have watched with great concern the relentless pursuit of official racism (apartheid) by the South African Government. It has defied the most elemental considerations of human decency in its treatment of African and Asian citizens, loosely called non-whites. Our concern has turned to horror as we have learned of the brutal treatment of these non-white South Africans and the extension of totalitarian control into almost every area of human life. What has been almost as shocking is the callous disregard of this tragedy by the free peoples of the world. (Oram n.d.)

Oram himself was a master letter writer. His colleagues and clients note his skill in writing compelling and efficient appeals. One interesting anecdote bears this out. If one searches the record for quotable quotes one will no doubt come upon the following quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: ‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled disaster’. In fact, these are Oram’s words written in a telegram on 23 May 1946 (Oram 1985). The fact that he waited nearly thirty years to correct the error also speaks to Oram’s approach to public relations to remain behind the scenes. The public relations

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work of the 1930s, 40s and 50s shows that the firm was involved in some of the most important social and political causes of the period. While it may be tempting to categorize appeal letters as simply a form of marketing, and to suggest that the firm was merely in the business of selling causes, the archive collection documents a personal interest in the social justice causes that Harold Oram was involved in. When Oram was negotiating his continued contract with the American Association for the United Nations in November of 1954, he revealed in the correspondence that he was reluctant to end the relationship ‘since there is only one other client with which I have been associated with over the years – the NAACP – with whose purposes I so closely identify myself ’ (Oram 1954a). Knowing that social justice causes were not often ‘sexy’ causes for elite philanthropy, Oram himself tried to insist upon his clients the importance of issue-based appeals. In correspondence with an organization called the International League for the Rights of Man, Oram blatantly stated that ‘nobody will give a damn unless your appeals are issue based’ (Oram 1971). While the language of the appeal letters often invoked notions of a common humanity and global interconnections, when it came to fund-raising, Oram argued that such notions were far too vague to enlist support. Fundraising success still required emergent issues. However, Oram also recognized that to diversify and expand a client base, a broader cosmopolitan language often had its role. In the case of the support of the United Nations, this meant an appeal that was a based on the recognition and support of ‘human rights’ (Oram 1946a). In a 1948 letter of correspondence, Oram also speaks to the tensions between universalism and particularism that arise when one uses issue-based campaigns. It was Oram’s advice to the American Association for the United Nations to capitalize on the issue of a resolution to end the conflict in Palestine. In an interesting postscript, Oram concludes the letter by saying: ‘The suggestion was made that we send out the letter I had prepared on the Palestine situation signed by a distinguished Jew to a list of Jews. I think this would be shortsighted since I am sure the A.A.U.N does not want to give the impression of making separate appeals to separate groups based on special interest, without at the same time communicating this position to the general public’ (Oram 1948a).

Philanthropy as Hegemony Beginning in the late 1930s and stretching throughout the Cold War, Oram fund-raising appeals are often drenched in the anti-communism

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of the period. A pamphlet from the organization World Neighbors sent out at Christmas laments that: ‘A vast world conspiracy believes that Christmas and all it stands for will be ended before our children shall reach full maturity’ (Oram n.d). The anti-communist sentiment of the 1950s had already had a strategic character in the appeals. For example, a group trying to aid refugees from the Iron Curtain appeals to donors by suggesting the benefits to donors themselves: their 8 June 1951 appeal letter reads that the refugees’ ‘understanding of Communist techniques, their insight into the Soviet mentality, and often their specific information of concrete events behind the Iron Curtain can be of tremendous value in our efforts to stand firm against the communist threat’. The making of American empire is also part of the appeal narrative. Oram described his firm’s work around the Marshall Plan as not only providing relief to war-torn Europe but attempting to ‘liberalize American trade and tariff policies so as to enable our friends to earn the dollars they needed for survival’, and thereby, ‘contributing to a world in which it is safe to live’ (Oram 1958). The early development language of modernization also marks the appeals. The United States is positioned as the steward of progress that must work to ‘help’ the backward countries of the world. As a pamphlet from World Neighbors reads: ‘Our history has inspired them. It is natural for them to expect understanding and guidance. But, while we delay, their misery is being exploited’ (Oram n.d.). In a more direct and perhaps more serious fashion, the furthering of US hegemony haunts Oram’s personal work in South Vietnam. His involvement as a public-relations representative for South Vietnam and his involvement with the lobby group American Friends of Vietnam remains clouded in some controversy.6 Groups that Oram represented, like The Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery, had a strong influence on US foreign policy. Although identified as a citizen’s organization, members of the Marshall Plan committee had a direct association with key congressman and senators which meant that, like other philanthropic organizations, it could act as an ‘external propaganda agency’ (Wala 1986:248). Oram worked with many political and economic elites and the fund-raising work included typical elite philanthropy activities like arranging dinner and luncheon parties. The postwar period sees the emergence of global institutions like the United Nations, and more outward-looking political policies like state-led foreign aid, and the hope for a more prosperous and peaceful cosmopolitan vision in the United States. Yet the philanthropic narratives that spoke of a more unified ‘one world’ often worked to enable a new American domination. Anne Vogel (2006) argues

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that the role of philanthropic organizations in spreading globalized capitalism has not been adequately addressed, and that philanthropy is an ‘underdeveloped aspect’ of the debate on contemporary US hegemony. Rather than simply focusing on the power of states, a full account of empire building, she argues, requires an examination of how philanthropy operates in the ‘cultural-symbolic and organizational capacities of hegemonic powers’ (ibid.:652). Looking at the work of the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations, Inderjeet Parmar (2002) comes to a similar conclusion. He argues that America’s rise to globalism was fuelled by the work of these foundations. Programs to educate and modernize foreign elites formed international knowledgenetworks that ‘cemented the ties’ between US foreign policy and the Cold War, and promulgated an ideology of ‘liberal internationalism’. Parmar turns to Gramsci to conclude his analysis and suggest that the ‘modernizing elites’ became the intellectual and ideological army that consolidated global hegemony (ibid.:26). Oram, however, was not the mere tool of the Cold War elites who may have had a vested economic interest in foreign policy. Oram worked with more liberal-leaning intellectuals, artists, and political figures. A poster produced for the Africa Defense Fund’s 1957 campaign for human rights in South Africa entitled a ‘Declaration of Conscience’ was signed by supporters such as Senegalese poet and politician Leopold Sedar Senghor, American poet William Carlos Williams, and sociologist Pitrim A Sorokin (Oram 1957a). As another example, one of the campaigns for the Citizens Committee for Displaced Persons was to protest successfully against laws which limited the numbers of displaced persons into the United States and support a new, more liberal, 1950 legislation that was deemed more fair and equitable. Like other Oram campaigns, this one looked to unions for their support. In a recent speech at a gathering to honour his own philanthropic work, Henry Goldstein described the early Oram clients as representing outright ‘unpopular’ causes, stating that Oram provided office space for ‘any crony, cause, or luckless stray who asked for it’ (Goldstein 2001). When philanthropic subjects are positioned as players in the enactment of postwar cosmopolitanism, it becomes evident that this discourse cannot simply be distilled down to a discourse of strategic interest; international philanthropic endeavours were not a pure product of the anti-communist threat, or American hegemonic interest. In their public education materials, The Committee for The Marshall Plan directly insisted that The Marshall Plan was not American imperialism nor aimed against Russia. Their appeals positioned European recovery as a dual project of self-interest and humanitarian aid: ‘The need of Europe is a challenge partly to our generousity and

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partly to our good sense’ (Oram 1947a). One 1947 New York Times Magazine article reprinted and distributed by the committee argues that socialist European governments must be supported because ‘it is none of our business what form of governments other peoples may freely choose for themselves’ while later adding that ‘our aid is quite as likely to reduce as to accelerate developments which have evoked certain measures of a socialistic nature’ (Oram 1947b:7). In a similar way, an appeal letter for the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons speaks of both the democratic successes and failures of the United States. Referring to the law for displaced persons, the 1949 letter states: ‘This is a law to exclude human beings, not to save them. By our apathy and inertia which permitted a few politicians to work this evil, we have compromised our moral position before the world. Never was there more need in modern times for this haven of liberty and never has there been a greater failure to meet this need’ (Oram 1949c). American historians have long noted that the 1940s marks a critical point in which the modern liberal subject becomes central to the American political landscape (Gerstle 2006). In many ways, the contemporary kind of American liberal, who is open to some government intervention and believes in the promises of democracy, surfaces in this era. The appeal letters have a strongly liberal character in that individuals are called upon to help individuals, and freedom is often described as that which has been lost, and that which should be guaranteed. Appeals for The Africa Defense Fund reminds supporters that freedom is ‘expensive’ and calls to their attention unfair treason charges and the challenging of freedom of worship in South Africa. Supporters of the fund are sent a copy of a message of congratulations from Eleanor Roosevelt (and Dr Channing Tobias) to Kwame Nkrumah congratulating him on achieving independence. The message includes the statement that: ‘Because of our own struggle to emerge from colonial status to national independence, we can fully appreciate your desire to govern your own destiny’ (Oram 1957b). While urging Americans to aid anti-colonial struggles in Africa, by equating American independence with Ghanian independence the statement erases the political and economic histories that led to such struggles. One could certainly read the appeals as using humanitarian sentiment to sugar-coat more self-interested and opportunistic political strategies. Moreover, the national is always present in the appeal to the international, which begs the question of whether Oram’s cosmopolitanism was merely an American vision posing as a more global one. Here, I suggest reading the dual goals of aid and self-interest alongside one another rather than in opposition. When we embrace a more critical cosmopolitanism that does not artificially separate the social and the political, we can see it arising from tensions within the

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project of global ethics and as an ‘open process by which the social world is made intelligible’ (Delanty 2006:42). The cosmopolitanism that was emerging in post-Second World War America was attempting to make sense of the relatively new demands of international peace and prosperity. There is an unresolved tension between the national and the international in the philanthropic appeals: Americans are propelled to the international from their national positioning as Americans. Given the social and political conditions of the period, such a positioning is predictable. Yet the cosmopolitan philanthropic calls are clearly and radically ‘beyond the nation’ in that they often emerge as a result of failures of the state enterprise itself. When the state fails to meet the needs of refugees or to relieve the suffering of those under authoritarian regimes, the appeal letters insist that international philanthropy is required. Many appeal letters are notable in the way that both the strategic needs of cosmopolitanism and the need for international humanitarianism are kept in view. An undated appeal letter for the American Committee on Africa on the issue of the Algerian war is overtly critical of American foreign policy and of America’s involvement in North Africa: ‘There might be little excuse for private Americans citizens to speak out on this question if our own country were not so inextricably involved. We are involved not only as allies of France, but also as a source of military equipment which is being used by France to carry on the Algerian war.’ Again, however, the anti-communist fear rears its head; ‘If the North African countries are driven by the pressure of events to turn [for] support to the East, the United States as well as France will suffer the consequences’. The tactic for this particular campaign is interesting as it emphasizes the philanthropic over the political, noting that ‘Because we wish to keep the tone of the letter as unpolitical and conciliatory as possible, persons who hold federal political office are not being asked to sign’ (Oram n.d.). Oram believed that the ‘liberal humanitarian’ approach seemed best able to accommodate issues that may have challenged American public opinion. As Oram noted in his correspondence to the International Rescue and Relief Committee, the organization could continue to support refugees who were ‘antagonistic to the liberal point of view’ because they come ‘within the framework of a liberal humanitarian relief policy’ (Oram n.d.). Oram’s ‘one world’ philosophy was not apolitical but at times it was supra-political. When the International Rescue Committee began to focus on supporting refugees from communist Vietnam, the appeal letter directly states that ‘This is a matter that transcends party or political consideration’ (Oram 1955a). Oram believed strongly in the possibilities of philanthropy itself to transform, if not create, the

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cosmopolitan outlook. In a letter of correspondence to one of the firm’s clients, World Neighbors, Oram speaks of the hopes of philanthropy in Asia: For generations, in fact, ever since the founding of this country, our people have had their view fixed on Europe from which most of us came. There has been a notable lack of interest in Asia and in the people of Asia … One of the most potent means of securing such understanding is through the operation of American philanthropy. If we can bring the American people to support works – not words – in the underdeveloped countries, we are getting understanding with their dollars. (Oram 1955b)

While the appeal letters for this same organization also used anticommunism to inspire Christmas donations, so too did they describe philanthropy as a ‘war of amazing’ kindness that could fight communism (Oram n.d.). The notion that ‘doing good’ builds a cosmopolitan understanding is perhaps best revealed in a quotation from one of Oram’s first campaigns, The Joint Campaign for Political Refugees, dated 2 December 1940: None of us knows when our turn may come. If it does come, our only hope will lie in the frail web of understanding of one man for the pain of another. That is the only thing that differentiates the human race from a pack of wolves. Every time we dig into our pockets to help somebody less fortunate than ourselves, we strengthen that web.

As he moved his would-be supporters into a global viewpoint, Oram carefully managed the multiple ways in which his readers approached cosmopolitanism. Oram seemed quite aware of the fact that the liberal humanitarian position could not always erase the ideological differences of the period. One of Oram’s unique skills as a writer was his ability to speak to different audiences, in often quite different terms, in the same letter. A 1947 appeal telegram seeking support for the Marshall Plan uses strong, stirring and overtly patriotic language when it states that the reconstruction of Europe is a ‘task from which Americans can decide to stand apart only if they wish to desert every principle by which they claim to live’. The telegram later shifts to a more pragmatic language when it is stated that: ‘The sooner we act, the surer our success and the less it will cost us’. The efficiency and simplicity that characterize Oram’s writing style no doubt helped him to engage in dialogue with often conflicting viewpoints. His dominant rhetorical strategy was always to draw his readers into issues and not into ideological positions.7 The international Oram appeals are also marked by a profound hope. The hope in the ability of the United Nations is evident in many

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of Oram’s appeal letters for the American Association for the United Nations. Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949, an appeal letter notes that ‘every child throughout the world may now be brought up with a consciousness of his heritage as a freeborn human being’ (Oram 1949b). Here, Robert Fine’s comments on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and violence are useful. Looking to writers like Hannah Arendt, Fine argues that an important part of the cosmopolitan outlook was its maintenance of a sense of ‘astonishment’ in the face of human atrocity, and an accompanying radical belief in a vision of international order: ‘The cosmopolitan outlook is the attempt to keep both moments firmly in view: not only the experience of violence in the modern age but also the normativity of its non-acceptance’ (Fine 2006:51). There are numerous references to historical atrocities in the appeal letters and would-be contributors and supporters are reminded of the dangers of repeating the past. An appeal letter of the Committee on Human Rights begins with this powerful reminder: ‘In all the long forward march of mankind since the dawn of history, it remained for our generation to coin the word “genocide” – extermination of a race’ (Oram 1946b). While cosmopolitanism is clearly embedded in the histories of war and genocide, and arguably the Holocaust in particular, one need not position it only in relation to the extremes of human catastrophe. I would argue that its ambivalences also speak to the mundane, everyday practices of inequality. The realization that the promises of welfare and of democracy have not meant equality for all also sits at the foundation of the humanitarian cosmopolitan subject (see Sznaider 1998). Certainly, Oram was intimately familiar with the unmet promises of the American dream and many of his domestic clients – organizations such as the NAACP – were working to end social and political inequalities in America.

The Human as Universal One of Harold Oram’s long-standing personal commitments was to refugee organizations, most notably the International Rescue Committee. One of its key campaigns was to help get Jewish intellectuals out of Europe after the fall of France in the Second World War. When the work shifted to getting refugees out from behind the Iron Curtain, the Oram appeals drew a direct line between political suffering under fascism and under communism: we saved thousands who fled Nazism. Brown fascism has given way to red totalitarianism, but our job remains – to succor all those who, at risk of

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their lives, have come to us believing that the democratic West – will not – forget its blood brothers in mankind’s fight for freedom. (Oram 1949d)

When Oram later wrote appeals for The Aid Refugee for Chinese Intellectuals he called on supporters not to ‘discriminate’ in their ‘humanitarian endeavour against any people in need’ including Chinese refugees from Communism (Oram 1953). Taken together, the appeal letters around refugees build a strong discourse of universal humanism. If subjected to the contemporary eyes of some critical scholars the refugee appeal letters may represent a version of universal humanism that artificially masks differences at the expense of an idealistic ‘one world’ vision. Kwame Anthony Appiah, for example, in arguing for a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ embraces a cosmopolitanism that is inconsistent with some versions of humanism: ‘The humanist requires that we put our differences aside; the cosmopolitan insists that it is sometimes the differences that we bring to the table that make it rewarding to interact at all’ (1998:111). Certainly these debates demand some attention but as an appeal tactic, universal humanism worked well as it insisted upon a moral imagination that could act globally, and moreover, it encouraged supporters to reflect on how their own cosmopolitan outlook may be limited or biased. When Oram wrote about the need to help those beyond American borders he spoke in a factual manner. Americans had a ‘humanitarian responsibility’ to displaced persons (Oram 1948b), and to preserve the United Nations ‘and make it strong so that those who come after us may inherit a better world than that we entered upon’ (Oram 1948c). The appeals situate international philanthropy as a logical and natural step for those who want to stop human suffering. The appeal letters never suggest the most radical cosmopolitan action: that Americans should value other citizens over American citizens. However, they continually insist that liberal humanitarianism has no national boundaries. The postwar appeal letters contain numerous examples of the kind of appeals we often hear today, and in this way uncover the character of philanthropic cosmopolitanism. For example, one closing line reads ‘let us resolve that these men and women shall not die because we have failed to provide the help that would have saved them’ (Oram 1949d). Americans are often called to fulfill their ‘obligations’ and to ‘do their fair share’ given their status as a ‘nation with abundant resources’ (Oram 1948d). Finally, appeal letters challenge Americans to support human rights without exception, and moreover, that any exceptions undermine the project of international humanitarianism. An appeal letter for the Committee on Displaced Persons, for example, outs the United States for doing ‘virtually nothing’, and therefore,

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compromising the ‘moral position’ of the nation (Oram 1949c). (Notwithstanding, universal humanism can still carry with it a selectivity, as in the case of The Committee for One Million whose members argued that the new UN charter could only be defended by ‘peace-loving’ nations, and that the ‘Red Chinese’ had ‘not qualified’ (Oram 1955c).) Any discussion of universal ethical claims –‘the human’, ‘the cosmopolitan’– must respond to the postmodern turn. The thrust of postmodern inquiry has been to dismantle fixed notions of identity attached to the ‘backward’ and the ‘uncivilized’, and also, as John Tomlinson suggests, to ‘register a very recent crisis in the selfunderstanding of affluent Western capitalist societies’ (1991:174). Tomlinson goes on to explain that the critical aspect of this signal of ‘crisis’ is the way in which it draws a distinction between the age of ‘high imperialism’ and the postmodern present. The postmodern present sits on much more precarious ground that assumes neither the optimism nor the cultural confidence of modernity. Instead, it is characterized by uncertainty and a lack of moral justification. This crisis of confidence described by Tomlinson is not present in the Oram appeal letters of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The language of much of the writing affirms Western philanthropists as saviours of suffering victims, particularly those who suffer from a lack of democracy, of capitalism, and of peace. The letters build a discourse of humanitarianism through the category of the human: to be human is to be liable to suffering and to recognize suffering in others. The letters show that this recognition need not be impulsive or sentimental; instead, it is a reasoned response to the ‘inhumanity’ of totalitarianism, or communism, or war. There are, moreover, moments of a less hegemonic notion of empire. A 1947 public announcement for the Committee for the Marshall Plan notes that effective aid is based on ‘mutual respect and honor’ and that when the aid programs begin ‘we must enter into the agreements with these countries based on, fundamentally, the goals, plans, and the programs that they have voluntarily adopted’ (Oram 1947d). This language communicates a more palatable rhetoric of self-help, rather than stewardship. Reflecting on what he labels the ‘new’ cosmopolitanism that emerged since the end of the Cold War, Scott Malcolmson notes that one of its key characteristics is that it attempts a ‘strategic bargain with universalism’: ‘The idea is to show a purposeful concern for all humanity without ignoring difference’ (1998:234). In his plea for a cosmopolitan morality, Kwame Anthony Appiah also insists that a critical component of cosmopolitanism is that it makes sense of ‘particular human lives’ (2006:xv). The Oram appeals, while noting the plight of individuals, rarely used detailed individual stories as

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appeal tactics and showed more confidence that – albeit with ‘mutual respect and honor’– ‘the human’ was a generalizable phenomenon. The appeal letters for the Emergency Rescue Committee named influential individuals who had been saved from ‘Hitlerism’, including intellectual figures like Ernestine Freud, but also spoke of the generic man: ‘He is the one who first fought Hitler. Now, hunted and alone, he waits for rescue or death’ (Oram 1942). Again, the emphasis of Oram’s version of Cold War cosmopolitanism remains a human universalism.

Conclusion: Cosmopolitanism as a Project As the figure of Harold Oram sits prominently in this study, I continue to be plagued by the question of his ‘true’ intentions and the intentions of those he worked for.8 While I do not want to rewrite his history as Cold War hero, what should be concluded of his international work and the work of his clients? Like all social and cultural analyses, the analysis of ‘do good’ behaviour is framed by the questions we pose. If we ask, for example, why there are so few people who act with more regard for others than for themselves, then we make claims both about the nature of our society and the social actors who animate it as inclined to selfishness. Altruism is, on these terms, an exception to the general direction of society. Or we might position social actors as essentially altruistic and then inquire as to whether a self-oriented culture is a limit to, or suppression of, an inclination to do good for others. While we may have moved beyond such dichotomous framings, anthropologists continue to ask such questions as whether there is a sociobiological origin for cooperative or altruistic behaviour, and whether notions of the ‘virtuous’ life were dangerous fuels for forms of cultural imperialism. In this chapter I have attempted to ask a different set of questions about philanthropic work, and ultimately I hope, about human nature. I have attempted to make sense of international ‘do good’ work as an exercise in cosmopolitanism. There is an impure complexity to those engaged in philanthropic work in the postwar years, which is further marked by what Cheah has labelled the ‘uneven forcefield of the cosmopolitical’ (1998:36). The cosmopolitan Cold War appeal is neither smoothly strategic, nor saintly. Instead, it seems to demand both the comfort and protection of national identity, and the hopes of international peace, law and prosperity. It fumbles around the inclusions and exclusions of universal humanism. In its aims, this version of historical cosmopolitanism may be little different from many contemporary cosmopolitan appeals. What is markedly different

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in the Oram appeals is that these conflicted aims are laid out with a refreshing honesty that speaks to the lived complexity of cosmopolitan ethics. The current scholarship around cosmopolitanism often speaks of the blurring boundaries between ‘home and away, local and global, traditional and de-traditionalized’ (Skrbis, Kendall, and Woodard 2004:116). While the philanthropic cosmopolitanism of the postwar years was still largely fixed within the view of nations, empire, and the promises of modernity, and in turn, not innocent, it remains a productive site for the analysis of cosmopolitan outlooks. The Oram firm’s work was uniquely cosmopolitan in that it served to remind Americans of their global ‘interconnectedness’. In this way, in the terms employed by Victor Roudometof (2005), the Oram appeal letters insist upon the moral worth of ‘cosmopolitanism-as-a-project’ as a way to understand and have Americans respond to the relatively new demands of ‘cosmopolitanism-as-a-reality’. The Oram appeal letters seem to validate the notion that as ethical actors, Americans of the post-Cold War years were not automatically cosmopolitan. However, they could be urged, nudged, and sometimes pushed, into the moral space of the global. One of the key appeal tactics that surfaces in all of the fund-raising letters is the accusation that Americans cannot exclude some forms of suffering and some victims from the cosmopolitan ethical outlook. Yet, as the cosmopolitan appeal was rehearsed again and again, in letter after letter, it becomes apparent that the passion or fuel of the accusation was often nationalism itself. It was not American to look the other way when people who believed in liberty, equality, and freedom were suffering. When Oram invoked the cosmopolitan vision for his would-be contributors and supporters, he tried to bridge the distance by making both the victim and ‘helper’ similarly human, and in this often meant, casting them as similarly American in political values and beliefs. His local positioning made for a cosmopolitanism that hoped and dreamed for a future world of peace and prosperity and was imbued with a keen sense that this world would be carved out by decent, democratic Americans. The appeals chastise Americans for their ignorance and disregard of international suffering but this disregard is often strategically positioned as dangerous for Americans themselves. In his exploration of cosmopolitanism, Richard Rorty argues that claims for global justice may be better pursued if they were less ‘professedly universalist’ (1998:56). Dialoguing with Rawls, Walzer and Habermas, Rorty suggests that the emphasis on rationalism has led us to analyse the moral dilemmas that confront cosmopolitans as dilemmas between loyalties to those close to us and justice to the

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human species as a whole. As Rorty (and others) have pointed out, we see our moral commitments to our families as based in sentiment, and our commitments to our fellow citizens as based in reason. Those that act in the name of global suffering often do by so arguing that it is rationality that gets one to the crux of morally significant sites of just treatment. In Rorty’s language, the Oram letters use appeals to justice to incite cosmopolitan moral imaginings, and in this way, position cosmopolitanism as a rational extension of humanitarianism. However, he also was aware of the tensions between reason and sentiment and knew that fund-raising was driven by both. Without abandoning a concept of rationality, Rorty concludes that Westerners should not approach cosmopolitan ethics ‘in the role of someone purporting to make better use of a universal human capacity’, and instead, work on building a community of trust, or a ‘global moral community’ (ibid.:57). Oram’s firm grasp on a ‘one world’ philosophy was not fundamentally troubled by the loyalty dilemmas that Rorty highlights. The appeals suggest that commitments to the human species were born out of commitments to American values and beliefs. There are moments in which Oram seems to recognize that the ‘one world’ philosophy is founded in a community of trust and not in a simple imposition of such a philosophy, but it is the would be ‘victims’ that are usually asked to trust the cosmopolitan philanthropists in their vision of the ‘one world’. Oram’s cosmopolitanism was certainly formed by the American lens through which it was delivered but it was not wholly corrupted by it. His cosmopolitanism was not a lesser, more shallow version simply because it was an American Cold War vision. Oram wrote his appeals as if the human capacity to think globally was necessary and nearly natural, and in so doing, suggested that there wasn’t anything remarkably altruistic about cosmopolitan ethics. Yet Oram was radical both in his willingness to take on global issues that were of minor interest to the bulk of Americans of the period, and his belief that all humans occupied ‘one world’ that all were committed to building and preserving. Oram came to fund-raising with international experience and with a cosmopolitan vision, but undoubtedly it was his work in fund-raising and public relations that fully made him a cosmopolitan. As the appeals themselves often suggested, the practice of thinking globally was itself a cosmopolitan experience. Philanthropists and supporters of international social and political causes of the period may not have had the daily social and cultural experiences of global travel nor the technological capabilities to shrink distance, but their engagement with a larger, more global, ethical imagination contributed to a more daily practice of cosmopolitan morality. In its navigation of the space between public and private concerns, philanthropy may

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have offered a unique space where Americans like Oram could explore the possibilities of a cosmopolitan future.

Acknowledgements I am grateful for the opportunity to conduct research on the Ruth Lilly Special Collections, made possible by a Research Fellows’ Grant from Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy. I extend my thanks to the staff of the Center on Philanthropy and the archives. I thank Nigel Rapport for a vibrant and challenging dialogue around various versions and forms of this chapter

Notes 1.

The firm continues to exist as a public relations and fund-raising firm, now with offices on both the East and West Coasts of the United States. One of its current partners, Henry Goldstein, joined the firm in 1964 and worked closely with Harold Oram. As described in the company’s website, the Oram group has responded to some of the changes in the philanthropy industry: ‘[O]ur clients changed and their broader needs demanded that we develop professional competencies in every aspect of nonprofit philanthropic management – which we did: expertise in capital and annual fund raising, institutional assessments, strategic planning, organizational development, governance and board leadership.’ See: www. oramgroup.com, accessed 21 June 2007. 2. I examine the public relations work done for twenty different international clients starting in the late 1930s until the early 1960s. They include: Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, American Association for the United Nations, Citizens Committee for Displaced Persons, Committee for International Economic Growth, Committee for the Marshall Plan, Committee for One Million, Dooley (Thomas A.) Foundation, Emergency Committee for Atomic Scientists, Emergency Rescue Committee, International Rescue Committee, United World Federalists, and World Population Emergency Committee. I examine approximately two hundred examples of appeals including telegrams, letters, mailouts, petitions, and pamphlets. I also draw on correspondence between the firm and its clients, and on a series of oral histories with employees of the firm entitled ‘The Harold Oram History Project’. 3. Goldstein also argued that some of Oram’s more overtly politically conservative clients came from employees who ‘brought along their baggage’, and that Oram’s own turn to anti-communism may have come from his experience of being ‘kicked out of various organizations’ that were communist (Goldstein 1991: 15–16). 4. The list is described in one 1946 correspondence letter for the campaign for the American Association for the United Nations as including 100,000 names. This same correspondence notes that a large letter campaign would include 50,000 letters and that the list contains people of varying financial contributions including those who could contribute $5 or less (Oram 1946a). 5. As his colleague Harold Goldstein noted: ‘He chose to organize these groups and to help organize, and sometimes to start them in order to build a better world’ (Goldstein 1991: 131). This statement is verified through examples detailed in a memorandum dated 21 January 1954 in which he suggests a joint fund-raising

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campaign for two organizations (American Bureau for Medical Aid to China and Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals) to work together (Oram 1954b), and in a 1956 letter where he states that he ‘dug up’ interested people and ‘organized the operation from the ground up’ for The Committee for the Marshall Plan and for the Committee to Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals (Oram 1956). 6. Oram is largely absent in the public historical record (with perhaps the exception of his involvement with the International Rescue Committee), but there is some discussion of Oram’s involvement in South Vietnam and with the organization American Friends of Vietnam in Joseph G. Morgan (1997), The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam: 1955–1975. As my intent is not to analyse Oram’s particular personal involvement in Vietnam, and as the archival correspondence under investigation would not be sufficient for such a task, I leave this issue aside. 7. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I highlight some of Oram’s unique skills as a letter writer. 8. I am not alone in such a query as elites make for difficult subjects of historical inquiry when their good intentions reap political and economic benefits for themselves. Historians of the anti-slavery movement, for example, faced such a problem when they explored how the anti-slavery movement benefited the emerging capitalist system. Thomas Bender argued that in theorizing the association between capitalism and slavery, historians must address a much larger and quite important ‘historiographical issue’ of ‘the relationship of consciousness to society, or the way consciousness works in society, or, further, how social change and ideology are related’ (Bender 1992: 12–13).

Archive References All cited document are from the Oram Group Inc. Records, 1939–1992, Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives, IUPUI University Library, Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis, Indiana. Oram, Harold. 1940. Appeal Letter for the Joint Campaign for Political Refugees, December 2, 1940. Oram, Harold. 1942. Typed Appeal Letter for the Emergency Rescue Committee, Sept. 19, 1942. Oram, Harold. 1946a. Typed Memorandum to Clark Eichelberger of The American Association for the United Nations, July 10, 1946. Oram, Harold. 1946b. Typed Appeal Letter for the Committee on Human Rights of the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, December, 1946. Oram, Harold. 1947a. Typed Appeal Advertisement for the Committee for the Marshall Plan To Aid European Recovery. Oram, Harold. 1947b. ‘What About the Marshall Plan?’. Reprinted from New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1947. Oram, Harold. 1947c. Telegram for the Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery. November 17, 1947. Oram, Harold. 1947d. Public Education Insert entitled ‘Four Essentials of a European Recovery Program’ for the Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery. Oram, Harold. 1948a. Typed Letter to Frederick McKee of the American Association for the United Nations, April 16, 1948.

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Oram, Harold. 1948b. Typed Appeal Telegram for The Committee on Displaced Persons, July 28, 1948. Oram, Harold. 1948c. Typed Appeal Letter for the American Association for the United Nations, November, 1948. Oram, Harold. 1948d. Typed Statement for the Committee on Displaced Presons, January 16, 1948. Oram, Harold. 1949a. Typed Fund-raising Memorandum for the American Association for the United Nations, August 24, 1949. Oram, Harold. 1949b. Typed Appeal Letter for the American Association for the United Nations, May 4, 1949. Oram, Harold. 1949c. Typed Appeal Letter for the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons, February 7, 1949. Oram, Harold. 1949d. Typed Appeal Letter for the International Rescue Committee, Sept 20, 1949. Oram, Harold. 1949d. Typed Appeal Letter for the Iron Curtain Refugee Campaign, December 5, 1949. Oram, Harold. 1950. Typed Letter to Elizabeth Borgese of The Committee to Frame a World Constitution, June 28, 1950. Oram, Harold 1951. Typed Appeal Letter for the Iron Curtain Refugee Campaign (of the International Rescue Committee), June 8, 1951. Oram, Harold. 1953. Typed Appeal Letter for Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, October, 1953. Oram, Harold. 1954a. Typed Letter to Oscar Lima of the American association for the United Nations, November 30, 1954. Oram, Harold. 1954b. Typed Memorandum to Dr. Magnus Gregerson, January 21, 1954. Oram, Harold. 1955a. ‘Operation Brotherhood’ Appeal Letter sponsored by the International Rescue Committee and the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce, May 26, 1955. Oram, Harold. 1955b. Letter to Dr. Roy Burkhart of World Neighbors, July 4, 1955. Oram, Harold. 1955c. Typed Appeal Letter for The Committee for One Million, March 4, 1955. Oram, Harold. 1956. Typed Letter of Correspondence to Louis Gehring of World Neighbors, August 1, 1956. Oram, Harold. 1957a. Appeal Insert Petition: ‘Declaration of Conscience’ for the Africa Defense Fund. Oram, Harold. 1957b. Message of Congratulations Appeal Insert for the Committee on Africa, March 1957. Oram, Harold. 1958. Typed Letter to William Schmeisser of the Committee for International Economic Growth, January 27, 1958. Oram, Harold. 1971. Typed Letter to John Carey of the International League for the Rights of Man, September 7, 1971. Oram, Harold. 1985. Typed Letter on Einstein Memorabilia, June 10, 1985. Oram Group Inc. Records, 1939-1992. Oram, Harold. n.d. Typed Memorandum on Fund-raising Campaign for the International Rescue and Relief Committee. Oram, Harold. n.d. Typed Appeal Letter for the Committee on Africa.

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Oram, Harold. n.d. Appeal pamphlet for World Neighbors. Oram, Harold. n.d. Typed Appeal Letter for the American Committee on Africa. Oram, Harold. n.d. Typed Memorandum on Fund-raising Campaign for the International Rescue and Relief Committee.

Interviews Goldstein, Henry. 1991. Interview by Philip Scarpino and Glory-June Greiff (November 21, 1991). Harold R. Oram History Project. Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives. IUPUI University Library. Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis, Indiana. Liebman, Marvin. 1992. Interview by Glory-June Greiff (July 18, 1992). Harold R. Oram History Project. Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives. IUPUI University Library. Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis, Indiana. Loeb, Anna Frank. 1991. Interview by Glory-June Greiff (Oct 27, 1991). Harold R. Oram History Project. Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives. IUPUI University Library. Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis, Indiana.

References An-Na’im, A. (2002), ‘Religion and Global Civil Society: Inherent Incompatibility or Synergy and Interdependence’, in Global Civil Society, eds M. Glasius, M. Kaldor, and H. Anheier (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Appiah, K.A. (1998), ‘Cosmopolitan Compatriots’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). (2006), Cosmpolitanism: Ethics in A World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton and Company). Beck, U. (2006), The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press). Bender, T. (ed.) (1992), ‘Introduction’, in The Anti-slavery Debates: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press). Brock, G. and Brighouse, H. (eds) (2005), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cheah, P. (1998), ‘Introduction. Part II’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Delanty, G. (2006), ‘The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory’, The British Journal of Sociology 57(1): 25–47.

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Fine, R. (2006). ‘Cosmopolitanism and Violence: Difficulties of Judgement’, The British Journal of Sociology 57(1): 49–67. Gertstle, G. (2006), ‘The Crucial Decade: The 1940s and Beyond’, The Journal of American History 92(4): 1292–300. Goldstein, H. (2001), Sage Award Acceptance Speech. http://www.oram group.com/publications/2001_07_sageaward.html, accessed 21 June 2007. Malcolmson, S.L. (1998), ‘The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Morgan, J.G. (1997), The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam: 1955–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Parmar, I. (2002), ‘American Foundations and the Development of International Knowledge Networks’, Global Networks 2(1): 13–30. Rorty, R. (1998), ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Roudometof, V. (2005), ‘Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Glocalization’, Current Sociology 53(1): 113–35. Sznaider, N. (1998), ‘A Sociology of Compassion: A Study in the Sociology of Morals’, Cultural Values 2(1): 117–39. Skrbis, Z., Kendall, G., and Woodward, I. (2004), ‘Locating Cosmopolitanism: Between Humanist Ideal and Grounded Social Category’, Theory, Culture and Society 21(6): 115–36. Tomlinson, J. (1991). Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Vogel, A. (2006), ‘Who’s Making Global Civil Society: Philanthropy and US empire in World Society’, British Journal of Sociology 57(4): 635– 55. Wala, M. (1986), ‘Selling the Marshall Plan at Home’, Diplomatic History 10, (Summer): 247–65.

Part III Beyond the Classificatory

Introduction to Part III Nigel Rapport

The two essays in Part III find human actors immersed in worlds of categories and things, of identities and relationships that take on classificatory forms. Indeed, in these chapters ethnographic attention is focused on the very thing-iness of human social existence: on our seeming modern fetish of inventing new things – ‘entifying’ – whereby life can become further specialized and commodified (Chapter 6); and on people treated as kinds of things, valued according to where they happen to have been born (Chapter 5). But it is also true to say that here are the human capacities to reflect on the reifying tendencies of social life and exchange and to place the self – imaginatively, ironically, critically – beyond the classificatory. More precisely, in ‘Acts of Entification: The Emergence of Thinghood in Social Life’, Tord Larsen attends to the abiding human capacity and practice to ‘entify’, to fill social space with ‘things’: social facts, forms, norms and institutions, traditions and habitual relations. Also the capacity and practice to supersede these things: to reinvent and go beyond existing systems of symbolic classification and the materiality to which they give rise. The term ‘entification’ derives from medieval philosophy, where it enjoyed company with concepts like individuation, identification and classification. Processes of entification may include the emergence of new things and categories (such as medical syndromes), new identities (such as ‘indigeneity’) and new concepts (such as product branding). The chapter draws up a preliminary typology of contemporary entification processes, the rhetorical strategies by means of which they are achieved, and the social situations which bring them into existence. Can entification be said to have speeded up? Are we subject to an excessive weight of things in our social spaces and social lives? Much contemporary description and analysis might take place by way of the lens of entification.

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Attention to its processes helps us analyse not only phenomena such as the ubiquitousness of identity talk and the increased attention to performativity in social life, but also the abiding human capacities that make an ‘excess’ of social things possible – even necessary. A political or moral dimension also exists in this study, Larsen suggests. Entification may help us identify some of the social requirements of cosmopolitanism, understood as an agenda to distinguish, ontologically and juridically, between the human subject as an autonomous self and its particular, situational identities and attributes. Transformations of identities into detachable property (‘I have a problem with my aggressiveness’, ‘I need to reinvent myself ’) – usefully approached by way of notions of entification – provide a way of thinking about, and a possible practical route towards sanctioning a liberating distance between, the individual actor’s ‘nature’ and the social identities they are attributed. Larsen’s essay is preceded by Andrew Irving’s ‘Money, Materiality and Imagination: Life on the Other Side of Value’. The chapter pursues a better understanding of how human experiences of HIV/ AIDS, illness and death, are inscribed onto a global geopolitical and economic landscape which is at once material and imagined. Money is an aggregation of mind, society and material substance, Irving explains, which involves a type of animism: an ascription of moral values that are not inherent in the substance itself. Money is located not simply in the visible realms of materiality and social exchange but amid the capacity to imagine worth and ascribe value. Moreover, while people’s attitudes and behaviours towards money may be socially informed, a person’s relationship to money and their patterns of economic behaviour should be taken to embody a universal existential unease, anxiety and discontent, variably expressed through a range of identifiable and only superficially conventional behaviours. ‘Money is shit’, then, can advert not only to the waste products from which financial currencies are minted but also to the wastefulness that would deprive sick African bodies of access to antiretroviral medications. There is no necessary ontological relationship between land and the value of life – indeed it is a completely arbitrary relation – but in the current global-political climate a strong correlation is effected. The chapter attempts to do justice to the imaginary, nevertheless, by way of techniques that blur the lines between ethnography, art and performance in the city of Kampala, Uganda. Imaginative lifenarratives are not abstract or wishful fantasies, Irving argues, but are constitutive of people’s material lives and embodied experiences of being-in-the-world. Rather than thinking of a person’s life biography as having an essential, factual content and material context, for a true understanding of their circumstances it is necessary to take

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account of the lives of the imagination that people such as Yudaya and members of her family reconstruct on a daily basis. However, while the imagination of persons in Africa may transcend economic, national and social borders in order to imagine a life of health in Western countries, their bodies cannot, for they are devalued: designated as waste. This denies the originary etymology of ‘imagination’ whereby body and psyche are linked, in imago, via mimesis and movement; and, more importantly, denies the capacity morally to recognize the human potential to live thousands of lives beyond the actual horizons of any one. As in Larsen’s chapter, Irving discloses those processes by which categories and distinctions, things and relations – ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’, ‘African’ and ‘Western’, ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ – are mundanely displaced. Spaces are found within present fixities; the human emerges as the consummate conjurer with the terms of reality.

Chapter 5

Money, Materiality and Imagination: Life on the Other Side of Value Andrew Irving

The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man. Man being the chosen alloy, he must be reconnected – via shit, at all cost. Inherent with(in) us is the dream of the task of the alchemist To create from the clay of man, And to re-create from excretion of man pure and then soft and then solid gold The Patti Smith Group 25th Floor (& High on Rebellion)

Beginnings From a distance it may seem that the dialogue between money and imagination is located in mind, consciousness and cognitive capacity rather than materiality and body. Indeed, the material body of money is seen as less important than the semiotic value attached to certain objects by way of the brain’s ability to invest substance with meaning and purpose. ‘Money’ – suggests Norman O. Brown – ‘is inorganic dead matter which has been made alive’ (1970 [1959]:245). The discarded bodies of different material substances, often with little practical utility, such as clay, shells, teeth, stones, paper and beads are brought to life by the capacity to reimagine these materials and accord them the status of being valuable. This presupposes a faith in substance, as well

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as society, best summarized by Santayana’s discrimination between an object’s essential properties that exist independent of perception (existents) and those attributed by the human mind (subsistents). As we can never be certain the attributed essence inheres in the object itself – whether it is worthless or not – doubt and scepticism emerge; but this uncertainty is balanced by the type of pragmatic ‘animal faith’ that is necessary to live, act and survive in the world. For Santayana: All knowledge, being faith in an object posited and partially described, is belief in substance, in the etymological sense of this word; it is a belief in a thing or an event subsisting in its own plane, and waiting for the light of knowledge to explore it eventually, and perhaps name or define it. (1955 [1923]:182)

Once named in this way, money (as Simmel observed) reflects and encourages a type of thinking based in both substance and sign, i.e., in objective materiality and mental abstraction. It is an impersonal, quantitative thinking that promotes strategic rationalities to temper ‘excessive’ bodily appetites in favour of accumulating a socially significant material that for most practical purposes is worthless. Money, rather than being the ultimate expression of secular reason and rationality, thus requires faith and imagination; which is to say money is fundamentally religious not simply in its origins but in its subsequent incarnations (Brown 1970). The transubstantiation of matter into money involves the same capacity by which objects are transformed into art; namely the imaginative capacity to invest meaning into materiality and gain a value exceeding the raw substance it is made from, as in Duchamp’s outrageous conversion of industrially manufactured urinals into art. For Sartre, all art involves such imaginative transubstantiations, which are not simply variants of thought or perception but are distinct forms of consciousness encompassing both the act of imagining and the imagined world brought into being: When I look at a drawing I posit in that very look a world of human intentions of which that drawing is a product [and for] the image to appear, the cooperation of my consciousness is necessary, but the artist knows this, counts on it; the artist solicits this cooperation. (Sartre 2004 [1940]):35)

Money too requires the cooperation of different consciousnesses to assign shared value to certain material forms. This does not mean all people ascribe the same status to money – for monetary value is constituted by the play and differences between objects and signs – but

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nevertheless it requires a shared social context within which relative values are negotiated. It combines animal faith (pragmatism) with religiosity (animism) to ascribe subsistent social and moral values that are not inherent in the substance itself (e.g., ‘as good as gold’). Money, as suggested by John Locke, can thus be understood as an aggregation of mind, materiality and society whereby humankind ‘consents to put an imaginary value upon gold and silver’ (Locke quoted in Brown 1970:218, original italics). Consequently money cannot be understood by only analysing the visible realms of material social exchange but requires an investigation into the human capacity to imagine worth and assign value. Money might be invisible because we may not have any of it but also because there is no independent, objective access to a person’s mind or imaginary to see how value is attached to certain substances. We observe practices of exchange and theorize how these might condense, displace, substitute and sublimate meanings, but no matter how sophisticated the divinatory techniques and theoretical models, the animating capacities of imagination remain beyond vision. When we actually see money being exchanged it soon disappears into pockets and banks and enters a deferred system where there is no ultimate object of guaranteed worth, no gold standard: simply an endless exchange of abstract signs. And even when money is exchanged for an object, its ‘existence as a material thing is put out of sight’ (Marx 1999 [1867]:15): [A commodity] must quit its bodily shape, must transform itself from mere imaginary into real gold, although to the commodity such transubstantiation may be more difficult than to the Hegelian ‘concept’, the transition from ‘necessity’ to ‘freedom’, or to a lobster the casting of his shell, or to Saint Jerome the putting off of the old Adam. (1999:63)

It seems however one conceptualizes it money is unsightly and of late increasingly lacks conventional material forms. However, whenever we try to reconcile visible practices of exchange with the invisible, interior world of intentions and imagination that bring money to life, we have no direct access to mind and brain, only indirect access, for example, through speech, brain-imaging and fMRI scans.

Complexities of Mind and Money The complexities of mind are such that Locke, Hegel and Collingwood offer a line of philosophical thought whereby the impossibility of

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defining what mind is has shifted the focus from definition to function by not asking what mind is but rather observing what mind does. This removes us from presupposing an essence and ontology of human thinking and instead invites an investigation into observable action. Such a study of mind involves two methodological renunciations: First, it renounces with Locke all ‘science of substance’. It does not ask what mind is; it asks only what mind does … Secondly, it renounces all attempt to discover what mind always and everywhere does, and asks only what mind has done on certain definite occasions (Collingwood: 1992 [1942]:61 italics in original).

When Locke extended his analysis from mind to money, he sided against ascribing an essential materiality to money and argued that its substantive form was irrelevant. The nineteenth-century economist Francis Walker applied Locke’s reasoning by arguing that social theorists need not investigate the ontology of money because ‘money is what money does’, which is serve as ‘a medium of exchange, store of value, means of unilateral payment (settlement), and measure of value (unit of account)’ (Ingham 2004:19). Walker is clearly not trying to get inside people’s heads and instead observes the monetary practices that happen outside them, thus avoiding the thorny problem of understanding people’s motivations and desires. By doing so Walker set the tone for economists and sociologists to abandon the complex metaphysics of mind and money by reducing people’s actions to simple descriptions of function (Ingham 2004). Monetary value here is seen as self-evident: a substance that can be exchanged, stored and whose meaning is negotiated between rational humans. However, as with most functionalist explanations, this leaves many essential questions unanswered and necessitates that we go beyond assumptions of universal rationality insofar as human ‘nature’ always amounts to more than acts of reason alone, as Charles Taylor affirms: Man as a living being is not radically different from other animals, but at the same time he is not just an animal plus reason, he is a quite new totality; and that means that he has to be understood on quite different principles. (1979:19)

Psychoanalysis promises an alternative method for digging beneath observable, public behaviours to uncover the unconscious motivations and desires of the person. Here, attachments to money and/or goods are rarely seen as acts of rational calculation and utilitarian interest but are symptomatic of deep-seated insecurities and irrationalities rooted in the human condition. To be human is to be unfinished, incomplete

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and to be implicated in a series of irresolvable paradoxes (e.g. Self/ Other; Id/Ego, Life/Death) that are expressed through symbolic social acts, including accumulation, spending and exchange. However, while people’s behaviours and attitudes towards money take a social form, they cannot be judged in terms of society’s own standards as these are symptomatic of the exact same problem. Instead a person’s relationship to money is taken to represent a universal, existential unease and discontent, variably expressed through a range of identifiable, often unhealthy, obsessive or irrational behaviours. Like all signs, money is neither neutral nor objective as it is understood within a specific interpretative framework. When we encounter contexts where the polysemy of a sign is reduced to a dominant interpretation, we must look at the power operating behind it, be that social, political or economic (Volosinov 1973). The meaning of money in psychoanalytic and economic theory – including the two different faces of desire, the rational and irrational – often betrays a universalization of Western values that is of limited use for understanding money in a global context.1 Although in theory a sign possesses multiple meanings, in practice it tends to coalesce around certain interpretations whereby Western perspectives are universalized (Crapanzano 1992). This does not make Western interpretations about money wrong but it does make them sociohistorical, and reveals more about certain disciplinary presuppositions than an understanding of human beings per se. Characteristically, Nietzsche warned against such over-generalizations by declaring: ‘I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity’ (1990 [1888]: 35). But if integrity cannot be found in systematization, is it any more likely to be found in the biography of a specific body? The scale of such a task is substantial in that one must first reclaim people’s bodies from universal abstraction and then recast the relationship between body and money through an ethnography of particular life stories and bodily experiences, in their daily phenomenological and existential realities.

Money, Materiality and Imagination The material effects of living with disease without any money are made explicit in the bodies and imaginations of HIV+ persons who are unable to access antiretroviral medications because of their economic position, ethnicity and national identity. There are estimated to be more than forty million HIV+ persons worldwide (UNAIDS 2006). For every person infected there are tens, even hundreds, of others,

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including children, spouses, family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, neighbours and medical staff, whose lives are affected on a daily basis, thereby forming a massive population of infected and affected persons that crosses genders, religions and cultures, and constitutes a large proportion of the entire global population. In Western countries antiretroviral medications have stabilized people’s health by increasing their immunity and t-cell count, staving off infections and reducing the viral load in the blood. When used in combination, antiretrovirals can markedly reduce the virus’s effects and have opened time and space for hundreds of thousands of people, triggering a massive shift of consciousness, body and emotion away from death and back toward life. People and their families are learning how to ‘live’ again. However many people find it impossible to return to their previous lives and are now living with irreversible decisions and medical side-effects, and having lived under the shadow of death are now questioning how to forge a future. In contrast to the West, throughout most of the world, including Africa, many people are unable to access antiretrovirals and are dying from treatable opportunistic infections. People experience illness and anticipate death knowing about life-saving medications, freely available in the West, that are restricted through their ethnicity and economic status. Accordingly, the advent of antiretrovirals in the late 1990s has fundamentally altered and exacerbated differences between persons, illustrating how experiences of HIV/AIDS cannot be understood unless placed in a global comparative context. HIV/AIDS is now often called a chronic rather than acute disease in that access to medication allows for long-term living. However, for many of the world’s citizens HIV/AIDS betrays a different meaning of ‘chronic’, namely chronic inequality and a chronic lack of money. More accurately HIV/AIDS should perhaps be referred to as a critical disease insofar as it not only places much of the world’s population into crisis but current mortality rates offer a critical perspective upon global-political inequality. It is critical because it makes visible the presuppositions about the relative value of life in wealthy and non-wealthy countries. It is critical because it exposes the historical relationship between money and people’s bodies whereby life in Africa, Asia and South America is devalued and people’s daily experiences of suffering are largely rendered invisible. Most critically of all, the story of impoverished people living with HIV rarely ends with their death but continues through their children who are often denied an education through a lack of school fees, thus emphasizing the intergenerational effects of a disease responsible for the continual severing of familial relationships – between parents and children, husbands and wives,

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brothers and sisters, friends and friends, and also between the rich and the poor – that is occurring on a massive scale throughout the world. What follows is just a single familial severing from Africa, presented in the form of a collaborative visual ethnography. The location is Kampala, Uganda, where one out of ten people lives with HIV/AIDS and it affects almost every family. I got to know the family, Yudaya Nassiswa and her four children, in the 1990s. Yudaya’s husband was a wealthy man who worked in the Ministry of Finance and had three wives who lived with him in a large rented house. The house was full of life, as the husband, the three wives and all the children lived there together. However, by 1993 Yudaya’s husband and both her co-wives had all died from AIDS. Yudaya was herself infected, struggles with illness and has no real independent income, so after her husband died she had to leave the house and now lives in a mud-brick house with no water or electricity, that consists of a living room and one bedroom that they all sleep in. Here follows a brief description of Yudaya’s circumstances during the late 1990s taken from a piece published in 2005 (Irving 2005:322). Yudaya frequently suffers opportunistic infections and last Christmas had her first ominous bout of tuberculosis, which is morbidly significant in Uganda where it is the main cause of death amongst HIV+ persons. That Yudaya fell sick at Christmas was hugely significant for her and the children, not because Yudaya, although born into Islam, raised her family as Christians, but because her husband died on December 25th. Moreover, in Uganda children are present to most that life offers and get caught up in the voluminous atmosphere whenever there is a dying person in the house. Every Christmas the atmosphere in Yudaya’s house is thick with memories of her husband’s illness and death. This last Christmas was even worse as Yudaya’s tubercular breathing mixed with her children’s anxieties about the future. The suffering and uncertainty caused by HIV/AIDS has a ‘volume’ that extends out from the person and fills up the entire house and seeps out into the neighbourhood. If you ask Yudaya’s children they will tell you how it felt to dwell in the midst of their father’s death; they’ll talk about how this atmosphere descends every Christmas and how this last Christmas they kept imagining their mother’s impending death. They’ll tell you they are worried about the future, about who will look after them and remind you how two of them have stopped attending school because of lack of money. They will talk about how they thought they were going to be orphans with no one to pay their school fees, and about their relief once their mother began to pull through. Now all the children hate Christmas. The family home looks like many houses in Kampala. It is built from the same earth that it stands on. The earth is scooped up, mixed with straw, stones and water and moulded into large bricks fired in neighbourhood kilns. Wood and mud­-plaster are added, while the ground from which the

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bricks were extracted creates a compact floor alongside the characteristic trenches found outside people’s houses. Yudaya did not do the work herself but it is tangibly her place – a house mixed out of earth, straw and personal history – and that wouldn’t exist without Yudaya or her husband’s death from AIDS. The house is just two rooms with no electricity. Water is fetched from the public tap and boiled on an open charcoal fire. The mud-plaster walls are covered by children’s drawings, magazine pictures, old newspapers and Manchester United posters. Three beds take up all the space alongside everyone’s shoes and clothes. Round the back is the vegetable plot, where Yudaya grows sweet-potatoes, matoke, yams and other staples to feed the family. It used to be a wilderness but when Yudaya is well enough she makes an effort, and so do the children. Together they get by.

Yudaya’s children were young in the 1990s but by the time I returned to Uganda in 2004 her two sons Denis and Jeremiah had grown tall and at fifteen and seventeen were on the verge of adulthood. No longer in primary school, they were attending the secondary school and venturing out into the world, which necessitated a very different type of relationship not just with their mother and the local community but also with myself. Denis and Jeremiah told me how life had been a constant struggle for their mother to raise four children alone with no husband, little money and amidst frequent episodes of illness. They were too young to remember their father or the large house they lived in as infants and instead had spent their entire remembered life in the unfinished mud-brick house. Despite never knowing their father, he remains a dominant presence in their life, who reinforces his presence through his absence and non-appearance (Sartre 1996 [1943]:277–80). In death their father’s absent presence is reiterated by things such as a lack of financial support and his not being around to give advice or teach the boys football. However, perhaps the most constant mnemonic is the family’s mud-brick house insofar as it has no electricity, no television, no cooking facilities and the family has to walk to the well to collect water. What follows is a collaborative visual ethnography of the imaginative worlds that Denis and Jeremiah inhabit as a consequence of their father’s death and impoverished circumstances. It attempts to do justice not only to the material facts of life – the lack of money and materiality – but the imaginative processes against which that life is understood, framed and interpreted. The radical disjuncture between the actual life a person lives and the multiple possible lives they can imagine living were it not for the contingencies of existence, is constantly made explicit by the family’s impoverished circumstances and the types of everyday practice that comprise their daily life. With no money or sense of what the future will bring, Denis and Jeremiah

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imagine their life of poverty against the more comfortable, stable existence they would have lived but for their father’s death, recalling Clifford Geertz’ assertion that: ‘One of the most significant facts about us, is that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end up in the end having only lived one’ (1973:45). Representing the relationship between the two lives – the one they could have lived and the one they ended up living – presents a series of epistemological and methodological problems, best addressed through a collaborative ethnography that allows people to represent their selves in the manner of their own choosing. To this end I trained Denis and Jeremiah in how to use a basic Digital Video Camera and the essential techniques, conventional framings, narrative devices and so forth that are used in ethnographic film. I explained that they would need to edit ‘in camera’ rather than using an editing suite or programme; that is to say they would be telling their story using a straightforward linear chronology of events in the same order they were filmed rather than employing non-linear approach whereby the story is constructed through editing. We spent a few days working out the main ideas and practicing, with the aim that the boys would then take full control of the filming and choice of subject matter. Once we had discussed the main ideas and they were technically competent I was not involved in the development of the film or present during the filming. Growing up without electricity and never having owned a television, let alone used a video camera, and editing in camera, the boys produced an extraordinary hour-long film. The film represents a day in the life of them and their family. It is not just any ordinary day but Christmas Day, the day that their father died and which perhaps more than any other day of the year exposes the alternative life trajectory they could have lived. Denis and Jeremiah begin the film by visiting their auntie who is also HIV+ but lives in a house with electricity, lights and music. Then they return to their own home to give us a sense of how Christmas Day is lived there, and interview their mother and older sister about the difference between Christmas Day as they spend it now and how they used to spend it when their father was alive. They ask their mother to describe the house where they used to live; and once they have constructed a mental image of the house, they journey to the house and film the garden where they would have been spending Christmas Day were it not for the contingency of their father’s death. Then to finish they return back to their own house and film an extended interview with their mother, Yudaya, about the personality of their father and the circumstances and consequences of his death, including most significantly Yudaya’s infection and the day of her HIV test when she found out she was HIV+.

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Life on the Other Side of Value

Figure 5.1. ‘My name is Denis Bete’

My name is Denis Bete, son of Yudaya. I am the third-born in Yudaya’s family. I would like to share with you some views about AIDS and what it has done to our family. Right now, we are going to the home of our auntie, the sister of our mum. Let’s go inside. That’s their sitting room. They are lucky, they have electricity. They watch TV. They have a radio. The big boy is preparing for lunch. It is their lunchtime. That’s the aunt we have been telling you about, the sister to our mum. Auntie is also HIV+. The child who you can see sleeping is sick. She is the daughter to our auntie and is also HIV+. Auntie brings drinks for her daughter. She is saying ‘wake up, wake up, have a drink’. ‘Auntie, how old is she? [Auntie replies 12] And which class is she? [Auntie replies Primary 6]. And so now we are in Auntie’s bedroom. You see, her husband had two wives. Can you imagine! Two wives staying in one house! The husband died, also of HIV. But they never realized when he was living that he was HIV+. They thought that people were bewitching him. They never got a message from him that he was HIV+.

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Scene Two: Remembering Christmas Day

Figure 5.2. ‘How did we used to spend christmas when our dad was alive?’

Denis Mum Denis Mum

Denis

Mum, Mum. How did we use to spend Christmas when our dad was alive? By this time we used to be having a drink. You mean you didn’t have to work on Christmas Day? Even your dad didn’t work. We used to go to out with your daddy. I cooked food for breakfast. We used to have a fridge full of food. I can’t even imagine how we used to eat on that day. It was a day of eating. Music! But you can’t hear music right now. Booming, the whole house was booming. Just listening to music! Our big sister Diana is preparing today’s meal. Ahh, Diana. What are you cooking?

Figure 5.3. ‘Ahh, Diana. What are you cooking?’

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Diana Denis Diana

Denis Diana Denis

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This is meat for Christmas. Eh! That’s a surprise! What do you remember about this day Christmas? Our dad used to take us out. We used to have sodas, but now Mummy cannot afford so we are just here at home. Our dad used to take us out to the beach, but now we are going to just eat and sleep. We used to get new clothes. Can you remember where we lived when we were still young? Yes I can still remember, it was before the floods. About the house, when you compare the other house with this one. Which one is better?

Figure 5.4. ‘The old home was better, self contained’

Diana

Denis Diana Denis Diana Denis Diana

The other one. It was self-contained, it had a bathroom, a kitchen, we used to cook inside the house but now we cook outside. I used to have my own room, even Mummy and Daddy had their own room. But now in this house, we all live in one room. The other one had power and electricity or not? Yes, we had electricity. We used to own a TV. We were watching good movies. But now we are without electricity. What about the compound? The compound was very nice. We had a garden, flowers. So it really was an admirable house? Yes

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Denis and Jeremiah travel to the other house

Figure 5.5. ‘This is the house were we used to live when our Daddy was living’

This is the house where we used to live when our Daddy was living. It really is so nice. It is so admirable. It had a garage. Our sister even had a bedroom as a baby, but now we all sleep in one room.

Scene Three: Back Home

Figure 5.6. ‘You can see Denis is very tired’

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Jeremiah So, we have returned to where we live from the other house where we used to stay. There you can see Denis. You can see Denis is very tired. Mum Welcome back Denis and Jeremiah! Mum How was your journey? Denis It was … the house looks so nice! Mum Jeremiah, have you seen it? Jeremiah Yes, nice house. Denis Yes, yes. Very nice. Mum Very nice. Denis Yes, I wish I was there. Mum You were there when you were young. Denis I cannot recall. When was it? I can’t remember. Mum That time when your Daddy was alive he cared for me, I was a bit young. Denis Did you not have any plans to build a house for us? Mum Ahhh, you know here in Africa we women we have to follow orders. What a man, what a husband says, is what you have to follow.

Figure 5.7. ‘You know here in Africa we women have to follow orders’

Denis Mum Denis Mum

But you have to give him a plan. As you are his wife. Do you think that you will complete this house? Yes I will. I’m not going to die, Denis. I’m not going to die. Let’s assume. Let’s assume. I will, I will, I will. You never know, I might get friends to help me. I might get money. You never know. Did you know that I was going to live this long?

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Denis Mum Denis Mum

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About our father. Can you recall what our Dad liked to be? What things would happen if our father was still alive? He had a car. He would drive you around. He had many, many things. But I am wondering. Are you good at playing football? Of course! Well, he had plans for you. Whenever he was looking at you, it was as if you were the only boy he had, even though he also had elder boys! He was encouraging me to have more children. I would have stopped at your sisters, Diana and Victoria. But he liked children. When I was in hospital after giving birth to you, you could see him happy, you could see him driving, bringing me all sorts of things and meat for the baby. People would look at me in the hospital. I was among the big ladies in the hospital! As if the wife of a minister he used to pay a private room for me. I was a big woman there! [Laughs] Ooh, those days! And about this lifetime which we are now? This life time? I can’t say much. Do you think that our Daddy wished to be here with us in this life? If he can see it. If it is true he is down under the ground watching us, he is crying.

Figure 5.8. ‘If it is true Daddy is under the ground, watching as he is crying’



He’s regretting. You know why? He left us in a house which wasn’t his own. You saw the house … it wasn’t like this one. It had a kitchen and the toilet was inside. Your Daddy was working in the government. He never ever thought about this life we are living now. He was only thinking about the other life. Your Daddy was an old man. He was not of my age but he was alive … he had money – whereas now here we are staying here! This one! I’m sure it would be different if he was still around. I wonder where right now would we be?

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Scene Four: The HIV Test Denis

Mum, Mum, who encouraged you to go and have a test. Where did you get the strength to go and have that test?

Figure 5.9. ‘Where did you get the strength to go and have that HIV test?’

Mum

Denis Mum Denis

Mum

Denis Mum

You know I was thinking about how your Dad died. He was sick for a long time but he never told me anything. He denied to tell me. He used just to be in the bed. I used to look after him but he told me nothing. I thought I should go to be checked, be tested. You know, we were three wives. Then one co-wife, the mother of your elder sisters and brothers. She died first. Then your Dad fell. Did you realise before that you might be HIV+? I was thinking, but not very sure. And I’m telling you by the time I left for test I thought I would be negative. Maybe because I was young. And about you going for testing? How did you feel at that particular moment when they told you that you were HIV positive? At that particular moment when you were still in the hospital? It was the blackest, darkest day. OK, the first day they took my blood and then after two weeks I had to go back for the results. But in those two weeks I had already lost 5 kilograms by the time I had to go back to collect my results. After leaving the room, I cried all the way back to our house. I can remember that. You remember?

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Denis When you came in the bedroom and you covered yourself. Mum Ah, yes, you know the things. Jeremiah Excuse me Mum. How did you feel in the moment when you were telling us about that status of yours. When you told us all that you were HIV+? How did you feel when you were talking to us? Mum I felt that if I told you that you will be free. So that you will be HIV negative. That’s why I shared with you. I didn’t want anyone else to be first to share with you. Denis Do you share this message which you give to us with other people? Mum Why not? Why not? But first, it is you my children and then for the whole community. I think you can understand me. But is it you, my children, who are first. Denis That means you are planning to build for us. What about the school fees? Mum Oh, that one. It is coming like Victoria these days. She has a friend who pays for her. Things will come slowly by slowly. You never know. Jeremiah OK Ma, do you think you will finish building our house? Mum It is good if you trust me. Look at me, everything is going to be done that you’ve learnt of before my death, and I’m telling you I’m not going to die now. Jeremiah It’s because you are sick. Mum I’m sick. And the thing is that you can’t get used to AIDS.

Lives of the Imagination Denis and Jeremiah’s words and images reveal just how different their life would have been had their father remained alive; they draw attention to the fact that there is no such thing as a pure life experience, only experiences that are imagined in relation to the other possible lives one could have lived. By representing themselves in the manner of their own choosing and by comparing and exposing the radical discrepancy between their actual and possible life trajectories they call attention to how the contingencies of being are experienced and played out within a particular social and practical context. The alternative, imagined life they could have lived offers a type of ever-present moral framework for interpreting their current life circumstances and understanding how their father’s death affects not just their past but also their future. As such, imaginative life-narratives are not abstract or wishful fantasies but are constitutive of people’s material lives, embodied experiences and being-in-the-world. This means that

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rather than thinking of a person’s life biography as possessing an essential, factual content and material and social context, for a true understanding of their circumstances it is necessary to take account of the lives of the imagination that they reconstruct on a daily basis, alongside the accompanying emotions and actions. Moments of crisis, such as illness, disruption or death often create the circumstances for reflecting upon and seeing beyond conventional surroundings to other worlds and lives. By recognizing the contingency of one’s situation and what may seem as constituting a fixed material and ontological reality, people are able to creatively reimagine the world through acts of the imagination that defy determination. Throughout Western history the imagination has been seen as a threat to reason, rationality and certainty due its ability to transform objective reality, not to mention its enduring association with the unreal, material alchemy, the fantastical, the primitive and the oriental (Casey 1991). The imagination’s surpassing of social, cultural and other institutional categories presents a serious problem for socialscientific epistemologies and methods and it is neither coincidental nor innocent, therefore, that the imagination, like consciousness itself, is often actively excluded within social science. Interior perceptions are understood as the property of singular subjectivities and are seen as too ephemeral or unreliable to be accorded wider validity by external, third-party observation. The imagination is defined as ‘immaterial’ and subordinated to scientific abstractions that are no less immaterial but bolstered by the strategic use of metaphorical language such as ‘structure’, ‘context’, and ‘habitus’. I would argue, following Vincent Crapanzano (2004) and Iain Edgar (2004), that to be concerned with the imagination is not to be concerned with the ephemeral, the intangible or the immaterial but to take seriously a much neglected aspect of the human experience that is constitutive of body, action and practice. It is especially interesting that the imagination has rarely been linked to the body, except indirectly through things such as desire, fetish and sublimation. Even Sartre’s sustained exploration of how mundane everyday experiences are mediated through the imagination (1996, 2004) largely locates the imaginary in mental activity rather than the body. However, if we trace the etymology of imagination back we see that the Latin words imago and imaginem derive from imato, to copy or imitate, linking the imagination to notions of mimesis, mimos and mime which are bodily movements and practices. This suggests that in its originary meaning the imagination was already, in part, a physical, bodily phenomenon located in action, mime and dance, which involved transformations and exchanges of meaning through bodily movement. And just as mime occupies a physical volume that extends out from the body into the

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world, one might suggest that people’s embodied imaginations extend out into the world where they become intertwined with a global and cosmopolitan imaginary. It is precisely this capacity of imaginative acts to transcend social contexts and national boundaries by acting through the body and into the world that creates lived possibilities and meanings. As such a person’s body becomes the means by which they are linked to the outside world and through which imaginative and existential possibilities are made material. The radical disjuncture between Denis and Jeremiah’s lived circumstances and the alternative life trajectories they creatively imagine, reveals an existential relationship between contingency and one’s fundamental being and place in the world. The first, and often most enduring, contingency is birth itself, especially the ethnicity and economic status of one’s parents, the country of birth and its position in the global-political economy. There is no necessary ontological relationship between land and the value of life – in fact it is a completely arbitrary relation – but in the current global-political climate a strong correlation between national identity and the value of life is actively maintained through an erroneous, yet politically powerful, pathological identification of a human being’s worth with the land where they (or their ancestors) were born. Without money those born on African soil are often unable to afford life-saving antiretroviral medications that are freely available in the West. There are currently estimated to be more than twenty-five million persons living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa (63 per cent of all persons infected worldwide), with an estimated 2.8 million adults and children becoming infected in the region in 2006 (UNAIDS 2006). Antiretroviral medications cost little to manufacture and yet are sold at hugely inflated prices. Although there are more than forty million HIV+ persons worldwide, only a small proportion currently receives treatment. Many families confront illness and death in the knowledge of a ‘cure’ that is freely available elsewhere in the world but that is denied to them. As such, many Africans are able to imagine the healthy life that they would be leading were it not for the land of their birth, their national identity and their marginal economic position, but they are unable to live that life. This means that while people’s imaginations can transcend social, economic and national borders so as to imagine a healthy life in the West, their bodies cannot, for they are designated as waste, thereby denying the originary etymology of imagination whereby body and psyche are linked in mimesis and movement. Here, the fear of touching the diseased or economically impoverished body extends out into the topography of the world and is translated into international boundaries and borders designed to

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allow money and certain goods to cross but prevent bodily movement, well-being and health. The possibility or denial of movement across national and economic borders reveals how different institutional regimens ascribe a particular classificatory status to people’s bodies alongside a specific moral, political and economic relationship to the land. While the impoverished, unmonied individual is fixed to their terrain and bounded by national and economic borders, the healthy, economically viable world citizen glides over space and transcends national and classificatory borders with relative ease. Movement, identity and economic status thus represent the iconic modes through which individuals and groups become known and defined. The control over how, where and when one moves reflects who you are and is enforced through a nexus of political power, economic impoverishment and ethnic categorization that determine the relative status and value of the person (Rossi 2009). Unfortunately, a further consequence is that it is not just identities that are mapped onto land but people’s capacity for enduring suffering. Suffering, like the imagination, is rarely confined within an individual body but extends into the lives of families and communities. Institutional attempts are made to contain suffering within national, ethnic and economic borders and thereby limit the chances of witnessing or being contaminated by the economically unviable or suffering body. This legally enforced restriction of movement among impoverished people provides a macabre twist to Marx’s comments on the relation between the earth, imagination and value: The idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions, arise, however, from the relations of production themselves. (1999:310)

I would argue this reversal of value actually represents a confusion of relations, not only between the material and the imaginary (which I hope to have shown are in part mutually constituted), but between the moral values accorded to different bodies, namely the living human body and the discarded, deathly body of money. Such a drastic reversal, whereby living bodies are accorded a lesser value than excess profit, is symptomatic of a deep uncertainty, where belief in the substance of money is taken as self-evident and the value inherent in the living, corporeal body is called into question. It is a confusion of the inanimate over the animate, of death over life, of prestige over humanity that presents itself as a misunderstanding between the

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body of money and the body of persons, resulting in unequal access to bodily health.

Conclusion: A Life on the Other Side of Value This chapter presents a deathly confusion between the body of money and the body of persons, as mediated via contemporary political conditions where the contingency of birth and identity is perpetuated through unequal health and the incessant severing of family relationships. It reveals how the relations between the body and money is formulated in the current moment whereby African families can imagine a life of health elsewhere but whose bodies are devalued and whose suffering remains mostly absent within global policy. It is a highly polythetic absence, which encompasses the absence of medication, the absence of money and an absence pertaining to the value of African lives. It is instructive therefore that humankind is characterized by Nietzsche as ‘an animal that can promise’, for money is itself a promissory note and the capacity to promise always implies the capacity for lying and deceit. The often empty promises and lack of sustained commitment by the international community to effect any lasting change on poverty, health and inequality can be juxtaposed with every single instance of familial severance to tell another story. The bodily needs and desires of families seeking health are subordinated to an irrational faith in accumulating excessive profit. Tellingly, Norman O. Brown argues that ‘the morbid attempt to get away from the body can only result in a morbid fascination (erotic cathexis) in the death of the body’ (1970:257). For Brown: The desire for money takes the place of all genuinely human needs. Thus the apparent accumulation of wealth is really the impoverishment of human nature, and its appropriate morality is the renunciation of human nature and desires-asceticism. The effect is to substitute an abstraction, homo economicus, for the concrete totality of human nature, and thus to dehumanise human nature. In this dehumanised human nature man loses contact with his own body, more specifically with his senses (ibid.:211).

Consequently, What the elegant laws of supply and demand really describe is the antics of an animal which has confused excrement with aliment and does not know it, and which like infantile sexuality, pursues no ‘real aim’. Having no real aim, acquisitiveness, as Aristotle correctly said, has no limit. Hence the psychological premise of a market economy is not, as in classical theory

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of exchange, that the agents know what they want, but that they do not know what they want. (ibid.:227)

Here lies a confused uncertainty and misunderstanding about the moral status of material substances that is played out with tragic consequences across a world in which human beings are surplus: unnecessary and unneeded, and certain types of human body are accorded the status of waste, of excrement, of shit. Denis and Jeremiah’s film bears poetic witness to life on the other side of value. Their images and personal narratives negotiate the complex tension between an exploration of their social and existential circumstances and a critical statement on the contingency of illness and suffering. Their family’s story – one of millions across Africa – simultaneously transcends and exaggerates the social and cultural borders between the West and non-West. Here, following Levinas’s elaborated sense of our ethical responsibility for other persons, I would argue that (like national and epistemological borders) these borders can be a rich source of interaction and understanding rather than simply being seen as barriers to knowledge or action. This creates a type of awareness and appreciation that cannot be defined in terms of objective rational truth or shared, hermeneutic understanding but nevertheless offers a basis for engaging with, learning about and responding to the experiences of other people. The sharing of life that occurs in Denis and Jerimiah’s film is a step towards recognizing, reorganizing and securing the rights of others. However, as their representation of life on the other side of value demonstrates, it is not simply a case of making visible experiences of illness, suffering and poverty but also their contingency.

Acknowledgements First and foremost my thanks go to Yudaya, Denis, Jeremiah, Diana and Victoria, without whom this chapter would never have been possible. I would also like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding both the original and subsequent research; Sarah Green and the Centre for Research and Economic Change (CRESC) for inviting me to think about these themes and present an earlier version of this essay accompanied by the film at the Money, Location and Visibility conference hosted by CRESC at the University of Manchester in March 2007; the Concordia Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, at Concordia University, Montreal, for offering a welcoming and stimulating environment for writing up this piece in May 2007; and the Uganda Nation Council of Science and Technology and the

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Office of the President for their assistance and support in carrying out this research.

Note 1.

Voltaire suggested that ‘when it’s a question of money, everybody is of the same religion’. Likewise in the action-comedy Heist, Danny de Vito’s character persuades another crook out of retirement with the words ‘everyone needs money, that’s why they call it money’. However, Camus alerted us to the error of mistaking such intensities of feeling for a universal characteristic of all humankind. For Camus, no matter how strongly a particular perspective—be that concerning money, religion, politics or death—dominates our thoughts and shapes our worldview, it does not mean it has any wider or universal validity

References Brown, N.O. (1970 [1959]), Life Against Death (London. Sphere Books). Butler, J. (1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge). Canguilhem, G. (1991 [1943]), The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books). Casey, E. (1991), Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology (Dallas: Spring Publications). Collingwood, R.G. (1992 [1942]), The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Crapanzano, V. (1992), Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). 2004. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Edgar, I. (2004), Guide to Imagework: Imagination-Based Research Methods (London: Routledge). Geertz, C. (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books). Hacking, I. (1990), The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ingham, G. (2004), ‘The Nature of Money’, Economic Sociology 5(2): 18–29. Irving, A. (2005), ‘Life Made Strange: An Essay on the Reinhabitation of Bodies and Landscapes’, in Qualities of Time (ASA Monograph 41), eds W. James and D. Mills (Oxford: Berg). Levinas, E. (1996), The Levinas Reader, edited by S. Hand (Oxford: Blackwell). Marx, K. (1999 [1867]), Capital: An Abridged Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Nietzsche, F. (1990 [1888]), The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ (London: Penguin Classics).

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Rossi, B. (2009), ‘Slavery and Migration: Social and Physical Mobility in Ader (Niger)’, In Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories, ed B. Rossi (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Santayana G. (1955 [1923]), Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy (New York: Courier Dover Publications). Sartre, J-P. (1996 [1943]), Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge). (2004 [1940]), The Imaginary (London: Routledge). Simmel, G. (1950), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press). Staples, J. (2003), ‘Disguise, Revelation and Copyright: Disassembling the South Indian Leper’ in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 9(2): 295–315. Taylor, C. (1979), Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). UNAIDS (2006), Annual Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic (Geneva: Volosinov, V. (1973), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press).

Chapter 6

Acts of Entification: The Emergence of Thinghood in Social Life Tord Larsen

Entification begins at arm’s length Willard van Orman Quine (1960)

We have all heard about people who get up in the middle of the night, open the fridge, have a snack, and go back to bed. I was familiar with the phenomenon when I came across an advertisement in a newspaper a few years ago. It read: ‘Are you a night eater?’ The advertisement offered assistance to habitual night eaters. Assistance, because their habit was now redefined as an illness, a kind of eating disorder. The question established a new category or class of people who thereafter became possible addressees of appeals, and who acquired a new ‘identity’ in addition to the ones they had before. Their new identity could in turn provide the basis for collective action. In this case, the generation of a new social entity was made possible by the introduction of a noun. People who read the advertisement and were in the habit of raiding the fridge at night time probably felt interpellated as night eaters and saw themselves as members of such a group for the first time. Their new identity, and the subjectivity that goes with it, was brought into existence by interpellation, as Althusser and a variety of Freudians argued. We can envisage the next step in the process. Although created by an initiative from the outside – therapists and pharmaceutical companies have category-generating powers – night eaters may want to destigmatize their affliction by demanding respect for their ‘custom’

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and public recognition of their chosen lifestyle, their identity. Were this ideological entrepreneurship to meet with success, night eating would no longer be a deficiency, and the practitioners no longer in need of moral or medical correction. On the contrary, a new ‘culture’ would have been born. History abounds with examples of the transformation of deficiency into cultural positivity – ‘grace out of stigma’, as Robert Paine (1988) once described a related process. Recent examples are anorectics who embrace their habit as a lifestyle, and the transformation of being overweight into ‘fat identity’. In the course of a few paragraphs we have identified two of the most prominent ways of generating new categories in our time. First, new therapies and pharmaceuticals bring new syndromes to our attention and sometimes a drug precipitates an affliction, rather than the other way around. We bear witness to an enormous increase in the number of syndromes and disorders, whereby behaviour is pathologized and made the object of therapy. Second, new identities emerge incessantly, demanding autonomy and recognition. Identity talk seeps in everywhere: it is invoked to give accounts of events, justify actions, legitimate choices and explain behaviour. The generation of new disorders and new identities are examples of what may be called processes of entification: something inchoate congeals into a thing (Latin: ens), a unit, a category with discernible boundaries. The concept of entification orients our attention to the conferral of a ‘gestalt’ on our experience. It calls for a study of the agencies that produce new entities and a comparative study of styles of entification, different ways of producing thinghood. In the following I will explore a range of entification procedures and establish a preliminary typology. 1

The Self and its Properties: Entification and Identity When I have a new identity ascribed to me, or when I verbalize or otherwise symbolize a quality of mine, I attain a new distance to that quality. By thematizing and objectifying my being, I make it accessible to myself. Hence, a measure of self-objectification seems to be a precondition for self-awareness and reflexivity. Yet the process of objectification may occur in such a way that my qualities, my behaviour or my views are turned into properties which I can attach and detach at will. That kind of objectification is an historically specific one. Objectification or entification, understood in the latter sense, opens up a gap between my ‘self ’ and its properties which exist at a distance from the acting and choosing I. Thus, entification is a prerequisite of management and governmentality. And as the demand for

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management increases, so does the number of manageable entities, or ‘externalities’, as Arvidsson (2006) calls them. We used to say of someone that he or she ‘leads a simple life’, commenting on his or her frugal ways. Now there is a lifestyle called ‘simple living’, which seemingly is about the same thing. But leading a simple life is a quality, while ‘simple living’ is a detachable property. In the first case I inhabit a way of life, as it were, in the second case I am a sovereign subject soaring above the lifestyle I choose to adopt. In television series for teenagers we frequently hear that adolescents have an ‘attitude problem’ and we have begun to say that children suffer from ‘school avoidance’. When we talk like this, we seem to imply that we can ameliorate the problem and leave the self untouched, as it were. The operations we may perform on the detachable properties do not transform us, we can readjust some fixtures or appendages rather than improve ourselves, as an older moral vocabulary would have it. Hence the obsolescence of the notion of conversion. The notion of detachable properties sits well with ‘the liberal self ’ which chooses its properties and identities at will. There is a wedge interposed between me and my actions so that my unique identity – my being, as it were – is left unaffected by my acts. If it is true, as I believe it is, that there is an increasing tendency to redescribe qualities as detachable properties, this may seem to increase my autonomy – a greater part of my life becomes subject to choice and control. Modernization is in part about increased autonomy, whereby our actions and opinions are the outcome of conscious choices. What we used to take for granted now requires explicit critique and justification. The concomitant distance between self and its properties allows us to talk about the choice of ethnic identity and the adoption of a world view, a tradition, lifestyle and religion. But the gain in autonomy and subjectivity is offset by the increase in objectification which is subjectivity’s inevitable companion. My identities, my actions, my world view become objectified signs of self, and as chosen ‘externalities’ they emerge as alienable possessions rather than as authentic expressions of self, so dear to the romantic bent of mind. When I design and project an image of myself, when corporations formulate their core values, when local communities design their identities, these objectified qualities become attachable fixtures and intellectual property, sometimes protected by patents. Signs of self are increasingly subject to instrumental manipulation, culture is literally constructed (in the instrumental sense of the term), chosen, patented and subjected to management. That which bears no essential relation to our being can be outsourced, managed by others and further removed from ourselves in a continuous process of entification. When corporations objectify

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‘reputation’ as a thing in itself, they can hire people to do reputation management, and firms which do reputation management mushroom in turn. Reputation used to be an aspect of behaviour, judged by existing moral standards. But now, as it has become a realm of its own, it spawns occupational specialization. Scales are devised to measure fluctuations in levels of reputation that have a profound impact on corporate stock value, a university’s attractiveness, a community’s value as tourist destination, and so on. All measurement presupposes entification, the manufacture of countable units. The analogy between identity politics and reputation management is evident, as both obey the logic of marketing and branding. So is ethics, when it is entified and outsourced as a special corporate activity. In the process, it becomes juxtaposed to and comparable with other entries on the balance sheet, permitting expressions like ‘Ethics as an identity generating resource in organizations’ (the genuine title of a conference). Identity politics can be analytically divided into moments of objectification and legitimation. Both functions require an explicit verbalization of the ‘content’ of identity, effecting a reflexive and instrumental or aesthetic distance to the objectified content. The moment of objectification consists in the formulation of a cultural estate (Larsen 1983) around which a group can incorporate (Eidheim 1971). The formulation of such an estate requires that tacit knowledge become explicit. Once made explicit, it may be harnessed to do a series of tasks: I can use it to claim rights, aboriginal or other, or negotiate compensation for lost identity. I may aestheticize my identity in folkloristic presentations of self, or I may normalize my behaviour so that it conforms to the accepted standard (a case of ‘strategic essentialism’, perhaps). If I end up in court, I may choose the ‘cultural defense’ (Rentelin (ed.) 2004) and define my infraction of the law as a cultural trait, which ideally would exculpate me and exempt me from prosecution. Identity objectified is not so much a source of my understanding of self and world as something I can choose freely on the basis of strategic considerations. In the moment of choice, I must consider myself unfettered by the identity/identities I am about to select. In objectifying my identity I have achieved sovereignty over it and am less an expression of it – identity has become my instrument. Identity politics then, may undermine what identity discourse wants to claim for itself: the existence of something inherent, primordial, unalienable which cannot be the object of transactions. Identity discourse becomes a symptom of the very ailment it seeks to cure: the notion of an atomistic, detached, liberal individual with an instrumental distance to its own being.

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Such an external relation between myself and my identities can be understood as part of the excision of the individual from social context which has been going on since the breakdown of feudalism. In purifying the self from external determinants, I eject them from my being, and achieve autonomy in the process. However, I have to reinstate these expelled qualities when I am called upon to define myself, but now they have become objects which define me in a purely contingent way. Consequent on the objectification of identity comes its use as legitimation. When the Norwegian Research Council established a program of cultural studies a few decades ago, the program was justified by a felt need for a strong Norwegian identity which would boost our commodities in the export market. Counties and municipalities have established programs of identity politics and hire people to do identity work and profiling at different political levels. At the national level, we instrumentalize and aestheticize a Norwegian identity for marketing purposes. Similarly, during the recent presidential election in France, the winner, Nicolas Sarkozy, announced the establishment of a new ministry for national identity, and he emerged a strong believer in ‘French values’, objectified signs of the national self. The transformation of culture – understood as, e.g., conceptual schemes – into ‘values’ and ‘heritage’ signals a change in its function. This can be readily seen in the debate about the presence of religious ritual in public schools in this country (Norway). The singing of hymns in schools is legitimated by saying that Christianity is part of our cultural heritage and identity. Hymns and prayer have a place in the schools by virtue of the identities they help transmit and inculcate, and the Bible is granted admission, as long as it is harnessed to the requirements of heritage management. The promotion of signs of self in the service of identity management presupposes their demotion as realities that shape our lives and perceptions. Decades ago Jean Baudrillard detected the loss of reality – Max Weber called it ‘Sinnesverlust’ – which lay at the base of the authenticity industry: ‘There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There … is a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real’(Baudrillard 1983:12–13). Christianity has metamorphosed into an elective identity signal. The same transformation has occurred within Islam, or at least in Islamic discourse on the veil: once used to forestall male sexual arousal, the veil is now interpreted as a sign of a chosen religious identity. When religion becomes subordinate to me as a choosing and self-creating individual, religion has become a ‘value’, commensurate with other

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values. We choose our religion the way a corporation chooses its ‘core values’. Marxists like Fredric Jameson have long argued that ‘values’ become explicitly articulated at the very moment all autotelic value is lost, and that values can only be talked about posthumously, as it were. Their argument can be applied to present-day identity discourse as well. Jameson sets himself the task of investigating how values become isolated ‘as a realm in itself and contemplated as a separate object of study’ (1983:238). In our terminology, he sets out to examine how values become entified as values. The autonomization of the notion of value presupposes a standard of comparison which we can apply to various activities. In premodern societies, says Jameson (echoing Marx), different economic pursuits and activities are unique in the sense that there is no standard to commensurate them. There are only qualitatively different forms of labour, for lack of a standard which makes commensurate the work of the shoemaker and the peasant, generating the notion of ‘work’ per se. With the breakdown of feudalism, and later with the advent of industrialism, people are confronted with a choice between different careers. In feudal times work was organized along caste-like lines, work was inherited from father to son, and guilds monopolized different trades. An abstract concept of value emerged when people were emancipated from these caste-like structures and confronted with choices (none of them perhaps very glamorous). The need to compare possible lines of work created a distance between the subject and work options (thereby fostering a new kind of subjectivity), and a concept of abstract value emerged, allowing a comparison of occupations. Historians of semiotics, like Jean Baudrillard, also find a watershed here. During feudalism, clothes bore an unequivocal message about the status of the wearer. With the breakdown of feudalism, people were allowed to wear whatever they liked, thus emancipating the sign from its erstwhile reference. Fashion was born, along with a more radical notion of the arbitrariness of the sign. We witness ‘the emergence of open competition on the level of the distinctive signs’ (Baudrillard 1983:84, cf. Sennett 1974). With the emancipated sign comes competitive democracy which ‘succeeds the endogamy of signs proper to statutory order’ (Baudrillard 1983:85). ‘Value’ emerges as an abstraction when exchange value succeeds use value as a measure of worth. As a ‘value’, identity is instrumentalized in the pursuit of other things: the community needs a more attractive identity to draw tourists, indigenous peoples need to revitalize their spirituality in order to improve their negotiating position vis-àvis the state, universities must develop profiles which make them visible in the marketplace of education, etc. When identities become

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instrumentalized, they no longer define our selves and attune our perceptions of the world. But they gain increased visibility as calculable entities within the reputation economy.

Making it Explicit: Entification and Emotion In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the milkman sings to his wife Golde: ‘Do you love me?’ His wife answers, somewhat annoyed, that she washes his clothes and raises his children. Tevye persists undeterred: ‘Yes, I know, but do you love me?’ Tevye demands that love become an autonomous feeling or experience severed from the activities in which love hides. Step forward and show yourself, don’t hide in the laundry basket, Tevye seems to be saying, imploring love to shed its guise. When historians like de Rougemont claim that romantic love acquired legitimating force during the high Middle Ages, they do not mean to say that the feeling itself is brand new. Rather, they maintain that the romantic vocabulary expands, and that reference to love becomes a valid way to justify a course of action. The rise of romance increases the number of descriptive genres (e.g., love novels) and enlarges our repository of accounts and justifications. The expression of moods and emotions is frequently couched in a physical idiom by non-Western immigrants to Europe. Anthropologists in Norway have reported on immigrants being rushed to the hospital complaining about heart pains. But referring to the heart often turns out to be an idiom for a general feeling of despondency or other emotional problems. In a similar vein, indigenous populations often characterize their emotions as ‘embedded’ in social practices and see the explicit thematization of emotions as a step towards ‘modernity’. In the early 90s I taught theories of ethnicity to a group of Sami health workers in Northern Norway. One of the students was interested in Sami emotional expression and told a story about a woman who had recently lost her husband and expressed her grief by saying ‘I don’t feel like going to the grocery store today’. The student reported that emotions seemed to be invariably expressed in this indirect way. Such statements offer a challenge to the anthropologist engaged in cultural translation. Does the woman mean to say that her grief has incapacitated her to the extent that she is incapable of going to the store? If that is the case, she means to say that grief is the cause of her behaviour. Or it may be the case that the expression simply means ‘I feel grief ’, in which case we may surmise that she does not have an autonomous language of emotions at her disposal, or that the use of such a vocabulary is circumscribed by rules of modesty, etc.

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Emotional discourses which differ radically from that of the twentieth century Western kind (assuming that is a meaningful category) seem to refer simultaneously to an inner experience, to a social relation and to natural events. The Ilongot term ‘liget’ refers to felt rage, as well as to unbalance in social relations, and to natural growth (Rosaldo 1980). Apparently, this description of emotions does not distinguish sharply between interior stirrings, upheavals in social life and natural events. But an autonomous language of emotions presupposes a differentiation between the natural and the human on the one hand and between interiority and sociality on the other. Tevye’s song prepares the ground for such differentiations. His question enters into a negotiation of appropriate ways to describe our actions. He is a modernizing agent at a time and place when marriage was understood in terms of family alliances, match making and political strategy. Through Tevye’s intervention, the implicit premises of the new and the old orders were articulated and brought to a new level of explicitness. With the emergence of a private interiority to which we have privileged access, our emotional life becomes an autonomous realm, the object of therapeutic intervention, the energy source of our action and a storehouse of legitimations.

Reality Enhancement: Entification and Profession One Saturday my regular barber was closed and I went to a more fashionable establishment for the removal of excess hair. At my regular barber’s I usually have to wait my turn and leaf through weeklies or newspapers before I am called to the chair. Once installed in the chair, I ask for the usual treatment: take a great deal off at the back, leave it down to the ears on the sides, and take whatever you have to off the top. The barber goes about her task, I pay, and the session is over. At the ‘klippotek’ (which translates awkwardly as ‘cutoteque’) the process is a bit more complicated. I am welcomed at a reception by a friendly female hair-designer. There is an appointment book on the desk, and a curtain blocks the view into the next compartment of the salon. I have not made an appointment in advance, but she manages to squeeze me in anyway. We move into the next compartment behind the curtain where she engages me in a discussion of procedure. We go through the alternatives, consider the relationship between skull shape and hairstyle. The conversation almost veers into a semiotics seminar on the relationship between identity and identity signs, and I begin to wonder if I will receive full anesthesia during the imminent metamorphosis. We agree on what seems to be like the standard

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haircut I get at my regular barber’s, upon which she escorts me into the next compartment in the salon and performs the operation. The haircut has a more defined gestalt and autonomy at the ‘klippotek’ than it does at my regular barber. Getting a haircut is more visibly walled off from the rest of reality, it is talked about in a technical vocabulary, and there are physical partitions between the different activities. The path leading to the central theatre is divided into stages and we stop at several stations before we arrive. At each stage, we talk about what lies ahead. The stages, the hedges, the vocabulary and the deferral of the real thing effectively elevates the haircut to a higher place in our reality hierarchy (the fact that some hairdressers put everything on display and tear down all partitions does not, in my opinion, invalidate my argument). Any enclosure has a sacralizing effect, it is a place ‘set apart’. The sacralization of the haircut is part of the professionalization of hairdressing which has been going on for years, resulting in numerous specializations within the field and hiked-up prices. A barber or a hairdresser is no longer someone who eliminates bodily boundaries or bodily waste, but an identity engineer who creates signs of identity. The setting apart of the actual haircutting, its entification, is part of such a shift.

Designer Identities: Entification and Performativity It is not only persons and groups which are subject to identity politics but also goods and commodities, events, restaurants, professions and training programs. They are all designed and profiled in ways that can be summed up in the commercial notion of the ‘concept’. The word concept is derived from the Latin concipere, which means to grasp or gather matter into an identifiable ‘thing’. The German equivalent is Begriff (Norwegian: begrep) which connotes the same activity of grasping, gathering and unifying. I may bring together something with my hands, or grasp it intellectually with my mind – a physical and a mental act of entification, respectively. In my conception of an object or an activity, it is seen as something. When something has achieved a recognizable style which can be imitated, we say that it has become a ‘begrep’ – a term which is being replaced by the English ‘concept’. The term concept (‘konsept’) is quickly replacing the Norwegian ‘begrep’ even in student papers, indicating that the commercial use of ‘concept’ is making its way into everyday speech and academic discourse. A ‘concept’ is what confers a unifying style on a product, a TV show, a restaurant. The ‘concept’ has become an entified property in

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the sense that it can be sold and bought. People who are responsible for the ‘concept’ of a television show appear on the list of credits, the concept generates income, it can be patented and protected against theft and plagiarism. A ‘concept’ in the commercial sense – which is becoming the dominant sense – is a mobile label which we can attach to a product we wish to design in a certain way. The concept confers identity on the object from the outside, as it were, it is not seen as an authentic expression of something which is already there, waiting in the depths of the object to be suscitated into visibility. As performative labelling replaces the notion of authentic expression, expressionism is being replaced by performativity in the arts, in art theory, in theories of meaning and in social life. Let me illustrate the contrast with a musical example. Vivaldi, the Italian baroque composer, lived at a time when the Affektenlehre – the theory of the affects – was the key to the understanding of music. The elements of music – keys, intervals, harmonies, typical motifs – were seen as carriers of emotions and moral qualities like repentance, sin, joy, love, rage, tenderness, grief. An octave was the bearer of dignity, an enlarged third conveyed joy, and diminished intervals incarnated flattery, sorrow, tenderness. E flat major was masculine and heroic, F major friendly and relaxed and so on.2 The theory of the affects does three things at once: it is a semiotic, a rhetoric and a hermeneutic all rolled up into one. It teaches us how we – hermeneutically – should interpret a musical work, it is a semiotic theory about the meaning of musical signs, and it provides rhetorical models for the composition of music descriptive of – and evocative of – feeling. The musical elements are not arbitrary signs of emotional and moral qualities. We do not ‘ascribe’ dignity to the octave – rather it is dignity incarnate, and we cannot remove the quality from the octave and expect it to remain the same (as opposed to how I can change my attitude without changing myself, in the example above). That is: dignity is not a detachable property annexed to the octave. Enlarged intervals are, symbolize and evoke ‘large’ feelings, they are not arbitrary signs of them. Dignity is not an external label we can attach to the octave, thus conferring an identity on it from the outside, as it were. But that is precisely what we do when we brand a product by putting it next to a quality we want transferred to it, the way celebrities transfer charisma to commodities they promote. A few hundred years after the heyday of the affect theory, we understand linguistic, visual and musical signs in a different way. First of all, the notion of the arbitrariness of the sign – although current since antiquity – has been radicalized and given pride of place in theories of meaning. We have come to believe that we, as humans, ascribe meaning to the world, which has become devoid of intrinsic

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meaning. Signifier has been torn lose from signified, and the ‘word– world relationship’ has been construed in novel ways. No longer does the world come with essential meanings which we can learn to decipher. Rather the subject is the source of meaning and value which it projects on to the world, at least in some theories of meaning. This new understanding of meaning is harnessed to do work for commercial and instrumental enterprises, and is somewhat transformed in the process. If you visit a hotel outside Bergen, you will find something called the Vivaldi Well-being Centre. The very possibility of such a name rests on a sign theory different from the Affektenlehre. We may say that Vivaldi gives us pleasure, and that the hotel intends to give pleasure at its recreation centre. So there is a thin thread of motivation connecting Vivaldi with the fitness club. But above all, the brand makers have seized on an ambience-producing ‘concept’ (Vivaldi) which is attached like a label to the centre. Aura no longer inheres in the work, but is glued on from the outside. The external, contingent relationship between sign and referent is also characteristic of the relationship between athlete and sponsors. The athlete emerges as a sign of his company by having its logo glued to his shirt. It may seem that the relationship between athlete and sponsor is the same as the relationship between individual and lineage in a lineage society (or between emblems of identity and status in feudal society). Yet a comparison between the two may throw their differences into relief. In clan or lineage society, the individual can ‘stand for’ the lineage in a moral, legal and semiotic sense. If I do something wrong, other individuals in my lineage may suffer from it at payback time, because in a sense I and my classificatory brothers are one body. It is only when the individual is detached from the lineage that he can enter into contractual relations with other similarly detached individuals. When I become alienated from my lineage through various processes of individualization, I am potentially many things, and free to become and symbolize (like the athlete) whatever I please (at least in standard narratives of modernization; see Goody 2006 for a critique). The individual’s separation from his original social group is accompanied by an analogous shift in our conception of the sign. The new relationship between individual and group is seen as purely conventional or as the result of a contract. The sign, similarly, loses essence and becomes mobile and arbitrary. Identity signs have attained a new freedom in the sense that they can be applied almost indiscriminately. In consequence, the notions of expressive truth or truth as correspondence recede into the background and we begin to understand truth as efficiency: we ask whether the signs efficiently produce the identity we intend them to.

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It is partly on the basis of this development that we can understand and appreciate the performative turn. Austin’s theory of performatives have gained a generalized currency in the past decades, not least through the work of Judith Butler. Gender is not so much a preexisting reality which we may choose to symbolize in one way or another. It is rather established and construed through our performances, gender is something we do.3 Branding, reputation management and identity construction can equally well be described as performative in the sense that they establish realities which did not preexist the associative work needed to brand a commodity, a nation, an ethnic group, an artist. When a corporation sets up a list of its ‘core values’, when a reputation-management group identifies ‘freshness’ as a sign of Norwegianness, when a politician casts himself as folksy, we are dealing with the generation of realities in a performative sense. The subject – the individual, the ethnic group or the company – is what it says it is, and it achieves this identity by exposing itself to ‘contamination’ from suitable sources of meaning.4 Branding is obviously made possible by the performative use of language/images and presupposes the detachability of signifiers, but these are only preliminary observations en route to an adequate semiotics and rhetoric of branding. It may be the case that branding can be adequately understood by means of the conceptual tools already at our disposal. After all, Thorstein Veblen’s notion of ‘conspicuous consumption’, Roland Barthes’ analyses of the fashion system and practically the entire oeuvre of Jean Baudrillard remain useful for the study of how brands are made. On the other hand, branding may require the development of new concepts, especially that part of the process when the sign tends to engulf the product it initially sought to bring to our attention. Naomi Klein gives an example of this ‘usurpation’ when she says about Lacoste that ‘the metaphorical alligator has risen up and swallowed the literal shirt’ (Klein 2001:28). The product is usurped by the brand, which is promoted from a secondary status as a sign to a thing in itself – meaning entified. As a thing in itself it has achieved agency of sorts, expressed as brand equity: the added value which a brand brings to the product, measured by such indicators as brand awareness and brand loyalty. The success of the branding process rests on the transformation of signs into motivated symbols, a naturalization of the relationship between image and product. This process may very well demand an extension of our semiotic lexicon (efforts to that purpose have been made by Umiker-Sebeok 1987 and Holt 2004).

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Standards and Equivalents: Entification and Measurement Processes of subsumption and measurement generate new ‘things’ by including them in taxonomies, classifications and scales. Reclassification, then, is a form of entification, as shown in the following example of the Sami joik, a distinctive Sami way of singing, originally endowed with magical powers. The destigmatization of the joik was part of the Sami cultural renaissance from the 1950s onwards (Eidheim 1971). The revaluation of the joik began when the Sami ideological entrepreneurs began looking for something in the Norwegian storage room of national emblems to which the joik could be compared. They found the Hardanger fiddle, used in the performance of Norwegian folk music. By comparing joik to the fiddle, the joik – once associated with heathenism, drinking and lewd behaviour – was reclassified as folk music. The joik singer could stand next to the Hardanger fiddler on stage, and both would represent the ‘expressive culture’ of their ethnic groups. Folk music was the ‘standard’, the instrument of commensuration and comparison, which allowed the joik to emerge as expressive culture. On the one hand, this reclassification expresses Sami cultural autonomy (the Sami have a repertoire of cultural ‘traits’ of their own), but on the other hand, the autonomy is undercut by its inclusion in a non-Sami category. Folk music was not originally a Sami category (nor was it a Norwegian one until the national romanticism of the nineteenth century). Categorized as folk music, the joik is transformed by romantic ideology – it is erased and preserved in the same act of reclassification. The difference between the joik and fiddle must be expressed in terms of a classificatory grid which will allow the joik to persist. Yet, when it is recognized as folk music, it is also misrecognized in its magical capacities, and that very misrecognition allows it to be reborn as expressive culture. In a comparable case, Australian aboriginal poets have been chastised for applying metre, since metre is considered a colonial product. Yet the only way aboriginal art will be recognized as art, is to define itself within colonial classificatory schemes, where art is an autonomous class of human activity. By classifying itself as art, the aboriginal activity evaporates and materializes in the same instant. The superordinate term in a taxonomy – the root node – functions as a standard in the sense that it ‘measures’ the categories below it. Standards are methods of ‘measuring’ particular events and things, as laws are standards for the ‘measurement’ of particular acts. Processes of modernization are mainly about the development of new standards for the commensuration of particulars: writing, monetarization,

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individualization, codification of customary law, quantification of time and space. In addition there are the standards of formal logic and mathematics: the syllogism disregards the content of the argument and is exclusively concerned with form; writing disregards phonetic differences; monetarization homogenizes things by pricing them; individualization divides mankind into comparable units; the metre divides space into commensurable units, and clock time makes all timespans comparable. This is the production of equivalents, a subcategory of entification in my scheme. The industrial variety of these forms of standardization is Taylorism or ‘scientific management’, which calls for each small work task to be mapped, analysed, and standardized. Taylorism continues to entify new areas of life: care of the elderly, mail service, marketing, etc., are rationalized by splitting up the work routines into the smallest units, timing them and coordinating them in the most efficient way. We can recognize the principle of Taylorism at work in all processes of modernization, as exemplified by the encounter between customary law and codified law in many parts of the world. In Papua New Guinea, some of the courts are ambulatory, and travel around in the countryside making sure that standards of adjudication and sentencing are uniform throughout the country, although paying due respect to customary procedures. Their time is limited, and universal standards of adjudication force the judges to isolate actions and events which are ‘actionable’. In so doing they have to disregard a wealth of contextual, historical and relational events which may possibly have a bearing on the case under consideration. The judges have to declare most of this irrelevant, isolate some events that stand out as legally prominent. ‘Did you beat your wife or did you not?’ These smaller sequences of events are ‘actionable’, they are manageable in more than one sense. By cutting out isolated acts from larger sequences, there is a standard developed with which we may measure and compare acts (beating your wife is illegal, regardless of context). The general process of commensuration was part of what Weber meant by the disenchantment of the world, and it continues to spread into new areas where it divides wholes into smaller units which can be managed and governed. Indices, business performance measurement, the KAPB factors (knowledge, attitude, practices and beliefs) for the measurement of social life, are tools with which we transform the immaterial into manageable materiality. In this transformation of the world into manageable and material components, knowledge is conceptualized as intellectual capital, manners as cultural capital, employees as ‘human resources’. Mastery demands measurement, and measurement demands entification.

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Conceptual Becomes Causal: Entification and Lifestyle To be able to manage things, we need entities we can handle, get a grip on. Quite often, that means we have to decompose larger wholes. Then we proceed to reconceptualize the relationship between the parts and the whole, not infrequently by substituting a causal relation for a conceptual one. A brief example: In a magazine for teenagers, there is a ‘Test yourself ’ page where the reader is asked ‘How social are you?’. Among the questions are: ‘When you are on a holiday, do you usually a) meet a lot of people and go to many parties, b) go on small excursions by yourself to explore and enjoy the silence?’ The reader is given points for each question, and is then asked to add them up, yielding an answer about how sociable the person is. Usually, we think that the tendency to do a) rather than b), is what counts as being ‘social’, it is part of what it means to be social. That is, there is a conceptual relation between each question and the ‘diagnosis’ social/antisocial. Yet it is precisely this conceptual relation which is reinterpreted as an external, additive relation in the test. Being social or antisocial is seen as the sum of bits of behaviour or behavioural tendencies. Gilbert Ryle once explicated the meaning of the word ‘brittle’ by saying that it is a ‘dispositional term’. When we call something brittle, we mean that it has a tendency to break if we drop it on the floor. Analogously, to be social means that you have the tendency to seek out company when you are on vacation. But in the questionnaire, behaviours are seen as bits that can be added, and hence stand in a causal – rather than conceptual – relationship to each other. And when we have entified behaviours into causally related bits, we can act on them, manage them, manipulate them. In a similar ‘test’, teenage girls are told whether or not their boyfriends will ever be more than just friends. They can find out by answering questions like: ‘How many times a day do you talk with your boy friend at school?’ Again, you are invited to add up your answers, and see what the chances are that you and your boyfriend will end up being ‘more than just friends’. That is, the conclusion is formulated as a prediction. The intentions and the decisions of the people involved are disregarded and replaced by the counting of bits of behaviour, assumed to have causal efficacy. ‘Are you an eccentric?’ a Norwegian tabloid asks. You are supposed to tick off precoded answers to questions about how unconventional you are, whether you are creative, very inquisitive, have a weird sense of humour, if you were already different as a child, if you are obsessed with strange ideas, if you live in a strange place, if you are uninterested

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in competitions and do not rely on others for validation, etc., etc. If you answer more than 50 per cent of these questions with a yes, you definitely are an eccentric. This is an example of a tautology. Being an eccentric means that you have strange ideas and do weird things. But the function of the questionnaire is to replace the conceptual relation between the identity ‘eccentric’ and its behavioural instantiations with the notion that being an eccentric is a calculable product of a series of ideas and habits. The difference between a conceptual relation and an additive, external one may seem subtle. Yet as steadily more things in our lives are factorized, divided into components which ‘add up’ to our life world – that is, when countable entities replace conceptual relations – we are in the process of redefining our understanding of identity and action. The entification of relations happens, e.g., when financial companies ‘buy debts’ (a relation thingified), and through money itself, which according to Simmel (1978:129) is the paramount example of the projection of mere relations into particular objects. The change facilitates management and promotes an understanding of ourselves as objectified, determined beings (see below). This state of affairs continues a line of development which has been discernible since the Enlightenment, and Hegel was emphatic when he pointed out that utilitarianism presupposes units which are related to each other in an external, causal way. Since the Enlightenment, order has simply meant the division of the world into separate elements related through efficient causation (see, e.g.,Taylor 2004). Braverman draws a connection between Weber and Taylorism on this point and says that both Taylorism and the disenchantment of the world depend on ‘the loosing of the parts from each other, the breaking into component segments of those traditional units of work that seemed natural and which were generally performed by a single person. The meaningless parts are now reshuffled according to criteria of efficiency’ (quoted in Jameson 2002: 83). The entification of ‘values’ and ‘identities’ must be understood in the light of this general development.

Self-reference and Autonomization: Entification and Brokerage There is a tendency among soccer fans to pay less attention to what goes on in the soccer field than to their own activities (a fact brought to my attention by my colleague Martin Thomassen). The shouting, the choreography, the songs, the waving of flags and scarves are increasingly turned inward. It is still the case, of course, that the

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cheering remains in touch with what happens on the field, but it is increasingly obvious that cheering is an activity in its own right. Should the activity break entirely free of the soccer match, we would have a case of mitosis, as Jameson calls such a process of autonomization. When cheering is done for the sake of cheering, the activity is performed intransitively, that is, it refers to itself, like the autonomous work of art. This form of entification is achieved by turning an activity back on itself, in a self-referential manner. It is related to what Humberto Maturana and Niklas Luhman called autopoiesis, characteristic of contemporary discourse differentiation. Such processes of breaking free, the establishment of a separate turf, which is allowed to enjoy an independent mode of existence, constitute a distinct class of entification processes. The sociological classics described the differentiations which produced separate institutions – and discourses – of, e.g., law, politics, economy and religion. But these large-scale processes are initiated and kept going by less dramatic social encounters, negotiations and communicative exchanges. Their combined effect is to fragment unitary discourses, much like the way an expanse of ice cracks open and allows smaller ice floes to drift their separate ways. The institutional differentiation and the concomitant proliferation of separate vocabularies which allegedly characterize modernity will continue to exist only as long as they are protected by boundaries which restrict traffic between them. Such boundaries in turn require brokers to mediate between the vocabularies and discourses. As society is divided into more and more expert systems, the need for translation between them becomes urgent. A byproduct of this differentiation is what Star and Griesemer (1989) called boundary objects. Boundary objects exist on the interface between different communities of practice, and may be differently understood by the parties, yet well enough understood by both to enable communication between them. In addition to the fact that intermediaries on the borders between social games find a niche as the result of social and cultural differentiation, mediating agencies emerge and become actors in their own right. A typical example of this ‘autonomization of the middle’ is the disc jockey who used to be an invisible link between the record player and the dancers. Now he is an artist in his own right. DJs are known for their individual style, some of them are in demand among night clubs, they rise to fame as other celebrities do. The counterpart of the DJ in the world of the visual arts is the curator, who has also risen from anonymity. He designs, contextualizes, and turns the exhibition into a performance, catching some of the spotlight that used to be honed in on the artists themselves.

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The rise of a class of middlemen is perhaps the most notable characteristic of the modern economy. There are the lobbyists, who mediate between interest groups and politicians, communications consultants who devise communications strategies, coaches who teach ‘life skills’. Journalists get their bylines and portraits in the papers, television networks have become actors in the dramas they report from. Instead of inviting friends to a party, we can get event organizers to do it. In order to appear as desirable we can hire image builders and identity consultants, trend analysts and fashion advisors. Animators animate us, dog walkers walk our dogs, and we have outsourced every ounce of our body and soul to therapists, personal trainers and coaches. That is, we have entified every aspect of ourselves (or rather, certain segments of society have). The study of such mediating positions and middlemen was a major field in anthropology in the 1970s (see, e.g., Paine 1971). The typologies distinguished between patrons, go-betweens and brokers who pursued different strategies in their management of diverse cultural and social worlds. Typically, the patron kept the worlds apart in order to profit from their separation, the broker found a niche as a cultural translator and the go-between simply worked as a messenger between parties. It would perhaps be fruitful to reopen the archive of middlemen studies to shed light on the present-day proliferation of middlemen and middle terms. While the ‘old’ middlemen found a way to operate on the borders that separated groups and cultural units, present day mediators just as often create the distance they purport to bridge. The spin doctor does at least two things in one stroke: he designs the image of the politician and he shapes the desires of the constituents to fit the politician’s image. The spin doctor does not so much mediate between separate worlds as he shapes the parties he then proceeds to connect.

Conclusion: Levels of Analysis There is a cluster of cognate terms that aim to capture aspects of my topic: entification, objectification, reification, thingification, thematization, autonomization, externalization,5 representation, signification.6 What they share is roughly an ambition to say something about the emergence of things and categories, the solidification of the inchoate into thinghood, the classification of the unclassified, the stabilization of experience by means of identifiable signs and symbols. There is a growing interest in this area, but the field itself is old, and the transformation of the ineffable into thinghood has always triggered a passionate response.

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One of the first sceptics was William of Ockham, who resented excessive entification (‘Ockham’s Razor’) and urged us to refrain from multiplying ‘entities beyond necessity’: only particulars have real existence, and he recommended that we resist the temptation to clog the universe with all kinds of fictitious entities. In a way, Karl Marx was Ockham’s heir when he warned against the reification of social life. He deplored the commodification of human relations which occurs when the products of human thought and labour gain an independent life of their own and confront man – their maker – as something alien. He affixed the label ‘ideology’ to such unwarranted acts of entification. The extremists among us – I am thinking of Nietzsche – are even contemptuous of concept formation, which in their opinion violates the primordial and unmediated experience of individual man. A word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases, cases which are never equal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things, complains Nietzsche. Ernst Cassirer (1930) concedes that there is a foundational act of violence at the base of every segmentation of experience. To Cassirer, it is the function of language to order experience into recognizable form. This may remove us from the immediacy of sensate acquaintance with the world, but it allows us to live in a world of objects and categories. The study of how a structured world of things and categories comes into being has been undertaken at several levels. Transcendental philosophy (Kant, Husserl) tries to identify the ‘conditions of possibility’ of experience and give an account of how the subject synthesizes the manifold of sensibility into a world of experience, to put it in Kantian terms. But Husserl also examined historically specific forms of objectification like the idealization, and mathematization of nature instituted by Galileo. Husserl’s student Heidegger continued his studies of historical forms of objectification in his work on ‘the age of the world picture’ (Weltbild). To see the world as a picture set before us defines modernity, and it comes with the Cartesian subject–object polarity, says Heidegger (2002, see also 1975). The subject is confronted by an object which it then proceeds to represent. While the subject–object polarity institutes its own modes of objectification and representation, it is modified by romantic expressivism, which portrays the objective world as the continuous outpouring of the subject in language, art, technology and so forth. Expressivism in turn gives onto notions of performativity and simulacra in postmodern theories of objectification and symbolization. Styles of entification, then, lie at the base of historical periodization and enter into our descriptions of cultural difference.7 Some of

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the examples above are routinely associated with modernity (standardization, causalization) while other examples – only hinted at in the paper – may be adduced to testify to a postmodern way of producing thinghood.8 While human life is contingent on a measure of object stability and classificatory order, entification practices are historically and culturally diverse. It may also be the case that the sheer quantity of entification work varies historically. The study of how modes of entification emerge and change has gained momentum recently, and in particular, the construction of scientific objects has received a fair amount of attention.9 There is even a growing subdiscipline of ‘thing theory’. Yet a general framework for the comparative study of entification is still in the making.10

Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Nigel Rapport, Henrik Sinding-Larsen and Viggo Vestel for comments and suggestions.

Notes 1. Although in use during the Middle Ages, the concept of entification did not gain contemporary currency – to my knowledge – until Quine (1960) used it more or less as a synonym of objectification. In anthropology, practices of thing making were central to the work of Bernard Cohn (e.g., 1996), who examined the role of censuses and other tools in the colonial appropriation of India (see Fernandez 2002 on Cohn and entification). Thomas Ernst (1999) uses the term to describe what happens to local organization among the Onabasulu of Papua New Guinea when mining companies want to compensate the locals for land use. A more visible local ethnic organization springs up to be at the receiving end of compensation, and a process of entification occurs: the social artifacts (groups) which had been ‘soft and thick’ now solidify and get ‘hard and sharp’ at the edges. Eric Hirsch (2001) debates Ernst’s thesis; for entification among the Biangai, see Moretti (2002). 2. See, e.g., Thomas Christensen (2002) for a description of the theory of affects; my examples are from the website of May Ruth Bøe. 3. Butler warns against the idea that gender is something we put on the way we put on a shirt: ‘Gender performativity is not a matter of choosing which gender one will be today. Performativity is a matter of reiterating or repeating the norms by which one is constituted: it is not a radical fabrication of a gendered self. It is a compulsory repetition of prior and subjectivating norms, ones which cannot be thrown off at will, but which work, animate, and constrain the gendered subject, and which are also the resources from which resistance, subversion, displacement are to be forged’ (1993:x). Butler, Derrida and de Man have refined and expanded Austin’s original notion of the performative. They do not conceive of the performative as something we simply can employ to choose our identity at will. Yet that is the philosophy which lies at the base of commercial branding, and

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

Tord Larsen I believe there is a connection between social practices like branding and the rise of performance theory/theories of performativity. There is, of course, a superficial similarity between branding, magic and metaphor – all deal in the transfer of qualities from one object to another. While metaphor may be construed as the superordinate term, branding differs from magic by virtue of the secular instrumentality which informs it. For an elaboration of externalization, see Sinding-Larsen 1991. For a discussion of signification within this perspective, see Larsen 1979. Relevant to the characterization of epochs or cultures are notions of the ‘quasitranscendental’, like absolute presuppositions (Collingwood), epistemes (the French tradition), historical a prioris (Foucault) which try to identify historically variable principles of discourse generation. They also pave the way for a study of historically diverse procedures of entification. The entire world of academia seems to have grown weary of any talk of postmodernity. Yet I believe important work was done by writers, some of them tagged postmodernists, who pointed out new modes of signification and objectification which were in the offing from roughly the late 60s onwards (e.g., Baudrillard 1996). For example: our contemporary mania for duplication (the photograph, the video, the instant musealization of the present) testifies to the replacement of reality by its imitation (and eventually, by the simulacrum). The mania is manifest in contemporary art’s tendency to entify a piece of reality, reframe it and package it for our aesthetic gaze. Action as enactment, self as performance, world as fiction (9/11 as a work of art) are consonant with the objectifying identity politics of the heritage industry and the self-commodification of self-exoticizing indigenous groups. In these cases, aesthetization and objectification go hand in hand, as actions may be legitimated by reference to the aesthetic product we have designed ourselves as (‘I am a gangsta, and that’s what gangstas do’, ‘I am a homewrecker, and that’s what homewreckers do’ are examples of self-objectifying legitimations which are regularly offered on reality shows). About varieties of thinghood, see, e.g., Brown (2004). On the construction of scientific objects, see e.g. Brock et al. (2004), Daston (2000), Danziger (2001), Hacking (1990, 2002), Latour (1999), Poovey (1998). Several recent efforts contribute to the construction of such a framework: new versions of general classification theory (e.g., Bowker and Star 2000), formulas for the rhetorical generation of cognitive spaces (e.g., White 1978), developmental studies of logics of value, measurement and symbolization (e.g., Goux 1990) and the emerging field of Deleuze-inspired theory of assemblages (e.g., DeLanda 2002). See also the delightful collection edited by Latour and Weibel (2005).

References Arvidsson, A. (2006), Brands. Meaning and Value in Media Culture (New York: Routledge). Baudrillard, J. (1996), The System of Objects (New York: Verso). (1983), Simulations (New York: Semiotexte). Bowker, G. and Star, S.L. (2000), Sorting Things Out. Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press). Brock, A., Louw, J. and van Hoorn, W. (eds) (2004), Rediscovering the History of Psychology: Essays inspired by the Work of Kurt Danziger (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers).

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Brown, B. (ed.) (2004), Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge). Cassirer, E. (1930), Form und Technik, in Kunst und Technik, ed. L. Kestenberg (Berlin: Wegweiser). Cohn, B.S. (1996), Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Christensen, T. (ed.) (2002), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Danziger, K. (1990), Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (2001), ‘Whither the Golden Oldies of ESHHS: The Historiography of Psychological Objects’, Address at the twentieth annual meeting of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences, Amsterdam, 15 August 2001 date. Daston, L. (ed.) (2000), Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). DeLanda, M. (2002), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum). Eidheim, H. (1971), Aspects of the Lappish Minority Situation (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget). Ernst, T. (1999), ‘Land, Stories and Resources: Discourse and Entification in Onabasulu Modernity’, American Anthropologist 101(1): 88–97. Fernandez, J. (2002), ‘The disease of language and the language of disease’, Proceedings of the British Academy 117: 355–99. Goody, J. (2006), The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Goux, J. (1990), Symbolic Economies. After Marx and Freud (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Hacking, I (1990), The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (2002), Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Heidegger, M. (1975), ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Books). (2002), ‘The Age of the World Picture’, Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hirsch, E. (2001), ‘Mining boundaries and local land narratives (tidibe) in the Udabe Valley, Central Province’, in Rationales of Ownership. Ethnographic Studies of Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea, eds James Leach and Lawrence Kalinoe (London: UBSPD Publishers). Holt, D. (2004), How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press). Jameson, F. (1983), The Political Unconscious (New York: Routledge). (2002) A Singular Modernity. Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso). Klein, N. (2001), No Logo (London: Flamingo).

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Larsen, T. (1979), ‘Goffman og Gluckman: to forhold mellom tegn og betegnet’ (Goffman and Gluckman: two versions of the sign relation) (Oslo: Dept of Social Anthropology). (1983), Negotiating Identity. The Micmac of Nova Scotia, in The Politics of Indianness, ed. A. Tanner (St. John’s: Social and Economic Papers, Memorial University). Latour, B. (1999), Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (eds) (2005), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press). Moretti, D. (2002), Wau, it’s Gold! An Account of Land, Mine Disputes and ‘Entification’ Among the Biangai and Upper Watut of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea, BA Dissertation, Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University. Paine, R. (1988), ‘Grace out of Stigma: The Cultural Self-Management of a Sami Congregation’, Ethnologia Europeae, 18:161–178. (ed.) (1971), Patrons and Brokers in the East Arctic (St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland Institute of Social and Economic Research). Poovey, M. (1998), A History of the Modern Fact. Problems in the Science of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Quine, W. (1960), Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press). Rentelin, A.D. (2004), The Cultural Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rosaldo, M. (1980), Knowledge and Passion. Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sennett, R. (1974), The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage Books). Simmel, G. (1978), The Philosophy of Money (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Sinding-Larsen, H. (1991), ‘Computers, Musical Notation and the Externalization of Knowledge: Towards a Comparative Study in the History of Information Technology’, in Understanding the Artificial: On the Future Shape of Artificial Intelligence, ed. M. Negrotti (London: Springer Verlag). Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. (1989), ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science 19:387–420. Taylor, C. (2004), Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press). Umiker-Sebeok, J. (1987), Marketing and Semiotics: Selected Papers from the Copenhagen Symposium (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter). White, H. (1978), Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).

Part IV Beyond the Body

Introduction to Part IV Nigel Rapport

The two essays in Part IV look at human capacities that take actors beyond the body, narrowly and conventionally defined. The body does not limit human activities and potentialities insofar as the imagination is transcendent (Chapter 8). One imagines one’s way into other bodies, into being-with and being-for other bodies – where ‘other bodies’ include both the individual’s own and those of other people. One can imagine bodily otherness that exceeds the limits both of one’s current physique and of current sociocultural definition. Likewise, the body is not a limit insofar as the skills it can learn and incorporate give onto innovation in terms both of the body’s habitual practices and of physical and social environments (Chapter 7). In ‘“Live in Fragments no Longer”: Social Dance and the Individual Imagination in Human Nature’, Jonathan Skinner examines the human capacity for imagination and its practice. He begins with a Kantian distinction between empirical and transcendental imagination. To deploy the empirical imagination is to creatively address the social world, the world as is; to deploy the transcendental is to go beyond such worlds. In existentialist hands, this is then elaborated to distinguish, as Sartre phrased it, between the freedom to transcend the social and to negate it: to enter a world of utter unreality. With these distinctions to hand, Skinner turns to anthropological arguments concerning the relation between the cultural and the biological in determining human need (such as for sensory exchanges with others), and the ontology of the subject: an effect of social structure, social relations and discourse, or a transcendent entity? How might an anthropology of the imagination enter into these debates? Skinner then brings to bear information from the ethnographic study of dance. His own research on dance – specifically the fashion for ‘social dancing’ (that is, non-competitive dancing) as a hobby, and the

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classes where men and women come together, normally as singles, to partake of its instruction – has taken him from Belfast to London, Amsterdam, Gothenburg and San Diego. We hear of dance experiences concerning Grace and Jonathan, Samura, Jason, Unsala, Danielle and Deano, practising salsa, jive, tango and ballroom. Skinner’s argument is that dance is a prime example of how people come together, connect socially and physically, through making use of what Kant referred to as the ‘fiction-making power’ of the imagination. More precisely, in dancing with others, in dancing like others and in dancing around others and thereby accommodating them, Skinner finds that a ‘becoming-other’ quality emerges. His chapter evinces how individuals transform themselves, moving physically, sensually and imaginatively through the performative space of the dance floor, so as to achieve a going-beyond of both social and embodied identities. They connect with other bodies and other selves. As Skinner phrases it: dancing ‘in sync’ with another, individuals put into practice an embodied imagination whose expression comes to be reinforced by the body of another. And yet, the dancing remains the individual’s own. For its execution is the manifestation –and approximation – of an individual imaginary, and the connection with others is significantly transcendental, ‘fantastical’, too. Skinner’s essay is preceded by Trevor Marchand’s, ‘Embodied Cognition, Communication and the Making of Place and Identity: Reflections on Fieldwork with Masons’. The aim of the chapter is to relocate the active (capacitous) subject in processes of making social and physical architecture. Existing social-scientific scholarship, Marchand contends, renders the individual an abstraction, effectively dislocating him or her from the practices and places of everyday life. It is difficult to glean from practice theory (for instance) how the individual engages with space beyond the mere reproduction of the habitus and the structures of meaning; for Bourdieu, space and architecture structure identity, but then the lived-in world is itself structured by embodied selves in a dynamic and emergent fashion. Existing social-scientific models fail adequately to treat resistance, subversion and change: to recognize experiences that fall outside the realm of the docile body. Hence the appropriateness of anthropology borrowing from theories in neuroscience and linguistics that draw equally on biology and culture, and moving beyond the black box of habitus to more nuanced descriptions of skill-based learning, production and innovation. Here is the human subject and built environment emerging jointly from performance. Basing his argument on extensive fieldwork among stonemasons in Yemen, Nigeria and Mali, Marchand shows how skilled practice is

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learned and communicated with the body. The masons exhibit a nonpropositional kind of knowledge, which exists beyond the language faculty while yet taking the form of a kind of ‘shared utterance’ of physical tasks undertaken in a coordinated, but not predetermined, manner by two or more participating practitioners. Understanding is arrived at from the body, and performed through the body: processed in the motor domain of cognition and expressed somatically. The masons’ practices involve motor-based interpretations which contain kinaesthetic and proprioceptive information directly related to the physical character and coordinated bodily mechanics of the actions at hand. Together they unfold a common map of physical activity, feeling between them how they will proceed. Like Skinner’s, Marchand’s essay contains innovative appreciation of how the embodied nature of understanding and communication exists in the shared space of a common social activity. Here is practice (dancing, building) verbally and somatically interpreted by individuals, constructed, contested and changed by way of an ongoing dialogue of bodies. In making places, buildings, dwellings and selves, Marchand’s masons position themselves between discourses of modernity and tradition, exhibiting the capacity and will to improvise, economize, explore, innovate and augment.

Chapter 7

Embodied Cognition, Communication and the Making of Place and Identity: Reflections on Fieldwork with Masons Trevor H.J. Marchand

Introduction: Locating Space, Place and Architecture in Anthropology Despite anthropology’s long-standing fascination with the spaces and places of people’s lives, Gupta and Ferguson rightly identified a surprising lack of ‘self-consciousness about the issue of space in anthropological theory’ (1997b:33). In general, space has been dismissed as a preexisting natural category within which societies are distributed and humans are politically, economically and socially organized: in other words, an infinite three-dimensional emptiness containing bounded places. Euclidean notions of space as homogenous and extensible have permitted passive contemplation of a distanced ‘there’, safely separated and reified as a static entity rather than a changing and socially contingent phenomenon. Until recent decades, the body, too, figured mainly as a vehicle or implement for social, cultural and material production, but rarely as a site of production and transformation in itself. The intent of my chapter is to locate and describe the role of human agents in the dynamic processes of making space, place and physical architecture. I start by briefly describing my fieldwork with masons

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in Northern Nigeria, Yemen and Mali. In addition to his embodied engagement with work and materials, a mason’s practices also include exchanges with clients, suppliers, fellow workers, local patrons and dispersed audiences of national and possibly global interest groups. My research concentrates largely on issues of training and skill-based knowledge, and I maintain that the apprenticeship systems in my places of fieldwork equip trainees with more than merely technical proficiency in their trade. Building sites are participant learning environments (Lave and Wenger 1991) where workers acquire and hone an array of business skills, professional comportment, social values, worldviews and, very often, trade secrets. These various forms of knowledge together construct the builder as a moral agent with publicly recognized duties and responsibilities toward his fellow tradesmen and public. The next section further develops the framework for an anthropology of place making, and points to the seminal roles played by phenomenology and practice theory in directing the discipline’s attention to place and the body. Heidegger’s notion of ‘dwelling’ (1977), Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the senses (1962) and, later, Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus (1977), all emphasize the essential connectedness between embodied subjects and place. Casey has drawn these ideas together in a rethinking about place that forcefully challenges presuppositions of Euclidean space, subject– object relations and mind–body dualism (1996a). Place and human activity are conceived as mutually constitutive, whereby place is constantly in the making, and making is always emplaced. Though my emphasis in this chapter is on masons, the concept of place making extends to all dwellers, in Heidegger’s sense, who through their daily and ongoing practices make themselves at home in the world. As with any study of human production and identity formation, a theory of place-making must accommodate resistance and change. From Foucault we have understood that response is always and necessarily the effect of discourse, and operates within it (1977). But more than simply reproducing ‘truths’ and ways of being-in-the-world, Butler’s performance theory (1990) illustrates that stylized repetition has the potential to shift discursive boundaries, thereby introducing change to widely held practices, perceptions, beliefs and values. I will discuss with examples how masons, operating within historic systems of training and craft production, are capable of creative improvisation and the integration of innovation within discourses of ‘tradition’ in manners acceptable to their fellow practitioners and audiences of local patrons. In this sense, masons in so-called ‘traditional’ contexts can be recognized as going beyond established conventions of style and practice, and to be constantly reinscribing architecture and place with

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the changing meanings and values of the local and wider societies of which they are part. In sum, I review the contributions from phenomenology, practice and performance theories toward better describing the experiential, situated and constructed nature of human activity, but I also acknowledge their individual limitations in providing any satisfactory explanation of how the acquisition and generation of a masons’ skilled and stylized practices actually occur. If anthropology is to move beyond the black box of habitus and the descriptive surface of performance theory to more detailed investigations of skillbased learning, production and innovation, then we must look to the ways that skills are communicated, processed and actualized in human cognition. Significantly, a craftsperson’s trade knowledge is learned and performed in practice, and on-site communication is generated and interpreted almost exclusively from the body. I therefore contend that anthropological studies of such skill-based activities must engage seriously with the question of embodied cognition and communication. The final section posits a way forward by centrally theorizing the nature of on-site communication between masons and their trainees in the making of buildings. In doing so, I introduce an interdisciplinary approach that takes seriously what’s on offer from linguistics, the neurosciences and philosophy of mind. Most notably, the ideas I am developing are inspired by a Dynamic Syntax theory of language (Cann, Kempson and Marten 2005) and I am recasting its principal tenets as the basis for a cognitive model of embodied communication. Not only am I endeavouring to extend conventional ideas about human knowledge beyond the realm of language and propositional thinking, I am also moving my anthropological studies beyond our disciplinary boundaries to engage in a broader, more inclusive discourse about place-making and what it is to be human.

Fieldwork with Masons Nearly two decades ago, Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga composed a comprehensive genealogy of anthropology’s engagement with space and architecture (Lawrence and Low 1990), and in the introduction to their more recent edited volume on The Anthropology of Space and Place, they declare: [A]nthropologists have begun to shift their perspective to foregrounding spatial dimensions of culture rather than treating them as background, so that the notion that all behaviour is located in and constructed of

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space has taken on new meaning … Anthropologists are rethinking and reconceptualising their understandings of culture in spatialised ways. (Lawrence-Zúñiga and Low 2003:1)

I would contend that the second sentence in this quote is perhaps most revealing. In large part, the discipline’s foundational concerns with social organization and cultural meaning have been cast in new metaphors – expressly ones of space. The issue of ‘space and place’ discussed in much writing on the subject has little to do with the actual physical environment or architecture of human settlement, habitation and interaction, and more to do with issues of ‘gender and sex pollution, kinship and moiety patterning, linking the cosmos to the earth, and segregating individuals by age, rank and status’ (Parker Pearson and Richards 1994:28). The process of spatializing and mapping these classic social and cultural attributes onto the built environment gives them tangibility, making them pliable for novel interpretations, organizations and structured arrangements. Though this arguably has its value, anthropology should also be generating detailed analyses about how locations are built and made in a physical sense – with all the negotiations, conflicts and cooperative efforts that these practices entail – and not merely focussing on how space is lived, perceived and conceived (Lefebvre 1991), or reconfigured and reimagined by the secondary productions of users (de Certeau 1984). As a trained architect I came to anthropology in order to investigate the actual processes of building and, in particular, the individual masons and labourers involved, their on-site decision making and the ways in which they come to know their craft and construct social and professional identities in relation to their trade. Initially inspired by publications on vernacular architecture (i.e., Rudofsky 1965; Oliver 1976; Bourgeois and Pelos 1983), I soon focussed on ‘traditional’ builders, whom I define thusly: site masons or carpenters who are responsible for the design, planning and construction of a project; who employ mainly local materials and indigenous technologies; and who undergo a practical apprenticeship rather than an institutional, classroom training. The traditional builders with whom I laboured did not erect edifices according to sets of architectural drawings, but instead they were intimately involved in the conceptualization and realisation of space through the act of ‘making’. In no way does the qualifier ‘traditional’ imply stasis or historical displacement in some imagined past, but rather it reflects the direct and nonalienated mode of their embodied production: the builders’ practices not only respond to, but make the place of their involvement. This notion of an embodied

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engagement in design, problem solving, and building is succinctly captured by Ingold in the following passage: Building … cannot be understood as a simple process of transcription, of a pre-existing design of the final product onto a raw material substrate. It is true that human beings – perhaps uniquely among animals – have the capacity to envision forms in advance of their implementation, but this envisioning is itself an activity carried on by real people in a real-world environment, rather than by a disembodied intellect moving in a subjective space in which are represented the problems it seeks to solve. (2000:186)

My approach to the anthropology of space, place and architecture is concerned with processes of emplacement and place making. The key unit of analysis I adopt as a fieldworker is neither the entire city or town, nor a specific neighbourhood (cf. Singerman 1995; Pellow 2002), but rather a community of craftspeople centrally involved in the building trades. An intense ethnographic engagement with their daily activities, social networks, professional practices and apprenticeship training affords more nuanced understandings of the ways that the built environment is produced and reproduced, as well as the ways that gendered, professional and civic identities are constructed and contested. The constitution, practice and performance of the masons with whom I worked in Zaria (Nigeria), San’a (Yemen) and Djenné (Mali) did not speak about their respective urban sites in a detached or objectifying manner, but spoke from within them: from within the everyday negotiations for civic, political and religious identity; from within hierarchies of status (i.e., professional, economic and ethnic), and from within struggles over cultural capital (i.e., technical knowhow, magical knowledge, public recognition and cultural heritage) and resources (i.e., patronage, financial capital, labour and material supplies). During fieldwork, I employ an apprentice-style method whereby I train and labour over lengthy periods as a member of the building community, and establish a solid rapport with my fellow workers.1 In the exchange of ‘toil for knowledge’, my physical contribution of labour allows direct access to the place-making practices of craftspeople. A regular schedule of long hours, and an engagement in what are often repetitive and mundane manual tasks, allows for close observation and verification of technique, stylized practices, social performances, and on-site communication. Notably, much communication is non-propositional in nature, relying more immediately on an intercourse of visual, auditory and somatic forms of information, and is better grasped through immersion in the activity than detached observation (Marchand 2003a, 2007). In

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addition to forging working and social relations with fellow builders, an apprentice-style method also transforms me into a practitioner with vested interest in the making of domestic, public and religious places. From a phenomenological perspective, regular reflection upon my own physical strains, emotional states, and changing sense of well-being, tedium or accomplishment, figures in the analysis and heightens my empathy with the daily experiences of co-workers. A measure of technical competence informs my understanding of what constitutes a secure edifice; how daily design and construction decisions are made and implemented; how aesthetic judgements are levelled; how innovations are introduced and negotiated; how the abilities of apprentices and junior masons are tried, honed and tested; and what qualities ultimately make a ‘master’. The making of a mason is not merely a feat of attaining technical proficiency. On minaret-building sites in San'a, for instance, the usta’s (master mason) engagement with his clients and labourers alike is typically informed by popular conceptions of Islamic piety and moral conduct. His speech is punctuated by Qur'anic verse and religious expressions, and work is scheduled to observe midday prayer and the daytime fast during Ramadan. A large brass insignia reading ‘ma–sha– ’Allah’ (What God Wills) is typically suspended from an iron chain above the ground-level doorway, offering God’s protection for the workers throughout the erection of these towering edifices. Young tradesmen are strictly disciplined with a deep reverence for authoritarian hierarchy, and every member plays his part in the machine-like assembly of routine activities and is responsible for plying endless loads of building materials up and down his designated territory of the spiralling stairwell. The apprentice’s position within the chain of command is tenuous, and if he transgresses the boundaries of proper comportment then he is replaced and distanced from his privileged position working next to the mason. It is from this spot that an apprentice is able to effectively ‘steal’ technical know-how through careful observation, and gradually acquire the necessary aptitude for commandeering his own future building sites. Qa–t (catha edulis) chewing is an integral part of the daily social interactions that bond all men on the job and bring them together outside working hours. The usta draws inspiration for the decorative brick designs from his evening ‘chews’, claiming that qa–t stimulates his imagination to calculate novel configurations of geometric relief patterns. In conversation, San'ani masons regularly distinguish themselves from the so-called ‘modern’ contractors responsible for the steel and concrete structures that mushroom throughout the expanding city quarters. They appropriate the Arabic term taqlı–dı– (literally ‘traditional’) to qualify themselves and

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their work, boasting to their audience of patrons or clients that their buildings are more stable and enduring, and authentically San'ai. In West Africa, both the sarkin magina (master mason) of the Hausa Emirate of Zaria and the Djenné barey (mason) are versed in Qur'anic and ‘black African’ secrets (respectively bey koray and bey bibi in Djenné-Chiini), with a cache of powerful spells and benedictions that guarantee safety or cause walls to crumble. Building sites are exorcized of troublesome djinn spirits, amulets and blessed artefacts are buried in foundations, and daily incantations are recited to protect the team of workers and future occupants from accidents and malevolent forces. In Djenné, the masons’ secret knowledge is popularly conceived as distinct from that possessed by the town’s marabouts (religious scholars) or other tradesmen. The masons occasionally make spectacles of their secrets by overtly performing them on site, but jealously guarding the content of their recitations, even from one another. The spectacle publicly proclaims their unique expertise and professional status, and assures patrons that sites are protected and buildings guaranteed. Masons effectively make and remake Djenné’s built environment safe for habitation. Secret words and the significance of ritualized actions are gradually taught to family members or to trusted apprentices who demonstrate unwavering commitment to the trade. In ethnically diverse Djenné, masonry is commonly believed to be controlled by the Bozo, and a majority of masons from that ethnic group claim that all others are denied access. In truth, membership of the barey ton (masons’ professional association) is ethnically heterogeneous, and even includes representation from the town’s former servant class of Hourso. Building sites are nevertheless important sites of socialization where ethnic lore is recounted in everyday conversation and joking relations, especially that between Bozo masons and their Dogon labourers, are played out (Marchand 2003b). Homo-sociality defines all construction sites to varying degrees, and competing masculinities also play a central role in the negotiation and construction of identity, perceived aptitude and rank. My cross-cultural studies (Marchand 2001, 2008, 2009) demonstrate that the teaching and learning of craft knowledge exceeds trade skills and includes social values, worldviews, ethical conduct, religious practice, and sometimes an ability to harness and manipulate occult forces. These various ways of knowing are not practiced and learned as separate categories, but are amalgamated in the constitution of an ‘expertise’ that is performed both on and off the site, and that publicly connotes authority and veracity. Importantly, a mason’s performance is engaged not only with other interlocutors and fellow practitioners, but also with the material production of buildings. This will be explored in the following section where I

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consider more carefully the interface between making buildings, craftsmen and place. An apprentice-style methodology permits, and indeed coerces, anthropology to move beyond its traditional role as ‘reader’ and interpreter of culture-as-text (Geertz 1973; Ricoeur 1979), and to actively participate on-stage in the co-production of the field. This demands a more transparent accountancy of the impacts we have as outsiders and anthropologists on our field sites and the people with whom we study. It also encourages recognition that our field sites are not closed systems, but inextricably linked to the global movement of people and exchange of goods and ideas. Our interventions as anthropologists should be contextualized within a larger, historical and more complex picture of human interaction. Interpretation within an apprentice-style framework takes on an intensely intersubjective hue since we are obliged to mediate our understandings of experience within shared, and at times competitive, arenas of fellow practitioners. As a participant builder and apprentice, I was immersed in both social and professional formations. My subjugation to the hierarchy and training promoted a full spectrum of interactions with my peers and superiors ranging from cooperation to skirmishes, and elicited direct responses to my performance that ranged from reassurance to reprimands. Constant reassessment of my own activities, assumptions and aspirations from within the system bound me more intimately to the making of community, identity and the production of place.

An Anthropology of Place Making Architectural anthropology is anthropologically oriented synchronic and diachronic research on the building activities and processes of construction that produce human settlements, dwellings and other buildings, and built environments. (Amerlinck, 2001:3)

This passage from Amerlinck’s introduction to Architectural Anthropology partially conveys my approach to the study. I refrain, however, from adopting the description ‘architectural anthropology’ which seems to me on the whole limiting in its conception. Architecture is the art of designing or constructing buildings. An anthropological approach to space, place and architecture extends beyond analyses of design and construction activities and their material outcomes, and foregrounds the human actors involved. As discussed in the previous section, a comprehensive study of builders engaged in craftwork entails more than a consideration of their technical skills, since the

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act of building is socially, culturally and historically situated. A new brick minaret in San'a, though loftier and bolder than those built in the past, is popularly embraced as part of the local architectural heritage due in large part to the position taken up by its masons within the dominant discourse on ‘tradition’. An abode in Djenné is structurally guaranteed by the power of its mason’s benedictions as much as by the quality of bricks and mortar in its walls. Heidegger’s belief that ‘we do not dwell because we have built, but we build because we are dwellers’ (1977:326) offers a useful starting point. It directs our attention to human subjects and activities in deciphering the meaning of place, rather than to autonomous architectural objects of fixed significance. Eco rightly observed that architecture poses a particular challenge to semiotics ‘because most architectural objects do not communicate, but function’ (1986:56). He thus tuned his semiotic reading of built forms from the symbolic dimension to functionality. But the function of architecture is itself constantly defined and redefined by the practices of production, alteration and use; and, correspondingly, these activities are shaped and influenced by the built environment. Physical form and practice therefore modify one another in an ongoing process that defies semiology’s aim to fix meaning. Building and dwelling unfold relationally to one another in the constitution of both the physical environment and the emplaced body. In a genealogical line from Husserl onward, phenomenologists have contested the West’s historical detachment of a knowing subject from a priori, absolute space. Their philosophical enterprise revolves around suturing the historic rupture between the body and space (and time). Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty denied the existence of an ‘inner man’ separated from objectified time and space, and proclaimed rather that ‘man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself ’ (1962:xi). He grounded his phenomenology in the sensual, perceiving body. Sensations continually ‘emplace’ man in a direct and embodied relation to his environment: ‘the world which I distinguish from myself as the totality of things or of processes linked by causal relationships, I rediscover “in me” as the permanent horizon of all my cogitationes and as a dimension in relation to which I am constantly situating myself ’ (1962:xiii). Phenomenology laid the groundwork for dismantling a host of dichotomies which for centuries underpinned Euro-American thinking about the world; and the ‘event of place’, as described by Casey (1996b), has reincorporated synchronic space and diachronic time within a unified epistemological framework that starts from the human body. Phenomenology’s claim to collapse subject–object and self–other distinctions, however, assumes a universal sentient

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body and universal access to experience. It needs to be recognized that by ignoring social, cultural, gendered and individual variability, phenomenology’s model of the body is in fact one constructed by, and within, a Western philosophical discourse that describes the experience of experience of a privileged social class. Desjarlais’ studies of homeless people in American cities demonstrates that an aspiration for, and accumulation of, experience is the preserve of those who venture into the world with the luxury of knowing that they can return ‘home’: to a place removed from the kaleidoscopic flux of unknown phenomena, and one that affords a space for reflection and the weaving of experience into narratives of self. Desjarlais argues that, by contrast, many homeless shun experience because it immerses them in the menacing uncertainties of everyday of life. As a result, their own life stories are often a patchwork of spatially and temporally disconnected episodes (1994). Ethnography therefore reveals that the body is not universal or ahistorical: the ‘knowing body’ is socialized and gendered and it continues to learn, strategize and change over time. For this reason, it is imperative to locate the making of bodies, and embodied identities, in direct relation to the changing world in which they act, and which they act upon. Casey’s philosophy of place addresses this concern by establishing a productive interface between phenomenology and Bourdieu’s practice theory. Bourdieu’s application of practice theory to the built environment (1990) deliberates on how built spaces – especially those ‘structured according to the mythico-ritual oppositions’ of a culture – play a central role in the social apprenticeship of group members, leading to their incorporation of the structures of the world. He describes this dialectic relation as ‘the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world’ (1977:89). Though he claims that bodies ‘make the space within which they are enacted as much as they are made by it’ (ibid:90), practice theory does not account for ways in which individuals consciously, strategically and tactically engage with their space beyond the mere reproduction of the habitus and the structures of meaning. His theory plainly describes how space and architecture structure, but not how the lived-in-world is itself constantly restructured by embodied selves in a dynamic and changing fashion. Noting this deficit in Bourdieu’s work, Casey cites Soja’s (1996) ‘thirdspace’ (Casey 1996a) as a useful model (and bearing striking similarity to his own concept of ‘place-world’) for moving beyond the social and historical power of place, and incorporating the active experience of spatiality itself. Spatiality ‘is what Bourdieu neglects and Soja celebrates in his “real-and-imagined” journeys to Los Angeles’ (2001:687). Casey’s approach posits not only a sentient body as the

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locus of experience, but also a body that is socialized, habituated and knowing (1996a, 2002).2 Importantly, this theoretical manoeuvre opens a space for recognizing that knowledge is not confined to the concepts and logical propositions expressed in language. Knowledge necessarily extends to other domains including emotional, sensorial, spatial and somatic ways of knowing. Though these domains may be defined as faculties of knowledge ‘beyond language’, they are nevertheless learned, practiced, expressed and communicated between actors, most obviously with the body. The mason’s know-how for passing, catching and handling, judging, carving and setting bricks in coursework exemplifies this point. His skill-based knowledge is acquired and refined with the sensorimotor system, and these exercises are not conducted solely to raise walls, but they serve as sometimes consciously performed demonstrations for apprentices, fellow masons and a public audience. Building, as an embodied form of thinking and communication, contests standard divisions made between a ‘knowing mind’ and ‘useful body’, and directs anthropology to heed not only what informants say, but to take stock of what practitioners do. In sum, the receptivity of habitus is always accompanied by the activity of habitation. From my studies with masons, I contend that habitation extends beyond the active experiencing of spatiality suggested by Soja and Casey to include the active human engagement in ‘making’ spatiality and place. Geographies, landscapes, cityscapes and architecture are not only meaningfully made through our embodied encounters and interactions with them, but they are physically made and intentionally acted upon. The intersubjective processes of that physical making and alteration are conjoined with the incessant intersubjective experiencing of spatiality. The mason’s social self and his professional person are made in the processes of building, and in doing so he simultaneously (re)produces the skill-based knowledge of his trade. The making of buildings, selves and practices is not individual, but is achieved within communities of other craftspeople as well as with suppliers, patrons and members of the local public. In the cases of San'a and Djenné, both of which were declared World Heritage Cities by UNESCO, masons are also implicated in discourses about heritage and authenticity with government representatives, funding bodies and foreign advisors. The dialogic nature of making therefore liberates the potential for negotiation, resistance and subversion, best illustrated by Butler’s performance theory and its emphasis on the self-styling subject operating within the constraints of discourse (1990). Foucault’s genealogical studies of knowledge and power sharpened sociology’s focus on the relation between the subject, space and

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architecture (1977). His idea that architecture and urban planning are instrumental in the making of docile bodies was widely adopted, and panopticism became a pervasive metaphor in analysing surveillance and the gaze. But power and resistance are necessarily relational, and Foucault’s attempts to firmly locate the latter in his model of discourse were more effectively pursued by Butler. Her performance theory of gender fosters the idea that subjects are both positioned by and take up positions within discursive fields. The accommodation of response in Butler’s account of gender construction restores an important measure of agency to the subject, and, in a Marxist sense, leaves space for challenging hetero-patriarchal normativity and subversion from within. Response and resistance are crucial to any coherent account of identity construction, and this applies equally to the stylized performance of my fellow masons. A mason’s situated engagement in making entails not only the crafting of buildings, but also the crafting of self and others as embodied and emplaced subjects. By taking up positions in the spaces of overlap between competing discourses of modernity and tradition, for example, masons are able to innovate and introduce novelty to decorative vocabularies, to their use of materials and to structures, while asserting that their practices, technologies and buildings remain ‘traditional’ and representative of San'a-style minarets or Djenné-style houses. The al-Maswari family of masons I worked with in San'a, for instance, were at the forefront of a new wave of minaret-building activity in highland Yemen financed by the country’s surge in private wealth and affluence in the early 1980s. Within a decade, the al-Maswaris had established their rank among the most highly esteemed builders in south Arabia and they were securing commissions to erect free-standing minarets that far exceeded the heights of those in the historic walled city. Family members confided that before embarking on their very first project for a relatively small minaret, they carefully surveyed one of the town’s old and famous structures to understand its construction. In conversations with their public of patrons, however, the masons denied any such preparatory study and instead claimed that, as Yemeni builders, their know-how is intuitive. They did not produce drawings, nor did they use mathematical ratios to gauge the relational dimensions between the vertically-stacked components of their towers. Instead, the usta judged the proportions to be correct when they ‘filled his eye’. Confident assertions that ‘the knowledge is in his head’ were theatrically emphasized with forefingers pressed to temples, and served to reinforce commonly held beliefs that skills are innate and that the city’s building tradition is embodied by such experts. Traditional San'ani minarets are constructed from the inside out, so to speak, without external scaffolding. Materials are transported

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manually along the winding staircase to where masons lay kiln-baked bricks in beds of cement mortar while perched precariously on top of walls rising more than fifty metres in the air. This provides a popular spectacle for the regular gatherings of passers-by who watch uneasily from the streets below. The various radii of the tower are measured and checked with a nylon cord, knotted at fixed intervals and fastened to an axial steel post. The metal post is embedded in the central column, and is incrementally extended through the entire height of the tower. The central masonry column, spiral staircase and exterior circumferential wall are raised in tandem, and the structure is supported on deep masonry foundations. When queried about foundations, the master of the al-Maswari masons claimed all responsibility for calculating their size and depth. He flatly denied any need for engineers who, according to him, worked only for modern contractors without the know-how to build. In fact, the al-Maswaris periodically consulted with a family friend who was a civil engineer, and who analysed soil samples and surveyed their project sites. The al-Maswaris’ concerted efforts to centre themselves within local discourses on tradition, craft and civic identity, and within more widely circulating discourses on world heritage, has allowed them to negotiate a formidable reputation amongst a discerning public, and to play an active and financially lucrative role in reproducing San'a’s built environment. Simultaneously, they also engage with so-called ‘modern’ building practices by employing contemporary engineering expertise and imported materials such as Portland cement for their mortar and steel rods for the axial post. By manoeuvring within the space between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, the masons have surpassed the feats of earlier minaret builders by erecting loftier, but ‘traditional’, structures that soar high above the skyline of tower houses. Each of their minarets is embellished with novel arrangements of decorative brick relief that dialogue with the patterns of the historic city buildings, but that are simultaneously distinguished by the boldness and crispness of their geometric designs. By adhering to historic uses of locally produced kiln-baked brick (a–jurr) and accentuating the relief patterns with lime plaster (juss), the innovations of structure and height and the play on decorative motifs are safely negotiated within the bounds of ‘authentic’ San'ani architecture. The success of the al-Maswari family is grounded in their ability to reproduce the city’s distinctive sense of place in the minds of both local inhabitants and foreign visitors, while going beyond the structural limitations and stylistic expression of the past. Not all competent and creative craftsmen are socially positioned to introduce novel structural and stylistic solutions, even if their ideas meet functional and aesthetic requirements. In order for a novel

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improvisation to be recognized as an innovation, and not merely categorized as anomaly, it must be accepted and accommodated within the repertoire of practices by one’s peers and public. Typically, the successful accommodation of a novel practice is hinged on the mason’s rank and status as a craftsman. In Djenné, for example, a mason’s authority is made and lost in his interactions and negotiations with fellow tradesmen and a wider public (see Marchand 2009). Sanctioned architectural innovations in Djenné are almost exclusively those attributed to senior masters of the trade (barey amir), and sometimes only posthumously. Some clients also request changes and new materials for their houses that conflict with their mason’s better judgement. Growing demands to render mud-brick houses with clay tiles or cement plaster, for instance, correlate with client aspirations for a ‘modern look’ and a desire to minimize maintenance and replastering after the annual rains. Clay tiles and cement renderings are associated with wealth and therefore connote prestige. By contrast, masons are fully aware that tiles and cement will crack and separate from mud surfaces due to incompatible rates of expansion and contraction between the materials, resulting in serious structural damage. Wall tiles and cement are alien to the town’s historic palette of materials, and pose a challenge to local and international discourses about the town’s heritage. For this reason, some older masons refuse to employ them while other younger ones are eager to expand boundaries and demonstrate their competence in working with new finishes. Internal debates and divergent practices produce shifting camps of consensus and discord within the community of masons, and the extent to which practices are judged legitimate is inseparable from the position and identity of the practitioners involved. Notably, change is introduced and dynamically incorporated into the canon by means other than planned innovation, conflict or direct competition. Situational improvisation, accidents and mistakes also play an important role in the creative process. Again, the actor’s social and professional position is salient to the ways in which any creative improvisation and enunciation they make is interpreted and evaluated; or even possibly reassigned to another individual. On building sites in both Yemen and Mali, accidents, mistakes or deviances perpetrated by apprentices and junior masons typically result in a barrage of reprimands and possibly punishment. Atonement of one’s worthiness demands a show of long, hard work. If opportunity arises, some young builders may attempt to disown their mistakes or falsely attribute them to others in order to avoid the consequences. By contrast, however, an error may be misconstrued by fellow practitioners or patrons as a purposeful creation, and thereby accumulate professional currency and be adopted by others. Errors-cum-innovations produced by a

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low-ranking builder are often attributed to, or appropriated by, an established trade master since authorship translates into elevated status and possible financial gain. In short, the politics of making things and making selves are intermeshed in the daily practices of the worksite. So far, place-making practices have been described as the conjunction of crafting buildings and dwelling spaces and crafting selves and others. Crafting demands knowledge and experience of how things and identities are assembled and performed. This involves an understanding of existing properties in self, people and materials; recognition of potentials and limitations; a honed familiarity with available tools and technologies; an aesthetic sensibility to judge proportions and arrangements; and an ability to identify prospective opportunities for creative manipulation and innovation. Making entails creativity, not merely unwavering reproduction, and this is driven by responsive improvisation as well as a determined will to economize mental calculations and physical tasks; to explore and expand an existing repertoire; and to augment status and credibility. In all cases, making is not producing an a priori idea or image in the ‘mind’s eye’, but rather creativity centrally involves the physical processes of making itself. The final product, as an idea, unfolds in these processes, whereby the making subject is merged with the object in a hands-on interaction. The mason’s skilled practices are effectively in dialogue with the changing form and properties of the object, and as the object takes shape, it modifies the maker’s actions upon it. The physical object becomes an extension of the craftsman’s evolving idea, and, in the process, his craft knowledge is modified, challenged and updated with information derived from his sensory apparatus. This dialogic process of making architecture likewise applies to the making of human agents. In forming the identities and practices of his apprentice and labourers, the mason is also being formed by them. His repetitive interaction with subordinates, for instance, makes him into a mentor, with the duty, responsibility and authority that the position entails, thereby altering his professional and social performance in the world. Craft and construction work is a site of production and reproduction of individuals capable of imbuing single buildings and entire towns with social value and cultural meaning that is shared, contested, negotiated and updated within the practices and discourses of wider communities of inhabitants, visitors and possibly outside agents. Engagement in ‘making’ produces physical entities, locations, and subjects; and the engagement of subjects with, and in, the former ultimately results in ‘place-making’ – embodied subjects with a sense of proprietorship and place.

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A Way Forward: Communication and the Act of Making The previous section discussed the three ‘P’s at the core of a placemaking theory: Phenomenology directs us to the relation of the sensual body and place; Practice theory elicits a better understanding of the relation between embodiment and the making of place; and Performance theory enables an exploration of resistance, subversion and change within discourses of identity, practice and architecture among masons. The combination promotes a rethinking within, and between, the disciplines of anthropology, cultural geography, architecture and archaeology about the built environment as a human-directed process; a way of attending to the world, rather than a static object or the end-product of a set of activities. Place making – implying the joint production of locations, practices and identities – was shown to occur within communities of interlocutors and practitioners. Communication among masons and craftspeople is constituted principally through the performance and negotiation of skill-based knowledge; gendered, ethnic and religious identities, and world-views. These discourses transpire to considerable degrees outside the realm of spoken language. If we are to take the intersubjective activity of place making seriously, then there is a pressing need to advance a more satisfactory theory of communication that describes the performance and acquisition of skill and practice, and that is inclusive of non-propositional forms of knowledge. In the remaining pages, I propose a way forward that moves the study of human exchange and learning beyond the ‘language faculty’, and repositions it within a more general theory of cognition.3 Practice theory determines that we learn by example as active participants in our daily living environments. Therefore acquiring comportment, gesture, and skilled activity is like language learning in that ‘understanding’ is necessarily prior to ‘generating’ either techniques of the body or speaking. I adopt this as my starting point in exploring the processes that give rise to ‘embodied understanding’, and subsequently to the physical capacity for mimicry and creative production. In defining the parameters of my investigation, it is essential to declare that I subscribe to a ‘representational theory of mind’ (RTM). RTM claims that we can have no direct knowledge of objects or phenomena in the world, but rather information received as stimuli from our total environment is cognitively mediated via our perceptual faculties and meaningfully represented as mind-internal concepts. Therefore the concepts we possess are essentially minddependent and formulated in what Fodor refers to as the ‘language of thought’ (LOT) (1981). Straightforwardly, LOT is not a language of words, images or gestures, but one of concepts that are comprised

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of informational content and that combine syntactically ‘in thinking’ to generate context-dependent interpretation and meaning (Cann et al. 2005). Skilled practice is learned and communicated with the body. Interpretation and deriving ‘understanding’ of skilled practice and movement is therefore not achieved by either entertaining imagistic representations in the so-called ‘mind’s eye’ of what has been seen or formulating linguistic propositions that describe what has been done. Understanding, instead, is arrived at from the body, processed in the motor domain of cognition and expressed as motor-based (or somatic) representations. In the way that the hearer of a speaker’s utterance has access to some signal manifest as sound waves, an observer has access to the visual stimuli supplied by the physical movement and activity of another subject. Visually processed information is available to motor cognition for the construction of motor-based representations, requiring immediate and efficient sharing of information across domains. Like other mind-internal representations, it should be expected that motor-based representations of a skilled practice or movement are formulated in the language of thought (LOT) and are constituted by structural combinations of the motor-based concepts corresponding to individual actions that make up a movement. But how exactly does an observer construct motor-based representations of the actions and movements that they see? Dynamic Syntax and Parsing Skilled Practice Following the principles of language processing outlined by Dynamic Syntax theory (DS),4 a hearer constructs a logical proposition (or fully specified mental representation) of an utterance by executing an automatic parse routine. Parsing involves an online mapping of received words (as signals) onto corresponding representations in a strictly incremental, word-by-word and time-linear fashion. These constituent representations are initially ‘underspecified’ in terms of semantic content and introduce syntactic requirements to combine with other sorts of lexical information. The parsing task therefore entails the progressive enrichment of the semantic content and update of the syntactic requirements, all relative to some context, in order to arrive at a complete and fully specified logical proposition that closely matches that entertained by the speaker. This is what makes successful communication between two or more parties possible. Notably, DS challenges the long-standing division in linguistics drawn between semantic and syntactic processing by convincingly demonstrating across a range of languages how meaning and compositionality unfold together in the parsing exercise. In the words of the theory’s authors, ‘underspecification and the dynamics of

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update constitute the heart of natural-language structure and are a direct reflection of language processing’ (Cann et al. 2005:376). The theory thus presents a parsing-directed grammar formalism whereby grammaticality is confirmed not by an encapsulated, hard-wired set of syntactic rules (i.e., Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar), but rather by the hearer’s cognitive achievement in constructing a fully specified interpretation. Like language processing, a demonstration of skilled practice or movement is disarticulated by the observer’s parse task into component actions, gestures and postures, and these are incrementally assigned interpretation in a time-ordered manner, and thus ‘acquired’ as mental representations. Significantly, but not surprisingly, I propose that the content of a motor-based interpretation is not semantic in nature: it does not pertain to the meaning of the action, to aesthetic judgements or to symbolic connotations. Instead, a motor-based interpretation contains kinaesthetic and proprioceptive information directly related to the physical character and coordinated bodily mechanics involved in performing some action.5 More specifically, kinaesthetic information represents the corporeal sensation associated with that action: the feeling of muscular extension and contraction; the feeling of muscular relaxation and tension; the feeling of flow, disruption and vibration in action, and the feeling of applying force or exerting pressure. The proprioceptive content represents an embodied sense of balance and an interior sense of the relational positioning of limbs, digits and other body parts to each other. Motor-based interpretation and understanding centrally involves simulation of the associated kinaesthetic and proprioceptive content and the structural properties of combination. As described more fully elsewhere,6 motor mirror neurons would seemingly play a central role in these processes. In brief, motor mirror neurons are located in the Broca’s area of the brain and fire when both observing and executing grasps and other movements. In parsing a constituent action in a movement, the initial motor-based interpretation assigned to the processed signal via the motor mirror neuron system will be underspecified, but underspecification in the motor domain is defined in terms of kinaesthetic and proprioceptive content. Enrichment occurs via the parse process employed in a time-ordered manner over the physical movement and relative to some context. Following RTM, context is necessarily representational and, at any point, context will be minimally defined by the motor-based representations constructed up to, and including, the current one under construction in the parse task; plus representations derived from the physical context where the activity is being performed (i.e., the work site), existing knowledge about the activity itself and its

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objective(s), and potentially relevant information possessed about the position, rank and ability of one’s fellow practitioner(s). More radically, I am also suggesting that the constituent actions of a movement, like words in an utterance, are structurally underspecified. In other words, representations corresponding to parsed actions introduce structural requirements regarding what other sorts of motor representations they may combine with. These constituent representations introduce requirements regarding the coordinated arrangements of simultaneously entertained motor representations they may enter into; plus requirements concerning the sorts of actions with which they need to combine in order to arrive at a fully specified representation of fluid and completed movement. In sum, underspecification drives the process of kinaesthetic and structural update relative to some context to arrive at a fully specified representation of a movement. Importantly, in the case of motorbased representations as differentiated from linguistic propositional ones, I propose that update may not proceed in a strictly time-linear, action-by-action sequence, but rather more than one, and possibly several updates are likely to be processed simultaneously in a timeordered manner, reflecting the complex and three-dimensional nature of movement that regularly involves the instantiation of numerous coordinated actions executed by various parts of the body at the same time. Generating Practice Dynamic Syntax importantly explains how parity between speaker and hearer is cognitively achieved. In successful communication, the individual exercises of parsing and generating an utterance simultaneously construct the very same architecture of mental representations. The parsing model describes both the hearer’s exercise of interpreting and the speaker’s job of producing an utterance. As already described for the hearer, parsing entails the construction of a semantic interpretation of a string of words built up in an incremental, word-by-word, time-linear sequence. In the case of production, the speaker generates an utterance using the very same cognitive strategies in constructing a fully-specified logical proposition, with the key difference being that the speaker already has an idea in mind of what they want to say. The speaker’s initial idea, expressed as a (possibly partial) representation in the language of thought, serves as a check against which all selected words to express the idea are matched (Purver and Kempson 2004:87). The process imposes no prescriptions concerning choice of specific words. The only criteria is that each successive lexical item selected (i.e., retrieved either from the mental lexicon or from context provided by the dialogue to that point)

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must progress enrichment and update of the representation under construction, and ultimately produce a string that can be parsed by a hearer.7 Because hearer and speaker are individually employing the same set of cognitive strategies in progressively building a propositional formula, it is then possible for the hearer to perform a so-called ‘abduction’ step, and jump to the conclusion of how the utterance will finish, thereby completing their own fully specified representation and possibly intervening to finish the actual utterance. In turn, the speaker swaps roles and becomes a parser of the utterance completed by the hitherto hearer. Role swapping is perpetuated throughout dialogue in this manner. This cognitive model of ‘shared utterance’ is especially relevant to developing a better understanding of skill-based teaching– learning, whereby physical tasks are taken up in a coordinated, but not predetermined, manner by two or more participating practitioners. In generating a skilled practice or movement, representations corresponding to constituent actions are combined in motor cognition to generate mimicry or improvisations of motor-based knowledge. The generation of fluid practice demands immersion in, or prior experience of, the same or a comparable activity. As per any domain of knowledge, the finesse of a motor-based understanding and the ability to reproduce a practice are dependant on one’s individual engagement and experience. Skilled practice and movement develop in bodily practice: in repetition and rehearsal and even in ‘simulated motor imagery’ of the exercise whereby one ‘feels’ one’s body engaged in the action without actually generating it. Simulation is therefore a motor-based ‘imagining’ of action which, like inner dialogue, can serve to re-form and hone performance (Yue and Cole 1992). This is especially salient in sport and dance, as well as craft production, but extends equally to everyday activities. In participant-learning environments like building sites, an apprentice’s online motor-based parse of his mentor’s example may yield simulated imagery of the activity as he watches; or in some cases it may invoke an actualized response. The latter will typically be mimetic in that the apprentice attempts to emulate the physical procedures of a task that he has just parsed, but it likewise involves improvisation since the pupil must creatively fill in what he’s missed. His actions, in turn, establish new information in context that may provoke response from the mentor in the form of verbalized praise or reprimand, or further demonstration. As a Yemeni mason watches his apprentice’s improvised efforts at carving the angular geometries of a decorative brick with an adze, the mason’s simultaneous parse of the activity invokes simulated motor imagery corresponding to the young man’s actions and movements whereby his own experienced

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body somatically and proprioceptively ‘feels’ them to be correct or not. As an act of communication, the mason’s ensuing demonstration is intended to update the motor representations entertained by his apprentice with respect to that activity, and he may emphasize particular component actions or postures of the exercise using verbal or physical deixis. Like dialogue in language, parsing and generating an activity construct the same cognitive architecture. The motor-based representation of an activity is constructed incrementally in a timeordered manner as the physical performance unfolds, whereby each constituent action, movement and posture of the activity is mapped to a representation. As discussed, it is the underspecified nature of constituent representations and the action of update that drive both the parse and the generation to arrive at a fully specified representation of an activity. Because the incremental construction is individually shared by both observer and performer, it is possible for the observer to make the so-called ‘abduction’ step to complete their representation of the activity before it is physically concluded, and to potentially intervene and take over the exercise. Craftspeople who work together over a lengthy period of time, like the al-Maswari family in San'a, are particularly adept at fluidly coordinating their shared performance. As they moved in counter-clockwise rotation around the narrow top of the minaret wall laying bricks, the al-Maswari brothers continually took up and completed one another’s tasks in a silent exchange of practice.

Concluding Thoughts Pivotal to my argument is the claim that the mind-internal representations we possess are not restricted to those that can be articulated in language or to those forming the constituent basis of propositional thought. Rather, I have insisted throughout this chapter that representations are generated by other cognitive domains that process the various stimuli in our environment, and these representations are the constituents of non-linguistic ways of knowing, thinking and intelligent expression. As a minimum, therefore, knowing includes thinking with and articulating nonpropositional sounds (i.e., music), visual imagery (i.e., drawing and painting), and action and movement (i.e., skilled craft practices, dance, or sport). To repeat, the representations that constitute both the builder’s interpretation of an observed activity and his generation of a mimetic

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or improvised response are instantiated in his motor domain. But like understanding and producing an utterance, motor-based interpretation and generation of practice are informed by a broader context of relevant information supplied by cognitive domains processing other signals from the overall learning environment. On sites in San'a and Djenné, for instance, the extra-motor information cognitively employed by a mason in parsing and progressively updating his understanding of another builder’s actions and in generating his own practice includes representations corresponding to the properties of the tools to hand and building materials; to the physical positioning and distance between workmen; and to calculations of risk in relation to the exercise. Importantly, relevant information also includes representations corresponding to the comportment, dispositions and views expressed by his co-practitioners. Making, therefore, is not an individual practice detached from the physical and social environment, but is firmly embedded in interaction with things and communication with people. Embodied cognition and communication among masons is what allows for the exchange and creative reproduction of skill and practice; and in so doing, the transformation of professional identities and the renewal of place. The acquisition of physical skills, like ideas, is integral to our evolving identities as members within communities of practice; and loss of them, like the loss of any knowledge, alters one’s sense of self. By formulating a theory of practice and place making within a framework that takes account of communication and cognition, we may ultimately arrive at a better understanding of how practice is socially and neurologically interpreted and enacted by individuals, and importantly how it may be contested and altered within an ongoing dialogue from the body.

Acknowledgements The fieldwork components in Northern Nigeria, Yemen and Mali were made possible by grants from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the British Academy. The comparative component of my research with craftspeople was generously funded by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Fellowship (RES-000-27-0159). I thank all the craftspeople I have worked with over the past years for their kind support and generosity in sharing their knowledge.

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Notes 1. ������������������������������������������������������������������������ See Coy’s edited volume (1989) for focussed discussions on the study of apprenticeship learning, and on the use of apprentice-style methods in anthropological fieldwork. 2. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� See B. Hooper (2001) for a comprehensive feminist critique of Casey’s approach to place. 3. �������������������������������������������������������������������������� See Marchand (2007) for a more developed explanation of how a combination of Dynamic Syntax theory and Motor Neuron theory can account for nonpropositional, skill-based communication. 4. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� For a complete account of Dynamic Syntax theory, see Kempson, Meyer-Viol and Gabbay 2001; and Cann, Kempson and Marten 2005. 5. ���������������������� Kinaesthetic: (Greek) kineo ‘move’ + aisthesis (Greek) ‘sensation’; proprioceptive: (Latin) proprius ‘own’ + receptive. 6. Marchand 2007. See also Downey 2007; Jeannerod 1994; Arbib and Rizzolatti 1997. 7. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For a more detailed discussion of language production, see Cann et al. 2005: 388– 97.

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Marchand, T.H.J. (2001), Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen (London: Curzon). (2003a), ‘A Possible Explanation for the Lack of Explanation; or “Why the Master Builder Can’t Explain What he Knows”: Introducing Informational Atomism against a “Definitional” Definition of Concepts’, in Negotiating Local Knowledge: Power and Identity in Development, eds J. Pottier, A. Bicker and P. Sillitoe (London: Pluto). (2003b), ��������������������������������������������������� ‘Bozo–Dogon Bantering: Policing Access to Djenné’s Building Trade with Jests and Spells’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 14(2): 47–63. ���������������������������������������������������������� (2003c), ‘Process Over Product: inverting the emphasis in sustainable conservation’, in Managing Change: Sustainable Approaches to the Conservation of the Built Environment, eds J. M. Teutonico and F. Matero (Los Angeles: The Getty Institute). (2007), ‘Crafting Knowledge: The Role of Parsing and Production in the Communication of Skill-based Knowledge among Masons’, in Ways of Knowing, ed. M. Harris (Oxford: Berghahn). (2008), ‘Muscles, Morals and Mind: Craft Apprenticeship and the Formation of Person’, British Journal of Educational Studies 56(3): 245–71. (2009), The Masons of Djenné (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge). Oliver, P. (ed.) (1976), Shelter and Society (London: Barrie and Jenkins). Parker P. and Richards, C. (1994), Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space (London: Routledge). Pellow, D. (2002), Landlords and Lodgers: Socio-Spatial Organisation in an Accra Community (London: Praeger). Purver, M. and Kempson, R. (2004), ‘Incrementality, Alignment and Shared Utterances’, in Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Catalogue) 2004, Barcelona: 85–92. Ricouer, P. (1979), ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as Text’, in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, eds P. Rabinow and W. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press). Rudofsky, B. (1964), Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art). Singerman, D. (1995), Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Soja, E.W. (1996), Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell). Yue, G. and Cole, K. (1992), ‘Strength Increase from the Motor Programme: Comparison of Training with Maximal Voluntary and Imagined Muscle Contractions’, Journal of Neurophysiology 67:1114–23.

Chapter 8

‘Live in Fragments no Longer’: Social Dance and the Individual Imagination in Human Nature Jonathan Skinner

Figure 8.1. ‘In Guantanamo Bay’ Source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Camp_x-ray_detainees.jpg. Photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy

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Figure 8.2. ‘Same Sex Dancing World Championships, Nijmegen 2007’ Live in fragments no longer. Only connect … E. M. Forster, Howards End Imagination is a faculty so wild in its own nature, that it must be accustomed to the discipline of reason before it can become tame and manageable enough for a correct production. A. Gerard, An Essay on Genius

L’imagination au Pouvoir (‘Empower the Imagination’) As a social science, it is characteristic of anthropology to examine the particularities of human cultures through detailed and nuanced ethnographic investigation (Crapanzano 2004; Abu Lughod 1993). In so doing, a choice is made by anthropologists as to whether or not to deploy etic distinctions between culture and nature and between human and animal – the former with the capacity ‘to produce’ in order to live (Godelier 1986) – or to work from emic constructions of like divisions and the ways in which people locally live by them, or to challenge and contest all such divisions as anthropocentric (Bateson 1999; Ingold 2000; Milton 2002). In this chapter my intention is to explore the human imagination, its power, capacities and liabilities as a species-specific characteristic of human nature. The human imagination, I shall suggest, is key to our unique being and our unique

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becoming; it is with the imagination that we go beyond ourselves. I shall make my argument through an examination of the ‘social dance’ world where people imagine, connect and communicate (as against the more choreographed ‘competitive dance’ world). As human actors we use our senses to control ourselves. We also stretch our senses when we flex a muscle, hold a conversation, sing in the shower, dance by ourselves or with others. Murray Melbin (1972:37), in his quest for a grammar of human behavior, Alone and With Others, suggests that human beings dislike ‘sensory homogeneity’, meaning that we are constantly seeking out different sensations, making new connections and communications. This would certainly accord with Stephen Lyng’s (1990) ethnography of sky-divers seeking sensation in generally risk-averse milieux, or with Edward Bruner’s (1991) more general account of the tourist’s quest for new environments under different skies (see also van den Berge 1994). And yet, for all these different sensations sought – the fragmentation and fracture deliberately introduced into our lives to varying degrees in our human nature, in our ‘human going-ons’ - there is an internal ordering and composition taking place, a making sense of our being-in-the-world. Our individual perceptions are all being carefully ordered, structured, screened and formatted. Here lies the work of the imagination, the mechanism, as Kant described it (1970), by which the chaos of sensation is ordered (a synthesizing faculty, productive or reproductive of images, taking us from intuition to understanding [ibid.:112, 144– 45]). This mediating faculty is, for Kant, ‘one of the fundamental faculties of the human soul’ (ibid.:146). Our imagination serves as the bridge over the gap between mere sensation and intelligible thought, so the contemporary philosopher Mary Warnock (1976: 34) clarifies. In essence, ‘imagination connects’ (Kant 1970:146). Before developing further an anthropology of the imagination by way of ethnography, I elaborate somewhat on the philosophy of the imagination, Kantian and later. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (1970:141) notes the following human structure: There are three subjective sources of knowledge upon which rests the possibility of experience in general and of knowledge of its objects – sense, imagination, and apperception. Each of these can be viewed as empirical, namely, in its application to given appearances. But all of them are likewise a priori elements or foundations which make this employment itself possible. Sense represents appearances empirically in perception, imagination in association (and reproduction), apperception in the empirical consciousness of the identity of the reproduced representation with the appearances whereby they were given, that is, in recognition. (original emphasis)

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Regarding the workings of the imagination, Kant holds that the imagination (Einbildungskraft, Aristotle’s phantasie) works either in an ‘empirical’ or a ‘transcendental’ fashion. The imagination – ‘a power of making images, pictures or representations of things’ (Warnock 1976:26) – can be used to distinguish the real from the imaginary such as the lived experience from the dream.1 It can also refer to the perceptual understanding of the world as a universal capacity of the human being (transcendental) related to Nietzsche’s will-topower project, and to Sartre’s existential projection of transcendental freedom granted by the imaginative individual (see Rapport 1997:31– 35 for further elaboration). We have, in all cases, the imagination working as an ‘active faculty’ (Kant 1970:144), one which synthesizes perceptions, reproducing representations by association. So too: Since the imagination is itself a faculty of a priori synthesis, we assign to it the title, productive imagination. In so far as it aims at nothing but necessary unity in the synthesis of what is manifold in appearance, it may be entitled the transcendental function of imagination. (Ibid.:146–47)

Kant’s exposition on the imagination as human capacity departs from previous stances such as Hume’s (1969) which contended that imagination is a faint copy, a weak form of mental representation when compared with representations raised through the memory. Kant’s is consistent, though, with previous hypothesizing concerning the imagination as the integrating faculty, one which gives continuity to the existence of impressions, ordering or ‘narrating’ to use the language of contemporary psychologist Jerome Bruner (1986; see also Ricoeur 1988). Alongside its shaping and ordering nature and function, then, the imagination – this manifold faculty – is also associated with freedom, creativity and interpretation (transcendental). This becomes fundamental to the work of the Existentialists. In his The Psychology of Imagination, for instance, Sartre (1966) makes two key contributions to the theorizing of the imagination. First is the point that imagination is intimately connected with personal freedom, for to imagine is to escape from the world, to withdraw: ‘imagination … it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom’ (1966:270). Moreover, ‘it is because he is transcendentally free that man can imagine’ (ibid.:271). Second, Sartre’s act of imagination is ‘an incantation’ (ibid.:177) whereby its objects are ghostly unreal, like silhouettes drawn by children: it gives ‘implicit meaning [to] the real’, but by way of negation. To qualify this, he continues (ibid.:273): ‘That which is denied must be imagined’; negation attaches to imaginative acts

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insofar as to posit the imaginary is to collapse the world of the real. The imagined, in other words, is not real. Two problems raised by this existentialist take on the capacity of the imagination, one which blurs Kant’s distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, are the extent to which the imagination is free from causal explanation and the real and hence free from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and others whose attention to perception is at the expense of imagination. We should also be wary of Wittgenstein’s point that perceptions are relational and subject to mistake and change – perceptions that include our imaginations. To also be judicial in our assessment, we should note that critics such as Kaufman (1947:374) would critique Sartre from an opposite position: that phenomenology is intuitive and therefore imaginative; that ‘the adventure of the imagination’ is one of the tools by which we devise new meanings and possibilities and thereby transcend our world. It is therefore not necessarily the case that to be imaginative comes at the expense of being realistic. That we have an imagination is not to be denied. All human beings imagine; just as we all connect cause and effect, and all plan and plot our futures. Indeed, such capacities are not even species specific as Bryne (1995) argues in The Thinking Ape: they have evolved and can be demonstrated in primates. In this chapter, I seek to ascertain some of the workings of an empirical and transcendental imagination as they pertain to the realization of our human potential. I do so through dance ethnography, and an account of the realization of dance lifeprojects. Dance, I will argue, is a prime example of how people come together, connect and communicate, establish and gain sociality through making use of what Kant referred to as the awesome ‘fictionmaking power’ of the imagination. Social dance can be a particularly integrative way of connecting with others through creative means and thereby obviating a sense of loneliness or aloneness, that profound modern alienation which Camus described as estrangement from self and other. First I will explore the bio-sensorial nature of dance before going on to consider the socio-cultural.

The Bio-Sensorial Nature of Dance ‘To Dance is human’, declares Judith Hanna (1987). Dance is therapeutic and cathartic for both the individual and the group (cf. Spencer 1985, Gotfrit 1988, Laderman and Roseman 1996). Dance has instrumental purpose as well as providing aesthetic pleasure. Hanna elaborates (1987: 63):

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~~ Dance is about non-verbal communication, communication which possibly predates verbal communication. ~~ Dance teaches rhythm, metaphorisation, the ability to make fine distinctions and, crucially, the ability to work through a symbolical frame. ~~ In dance we come together empowered for: ‘dance provokes a sense of personal and group power for performer and observer alike’ (ibid:128). This is distinct from the ‘virtual powers’ of dance identified by Langer (1953), virtual in the sense that the portrayals of emotion and feeling are gestural and imagined.

An anthropology of dance has come to see in dance more about the body, and ways of understanding and relating with that body, than it has Kantian notions of an empirical or transcendental imagination. For Johnson (2004:135–41), then, in a study of club culture, dancing is often about abandonment: physical, as the body is loosened and changes habitual movements; emotional, as people become far more expressive of how they are feeling; and social, as the informality of clubs facilitates new encounters. In social dance one can play, fantasize, come together, and create new feelings of sociality. Sheets-Johnstone (1966) goes so far as to suggest that both thinking and learning come about through movement; that movement is the mother of all cognition. Movement in the context of social dancing involves a fine-grained connection with one’s partner. Writing about dancing the tinikling stick dance in Bali, Sally Ness (1992:135–36) gives us a full and detailed exposition on this connection; in particular, the proprioceptive feelings of pressure, the awareness of movement and resistance: To dance the steps of the tinikling – at least the single-step pattern that I was given to learn on the hotel’s stage that rainy night – I needed knowledge about more than how to conduct myself inside some reachable imaginary microcosm. There was a partner to deal with less than an arm’s length away, a man confronting me face to face, holding both my hands, a body whose steps, grasp, smile, and gaze, were to be considered at my every step. The knowledge embodied in my dance was in part a knowledge of his dancing, his buoyancy, his timing, his agility, his finely measured touch. It was a knowledge that became embodied through my hands, which ‘listened’ avidly to his in order to move with him, reading the energy patterning manifest there and following it, absorbing it, reflecting it as movement dispersed throughout myself, up my forearms and down into my feet, seeping from the distal ends towards my center of gravity. We had only a very small area of contact. We were not even joined with our whole hands, our thumbs were not intertwining, only our palms and fingers loosely rested inside one another, making this monitoring a

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fragile activity, requiring a sustained, though not powerful and not critical, attention. Yet, enhanced by visual readings of the movement, the hold was more than enough of a lifeline to produce a rhythmic merger in our steps. It was evident we both knew in our dancing how to read a partner’s grasp for these sorts of messages. We went on together matching each other’s stride and spring and hold under more and more stressful conditions when the dance progressed to faster and faster tempos. Innumerable minute adjustments of pressure, speed, and direction, were registered, ‘heard’ and understood performatively through the linking of our hands. The knowledge embodied was of both a general and a very individual sort.

Also writing about dance, specifically lesbian and gay dance-floor practice, Jonathan Bollen (2001:288) talks about the erotic submission to disco’s disciplinary beat: the performing body ‘submits’ itself both to the music and to other performing – and perhaps watching – bodies. Moreover, in his study of capoeira, the Brazilian dance and martial art, Downey (2005b:61, 65) notes how apprenticeship in the ‘sport’ changed both dancers’ external physiques (muscle growth and elasticity for example) and their internal understanding of equilibrium (such as the motor-sensory perceptual system – the neural pathways learned in skill acquisition): The two capoeiristas weave around each other patiently on the floor, cartwheeling, crab-walking, spinning, and sliding close to the ground … A kind of conversation develops between the two, simultaneously cooperative and competitive, aesthetic and agonistic. (Downey 2005a:2) As the cyclical weight shifting became a familiar pattern to ‘me’, ‘my arm’ also became more sensitive to this kinetic chaining that had to occur for complete integration of the phrase. ‘I’ began to close my eyes and let ‘my arm’ perform. Over the weeks that passed, habit set in. The posture of everyday life disintegrated as the new patterning took over. (Ness 1992:5)

In Downey, Ness, and others, dancing is a cooperative connection, a conversation with patterns and rhythms. It is about biology and the body. Bollen (2001:291) cites the work of philosophers Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Ruth Diprose (1994), the former suggesting that our own body emerges through reciprocal relations with others, and the latter suggesting that by performing/dancing with other bodies an ‘indistinction’ develops, a blurring of perceptual boundaries. Here is what I would refer to as the evolution of a connection. Diprose (ibid.:13) refers to this kinaesthetic occurrence as ‘the transfer of movements and gestures between dispersed bodies’, all taking place within a system of ‘syncretic sociablility’. This form – or sense – of sociability is considered, for some, an instance of ‘collective effervescence’,

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found out there, immediate, tangible, biological – a form of sociability associated with sacrality (Alexander 1990:189).2 To return to Bollen (2001:292, 298), bodies learning and practicing dance skills with others come to constitute ‘interworlds’ ‘falling into step’ with each other, ‘feeding off ’ each other, both imitating the other and generating an other. In dancing with others, we might declare, in dancing like others and in dancing around others and thereby accommodating them, a ‘becoming-other’ quality emerges. This is more physical and imitative than imaginative. Again, to hear from Diprose (1994:15), due to its openness – as well as the closedness of its coupling – dancing increases our tolerance to others. By this, social dance becomes a morality tale for participants and audience. For Bollen (2001:300), the result is that ‘we become … less like ourselves and more like each other’.3 Certainly, I would argue, the attraction – and addiction – to social dance comes in part from this feeling of indistinction from this connection and intertwining with the other: from a therapeutic blurred perception of bodies’ boundaries. Such reactions approximate what Durkheim once (1995:218) posited as ‘collective effervescence’ (cf. Fields 1995:xli): when activity in and as a group causes us to feel ourselves transformed, transcendental, grander, transported beyond ourselves by the collective and by a force experienced and perceived as external to us. But this can also be balanced by a more individualistic ethnography and approach to social dance, one of Kantian imagination as capacity.

Human Nature, Indistinction and Kinaesthetic Sociability Grace and I (Jonathan) have a chemistry on the dance floor. We perform for ourselves, for each other, and for the audience. We connect and we communicate well and fast with each other. We both know how the other dances, and we like that as well as each other. We can be close and we can touching but far apart, arms extended, but we are always connecting with each other; the point of connection can be a hand upon a shoulder, a left hand lead, a touch upon a knee, cupped fingertips pushing and pulling, a turn of the head or a glance with the eyes. We lead each other on, and together we are more than each separate aspect. When I spin her, I can spin too at the same time as moving towards her to pick her up for a cross-body lead. The momentum gained is not lost as we rotate on to the next move. I can play with her and she will play back: I can fake a cross-body lead and hold her before pulling her across me, and in the hold she will roll her

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body and flick her feet as though doing tango. She might even invite me into a body roll, tracing torsos as we join and unjoin – but always connecting. Apart, we might try and outdo each other, shining, imitating and exaggerating each other’s body movements from the toes to the head, joking with each other, romancing and seducing. By looking and watching each other, by spinning as one body on the floor, Grace and I dance with confidence in each other and we dance out of ourselves. We feel that we know where we are with each other at all times. Her body fits mine. It slots into my right side. Dancing bachata, only hers feels right so close up. Though it is similar to the sexual union, there is no sex or sexuality here. It is purely about dancing. Between us, we create that body interworld. Such a connection through dance does not come about without work as well as some correspondence and attraction between each other. We are both experienced dancers. Independently, we both know the dance basics – the beat of the music and how it translates into the steps of our feet and the movement of our bodies. This dancing is a cultural practice. It has an history to it. But the connection between us is a natural one, too, transcendent in the Kantian sense as we both imagine that we understand each other and our place alongside each other. We resonate unlike others on our accustomed dance floors in Belfast, Northern Ireland. With Samura, I spin and she side steps her ‘basic’ so that I collide with her. With Janice, we communicate through the language of salsa but there are inhibitions. With Linna, we run through the movements and the turn patterns but that is all there is to it. With Unsala, there simply is no tension or connection. With Heaven, I feel uncomfortable in her eyes and in her hands: whenever I sink into the dance and feel a connection she destroys it by making a face at me, letting me know that I have this blank expression on my face, my mouth drooping open and that I must be bored. With these others I share only the empirical imagination to make connection and pattern. With Grace, we simply dance in the moment together. * Here, above, is the ambiguous sociality of social dance, a varied connection between individuals by way of an unscripted choreography in pairs: all according to a loose rhythm and mutually accepted guidelines regarding body posture and movement. Here are dancers feeding off each other, myself and Grace, Grace and myself, and others connecting and accommodating each other. This is the ‘psychophysicality of human experience’ described by Marion (2006:8–9): a deep muscular bonding (McNeill 1995) through a sustained negotiation with others. This bonding through kinesthetic experience is powerful and addictive. It only happens with partners

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who return feelings and converse in the dance. Those addicted dance ten social dances for that one effervescent dance. Marion (2005) terms it ‘activity-based culture’. Returning to Bollen (2001:301–5), we hear that dancing is a physical capacity often relating to the group imaginary. For him, it is an exhibition of enculturation rather than a case of autonomous agency. Writing about queer kinesthesia, Bollen poses the following question: Yet what if a body’s capacity for action were considered not as evidence of an autonomous, independent agency, but as evidence of a body’s enculturation, its training and participation in socialized and cultured ways of moving? (Ibid.:301)

For Bollen, the body is inscribed and body movement is prescribed by dominant subject positions. ‘Queer’ social dancing is realized between the imaginary morphologies of the ‘feminized hag’ and the ‘phallicized dyke’ (ibid.:302). In Bollen’s fieldwork experience, dance-floor dancings are enactments: performances of gender inflected by collective imagination and stereotype. Bollen proposes a morphological imperative to this sociality, an imagined sociality to my mind, one corroborated through the dance connection. For ‘Karen’, then, the ‘cool’ way to dance as a dyke is with a toughness accrued around weight: In contrast to the lightness of ‘girly’, the kinesthetic of ‘cool’ is less ‘up and out’ and more ‘down and into it.’ It is distinguished by a restrained range of arm gestures, either held contracted low or swung around the torso, and by a torso ‘hunkering-down,’ or tilting, twisting, and shifting, but without the isolation of lateral pelvic action. It has a low sense of gravity, weight held back on the heels, and support shifts, when they occur, tend to be heavy. (Bollen 2001:306)

This means that when a woman ‘comes out’, her dancing style might change significantly to mark her identification as a lesbian: Emma: ‘I just know that my dancing is not the same now as it used to be … I danced like a drag queen and I was comfortable doing that when I was straight … But I would never do that now’. (Ibid.:306–7)

Emma now polices her dancing, leaving the ‘girly’ moves for others. Equally, male-to-male social dancing might also consist of selfconscious movements in relation to each other and to impressions imagined to be made to the other. Ricardo, below, recounts how his relationship with his partner affected his social dancing:

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I noticed this year at this party I danced differently to how I have previously and I think it’s a comment I got from a boy I was going out with … I’ve never actually danced with him [but] he made a comment saying he didn’t like blokes who danced in a girly sort of way and waved their arms around a lot. Now, I don’t think I dance in a girly sort of way but I was more conscious of where my arms were in relation to my body and instead of putting them up in the air, I put them up in front and out to the side sort of thing which was really weird, and I concentrated a bit more on moving my chest and my upper body separately to my lower body. (Ibid.:308)

And yet, my dancing salsa with Grace, and Ness’s example of her learning the tinikling dance and the distinct proprioceptive feelings which she had, do suggest that for all these conventions one’s dancing is still very much one’s own. Furthermore, I would maintain that individuals’ dancing is imaginative in its connection with others. For all the enculturation of the dance, for all the melding of bodies, and for all the interconnections and sociality of the dance, the meanings, feelings, interpretations and style features in social dancing can remain individualistic. The connections, fantasies, capacities and possibilities can all be imagined by the dancer at the same time as they are shared in the narrative of the social dance. * Writing about the anthropology of the body rather than dance and the imagination per se, John Blacking (1977:4) makes the point that sensory deprivation interferes with human cognition. He suggests this in the context of advocating music and dance in society: the two forms of nonverbal communication both acting as mediators between the mental and the manual (1977:20). Blacking continues, in strident vein, by setting out his Durkheimian vision for the place of music and dance and how they should be investigated by anthropologists. First, he (1977:6) writes that ‘our task, as anthropologists, [is] to experience others’ bodies through our own bodies and to learn more about some of the somatic states that we can understand but about which we know little beyond the inadequate verbal descriptions of our society.’ He then goes on (1977:8): ‘Human society is not merely like a single organism: it is a biological phenomenon, a product of the evolutionary process.’ The reader is left in little doubt, then, as to Durkheim’s legacy in Blacking: society as biological fact. However, opposed to Durkheim’s homo duplex (whereby the social and moral is set against the animal and selfish), for Blacking (1977:8), cooperation and social interaction is a ‘biologically programmed’ necessity for human organisms:

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Human beings are meant to share somatic states and … this speciesspecific characteristic is necessary for the development of their cognitive processes and capacities … Shared somatic states are consequences of the sensory and communication system of the human species which is the basic condition for social interaction. (1977:8, 10)

The chemistry that I feel with Grace is in our make-up. It is through our bodies that we understand other people, that we share states with them, that we empathize and sympathize with them. There is, in other words, a ‘human proclivity for relating with others in terms of feelingresponse’ (Blacking 1977:9), one which many deny or have blunted from an early age. It is human nature, after Blacking, for people to come together and connect in various ways and means, and to create those ways and means when necessary. I would concur with much of Blacking’s argument about our human sensibilities and proclivities to cohere and to connect with one another. I would go so far as to add that these feelings are cravings. And yet I would dispute their natural-biological basis and bias: Blacking’s theorizing of ‘society as social fact’, his conceptualization of social proclivities as biologically programmed features common to all ‘Man’. Blacking comments upon human creativity in terms of a biological– cultural continuum, but he does not develop any substantial position beyond these guidelines. Indeed, his closing remarks in his edited ASA collection on the Anthropology of the Body are simply to rehearse hoary questions about the body and society: What has become problematic for me in the last few years is the question of how much control man has over his own destiny and to what extent his cultural freedom is restricted by biological and evolutionary restraints. (1977:25)

What happens to the imagination in this Durkheimian or neoDurkheimian conception? The issue is returned to some twenty years later in Rapport’s Transcendent Individual where he seeks to articulate ‘a developmental relationship between social structure and individual creativity’ (1997:31). In this case, however, Rapport eschews Durkheim in favour of a Nietzschean-cum-Leachian inspired stance of individual creator and self-inventor. For Rapport, social structure is not to be reifed or regarded as sui generis. Nor does social structure have to be a binding cloak of conformity. And certainly, neither society nor social structure are biological social facts. Rather, they are useful fictions by which we script and play out our exploits. Blacking’s musicians and dancers can have all their possibilities and proto-potential without the conceptualization of universal collective consciousnesses, or aesthetic senses based, as Blacking insists, on theories of evolution and biological development (see Hanna 1979:28).

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Rapport’s stance is fundamentally ‘humanistic’. Carrithers writes similarly. Humans have plasticity and ‘human life is metamorphic’: indeed, there is an ‘incessant mutability [about] human experience’ (Carrithers 1992:29). For Carrithers, as with Bollen, sociality is key. And yet, for Carrithers, this sociality – ‘a capacity for complex behaviour’; ‘a capacity, a potential’ linked with birth and maturation (1992:34, 40, 38) – should have biological rather than intersubjective traits so that anthropologists can speak to other disciplines. Hence, Carrithers proposes a purely biological evolutionary background for sociality, one ‘established through the force of natural selection’. Our capacity to connect comes from our human specificity. It is more than just long term adaptive advantage of the intellect which gives us our ‘innate human propensity for mutual engagement and mutual responsiveness’ (1992:55). Contra Rapport, Carrithers codes sociality genetically. It is an inbuilt instinct rather than an intersubjective desire. Rapport and Carrithers, alike, go on to draw upon the work of Jerome Bruner. For Carrithers, ‘narrative thought lives at the heart of sociality’ (1992:74, 76), establishing landscapes of action and consciousness which ‘go to the heart of the human capacity to imagine’. For Rapport, ‘there is a constant readiness to rewrite … narratives, to write new narratives, and so render experience (the world) otherwise’ (1997:35). And Rapport continues, ‘in the writing and telling of narratives is assured … a human knowledge of breach and exception, of alternative ways of being, acting, striving, which we can envision.’ When Rapport writes in terms of our capacity to reflect, escape and reevaluate, I read into his work the creative power of the mind and body to imagine and to then create. In the next section I should like to give evidence of this power; while linking it to sociality, I would define it as a matter of intersubjective negotiation rather than instinctual patterning – and also a matter of transcendent imagination. Here, then, are ethnographic examples of the workings of the imagination in the teaching and learning of dance.

Imagination and the Dance Let me continue, first, with the work of Jerome Bruner. In his book, The Culture of Education (1996), Bruner lends support to the Socratic and interactive style of teaching and learning. To apply Bruner to the dance world, effective dance teaching is more than imitative action. Best practice is collaborative and also conceptual and imaginative; there must be a productive interaction between conceptual understanding and situated actualization. ‘Studies of expertise have shown that

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merely learning how to perform skillfully does not get one to the same level of flexible skill as when one learns by a combination of practice and conceptual explanation’ (Bruner 1996:54; cf. Skinner and Simpson 2005). Here is apprenticeship by practice and participation, as Lave and Wenger have defined it (1991). The results on the dance floor, sometimes referred to as the acquisition of a kind of intelligence – kinisthetic intelligence (Gardner 1985) – can be the heightening of both inter- and intra-personal understandings and feelings. Indeed, due to the physicality of dance, its hold and connection, there is the possibility that the capacity ‘to apprehend directly’ the actions, feelings, or dynamic abilities of other people is stronger and more direct because it is not mediated by words or pictures. To dance socially ‘in sync’ with another is to embody and exemplify an imagination and to have it accepted and reinforced by another. The following are examples of dance instruction which encouraged specifically the use of the imagination. They are drawn from several years of my fieldnotes, gathered from research into salsa, jive, tango and ballroom dance circles in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and the southwestern US, and from individual international workshops in Amsterdam and Gothenburg. I have divided the ethnographies into two groups: the first are examples of dance instruction where the students are mimicking the teacher and are being assisted by their using their imagination. The imagination here has a close connection with the reality of the dance class; it is being used to achieve a dance end point. In the second set of examples, the imagination is referred to as mental representations which approximate the fantastical or transcendental more than the real. In these cases, the realization of the imagination is thought about but it is not the desired end point. The purpose of the imagination in these latter examples is to be savoured purely as the contents of the imagination; often sexual in nature, these ‘imaginations’ remain to a large extent unconsummated. In the latter instances, then, their absence from, or negation of, the everyday takes on a Sartrean colouration, and they highlight the extent to which dancers hold themselves in check. Both sets of examples are pertinent to Kant’s theorization of the imagination. Both rely upon an ability to distinguish between the real and the imagined and how to make the imagined real. And both rely upon the human capacity for motility, and an understanding of one’s place in the world and how to stage and direct it: Example One At the end of the social dancing in the studio, the studio manager introduces his staff. The staff line up on the dance floor and are introduced individually to the dancers. They do this every other night

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yet there is still an awkwardness about it. The staff bow and curtsy with mock flourishes. You can see them projecting an adopted mantle of a self especially imagined for these moments (‘I’m a Latin dancer, not an erotic dancer’ is a commonly heard self-expression). At other times they practice with their students, catching glimpses of themselves in the mirrors along the walls, checking to see if they are dancing as they imagine themselves to be. The students also adopt these activities, watching others and themselves through the mirrors to see if their mimicry is ‘working’. Often it is an embarrassing let-down as the visual reality breaks into their imagination. Example Two An instructor is teaching Latin motion rotation of the hips and the importance of small steps in rumba and salsa: ~~ Imagine you are threshing grapes. Imagine the slaves in Cuba making the wine, standing there in great big vats. Imagine centuries ago, making the wine, crushing grapes, squelching grapes under foot – pushing down into the ground and transferring weight from side to side. Ideally, my head level stays the same. ~~ Imagine you are on a beach, dancing in the sand and on your beach towel; take smaller and smaller steps. ~~ This is an Afro-Cuban dance. Your body is an expression of yourself. As you move from side to side, lock the legs. This gives you one loose side and one tight side. You move the body via the rib cage and the arms should follow the rib cage out. Imagine your feet are stuck and then dance with your upper body only.

The last instructions proved to be particularly effective as the male salsa dancers worked on their body movements in front of the dance studio mirrors. Example Three Other instances from the teaching and learning of dance which feature the explicit use of the imagination include the following mental instructions to help with body movement, body isolations, body posture, and dance attitude: ~~ Dance: it is typically from the footwork up, but salsa is the exception where it is from the body down. Imagine the music trickling down your body. ~~ Imagine the rib cage like a cardboard box with corners.

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~~ Imagine you are given some stinky flowers, you look up and away. That’s how the woman should hold her head away from her partner. ~~ Imagine you are wearing a g-string around your hips; you have sparkles on your nipples; feathers on your hands; and expensive tights that can run on your legs.

Through Examples One to Three, dance can be seen to be more than merely the creation of an ‘imaginative space’ (Sheets-Johnstone 1966) in the mind of the audience. This space is acted out by the dancer – both the student and the teacher. We might say that the imagination plays a part in the formation as well as the execution of the dance moves and dance steps. This is learning by enculturation further refined by enskillment (cf. Ingold 2000:416). Dance can only ‘flow’ with these two in tandem. The execution is the visible manifestation or approximation of the imagination (‘Imagine you are threshing grapes’). The dancing is the imagination as capacity made concrete (‘Imagine you are given some stinky flowers’). The imaginative act leads to and facilitates the physical manifestation of the dance. But it is not always the case that the empirical nature of Kant’s real/imaginary distinction is played out. In more Sartrean mode, however, the next set of examples display the imagination as a personal bubble to be held in check in the mind. The examples are still drawn from my dance fieldnotes but, interestingly, the context is different: social dancing rather than dance lessons. These are cases of more ‘fantastic’ imaginations where the social dancer dwells upon imaginative possibilities, living in infatuation, appreciating and relishing the real/imaginary distinction. Example Four The female dancers watch Deano dancing with all of his pupils. They pay to dance across the floor with him. Their favourite moments are being escorted arm-in-arm on and off the dance floor, and when he first faces them and they lock bodies in closed position. He’s seen to be ‘gorgeous’ and the women giggle when talking about him or watching him. They are all happily married and are not looking for another relationship, but they are more than just looking at Deano. Example Five We’re sitting drinking at the bar before the free-dance lesson followed by dancing. Jason is making the most of his second wife and their children being away visiting his in-laws for the month: he has been out dancing every night. He tells us that his fantasy at the moment is that one of the women in front of us will love his dancing, fancy

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him and invite him back to her place for sex. Antonio makes a cutting motion and says these days she’d be ‘a slasher’. Jason replies that the husband would probably be there wanting to watch. I add that he might even want to join in. Example Six Danielle and Zani sometimes go out dancing together. Because they leave and arrive together and dance together a lot, Danielle thinks that people in the dance scene think that they are sleeping together. Danielle even thinks that Zani would sleep with her if she let him. But she understands their relationship as ‘a pact’: they can dance close and sexy because Danielle knows that Zani knows about her ‘pact’ with him – namely that it is just dancing and friendship that they enjoy together. Danielle belabours the point a bit to me. She then goes on to tell me that one of her girlfriends was a regular salsa dancer and after she brought her boyfriend along once, all of the male dancers who danced with her changed their relationship with her. They started treating her differently and were always asking after him. She didn’t like that and resolved to keep her dancing separate from her relationships. Finally Danielle ended our interview by telling me that now she could not dance with me like we used to the past few weeks. ‘I can’t dance with you like I used to. It’s harder for me to dance with you in my fantasy world now that I know all about you, your personal life and your “practically-wife”’. In Examples Four to Six, dancers are using their imagination to depart from reality; to enhance reality, a reality which is not there and probably never will be: the female dancers with Deano, and Zani and myself, and Jason with his roving eye and imagination. In terms of perception, these last examples are non-sense examples: they are not examples of a conscious being-in-the-world. They are examples of possible-but-unlikely futures. They are examples of not-being-in theworld, of absence rather than presence. There are no sense impressions in this example of Danielle’s imagination, no primary embodiment, no worldly facticity. In his imagination, Jason develops and adds projections to his memory: what he entertains and desires but doubts will be realized or, if they were, would turn into a hideous nightmare. This makes these last examples very different from the first set: they are fantasy-remaining imaginations. They have an unreal aspect to them, whereas those instructed to imagine themselves on the beach (as cardboard, as smelling bad-smelling flowers, and as wine-making slaves) are drawing upon memories or projected thoughts to help out with their dancing, to act out their imaginations. The instructors rely upon an interpretive community familiar with many of the words and images painted.

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An Anthropology of the Imagination: Fantasy and Fancy From Classical Greece onward, the imagination has been interpreted and reinterpreted: from Aristotle’s ‘phantasia’ – imagination as sense perception (cf. O’Brien 1993:4) – to Coleridge’s imagination as creative faculty. The concept has also often been critiqued, even derided as ‘fancy’, with associations of irrationality, illness and irreligion (Sparshott 1990; Schulte-Sasse 1986/7); untrammelled, our imagination could, it has been claimed, very easily lead to idle and ideal (distorting and corrupting) thoughts, even unto madness. The imagination has been considered in terms far broader than the Kantian ones with which this chapter began: empirical versus transcendental. For many it is a dangerous, falsifying and misguiding faculty which feigns unreal images, inflames minds and has the potential to lead people into ‘unlawful matches’ and ungovernable practices (Rossky 1958 [after Francis Bacon]). In his article ‘Imagination: The Very Idea’, Sparshott (1990) considers the production of the fine arts: images created by imitation and representation and by use of the imagination. Paintings, sculpture and poems are charged objects through which we communicate but they are also ‘arts of imagination’: representational works with a subjective character to them. The imagination, for Sparshott, is ‘the ability to envisage things otherwise than as they are merely observed to be’ (1990:2, emphasis in the original). In a pithy – and empirical – take on Aristotle, Sparshott (ibid.) explains that he is developing his own epistemology of the imagination which he also understands to be ‘the ability to formulate, frame, and consider objects of sensation and cognition other than those directly anchored in the reality presented to the percipient’. Works of the imagination are the title given to the fine arts which appear from the human mind, whether those seemingly touched by divinity, or those works of fancy more kitschy, parodic and by-productional. They are the furthest development of our cognitive and semiotic faculties and so should be accorded due status. The artistic imagination, we might say after Sparshott, is the realization of our human capacity. Sparshott is also critical of an Aristotelian phantasia, however. In similar vein to Warnock’s critique of Sartre on dreaming and the imagination, Sparshott (1990:4) notes how difficult it is to preserve a distinction between the real and the unreal. Both perceived and desired worlds are the objects of consciousness but they have radically different statuses; the imagination, with its synthesizing and envisaging powers, can both dispose of ways of world-making and conceive of alternative orders. Jochen Schulte-Sasse (1986/7:26) develops this Janus-faced fecundity of the imagination in his study of

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the place of fantasy within a global semantic system which regulates the ideological reproduction of society. He is keen to rehabilitate the imagination as a faculty of innovation and to defend it against critics such as Theodor Adorno who saw any aesthetic institutionalization as a symptom of the bourgeois. For Schulte-Sasse, as for the French Avant Garde in the early twentieth century, ‘fantasy’ is to be encouraged for its deconstructive, anarchic and revolutionary potential (“Empower the Imagination” were the cries on the streets of Paris of the famous 1968 generation). Schulte-Sasse concludes by heeding Kant’s warning that insofar as we play with the imagination, it too plays with us (1986/7:32). Typically, anthropologists writing about the imagination have divided themselves between those looking to assert cross-cultural cognitive maps and imagery (the cognitive science route [JohnsonLaird 1983; Lakoff 1987; Whitehouse 2004]) and those seeking to chronicle and theorize native experiences and performances (the socio-cultural [Appadurai 1996; E. Bruner 1986; Turner 1986; Palmer and Jankowiak 1996]). In terms of my own work approaching the imagination through dance ethnography: interview setting, experiences of sensory connection, and uses of ‘imagine/imagination’ as linguistic terms have been my points of entry. And I have found the recent work of Arjun Appadurai and Vincent Crapanzano particularly useful for a topic so difficult to research due to its very (absent) nature. In spite of his alluding to ‘collective representations’ and his apparent support for Charles Taylor’s notion of the ‘social imaginary’ (social existence shared as a popular imagination [Taylor 2002]), Crapanzano’s (2004) book Imaginative Horizons goes some way towards developing a humanistic anthropology which can cater for the individual’s relationship with space/time: their place in the world, their being in the world, their making of the world including past and future narrative positions. Considering ‘the way in which we construct, wittingly and unwittingly, horizons that determine what we experience and how we interpret what we experience’ (2004:2), Crapanzano posits that it is through imaginative horizons on a transcendental plane that we regulate and evaluate our lives and our relations with others. More precisely, Crapanzano would attune anthropology to the ‘paradoxical ways in which the irreality of the imaginary impresses the real on reality, and the real of reality compels the irreality of the imaginary’ (2004:15). The imagination is unreachable, Crapanzano explains, and yet we reach for it; the imagination is uncertain and yet part of our projections and prophecies - and as we reach for them we inevitably destroy them for they are reified and become displaced. The imagination is Crapanzano’s ‘intermediate reality’ (2004:57) existing

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on the edges and at the borders, ‘barzakh’ as his Morroccan informants term it. Fieldwork experiences have highlighted for Crapanzano the diversity of this imagination; amongst the Navajo, performance-based narrations contrast with more literary Western forms of narration, a contextual and empirical imaginary as opposed to a projective one (2004:45). Citing the literary critic Jean Starobinski, Crapanzano further highlights imagination’s distancing and previewing capacity. By all this, the imagination ‘lightens our existence’ and is held in ‘anticipatory’ regard (Crapanzano 2004:19). The space/time dimensions which Crapanzano brings to bear upon the anthropological study of the imagination allow us to situate the Latin dance students of my ethnography with imaginative possibilities to transcend themselves, narratively, first in mind and then in body. The imagination opens up a ‘fourth dimension’ where Danielle and Zani dance, and Danielle and Jonathan non-dance. Finally, let me close with Arjun Appadurai who considers new contexts of imagination in his assessment of the cultural dimensions of globalization. Appadurai (1996:3, 31) describes the work of the imagination as a ‘constitutive feature of modern subjectivity’; it is a new social imaginary, but, crucially, one by which people can now script possible lives (whereas in the past it was but a virtual escape from ordinary life). His understanding differs from Taylor’s in its more individualistic stance: people’s ‘imagined worlds’ are fantasies and proto-narratives which they now have the ability to realize and fulfill. People are no longer so shackled and impeded by rigid class and caste systems. In a modern mobile society, sociality in the form of connection can now be purchased and played with on demand. Imagination the antidote has turned into imagination the possibility. Anyone can watch ‘Dancing with the Stars’ one night on the television, and book into a dance studio for lessons with Deano the next. But this is not to say that Deano will share the connection as Jonathan and Grace did. Anthropology would do well to use the human capacity for imagination to explore further the connections, coherences and incoherences mapped out and traced by anthropologists and informants alike.

Notes 1.

My thanks to Nigel Rapport and to Barnaly Pande for insightful comments, as well as to panelists and audience at a CASCA workshop, 2006. In respect to the above photographs (courtesy of Wikipedia free reproductions and the author), observe the contrast between people deprived of their capacity to connect under torture

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or in confinement, and those connecting to the point of overloading their senses: the thrill-seeker, risk-taker, the ‘edge-worker’ as Lyng (1990) characterizes them in his study of sky divers; or the ‘social dancer’ on their night out (Lupton 1990; Goftrit 1988). 2. See also Urmson’s (1967:89) distinction between the accurate recollection from the delusional imagination. 3. ‘Interaction produces an energy like the “effervescence” of religious ecstasy’, writes Jeffrey Alexander (1990:188). Alexander goes on to refer to this energy as a ‘psychic energy’ which is interpreted rather than felt externally. 4. I should remind the reader that I am still referring predominantly to social dancing, and that this sense of indistinctness does not necessarily occur with all partner dancers. Nor is it so evident amongst performance and competitive dancers who have ‘professionalized’ their proprioception. 5. Starobinski (1970): ‘the imagination is much more than a faculty for evoking images which double the world of our direct perceptions: it is a distancing power thanks to which we represent to ourselves distant objects and we distance ourselves from present realities.’ The imagination can be at once anticipatory, distancing, transcendent and ultimately disappointing with its potentially empty images of hope.

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Carrithers, M. (1992), Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Crapanzano, V. (2004), Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (London: University of Chicago Press). Diprose, R. (1994), ‘Performing Body-identity’, Writings on Dance 11/12: 6–15. Downey, G. (2005a), Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an AfroBrazilian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ——— (2005b), ‘Educating the Eyes: Biocultural Anthropology and Physical Education’, in Embodiment and Teaching and Learning in Anthropology, ed. J. Skinner, Special Edition of Anthropology in Action 12(2):56– 71. Durkheim, E. (1995), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by K. Fields (New York: Free). Fields, K. (1995), ‘Translator’s Introduction: Religion as an Eminently Social Thing’, in E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by K. Fields (New York: Free). Gardner, H. (1985), Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (London: Paladin). Godelier, M. (1986), The Mental and the Material (London: Verso). Gotfrit, L. (1988), ‘Women Dancing Back: Disruption and the Politics of Pleasure’, Journal of Education 170(3):122–41. Hanna, J. (1979), ‘Toward a Cross-Cultural Conceptualization of Dance and Some Correlate Considerations’, in The Anthropology of the Body, ed. J. Blacking (London: Academic). ——— (1987), To Dance is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Hume, D. (1969), A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Penguin). Ingold, T. (2000), The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge). Johnson, P. (2004), Inside Clubbing: Sensual Experiments in the Art of Being Human (Oxford: Berg). Johnson-Laird, P. (1983), Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kant, I. (1970), Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan). Kaufman, F. (1947), ‘On Imagination’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 7(3):369–75. Laderman, C. and Roseman, M. (eds) (1996), The Performance of Healing (London: Routledge). Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Langer, S. (1953), Feeling and Form (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lupton, D. (1990), Risk (London: Routledge). Lyng, S. (1990), ‘Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking’, American Journal of Sociology 95(4):851–86.

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Marion, J. (2005), ‘“Where” is “There”? Towards a Translocal Anthropology in Competitive Ballroom Dancing’, Anthropology News 46(5):18 –19. ——— (2006), ‘Beyond Ballroom: Activity as Performance, Embodiment, and Identity’, Human Mosaic 32(6):7–16. McNeill, W. (1995), Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Melbin, M. (1972), Alone and With Others: A Grammar of Interpersonal Behaviour (London: Harper & Row). Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Milton, K. (2002), Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (London: Routledge). Ness, S. (1992), Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinaesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). O’Brien, J. (1993), ‘Reasoning with the Senses: The Humanist Imagination’, South Central Review 10(2):3–19. Palmer, G. and Jankowiak, W. (1996), ‘Performance and Imagination: Toward an Anthropology of the Spectacular and the Mundane’, Cultural Anthropology 11(2): 225–58. Rapport, N. (1997), Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology (London: Routledge). Ricoeur, P. (1988), Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Rossky, W. (1958), ‘Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic’, Studies in the Renaissance 5: 49–73. Sartre, J-P. (1966), The Psychology of Imagination (New York: Citadel). Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1966), The Phenomenology of Dance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). Skinner, J. (2007), ‘The Salsa Class: A Complexity of Globalization, Cosmopolitans and Emotions’, Identities (Special Edition on Emotions and Globalization) 14(4):485–506. Skinner, J. and Simpson, K. (2005), ‘�������������������������������� Community and Creativity in the Classroom: An Experiment in the Use of The Guest Interview, Focus Group Interviews and Learning Journals in the Teaching and Learning of The Anthropology of Modern Dance’,���� in Embodiment and Teaching and Learning in Anthropology, ed. J. Skinner, Special Issue of Anthropology in Action 12(2):28–43. Sparshott, F. (1990), ‘Imagination: The Very Idea’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48(1):1–8. Spencer, P. (1985), ‘Introduction: Interpretations of the Dance in Anthropology’, in Society and the Dance, ed. P. Spencer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Starobinski, J. (1970), La Relation Critique (Paris: Gallimard). Schulte-Sasse, J. (1986/7), ‘Imagination and Modernity: Or the Taming of the Human Mind’, Cultural Critique 5:23–48. Taylor, C. (2002), ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture 14(1):91–124. Turner, V. (1986), The Anthropology of Experience (New York: PAJ).

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Urmson, J. (1967), ‘Memory and Imagination’, Mind 76(301):83-­91. van den Berghe, P. (1994), The Quest for the Other: Ethnic Tourism in San Cristobal, Mexico (Seattle: University. of Washington Press). Warnock, M. (1976) Imagination (London: Faber). Whitehouse, H. (2004), Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira). Wikipedia (2007), Detention camp photo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp, accessed 20 March 2006.

INDEX A aesthetics 12, 157–8, 174n8, 187, 194, 196, 199, 211, 213, 218, 225 Amit, V. 20, 29–30, 45, 68 Appadurai, A. 50, 225–6 Appiah, K. 115–16 apprenticeship 183–92, 195–6, 201–2, 213, 220 architecture 21, 180–202 B Bateson, G. 10, 208 Baudrillard, J. 158–9, 165, 174n8 Becker, E. 4–5, 16, 19, 23n2 being-in-the-world 2, 5, 128, 146, 183, 209, 223 belonging 6, 75 biology 3, 11, 117, 179–80, 213– 14, 217–19 Blacking, J. 217–18 Bloch, M. 1, 3, 11 body 3–11, 15–23, 128–35, 146– 51, 179–86, 190–3, 196–203, 212–223, 226 Bollen, J. 213–14, 216, 219 Bourdieu, P. 180, 183, 191 branding 92, 127, 157, 160, 163– 6, 174n3 Bruner, E. 57, 68, 209, 225 Bruner, J. 210, 219–220 building 47–9, 103, 143, 146, 181, 183–96, 201–3 bureaucracy 20, 30, 37, 44, 76 Butler, J. 165, 173n3, 183, 192–3

C Carrithers, M. 219 Casey, E. 147, 183, 190–2 categorisation 3, 20, 39, 95, 127, 129, 147, 149, 155, 166, 171– 2, 188, 195 causality 2, 5, 7–8, 13, 168–9, 173, 190, 211, 214 citizen 20, 30, 59, 77–8, 84, 86, 93–7, 103–5, 109–12, 115, 119, 135, 149 civil society 88, 90, 102–3, 105 cognition 9, 11, 16, 22–3, 30, 56, 130, 174n10, 181, 184, 197– 203, 212, 217–18, 224–5 Cold War 75, 102–3, 105, 108, 110, 116–19 commodity 101, 127, 132, 158, 162–3, 165, 172, 174n8 communication 4, 10–11, 17, 20, 105–8, 116, 170–1, 181, 184, 186, 190, 192, 197–8, 200–3, 209, 211, 214–18, 224 communitas 56, 61, 63, 68 community 3, 6, 13, 21–2, 45, 50, 76, 77, 86, 89–90, 93, 95, 101, 119, 137, 149–50, 156–7, 159, 170, 186, 189, 192, 195–7, 205, 223 connection 7, 94, 180, 209, 212– 17, 220, 225–6 consciousness 4, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 22, 23n2, 87, 114, 121n8, 130– 5, 147, 156, 191–2, 209–10, 216–20, 223–4

232

contradiction 4–5, 15–16, 23n2, 46, 92 conversation 13, 31–5, 40–9, 161, 187–8, 193, 209, 213, 216 cosmopolitanism 2, 4–5, 7, 20–1, 29–30, 54, 59, 75–6, 79–80, 96, 101–20, 128, 148 craft 11, 183–97, 201–3 Crapanzano, V. 134, 147, 208, 225–6 creativity 2, 4–5, 8, 15–17, 22, 23n7, 68, 97, 106, 112, 130, 147–8, 158, 162, 168, 179, 183, 194–7, 201, 203, 210–13, 215, 218–19, 222, 224 culture 3–6, 9–19, 21–3, 50, 54, 68, 83, 87, 92–6, 117, 135, 155–8, 166–7, 171–2, 179–80, 184–6, 189, 191, 196, 208, 215–22 cyborg 10, 19 D dance 21, 147, 170, 179–81, 201– 2, 209, 211–27 social 21, 179. 209, 211–12, 216, 220, 222, 227 death 4–6, 12, 20, 24n8, 41–5, 55, 117, 128, 134–8, 146–50, 152n1 democracy 23n7, 87, 111, 114–15 dialogue 80, 105, 113m 192, 194, 196, 200–3 discourse 5–6, 11, 15, 17, 23, 59, 75, 83–4, 92–5, 102, 105, 110, 115–16, 157–62, 170, 174n7, 179, 181, 183–4, 190, 192–7 displacement 110–111, 115, 120n2, 129, 132, 173n3, 185, 225 Donnan, H. 88, 94 dream 4, 46, 210, 224 dualism 7–8, 183 Durkheim, E. 214, 217–18 E economy 3, 9, 19–20, 29–30, 35–6, 40, 44, 50–1, 58–9, 64, 69n2, 77, 80–1, 85, 87–95, 102, 109–11, 121n8, 128–9, 134–5, 148–50, 159, 170–1, 186 Eidheim, H. 157, 166

Index

elite 20, 54, 76, 77–80, 82, 85, 87, 93, 96, 106–10 emotion 1, 7, 9, 30, 36, 44, 83, 93, 107, 135, 147, 160–1, 163, 187, 192, 212 empathy 187, 218 empire 86, 103, 109–10, 116–18 entification 21, 127–8, 155–7, 159, 162, 165–74 environment 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 21, 179–80, 183, 185–91, 194, 197, 201–3, 209 epistemology 9, 11, 14, 21–2, 138, 147, 151, 190, 224 equality 56, 62, 88, 90, 114, 118, 135, 150 essentialism 1, 157 ethics 21, 30, 76, 101–3, 105, 112, 116, 118–19, 151, 157, 188 ethnicity 5, 13, 95, 134–5, 148–9, 156, 160, 165–6, 175n1, 186, 188, 197 ethnography 2–3, 7, 18–23, 29, 75, 94–5, 127–8, 134, 138, 179, 186, 191, 208–9, 211, 214, 219–20, 225–6 visual 136–8 European Union 75–6, 77–8, 81, 83, 94–5, 97 Everyman 2, 19 excessiveness 4, 7, 14–19, 127–8, 131, 172 exchange 5, 9, 12, 16, 19, 70n4, 127–8, 132–4, 147, 151, 157, 170, 179, 183, 186, 189, 197, 202–3 student 58–67 existentialism 179, 210–11 experience 5–6, 9, 12–14, 17–18, 20, 24n8, 30, 37, 40, 45, 50, 55–68, 79, 102, 105–6, 119, 128, 134–5, 146–7, 151, 155, 160–1, 171–2, 180, 184, 187– 92, 196, 201, 209–10, 215, 219, 225 expertise 3, 120n1, 188, 194, 219 expression 6, 13, 15, 17, 22, 156–7, 160, 163–4, 166, 172, 202, 221 F family 29–30, 35–6, 40, 44–51, 62–3, 65, 67, 76, 101, 119,

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Index

129, 135–9, 148–51, 161, 188, 193–4 fantasy 12, 128, 146–7, 186, 212, 217, 220, 222–6 feelings 12, 160, 163, 181, 199, 212, 214, 216–18, 220 Ferguson, N. 20, 30, 38 Fernandez, J. 12–13, 17, 173n1 fieldwork 3, 13, 16, 29, 32, 34, 180, 182–4, 186, 226 Foucault, M. 15, 174n7, 183, 192–3 freedom 7–8, 13, 15, 35, 39–40, 44, 107, 111, 114–15, 118, 132, 157, 164, 179, 210–11



G Geertz, C. 3, 8–10, 138, 189 Gellner, E. 1, 8, 15, 22 globalism 2, 22, 29–30, 50, 57–8, 64, 68, 75, 82, 88, 94, 96, 102– 3, 105, 108–19, 128, 134–5, 148, 150, 183, 189, 225–6 going-beyond 3–7, 14, 18–22, 29– 30, 36, 40, 50, 56, 75–6, 79–80, 90, 92–3, 95, 101–2, 104–5, 112, 117, 128–9, 132–3, 147, 172, 179–81, 183–4, 189, 191– 2, 194, 197, 209, 214 gratuitousness 16, 18, 23

I identity 3, 6, 10–14, 16, 20, 22–3, 76, 80, 82–4, 87, 92–4, 96, 101, 116–17, 127–8, 134, 148–50, 154–65, 169, 171, 173n3, 174n8, 180, 183–97, 203 illness 6, 16, 20, 128, 135–7, 147– 8, 151, 154, 224 imagination 2–4, 9, 18, 20–1, 103, 106, 115, 119, 127–9, 130–4, 137, 146–9, 179–80, 187, 208–27 imperialism 1, 86, 103, 110, 116–17 improvisation 21, 30, 37, 51, 181, 183, 195–6, 201, 203 individuality 4–7, 15–16, 22, 44, 51, 164, 217, 226 Ingold, T. 11, 186, 208, 222 inhabitation 5, 20, 22, 76, 137, 156, 194, 196 innovation 54, 57, 104, 179–81, 183–4, 187, 193–6, 225 instinct 8, 219 institution 21, 23, 30, 35, 50, 57, 59–60, 64, 68, 75–6, 78, 90–7, 101, 109, 127, 147, 149, 170, 225 instrumentality 11, 30, 37, 40, 55, 65, 86–7, 93, 97, 156–60, 164, 193, 211 intention 4, 7–8, 18, 30, 36–7, 40, 50, 105, 117, 131–2, 168, 192 interpretation 4, 14–15, 37, 104, 134, 137, 146, 158, 163, 168,

H Habermas, J. 8, 118 habit 6–7, 16, 21, 23, 127, 147, 154–5, 169, 179–80, 183–4, 191–2, 212–13 health 6, 15, 19–20, 103, 129, 134–5, 148–50 heritage 87, 158, 174n8, 186, 190, 192, 194–5 hierarchy 1, 15, 95, 162, 186–9 HIV/AIDS 20, 128, 134–9, 145–6, 148 holiday 168 working 20, 58–67 home 6, 14, 30, 34–6, 42–51, 55, 58–68, 82, 84, 118, 138–9, 142, 183, 191 human nature 1–4, 7–10, 12, 14, 16–19, 22, 23n7, 117, 150, 179, 208–9, 218

as capacity 2–8, 14–23, 23n1, 23n7, 29–30, 36, 51, 57, 59, 68, 75–6, 102, 119, 127–9, 130–2, 148–50, 160, 179–81, 186, 197, 208–11, 214–20, 222, 224, 226 as substance 2, 6, 18 human rights 90, 104, 108, 110, 114–15 humanism 20, 76, 115–17, 219, 225 humanitarianism 20, 75, 102, 107, 110–16, 119 humanity 10, 14, 17, 19, 22, 23n2, 76, 105, 108, 116, 149

234

181, 184–5, 189, 195, 198– 203, 210, 217, 223–5, 227n3 intersubjectivity 6, 13, 189, 192, 197, 219 intuition 2, 4, 17, 193, 209, 211 irony 3–4, 13, 20–1, 50, 65, 75, 92–3, 127 Irving, A. 20, 128–9, 136 J Jackson, M. 5–7, 13–14, 17 Jameson, F. 159, 169–70 justice 15, 20–1, 76, 88, 102, 106, 108, 118–19 K Kant, I. 1–2, 19, 21–2, 103, 172, 179–80, 209–12, 214–15, 220, 222, 224–5 kinaesthetics 181, 199–200, 204n5, 213–14 knowledge 1, 3, 8–10, 14, 19–22, 50, 110, 131, 151, 157, 167, 181, 183–4, 186, 188, 192– 203, 209, 212–13, 219 L language 16–17, 21, 24n8, 107, 165, 172, 181, 184, 192, 197–202 language-game 10, 21 Larsen, T. 21, 127–9, 157 Lave, J. 183, 220 learning 3, 21, 135, 151, 180, 183–4, 188, 197, 201, 203, 212, 214, 217, 219–22 liberalism, 14, 23n7, 83, 105–6, 110–13, 115, 156–7 life-project 20, 30, 36–7, 40, 44, 50–1 life-world 5–6, 22 lifestyle 155–6, 168 liminality 29, 55–69 Locke, J. 132–3 M managing 13, 36, 113, 155–71, 208 Marchand, T. 21, 180–1, 186, 189, 197 market 9, 20, 29–30, 38–40, 50,

Index

58, 68, 85, 108, 150, 157–9, 167 marriage 55, 83, 161 Marshall Plan 103, 109–10, 115– 16, 120n2, 121n5 Marx, K. 132, 149, 159, 172, 193 materialism 7–8, 11–12 materiality 4, 8, 13, 17–21, 51, 127–8, 130–4, 137, 146–51, 166–7, 182–9, 193–6 meaning 2, 5–6, 9, 12, 18, 50–1, 76, 79, 87, 95, 105, 130–5, 147–8, 161–5, 168–9, 180, 184–5, 190–2, 196–9, 210–11, 217 measurement 4, 19, 133, 157, 159, 165–7, 173, 174n10, 194, 212 Merleau-Ponty, M. 183, 190, 211, 213 migration 20, 29–30, 32, 35–40, 44–7, 50–1, 82–4, 91, 102, 160 labour 30, 35, 39–40 mind 4, 6–13, 54, 128, 130–3, 162, 183–4, 192, 196–202, 219, 222, 224, 226 modernity 1, 12, 14–15, 23n7, 51, 55, 57, 60, 102, 111, 114, 114, 118, 127, 159–60, 170–3, 181, 187, 193–5, 211, 226 modernization 75, 102, 109–10, 156, 161, 164, 166–7 money 20–1, 36, 86, 103–4, 128, 130–7, 148–50, 152n1, 169 morality 1, 11, 15, 20–3, 75–6, 101–2, 111, 115–19, 128–9, 132, 146, 149–51, 155–7, 163– 4, 183, 187, 214, 217 motor 181, 192, 198–203, 213 movement bodily 8, 44, 50, 129, 147–9, 198, 202, 212–16, 221–2 transnational 35, 45, 50, 56, 58–9, 67–8, 149, 189 N National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 103–4 nationhood 5–6, 20–1, 23, 29–30, 50, 59, 76, 78–97, 101–3, 111– 12, 115–18, 129, 134, 148–51,

Index

158, 165–6, 183 nature 6–7, 11, 13, 161, 172, 215, 218–19 nature/culture 2, 23n2, 208 nature/nurture 2 Nietzsche, F. 7, 12, 15, 18–19, 134, 150, 172, 210, 218 O objectification 11, 155–8, 169–72, 173n1, 174n8, 186, 190 objectivity 1–2, 9, 11, 13, 22, 24n8, 131–2, 147, 151, 158, 172 ontology 6, 14, 21–3, 81, 128, 133, 147–8, 179 openness 2, 4, 6–7, 13–14, 19, 23n7, 37, 112, 155, 192, 214, 226 organism 2, 4, 8–10, 217 P Paine, R. 151, 171 Parkin, D. 3 parsing 198–203 perception 9, 12, 80, 87–92, 96, 131, 147, 158, 160, 183, 185, 188, 190, 197, 209–14, 223–4 performance 20–1, 128, 156, 162–72, 173n3, 174n8, 180–1, 183–202, 212–16, 220, 225–7 person 5, 7, 13–15, 30, 35–6, 40, 46, 50–1, 54–5, 57, 62, 68, 94, 104, 108, 114, 128–9, 131–8, 147–51, 162, 168, 210, 212, 220, 222–3 phenomenology 6, 13, 134, 183–4, 187, 190–1, 197, 211 philanthropy 23n7, 75–6, 102–19, 120n1 place 4, 6, 11, 45, 51, 55, 58, 62, 68–9, 95, 127, 148, 161–2, 168, 180–1, 182–97, 203, 215, 220, 225 play 6, 16, 19, 21, 33, 66, 212, 214, 218, 225 politics 9, 19, 21–2, 39, 50, 75–6, 79–80, 82–96, 102–14, 118– 19, 128, 134–5, 148–50, 157– 8, 161–2, 170, 182, 186, 196 polity 3, 20, 75–6, 80, 83, 86, 95, 105

235

Popper, K. 19, 23n7 postmodernity 94, 116, 172–3, 174n8 power 7, 11, 18, 20, 40, 50–1, 86, 91, 94–5, 105, 110, 134, 148– 9, 166, 180, 190–3, 208–13, 216, 219, 224–5, 227n5 practice 3, 6–7, 9–11, 16, 21, 23, 29–30, 37–8, 68, 76, 82, 93–5, 102–3, 114, 119, 127, 132–3, 137, 146–7, 160, 167, 170, 173, 179–81, 183–203, 213– 15, 220–1, 224 R randomness 7, 14, 16 Rapport, N. 2, 4–6, 8, 14, 16, 18, 36–7, 45, 50, 210, 218–19 rationality 1, 3, 7, 10–11, 45, 56, 118–19, 131–4, 147, 151, 208, 224 refugee 75, 105–6, 109, 112–15, 120–1 relationality 10–14, 190–3, 197, 199, 211, 213 relativism 8–10, 14, 22 representation 5, 9, 11, 17, 138, 146, 171–2, 197–203, 209–10, 220, 224–5 resistance 78, 96, 180, 183, 192–3, 197 Ricoeur, P. 189, 210 rite of passage 67 role 6, 40, 56, 58, 64, 67, 210 Rorty, R. 118–19 Roughley, N. 5 S Sartre, J-P. 8, 131, 137, 147, 179, 210–11, 220, 222, 224 science 1, 3, 7–8, 15, 17–22, 23n7, 143, 173 neurological 180, 184, 225 social 1, 3, 8, 17, 21, 147, 180, 208 Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program 32, 35, 37–9 secularism 15, 23n7, 131 selfhood 4, 6, 8, 14, 16, 19–23, 30, 36–7, 44–5, 50–1, 54, 57, 116–17, 127–8, 134, 155–8,

236

169–70, 173n3, 174n8, 190–3, 196, 203, 211, 216–19, 221 semiotics 130, 159, 161–5, 190, 224 sensation 7, 14, 150, 183, 190, 199, 209, 224, 227n1 sense-making 29, 44, 209 Simmel, G. 14, 19, 23n6, 131, 169 simulation 199, 201 skill 11, 69n2, 107, 113, 171, 179– 80, 183–4, 188–93, 196–203, 213–14, 220, 222 Skinner, J. 21, 179–81, 220 social fact 5, 127, 218 social relations 3, 6, 14, 17, 21, 37, 40, 56, 62–4, 67–8, 75, 127, 129, 135, 150, 161, 164, 169, 172, 179, 187–9, 216, 222–3, 225 sovereignty 82–3, 86, 156–7 space 4, 7, 10, 15, 21, 30, 60–2, 75–6, 86, 102–3, 118–20, 127, 149, 167, 174n10, 180–1, 182–6, 189–96, 225–6 spontaneity 7, 56 standardisation 157, 159–61, 166–7, 173 statehood 44, 50, 58–9, 76, 77–84, 88–95, 101, 109–10, 112, 159 Steiner, G. 16–17 Stevenson, L. 7 Strathern, M. 2, 10, 19 student 20, 29–30, 40, 54, 58–70, 160, 162, 220–2, 226 subjectivity 1, 13, 22, 147, 154, 156, 159, 186, 209, 224, 226 subversion 80, 173n3, 180, 192–3, 197 suffering 2–3, 20, 41, 75–6, 102–3, 105, 112–19, 135–6, 149–51 Suski, L. 20, 75–6 symbolic classification 1, 3, 5, 16– 17, 19–22, 127, 149, 164, 166, 171, 173, 174n10 sympathy 89, 93, 107, 218 syntax 184, 198–200 T Taylor, C. 133, 167, 169, 225–6 technology 11, 39, 57–8, 119, 132,

Index

138, 162, 172, 183, 185–7, 189, 193, 196–7 thinghood 3, 6, 8, 10, 15–18, 21, 127–9, 155, 163, 166–73, 190, 196, 203, 210 tourism 29, 46, 48, 54–61, 64–69, 91–2, 157, 159, 209 tradition 3–5, 40, 56, 83, 101, 104, 118, 127, 156, 169, 181, 183, 185, 187, 190, 193–4 transcendence 4–5, 19, 21–2, 23n2, 56, 60, 103, 112, 129, 148–9, 151, 172, 179–80, 210– 15, 218–20, 224–6 transnationality 35, 50, 58–9, 62, 64, 75–6, , 87–91, 94, 96, 101– 20, 148, 150, 195, 220 transubstantiation 130–4, 149, 151, 158 travel 20, 29–30, 54–69, 91, 102, 106, 119, 167 trope 13, 22, 54, 84 Turner, V. 55–7, 60–1, 63, 67–9, 225 U United Nations 75, 104, 106, 108– 9, 113–15 universalism 3, 5–6, 20, 22, 76, 103, 108, 114–19, 128, 133–4, 152n1, 190–1, 210 V value 4, 11, 15, 21, 36, 51, 76, 78, 87–8, 97, 115, 119, 127–9, 130–5, 148–51, 156–9, 164–5, 169, 174n10, 183–5, 188, 196 W Warnock, M. 209–10, 224 Weber, M. 158, 167, 169 well-being 149, 187 Wilson, T. 20, 76, 79–80, 88, 92–4 Wittgenstein, L. 10, 211 Woolf, V. 12, 17–18 work 29–30, 31–41, 44–5, 47, 49– 50, 58–9, 61, 63–7, 106, 136–7, 159, 164, 167, 173, 182, 186– 8, 195–6, 199, 202–3 world-view 14–15, 29, 197