Tropological Thought and Action: Essays on the Poetics of Imagination 9781800732735

Citation preview

Tropological Thought and Action

Studies in Rhetoric and Culture Series Editors: Ivo Strecker, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Robert Hariman, Northwestern University Felix Girke, University of Konstanz Christian Meyer, University of Konstanz

Our minds are filled with images and ideas, but these remain unstable and incomplete as long as we do not manage to persuade both ourselves and others of their meanings. It is this inward and outward rhetoric that allows us to give some kind of shape and structure to our understanding of the world and that becomes central to the formation of individual and collective consciousness. This series is dedicated to the study of the interaction of rhetoric and culture and focuses on the concrete practices of discourse in which and through which the diverse and often also fantastic patterns of culture—including our own—are created, maintained, and contested. Volume 9 Tropological Thought amd Action: Essays on the Poetics of Imagination Edited by Marko Živković, Jamin Pelkey, and James W. Fernandez

Volume 5 Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology Edited by Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

Volume 8 Rhetoric and Social Relations: Dialectics of Bonding and Contestation Edited by Jon Abbink and Shauna LaTosky

Volume 4 The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture Edited by Christian Meyer and Felix Girke

Volume 7 Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric: The Texture of Political Action Edited by Robert Hariman and Ralph Cintron Volume 6 Chiasmus and Culture Edited by Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul

Volume 3 Economic Persuasions Edited by Stephen Gudeman Volume 2 Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life Edited by Michael Carrithers Volume 1 Culture and Rhetoric Edited by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler

Tropological Thought and Action Essays on the Poetics of Imagination   

Edited by

Marko Živković, Jamin Pelkey, and James W. Fernandez

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Marko Živković, Jamin Pelkey, and James W. Fernandez 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 Names: Živković, Marko, editor. | Pelkey, Jamin, editor. | Fernandez, James W., editor. Title: Tropological Thought and Action: Essays on the Poetics of Imagination / edited by Marko Živković, Jamin Pelkey, and James W. Fernandez. Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Studies in Rhetoric and Culture; volume 9 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039749 (print) | LCCN 2021039750 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800732728 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800732735 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Figures of speech. | Rhetoric—Social aspects. | Imagination (Philosophy) | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P301.5.F53 T76 2022 (print) | LCC P301.5.F53 (ebook) | DDC 306.4—dc23/eng/20211012 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039749 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039750

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

ISBN 978-1-80073-272-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-273-5 ebook

Dedicated to the memory of Bernard Bate (1960–2016)

Contents       

List of Figures

ix

Preface

x

Acknowledgments Introduction. Aides Pensée: Tropology and Tropologic James W. Fernandez

xvii 1

1. Don Quixote: Icon of Rhetoric Culture Theory Ivo Strecker

27

2. A Trope of Time: Twilight Swings across the Central Himalayas John Leavitt

44

3. Dreams Inside Out: Some Uses of Dream in Social Theory and Ethnographic Inquiry Marko Živković 4. On Conversion: A Theory of Ruins Joseba Zulaika 5. Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer, or “Witnessing a Shipwreck”: German Figurations in Facing the Past to Face the Future Michael Carrithers 6. An Apologia for Filthy Lucre Gustav Peebles

67

92

106

136

viii



contents

7. “Down the Garden Path”: On Path-ologies of Inquiry and of “Progress” in Understanding James W. Fernandez

161

8. Sí teanga na muintire a shlánós an mhuintir: Ó Cadhain, Rhetoric, and Immanence Steve Coleman

183

9. Parapraxis Today: The US Flag and the Mythopoesis of Self and Other in Post-9/11 New England Bernard Bate

209

10. Irony’s Arrow: Launching Contraria in Chinese Linguaculture Mary Scoggin

231

11. The Tropes of Music William O. Beeman

255

12. Tactics for Working Anyway Dale Pesmen

272

13. Tropes, Frames, and Powers Terence Turner

296

Conclusion. Imaginative Leaps and Embodied Grounding Marko Živković and Jamin Pelkey

305

Index

325

Figures       

11.1. Georg Friedrich Handel, “Hallelujah Chorus,” from Messiah, 1741, public domain.

259

11.2. Johann Sebastian Bach, Cello Suite #1—Prelude in G Major, c. 1717, public domain.

260

11.3. Robert Schumann, “Im Wonderschönen Monat Mai,” 1844, public domain.

262

11.4. George Gershwin, handwritten notation for taxi horn, measure 30, An American in Paris, 1928, public domain.

264

11.5. Antonio Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, Spring, first movement, violin solo, 1725, public domain.

265

11.6. Franz Schubert, Die Biene, 1860, public domain.

266

11.7. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Two Armed Men, in The Magic Flute, 1791, public domain.

267

11.8. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Aprite un po’ quelgli occhi,” from Le Nozze di Figaro (Marriage of Figaro), 1786, public domain.

269

Preface       

Edited volumes such as this one emerge out of the convivialities and contingencies of academic life. A core of friends who already have a history of collaboration organize a panel, often with some members inviting new participants. An effervescent panel generates a desire to further the conversation, and when the common project is sensed as insistently demanding further germination, time and energy are found to organize a specialized conference (followed by a series of conferences) and then to publish an edited volume, which may then grow into a series. This is volume 9 in such a series. As Christian Meyer and Felix Girke tell the story in their preface to The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture (vol. 4), the Studies in Rhetoric and Culture series had its origins in the 1990s, “in the animated atmosphere of Ivo Strecker’s office at the University of Mainz,” with its “ever-shifting piles of papers, photocopies, journals and books, the ringing of the phone, the aroma of Ivo’s Wüstenkaffee (wasteland coffee), and constant visits by curious colleagues, startled students, and confused computer repairmen, more reminiscent of a bustling open-plan editorial office than of the solemn quietude of an academic retreat.” Effervescence of conviviality indeed, where excited collaborators “complete each other’s sentences” and where planning and contingency enter into a “strange relationship,” as Robert Hariman and Ralph Cintron put it in their preface to volume 7 in the series, Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric. The composite narrative of origins that emerges from these prefaces is full of “winding paths” and “widening circles.” And, indeed, as the circles of scholars drawn into the Rhetoric Culture project widened, they brought with themselves their own winding paths of collaboration. This preface will likewise provide a narrative, one of many possible narratives, of how the present volume came about through its own strange mix of conviviality, contingency, and planning. While the origin story of Tropological Thought and Action shares some protagonists and mutual illuminations with the Rhetoric Culture Project inaugurated by Strecker, Stephen Tyler, Hari-

preface



xi

man, Michael Carrithers, Meyer, and Girke, it could also be traced backwards through other moments of academic conviviality, other contingencies and core groups, that start to resemble a “garden of forking paths”—to borrow a path metaphor from Borges (but see Fernandez, chapter 7)—only some of which intersect with the genealogies of the other volumes in the series. Rather than provide a detailed genealogy, the prospect of which seems daunting when faced with this rhizome-like structure, I will trace it back from the initially tangential position I had on this kinship chart, through Bernard Bate, the person who supplied an exuberant, oversized amount of energy, organizational acumen, and sheer charisma to the enterprise that resulted in this volume. Barney, as he was known to friends, took over the task of converting a collection of essays published in 2006 as a special issue of Revista de Antropología Social, titled “Tropology and the Figuration of Social Thought and Action,” into the Berghahn volume before you. As one of the original Revista contributors, I was brought onto the project sometime around 2011 as the second coeditor. I was the fresh new deck cadet brought on to first learn the ropes of the editorial business; it was Barney who did all the work. In 2013 Barney initiated the confluence of the Revista collection with the nascent collective project of the convivial group he christened the “Chicago Tropologists and Anthropoets” and of which he was, by common consent, the animating spirit. “Dear Chicago Anthropoets,” he wrote in an email dated 24 November 2013, “We finished our AAA panel at Chicago with a strong sense that we are ready (indeed, have been ready) to put together a volume that expresses what we have been involved with over the past few years, i.e., a singular synthesis of tropology and poetics that we might call the Chicago school of anthropological poetics.” The Chicago AAA panel he referred to was “Poetry, Power, and the Social Imagination,” organized by John Leavitt, with presentations by Mary Scoggin, Steve Coleman, Leavitt, and Dale Pesmen, and with Barney and James W. Fernandez as discussants. These “past few years,” Barney mentioned, turned out to be no less than eighteen years and twelve panels, if we take the 1995 “Anthropology and Literature” panel as the first in the series. Here is the list I reconstructed with the help of Scoggin, Coleman, Pesmen, and Leavitt: 1995. “Anthropology and Literature.” 94th AAA (American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting), Washington, DC. 1996. “Rethinking the Symbol.” 95th AAA, San Francisco. 1998. “Ideologies of Rhetoric: Language Ideology/Language Function/ Oratory.” 97th AAA, Philadelphia.

xii



preface

1999. “Tropologies: Metalinguistic Discourses on Meaning Transformation.” 98th AAA, Chicago. 2000. “Language, Democracy, and the Localities of Power.” 99th AAA, San Francisco. 2001. “Poetics, Politics, and Persuasion.” 100th AAA, Washington, DC. 2002. “What Is at Stake? Oratory and Social Imaginings.” 101st AAA, New Orleans. 2007. “Vernacular Social Imaginaries: Public Spheres, Modernities, Nations.” CASCA (Canadian Anthropology Society) and AES (American Ethnological Society), Toronto. 2007. “Mythopoesis.” 106th AAA, Washington, DC. 2011. “The Poetic Structure of the World.” 110th AAA, Montreal. 2012. “Species of the Non-said: Linguistic and Other Tricks to Live, Feel, and Know the Ineffable.” 111th AAA, San Francisco. 2013. “Poetry, Power, and the Social Imagination.” 112th AAA, Chicago.

As Leavitt recalled, “For an embarrassing number of these, Barney had the idea, did all the organizing, but did not want to be named as organizer, since that would prevent him from doing other things.” “Words like ethnomimesis and epiphany certainly swirled along with him in most conference ballrooms I remember,” Scoggin added. In Leavitt’s words, What Barney called the Chicago anthropoets is a development out of earlier groups of anthropologists centrally concerned with poetic language and its powers. The totemic ancestor was the North American ethnopoetics movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which brought together scholars who were also poets (e.g., Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, Paul Friedrich) and poets who were also scholars (e.g., Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg). After the rise and fall of the journal Alcheringa (1975–85), the continuing presence of this loosely defined school was felt in a tradition of readings of poetry and fiction at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, as well as ongoing panels on the theme at this and other conferences. From the 1980s on, the teaching of Paul Friedrich at the University of Chicago influenced a diverse group of “Friedrich students” who, again, started to meet when the occasion presented itself, notably at a 1996 AAA panel held in honor of Friedrich’s seventieth birthday and later published as the volume Language, Culture, and the Individual. Meanwhile, James Fernandez’s concerns with rhetoric and

preface



xiii

tropologies launched what might be considered a parallel stream of Chicago rhetorician tropologists. Not surprisingly, the two streams met, and the current avatar of Chicago anthropoets is the result of their confluence.

My entry into this confluence was the 1995 “Anthropology and Literature” panel—the first one I remember. The core of the Chicago anthropoets at that point consisted of Coleman, Pesmen, Scoggin, Leavitt, Alaina Lemon, and Barney himself. All of them were strongly influenced by both Fernandez and Friedrich, and all but Lemon are contributors to this volume. Barney, together with Pesmen and Coleman, was three years ahead of me at the University of Chicago (he started in 1986), and it was only by the late 1990s that I became aware of the Chicago anthropoets as a distinct group united around an ongoing project. An admirer but not an active participant, I came on board in 2011 when they invited me to be a discussant at “The Poetic Structure of the World.” It felt strange to discuss the work of my seniors, and I noted that while they all had both Fernandez and Friedrich in their scholarly “genome,” I carried only one half of it—that of Fernandez. When Barney passed away, in March of 2016, I took over the editorship of the Tropological Thought and Action volume and was then joined by Jamin Pelkey in May, at the recommendation and invitation of series editor Ivo Strecker. Jamin had, at the time, just published an appraisal of the Rhetoric Culture Project in Reviews in Anthropology, considered in light of a newly published reference work, the Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. He has since become a contributor to Rhetoric and Social Relations (vol. 8) and, in addition to his own previous editing experience, brings with him complementary expertise in cognitive poetics and cognitive semiotics. Scoggin, Pesmen, and Coleman were brought in as new contributing authors, and a number of original contributors to the Revista volume dropped out, with the resulting collection still retaining most of its Revista flavor. The Revista issue could then be seen as just another node in this string of convivial gatherings.1 Terence Turner, although he did not influence the Chicago anthropoets in the way Fernandez and Friedrich have, was a major presence in Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology (Fernandez 1991), one of the volumes ancestral to this one, where his chapter “We Are Parrots, Twins Are Birds: Play of Tropes as Operational Structure” exerted a gravitational pull comparable to that of Friedrich’s “Polytropy.” It was in the same collection where Pesmen’s essay on mixed metaphors pulled in the opposite, centripetal direction that reverberates in her contribution to the present volume. If Turner pulls toward greater theoretical coherence (unifying the Play of Tropes with the Play of Frames), Pesmen reminds us again of the need to “lose some neatness” and find wiggle room away from its allure.

xiv



preface

Whether by a single line of events, such as our twelve panels over eighteen years or by a route of “forking paths” extending into remoter pasts—in this case involving ever-remoter ancestral figures, from Hymes and Snyder to I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, and Roman Jakobson—this volume could be said to create its own precursors, as, to invoke Borges once more, Kafka created his. What emerges out of such retrospective reminiscences is an image of a project compelling its own enactment, a theme of tropological poetics that propels a group of people to gather again and again around it, proving powerful enough in the end to incarnate itself into the solid form of a book. In the process, this group acquires an identity, even a clan name, such as the Chicago anthropoets; the propelling force metamorphoses until it settles on a name, such as Tropological Thought and Action; but most importantly, these reminiscences all recall the role of a particular person, Barney Bate, as the living carrier, the animating spirit and soul of the endeavor. As anthropologists, we are aware of the human propensity to endow contingencies with teleological force, especially in retrospect, but even if this is, strictly speaking, a fallacy, it still carries a poetic truth. In a word, it is not entirely wrong to infer the workings of an invisible force attracting a group of people who are impelled to circle around a theme, refine it over the years, and finally make it into a tangible thing. In our case, I suspect that this poetic truth has a lot to do with the urge we feel to complete the work of those prematurely departed, especially when they have been extraordinarily driven to accomplish a task. It was Barney who “had the idea, and did all the organizing,” for many of these panels. It was Barney who named the anthropoets and, while it was a group process, was probably the one most responsible for the title of the volume itself. When he passed away, the urge to complete this project, and the stamina needed to keep it alive over years and finally bring it to completion, is owed in large part to the need of the living to carry on the work of the dead. Whether or not we entertain the idea of an impersonal force connecting people and urging its own hypostasis in a published book, what is indubitable is that it was Barney who had been this connector of people, the impresario of convergences, the engine of convivial explorations. When this deck cadet found himself suddenly promoted to one of the deck mates, it was ultimately the force of Barney’s drive that filled my sails. That we feel the need to complete the work of the prematurely deceased was already forcibly impressed on me precisely around the time when I was brought on to the deck of the Tropology book project. In August of 2012, Isaak Kornelsen, a student of my wife, Gordana Živković, died at the age of twenty-one. Gordana was teaching studio art at the University of Alberta and had attracted a closely knit group of extraordinary students. Isaak was one of them—a brilliant musician, talented artist, and accomplished athlete. Gordana

preface



xv

and I were honored to become “intellectual parents” to this group, who were constantly inventing projects, an informal art collective. Laura Porter, another member of that collective, was taking my “Tropes and Narratives in Anthropology” class that fall, a class that melded together two of Jim Fernandez’s signature classes I had taken at Chicago. It was midway through that class that Gordana was diagnosed with incurable cancer. She died at the end of December. Two of my doctoral students took over the course. It was months later that I got around to reading Laura’s final paper. It was a profound and moving essay about lives, narratives, and mourning that went far beyond a mere term paper. “When Isaak passed,” Laura wrote, I resolved that once the emotional intensity subsided, I would live in a way that emulated what he had taught me . . . The agency we have in our own lives becomes apparent to us when it is taken from someone close to us. In lieu of a coherent ending, we may take up what we knew their journey to be, or how it related to us, and incorporate it into our own lives . . . In life we exist in many little pieces, strewn over the map of people, coffee shops, and part-time jobs that knew us. In death, the pieces come together, unified by a mutual loss.

Isaak’s best friend, Daniel Kent, traveled to Sweden the next year because Isaak had been planning to just before he died. It was Daniel and I who together held Gordana as she was dying. Before Daniel made a pilgrimage to Sweden to complete Isaak’s project, the two of us first made a pilgrimage to the 2013 Venice Biennale in Gordana’s memory. I do not think we had formulated an explicit theory of “completing the work of the prematurely deceased” at the time; we simply felt the urge and acted on it. In death, pieces come together, unified by a mutual loss. This volume feels like pieces that came together, unified by Barney’s loss. “The purpose of a Malangan, a type of memorial carving from New Ireland,” wrote Alfred Gell (1992: 225), is to provide a “body,” or more precisely, a “skin” for a recently deceased person of importance. On death, the agency of such a person is in a dispersed state . . . indexes of their agency abound, but are not concentrated anywhere in particular . . . all the dispersed “social effectiveness” of the deceased, the difference they made to how things were, gradually becomes an objectifiable quantity, something to which a single material index may be attached, and from which this accumulated effectiveness may be abducted. This is what the Malangan is; a kind of body which accumulates, like a charged battery, the potential energy of the deceased dispersed in the life-world.

In a paper I wrote as an encomium for Daphne Berdahl (1964–2007), another of Fernandez’s students from Chicago, and a companion piece to her

xvi



preface

brilliant essay on the East German Trabi (Berdahl 2001), I used Malangan as a metaphor for Trabi’s Yugoslav companion, the little Fiat 750 or Fića. Fića, I argued in that paper, is perhaps a type of Malangan—“a battery that accumulates the dispersed agency of a dead state (Yugoslavia), a way of life that is lodged in memories and decaying reminders” (Živković 2014: 127). May this book serve as a Malangan, bringing together, once more, the dispersed agency of those who have left us: Terence Turner, Paul Friedrich, and Bernard Bate. Marko Živković Edmonton, Alberta December 5, 2021

Note 1. It is important to note that the present volume did not originate in any particular conference panel. Nine chapters were originally solicited as contributions to the general topic identified as “Tropology and the Figuration of Social Thought and Action” and published in Spanish in the Revista de Antropología Social. The remaining four chapters were solicited at a later stage in the preparation of the volume. All references to conference panels in this preface, as well as in the volume at large, are meant solely to acknowledge the genesis of this particular project in convivial gatherings out of which Margaret Mead’s “clusters of interacting individuals” typically arise.

References Berdahl, Daphne. 2001. “‘Go, Trabi, Go!’ Reflections on a Car and Its Symbolization over Time.” Anthropology and Humanism 25(2): 131–141. Fernandez, James W., ed. 1991. Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Živković, Marko. 2014. “Little Cars That Make Us Cry: Yugoslav Fića as a Vehicle for Social Commentary and Ritual Restoration.” In Vehicles: Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination, ed. David Lipset and Richard Handler, 111–132. New York: Berghahn Books.

Acknowledgments       

We wish to acknowledge here that an important proportion of the essays collected in this volume were previously translated from the original English into Spanish and published in Spain’s preeminent journal of social anthropology, Revista de Antropología Social, a publication of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (vol. 15, 2006). As one of our editors remarks in the preface, much academic work emerges out of the “convivialities and contingencies” of the academic world. That was certainly the case here. Since the 1970s James W. Fernandez had been periodically publishing articles in Spanish on the influential presence of the tropes—metaphor, especially—in social interaction, mostly using data derived from Spanish fieldwork dating from that decade. This work itself was a producer of professional convivialities and a certain interest in Spain in the tropes and the figuration and con-figuration of social thought. The editors of the Revista found it of interest, in that vein, to offer an issue of their journal, not entirely but in large part, to a collection of papers examining social relations from the figurative point of view. This invitation coincided with a collection of essays on the tropes that Fernandez was in the process of editing at the turn of the millennium, and it was this collection that was translated into Spanish and appeared in the Revista. This translation was by no means an easy task, and the editors of the Revista, María Cátedra and Asensción Barañano and the late José Luis García, are to be thanked for their efforts in helping propagate the study of the tropes in the figuration and configuration of social thought in Spain. Professor García, who died suddenly from COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, is to be especially remembered for his support and his own article in the Revista: a study of how, with the gradual failing of the Asturian coal mines, and the consequent offer of pre-retirement to the miners, the decision to retire early and to assume that category of retired worker gradually and ironically fell into ill repute and became a burden upon the miners’ identity.

xviii



acknowledgments

We are very glad that the original collection of essays is finally being published in its original language. To be sure, one cannot undertake or take up any phase or part of this present volume without remembering our more immediate colleagues Barney Bate, Paul Friedrich, and Terry Turner: sine qua non in our thinking about the tropes over many years. Two final notes of thanks go out to Kai Maurin-Jones for his support in the final stages of our index preparation and to Elizabeth Martinez for her excellent technical work during the final proofing process.

INTRODUCTION

Aides Pensée Tropology and Tropologic James W. Fernandez       

Vicissitudes: The Imaginative Motility and Vitality Of Human Life Some “Truths” about Tropes and the Dynamic of the Imagination In this introductory essay, and elsewhere in this collection of essays on the tropes, we might best understand a trope as a constituent of “communicative interaction,” verbal or visual, that makes a meaningful movement in the imagination. These mental movements, these arguments of images by which we are moved, are, as far as we know, unique to humans. We achieved them by organizing our communication systems into domains or frames of activity, interest, and action—insofar as we have some sense of these differentiations of experience and are able to articulate them. But more than such an elementary organization is at play. There is a systems-level dynamic involving the constant possibility of recurrent change by predication. And in that ever-present possibility arises the sense of temporality—the sense of a future different from the present. And in that sense there arises the human need for a project more suited to what might come to pass than what suits the present. And that miraculous sense of the possibility of, even the need for, mental movement between domains or frames of experience has opened up the stage for the tropic predications that attract our attention in this collection of essays. How this occurred is quite another question, which we mean to briefly ponder, surely not resolve,

2



james w. fernandez

at the end of this introduction. In any event it is these “vicissitudes”1 of life and their incessant revitalizations and de-vitalizations that have a great deal to do with the feelings of meaningfulness that make sense in and give sense to our lives as humans! In fact we might say quite simply, “In movement lies meaning, and the tropes are the prime agents of mental and actual movement!” These matters of the movement of meaning to which the essays collected here are particularly attentive are most often creative and revitalizing. All the same, though, such movements can be depressing and stultifying as well, devitalizing in a word; they can bring worlds into belief and “being.” They can bring into being new worlds in which to live only virtually—though these worlds may not really exist other than intersubjectively and figuratively. But we humans can also seek to imaginatively model, for eventual testing, objective reality, whether microscopic or cosmic, whether quarks or black holes, that we cannot otherwise directly experience, thus making them available for future investigation, testing, and objectification. There are two kinds of truth, then, and correspondingly two kinds of tropes: models and metaphors. This was a distinction urged in the work of Max Black (1962). The fundamental difference is perhaps that models are rule bound and therefore reductive, while metaphors as images are interpretation bound and therefore in the process of inquiry, florescent and expansive, producing imaginative movement not requiring verification and proven conformity with the real world but instead constitutive of it! Anthropologists as ethnographers are mainly interested in beliefs that hold the members of a culture together or apart, make it meaningful to them, and make them more or less responsive in obeisance or obedience to its presence and potency. And the tropes, as a consequence, are one of the (if not the) main constituents, the agglutinative elements, of culture. They are, at the least, crucial constituents of culture that meaningfully capture the popular imagination that ties us together one by one as cooperating subjects into interactive wholes, the “imagined communities” of our lives and loyalties. Because the tropes are part of the integuments of culture, we have very good reason in this collection to single them out as basic to our understanding of social order and disorder—moral order, in short—and hence as eminently objects and subjects of study. The anthropologist, we might go so far as to argue, is or should be mainly a student of the intersubjective imagination,2 which is to say the tropes so vitally at play in organized and, in some ways, cooperative social life and moral order (see Fernandez 1986b). But in their study, as we will now go on to observe, we must be cautious. We will never find absolute certainty in their study. The study of intersubjective truth is, in a word, inevitably intersubjective,3 which is to say uncertain.

introduction



3

The Body in the Mind: On Coupling in Its Various Senses and the Mental Reproduction of Meaningful Physical Being and Becoming To employ a familiarizing, perhaps revitalizing, trope, we may note that these imaginative movements that take place intersubjectively involve a coupling process, a kind of dance between puzzling subjects of interest and objects of meaningful predication/postulation made upon them. Not unlike human coupling, they are or can be creative of new being or senses of being! Hence the aptness of the related and redolent term “copula” for the axis of this propositional/predicative process bridging between puzzling subject and solutional object in which the imagination is inevitably involved and stimulated and, most meaningfully, revitalized in one way or another. It is well known that human language is recursive and re-combinatory, a dynamic that has made it particularly efficient, powerful, and robust—extraordinarily fertile in word production. But an important part of its power lies in this capacity for informative interassociation of meaningfully differentiated domains or frames of meaning.4 It is these interactive capacities and how they developed that is an important part of the challenge to the endlessly fascinating speculation on language origins. We will not forget the urgency of that speculation in this essay but we are mainly interested here in how movement by coupling can be, in the association established, evocative and rich in imaginative meanings, in how we can be edified, and meaningfully moved, by our puzzlements.5 Tropology thus addresses mentally productive movement in humans as a kind of mental copulation, bringing into fertile relationship a puzzling subject of interest and desired understanding with, in some way, a more meaningful object or subject of more established understanding. And, surely resonant with the reproductive referent, we do not hesitate to use the related word “copula” to identify the axis of imaginative movement and momentum: a movement that takes place in the predication across the copula of a more meaningful object of interest upon a puzzling or relatively meaningless or confusedly meaningful subject of interest. This predicative coupling across the copula is meaningful in the revitalizing sense. We might call this activity the Romance of the Imagination—in its way, the ultimate productive intimacy proper to human thought and its sense of meaningfulness. Given the extraordinary mental transformations undergone by Homo sapiens sapiens, the question arises of how to account for them, particularly the transformation of communicative interaction from closed, limited call systems of the apes to the astonishingly open, grammatically complex and productive language systems of humans. In the language origins research of the

4



james w. fernandez

last decades there has been an intriguing new focus on a change that produces language, namely the change from the obsessive physical, quasi-erotic attention to one another of the apes, seen in grooming, to an equally prominent attention to one another’s activities through language: human gossip! This shift from frequent erotic grooming, common among the great apes and especially the bonobos, to frequent social bonding, by means of a much wider, less intimate mechanism, gossip, is something captured succinctly in the title of Dunbar’s (1996) captivating and important book on the process of evolution from call system to language system: Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. This extraordinary shift might equally, by our argument here, be labeled, if a bit more colorfully, From Copulation to the Copula in the Evolution of Language!

On the Excluded and Included Middle and the Inescapable Uncertainties of Trope-Logic So, in brief, if we ask what kind of logic is tropologic, we answer first that it is a predicative logic counting on the transitional and agglutinative power of the copula, by which a puzzling domain, or parts of it, of difficult understanding and uncertain meaning seek and are offered from across the copula, and by various figurations, meaningfulness from another domain of experience. The seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Calderón de la Barca’s play La Vida es Sueňo affirms that the inchoateness of life can be better understood as a dream. Indeed, Calderón’s assumption finds itself accepted and richly employed—refigurated, as it were—in the essay here by our editor Marko Živković, “Dreams Inside-Out: Some Uses of Dreams in Social Theory and Ethnographic Inquiry” (chapter 3). It is in both cases a predication in terms of simplicity and generality matched by Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage.”6 In short, it suggests a logic by which something of or from a domain of enriched understanding, say, from the domain of dreams or of stage plays, is predicated upon the puzzlement and paucity of another, more complex and obscure domain of interest—say, interrelational life itself—acting either to resolve its uncertainties or in one way or another minimize it or enrich it. It is an act of construction whose fundamental building blocks are the tropes—the metaphors, metonyms, synecdoche, ironies, etc., the drama or the stage plays etc.—with which, or out of which, the imagination poetically constructs (i.e., “figures out” through creative figurations) its “pleasure domes” of dramatic experience.7 The reader will find these figurings-out happening in most of the essays included in this volume. The study of the tropes, in any case, presumes the recurrent situation in the human condition of puzzlement or deficits of meaning—which might be also called the inchoateness of the human condition or situation out of which

introduction



5

all humans must work their way “casting about elsewhere” to supply that meaning. This search for greater meaningfulness can take place within the domain where the subject normally is situated or belongs, in the cases of metonymy and synecdoche, or outside that domain of normal situation or belonging, in the case of metaphor. The logic of the trope, then, is first that of meaningful predication upon or association of a deficient subject of interest with more meaningful objects or actions of contemplation or evocation. In a manner distinct from symbology,8 tropology tries to (1) find or maintain a clear sense of connection between the subject or situation of deficit of meaning and that which is predicated or associated with or upon it; and (2) understand the consequences of this predication or evocative association for the deficient subject in its actions and interactions in the everyday social world, studied by the anthropologist. Given that anthropological method requires or urges long-term participant observation on its practitioners, generally a year or more in a particular society, the discipline as such is well placed to understand the multiple associations at play and being transferred in the plurality of predications taking place day in and day out in human interaction and, most significantly, in human conversation. The study of the tropes is, of course, widespread in the humanities but, up until recently, not much used in the social sciences. Among the social sciences, to be sure, anthropological ethnography is said to be most proximate to the humanities and thus perhaps most congenial to the figuration-oriented, conceptual analytic apparatus of the humanities and more accepting of it. Just the same, as tropology is a method of inquiry and understanding that seeks to belong to the social sciences, we should address two issues that often worry social scientists—anthropologists, at least—when one undertakes to introduce concepts more familiar to the humanities. The first issue concerns the difference between the logic of the sciences and the logic of the humanities. Some decades ago, F. S. C. Northrop (1965) pointed out that in the humanities, in contrast to the sciences, there is a tolerance of “the excluded middle.” That is, there is the acceptance that a thing under investigation and being thought about can be and not be at the same time, or can be some one thing and some other thing at the same time. Scientific method, commonly considered, in its intent to find and clarify causal paths and eliminate fuzzy methods is designed to eliminate such ambiguities and ambivalences in observation and explanation. Ethnography, I believe, especially that undertaken in foreign cultures, does force the acceptance of that tentativeness upon us. Manifestly, the human condition, and life in culture, is full of such ambiguities and ambivalences, and they are an integral part of the so often ambiguous dynamics of that condition and the instability, volatility, and constant turnings of social situations. It is part of the puzzlement of our lives. While tropology

6



james w. fernandez

does claim a logic that rests on the agglutinative power of predication, it does not and cannot exclude the presence and uncertainty of multiple meanings and the intermingling of multiple voices9 and also the consequent tensions present within and between the tropes investigated. While it is open to the recognition from experience that a dominant meaning or salient voice may claim and maintain a persistent presence in particular social situations, at the same time it recognizes that such presences and understanding are temporal. Other subordinate voices are present that may often, without very explicit or easily calculable volition, assert themselves to gain “market share,” in the effort to capture the imagination, so to speak, and bring about turnings in meaningful replacements and reversals. Out of puzzlement and paucity a turning toward ephemeral or more enduring moments of meaningfulness is forged. One final point follows from accepting a logic that depends on the copulation of existential domains of experience and that in such a process does not “exclude the middle.” As in the study more broadly of symbolism, tropology recognizes the multivocality of figures of speech and the multiplicity of the tropes available for predication. Consequently, there is a frequent tension as regards discoverable meanings. There is the constant possibility that, in specific social situations, subordinate voices may assert themselves over against the dominant meanings of an existing trope, or set of tropes, and thus subvert a given representation leading to misunderstanding and uncertainty.

Attitudes Three Schools of Rhetorical Thought: Aptness of Argument and Expression A shorter and rather differently oriented version or arrangement of these essay-chapters was first published in Spanish in 2006, acting upon the invitation of editors of Revista de Antropología Social, the preeminent Spanish journal of social and cultural anthropology, based in Madrid.10 We, that is, those of us who participated in that earlier collection, took that initial occasion to introduce this collection by making reference to the importance of the study of rhetoric in the ancient world, in Greece among the Sophists and in Aristotle, in Rome in the overarching figure of Cicero. And more particularly we took the occasion, in deference to our Spanish hosts, to briefly point out the place of rhetoric in Iberian intellectual history, both ancient and early modern, as well as an important difference to be noted in its employ in these two contexts. Different attitudes toward self and world and different schools of rhetoric were involved. Taking into account these differences of context was inevitably of

introduction



7

importance; they were differences that influenced the sense of aptness and expressiveness of re-figurative and con-figurative argument. We proceeded, first, to highlight differences of context by reminding ourselves of two well-known schools and figures in the history of Iberian rhetoric: in Roman Iberia and in early modern Spain (i.e., the seventeenth-century Golden Age of Spain). These significant figures were the Iberian Roman, Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, 35–95 CE), a native of Calahorra, La Rioja, and the two brilliant and enduring figures of seventeenth-century baroque, Golden Age Spanish literature: Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) from Madrid and Baltasar Gracián (1601–58) from Belmonte, Calatayud.11 In this return to the original English version for publication we have added Cervantes and the Quixote as a third significant school of rhetoric. We could not in that first collection expand in any complete way on the overall place of rhetoric in the Spanish intellectual and oratorical traditions, and we do not pretend to do so here. It is a subject not subject to easy generalization in any case. What we can do is point out the different ideas on the role of rhetoric and the figurative imagination as between Quintilian, the Imperial Iberian Roman of the first century CE, and the seventeenth-century Golden Age Spaniards: Cervantes (1547–1616) with the Quixote on the one hand, and Quevedo and Gracián, on the other. These three schools of rhetoric are celebrated and considered foundational figures and forces in the study of rhetoric in general and in the study of rhetorical style, most surely in those cultural worlds where the romance languages prevail.

Quintilian: The Sense of an Imperial Order and of the Orator’s Loyalty to It Quintilian was, if not the major figure in ancient classical rhetoric, at the least, along with Cicero, and in respect to reputation, the preeminent Roman student and teacher of rhetoric. His pedagogical contribution was to argue that training in rhetoric had a crucial relation to the maintenance of the moral order of the empire. As much a teacher as a theoretician, Quintilian set up a school of rhetoric where he argued the very-evident-to-him connection of rhetoric to the moral and social order of the empire. No man consequently, in his view, could be truly eloquent unless he was in principle a good man by those lights. This was a principle that underlay his great study of rhetoric, his magnum opus the Institutio oratoria, a twelve-volume textbook on the theory and practice of rhetoric. It was a textbook that particularly emphasized rhetorical practice, where, very evidently, the ethics of oratorical argument was what he particularly brought to the attention of his students. The orator in his view

8



james w. fernandez

should be just and honorable by nature and a user of rhetoric in the interest of such principles. Oratorical prowess, while the result of the confirmed learning of Quintilian’s technical teachings, was at the same time to be used to confirm innate goodness. One cannot be so naïve as to believe that there was not a conservative politics at work here in favor of a foreordained view of a hierarchical patrician/plebeian class/caste system politics and associated privileges. In any case, he was mainly concerned with the oratorical confirmation, not to say configuration, of social and, to be sure, of conservative political thought and action. In any event, one might say of Quintilian that in his view the condition of possibility of the patricians’ status itself rested, in important part, on their rhetorical capabilities to address, to effectively and convincingly influence, the maintenance of the existing patrician/plebeian moral order. In Quintilian’s efforts to invigorate or reinvigorate the Roman rhetoric capabilities of the patrician class, there lay very practical political concerns for both the maintenance of patrician claims and patrician domination of the empire. Quintilian and the Roman rhetoricians who followed his teaching in general were obviously convinced of the socially constitutive powers of the rhetorical.

Quixotic Dialogue and the Play of Tropes in Culture as a Palaestral Pendulum of Argument in Culture This transitional introduction is hardly the place to expand on Quintilian’s pioneering contribution to the rhetoric literature worldwide and his argument for rhetoric’s crucial contribution to the maintenance of the imperial moral/ social order. Nor can we follow in any detail Quevedo or Gracián and their competitive use of the rhetorical arts, their production of ingenuities pertinent to their own placement and prestige in the courtier’s world of the seventeenth century. But more needs to be said introductorily about the play of tropes in the worldwide classic the Quixote. It so happens that one of our contributors here, Ivo Strecker, and his first essay in this collection, “Don Quixote: Icon of Rhetoric Culture Theory” (chapter 1), offers apt commentary for the contextualizing point we are seeking to make about varying value contexts, or schools, of rhetorical effort. Strecker’s essay offers two important suggestions for our present enterprise. He is, of course, treating a now long famous and widely appreciated, often enough halting, conversation between a mad knight-errant and fantasist, Don Quixote, and his squire, the peasant pragmatist Sancho Panza. The one, Alonso Quijano, is in essence an archetypal patrician driven by the resolute bookish fantasy of what, to him, is the noble lifeway of the knight-errant, while the other, his peasant interlocutor, Sancho, is a down-to-

introduction



9

earth if not utterly earthy peasant driven mainly by the state of his stomach (his panza). Strecker suggests first that we be aware of the abundance of dualistic conceptual oppositions popular in Euro-American culture that may or may not be at play in this “grand conversation” and second that we be cautious in our confidence of the fullness—the validity, perhaps—of our interpretations, a point emphasized in our previous section. In respect to the first caution, Strecker points out that the Quijano/Panza conversations reveal and shape two different characters who reflect a division of society (master versus serf) and then, in turn, two opposite attitudes, styles of speaking, mental dispositions, views of life, and so on: the idealist versus realist, figurative versus plain style, intoxicated versus sober minds, spirit versus matter, etc. So there is an antinomy and polarity that causes the pendulum of argumentation to swing back and forth without ever coming to rest.

Surely there is a complexity here quite besides the age-old problem of limited dualistic, body-mind thinking and its dynamic variations.12 For this reader and author of this essay the Quixote interaction has often been argued to be, and taught as, a classic example of the fictionalism/factualism argument. And he has struggled in an ethnography of a new religion in Africa, created by a people often enough said13 to be an example of primitive or institutionalized dualism. For there are many rituals in this religion whose purpose or consequence are also, quite contrarily, the obtaining of complementarity, or a “saving circularity,” or “one heartedness,” all in an attempt to “return to the whole”—rather than to accept a settled and final set of dualities of oppositional things and thinking!14 No doubt this kind of struggle between oppositionality of elements in rituals and belief systems and complementarity could be found in much ethnography and in many engaged and identity-oriented conversations, for that matter. It is a situation that Strecker calls “the pendulum of argumentation” relevant to our understanding insofar as interaction gets beyond brief truncated gossip and hearsay into more engaged conversation and attempts at completed, transformational argument and more extensive storytelling. And it is the experience of this anthropologist, in studying a half dozen syncretic religions in three parts of Africa from 1955 to 1975, that though the various memberships might seem to be steadfastly dualistic, there is, indeed, a kind of pendulum in play, swinging back and forth between opposition and complementarity. Indeed, it is a play in which the tropes and tropological predication is very much implicated. So Cervantes’s primordial novel raises not only the fictionalism/realism or fact/fiction pendulum likely to be present

10



james w. fernandez

in conversation but a swinging search for equation natural to the human situation, not to say the human equation, generally. The detailed presence of these present or implied oppositional misunderstandings raises the question of what kind of play we have in mind when we think of rhetoric and the play of tropes. Just to take the ongoing discussion here of the four Iberian rhetoricians and the three schools—the first-century Quintilian and the seventeenth-century Cervantes, and Quevedo and Gracián—we are bound to see the difference between, on the one hand, the quite serious “play” of commitment in Quintilian to the moral order of Empire and, on the other hand, the subtly artful verbal play of commitment to self and one’s own placement in an intellectual cum aristocratic cum courtly hierarchy in which Gracián and Quevedo flourished. Here, of course, Cervantes and the Quixote occupy a special and ironic place that exalts them in our understanding and appreciation. For Cervantes is neither a teacher nor a student of a specific moral order, neither imperial nor aristocratic; rather, he famously exists in being a kind of ironic observer and overseer of the moral order of human nature itself and not himself a pupil or product of a particular schooling. So what we have is two kinds of rhetorical play and a referee to that play itself. A situation in which the game at play involves acceptance of common commitment to overarching imperial values is significantly different than a situation in which the game at play is one of perspectival and experiential differences to begin with, put to the service of an ethic of self-promotion—a kind of play productive of cleverness in slicing and dicing tropological choices in such a way as to favor one’s own advancement, often enough, and most usually, at the expense of others. Any academic not selflessly devoted to an imperial ideology, or fastidious about self-promotion, will recognize either the ego nurturance or the imperial nurturance ever-present in academic life! Indeed, it has been argued that much of the “play of tropes” is palaestral (Bailey 2007), that is, a kind of wrestling going on between, as is inevitable in the human situation, significantly different bodies and minds, each with differences in perspective and experiences and hence essentially dissimilar in understanding or weighting of the implicit arguments contained in so many conversations. When we think of the play of tropes in various kinds of social conversation, therefore, we think not only of the play between the tropes themselves, between metaphor and metonym, for example, or between irony and sobriety, but of the play between the different individual perspectives of the various participants in the conversations cum arguments. Once again, the classic conversation between Quixote and Sancho is not only a play between various kinds of tropes, the belly and the brain or the genitals and the soul, and possible oppositional entities such as windmills, on the part of the one, and possible sources of food or drink or foreplay for he himself

introduction



11

or his donkey, on the part of the other. Though the play of tropes in the conversational relations in this Baroque classic is highly stylized and particular, as is the knight/squire relation by definition, it tells us something about the illusory power, the power to produce realities by the play of tropes in general among humans. It is a play, is it not, among beings whose mutuality of interest is always conditioned and challenged by important differences of experience and interests that challenge and devalue the mutual being at play in conversation and that stimulate participants to tell stories out of school. But at the same time it is a play of illusory power, the power to capture the imagination in favor of particular realities favorable to the rhetor rather than to the author.15 There are, then, important underlying questions that all of us, the contributors, face in this collection of essays as we take up the overall question of the role of the tropes in culture and in establishing the tenor and structural strength of human relations in society that are a consequence of their presence. One question is the question of the tropes as prime agents of fantasy, for, as Strecker points out, our culturally anchored beliefs and accustomed behaviors and social interactions rest more upon fantasy than we ordinarily recognize. Cervantes himself, of course, raises in his now virtually universal text, and in the heedlessly fantastical behavior of Don Quixote therein described, that pervasive question: the degree to which human belief and comportment is in important part fiction if not fantasy driven. In the case of the Quixote, the fiction of nobility with a crucially important mission—a mission supposedly of great meaningfulness in and of itself—becomes quite questionable! What is taken to be the inevitably fruitful consequences of valorous knighthood in tasks undertaken in its service is shown to be of hollow and vacant consequence—fictitious, in a word. There is, however, in Strecker’s essay, an additional and important caution as regards the surety of our interpretive understanding of the tropes themselves, in their singularity and in their inevitable combinatory multireferentiality. Strecker suggests, evoking the work of Steven Tyler, his colleague in the Rhetoric Culture Project,16 that every instance of attempted interpretation of figurative communication faces the challenge of what is called in psychiatry “overdetermination”—or, by Tyler, “indeterminacy” and “interpretive leeway”—in communication.17 Though it is by no means a solution to the problem of “indeterminacy” and “interpretive leeway,” the long-term fieldwork commitment of the anthropologist as ethnographer does very often offer a deeper understanding and, at the least, more locally enriched interpretation of what is involved in any instance of the play of tropes. A good example of this enrichment of understanding obtained by extended fieldwork is found in Lydall and Strecker’s (1979a, 1979b) own extensive ethnographic work, in which they have been involved

12



james w. fernandez

over many years with recurrent conversations by which they have been able to more fulsomely triangulate the meanings of the tropes that are produced in the conversations they have held or that have come to their attention in their accumulating years of ethnography.18

A Sense of a Hierarchy of Privileged Intelligence Engaged on the Royal Field of Verbal Jousting and Exercising the Clever Egocentric Art of Gaining Reputation Most interesting in respect to the role of rhetoric and figurative thought in the Spanish literary tradition would be the work of the two major figures of the seventeenth-century Spanish baroque, Quevedo and Gracián. It was a century otherwise referred to as the Golden Age (Siglo de Oro) of Spanish literature. Both of these major figures in the Spanish literary tradition are especially known for the inventiveness and subtlety of their use of figurative speech. Gracián’s literary ideas and emphasis are best suggested perhaps in the book published at the height of his powers, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Subtle wit and the art of the ingenious) (1642). Both Quevedo and Gracián were noted practitioners of what was called conceptismo, a style of expressing oneself involving pungent and subtle use of wit or sharpness (agudeza). It was a time of the predominant presence of the royal court and hence the supreme importance of the obtaining and granting of royal privileges and placements. Both of these figures were engaged in that “competition of letters,” seeking in their work recognition and high placement on the score sheet of subtlety and ingenuity, particularly Quevedo. In contrast to the ambitious patriotism and practical optimism of early Imperial Rome of the first century AD, the seventeenth century in Spain despite its creativeness—its Golden-Agedness, one might say—in respect to creative cleverness was in retrospect a time of sensed decline of Empire and hence very frequently an air of irresolute disappointment, pessimism, and consequent satire (Gracián y Morales 1929 [1645]). And the rhetoric of the gifted, like Quevedo and Gracián, was in important part satirical and down-putting. In so being, it risked affectation and an overly manneredness of argument. It was quite unlike the robust moral positivity of social-imperial commitment emphasized to the rhetorician-in-becoming as defined by Quintilian. One must be cautious about such gross generalizations. It still seems fair to recognize an important difference between the “rhetoric of the good man” and his moral convictions of first-century Rome and the rhetoric of the clever and witty man and his subtle sense of his personal place achieved on the jousting field of verbal challenges among relativities characteristic of life in seventeenth-century Spain.

introduction



13

Obviously, in respect to our collection here, it is the role of each particular author to judge and describe his or her own sense of the particular context(s) in which the tropes he or she is dealing with are operating, or at least the rhetorical tradition and school to which they might best correspond. We may, in an overview and an introductory way, however, call our readers’ attention here to the various contexts that shape or challenge the revitalizing effect of tropological predication and figuration. Inevitably, one argues, these influences have their distinct effect on the efficacy, aptness, and valiancy of the figurations predicated upon them and employed or referred to in the associated commentary.

Plenitude and Finitude The Warp and Weft of the Imagination: How the Dramatization of the Human Condition Energizes Tropic Predication, Favoring and Fashioning Open Language Systems out of the Closed Call Systems of Animals What we have argued so far is that to think tropologically is to be made aware of possible movements in meaning, that is, turnings of understanding, accompanied by a sense of possible apt redescription of self and other by turning to another existential domain of experience. To obtain meaning, one turns away from the employ of a particular domain on which one has focused but found puzzling and turns, vey often by an aptness of trope, to another domain or another part of that domain that is more illuminating. Mehr licht! We have unabashedly in the process of this essay, indeed, in the very first section, put forth some elemental principles to anchor our argument: “meaning as mental movement,” or “thought as predicative movement.” Very early in our argument we developed a view of the tropes as agents of re-direction, re-description, re-vitalization, or de-vitalization. This reductionism, however satisfying to very human desires for simplification and parsimony, has to be countered with the recognition that the tropes are in their endless predicative activity and possibility also continuous producers of plenitude in human experience and explanatory thought. This point is amply supported by the very diversity of tropes we find in play in the various chapters that follow this introduction—a plethora if not a plenitude! This plethora or plenitude is addressed summarily in our final section, entitled “Multitudes of Edification.” In any event, there is a kind of double argument going on simultaneously in this introduction: both a simplification of perspectives and a complexification. We might well use Professor Strecker’s term for treating the dialogue, and

14



james w. fernandez

dialectical tension, in the Quixote between the humble squire Sancho Panza and his knight-errant Alonso Quijano and label this double argument another instance of the inevitable “pendulum of argumentation.” There is a constant effort in human intercommunication, both conversational and more formally intellectual, to make sense together about the complexities—the blooming buzzing confusion, to echo William James—of the human condition! And I might add as the present author and thinking of my earlier ethnographic work (Fernandez 1982), where I identified an “oppositionality/complementarity” at work: the two dynamics might well be called pendulum effects. These are, of course, analytic abstractions, but in that ethnographic work I saw these semi-systematic changes anchored or anchor-able in the ethnography. As another instantiation of this dynamic one could take male/female differentiation, even oppositionality. The various ritual statements of this oppositionality in Bwiti were almost always accompanied by forms of dress and ritual song celebrating complementarity.19 It would be wrong to think that these successive revitalizations of our thoughts have any finality or finitude to them. For the argument of images has a plenitude and perpetuity in it. Perhaps we might say an infinitude in it, for there will always be puzzlements that arise with the times and a plenitude of tropes—arguments of images—within the purview of imaginative people by which they might be captured. That puzzlement and recapturing seems to be a dramatical fact of human life together. To mildly paraphrase an old saw,20 if there is a puzzled person born every minute there is a trope discovered to capture his imagination. I want to end part 3 with something that has long puzzled not only me but thousands of others over a century and a half at least. How do we explain the origins and development of the complex, self-conscious, imaginative open languages of humans when all the other animals including the great apes have closed call systems with only occasionally the barest suggestion of openness and imagination? I want to emphasize this question since, as promised earlier, I want to take up and make some reference in part 3 to the “origin of open language” problem as it relates to the tropes. My speculation is that the origin is in some respects tied into the predication problem, the problem of feeling the existence of various domains of experience and feeling accompanied by the feeling of the possibility of these two domains entering into copulation, that is, finding a copula by which to interrelate them and thereby releasing imaginative images. Moreover, these images were (early on, it seems arguable) often explicitly or implicitly laden with the dramatic possibilities and assertions of our primordial social animality from chest pounding or dramatized estrous! I hesitate to say we are implicitly dramatic animals and the expressive and expository

introduction



15

energy of that dramatism has to be part of the calculation of our no doubt long-lasting laborious access and final access to our present exquisite competence in articulating our thoughts fully enmeshed in grammatical complexity. In open, fully copula-ating language use we find also our impulses as social animals to dramatize the tensions of that social animality, to enlist our own imaginations, and to capture others for this understandings in dramatic ways. We are not just social animals; we are dramatic animals, and that dramatism lies in important part in our synesthetic capacities to sense the instructive, possibly revitalizing relationship between two different domains of experience and existence. And to sense also the likely enlightenment to be found in their copulation is a capacity that enables dramaticality and very well may have been crucial to language origins. This may seem an extravagant, overdramatized argument, but let us not forget that two of our most important thinkers about society and culture of the previous generation, Kenneth Burke and Victor Turner, styled themselves or their thinking as dramatism or as “dramatistic.” Turner instructively formulated the ethnography of social life as the study of “social drama” (see Rueckert 1963; Burke 1985; and Turner 1974, 1990). To be sure, we evoke here these related issues of dramatism, social drama, and capturing the imagination because of the obvious role of the tropes in these activities, as enablers, energizers, revitalizers, and dramatizers themselves. But we want also, as promised, to think about their presence returning to the beginnings and the overarching questions we have been raising: the evolutionary question of how our fully open languages, whatever their eventual trope usages and dramatic tensions, could ever have become possible in the first place. More particularly, how could the imagination of the mindful presence of the other and others stimulate interaction to such a degree that early humans shifted from the signaling of call systems to the predicative symboling and grammaticality of language systems. These questions, not incidentally, have been raised importantly in the last quarter century by paleo-anthropologists and paleo-psychologists who focus on human evolution and who attempt various answers to these questions. And we have already mentioned the “grooming to gossip” argument by the paleo-psychologist Dunbar and colleagues. One might suggest here as we conclude part 3 of the essay that the tropes have played an important part in this difficult-to-explain evolution. They could have been important parts, if not the important parts, of that achievement. Might not it have been the development, through powers of association and synesthesia, perhaps, of the ability to recognize the possibility and aptness of referencing associations from one domain of experience to another domain that was an exercise of associational capacity necessary for moving to more complex ideation and expression? Was the usefulness of that predicative pos-

16



james w. fernandez

sibility, the very nature of any trope, the discovery that put humans on the road to what was at first crude gossip? Gossip is, after all, naturally inter-domain oriented. Eventually, of course, this would have led to more composed social signaling or signing to a final storytelling with all the refinements of imaginative activity that we presently generate and live with (see Dunbar 1996). Does the use of those nuclei of inter-domain intercommunication—this synesthesia, these warps and wefts of imaginative intercommunication, the tropes— contain, at the very least, an important part of the answer to the becoming of the imaginative (fictive) creatures we have become? Were the tropes in more primitive form some of the earliest instances of the use of the primal imagination? Does our focus, then, upon the tropes in this volume return us to the very foundational capacity of our humanity in its beginnings? Here at the end of this transitional introduction we might well argue that it does. Hopefully we have at least made the case that the tropes are extraordinary aids to human thinking. That is why we have given this introductory essay the title “Aides Pensée.” Here we argue that we might have reason to reframe this effort to read “Aides Parler.” Are not the tropes integral to the most ancient weavings of the imagination? If so, then our interest in this volume in the tropes in contemporary ethnography is hardly a novelty, much less a peripherality. It is, rather, an act of touching base with an essential feature of our humanity. In its capacity for turning and transformation lies our capacity for transcendence of the puzzlement of outgrown and outworn circumstance giving back to us the possibility of stimulating dramatic engagement. The tropes in this view lie at the heart of the human imagination; that is to say, they lie at the heart of our humanity and its unique powers of cultural conversation and cultural creation—in short, our ultimate capacity for revitalization and periodic escape from the inevitabilities of morbidity and finitude! In processing reality, let us say, the plenitude of their presence, as always-available predications, is a never-ending satisfaction!

Multitudes of Edification Vignettes of Tropic Transformation: A Thumbnail Approach to the Dramatis Personae of This Collection and Their Edifying Arguments and Some Suggestions on How They Capture the Imagination We ended the previous section with some ambitious claims and appreciations indeed. Let us retreat a bit into our anthropological shell. The ensuing chapters in this collection are, by and large, quite down to earth. They are, in the majority, the product of extended ethnographic presences among the peoples described. The authors offer, as ethnographers can and must, “thick descrip-

introduction



17

tions” of the problems discussed. But insofar as they are tropological in nature they are all making or causing a turning in the reader’s imagination. They are “arguments of images” (Fernandez 1986a) with the intent, evident or not, of “capturing the reader’s imagination.”21 They are also edifying responses to puzzles that the authors as ethnographers have inevitably encountered in the field as a natural enough product of any ethnographic inquiry. The key terms “edifying” and “edification” deserve some special attention here. This author made use of the term in the late 1970s when addressing the way that intellectual activity in the social sciences is carried out, to an important degree, working under the stimulus of puzzlement! I was pointing out the often considerable opaqueness and uncertainty that attend our “communicative interactions” but that nevertheless, despite the uncertainties and ambiguities, can be inspirational, instructional, improving, even uplifting (Fernandez 1981). Though this phrasing and key word, “edifying,” came to me independently and as part of my experience as a scholar of African “systems of thought,” to which context it was then addressed, it turned out to be, I discovered, a term that was central to an important book on pragmatic philosophy, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by my then Princeton colleague Richard Rorty (1979).22 I have subsequently benefited from his thinking and usages of the word. Let me say how. Rorty was a neopragmatist in the tradition of John Dewey who questioned the possibility of any final certainty in philosophy, however systematic a philosopher might be. He saw the philosopher’s task not as that of finding final truth or certainty—one might say “finding finitude” in explication—but rather as that of enabling continuously creative and revealing philosophical conversation. The task was not that of finding “commensuration between academic cultures” but that of pointing out their uniqueness and hence their contribution to the enduring “conversation of mankind.” And this conversational enablement, for Rorty, largely consisted in producing re-descriptions of the human self and his or her social and cultural circumstances. What Rorty envisioned was a philosophy without epistemology (1979: 356) that is without the drive for truthful knowledge and the privileged positioning that its discovery offers to its possessors. What he was aware of—which I, in my non-philosophic way, was aware of as well—was the degree of opacity present on all sides in the academic conversations going on in the social sciences and humanities, and in fact in all human conversation. What I put forth in the late 1970s in the phrase “edification by puzzlement” was the sense that in the academic enterprise we rarely, if ever, fully understand the arguments of others. Yet it is a part of our entrepreneurial life to be stimulated to respond to these others by formulating and rethinking our own structures of understanding, our existing edifices as it were, of which we

18



james w. fernandez

alone, or with a few colleagues, have been the architects and masons. Encountering and working through, as far as a non-philosopher is able, Rorty’s own sense of his philosophy without epistemology, his edifying rather than systematically specifying philosophy, in short, I was struck with its pertinence to anthropological ethnography and, for the ethnographer, its communicative possibilities and obligations! Anthropological field ethnography is a very special, one might say peculiar, kind of conversation that leads, or should lead, to mutual edification—not a state of exact mutual knowledge, as one would expect to be produced by the systematicities of formal science, but a state of mutual reflection, re-description, and revision of existing convictions. Rorty was also a person who took the tropes—mostly metaphor—quite seriously as playing a fundamental revelatory role in the edifying conversations philosophers offered. Indeed, in his posthumous lectures he argued that philosophy was a kind of poetry, dependent, as poetry is, upon the tropes in obtaining edifying effects in its lucubrations and articulations (see Rorty 2016). One can hope that the reader of these ensuing chapters will find something of the same trope-generated poetic effect at play!

Brief Comments on the Motivated Movement and Turnings in Argument That Are Taken in This Collection We may turn now, finally, to this introductory encounter, by means of thumbnail sketches, vignettes, with the rich diversity of our various ensuing essays. At this point in the final whirl of the carousel the reader-rider can hardly be surprised by the notion that to think tropologically is to be aware of movements in meaning, that is, turnings of understanding natural to the predicative process and paradigm. These, hopefully, should stimulate, in Rorty’s words, re-description—freshenings, we can call them—of certain of our preexistent impressions. These thumbnails are of course intended to be only prefatory groundwork for the much richer texture of the chapters themselves and their detailed arguments. We turn now to thumbnail treatments of our ensuing collection in the hopes of priming the pump for the more extended edification that awaits. Chapter 1 (Ivo Strecker). An essay, persuasive in its findings, of the everpresence of the rhetorical in all human meaning making and, indeed, the condition of humankind’s creative existence in culture. This argument, apt for this collection, is exemplified in the unique, indeed eternal, if strained conversation between the illustrious but illusioned knight, Don Quixote, and his earthy squire, the one preoccupied with his fantasies and his honor and the other with the feed for his donkey and his belly (Panza). The now classic extended conversation of this archetypal pair cautions us from overgeneralizing vectors

introduction



19

in the emotional movements energized by the tropes that we emphasize in these vignettes. It shows us, rather, the pendulum of affect and argument by which and in which the imagination so often plays in human conversations and intercommunications. The argument is enriched by close reference to a many-years investigation by the author and his wife of the cultural world and figurative wisdom of the Hamar of Ethiopia. Chapter 2 (John Leavitt). An essay exploring the meanings associated (i.e., “swinging”) with the principle liminality of human experience: the universal diurnal turning from day to night, from the work-a-day world to the rest-anight world. Turning to the trope of twilight we discover how it humanizes the human condition. It would be difficult to find an ethnographically richer account of this universal liminality of the human situation and a better sense of managing the recurrent times of transition from the work-a-day to the resta-night than this essay, focused as it is upon a Central Himalayan crepuscular configuration and its swinging interlude! Chapter 3 (Marko Živković). An essay written by one of the victims of a situation involving a scandalous and corrupt government and a bewildering kind of magical realism that is hard to believe, hard to describe, impossible to influence critically: a situation calling out for a saving trope. The anthropologist turns to the dream trope, coming to see in it the necessarily bizarre governing principle of this strange and estranged instance of governmentality: it is a kind of dreamwork. It is a work that can only be made sense of, as far as the civic conscience is concerned, by the rhetorical use of the dream trope working at another level of consciousness than the normal, to-be-expected everyday work of the civic conscience-ness! Chapter 4 (Joseba Zulaika). An essay that evokes the situation in Bilbao and the Basque country of increasing, ruinous skepticism about the old realities of faith and the ready availability of helpful spiritual presences, as well as an accompanying lack of confidence in the realities of now outmoded disciplinary methods that can only remind one of the adjacent rusted ruins of the city’s once prosperous and potent iron and steel industry and, in turning to them, suggests a transferable, a convertible trope of material ruin and material reconstruction offering, in a material/spiritual predication, a transferable hope of spiritual resurrection, a methodological resurrection, and an overall sense of a possible and graspable re-constructible future. Chapter 5 (Michael Carrithers). An essay, one might say, following so closely on Zulaika, that also explores the consequence of moral ruin and the tropic effort to relieve the extraordinary weight of a shameful past contaminated by

20



james w. fernandez

a vicious genocidal politics, the shipwreck of Nazism and the producer of the Holocaust. A notable essay following the attempt by one of Europe’s “most civilized people” to come to terms with the weight of the former ghastly situation so as to reorient the present to a revitalized moral code. The author follows the fits and starts of that attempt to refigure that past and reorient a once contaminated moral order by taking up tropes to tell a new story. The tropic turn is to tell a wholly revitalizing and reorienting story, a reseeding of the landscape of national being, an extraordinary effort at reorientation closely followed in its anguished temporizing. Chapter 6 (Gustav Peebles). An essay examining the situation where the acquisitive accumulative, exploitative uses of money make this bright shining fictional coin of efficient marketing and mutually profitable exchange into the primal stuff of self-production and self-interest, an excrement aptly identified with that primal Freudian configuration of the child’s primal world where he or she must come to terms with one’s very personal production learning to alienate it accordingly. Chapter 7 (James W. Fernandez). An essay that focuses on two tropes, two aides pensée —the path and the garden—that so frequently find pictorialization in our dream life, where they are in contest both for our conscious and calculating understanding and for its enrichment. They express the perpetual tension between contingency and playfulness and are constantly subject to various path-ologies, especially for that pathfinder and gardener who is the ethnographer! They are also readable in evolutionary terms as the progression in thoughtways/lifeways from the expedient times of hunters and gatherers in their aleatory wanderings, of pastoralists settling down to follow their animals’ instincts and one stage or another of progressing agri-culturalists anchored to the algorithms of their agro sciences and subjected to the long-term dependency on, and unpredictability of, the local weather. Chapter 8 (Steve Coleman). An essay that treats of the situation of the devitalization attendant upon general abandonment of the Irish language, Gaelic. But a trope is found to remind the Irish of the real matter of which they are made and in which they remain rooted, from so many thousands of burials: the ever fertile and ultimately invigorating ancestral clay of the Emerald Isle. Let that ever-present clay be, ironically, the revitalizing trope in which the ancestors and the echoes of their talk is found and out of which they and their language can spring again anew. Chapter 9 (Bernard Bate). An essay that explores the misrepresentations, both inadvertent and intended, as well as the part/whole politics that arise in

introduction



21

a nation, ours, that for a second time commits itself to a colonial war—first Vietnam and then Iraq. Both of these enterprises have been undertaken parapractically, mistakenly invested in the guise of or in the name of the defense of liberty, a pretense focused particularly in and around that eternal trope of that so often bellicose solidarity, the flag, so often vested with a fetish power and regularly taken in ritual re-representations as part and parcel of the sacred whole of national identity! Chapter 10 (Mary Scoggin). An essay evoking a people living, as the citizens of China now do, in the de-vitalizing unrest of a one-party state, subject to its clumsy, often enough repressive, and even ruthless actions as a distant authoritarian regime. For those ever seeking a way to speak truth to power, it is a parlous situation best treated with the sure-handedness of an archer most often merely pricking, and sometimes dangerously drawing blood, but always with the possibility of cleverly, though not aggressively, addressing this repressive power with irony’s arrow. Chapter 11 (William O. Beeman). An essay that shows us, that makes us hear, as it were, the increased expressivity that musical tropes in their variety add to the already added meaning obtained by the interdomainal linguistic or visual play of the kind of tropes we are familiar with in these essays. Chapter 12 (Dale Pesmen). As an essay pertinent to the main themes of our collection, it presents a creative stream of quite conscious narrative in the form of a conversation by the author with herselves and her putative readers about the always present and always possible turnabouts, the volatility (precariousness, capriciousness, unpredictability) of human conversation. Hence an important demonstration of the tangentialism and/or breakpoints that can produce tropes or are themselves responses to a predicated trope! Chapter 13 (Terence Turner). An essay using both field data from the Kayapo of Brazil and frame theory from the social sciences; a rethinking of structuralism showing the powers of transformation and transcendence that can be obtained by the play of tropes together with the play of frames as posited in frame theory. James W. Fernandez is professor emeritus of cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. He taught previously at Smith College, Dartmouth College, and Princeton University. For the first quarter century of his career he carried out ethnographic research on religious revitalization in Africa, and his second ethnography in that pursuit, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (1982), won the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies

22



james w. fernandez

Association. A focus on the “play of tropes” and the “figuration of cultural that is to say intersubjective realities” has been a constant in his career and ethnography since the 1950s.

Notes 1. Axiomatic in this essay and indeed in this author’s work generally is the obligation in our ethnographical storytelling to pay attention to and convey the vicissitudes of local life, its becomings, and its fallings away. In this regard, see the exemplary collection of essays edited by Michael Carrithers (2009) on the rhetorical vicissitudes that constitute the very tenor of life and one way in which we humans feel the presence and pressure of culture. This present author, working the first quarter century of his career (from 1955 to 1980) on religious movements in Africa, has approached the vicissitudes of living from the point of view of Wallace’s (1956) revitalization theory, laid out in a classic paper that has led to a multitudinous literature. It treats of the overall effort of maintaining and, in the event, regaining vitality and continuing to thrive! 2. The absolutely central place of “intersubjective truth” or fiction, as the cognitive revolution that made humans human and gave them culture in a fulsome way, is argued forcefully by the new and virtually universal public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari (2014: chaps. 2 and 6; 2017: chaps. 3 and 4) in his series of books. Of course, Harari’s insights have been long preceded in the social sciences, in large and in small, by, on the one hand, “fictionalism” in philosophy and, on the other hand, such enduring gems of thought as Clifford Geertz’s (1972) observation in The Interpretation of Culture that culture is essentially “stories we tell each other about each other.” The most important philosophers dedicated to “intersubjectivism” have been the phenomenologists and especially Edmund Husserl (1950). This present author, from the point of view of an interest in consensus as a kind of intersubjectivity (and making a distinction between social and cultural consensus), analyzed the kinds of ways in which individuals agreed or disagreed with each other (Fernandez 1965). 3. This is a point made persuasively nearly a century ago by John Dewey (1929) in his book, foundational for American neo-pragmatism, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. 4. For illuminating discussion on the frames/domains debate, see the essay in this volume by Terence Turner (chapter 13). 5. For an argument about the instructive, edifying consequence of puzzlements when dealing with “intersubjective truth,” see Fernandez 1981. 6. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 2, scene 5. 7. A Coleridgean notion employed by this author (Fernandez 1982) in an “ethnography of the imagination” that attempts to “figure out” at length how the members of an African revitalization movement, Bwiti, themselves through their figurations “figure out” the “religious pleasure dome” they present to their participants. As regards this Coleridgean phrase, “pleasure dome,” it derives from his Kubla Khan. 8. See the argument on this issue between one of anthropology’s important students of symbolization, Victor Turner, and the author (Turner and Fernandez 1973). 9. There is a rich, masterful awareness of this multiplicity in the work of our colleague, the late Paul Friedrich (1991). This is a rewarding essay on the tropes and a full complement and companion to Kenneth Burke’s (1941) pioneering “Four Master Tropes.”

introduction



23

10. The title was “Monografico: La tropología y la figuración del pensamiento y de la acción social”; it was published as a special issue of Revista de Antropología Social 15 (2006): 5–317. María Cătedra and Asensción Barañano, the journal editors, had invited the author of these introductory lines to act as editor of the proposed monografico and make a collection of essays by like-minded colleagues on the role of the figurative imagination in society and culture. They promised to translate these into Spanish, as they did. Consequently, almost all of the essay chapters of the first collection, although originally written in English, were only available in Spanish for more than a decade and a half. But their importance and, often enough, brilliance has seemed to justify their re-presentation here again in their original English, opening them up to a wider readership in their original language than is and was possible in Spanish. Some significant changes have been made in this English version as compared with the Spanish, most notably the inclusion here of Cervantes and the Quixote as one of the schools of thought along with Quintilian and Quevedo and Gracián. 11. Cervantes and the Quixote was not originally included here because the author of El Quixote (the classic was published between 1604 and 1614) was a surpassing (i.e., universal) presence in Spanish as well as in world literature and it was uncomfortable to categorize him and it in the terms of the discussion of schools and as simply a figure of the Spanish Baroque and Golden Age. He and the Quixote much surpassed that! 12. Among which is, of course, the instability of any dualistic view and the inevitable transformations of it, according to time and temperament, studied by structuralist theory! 13. Most notably by the author of the valuable pioneering Fang ethnography, Gunter Tessmann (1972 [1913]), who in those chapters discussing their religion takes the Fang as impressive exemplars of primitive archetypal dualistic thinking. 14. For a discussion of both the institutionalized dualism and the way complementarity is achieved in rituals of various kinds, that is, rituals of “one heartedness,” see Fernandez 1982 (pp. 344, 371, 390–393, 639, and 649). 15. One of the important insights that rhetoric culture has long offered is its recognition of rhetoric’s ontological power to “realize illusions.” It is in that sense that Strecker speaks of Quixote as an icon of culture, which is to say a primordial portrait in European literature of the power of literature—the literature of knightly nobility, as it were—to create realities, giants out of windmills. For a similar argument, see Barbaruk 2015 (especially pp. 43 and 540–551). 16. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a consortium of scholars under the stimulus of anthropologists Ivo Strecker (Mainz University) and Steven Tyler (Rice University) have participated in the many conferences and publications of the International Rhetoric Culture Project (http://www.rhetoric-culture.org/). 17. Strecker instances here Steven Tyler’s signal postmodern work on indeterminacy in communication, in, from the speakers’ point of view, what is being said and, in interpretation from the listener’s point of view, what is meant (see Tyler 1978: 137). The present author (Fernandez 1980: 13–43) has treated this as the “inchoate in communication” and, inevitably, the “inchoate of inquiry.” 18. Despite this fulsomeness of ethnographic attention it does not escape “indeterminancy,” that is to say, “the inchoate of inquiry.” 19. We can also see this dynamic tension as captured in the weaving trope as both the opposition and complementarity of the warp and the weft of culture. 20. “There is a sucker born every minute and a sharper to take his money,” P. T. Barnum reportedly said.

24



james w. fernandez

21. In a long-taught course on oral narrative, a main thematic argument is that humans are “argumentative animals” bent on, for various purposes, “capturing the imagination” of the other and that such capturing is what storytelling and other kinds of narrative persuasion are mainly about! 22. See, especially, the introduction and chapter 8 (“Philosophy without Mirrors”) in Rorty 1979 for much fuller exploration of the edification trope.

References Bailey, F. G. 2009. “The Palaestral Mode of Rhetoric.” In Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life, ed. Michael Carrithers, 107–120. New York: Berghahn Books. Barbaruk, Magdalena. 2015. The Long Shadow of Don Quixote: Interdisciplinary Studies in Performance, vol. 3, trans. Patrycha Poniatowska. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Black, Max. 1962. Models and Metaphors: Studies in language and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Burke, Kenneth. 1941. “Four Master Tropes.” Kenyon Review 3(4): 421–438. ———. 1985. “Dramatism and Logology.” Communication Quarterly 33(2): 89–93. Carrithers, Michael, ed. 2009. Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life. New York: Berghahn Books. Crocker, J. C., and J. David Sapir, eds. 1977. The Social Use of Metaphor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dewey, John. 1929. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action; Gifford Lectures. New York: Minton. Dunbar, Robin. 1996. Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2005. The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution. London: Faber and Faber. Durham, Deborah, and J. W. Fernandez. 1991. “Tropical Dominions: The Figurative Struggle over Domains of Belonging and Apartness in Africa.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. J. W. Fernandez, 190–210. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fernandez, James W. 1965. “Symbolic Consensus in a Fang Reformative Cult.” American Anthropologist 67(4): 902–929. ———. 1974. “The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology 15(2): 119–145. ———. 1980. “The Dark at the Bottom of the Stairs: The Inchoate in Symbolic Inquiry and Some Strategies for Coping with It.” In On Symbols in Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoijer, 13–43. Malibu: Undena. ———. 1981. “Edification by Puzzlement.” In Explorations in African Systems of Thought, ed. Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird, 44–59. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1982. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1986a. “The Argument of Images and the Experience of Returning to the Whole.” In The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, 159–187. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1986b. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

introduction



25

Friedrich, Paul. 1979. “Poetic Language and the Imagination: A Reformulation of the Sapir Hypothesis.” In Language, Context and the Imagination: Essays by Paul Friedrich, ed. Anwar S. Dil, 440–517. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1991. “Polytropy.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. J. W. Fernandez, 17–55. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gamble, Clive, John Gowlett, and Robin Dunbar. 2018. Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind. London: Thames and Hudson. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1983. “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought.” In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 21–35. New York: Basic Books. Gracián y Morales, Baltasar. 1929 (1645). Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio. Madrid: La Rafa. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge: MIT Press. Harari, Yuval Noah. 2014. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Harvill Secker. ———. 2017. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Vintage. Husserl, Edmund. 1950. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Lydall, Jean, and Ivo Strecker. 1979a. The Hamar of Southern Ethiopia, vol. 2, Baldambe Explains. Hohenschäftlarn: Klaus Renner Verlag. ———. 1979b. The Hamar of Southern Ethiopia, vol. 3, Conversations in Dambaiti. Hohenschäftlarn: Klaus Renner Verlag. Northrop, F. S. C. 1965. The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities. New York: World Publishing. Quevedo, Francisco de, y Villegas. 1972 (1635). Los Sueños. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Quintilian, Marcus Fabius. 1872. Institutiones Oratoriae, Books 10–12. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2016. Philosophy as Poetry: The Page-Barbour Lectures. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Rueckert, W. H. 1963. Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stark, Frank M. 1996. Communicative Interaction, Power and the State: A Method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Strecker, Ivo. 1998. “‘Our Good Fortune Brought Us Together’: Obituary for Baldambe.” Paideuma 44: 59–68. Tessmann, Gunter. 1972 (1913). Die Pangwe. Völkerkundliche Monographie eines westafrikanischen Negerstammes. Ergebnisse der Lübecker Pangwe-Expedition 1907–1909 und früherer Forschungen 1904–1907, vols. 1 and 2. New York: Johnson Reprint. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1990, By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theater and Ritual. New York: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Victor, and James W. Fernandez. 1973. “Analysis of Ritual: Metaphoric Correspondences as the Elementary Forms.” Science 182(4119): 1366–1367. Tyler, Steven. 1978. The Said and the Unsaid: Language, Thought and Culture. New York and London: Academic Press. Vico, Giambattista. 1999. The New Science: Principles of the New Science concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh. London: Penguin. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58(2): 264–281.

26



james w. fernandez

White, Hayden. 1976. “The Tropics of History: The Deep Structure of the New Science.” In Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 197–217. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 1

Don Quixote Icon of Rhetoric Culture Theory Ivo Strecker       

In this essay, I want to argue that in Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra has created a figure—in both a literal and metaphorical sense—that is ideally suited to serve as an icon of contemporary rhetoric culture theory. To substantiate this view, I will proceed in four steps. First, I introduce the notion of “internal rhetorics,” without which no understanding of rhetoric culture theory is possible; second, I outline some of the basic ideas underlying rhetoric culture theory; third, I explain the affinities between Don Quixote and rhetoric culture theory; and fourth, I provide some results of fieldwork with the Hamar of southern Ethiopia that allow us to better understand the constitutive role of rhetoric in culture.

Internal Rhetorics Rhetoric is generally understood as the art of public speaking, but in her beautifully written book Internal Rhetorics, Jean Nienkamp (2001: 9) shows that “from the earliest sources in which public rhetoric is depicted self-persuasion is also portrayed.” She provides striking examples of internal rhetoric in very early Greek texts such as the Iliad, which are of particular interest here because they throw light not only on rhetoric but also on “figuration in thought and action.” Thus, when Agamemnon threatens to take Briseis from Achilleus, the latter’s thoughts are portrayed as follows:

28



ivo strecker

And the anger came on Peleus’ son [Achilleus], and within his shaggy breast the heart was divided two ways, pondering whether to draw from beside his thigh the sharp sword . . . or else to check the spleen within and keep down his anger. Now as he weighed in mind and spirit these two courses and was drawing from its scabbard the great sword, Athene descended from the sky. (Quoted in Nienkamp 2001: 11)

Note the centrality of tropes in this characterization of Achilleus’s internal rhetoric: the role of the heart as the source of deep thought and deliberation and that of the spleen as the seat of anger so widely reported in anthropological literature. In another example we hear Odysseus talk to himself in the midst of battle: Now Odysseus the spear-famed was left alone, nor did any of the Argives stay beside him, since fear had taken all of them. And troubled, he spoke then to his own great-hearted spirit: “Ah me, what will become of me? It will be a great evil if I run, fearing their multitude, yet deadlier if I am caught alone; and Kronos’ son drove to flight the rest of the Danaans. Yet still, why does the heart within me debate on these things? Since I know that it is the cowards who walk out of the fighting, but if one is to win honour in battle, he must by all means stand his ground strongly, whether he be struck or strike down another.” While he was pondering these things in his heart and his spirit. (Quoted in Nienkamp 2001: 12; italics added by Nienkamp)

From an anthropological perspective, it is interesting that Nienkamp finds it important to emphasize that these examples show how rhetoric is an almost timeless general human disposition and to witness how she applauds Susan Jarratt (1991) for arguing that “mythic discourse is capable of containing the beginnings of a ‘rhetorical consciousness’” (Nienkamp 2001: 10). There is no room here to do justice to Nienkamp’s (2001: 2–5) fine-grained analysis of the relationship between “internal” and public rhetorics, but it is important to note that she distinguishes between the time-honored orthodox position that restricts the definition of rhetoric to oratory and another rather recent position that sees “all human meaning-making as rhetorical” and which she calls expansive. Proponents of the latter view include Lloyd Bitzer and Edwin Black (1971: 208), who include in rhetoric all forms of human communication, as well as all symbolic expressions that have the capacity to influence human life. The ubiquity of rhetoric postulated by expansive rhetoric theory has led John Bender and David Wellbery (1990: 3) to speak of the rhetoricality of modernism:

don quixote



29

Modernism is an age not of rhetoric, but of rhetoricality, the age, that is, of a generalized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience. . . . [Rhetoricality] manifests the groundless, infinitely ramifying characteristics of discourse in the modern world. For this reason, it allows for no explanatory meta-discourse that is not already itself rhetorical. Rhetoric is no longer the title of a doctrine and a practice, nor a form of cultural memory; it becomes instead something like the condition of our existence.

Nienkamp (2001: 3) finds that this “distinction between rhetoric and rhetoricality is a useful way to think about traditional and expansive rhetorics”; she adds that, in a sense, rhetoric has come full circle in its expansive manifestation: the broader sophistic concern with all of logos (language, speech, reasoning, thought) that was codified into the art of persuasive speaking and writing is now being broadened again to cover the contemporary equivalent of logos: a concern with how language in all of its manifestations influences humans (and sometimes other sentient beings).

This accords well with the position taken by rhetoric culture theory, which says that our minds are filled with images and ideas but that these remain unstable and incomplete as long as we do not manage to persuade both ourselves and others of their meanings. It is this inward and outward rhetoric that allows us to give some kind of shape and structure to our understanding of the world and that becomes central to the formation of individual and collective consciousness.

Rhetoric Culture Theory Rhetoric culture theory, as developed by Stephen Tyler, Ivo Strecker, and others (see http://www.rhetoric-culture.org/), aims at establishing a new paradigm for anthropology that retrieves, explores, and makes full use of the ancient insight that just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric. Thus, rhetoric culture theory sets out with a chiasmus, which starts from a familiar mental territory, for we all know somehow that all successful rhetoric makes use of the cultural contexts of speakers and hearers. But from this wellestablished position, rhetoric culture theory ventures out to claim that also the opposite is true: namely, that culture is produced rhetorically. Critics have objected to an unmediated juxtaposition of rhetoric and culture, arguing that the juxtaposition of these two nouns without linkage leaves the reader wondering whether rhetoric and culture are meant to be one, which would require “rhetoric-culture” (and would grievously impoverish the con-

30



ivo strecker

cept of culture), or whether the distinct concepts are thought to be linked by constitutive interplay. In that case, one would need “rhetoric and culture” to make the interplay possible (F. G. Bailey 2002, personal communication). But to this one may reply that although it may be safe and fruitful to keep both concepts separate and analyze their interplay, Bailey (e.g., 1983) has shown in much of his work how rhetoric is inherent in culture and culture is inherent in rhetoric. The two fuse in infinite ways, they are saturated with each other, and their currents and countercurrents create a field of forces that encompasses both. Everything would be easy if we were to re-insert “in,” “and,” or “of ” between “rhetoric” and “culture”; it would, however, weaken the intellectual challenge entailed in the unmediated collocation of “rhetoric culture” considerably. The boldness would disappear as when one moves from metaphor to simile. As pointed out above, the relationship between rhetoric and culture needs to be understood as a kind of chiasmus where thought (and practice) move from rhetoric to culture and from culture back to rhetoric. Both phenomena interact in what one might call a “chiasmic spin.” The relevance of rhetoric culture theory for figuration in thought and action becomes further apparent when one considers the way in which rhetoric culture theory gains its momentum from a treasure of rich and exciting research on metaphor that began with Ivor Richards and Kenneth Burke in the middle of the twentieth century, sped up in the 1960s and 1970s, and continues today. Victor Turner, Paul Ricoeur, Max Black, David Sapir, Christopher Crocker, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Stephen Tyler, and, of course, James W. Fernandez are some of the most outstanding names to be mentioned here. Related to the study of tropes is the aim of rhetoric culture theory to highlight the fantastic elements in culture. Here—as it does so often—it draws on Tyler’s The Said and the Unsaid: Language, Thought and Culture, which shows that there exists a wide margin of indeterminacy and interpretative leeway in communication, because our sentences—and their interpretations—are syntheses, emerging from the interaction between intention, convention, and performance, and this is consistent with our commonsense notions that we think before we speak and that there are slips between the tongue and the lips—and that our speaking often fails to convey what we had in mind (Tyler 1978: 137). People do not and cannot always know how to say properly what they think, and they do not and cannot always know what others mean by what they say. These seeming shortcomings in natural communication can in turn be, and in fact often are, exploited rhetorically. The use of tropes is a prime example for this, because when people create tropes they create semantic collocations that resist any univocal interpretation and therefore have an element

don quixote



31

of the “fantastic.” In other words, the figures we live by, to paraphrase Lakoff and Johnson (1980), imply that we also live by the fantastic. It is from here that rhetoric culture theory launches its enquiries.

Don Quixote as Icon of Rhetoric Culture Theory The picture that I have sketched so far of internal rhetorics and rhetoric culture theory seems to me embodied in Cervantes’s figure of Don Quixote de la Mancha. No other book contains as many conversations and is based more on dialogue than Don Quixote, and all the events in the book appear only to be there to provoke conversations between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Cervantes himself is said to have wanted to create a work of “uplifting rhetoric,” and he was indeed very successful in this. As one keeps reading one dramatic conversation after the other—including innumerable exclamations, courtesies, curses, and blessings—one gets the feeling that human life is not only shaped and articulated by but even driven by rhetoric. The conversations reveal and shape two different characters, who reflect a division of society (master versus serf), and then, in turn, two opposite attitudes, styles of speaking, mental dispositions, views of life, and so on: idealist versus realist, figurative versus plain style, intoxicated versus sober minds, spirit versus matter, etc. So there is an antinomy and polarity that causes the pendulum of argumentation to swing back and forth without ever coming to rest. As long as Don Quixote is breathing, he is speaking and fighting, and while he would lose almost every fight, he would never lose an argument. Only when he dies do the conversations and the fighting end. Thus, Don Quixote is an exemplar of what F. G. Bailey (2009) has called the “palaestral mode of rhetoric.” Don Quixote acts fantastically because he has read too many fantastic books. The world was once full of errant knights, about whom Don Quixote has read too much. The epics praising the great valor and charm of knights like Roland, el Cid, and so on have driven him insane, so that he now chooses himself a gentile lady (a butcher’s daughter whom he calls Dulcinea de Toboso) and sets out to put the world right like those ancient knights used to do. This is where the deep ironical cum allegorical dimension of the story lies: the historically “displaced” ways of Don Quixote bring out the odd and fantastic dimensions of earlier ways of life. The most widely known scene is where Don Quixote attacks the windmills. This has captured the imagination of countless readers and has been pictured by many great artists, among them Pablo Picasso, Gustave Doré, and

32



ivo strecker

Jean Ignace Grandville, but it is amazing how short the episode is: only fifty lines in a book of more than one thousand pages! “Our luck could not be better,” says Don Quixote to Sancho Panza as he notices the windmills on a ridge in the fields. “See those immense giants against who I intend to wage battle and whose lives I will take in order to take their riches and to please God by exterminating this brute from the face of the earth.” When Sancho Panza insists that those are no giants but only windmills, Don Quixote answers that Sancho does not know about adventures, that the windmills are giants, and that Sancho should hide and pray if he is afraid. In addition to the exchanges between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Cervantes emphasizes in his commentary that Don Quixote was so convinced that he was confronting giants that he subsequently used neither his ears (i.e., listened to Sancho) nor his eyes (i.e., looked at the windmills). He had talked himself into a fight and now was going to attack the giants. After Don Quixote rode into battle on the back of Rosinante, broke his spear in one of the wings of the first windmill, was thrown down, and lay battered on the ground, Sancho said to him, “didn’t I tell you that these are windmills that everyone would know who does not have windmills in his head himself?” Don Quixote answers promptly that Sancho should shut up because he did not know that Freston, a sorcerer and great adversary of Don Quixote, had turned the giants into windmills. So, as I have said already, however bizarre a situation and however devastating a defeat may be, the genius of Don Quixote’s internal rhetorics will gain the upper hand. Not only windmills but also giants are cultural inventions; both are the result of discourse and imagination, yet while the windmills are physically real, the giants only exist as represented in stories, pictures, plays, and so on. Now, the indisputable material existence of objects that we encounter in this world often blinds our eyes to the fact that these objects need perhaps not be there in the first place. For a critical mind like that of Cervantes, the windmills—like all other machines before and ever after—need not be there; in fact, “like giants,” they should be exterminated from the face of the earth. But this is impossible, as the defeat of Don Quixote implicitly tells us. In other words, even though the windmills are real, their purpose, their function, the idea behind them is just as fantastic as the idea of giants. The last and most radical point that needs mentioning here is that Don Quixote can be understood as an allegory of culturally induced madness, or, even more pointedly, of how culture drives people crazy. On one level this is plain to see, because Cervantes begins his novel with a scene where members of Don Quixote’s household and his friends burn, destroy, and hide all the books that have caused the insanity of Don Quixote and will lead to all the unimaginable adventures that make up the story. But the crazy and historically “dis-

don quixote



33

placed” knight meets on his way countless characters who are almost as mad as he is. Here, in this complex layering of characters and situations, lies the great art of Cervantes. He creates a hero who is ostentatiously irrational and moves in a world that is supposed to be rational. Yet most of the people whom Don Quixote meets and to whose stories he listens are also insane, driven by fantasies and prone to act only a shade less madly than Don Quixote himself. Marcella and Chrysostomos, for example, left the homes of their rich parents and dressed themselves in sheepskins. Nowhere does Cervantes say that they are mad like Don Quixote. This remains in the realm of the unspoken and is left to the readers to sense, guess, or see clearly as they witness, for example, how Chrysostomos lies down, writes a lot of tragic poems, and, before he dies, demands of others to bury him at the very spot in the mountains where Marcella had refused his love.

The Constitutive Role of Rhetoric in Hamar Culture When, more than a quarter of a century ago, I asked my friend Baldambe (Father of the Dark Brown Cow) to provide us with an explanatory account of Hamar culture, I was miles away from rhetoric culture theory. But I felt already that I needed some rhetorical skill—and would have to take recourse to tropes—in order to express what I wanted to convey. This is how I formulated my request: “‘Misso’ (hunting friend), we have seen how you Hamar live and what you do. For many months we have talked with you about Hamar customs. Yet our eyes don’t see and our ears don’t hear. We feel as if we have been handling separate pieces of wood, poles and beams. You know how the poles and beams fit together. Please take them and reconstruct for us the house to which they belong.” Upon this, Baldambe answered “Eh, eh,” which meant that he had understood and agreed. (Lydall and Strecker 1979: x)

Looking back at what I thought and did then makes me feel awkward now because of the hyperboles I used (“our eyes don’t see, our ears don’t hear”) in order to emphasize total dependence on our Hamar host. Also, my metaphors aiming to evoke a picture of a “Gestalt” or meaningful whole look dated now, remindful as they are of the heyday of structural anthropology when culture was still seen mainly in terms of structure or system, that is, of logical and functional order. There was in this exchange no inkling, as yet, of the nondetermined, rhetorical, tropical, multivocal, even fantastic nature of culture. My understanding changed only slowly—and is in fact only gradually developing now—as I reread Baldambe Explains, which Jean Lydall and I

34



ivo strecker

transcribed, translated, annotated, and published so many years ago (Lydall and Strecker 1979). In what follows below I will analyze some passages of Baldambe’s text to show empirically how culture is based on rhetoric and how people may talk themselves and others into adopting and adhering to particular, “fantastic” ways of life. The text begins with a “view from afar” (Lévi-Strauss 1992) that is seemingly detached: Long ago, in the time of the ancestors, the Hamar had two bitta (ritual leaders). One was Banki Maro, one was Elto. The first ancestor of Banki Maro came from Ari (a country to the north) and settled in Hamar in the mountains. He, the bitta, made fire, and seeing this fire, people came many from Ari, others from Male, others from Tsamai, others from Konso, others from Kara, others from Bume, and others from Ale which lies beyond Konso. Many came from Ale. (Lydall and Strecker 1979: 2)

Shortly after this first passage, the mode of Baldambe’s account changes; it gets charged with more “rhetorical energy” (Kennedy 1998) and turns into mimesis. That is, Baldambe now uses direct speech, a command: “The bitta was the first to make fire in Hamar and he said: ‘I am the bitta, the owner of the land am I, the first to take hold of the land. Now may you become my subjects, may you be my dependents, may you be the ones I command’” (Lydall and Strecker 1979: 2). After the command, which heralds a usurpation of power, follow verbal exchanges—dialogues, conversations, arguments—that can be best understood as forms of tacit collusion. Summarizing the work by R. P. McDermott and Henry Tylbor (1995), Denis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim (1995: 13) write about tacit collusion in social life as follows: All events require the tacit collusion of the participants, who implicitly agree that they are interpreting the events within the same general framework. This interactional collusion is not socially neutral; rather it involves a carefully crafted set of social repositionings in which dominance hierarchies emerge with the collusion (though not necessarily the consent) of the dominated.

Although Mannheim and Tedlock, as well as McDermott and Tylbor, never speak and seemingly never even think of rhetoric, the notion of tacit collusion is eminently rhetorical and leads us deeply into all and everything that concerns figuration in thought and action. The “play of tropes in culture,” as James W. Fernandez (1986) has called it, or, in Paul Grice’s (1975) parlance, the “creativity of conversational implicatures,” all are based on myriad forms of tacit collusion where interlocutors may safely say what they do not mean and mean what they do not say. And it is here where the gates to the realm

don quixote



35

of the fantastic open and where the creation of cultural fantasies and fantasy cultures begins. Collusion theory is thus very well suited for an understanding of Baldambe’s account of the rhetorical emergence of Hamar culture. To bring this out clearly, I will subsequently quote and interpret further episodes of Baldambe’s (at times highly mimetic) representation of the conversation between the bitta and the people. Colluding with the bitta, the Hamar answer his command saying, “Good, for us you are our bitta.” Then the bitta asks the newcomers one by one from where they come and what they want. They all answer by giving the names of their clans and their country of origin and add that they want land, as in the following example: “From where do you come?” “I am KARLA, I come from Kara.” “Eh! What do you want?” “I want land.” (Lydall and Strecker 1979: 2)

After people have told who and from where they were, the bitta asks, “What are your marriage ways?” and then the following dialogue develops: “KARLA and GULET marry each other. DILA and GULET marry each other.” “Eh-eh! So you are mother’s brothers and sister’s sons?” “We are each other’s marriage partners, marrying each other we came.” “Eh-eh!” Then the bitta said: “I have no wife, I would marry a woman.” “Whom will you marry?” “The people of GULET who came with KARLA will provide my wife.” “Eh good, you marry GULET girls.” (3)

Later on, Baldambe recalls how the bitta not only usurped the land but also the people and their herds. “Let these people be mine. Your bitta am I. Herd cattle for me, herd goats for me.” “Bitta!” “Woi!” “We don’t have any cattle, only a few clans have cattle, only a few men have some. What shall we do?” “You have no cows?”

36



ivo strecker

“We have no cows.” “You have no goats?” “Only one or two men have goats. Most of us are poor.” “If you are poor collect loan cattle and cultivate your fields so you can bring sorghum to those who own cattle. Herding the cows drink their milk.” (4)

Upon this follows a passage where the bitta promised to protect the Hamar against their enemies, sickness, and drought. So, according to Baldambe, people began to collect animals and then said to each other, “The poor should not go down to the waterhole with nothing. The bitta told us that those who have cattle should share some of them, calling those to whom they give cattle bel (bond-friend).” “Whose cattle are these?” “These are the cattle of so-and-so.” “And yours?” “I have a cow from a bel, an arrow from which I drink.” (5)

Here, for the first time, a figure comes in, a metonymic expression, which Baldambe is quick to explain as follows: “A cow from a bel is called ‘arrow’ because one takes the blood-letting arrow to draw blood from the jugular vein of the cow, and mixing four cups of blood with one cup of fresh milk, one feeds the children.” Then Baldambe continues to imitate how the people spoke to one another: “Whose cattle are these?” “They are the hair of so-and-so.” (5)

As this exchange makes use yet again of a figure, this time a synecdoche, Baldambe enlightens the listening ethnographer by saying, “That means, they belong to so-and-so like his hair belongs to his head” (5). No mode of subsistence comes as natural as we may think, even the consumption of grain and its products may need persuasion, as in the following example, where the bitta encourages the people to practice agriculture. Note how he uses the rhetorical figure of analogy to convince the people that sorghum is edible: Dig fields. When you have done that, here is the sorghum. Barjo (creator, creative power) has given us sorghum. Sorghum is man’s grass. As cows eat grass so shall man eat sorghum. Barjo gave us meat and milk of cattle long ago, saying: “Drink milk of cattle and goats and eat their meat. Cattle and goats shall chew leaves from the bushes and cattle shall graze grass.” (7)

don quixote



37

Figuration increases when discourse reaches into the realms of social relations, morality, ethics, and—in a way—also magic. One can see this very clearly in Baldambe’s account of the rhetoric relating to marriage procedures. People address the bitta, asking him about the proper way to marry: “Some men are bad and troublesome, always beating their wives and then abandoning them. Bitta, tell us what to do.” The bitta replied: “A man of GULET should become a ‘butter man.’ When the country is dry and there is no butter, cow dung and the dung of sheep shall become butter.’” (6)

Here the “moral imagination” (Fernandez 2002) of the Hamar makes increasing use of figuration and expresses the wish to cause well-being by using butter and, if this is not available, by using appropriate symbolic substitutes like cow dung or the dung of sheep. These are, as David Sapir (1977: 19–20) would say, metonyms that express one cause by way of another, or cause for effect (efficient for final cause), container for contained, and such variants as instrument for agent, agent for act, etc. There is also analogy involved, for a marriage should be fertile, should produce offspring, should lead to abundance, should be rich like—guess what?—butter. Baldambe goes on to say that for a marriage ceremony, a cattle gateway has to be erected. This is, of course, again a trope. Gateways refer to the act of entering or leaving and therefore can express an important aspect of marriage, the fact that a new period of life will begin, and that the bride will leave her home to join her husband’s family. In addition, Baldambe mentions that a right-handed bowl should be used in the ceremony. Here one would expect that right-handedness is saturated with the figurative meanings observed and analyzed by Robert Hertz (1909), Rodney Needham (1973), and others long ago. That is, physical right-handedness expresses social righteousness, the will to do what is morally right and according to custom. To show how figuration inescapably leads into the realm of the fantastic I quote Baldambe once again at length as he lets the people instruct the “butter man” how to perform a proper marriage: Here is the bowl, if a maz (neophyte) comes to you rub him with butter. Before this, the girl should take the headdress of the maz and throw it into a giri tree and the maz should lap milk from a cow’s udder saying: “From now on I will never again lap milk from a cow’s udder.” Then they should come to the “butter man” and put four sorghum rolls in his bowl. Let the girl bite the sorghum first and you, the maz, bite second. Next, butter shall be put on to

38



ivo strecker

the hands of the girl and the boy and they shall rub each other’s hands. After this the girl shall take the belt from the waist of the boy, and he shall take the string skirt from the girl and they shall put them into the bowl. Finally the boy shall take the string skirt and the girl the belt and they shall return home. From now on for good or bad they will never leave each other. There will be no divorce, it is forbidden. Whether they bear children or not they will always remain together until the grave. (Lydall and Strecker 1979: 6–7)

All the strange objects, substances, and actions mentioned above—the butter, the head dress, the giri tree, lapping milk from a cow’s udder, the number four, the sorghum rolls, the exchange of the belt and the string skirt— carry symbolic meanings that express, as Dan Sperber (1975: 137) has said, “a commonality of interest but not of opinion.” That is, the bewildering “displacements” (Sperber 1975) or “artful placements” (Strecker 1988) we are witnessing in the ritual prescriptions for the “butter man” are the work of figurative imagination aiming at getting things done in the world. Or, to put it differently, they are a product of rhetoric, which in turn is hard to distinguish from magic. Anthropological theory holds that magic “is based on the belief that both nature and man can be brought under compulsion and controlled by psychological means” and that art (including all forms of figuration) has a magical quality too, for “when we say that we are ‘under the spell’ of beauty or great music, or call a view of a work of art ‘magical,’ we are acknowledging the existence of magic, in the extended sense of non-rational, emotional and often unconscious formalizing or patterning forces, which are essential for all transcendent experience” (Julian Huxley 1966: S264–S265). This goes well with Kenneth Burke’s (1950: 45) observation that the magical use of symbolism to affect natural processes by rituals and incantations can be understood as a kind of transference where the hortatory use of language “to induce action in people” is extended to a magical practice that aims “to induce motion in things.” In other words, the use of symbols is indistinguishable from magic. The rhetorical will creates, as it were, figurative expressions that act as means of inward and outward persuasion and lead to fantasies of power, of powers that are able to control not just single objects and events but even the whole cosmos, not just individual actions of people but even their whole destiny. Thus, after they have completed all necessary ritual actions under the supervision and with the blessing of the “butter man,” Hamar husbands and wives “will always remain together until the grave.” To round off this essay let me now return to some of my earlier thoughts about the art of figuration, which might be of relevance here. As I have said above, the objects, substances, and actions mentioned in Baldambe’s outline of

don quixote



39

a Hamar marriage ceremony appear to be in some way “displaced.” They have their proper places in other domains and other contexts of the order of things in Hamar. People know of these placements, and they also know that other people know of them as well. Given this shared background knowledge about the practical order of things, people may then deliberately place things where they—strictly speaking—do not belong. Here, people do on an action level what they also often do on a verbal level. Metaphors, for example, are created in a similar way, for they bring together terms that belong to different semantic domains (Sapir 1977: 6). But not every kind of displacement has the potential to carry figurative or symbolic meaning. Only “artful” displacements engage mind and emotion, and in The Social Practice of Symbolization (1988) I used the displacement of sand to illustrate how a particular displacement may have the power to lead to rich fields of culture-specific evocation. My argument went as follows: In one episode of the Hamar rite of transition in which a young man leaps across the cattle in order to be allowed to marry, the initiate enters a gully and is “washed” with sand. Baldambe has described this as follows: Then he (the initiate) runs off, over to a gully, a barjo (creation, creator) gully which he and his washer (ritual assistant) enter. The washer washes the ukuli (initiate) with sand, sand, sand, sand, his head, his back and his front. He washes away all badness. He washes away all that was bad in his childhood, his intercourse with donkeys and relatives, saying: “May all go away with the flood of the gully.” Then they step out of the gully and run to the homestead. (Lydall and Strecker 1979: 81)

Now, why was sand used here? I have answered this question by pointing out that in light of the culturally specific experiences and memories of the Hamar, the displacement of sand (from the river-bed onto the naked body of the initiate) at the particular moment when it occurs in the ritual can be understood as a successful move to create symbolic condensation. The condensation entailed in the displacement is in turn achieved through multiple forms of figuration, as follows: The displacement may be interpreted (by actors and ethnographers alike) in terms of metaphor, for the mountains of Hamar contain much quartz which makes the sand in the dry river beds look very light, and after each flood the sand is washed anew, getting a strikingly fresh, white, and “virgin-like” appearance. Thus, the sand in a dry river-bed is an impressive example of something recently cleaned. The flood removes filth; it erases all traces of human and animal use so that the sand of an untouched river-bed epitomizes any physically clean state and any kind of erasure of past states of pollution

40



ivo strecker

which one has observed in the world. And this metaphorical extension also reaches into the social and moral realm so that one can say that in the ritual the initiate is brought into contact with sand in order to become socially as unpolluted as the untouched sand in a dry river-bed. (Strecker 1988: 216)

Furthermore, “Watching the sand being poured over the body of the initiate, one may say that the sand is poured like water. Sand, resembling water in that it is pourable, would thus stand metaphorically for water,” and one could go on to argue that “by a synecdochial mode of thought, the sand may be seen as a part standing for a whole” (Strecker 1988: 216). In Hamar the mixture of sand and water is a widely used cleaning agent, the abrasive part of which is the sand. Knowing of no other technical term, I suggest we call the replacement of a mixture (sand and water) by one of its components (sand) an “ingrediental” synecdoche. The replacement of a mixture by a component has what Sapir (1977: 13) calls a particularizing character, like the replacement of a whole by a part in the anatomical mode and the replacement of genus by species in the taxonomical mode of synecdoche. Note that the use of only water would been a much weaker displacement here “because it would not have evoked the emphatic (abrasive) removal of dirt. In fact it is the very absence of water which counts. The absence of water makes the displacement ‘speak’ and provokes one to enter the metaphorical realm where physical acts and agents make one think of non-physical referents—for example, social and moral purification” (Strecker 1988: 216–217). One could add further figurative meanings to the displacement of sand, but I think the examples given above are already persuasive enough to suggest that “the analogies which are possible, which make sense in the context of the situation, are not only multiple but also condense into one general intended meaning. It is this condensation which makes displacement such a powerful tool of intention and here lies both the artfulness and the effectiveness of symbolism” (217).

By Way of Conclusion Don Quixote—icon of rhetoric culture theory—provides us, perhaps more than our own individual experience or any of our ethnographic observations, with an understanding of the ways in which human beings by internal and external rhetoric are prone to talk themselves and others into extraordinary forms of thought and action. Also, the exhilarating and sustained tenor of irony in Don Quixote de la Mancha is hard to find anywhere in “real” life, but, as the saying goes, “ethnography is stranger than fiction,” or at least it may ac-

don quixote



41

quire qualities that outdo fiction, in that ethnography may lead us into patterns of signification—or better, of fantasy—that we could not possibly imagine at home, for even our dreams are constrained by cultural conventions (Tedlock 1987). Who on earth would think, for example, that one would need to leap over a row of cattle in order to ensure a successful and fertile marriage and that before doing so one would have to be purified by means of sand poured over one’s back and shoulders? As my ethnographic examples show, the Hamar themselves understand very well that culture is the product of rhetoric, emerging as a continuous process of mutual persuasion, and they are also aware of the fact that culture involves figuration, that is, the use of tropes that open the gates to the realm of the fantastic, the mysterious, the magical. Having said this, I only want to add that I am aware of the fact that in the initial/earlier version of this essay I brought owls to Athens when I tried to draw the attention of Spanish readers to Don Quixote de la Mancha as an icon of rhetoric culture theory and masterpiece of cultural critique, and that I reinvented the wheel when I stressed the constitutive role of rhetoric in culture. As is well known, Isocrates argued already in antiquity that because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade one another and to make clear to one another whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts—and, generally speaking, there is no institution devised by man that logos (speech and thought) has not helped us to establish. For this it is which has laid down laws concerning things just and unjust, and things base and honorable, and if it were not for these ordinances we should not be able to live with one another (Isocrates, Nicocles, 5–7). And I know that Giambattista Vico (1961 [1744]) pointed out more than 250 years ago that figuration lies at the heart of cultural creativity. The founding father of cultural anthropology, he vividly imagined a “new science” that would explore the manifold ways of analogical thinking or poetics that provide the key to an understanding of culture. Here is an example of the fabulous way in which he analyzed and interpreted the “fabulous” culture of ancient Greece: And, in other metaphors both beautiful and necessary, they imagined the earth in the aspect of a great dragon, covered with scales and spines (the thorns and briers), bearing wings (for the lands belonged to the heroes), always awake and vigilant (thickly grown in every direction). Under another aspect, they imagined the earth as hydra . . . which, when any of its heads were cut off, always grew others in their place. It was the three alternating colors: black (the burned-over land), green (the leaf), and gold (the ripe grain). These are the three colors of the serpent’s skin, which, when it grows old,

42



ivo strecker

is sloughed off for a fresh one. Finally, under the aspect of its fierceness in resisting cultivation, the earth was also imagined as a most powerful beast, the nemean lion (whence later the name lion was given to the most powerful of the animals), which philologists hold to have been a monstrous serpent. All the beasts vomit forth fire, which is the fire set to the forests by Hercules. (146)

I think these two examples, vivid and compelling as they are, prove that we have still much to learn from the ancients, and it is interesting for us to see—as I have done in the present essay—where a renewed study of the persuasive themes they cherished may lead us. Ivo Strecker is professor emeritus of cultural anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. His empirical work has dealt with Hamar ethnography, and his theoretical work has focused on symbolism, ritual, and rhetoric. He is (together with Jean Lydall) author of The Hamar of Southern Ethiopia (1979) and The Social Practice of Symbolization (1988).

References Bailey, F. G. 1983. The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason and Reality. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2009. “The Palaestral Aspect of Rhetoric.” In Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life, ed., Michael Carrithers, 107–120. New York: Berghahn Books. Bender, John, and David E. Wellbery, eds. 1990. Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Bitzer, Lloyd F., and Edwin Black, eds. 1971. The Prospect of Rhetoric. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Burke, Kenneth. 1950. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice Hall. Fernandez, James W. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press ———. 2002. “Rhetoric in the Moral Order: A Critique of Tropological Approaches to Culture.” In Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life, ed. Michael Carrithers, 156–172. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Grice, H. Paul. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, Speech Acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. London: Academic Press. Hertz, Robert. 1909. “La prééminence de la main droite: Étude sur la polarité religieuse.” Revue Philosophique de La France et de l’Étranger 68: 553–580. Huxley, Julian, ed. 1966. “A Discussion on Ritualization of Behaviour in Animals and Man.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, ser. B, 251(772): S247–S526. Jarratt, Susan C. 1991. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press. Kennedy, George A. 1998. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

don quixote



43

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1992. A View from Afar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lydall, Jean, and Ivo Strecker. 1979. The Hamar of Southern Ethiopia, vol. 2, Baldambe Explains. Hohenschäftlarn: Klaus Renner Verlag. McDermott, R. P., and Henry Tylbor. 1995. “On the Necessity of Collusion in Conversation.” In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, ed., Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, 218–236. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Needham, Rodney, ed. 1973. Left and Right: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nienkamp, Jean. 2001. Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of Self-Persuasion. Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press. Sapir, David. 1977. “An Anatomy of Metaphor.” In The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric, ed. J. David Sapir and J. Christopher Crocker, 3–32. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sperber, Dan. 1975. Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strecker, Ivo. 1988. The Social Practice of Symbolization. London: Athlone. Tedlock, Barbara, ed. 1987. Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tedlock, Dennis, and Bruce Mannheim, eds. 1995. The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tyler, Stephen. 1978. The Said and the Unsaid: Mind, Meaning, and Culture. New York: Academic Press. Vico, Giambattista. 1961 (1744). The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 3rd edn., trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Reprint. New York: Anchor.

CHAPTER 2

A Trope of Time Twilight Swings across the Central Himalayas John Leavitt       

Millennia An earlier version of this essay was presented orally in the late nineties, at about the end of the last millennium. I began with a weak joke. “It’s been a long time,” I said, “since the last change of a millennium—why, it feels like a thousand years.” Why was that a joke, and why did it feel so sad? It was a joke because it set up the listeners to expect a hyperbole, but at that particular moment this particular cliché was not hyperbolic. It was weak because, except perhaps to the “2000 Year Old Man” in Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s comic routine, or to the depressed Baudelaire who wrote, “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans,” a thousand years do not feel like a thousand years. They do not feel like anything; they are an abstraction. But a millennium is a well-defined abstraction, as are centuries, lifetimes, years, months, weeks, and days. Some of these are pure abstractions, but some of them—the staged life, the seasonal year, the lunar month, the social week, and the turning wings of day and night—are also lived in the body. What we call a sense of time puts together lived experience, a more or less choate body hexis, with abstractions drawn from noted repeating transitions, some of which are equally lived in the body, some of which are not. All of these transitions are available for cultural and personal marking; it is not surprising that we made a great deal out of a change of millennium when every sunset can be a noteworthy occasion, a regularly repeating, bodily lived tropic moment.

a trope of time



45

Twilight Swings across the Himalayas In a ritual setting in the Central Himalayan region of Kumaon, in northern India, the transition of twilight is said to swing. This conjunction of the subject sandhyā (“twilight” or the goddess Twilight), a specifically religious form of the word that can be presented as a divine name, with the verb jhulan. (“to swing back and forth”) is heard repeatedly in the opening chant of the ritual of jāgar, or “waking.” This is a ceremony held to permit direct two-way contact with regional gods through their possession of a medium. It is run by a professional drummer and singer of tales whom I will be calling a bard. As the ritual’s name implies, it takes place at night, and near the beginning the bard intones a chant to the twilight, also called the sandhyā, the twilight song or evensong. Kumaon is located in what geographers call the Central Himalayas, a region including the far western part of Nepal and the Indian state of Uttarakhand. While culturally and linguistically part of the Indian and Hindu world, Kumaonis, like people of other Himalayan regions, have a distinctive historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious identity. Kumaon is a region of hills and valleys, generally temperate in climate; rural Kumaonis practice terrace agriculture and raise cattle, relying on the products both of river valleys and of forests (Guha 1999: 27–34). People are marked as members of an endogamous jāti, usually translated as “caste.” Here each village is formed, or at least dominated, by a single jāti. Within the jāti, social organization is based on a division into exogamous lineages. As in other parts of North India, social reproduction of this unit is based on patrilineal descent and virilocal residence, which implies very different typical life patterns for men and women. A man’s natal village remains his home throughout his life, and he bears the responsibility for producing another male to carry on the line; a woman, in contrast, grows up in one family (and village), only to leave it and move to another one at marriage. While a married woman maintains steady contact with her natal home, after marriage a woman is identified primarily with her husband’s lineage. Kumaonis worship the great Hindu gods, but they also have their own regional pantheon made up of beings called dyàpt (the typically brusque Kumaoni pronunciation of the Sanskrit devatā [“divinity”]), whom the nineteenthcentury British reports on the region referred to as “godlings” or even “demons”; one ethnography (Kapur 1988) calls them “evil souls.” More than the great gods, these local gods are concerned with immediate human problems, and it is they who play the central role in rites of possession. A jāgar is a vigil, a staying awake at night to enter into direct contact with one or more of these local gods. Contact takes place through the god coming into a human body (what we usually call divine possession, here called an avatār), dancing in that person’s body and speaking through that person’s

46



john leavitt

mouth. One variety of jāgar is performed to help a family get over or prevent some trouble such as sickness, bad luck, or sterility and takes place in the family’s home. On the day of the rite, friends, neighbors, and kin gather after sunset; the bard, after an opening drumming performance in honor of the assembled gods and a naming of his own line of legendary predecessors, sings his invocation to the twilight. In the course of the invocation, the designated medium or oracle becomes filled with the god, whose presence is signaled by trembling and an apparent state of trance. The twilight song also—in the cases I have participated in1 or heard about—seems to transform the noisy, bustling crowd of onlookers into a quiet and attentive audience. The bard then shifts into the god’s own story, and the medium starts to dance out the actions the bard is telling. The audience seems captivated: when the story is funny, people laugh. In interviews, they told me that they are equally affected by the sad parts. The god, in the person of the possessed medium, then distributes sacred ash, a holy and beneficial substance, to all assembled, putting some on the forehead of each participant. This is perhaps the paroxysm of attention: each person, kneeling to receive the god’s blessing, gives the impression of solemn concentration on direct, physical connection with the divine. The god then speaks through the medium’s mouth. The assembly relaxes a bit during this speech, and some members may interrogate the god. If the god requests it, the jāgar will finish the next morning with the sacrifice of a goat or chicken and a communal feast. After a jāgar, the host family and the guests all seem to feel relieved, lightened. There is a sense that the right thing has been done and now it is in the hand of god (on the jāgar, see Gaborieau 1975; Fanger 1990; Leavitt 1997; Krengel 1999). Different bards perform the twilight chant in different ways: some sing, some intone. As far as I can tell,2 the sandhyā chant usually says that t(T)wilight swings and that t(T)wilight falls. In Kumaoni, to say that twilight or evening falls is as much a dead metaphor as it is in today’s English. In any situation, in the middle of any conversation, if it is getting dark there is nothing surprising about saying or hearing “evening is falling,” “evening has fallen” (sās par.i gai, using the ordinary word for evening, derived from the religiously tinged Sanskrit word sandhyā). But twilight is said to swing only in the context of the sandhyā chant. And it is—again, as far as I can tell—only in this chant that Kumaonis present Twilight as a divine being: sandhyā mātā (“Mother Twilight”); sandhyā tārin.i, avidhā hārin.i, har dukh nivārin.i (“Savioress Twilight, destroyer of inauspiciousness, driver-away of suffering”). On the other hand, the Goddess Sandhyā is a figure in orthodox Hinduism, and this is not surprising; the goddess Us.as (“Dawn”) is important in the R g Veda, and the moments of dawn ˚ and dusk are both religiously marked for Hindus.

a trope of time



47

The conjunction of twilight with swinging takes a number of grammatical forms. The verb may appear as a participle, in the phrase jhulani sandhyā me˜ , par.ani sandhyā me˜ (“in the swinging twilight, in the falling twilight”), but most often it is a finite verb, part of a compound verb form: sandhyā jhuli ai cha or sandhyā jhuli ai ge (“twilight has come swinging”) or sandhyā jhuli ge (“twilight has swung”). On one occasion, I attended a jāgar on a night when no bard could be found; some of the women of the village sang the jāgar themselves, and they sang jhuli ai ge sandhyā (“swinging has come twilight”) and jhulī-jhulī sandhyā par.ī (“swinging-swinging twilight has fallen”). These examples are meant to give an idea of the variability, but also of the constancy, of the figure of t(T)wilight swinging. But is it in fact a figure? My initial impression was that it is: that to say that twilight swings is not a direct description but a “secondary” way of saying something, what the Western tradition has generally called a figure or a trope. Yet a number of people have suggested that the phrase might simply be a way of portraying the way the pink light of sunset moves across the mountains; it would then imply swinging in the sense used by Gary Snyder (1968: 4) to describe the movement of light and shadow through a day: and shadow swings around the tree Shifting on the berrybush from leaf to leaf across each day The shadow swings around the tree.

The light and shadow swinging through a day move in a single circular path, but the verb jhulan. in its various usages usually means swinging back and forth. And in elaborations on this phrase in Kumaoni sandhyās, we clearly have it moving in two or several directions. The bard Jay Rām (recorded in November 1981) sings, kā sandhyā kā bakhat me˜ sandhyā kā jhuli gai? cārai khan.d. me˜ , cārai disān me˜ sandhyā par. gai chau. Where, at twilight time, where has twilight swung? In the four sections, in the four directions twilight has fallen. pūrbā khan.d. me˜ sandhyā nhai gai, pūrab kī sandhyā pacchim nhai gai, pacchim kī sandhyā, bhagvān, uttar nhai gai, uttar kī sandhyā daks.in. me˜ pahũc gai. Twilight has gone to the eastern section, the eastern twilight has gone west, the western twilight, Lord, has gone north, the northern twilight has reached the south.

48



john leavitt

The bard Kamal Rām, too, asks “Where has twilight swung?” and he structures his sandhyā around clear geographic swings to named places, associated with the regional gods. If you locate the terminus of each swing on the map or, presumably, on the notional map that the participants have of geographic space, it becomes clear that twilight swings from here, the place where the ritual is being held in central Kumaon, going west of here and then east of here and then farther west and then not quite so far east. So this is a back-and-forth oscillating swinging, as we would expect from other forms of the verbal root jhuv-, jhul-, which are associated with cradles, swings to play on, swaying rope bridges, and swinging palanquins—and this, at least, justifies a conclusion that we are in fact dealing with some kind of a trope.3 While the (for the most part, up until recently) unlettered Himalayan small farmers and craftspeople who perform this ritual have no trouble recognizing an unusual way of saying something, they have offered me no explicit theory of figurative language. To understand the import of twilight swinging, I have looked to Western and Indian poetics.4

Looking to Poetics In the Western poetic tradition we would call “twilight has come swinging” or “swinging twilight” a metaphor, a trope based on similarity rather than, say, contiguity (metonymy) or part-for-whole relations (synecdoche). Since Aristotle (Ricoeur 1977: chap. 1), Western poetics has tended to define figures of speech as the replacement of one word by another and has seen the noun as the paradigmatic word. In Aristotle’s case, all verbs are reduced to the copula, the single verb “is,” plus a participle. A metaphor, then, would be the identification of one entity (noun) with another in a way that cannot be taken literally. “Barney is a professor of anthropology” says what it says; the listener pockets the information, as it were, and goes on. Assuming that Barney is a human being, to say that “Barney is a real tiger” does not mean that the person in question has stripes, kills and eats antelopes raw, could mate with a tigress and father tiger young, or possesses most of the other attributes of tigers. If the hearer knows that in this case Barney is not in fact a tiger, she or he must accept that the meaning here is figurative and search for a way in which Barney is like a tiger. This is a stereotypical metaphor, based more on lore than on observation. Since modern Westerners have learned to associate tigers with ferocity, this is a highly imagic way of saying, for instance, that “Barney will fight hard if need be”—imagic in that it not only evokes a hard fight but raises a virtual tiger in the mind’s eye, stripes, teeth, and all, giving a sort of image-bonus. In the usage currently standard with critics and philosophers, the replaced entity (Barney in this case) is called the “tenor” and the

a trope of time



49

metaphorically replacing entity of thought (the tiger) is called the “vehicle.” These terms were introduced by I. A. Richards in 1936 (96ff.), since, he says, up to then there simply were no Western terms to distinguish what had only been given descriptive names. We will see that Indian poetics had clear terms for these elements over a thousand years earlier.5 “Twilight swings” would represent two problems for the great tradition of Western poetics. One of these has to do with its structure, the other with its function and context. First, this figure does not identify tenor A as vehicle B, noun for noun, but says that tenor A acts in a B way, without specifying an entity that would be the nonfigurative subject of verb B. In fact, as Edwin Gerow (1971: 131) notes, many standard Western metaphors do precisely this, but often without acknowledgment. He cites the passage in T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” starting “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window pane,” in which the fog is clearly moving like a cat without a cat ever being named. But—unlike Indian poetics, as we shall see—Western poetics does not distinguish this kind of metaphor from others. Second, “twilight swings” is a ritual metaphor, not primarily a literary one. It does more than produce aesthetic pleasure or reveal new meanings: its role in the “text” of which it is part—a multimedia, largely acted-out, apparently deeply effective and affecting “text”—is as a piece of a dispositive for bringing gods into direct contact with humans. This means that analysis of meaning is not enough; what is needed is also an analysis of movement and of emotional resonance. Both of these aspects of the figure make it problematic for Western poetics. As it happens, Indian poetics deals directly with these issues. The Indian theory of figures, alam.kāraśāstra, the “doctrine of ornamentation,” was elaborated in Sanskrit starting from about the sixth century BCE and reaching a height of production from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries CE. As in classical Western rhetoric and poetics (e.g., Fontanier 1977 [1830]), Indian poeticians start from a presumed distinction between plain language, which in India was termed vārtā (“report”) or vācya (“[mere] speech”), and figurative language. In the West, non-ordinary linguistic usages were called figures from the Latin figura, something that has been worked on, or tropes from the Greek tropos, literally a turn of speech. In India, the common term used is alam.kāra (“ornamentation”), although the essence of such ornamentation of language was often held to be vakrokti (“saying it crookedly”), a close fit to the idea of trope; V. Raghavan (1973 [1942]: 102) calls it “out-of-the-wayness.” Is classical Indian poetics more appropriate than another tradition for interpreting modern oral performances in India simply by virtue of being Indian? This is not a given. Classical Indian poetics was, until recently, unknown to Kumaoni villagers. Even today, the vast majority of them know Bhāmaha or Ānandavardhana no better than they know Quintilian or Roland Barthes;

50



john leavitt

that is to say, not at all. It is possible that Indian poetics has the advantage of having grown up within a Hindu universe of which the Kumaoni jāgar can be seen as a semi-modern rural development and thus shares some fundamental assumptions with the object that interests us. But I am really not sure about this and do not, for the moment, feel the need to be. It does so happen, however, that Indian poetics offers some concepts and some analytical moves that at least parallel what my exposure to this material suggests are reasonable and illuminating ways to approach it. While the main stream of Western poetics defined metaphor as involving one noun replacing another, even in Western poetry the most common form metaphor takes is in fact that of a noun with a surprising adjective or verb (Brooke-Rose 1958), as in the Eliot example cited above. Most theorists feel obliged to “find” the noun that is supposedly being implicitly referred to, so that if a speaker snarls a reply this must be the equivalent of saying that the speaker is being called a dog or a wolf (Martin 2012), and that’s that. But this is to neglect the fact that the use of an apparently figurative attribute or way of being, like that of a figurative noun, evokes a range of associations. While saying someone snarls is not to say that he or she is in fact a dog or a wolf, the use of the word does call up doggy and wolfy associations and situations. As in the Western tradition, Indian poetics analyzes figures that are based on similarity or shared qualities—what the West calls metaphor and simile— in terms of a given entity (Richards’s tenor) that is compared with, identified with, or attributed properties of something else (Richards’s vehicle). In Indian poetics, these have been termed, respectively, the upameya, the one that is to be compared, and the upamāna, the comparing one (the verbal root behind both is mā [“to measure”]). At the same time, Indian poetics has a term and a concept for just the kind of figure we seem to have here, a tenor that is qualified in a surprising, apparently nonliteral way. Like the great tradition of Western poetics, it seeks the entities or situations that the qualification suggests but does not name: in Western treatments of Indian poetics this is called an occulted vehicle. This kind of trope is an utpreks.ā, the ascription of a quality or mode of action normally associated with one entity to another. It is clearly a similarity figure and is associated with upamā (“simile”) and rūpaka (“metaphor”) but is distinct from both of them (Gerow 1971: 131–132). Utpreks.ā is usually translated into English as “ascription.” Etymologically, it combines the verbal root īks. (“to look”) with the preverbs ut- (“up”) and pra(“forward”): in the most literal sense, it is an “overlooking.” To use Western terminology, in this figure a vehicle is evoked, in this case through its mode of movement, but it is also overlooked—and it is there to be looked for. While this may sound like the Western reduction of a striking verb to a mere noun, a concept replacing another one, what is really being looked for here are typical situations and the thoughts and feelings that they stereotypically evoke.

a trope of time



51

The second problem was that we are dealing here with a ritual figure, one used in ceremonies that are meant to be effective and moving. Moving first in the most literal sense: they cause gods to move toward the participants and cause ghosts, demons, and illness to move away from them. But also moving in the figurative sense: observations and conversations suggest that participation in the ritual is, at least stereotypically, an emotionally moving experience (Leavitt 1984, 1996). Now Western poetics has above all elaborated the idea that poetic figures operate conceptually and cognitively; they make you think in certain ways, activate certain images. Globally, these doctrines privilege thinking over feeling. And those who criticize the conceptual and cognitive bias of most metaphor studies praise not the affective specificity that metaphor can provoke but— in a reversal that seems to maintain the terms that have been reversed—precisely its conceptual and cognitive difficulty, the fact that it makes the reader do extra work: “the worst disservice critics can do to poetry is to understand it too soon” (Forrest-Thomson 1978, cited in Martin 2012: 865). For some (e.g., Shklovsky 1965 [1916]), this gives metaphor a function of revealing previously unnoticed aspects of the world. While some do, indeed, seek to clarify “the affective and aesthetic aspects of metaphor” (Martin 2012: 865), the emphasis in Western theory has remained on understanding, on grasping meanings, more than on the evocation of specific, perhaps stereotypical, feelings, as would be called for in much ritual practice. Here an advantage for Indian poetics is that, as in traditional Indian theory generally, the Western mind-body dichotomy is simply not there (Leavitt 1996). What is taken account of is the whole person and the interpersonal situation. In this case, the assumption is that poetic figures operate not only conceptually or cognitively but also to produce an emotional, which is also a bodily, effect. As Yigal Bronner (2012b: 1244) puts it, in what I feel is no exaggeration, The achievements of this long-standing and sophisticated discipline include an unparalleled analysis of figurative language, as in the investigation of the formal, logical, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of simile and its numerous sister tropes; a complex and overarching theory of readers’ emotional response to literature; and a highly complex semantic-cognitive analysis of denotation, metaphor and suggestion, linguistic capacities identified as enabling the readers’ emotional and aesthetic responses.

The point of ornamented language is to raise echoes, reverberations (dhvani) of unstated, implicit associations (Porcher 1983), thus provoking a particular kind of essentialized, purified “taste” or “essence” (rasa) of an emotional experience. These associations and reverberations come from outside the text itself; they must already be there in memory, both conceptual memory

52



john leavitt

and bodily memory. The presumption in classical Indian poetics is that the onus in a poetic performance is on the receiver as much as the performer: poetic works are produced not for humanity or for the universe in general but for a particular population that can be assumed to have a set of shared experiences, shared values, and, since this is Hindu India, a shared mental-bodily nature. Indian poetics was working from something like a very sophisticated reader-response or reception theory a good thousand years ago. Taking this seriously, I think, requires that someone coming from another society, who does not have the same implicit knowledge and the same associations as the expected producers and consumers of the figure, undertake something like a social-anthropological investigation of the role of the elements of the figure outside the figure itself, indeed outside the textual realm, in life; to paraphrase Michael Silverstein (1977), there are ethnographic prerequisites to poetic analysis. I will offer bits of such an ethnography based on the two elements of the figure considered here, first twilight, then swinging. In the case of swinging, we will seek to identify situations in which the vehicle is likely to be found and that are part of its resonance.

Twilight The upameya in this case is the word sandhyā (“twilight”). The word is a direct borrowing from Sanskrit, a form of which is also the ancestral language of modern Kumaoni. In linguistic terminology, it is a tatsama, a borrowing of an ancient Sanskrit word preserving its Sanskrit form. It contrasts with the tadbhava form, the predictable transformation of the ancient word (sandhyā) into a modern language, giving the relatively unmarked Kumaoni word sās (“twilight” or “evening”). In Sanskrit, sandhyā is a fairly transparent form uniting a preverb sam(“with”) to a form of the verbal root dhā (“put”), plus a feminine nominalizing ending: its etymological sense is juncture or joining together, in this case the juncture of day and night (“the meeting point of two periods of time” [Sivananda 1947: 135]). Its original usage marked both of the junctions between day and night, both dusk and dawn (as is sometimes the case with English “twilight” and is still a sense of the French crépuscule). Regional languages and religious practices throughout Hindu South Asia have borrowed the word, as well as the concept of twilight as the link between fundamentally different cosmic states, from this classical sense of the term. For orthoprax Hindus, the sandhyā is the prayer said at dawn, noon, and dusk. In the context of Kumaoni ritual and oral performance, sandhyā indicates the dusk of evening, as does its derived word, everyday Kumaoni sās. The reso-

a trope of time



53

nances of the term in this context are specified by a series of little images of this transition that are presented in sandhyā chants themselves. The bard Jay Rām: ghol ki car.i ghol me˜ bait.h rai cha, gāy bāchī kā baran. bādhi jānῑ, nau lākh tārā . khul jānῑ, jangal kā ghasyārī ai jānῑ, pān.ī kā panār ai jānῑ. The little bird of the nest is settling down in the nest, the cow and the calf ’s ropes are being tied, the ninety thousand stars are opening, the grass-cutting girls from the forest are coming, the water-drawers from the water are coming.

And the bard Kamal Rām (recorded in April 1982): sandhyā kā bahat me˜ , isvar mero bābā, gāi bachan kā bādan lāgῑ, ghol ki car.i jo cha ghol me˜ lhai gai cha, isvar mero bābā, sandhyā kā bahat me˜ . At twilight time, Lord my father, the cow and the calves have been tied up, the little bird of the nest has gone into the nest, Lord my father, at twilight time. bāt.i bat.auv ko dyār jo cha, isvar mero bābā, bāt.ai bādi go, isvar mero bābā. sandhyā kā bahat me˜ godi ko bālak jo cha god me˜ sukālo hai go, isvar mero bābā, sandhyā kā bahat me˜ tumāro nām lhinū, isvar mero bābā. The traveler on the road, Lord my father, has pitched his camp on the road, Lord my father, at twilight time the child of the lap has gone happy into the lap, Lord my father, at twilight time we take your name, Lord my father.

In the words of the famous bard Gopī Dās, as recorded by the anthropologist Marc Gaborieau in 1970 (each line is repeated twice), pañcanāma devatāo / thānā bāsi hai ga. gholā kā pañchī lai / gholo me˜ bāso lhai cha. cārā or.a kā pañchī lai / cāro or.o bāso lhai ga. . jangalā mirago lai / chāchõ me˜ bāso lhai jā. . tālā kī macha lai / manārõ bāso lhai jā . . . sun.ā sun.ā o devotāo / sanjiyā binatā. ban.ā jān.ā celī-baur.ī / ghara laut.ī ge chā. madhuvana kī gāi bhaĩsī / ai ge got.hā nan.ā. hai ga devotāo / gāi ko galobandā. sun.ā devotāo / thānā basī hai ga. [Declaiming] panchī prān.ī kiri kilimī thāna bāsī hai gai! The five-name gods have settle in their temple (than). The bird of the nest has settled in the nest. Birds of the four directions have settled in the four directions. The deer of the forest has settled in the brush.

54



john leavitt

The fish of the lake and the crocodile have settled . . . Listen, listen, gods, to the twilight prayer. The daughter and daughter-in-law who have gone to the forest have returned home. The cow and buffalo of the holy forest have gone into the cow-basement. The tying of the cows by the neck, oh gods, has taken place. Listen, gods, they have settled in their places. Birds, living beings, bugs, worms have settled in their places (than)!

Each of these runs presents a series of scenes that occur at twilight; each scene has something in common with the others, and the set can in each case be understood as an elaborated similarity figure. Each specifies the kind of juncture twilight is for the people involved in the ritual, evoking a whole chronotope in which adults, small children, cows and calves, travelers, and little birds are out and about during the day doing what needs to be done, while at night they all stop what they are doing to come back to the house, the nest, the mother’s lap, the cow-basement under the house, or even the temporary domesticity of a camp by the side of the road. This chronotope is that of a stereotypical Central Himalayan household. In rural Kumaon, the household is the basic unit of social life and the minimal unit of production. It consists of a family and their cows, buffaloes, goats, and smaller livestock. Its human component is made up of a commensal group living in the main part of the house, up a small flight of stairs from the courtyard; its animal component sleeps in a sort of half-basement (gōt.h). During a typical day this household is scattered across the landscape: the women and girls work in the fields or go through the jungle cutting grass and gathering firewood; the smaller children are either at school or out grazing the cattle; the senior men plow the land and go off to engage in wage labor or to trade, often at some distance from the village. The goats and the nimble Himalayan cows are out grazing on the mountainsides, while the buffaloes stay closer to home. At twilight these dispersed units come back together. During the night all are in the house engaged in the quiet activities of cooking, eating, and sleeping, to disperse again the next morning. This means that the abstract oppositions of day and night, of movement and rest, and their interlocking—so that day implies relative movement, and night, relative rest—are experienced in practice in every household every day, whether or not they are explicitly formulated. There is a strong sense that this is the way things should be arranged; people were really quite unhappy when we visitors continued to go out at night to attend rituals in different villages in the area and consequently slept late the following day. We were reproached for doing things backwards.

a trope of time



55

Poetic expression need not be vague; this series of poetic formulas, by showing the parallels among the activities of several kinds of human and other beings, renders abstract relations of opposition and parallelism as clearly as a diagram could, while at the same time suggesting their relevance for the whole realm of living beings (jiu). This set of oppositions resonates with a wider Hindu cosmology, in which the contrasts of day/night and movement/rest also suggest much broader patterns (Leavitt 2000). All of history is understood as a passing of one age after another in a cycle that always includes a period of darkness and repose. Human life is seen in the same way, in the doctrine of reincarnation, as a continual alternation between lives and deaths (see Dimmitt and van Buitenen 1978: 15–24). One can, then, see the combining of the oppositions of day and night, activity and rest, as suggesting this broad frame of existence of the world and living beings. In fact, in Kumaoni ritual and bardic narrative, this world in which we dwell is referred to as yo mirtu man.d.al (“this circle of death”), which we can phrase as “this mortal sphere.” This, then, is the distinguishing characteristic of life in this world: that day/movement/life exist only in alternation with their opposites, night/immobility/death. In rural Kumaon, as elsewhere in rural South Asia, twilight is when the household reunites after the dispersion of the day. In the North Indian plains this time is called godhuli (“cow-dust [time]”), the hour the cows come home to be milked, and you can see in the distance the dust they raise, golden against the setting sun. As elsewhere in South Asia, this moment of the day is stereotypically charged with a sense of warmth and security. Through this connection, twilight is associated with cows coming home and with a child’s relation to his or her mother: directly, since the children come home with the cows to be fed, and indirectly, since cows, the providers of milk, are associated throughout Hinduism with the figure of the providing mother (the cow is often called go mātā [“mother cow”]). I was most struck by this set of sentimental associations when I spoke with a North Indian friend, then a graduate student in anthropology in the United States, about cow-dust time. He started to explain it, said it made him think of his mother and his childhood, made him feel lonesome and far from home; he said it was the most beautiful time of day. He seemed extremely moved and stayed quiet until the subject changed to something less personal. Except for the dust (the Himalayas are less dusty than the North Indian plain), Kumaon shares this whole complex of sentiments. Twilight is the transition between being out in the world and being inside the house in close contact with others, and it is heavily charged with a sense of warmth and security. Somewhat more abstractly, if, as these images suggest, we equate day with purposive movement and night with closing-up and rest, then twilight

56



john leavitt

becomes the juncture between two modes of kinesis. To attribute a swinging movement to this moment, a movement that is not purposive, not unidirectional, seems more than appropriate. There may also be an implied sense of transcendence, of moving calmness that is somehow beyond both the movement of the day and the closure of the nighttime. And this is the moment, a kind of opening between more defined realms, when it is appropriate to call on the local gods to come and be immediately present and, more specifically, to call on angry and out-of-control gods to come and take pleasure in the balanced swinging movement of dance in a human body.

Swinging If swinging, then, is a mode of movement not literally descriptive of twilight, of what situations is it literally descriptive? To put the question ethnographically: What swings in rural Kumaon? I do not claim to have come near exhausting this question, but a few things stand out. Among the objects characterized by the verb jhulan., some of which can be designated by the nominal form jhuv (“a swing”), are the child’s swing, the infant’s cradle, the rope bridge over a river (no longer in use in the area where I worked, but see Traill 1828: 142–143), and a swaying palanquin. These objects evoke typical situations connected with the gods. Swings for playing are associated with the gods in many parts of the Hindu world (Bose 1967 [1927]; Gell 1980); in Kumaon, swings are often hung next to the temples of the local gods. Palanquins, for their part, are the favored mode of transport not only of brides and members of royal households but of gods and their images (as in other parts of the Himalayas; see Sax 1991: 58–60; Berti 1999); many Kumaoni myths end with the 330 million gods carrying the Great Goddess back to her home in her palanquin. These are metonymical relationships, relationships of contiguity. Bridges suggest a metaphorical relation to the gods, one of similarity; bridges cross you over, and “crossing over” (verbal root tr.) is the source of much of the Hindu vocabulary of divine salvation (Wadley 1975: 92–101). We have seen that the goddess Twilight is called tārin.i (“Savioress”), literally “she who crosses [us] over.” The cradle and the swing have further associations that seem relevant here. The small child’s cradle, the jhuv or cãvar, is a large basket connected by ropes to the ceiling of the house. It is a synecdoche, I think, of early childhood, which in the Kumaon hills, as elsewhere in North India, is a period of great license and at the same time great protection and indulgence, especially for little boys—a period that, again especially for boys, will be followed by what some have called the crackdown, when the child must take on his role as

a trope of time



57

a responsible member of the patrilineage. In the words of the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar (1978: 127), Even more than the suddenness of the transition, the contrast between an earlier, more or less unchecked, benevolent indulgence and the new inflexible standards of absolute obedience and conformity to familial and social standards is its striking feature. A north Indian proverb, addressed to men, pithily conveys what the boy has to now face: “Treat a son like a raja for the first five years, like a slave for the next ten and like a friend thereafter.”

Overall, this situation holds in Kumaon as well. This one swing, the child’s cradle, may, I think, fairly be held to be stereotypically associated with situations of safety, love, and indulgence before responsibilities set in. . The swing hung from a branch, jhuv or hinàv, has parallel associations. Swinging is an essential part of the festivities of springtime, when children and unmarried young people spend long afternoons out in the forest herding the cows, playing and swinging, gathering the suddenly abundant berries, and indulging in romances. All is green and flowering after the long winter. . Many songs celebrate rangilo caita, the merry month of Cait, which, like May in Western European tradition, is a bad month for marrying but a good one for wooing and amorous play. Especially for young girls, swinging on the jhuv is a synecdoche, if you like, of this whole season, and the season a metonymy of this stage of life, a stage stereotypically associated with license along with indulgence and protection by one’s natal family. In the West, it is considered right and proper for the romances of May to lead to marriages in June. In traditional North India, on the contrary, marriage unites two people who, ideally, have never seen each other before the wedding night. The lover in the springtime is thus almost never the future bride or bridegroom. Especially for the bride nothing could be clearer than the demarcation between her life as an unmarried sister, playing and swinging in the woods with the companions of her childhood, and her life as a young bride in a strange village, constrained to meekness and silence before almost everyone. This transformation is felt most keenly in the month of Cait in the early spring, and many songs tell how a young bride is going back to her natal home in this month to recapture—temporarily—her former freedom.6 Stereotypically, the situations in which one swings as a young adult are associated with freedom, lightheartedness, lack of constraint, indulgence, and, for older people (especially married women), intense nostalgia. Both swinging in the cradle and swinging on the swing are, it seems to me, likely to evoke these life stages that are remembered, commented on, and sung about as periods of indulgence and protection that are doomed to end with the assumption of social responsibilities.

58



john leavitt

Cradle, swing, bridge, palanquin: we have a number of likely vehicles, among which we need not choose. Instead of an occulted vehicle, we have a fan of possible vehicles, all of which happen, in a typical rural Kumaoni life, to be associated with a limited set of stereotypical emotions. Two of these vehicles have divine connotations, and two are linked to periods of life that are charged, or expected to be charged, with nostalgic good feelings. Through both sets of associations, to the forest swing and to the cradle, the idea of swinging evokes the most strongly and positively highlighted periods of life: for boys, before the “crackdown”; for girls, before the crackdown of marriage. The associated sentiments parallel each other, and they are entirely compatible with the comfort and nostalgia evoked by the associations to twilight. We started with twilight as the time of juncture between states, suggesting, in a fairly abstract conceptual way, a transcendence of the ordinary oppositions of this circle of death. Come at from this optic, swinging seems to do something very similar. It, too, can be seen as a mediating term, this time between the categories we have already seen evoked for twilight, of movement and rest. Like the day/night opposition, that of movement and rest comes up constantly in Kumaoni life and thought; both are returned to repeatedly in the opening invocation of the ritual. What is swinging, after all, but a movement that goes nowhere, goes two different ways almost at once, that gives a sense of covering distance without covering any? When the god dances in the medium’s body, he or she moves with a swaying motion; when the god speaks later in the ritual, it is in a singsong voice that suggests swaying (Leavitt 1997). On the one hand, then, we have a parallel conceptual structuring between twilight and swinging as mediating points, points of transition, specifically between activity and stillness. On the other hand, we have a set of mutually reinforcing stereotypical affective associations (on which, see Leavitt 1996). Twilight evokes returning home, and this particularly means returning to one’s natal home, to one’s mother: in the sandhyā itself, the bard Kamal Rām calls the house where the ritual is being held matokur.i (“mother’s house”); as we have seen, Twilight is sometimes called sandhyā mātā (“Mother Twilight”). Swinging, for its part, suggests not only the gods but also the indulgence and protection of a small boy while he is still sleeping next to his mother, of a girl before marriage, while she is still living in her natal home with her mother. My impression is that these are powerful stereotypical associations for rural Kumaonis, and this, I think, is at least one of the emotional echoes of this utpreks. ā—made all the more resonant by being conveyed indirectly, through crookedness. It is possible that what gives the figure of twilight swinging its emotional punch is precisely the connection it makes between a conceptual structure—a set, if you like, of concentrated ideas—and a set of concentrated emotions: the

a trope of time



59

emotions come to infuse the ideas, giving them a power and convincingness that is the greater for being implicit, for being felt rather than conceptualized, for resonating (dhvani) beyond the words. What makes the metaphor effective, in this view, what permits it to add its bit to the total effect of the invocation, and so to the total effect of the ritual, is the way it identifies the broadest cosmological categories, drawn from a variety of cultural contexts, with intimate, if expected and stereotypical, personal feelings. In this case, the idea of the gods becomes saturated with emotions derived from shared experience of, and shared associations to, twilight and childhood and youth, suggesting an effect of trust, quietness, and receptivity to the god. This kind of melding of concept and affect was noted by Edward Sapir (1934: 494) a long time ago: “Where, as in the case of a national flag or a beautiful poem . . . the two theoretically distinct types of symbolic behavior merge into one . . . one then deals with symbols of peculiar potency and even danger.” In this case, a play on concepts evokes the figures of the (somewhat) transcendent gods, and a play on feelings evokes a sense of well-being, of freedom and nostalgia, of a child with his or her mother. This specific echo plays a part, I think, in the overall economy of the ritual, which brings its participants into direct contact with regional gods who are supposed to become calm and reaffirm their role as protectors of the family, takers of trouble onto themselves. Already at this opening stage of the ceremony, it is suggested to the participants—and suggested with all the weight of the associations I have been outlining—that their relationship to the god is as that of a child to its mother, that they are free of responsibility, free of constraint, that the god, like a mother, will take care of things. This interpretation finds support later on in the ritual. When the god is finally brought to speak, he or she clearly enunciates this mother-child relationship: “You are the child of my lap,” the god says. “Don’t worry. Don’t shake the waters of the body up and down. I am responsible.” And over and over again: tu myar godi ko bālak (“You are the child of my lap”); tum meri phule ki bāri (“You are my garden of flowers”).

Widening the Swing of Comparison These are the associations that, I think it can be reasonably argued, are evoked stereotypically by the phrase “twilight swings” in the context of this ritual. Many of them are not unique to Kumaon, and they are not new. Given the nature of our planet and the nature of human biology and most human economies, some of them are probably at least salient for most societies. Within South Asia, some of the images that the bards evoke are very old indeed. The Vedic Hymn to the Night (R g Veda 10.127), probably composed ˚

60



john leavitt

around 1000 BCE, contains the following lines (with repeating elements in boldface): sā´ no adyá, yásyā vayám . ní te yāmann áviks.mahi vrks.é ná vasatím . váyah. ˚ As today you [have come], At whose coming we have gone home As birds to their dwelling in the tree. ní grā´māso aviks.ata, ní padvánto, ní paks.ín.ah., ní śyenā´ saś cid arthínah. Home have gone the villagers, home those with feet, home those with wings. Home even the eager hawks.7

This figure may be even older, given the striking parallels (down to the repetitions of indication of return toward rest, again in boldface) in fragment 104a of Sappho (Campbell 1982: 130): héspere pánta phérōn ósa phaínolis eskédas’ aúōs, phéreis óin, phéreis aîga, phéreis ápu máteri paîda Evening star, bringing all things that bright Dawn scattered, You bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring to the mother the child.8

The literature of Indian poetics, too, draws on the topos of nightfall, with parallel little scenes, for examples and illustrations. The two seventh- or eighth-century founders of Indian poetics, Bhāmaha (Kāvyālam.kāra 2.87; Sastry 1970: 50) and Dan.d.in (Kāvyādarśa 2.244; Belvalkar 1924: text 24, translation 36)—priority between the two is still debated (Bronner 2012a)—cite the śloka: gato ’stam arko bhātīndur yānti vāsāya paks.ín.ah. The sun has set, the moon shines. Birds go to their dwellings.

For Bhāmaha, this is an example of a non-poetic utterance lacking crookedness and so representing mere vārtā, mere reporting (Vijayavardhana 1970: 30). For Dan.d.in it is a species of hetu or causal figure allowing one to tell what time it is (discussion in Gerow 1971: 329). Mammat.a in the eleventh century (Kāvyaprakāśa 5; Karmarkar 1933: 240; Jha 1967: 148–149; cf. Porcher 1983: 48) and Hemacandra in the twelfth (Kāvyānuśāsana, Śarmā and Śarmā 1901:

a trope of time



61

28; cf. the comment in Sastry 1970: 50) cite the same line in order, on the contrary, to insist on its many contextually determined meanings. Mammat.a gives ten different interpretations for “The sun has set,” which include “It’s time to meet your lover,” “It’s time to stop working,” “It’s time for the cows to go home,” and “It’s time to start the sandhyā rite.” In other words, when a Sanskrit poetician wanted as flat and unfigurative a verse on nightfall as possible, the one he found also said that the birds were going home; when another poetician needed suggested meanings for the same verse, a fair number of these fit into the chronotope of daily activity, nightly rest, and a religious marking of the passage that we have seen evoked in a Himalayan possession ritual. Two other points about this last passage. First, Mammat.a insists on the non-finite nature of the possible implications of the phrase: he says anavadhir . vyangyo ’r tha (“the suggested meaning is unlimited”) (Porcher 1983: 48). This ˚ but I would argue that the series of images presented by the Kumay be true, maoni bards serves, among other things, to limit the suggested meaning of twilight, to direct listeners’ attention in certain directions rather than others. Second, the very phrase gato ’stam arkah. (“the sun has gone down”), is in fact a kind of frozen or stereotyped utpreks. ā, since its literal meaning is “the sun has gone home” (ástam, from the Proto-Indo-European root *nes- [“to return home”]; Mayrhofer 1992a: 149). And going home at nightfall is what this whole series of images is about.9

Sunset and Time: The Ethnographer’s Magic If these images speak to us, if they set off resonances for us too, this is probably because we, like many humans, live in societies that organize their time and space so that most of their members go out to work during the day and come together to eat and sleep at night. Time is about repetition as well as change, and this repeating transformation of the world is a planetarily available source of time-experience. Something comparable happens at dawn, and dawn songs, with a constant evocation of the central topos of passionate romantic love, are a staple of many European literatures (Hatto 1965). The strong associations to twilight do not represent an affective universal as such, but a generally available chrono-trope whereby an unmissable and regularly repeating transformation of the world is identified from earliest childhood with a regularly repeating set of stereotypical feelings, rasas if you will. These feelings are linked to the conditions of transition, so that for many of us twilight, the between-time, has a kind of shimmering quality to it, a kind of movement in stillness, a kinetic calm, that is inherently touching,

62



john leavitt

either transcendently beautiful or very sad or both together. We live this every day, experiencing it without thinking about it very much. It should be possible to make this explicit; the identification of stereotypical tropes and their resonances can be a tool for sharing how men and women of other climes and cultures live such marked situations as well in a way that words in themselves cannot convey. Even in frozen tropes, dead metaphors, something of the movement remains. In a 1930s strip from George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” (reproduced in Herriman 1969: 111; cf. Waugh 1947: 61), Ignatz the pompous mouse declaims, “The shades of night are falling” with an elocutionist’s hand gesture: dramatic, even overblown, but mundane. The eternally innocent, and literalminded, Krazy Kat, as always admiring and entranced, takes him at his word. “I got ’em, I got ’em,” s/he cries (Krazy Kat is gender neutral), as a pair of window shades falls out of the gloaming. Through such magic, the “ethnographer’s magic” perhaps (Stocking 1992 [1983]), the trope turns back, and the metaphor is renewed.

Acknowledgments Thanks to James W. Fernandez and Marko Živković for keeping the Tropologies project alive, to James W. Fernandez for organizing the Spanish translation and publication of an earlier version of this chapter, and to Gary Snyder for his kind permission to reproduce lines from The Back Country. Thanks to the bards Kamal Rām of Jhyūli and Jay Rām of Diyāri for permission to reproduce their performances, and to Marc Gaborieau for access to recordings of Gopī Dās. Special thanks to Bernard Bate for organizing many of our convivial meetings, for the reference to the Gary Snyder poem cited here, and for his querida presencia. This chapter, like this book, is dedicated to him. May his memory be a blessing. John Leavitt is professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal, where he teaches courses on poetics and culture and the anthropology of South Asia and the Celtic world(s). He has conducted field research in the Indian Himalayas and in Ireland. His publications include Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought (2010); the edited volumes Poetry and Prophecy: The Anthropology of Inspiration (1997) and Le mythe aujourd’hui (2005); chapters and articles on spirit possession and shamanism, linguistic relativity, and comparative mythology and poetics; and, as co-translator, the new English edition of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought (La Pensée sauvage).

a trope of time



63

Notes 1. Since 1981 I have participated in about twenty jāgar rituals. 2. This claim is based on my own participation in jāgars since the early 1980s; locally printed chapbooks (Belvāl 1978, 1981; Jośī 1981); audio recordings (Gaborieau 1970; Bernède 1997); and dissertations and published material (Pān.d.ey 1962: 353–354; Bernède 2004: 120, 2006: 59; Sah 2012: 99; Malik 2016: 50, 185). 3. It is possible that what is being referred to here is the twilight of dusk swinging in one direction and the twilight of dawn in the other. I heard nothing like this from Kumaonis. 4. On Western theories of tropes since the Greeks, see Barthes 1970, Ricoeur 1977, Bahti 1993, Bahti and Mann 2012, and Martin 2012 and his other articles on tropes in the same volume; on Indian poetics, see Gerow 1971, 1974, 1977, 1993, Porcher 1978, Vijayavardhana 1970, Raghavan 1974, and Bronner 2012b; on tropes in anthropology, see J. D. Sapir and Crocker 1977, Fernandez 1986, 1991, and Bate 2009. 5. One could then add tropology to the disciplines that achieved scientific rigor in India millennia before doing so in the West: mathematics, descriptive linguistics, and, it has been argued (e.g., Paranjpe 1984), the psychology of states of consciousness. 6. The spring songs, ritu-rain., explicitly pit the natal village against the village of marriage, with the latter coming out poorly. See Gaborieau 1974: 327, 329, and the references therein. 7. Similar sunset imagery is mobilized in the Hymn to Savitr ( R g Veda 2.38). ˚ to ˚ this passage. 8. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for calling my attention 9. The line is even more figurative than I have indicated. Sanskrit has a rich vocabulary of semi-synonyms. Here, instead of the inherited words for sun and moon, sūrya(Mayrhofer 1992b: 742) and mās- (Mayrhofer 1992b: 352–353), the line gives arka(“the shining one”) for the sun, from the root arc meaning to shine or praise (Mayrhofer 1992a: 114–115), also found in the name of the R g Veda (“the Veda of Praises”); and indu-, originally “drop,” as in a drop of liquid, the˚bright drop (Mayrhofer 1992a: 191– 192), for the moon.

References Bahti, Timothy. 1993. “Figure, Scheme, Trope.” In New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, 409–412. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bahti, Timothy, and Jenny C. Mann. 2012. “Trope.” In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn., ed. Roland Greene, 1463–1464. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bate, Bernard. 2009. Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India. New York: Columbia University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1970. “L’ancienne rhétorique: aide-mémoire.” Communications 16: 172–223. Belvāl, Mathurā Datt. 1978. Gan.ganāth Devtā kā varn.an. Kusumkhera, Dist. Nainital: Mathurā Datt Belvāl. ———. 1981. Bālā Goriyā yāne Gvel Devtā kī amar kathā. Kusumkhera, Dist. Nainital: Mathurā Datt Belvāl.

64



john leavitt

Belvalkar, S. K., ed. and trans. 1924. Kāvyādarśa of Dan.d. in. Poona: Oriental Book Supplying Company. Bernède, Franck. 1997. “Bardes de l’Himalaya. Népal/Inde. Epopées et musique de transe.” Le Chant du Monde, CNR 2741080. Compact disc. ———. 2004. “Le jāgar au Kumaon: Musique, danse et rituels possession dans l’Himalaya central.” PhD dissertation. Paris: École des Hautes en Sciences Sociales. ———. 2006. “‘Être au milieu du temps’: De quelques principes et usages de la possession en Himalaya central (Uttaranchal—Inde).” Cahiers de Musiques Traditionnelles 19: 53–78. Berti, Daniela. 1999. “Un dieu maître-chanteur: La résolution d’un conflit villageois dans la vallée de Kullu (Himachal Pradesh).” Purus. ārtha 21: 61–97 Bose, Nirmal Kumar. 1967 (1927). “The Spring Festival of India.” In Culture and Society in India, ed. N. K. Bose, 76–135. London: Asia Publishing House. Bronner, Yigal. 2012a. “A Question of Priority: Revisiting the Bhāmaha-Dan.d.in Debate.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 40: 67–118. ———. 2012b. “Sanskrit Poetics.” In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn., ed. Roland Greene, 1244–1250. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1958. A Grammar of Metaphor. London: Secker and Warburg. Campbell, David A., ed. and trans. 1982. Greek Lyric, vol. 1, Sappho and Alcaeus. Loeb Classical Library no. 142. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dimmitt, Cornelia, and J. A. B. van Buitenen. 1978. Classical Hindu Mythology: A Reader in the Sanskrit Purānas. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Fanger, Allan C. 1990. “The Jāgar—Spirit Possession Séance among the Rājputs and Silpakārs of Kumaon.” In Himalaya: Past and Present, vol. 1, ed. Maheshwar P. Joshi, Allen C. Fanger, and Charles W. Brown, 173–91. Almora: Shree Almora Book Depot. Fernandez, James W. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———, ed. 1991. Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fontanier, Pierre. 1977 (1830). Les Figures du discours. Paris: Flammarion. Forrest-Thomson, Victoria. 1978. Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. New York: St. Martin’s. Gaborieau, Marc. 1970. “Jāgar.” Sound recording of a jāgar of Gopī Dās, Uttar Pradesh, India. Archives d’Ethnomusicologie du Musée de l’Homme, Paris. https://archives.cremcnrs.fr/archives/items/CNRSMH_I_1976_006_014_02/. ———. 1974. “Classification des récits chantés: La littérature orale des populations hindoues de l’Himalaya central.” Poétique 19: 313–339. ———. 1975. “La transe rituelle dans l’Himalaya central: Folie, avatār, méditation.” Purus.ārtha 2: 147–172. Gell, Alfred. 1980. “The Gods at Play: Vertigo and Possession in Muria Religion.” Man, n.s., 15(2): 219–248. Gerow, Edwin. 1971. A Glossary of Indian Figures of Speech. The Hague: Mouton. ———. 1974. “The Poetics of Stanzaic Poetry: The Alam.kāra-Śāstra.” In The Literatures of India: An Introduction, by Edward C. Dimock Jr., Edwin Gerow, C. M. Naim, A. K. Ramanujan, Gordon Roadarmel, and J. A. B. van Buitenen, 120–128. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1977. Indian Poetics. History of Indian Literature series, vol. 5, pt. 2, fasc. 3. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ———. 1993. “Indian Poetics.” In New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, 582–585. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

a trope of time



65

Guha, Ramachandra. 1999. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, rev edn. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hatto, Arthur T., ed. 1965. Eos: An Enquiry into the Theme of Lovers’ Meetings and Partings at Dawn. The Hague: Mouton. Herriman, George. 1969. Krazy Kat. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jha, Ganganatha, ed. and trans. 1967. Kāvyāprakāsha of Mammat.a. Varanasi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan. Jośī, Mathurādatt. 1981. Rājā Goriyā—Mahākāvya Gvel Devtā kī amar kahānī. Janail, Almora: Śrī Nārāyan.datt Jośī, Kumāū  -Sāhitya-Bhan.d.ār. Kakar, Sudhir. 1978. The Inner World: Childhood and Society in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kapur, Tribhuwan. 1988. Religion and Ritual in Rural India. New Delhi: Abhinav. Karmarkar, Raghunath Damodar, ed. 1933. Kāvyāprakāśa of Mammat.a, 5th edn. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Krengel, Monika. 1999. “Spirit Possession in the Central Himalayas Jāgar-Rituals: An Expression of Customs and Rights.” Purus. ārtha 21: 265–288. Leavitt, John. 1984. “Structure et émotion dans un rite kumaoni, Himalaya central.” Culture 4(1): 19–31. ———. 1996. “Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions.” American Ethnologist 23(3): 514–539. ———. 1997. “The Language of the Gods: Poetry and Prophecy in the Central Himalayas.” In Poetry and Prophecy: The Anthropology of Inspiration, ed. John Leavitt, 129–168. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2000. “The Year in the Kumaon Himalayas.” Cosmos: Journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society 16: 43–88. Malik, Aditya. 2016. Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment: Oral Narratives from the Central Himalayas. New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, Wallace. 2012. “Metaphor.” In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn., ed. Roland Greene, 863–870. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mayrhofer, Manfred. 1992a. Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen, vol. 1. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. ———. 1992b. Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen, vol. 2. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Pān.d.ey, Trilocan. 1962. Kumāūkā lok sāhitya. Almora: Shree Almora Book Depot. Paranjpe, A. C. 1984. Theoretical Psychology: The Meeting of East and West. Delhi: Springer. Porcher, Marie-Claude. 1978. Figures de style en sanskrit: Théories des Alam . kāraśāstra; Ana. lyse de poèmes de Venkat.ādhvarin. Publications de l’Institut de Civilisation Indienne, série in-8˚ fasc. 45. Paris: Collège de France, Institut de Civilisation Indienne. ———. 1983. “Le déploiement de l’implicite dans la poétique sanscrite.” Purus. ārtha 7: 39–56. Raghavan, V. 1973 (1942). Studies on Some Concepts of the Alam.kāra Śāstra, 2nd edn. Adyar Library series no. 33. Madras: Adyar Library and Research Centre. ———. 1974. “Indian Poetics.” In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enlarged edn., ed. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, 383–384. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Richards, I. A. 1936. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1977 (1975). The Rule of Metaphor, trans. R. Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

66



john leavitt

Sah, Pooja. 2012. “Traditional Folk Media Prevalent in Kumaon Region of Uttarakhand: A Critical Study.” PhD thesis. Varanasi: Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University. Sapir, Edward. 1934. “Symbolism.” In Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 14, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Saunders Johnson, 492–495. New York: Macmillan. Sapir, J. David, and J. Christopher Crocker, eds. 1977. The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. . Śarmā, Śivadatta, and Pān.d.uran Kāśīnātha Śarmā, eds. 1901. Śrīhemacandravirocitam. Kāvyānuśāsanam. Bombay: Nirn.āysagar Press. . Sastry, P. V. Naganatha, ed. and trans. 1970. Kāvyālankāra of Bhāmaha, 2nd edn. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Sax, William S. 1991. Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage. New York: Oxford University Press. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1965 (1916). “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 3–24. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1977. “Cultural Prerequisites to Grammatical Analysis.” In Linguistics and Anthropology, ed. Muriel Saville-Troike, 139–151. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Sivananda, Swami. 1947. All about Hinduism. Rikhikesh: Sivananda Publication League. Snyder, Gary. 1968. The Back Country. New York: New Directions. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1992 (1983). “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski.” In The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology, 12–59. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Traill, George William. 1828. “Statistical Sketch of Kamaon.” Asiatic Researches 16: 137–234. Vijayavardhana, G. 1970. Outlines of Sanskrit Poetics. Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series no. 76. Varanasi: Chowkhamba S.S. Office. Wadley, Susan. 1975. Shakti: Power in the Conceptual Structure of Karimpur Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Anthropology. Waugh, Coulton. 1947. The Comics. New York: Macmillan.

CHAPTER 3

Dreams Inside Out Some Uses of Dream in Social Theory and Ethnographic Inquiry Marko Živković       

On the Peripheries of Europe: The Nation as a Dreamworld? Radio Peščanik (Hour-glass) is a weekly Belgrade B92 radio show that provides a community of commiseration for the marginalized antinationalist, antiwar intelligentsia of the Serbian capital city. If nothing else, in the words of one of the guests, it is the mosquito bite that does not do any harm to the current powers but at least keeps them from sleeping soundly at night. Here is a comment that Biljana Kovačević Vučo (2005) from YUCOM1 made on the 16 September 2005 episode of Hour-glass, commenting on the most recent slew of government scandals including high-level corruption in the army, the sacking of a supreme court judge, and the trial of Prime Minister Djindjić’s assassins: “Authorities are throwing sand in the eyes of the public, while whole ‘logs’ [of scandalous doings] fly by us,” Kovačević Vučo commented, “and, what is much worse, the public, including the parliamentary opposition, wouldn’t cry out even if all the ‘logs’ were thrown openly at it.” The sand thrown into eyes, of course, means that citizens have only the most blurred understanding of what is going on. “We can only guess at [what’s really going on],” Kovačević Vučo said, but even this vague hint horrifies us while, if we really knew what’s going on, I think we’d all emigrate. We are all a bit insane here—we behave so freely because we don’t know what’s really behind all of this. Sounds like conspiracy

68



marko Živkovi

theory, but isn’t. Otherwise, would this system persist as it is, would we remain as if in Munch’s “Scream,” always trying to say something, but no sound comes out, or it does come out but produces no effect?

She then recounts a dream: I dreamt of a good friend the other day and I told him—‘I dreamt of you, we were in some demonstrations, and then you suddenly turned into a little baby . . . and you tried to say something.’ Something was coming out, I understood him, but it wasn’t really articulated. And then I realized that this wasn’t my friend, that this was Serbia. We are constantly emitting those screams which just shatter, disappear, produce no effect. (Kovačević Vučo 2005)

Hour-glass is often rich in metaphors, and this radio commentary is no exception. The editor and host, Svetlana Lukić, opened the episode, as usual, with a short gloss on current affairs. The situation that Kovačević Vučo figured as “the speck of dust thrown into our eyes by the authorities [so we’ll miss the logs flying by us],” Lukić described as our inability to distinguish real bombs from smoke bombs (thrown by the same authorities). “Is there anyone here, in this little, revolting statelet [u ovoj maloj, gadnoj zemljici], who knows what’s going on?,” Lukić agonized. She then came up with this image: I have to confess I no longer understand. Just when I think I have a key of sorts that could clarify something, it turns out this key isn’t opening any doors. I am thinking of that fable about a castle with a thousand rooms, a key in front of every one of them, only the key is for some other door. That is, in this parable, no key is wrong, but the problem is we don’t know which doors they open, all the keys have been switched around, and so [who wouldn’t go insane]. (Lukić 2005)

In my ethnographic research into everyday life in Milošević’s Serbia, I paid close attention to the way people tried to figure out their social reality— the tropes, the idioms, the images and narrative elements they tended to use.2 A lot of these figurations turned out to be bizarre, outlandish, and strange. I eventually sorted them out into several genres. Conspiracy theories and tropes of amorphous substances, for instance, I classified as being a way to figure the “opacity of Milošević’s Serbia.” Amorphous substances like mud, slush, jelly, and mists were often overdetermined as metaphors; that is, they figured in both the “opacity of the political life” and another genre—that of the peculiar in-betweenness felt so often in the peripheries of Europe (and elsewhere). This in-betweenness is, in its turn, expressed in various spatial and temporal idioms. The spatial idioms comprise what is sometimes called “symbolic geography” (Fernandez 1988, 1997; Wolff 1994; Herzfeld 1987; Živković 1990, 1997a,

dreams inside out



69

1997b), while the temporal idioms abound with images of “missing the [Euro] train,” “catching up,” and, in the Serbian case most often, being “stuck” in some sort of twilight state of “bad eternity.” These figures often tried to capture a peculiar sense of being in the neither-here-nor-there state rather than of inhabiting the extremes of any “metaphoric continua” (Fernandez 1986: 9–10, 13). Thus the ubiquitous fairytale image of the “castle neither in the sky nor on the ground” (cardak ni na nebu ni na zemlji), the whole family of “half-bakedness” tropes, the notion of the “bearable evil” of Tito’s communism or Milošević’s rule (see Živković 2000c), and, of particular interest to me here, the images of slumber and fitful dream—neither fully asleep nor fully awake. The frequent presence of various pastoral idylls and fables of the Serbian Golden Age could be seen as figurative responses to traumas of modernity. These are common responses of small, marginal polities. But in Milošević’s Serbia these genres abounded with uncommon bizarreness, exemplified in, for instance, phantasmagoric mixing up of Byzantine high culture, peasant astuteness or barbarogenius, and theories about Serbs as the “most ancient people.” These fabulations were propounded by eccentric painters, prime-time TV astrologers, “serious” academics and public intellectuals, world-famous writers like Milorad Pavić of Dictionary of the Khazars fame, and film directors like Kusturica. All of them inhabited the mainstream rather than the fringe, and most of them indulged in some variant of a Balkan magical realism. Finally, there was the immense mythopoetic cluster anchored in the Battle of Kosovo, with the incredible hold it exerts on the Serbian imaginary. All of this could well be seen as a virtual Serbian national “dreamtime.” Clues were thus gradually accumulating over time that many of these bizarre, outlandish, and strange ingredients of the national “imaginary,” emerging in my ethnographic research of Milošević’s Serbia, could be figured as the National Dream.3 There was an oneiric bizarreness to it all. The banality of daily residues and a finite number of prefabricated elements entered into the most fantastic combinations both in the discourses disseminated by the media and in the words of my informants.4 There was evidence of condensation, displacement, and overdetermination in this material. There was a sense of twilight states of awareness. Above all, the “natives” themselves, as well as foreign observers, often enough resorted to explicit figuring of Serbian social reality as a species of dream experience, most often, and predictably, as a nightmare. The above dream of an inarticulate baby’s Munch-esque Scream is a good example of the former, while Stephen Kinzer offers a good example of the latter in his 1993 New York Times article, “The Nightmare’s Roots: The Dream World Called Serbia.” Serbia is a puzzling country, Kinzer begins; “In their efforts to justify the brutal war and ‘ethnic cleansing’ being waged in the name of a Greater Serbia, Serbs often appear gripped by emotions that take them

70



marko Živkovi

beyond the reach of rational argument” (1993: 1). And sure enough, it is not hard to find natives who agree with this characterization: “‘Gangsterism and criminality are so rampant here that we are now like some Latin American country, Paraguay perhaps,’ mused one Serbian official. ‘But it isn’t just the criminal aspect that is overwhelming our society. There is a drifting away from reality into a bizarre kind of fantasy world, like the world in Garcia Márquez novels’” (5). In my ethnographic research, I was also led to examine feature films as revelatory sites for various types of figuration of the social. One such figuration of the conundrums of peripherality was couched in a curiously inverted gender idiom that I called, with George Bernard Shaw’s play in mind, “the Reverse Pygmalion” (Živković 1998). This reversal I found recursively, almost obsessively exemplified in feature films. The ethnographic value of this material made me curious about the neglect of feature films as a resource in anthropology, and this in turn led me to study World War II–era national character research (Mead and Métraux 1953). This was one moment in the history of anthropology when due attention was paid to feature films. I discovered that between 1942 and 1944, rubbing shoulders with anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who was at that time busy analyzing the Nazi film Hitlerjunge Quex at the Museum of Modern Art, was Siegfried Kracauer, working on his influential book From Caligari to Hitler (1947). This conjunction seemed as a “hieroglyph,” a cryptic visualization (like a dream itself) of the ambivalent relationship anthropology has had, since this early instance of film study, with cultural studies generally—or with this whole area of overlapping disciplines (visual culture, critical theory, film studies). That films are often figured as “dreams of society” is of course trivial; even a most superficial perusal of the literature on the relationship of film and society will reveal the uncanny incidence of the “dream” in the titles of many books.5 Kracauer’s Caligari, however, led me to his Weimar essays and eventually to Walter Benjamin. Both Benjamin and Kracauer used dream as a figure in their social theory in often enigmatic ways that promised revelations. It is by this route that I was prompted to understand the dream as a figure, a part both of my ethnographic data and of the social understanding revealed in it. What would happen, I asked, if I should figure the Serbian imaginary neither as a text nor as a “depository of dialogically intertwined narratives” (as “stories Serbs tell themselves and others about themselves”), as has been customary in “interpretive anthropology,” but as a dream? One of the best examples following such a figuration is Stathis Gourgouris’s (1996) Dream Nation. Gourgouris makes an explicit argument for the benefits of seeing modern nations, and especially their historiography, as dreams rather than as texts. It is the ambiguousness and complexity of such

dreams inside out



71

concepts as secondary revision, and ultimately the fundamental unintelligibility of the dream, that draw Gourgouris to dream as the most fruitful figure for understanding the nation. “The apparent readability of the dream,” he says, “is pseudoreadability because the content of a dream is ultimately not a text but an object, whose textual intelligibility is but an affect made necessary by the demands of a thought-producing consciousness in its desire to emerge from sleep” (29). It is here also, ambiguously posed between dreamwork and waking consciousness, that Freud situated his “secondary revision,” and it is this ambiguity, this amalgam of rational plausibility and primary process, that Gourgouris (1996: 29) sees as an illuminating way “to conceptualize and describe the relation between the writing of a national history and the nation as a dream form.” More generally, he argues, “the Nation is fundamentally unintelligible” and “cannot be read as a text,” as even if it were to make sense, we would distrust it. This is why it is decisive to perceive the formal nature of the nation as akin to that of a dream. Attributing to the national imaginary the characteristics of an exclusively discursive formation is not fair to its complexity. The emphasis must shift from nation-as-text to nation-as-dream, which is to say that those texts bearing the nation’s mark may ultimately be seen as descriptions of the nation’s dream thoughts, thus figural transcriptions (prone to disguise and occultation—secondary revision) of the nation’s dream-work. (Gourgouris 1996: 30)

Starting thus from such insights in the literature and from the materials of my own ethnographic experience, I will focus on the figure of the dream. In what follows I will first “thread” the figure of the dream through certain currents of social theory inspired by Marx, following the affinity that Marxist thought seems to have with the dream as a trope. I will then test the fruitfulness of that trope on my own ethnographic material.

The Dream as Trope in Social Theory I start from the position, then, that the dream is super-figure among tropes, a “machine for thinking” about social phenomena of such intricacy, complexity, and flexibility that it should be taken seriously in social theory, and that, moreover, social theory already possesses an intrinsic affinity to dream as a figure. If figuration is understood as letting one’s thoughts be guided by images (broadly construed) in the process of groping toward what is hard to express, where does that specific difficulty come from that urges both ourselves as social scientists and our informants to “figure the social,” that is, to search for

72



marko Živkovi

images that will guide our intuitions about the society in which we live? This difficulty is not hard to find since postulating some sort of puzzle or “opacity” of the social lies at the very core of our enterprise as social scientists. If social reality were transparent, and explicitly formulate-able by most people in most circumstances, there would be no need for social sciences, and consequently none would have been invented. And if social reality were perfectly transparent for ordinary people, there would have been no need for them ever to produce all this rich figuration—the fetishes, totems, monsters, and dreams—that we anthropologists make it among our primary business to decipher. To develop this premise a bit further: it states that most people in most circumstances will have a significantly inadequate, partial, and in some way distorted understanding of the functioning of society of which they are a part. Ordinary consciousness tends to endow objects with agency, to engage in fallacies of misplaced concreteness; it is inconsistent, contradictory, partial, and unsystematic. This is often expressed as a (figurative) distinction between “surfaces” or “facades,” on the one hand, and what is variously seen as depth, essence, or more fundamental reality, on the other. Social sciences are, thus, all uncoverers of hidden, mystified, veiled reality (and so are “ordinary” people, especially when they resort to conspiracy theories). If this opacity of the social is seen as serving a function, or being beneficent, the social theorists could variously position themselves as engineers or physicians who can “steer the mechanism” or “monitor the social metabolism” because they understand best how it works (a typical Durkheimian position) or as art critics judging genuineness or spuriousness of unconscious cultural configurations (a stance typical of, for instance, the American anthropologists Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, and Gregory Bateson). The very positing of reduced, opaque, or deficient awareness with its corollary of “surfaces” and “depths” (themselves metaphors) is conducive to using dream as a figure and conceptual model. It is, however, when the opacity is seen as not just functional, or not just the way the savage mind’s bricolage appears to the scientifically trained mind, but as “malignantly” deceptive, as in Marxist social theory, that the dream as figure becomes potentially much more pertinent. The dream as a figure is, of course, not static or given at any moment. It could be said that it waxes and wanes through Western history in the sense of constantly accruing and shedding different associations. It tends to attain different levels of internal elaboration and complexity as it moves in and out of the focal attention. The more used as figure, the more internally complex and rich in associations dream becomes, and the more complex and rich, the more it is used. Tropes are always “chrono-tropes”; when moving among domains, as is their nature, and when they span different cultural configurations

dreams inside out



73

or “epistemes,” they always trail behind them the traces of previous spatiotemporal contexts of their use.6 The primary “home” of dream as an object of sustained inquiry tends to be in the disciplines that deal with the individual rather than society (this division of knowledge, of course, being a peculiarity of the most recent Western epistemes). When they use dream as a figure, therefore, social theorists have to move it from one domain (and its guardian disciplines) to another. The fate of dream as figure will depend on what happens to it in its “home” domain or discipline, as well as on the vicissitudes of the transfer. The dream should then ideally be “threaded” by the student not only through changing epistemes and particular social theorists but also through disciplines and whatever other domains temporarily serve as its “home” (religion, art, literature, popular culture). And as it is dragged from one disciplinary home to another (and back), dream will accrue different associations and internal organizations and thus will lend itself to different figurative uses that will, in turn, shape it as a figure. Of course, interdisciplinary borrowings of models could well adhere to what Hal Foster called the “used-car principle” or the “interdisciplinary exchange of damaged goods,” whereby a discipline borrows the already discarded models of another. Foster’s (1996: 106) example is anthropology’s borrowing of the already outworn text metaphor from literary criticism, while literary critics in their turn “adapted ethnographic methods to reformulate texts as cultures writ small—just when anthropology was about to trade in this model for others that focus on the state, legal codes and so forth.” Models for understanding the social are always being poached from other fields, but this transfer could be subject to a more conscious discipline than is usually the case, and this is where something I will call “Bateson’s maxim” could be of use. Bateson’s maxim advises us to use a vague “hunch” derived from some other science to lead us into the precise formulations of that other science in terms of which it is possible to think more fruitfully about your own material (Bateson 1972: 79). In other words, there is a cognitive benefit to be reaped by consciously and systematically revisiting the sites where the production of your tools is at its most refined. You could revisit their original “home” (to see if they developed it further since you last checked) or follow the tool in other “gardens” where it can be vigorously used, for vigorous use often leads to improvement of tools. There is a type of trope migration that corresponds to trajectories of anthropology. I am thinking of that peculiar circulation of concepts between the metropolitan and peripheral by which anthropology defines itself, lays its authority claims, and derives most of its rhetorical powers.7 European modernity projected upon the world concepts of its own self-understanding, concretized, localized, and often neatly inverted. It was the discipline that through ethnog-

74



marko Živkovi

raphy “localized the human condition” by assigning “gatekeeping concepts” to exemplary but “metonymically misrepresented” others. If we have commodities, they have gifts; if we have science, they have magic and myth; if we are conscious, they are unconscious, that is to say, dreaming and not knowing it. What anthropologists brought home from these distant savage lands, however, was not something so much discovered there but reclaimed as a more exaggerated, colorful, exemplary, pristine, extreme, or inverted version of one’s own obsessions. The ethnographers’ detour through the exotic lands brought bountiful harvests. And as they traveled from center to periphery and back, from psyche to external world and back, the figures got transformed themselves, as they transformed the thinking of those who used them in turn.8 It is relatively easy to see how this augmentation through detour and repatriation worked—for instance, with the Marxian image of the commodity fetish. It would be interesting to see if the dream as a figure too was significantly recycled through the exotic peripheries. Did savage dreams illuminate our own? Dreams did have their career in ethnography, as we shall see later, but let me focus on how first the figures of fetish and hieroglyph, and then the figure of dream, circulated in the metropolitan theory of anthropology and related disciplines.

Fetish, Hieroglyph, and Mechanisms of Vision Even though I have suggested that it is the Marxian tradition that will have most affinity to and derive potential profit (with all attendant risks) from using dream as a figure, it is not in Marx himself that dream comes to fruition. In Marx, the dream is a rather simple metaphor presaging perhaps but not delivering its (cognitive) bounties that are yet to unfold.9 It is perhaps too “shriveled” a figure in Marx’s (pre-Freudian) time to afford a good enough “machine” for the novel kind of thinking he was developing, unlike the two figures of fetish and hieroglyph that provided him not only with rhetorical dynamite but with a more complex figurative resource.10 With the Freudian revolution, however, dream becomes a rich, complex tool for thinking and is now available for the (posthumous) enrichment of Marx’s thought. If the dream was a sparse, poor figure in Marx, and although his thought, according to some highly esteemed Marxists, was in need of dream as a figure, what about the other figures that he used—primarily those that belong to the family of optical devices or machines of vision, the fetish and the hieroglyph? Could it be said that because Marx groped toward what Freud would offer with his dreamwork machine, the figures he did latch on to could be seen, retrospectively, as its precursors? Perhaps our understanding

dreams inside out



75

of the “morphology” of the dream figure, as well as its uses, could be enriched by relating it to these other families of tropes. To do that would necessitate some rapid tracing of these provisionally proto-dream tropes—the hieroglyph, the fetish, and the camera obscura—both from the retrospective “where-theycame-from” into Marx’s work and from the prospective “what-happened-tothem-afterwards” points of view. The problem with doing a rhetorical reading of Marx is how to resist being caught in the hall of mirrors. Comparing the two analyses of W. J. T. Mitchell (1986) and William Pietz (1993) will hopefully throw some light on the dangers of such analyses and advance my project of analyzing the dream as a figure of thought. Mitchell’s unpacking of the “full synthetic power” of the camera obscura figure in Marx is a noted example of what careful figural analysis can illuminate when it starts from the premise that Marx meant what he said and by asking “what sort of rhetorical and logical force would have attached to this figure in the 1840s” (Mitchell 1986: 171). This is a question analogous to the kind of question underlining Fernandez’s (1982, 1986) Bwiti: What do we need to know about the equatorial forest in Fang life in order to understand the “full synthetic power” references to it wielded in a Bwiti sermon? Both Mitchell’s and Pietz’s analyses start by distinguishing the ideology from the commodity fetishism problematic in Marx. For Mitchell (1986: 161), ideology and commodity provide the “mind-body axis” of Marx’s dialectic, with camera obscura and fetish as their respective figures. And while Mitchell starts out by noting a “kind of dissonance between the two”—one producing highly realistic images, the other “an antithesis of the scientific image,” he immediately assimilates this “dissonance” to a more fundamental “complementarity in form and function” (Mitchell 1986: 162). Each implies the other in a dialectical fashion: ideology is the mental activity that projects and imprints itself on the material world of commodities, and commodities are in turn the imprinted material objects that imprint themselves in consciousness (Mitchell 1986: 162). Even though Marx turns from ideological phantoms to commodity fetishism, the logic of this turn that guaranties the coherence and continuity of Marx’s thought is for Mitchell their underlying iconoclastic argument. Both are indictments of the idolatry implicit in capitalism—ideology of the mental, fetishism of the material kind. Modern commodity fetishism is a double or secondary fetishism, and its iconoclastic critique has to be double as well. This doubleness is neatly encapsulated in the apocryphal incident from Charles de Brosses’s Du culte des dieux fétiches that served as primary source for Marx. In Marx’s excerpt, “The savages of Cuba considered gold to be the fetish of the

76



marko Živkovi

Spaniards. So they celebrated it with a feast, danced and sang around it, and threw it into the sea, in order to be rid of it” (Pietz 1993: 134). Here are the “savages” recognizing as fetishism what the “civilized” would vehemently deny as such. Significantly—and this is where anthropology, at least implicitly, enters the picture—Marx’s use of this figure, both “theoretically serious and polemically satirical at the same time,” as Pietz (1993: 130) put it, implied that the savage was in a sense closer to reality than the capitalist and could thus critique the double, secondary fetishism from the standpoint of his own primary one just as “the savages of Cuba” did in their ritual gesture. What is implicit in Marx becomes explicit in Michael Taussig’s (1980) The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Taussig performs precisely such a circular repatriation of fetishism: from something “found” out in the (exotic) periphery by de Brosses (as the inversion of our supposedly nonfetishistic religion); back to Marx, who appropriates it both analytically and rhetorically in order to shock capitalist society enveloped in the slumber of the made-natural and made-familiar “secondary” fetishism of commodities; and back finally to Taussig, who is recycling it back again through the periphery. All this in the interest of waking us in the metropolis up again from our own immersion in forgetful slumber. But now to return to all the “semiological readings of fetishism” that “eliminate from Marxian analysis that materialism that most distinguishes it, and that extricates it from the ‘hall of mirrors’” (Pietz 1993: 119, 129). Now, it is true that Marx himself uses the language of phantasmagoria (thus implicitly of phantascope or laterna magica, a machine of vision par excellence) and of projecting, stamping, and impressing. Also, Pietz (1993: 148) tries to get away from this spell of optical/graphic metaphors by insisting that fetish is primarily a chiasmus for Marx, or more precisely, a “three-level chiasmus, or reciprocating reversal, between people and things.” Chiasmus is thus the figure of true materialist dialectics as opposed to the combinatory and rhetorical figures of the “semiological readings of fetishism” that pose or substitute for dialectics (Pietz 1993: 126). If chiasmus delivers us from the hall of mirrors, is it because as a “figure” it works its magic verbally, not imagistically, and that is essentially beyond pictures or icons, even beyond the very realm of the visual imagination? Escape from the hall of mirrors seems to lead through making concepts “material” or “concrete,” but in a way that is hard to conceptualize. It is perhaps with Benjamin and Kracauer that we encounter the most sustained effort to do so, an effort that also curiously gravitated to what seems to be the ethereal opposite of the material: the dream.

dreams inside out



77

The Dream as a Hieroglyph It is relatively easy to follow dream as figure for the social through structuralism (where, for instance, the myth-dream analogy flourished), but it is potentially more rewarding to look for it in the work that also relentlessly and uncompromisingly adhered to the concrete, to the material object. Benjamin and Kracauer were imperfectly “Marxist” in many ways, but perhaps they were also truer to Marx than many in that they transposed Marx’s impossibly convoluted chiasmus of social relations multiply and reciprocally mystified as relations between things into what could perhaps be expressed as the following chiasmus: objects in dreams, dreams in objects. They both sought to figure the elusive experience of something called modernity, Benjamin focusing on its past, Kracauer on the present, but both on what is concrete and marginal—the rags, the refuse, the ruins.11 “The difference between traditional abstract thinking and Benjamin’s manner of thinking is thus as follows,” writes Kracauer (1995: 260): “whereas the former drains objects of their concrete plentitude, the latter burrows into the material thicket in order to unfold the dialectic of the essentialities.” For both Benjamin and Kracauer, these reciprocities, these clues and symptoms, physiognomies and hieroglyphs, serve as tools not just for conjectural reading/expressing the hell of modern capitalism but for redeeming it—often by a shock of “awakening” produced by surrealist montages. Moreover, and this is where vertigo can really set in, the very form of these attempts at figuration and montage are themselves figures of what is in need of figuration. Perhaps Benjamin and Kracauer are best seen as avatars of Kafka: producing collages/ montages that are felt to be parables but, like Kafka’s, impossible to determine of what, this very indeterminacy seeming to be a parable, too—a parable of the indecipherability of parables? This is perhaps why hieroglyphs are such an enticing figure for Benjamin and Kracauer as well as for Marx and Freud: they seem to partake of both natural signs and writing systems, embodying their paradoxical union and mediating between them. The hieroglyph is a mark, a stamp, a sigil, a grapheme that mixes the pictorial and phonetic in a rebus-like structure. In the story of the evolution of scripts, it occupies an ambiguous position between pictographs and phonographs. A part of its enchantment might be an effect of precisely this ambiguous mixing of pictures and words in a culture that has been highly invested in keeping them separate (and purified) (see, for instance, Elkins 1999). It is relatively easy to see how hieroglyphs and fetishes link up with dreams and dream interpretation. If we add that Freud’s dreamwork mechanisms have

78



marko Živkovi

been mapped (practically one to one) onto the classical rhetorical schema of four major tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony)—by Hayden White (1999)—we have a tight circle. With Freud, however, the savage fetish Marx so fruitfully borrowed from nineteenth-century ethnology assumed a whole new domain of meaning. Hieroglyphs too appear in his new oneirocriticism, primarily as rebuses, picture/word puzzles presenting most of Freud’s dreamwork mechanisms in a nutshell. They go well too with Freud’s heroic self-positioning as both the Champollion and the Schliemann of the psyche. Strong affinity is thus established between the whole psychoanalytic endeavor and archaeology/cryptology/antiquarianism/art history—a cluster of highly prestigious disciplines in Freud’s day (combining classical education, artistic intuition, and precise scientific method with bourgeois respectability as per Hake 1993: 159). Moreover, as Carlo Ginzburg (1984) brilliantly observed, Freud, together with Morelli and Sherlock Holmes, is one of the central figures of what he called the conjectural sciences. It is no wonder that this cluster of disciplines provided psychoanalysis with metaphors both analytically productive and endowed with respectability. Archaeology as a model, for instance, entails stratigraphy (a model for Freud’s mental topography), the excitements/dangers of uncovering the hidden, the assumption of the continuing presence of the past, and the processes of interpretation, reconstruction, collection, and exhibition, as well as the implications of conquest and domination. Stones talk (saxa loquuntur), exclaims Freud in “The Etiology of Hysteria” (1896), after elaborately likening his early endeavors to the excavation of ruins. Stones and inscriptions, Schliemann and Champollion. In Freud (and, famously, Jung as well), dreams become thinkable as ruins and stones (with or without hieroglyphic inscriptions). Perhaps this makes it easier, owing to the interactive properties of metaphors (Black 1962), to think of ruins and stones as dreams. And if ruins and stones could be thought as dreams, so could concrete objects, spaces, even the modern metropolises.

Secondary Revision and Functional Autosymbolism One of the services that dream performs for Kracauer and Benjamin is to help them think through the peculiar and convoluted enchantments of modern capitalism. If for Benjamin (1999: 391 [Convolute K1a,8]) “capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces,” then perhaps he could “read” in its surfaces its visual, concrete, tactile, material aspects, figured as some kind of coded expression, the very workings of modernity. But what exactly is

dreams inside out



79

the nature of this “expression”? Here is how Benjamin (1999: 389, 392 [Convolutes K2,5 and K1,4]) converts Marx’s building metaphor of infrastructuresuperstructure into a dream one: The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure—precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of dreams, which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to “condition.” The collective, from the first, expresses the conditions of its life. These find their expression in the dream and their interpretation in the awakening. [italics mine]

Everything pivots on how we understand this “expression.” For here, in a nutshell, resides Benjamin’s theory of the figuration of the social. What then if we amplified this “expression” with the notion of the “autosymbolic function” as developed by Harry Hunt (1989: 149), who traces it from Freud’s “secondary revision”? In later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams, secondary revision came to include not only rational and social influence on the dream via the capacity for self-censorship (and ultimately self-awareness), but a self-referential imagistic capacity that Freud termed endopsychic perception. This was his own coinage for the potential in both mythology and spontaneous hallucinatory states to depict cognitive processes that are ordinarily inaccessible (formally unconscious). This is the same process that Herbert Silberer later termed functional autosymbolism—the tendency of sleep onset imagery to present not only what one is thinking about (material autosymbols) but formal features of one’s cognitive functioning. [italics mine]

Transposed to the Benjamin/Kracauer problematic, this means that we can analogously say that a social product like cinema will be, among other things, a self-referential formal autosymbol (in addition to being a wishfulfillment, a story X tell themselves and others about themselves, etc.) of the modern society’s “cognitive functioning.” In that sense, the optical apparatus of cinema, the perceptual world of urban existence, and the proverbial conveyer belt rhythm as figure of industrial capitalism could be viewed as formal autosymbols of each other. Perhaps the notion of autosymbolism could help clarify many an elusive trope used by Benjamin and Kracauer for what could perhaps be called the “auto-figuration of the social.” If Benjamin and Kracauer could be seen as anthropologists of metropolitan modernity, and if threading dream through more up-to-date workshops could strengthen the trope of dream as a useful figure for the social, is there some “peripheral wisdom” of the anthropological kind to be gained from the way anthropologists have treated dream in their “laboratories” analogous per-

80



marko Živkovi

haps to the way Taussig reenacts in his Devil and Commodity Fetishism the illumination Marx received from de Brosses?

The Dream in Anthropology Historically, the first use to which the phenomenon of dreaming, especially as manifested in primitive cultures, was put by anthropology was in the context of evolutionary theories. Most famously, in Edward Burnett Tylor’s “dream theory of religion,” it was primarily the dream experience that provided primitive peoples with the notion of soul and afterlife giving rise to animism as a basis of all religion. Primitive attitudes toward dreaming also played an important role in Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s widely influential theories about “primitive mentality.” Lévy-Bruhl inspired Jung and Piaget, while Alfred Gell (2001: 56) more recently used his analysis of the case of the missionary Grubb and the purloined pumpkins to argue against widespread anthropological fallacy of postulating alternative metaphysics “when seeking to explain exotic contingent beliefs.” The purloined pumpkins case is indeed a prime example of the linkage between dreams and exotic primitives that was made in anthropology of the period. A Laguna Indian (of Grand Chaco, Brazil) once accosted the missionary Grubb, accusing him of stealing pumpkins from his garden. The Indian was personally known to Grubb but lived in a village 150 miles away and the missionary had not seen him in a long while. Puzzled, and then intrigued, Grubb learns that the Indian actually bases his accusation on the fact that he had seen Grubb stealing said pumpkins in his dream (while freely conceding that Grubb had not visited the garden). Just as the famous primitive puzzles of the “Twins are birds,” or “We are parrots” type, this case then occasions competing scholarly explanations, some quite prodigiously ingenious (for a synthesis, see Turner 1991). The point is that confusing dreams with reality becomes one of the ways to characterize the primitive other. With the turning away from evolutionary concerns, dream material came to play a different role in anthropological endeavors. Dream beliefs and practices happened to be a prominent culture trait throughout Native North America and were treated among the Boasians, for instance, as an item on their “laundry lists.” With the influence that Freud started exerting on some anthropologists at that time, however, the dream material came to be used in a quite different fashion. One of the concerns of psychoanalytically oriented anthropologists has been to corroborate or test Freud’s dream theories by using dream material from “dream cultures” viewed as “natural laboratories.” Despite certain reser-

dreams inside out



81

vations, the test seemed to be positive as dream after dream collected from “primitives” yielded upon analysis the universal Oedipal core postulated by psychoanalysis (e.g., Róheim 1952; Lincoln 2003 [1935]). Much more in keeping with the aims of the culture and personality school, however, was the question of the influence of culture upon dreams as a part of the larger question of its influence upon personality. The focus shifted from the latent dream content, seen as more or less constant across cultures, to the manifest content that reflected both individual idiosyncrasies and the cultural patterning. As Dorothy Eggan (1952: 479), the foremost researcher of dreams in that period, aptly put it (paraphrasing Herskovits), “dream forms are the expression of unique sequences of personal events, perceived through a cultural screen, but they are the result of underlying processes that represent constants in human experience.” The content analysis of manifest dreams was able to point not only to “areas of tension in the personality of the subject, but to cultural stresses and cultural supports in a society” (481). The savage then was not confusing dream and reality anymore. Instead, his dreams seemed to be more coherent, meaningful, and relevant for the waking life owing perhaps to the greater coherence (and simplicity) of his culture and the fact that, unlike us, his culture has institutionalized the traffic between the two (see Bastide 1966). By the end of 1960s and in the 1970s, a great boost to anthropological interest in dreams came from the feverish atmosphere of the New Age, when “dream cultures” became a subspecies of utopia. The best example is offered by the fable of the Senoi as told by Kilton Stewart (1969) in his article “Dream Theory in Malaya.” The Senoi lived, according to Stewart, in a world without crime, war, and destructive conflict, comparatively free from chronic mental and physical ailments, and in no need of police force, jails, or psychiatric hospitals, all apparently owing to their dream practices based on a highly sophisticated dream theory. As it turned out, the account had very tenuous links with the reality of Senoi life, but for years it excited the imagination of Western audiences as a powerful utopian fable. In contrast to the Senoi, Stewart wrote in the conclusion, “in the West the thinking we do while asleep usually remains on a muddled, childish, or psychotic level because we do not respond to dreams as socially important and include dreaming in the educative process. This social neglect of the side of man’s reflective thinking, when the creative process is most free, seems poor education” (167).12 With Tylor, dream experience was a model for animism—a concept that encapsulated both fetishism and totemism. Traffic between dream and waking was different with savages. Either there was too much of it, and they tended to mistake reality for dream and dream for reality, thus living in a “dreamworld” (or dreamtime), or, while abundant, that traffic has also been well regulated

82



marko Živkovi

(by established dream-related cultural institutions and developed dream theories), making savage dreams more coherent, potent, or revealing about their culture than our muddled ones. With a few exceptions (e.g., Tedlock 1992), the study of dreams has been relegated to the margins of anthropological thought since the first generation of Boasians. Dreams, however, could perform interesting work for anthropology even though most of its current concerns seem far away from the classical ones that drove the study of dreams in the past. Anna Tsing’s (1993) use of shamanistic dreams in her Diamond Queen, for instance, offers a good example. If fetishism could be profitably recycled through periphery for renewed service at “home,” as Taussig has done, dreams too, related as they are to fetishism in more than one way, could be grist for similar mills. More than just paying attention to actual individual dreams, however—and this is to my mind a potentially more rewarding direction—the dream could be quite seriously considered as a highly suitable and fruitful model for such seemingly unlikely subject matter as that of nation-state and modernity.

And So, What Are Dreams Good For? Before I return from these explorations in cultural studies to my own ethnographic material, let me first try to distinguish several ways in which dream might function as a trope, a model, a figure for things social. For one thing, dreaming offers one of the most complex and nuanced, as well as experientially impressive, models for figuring various modalities in which consciousness could be attenuated or modified. Since social theory by necessity relies on some notion of the opacity of the social, it is easy to see how dreaming could offer nuanced models for this state of affairs. A corollary is that when various levels of social unconsciousness are mapped, insidiously or not, onto various social groups, these gradations could be figured as oneroid, or as “maps of slumber.” One could then see how both internal and external others (lower classes, women, children, primitives, exotics, Orientals, and so on) could be figured as relatively more dreamlike, prone to confusing dream and reality, or, perhaps less insidiously, in better touch with their dreams than ourselves. My short account of the vicissitudes of dream in the history of anthropology offers some glimpses into such mappings. Second, dream interpretation is a major figure for the hermeneutical practice in general. It offers the archetypal figure of the dream-interpreter as a fascinating but ambiguous role model. The power of oneirocriticism rests on a murky dialectic of decipherability/indecipherability. Oneirocritics are embodiments of the dreams of total interpretability who at the same time de-

dreams inside out



83

pend for their continued authority on the irreducible mysterious reminders, the uninterpretable core figured famously by Freud as the “navel of the dream.” Dreams are, perhaps, more than hieroglyphs and Chinese characters, able to figure that tension between readability and unreadability that underwrites the authority of priests and mandarins. Dreams also embody the difficulty of deciding whether something is meaningful or nonsensical gibberish. As the very incarnation of the undecidability between choate and inchoate, dreams are thus perfect metaphors for life itself.13 Dreams are, furthermore, epistemological machines for figuring all sorts of different worlds, self-sealing paradigms, epistemes, or frames, as well as the traffic between them. They are particularly good for thinking the paradoxes attendant on switching between such incommensurable worlds, especially if these worlds are also pictured as multiply nested and looping back on themselves. The most complex way of figuring such paradoxes seems to exist in the vast and intricate corpus of Indian myths and philosophical parables presented in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s (1984) Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities that rely on the dream as their master operator. Douglas Hofstadter (1980) called this kind of paradox Strange Loop or Tangled Hierarchy, and found it exemplified in Bach, Escher and Gödel.14 Western literature played with these paradoxes—from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Pirandello and Calderón de la Barca, all the way to Lewis Carroll, surrealists and Borges—yet, as Doniger O’Flaherty (1984: 245) claims, “only intermittently and rather nervously.” Reading Doniger O’Flaherty one cannot but conclude that it is the Indians who are peerless masters of the genre. Indeed, a certain “critical mass” of exposure to Indian tales of monks dreaming of being kings who dream of being outcastes, and so on through endless vertiginous self-including loops, can do strange things to one’s brain. After being squeezed through enough nesting dreams one can attain some sort of mental runner’s high and acquire, if for a moment, a champion vaulter’s facility in frame-jumping.15 Finally, the dream is a prime figure of figuration itself. Dreamwork offers perhaps the richest model for the various modalities of “translation” between thoughts, words, emotions, physiological processes, and images. They are an excellent source of both the everyday, conceptual metaphors studied by George Lakoff (2001) and “tabooed” metaphors of special interest to psychoanalysis. Dreams are a major arena where the image-word battles, recently a focus of sustained examination by scholars such as Mitchell (1986) and James Elkins (1999), have been fought for a long time. If Freud and Jung could serve as the most prominent antagonists on that score, their respective positions on the primacy, relative worth, significance, autonomy, and potential for development of imagistic as opposed to verbal cognitive processes have been both

84



marko Živkovi

anticipated and further developed by a long line of predecessors and successors (see Hunt 1989). This complexity of figurative processes that dream shows upon careful examination is what prompted Gourgouris (1996) to promote it as a better model than text for the life of nations.

Conclusion: The Dreamlife of Peripheral Nations Revisited When Kovačević Vučo (2005) described on Hour-glass her dream about a friend turning into a baby, the important part was not so much the dream itself but the way it was used to express something about “Serbia.” There was something about Serbia at that moment that made Kovačević Vučo identify it with the screaming baby deprived of articulation in her dream. Lukić’s parable of the thousand rooms with scrambled keys could also perhaps be seen as a dream-image. Hour-glass tends to be a wellspring of such metaphoric predications. Metaphors seem to gush forth spontaneously out of the mixture of bewilderment and resignation, anger, and gut-level disgust that both the editor and her guests display toward Serbian reality. Analogously to Marxist social critics, they feel the opacity of the social to be malignant, an affront, a scandal, an unnatural and pernicious state of affairs. True, most of the Hour-glass guests tend to have PhDs in social sciences or the humanities, but even if they engage in explicit social science analysis, they often also veer into what I call the Serbian Jeremiads (see Živković 2000b). I paid attention to the figures used not just by the oppositional intelligentsia but also by Milošević’s ideologues and ordinary people when they were all groping to express Serbian political and social reality, Serbian national identity and destiny, and Serbia’s position in the wider world. In some of my analyses of this ethnographic material, I strove to show that such “garbled mappings” of the social as conspiracy theories, or the ubiquitous idiom of “amorphous substances” as the mainstay of Serbian Jeremiads (various species of sticky, viscous quagmire/quicksand must be the most frequently used metaphors on Hour-glass), could be read as a kind of Serbian “poetics of opacity.” By “poetics of opacity,” I meant that these tropes and narrative forms were not just bizarre symptoms but also expressed a certain kind of “poetic truth” about predicaments of day-to-day life in Milošević’s Serbia. It was also the multivalency of such idioms that prompted me to see them as a “poetic” genre (contrasted implicitly with an imagined “prose of transparency”). That something bizarre, marginal, or seemingly trivial could be seen as particularly revealing or expressive of some deeper reality could of course be glossed as “poetry” (perhaps of the bricoleur’s sort), with all the fruitful analogies this

dreams inside out



85

figure may bring, but if it is such a monster machine for thinking as I tried to show in the preceding pages, then it would be even better to use the dream as the model when we think through our ethnographic material.16 The “multivalency” of certain tropes, idioms, or parables encountered in our ethnographic material could then be seen, arguably in a more complex fashion, as the outcome of various analogs to dreamwork mechanisms—displacement, overdetermination, secondary revision, etc. If we then update Freud, both conspiracy theories and the idioms of amorphous substances, for instance, could be seen as autosymbols of society, expressing the very form of the mental functioning of the collective. It is by rigorously following the entailments of the dream as figure or model, preferably poached from the most advanced “workshop” that currently uses it, that we might be led into novel ways of understanding our ethnographic material. Or, in other words, take the dream as your guide and run with it to see where it leads you. We have seen the adventure of such intellectual scurrying repeatedly in Serbia. The typical guests of Hour-glass, as a particular type of European-oriented humanistic intellectual elite, tend to feel they are caught in a nightmare and want to wake up. They are forever searching for appropriate keys to open the thousand locked doors of the castle neither in the sky nor on the ground called Serbia. They posit themselves as awakeners of the slumbering masses toward whom they express an ambivalent mixture of anger, contempt, and compassion. For these are the masses of ordinary citizens who, in their struggle for everyday existence, have gotten used to the scandalous incongruities of life in Serbia and no longer notice that anything is amiss. The Hour-glass guests are also ordinary citizens, subject to the same sleeping potions, but as opposition intelligentsia they have a duty to pinch themselves constantly in order to stay awake in the country of the slumbering—for who else will be left to shout that this is all indeed a bad dream? (In this they are Brahmins, specialists in telling illusion from reality.) My threading of dream through social theory was a threading through the problematic of particular enchantments (sleeping potions) of modern capitalism. Taussig has shown that the slumber in the metropolis (the tendency to accept commodity fetishism as natural and normal) could be disturbed by recycling the figure of the fetish, or of the devil, through the peripheries of capitalism once again. In Serbia, the phantasmagorias and the collective dreams/nightmares, I would argue, still have less to do with capitalism and its peculiar enchantments than with nation-state traumas. There is a sense, for instance, that the national body still sports the phantom limbs of some sort of “Greater Serbia.” This phantasm seems to be the major opiate that Serbian politicians use in

86



marko Živkovi

order to keep the ordinary citizens enmeshed in the vain dreams of national (territorial) greatness and thus prevented from posing unwanted questions about the depressing prose of everyday existence. When these phantom limbs like Montenegro and Kosovo are finally shed, so the argument goes, the time will perhaps come for the Devil of Commodity Fetishism to take center stage of the Serbian collective dream. To use dream as a guiding trope in sorting out our ethnographic material is to proceed on the assumption that there is an underlying meaning to national dreams and that we can “read” its latent dynamics from its “manifest content.” This is the same assumption that underlay my intuitions about the “poetics of opacity.” The dream, however, is not only a figure of interpretability of the bizarre, odd, marginal, and so forth. One of its ambiguities is precisely that it figures the very undecidability between meaningfulness and meaninglessness. That is to say, if we take the dream as our guide, we have to confront the possibility that national dreams might be like life itself appeared to Macbeth: an incoherent jumble, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The risk is patent, but there is also the promise of more substantial understanding of the fragments and figments of social life that inevitably fill the field notebooks of any attentive ethnography. Castles in the air with one thousand locked rooms and one thousand scrambled keys, babies screaming silent Munch-esque Screams—aren’t these eloquent signatures, hieroglyphs, not just of the content of social life (of Serbia in this case) but of its challenging reversible opacity as the very form of the way it is apprehended? What better to predicate on the ultimate inchoate of society than the ponderable inchoate of the dream? Our informants do it, and so do social theorist/critics like Kracauer and Benjamin. Perhaps it is time we moved dreams from the margins to the mainstream of anthropological inquiry as our new meaning-making machine for thinking through those fragments and integuments of social life that we have collected in our ethnographic fieldwork. Marko Živković is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. His publications include Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević (2011) and chapters in Vehicles: Cars, Canoes and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination (2014), Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader (2016), and Everyday Life in the Balkans (2019).

dreams inside out



87

Notes 1. The Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, or YUCOM (https://en.yucom.org.rs/) was founded in November 1997 as an expert, voluntary, nongovernmental organization whose members are legal experts engaged in promoting the idea of the rule of law and upholding of human rights, raising public awareness, and rendering legal assistance to victims of human rights violations, as well as developing cooperation with national and international organizations involved in human rights protection and promotion. 2. My dissertation (Živković 2001), based on fieldwork done in Belgrade between 1993 and 1997, traced genealogies and current political uses of recurring themes, scripts, and narratives that permeated both public and everyday discourses in Milošević’s Serbia. I showed how people in Serbia tried to make sense of their peripheral position within European symbolic geographies and their bewildering everyday reality when they talked of themselves as “Gypsies” or “Jews,” violent highlanders or peaceful lowlanders, unfinished urbanites or “barbarogeniuses,” or when they invoked their mythicized defeat at the Battle of Kosovo. 3. I was mostly inspired by my informal mentor Ivan Čolović, the peerless ethnographer and analyst of Serbian urban folklore and popular culture, to figure the subject matter of my research as the Serbian imaginary (by analogy with bestiarium—that is, as a collection of “creatures” populating Serbian talk). This usage certainly predisposed me to eventually embrace the dream as a useful model for thinking. 4. My field experience has persuaded me to take the maxim “there is nothing in the mouth of informants that hasn’t previously been in the media” as a good rule of thumb. I am in complete agreement on this with Ivan Čolović (personal communication). 5. See, for instance, Powdermaker 1950, Traube 1992, Hoberman 2003, and Buck-Morss 2000. 6. I took the liberty of filling the term “chrono-trope,” suggested to me by James W. Fernandez (personal communication), with my own content here. 7. By “circulation” I mean the peculiar interplay of localized concepts and exigencies of metropolitan theory that has been reflexively analyzed as underlying anthropological practices by Appadurai, Carrier, Fardon, Fernandez, Strathern, and others (e.g., Appadurai 1988; Fardon 1990; Carrier 1992, 1995). 8. This transference of models from one domain to another, the very meta-phrein, conceals an implicit chiasmus owing to the interactive nature of the transference. As old ossified figures are transferred to new domains to be twisted into new uses their “associated commonplaces” (Black 1962: 41) tend to change, reflecting in turn on the uses to which the figure was put in its original “home.” This is, of course, the interactivity of metaphor—if John is lion-like, then lions are also John-like. Interactivity of metaphors spelled out equals to chiasmus. This way of conceptualizing conceptual transfers could apply not only to that between established domains of knowledge in the West but to the traffic between the Western metropolis and its variously spatiotemporally situated “others.” It is tempting to see these relations as a series of inverted projections, as Strathern (1988) does—chiasmi of concepts that are always already co-conditioned by threading them through alien lands/times and bringing them home. 9. “The reform of consciousness consists only in enabling the world to clarify its consciousness, in waking it from its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of

88

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.



marko Živkovi

its own actions . . . Our motto must therefore be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through analyzing the mystical consciousness, the consciousness which is unclear to itself, whether it appears in religious or political form. Then it will transpire that the world has long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it becomes conscious of it.” Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, printed in Deutch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844: “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing” (Tucker 1978: 15). In the West we can perhaps talk of several ages when the interest in dreams, and thus their potency as a figure, particularly “swelled.” According to one such periodization, “there have been three great periods of heightened interest and debate surrounding dreams” (Ford 1998: 4): the Classical Greek era, epitomized by Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica (see Brelich 1966: 294); the Romantic era, epitomized by Coleridge; and the era that starts in 1900 with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. One could perhaps insert into that periodization the early seventeenth century that saw the flowering of the Theatrum Mundi/Life-is-a-dream figure most famously exemplified in Shakespeare and Calderón de la Barca (see Pearce 1980). If we adopt such a periodization, we can say that Marx lived in the era where dream was no longer inflated by Romanticism, not yet transformed by Freud, and not (yet) a fruitful figure. As Kracauer (1995: 261–262) has put it, “Benjamin hardly ever tackles constructs and phenomena when they are in their prime, preferring instead to seek them out once they have entered the realm of the past. For him, living constructs and phenomena seem jumbled like a dream, whereas once they are in a state of disintegration they become clearer. Benjamin gathers his harvest from works and states of affairs that have died off, that are removed from the contemporary context. Since the most pressing life has left them, they become transparent, allowing the order of the essentialities to shine through them.” In fact, the Senoi fable might not be all that radical, according to William G. Domhoff ’s analysis. “The Senoi way of dreaming,” he says, “actually rests on the unquestioned American belief in the possibility of shaping and controlling both the environment and human nature” (1985: 75). At least a part of the fascination that the Senoi article exerted on the American mind might therefore derive from the promise of extending that shaping and control even to the realm of dreams. Dreams might then be akin to the Russian Soul, amorphous substances, and other mixed metaphors as images of inchoateness predicated on the inchoateness of life itself (see Pesmen 1991, 2000; Živković 2000b, 2011). In their role of figuring such self-reflexive retro-looping paradoxes of illusion and reality, dreams are akin to the figure of chiasmus. This is another reason, perhaps, that Marxist tradition—with the founder’s predilection for chiasmus, and the vagaries of Mannheim’s paradox—has had (and should have) a special affinity to dream as a figure. And it is the Brahmins who are the guardians of such skills. Thus, in contrast to Egyptian priests and Chinese mandarins, their power is vested not so much in special hermeneutic skills of hieroglyph/dream reading as in the ability to nimbly vault among frames. Academia produces both mandarins and Brahmins, and it might be interesting to sort them out. I have actually followed this hunch and systematically reframed my ethnography of 1990s Serbia in terms of dream as the overarching trope. What was “stories Serbs tell themselves and others about themselves” became Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević (Živković 2011).

dreams inside out



89

References Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1988. “Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory.” Special issue, Cultural Anthropology 3(1). Bastide, Roger. 1966. “The Sociology of the Dream.” In The Dream and Human Societies, ed. Roger Caillois and Gustave E. von Grunebaum, 199–212. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Black, Max. 1962. Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Brelich, Angelo. 1966. “The Place of Dreams in the Religious World Concept of the Greeks.” In The Dream and Human Societies, ed. Roger Caillois and Gustave E. von Grunebaum, 293–302. Berkeley: University of California Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carrier, James G. 1992. “Occidentalism: The World Turned Upside-Down.” American Ethnologist 19(2): 195–212. ———, ed. 1995. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Oxford: Clarendon. Domhoff, William G. 1985. The Mystique of Dreams. Berkeley: University of California Press. Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy 1984. Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eggan, Dorothy. 1952. “The Manifest Content of Dreams: A Challenge to Social Science.” American Anthropologist 54(4): 469–485. Elkins, James. 1999. The Domain of Images. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fardon, Richard, ed. 1990. Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Fernandez, James W. 1982. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1988. “Andalusia on Our Minds: Two Contrasting Places in Spain as Seen in a Vernacular Poetic Duel of the Late 19th Century.” Cultural Anthropology 3(1): 21–35. ———. 1997. “The North-South Axis in European Popular Cosmologies and the Dynamic of the Categorical.” American Anthropologist 99(4): 725–730. Ford, Jennifer. 1998. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, Hal. 1996. “The Archive without Museums.” October 77: 97–119. Gell, Alfred. 2001. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Berg. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1984. “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes.” In The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, 81–118. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gourgouris, Stathis. 1996. Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hake, Sabine. 1993. “Saxa Loquuntur: Freud’s Archaeology of the Text.” Boundary 2 20(1): 146–173.

90



marko Živkovi

Herzfeld, Michael. 1987. Anthropology through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoberman, J. 2003. The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties. New York: The New Press. Hofstadter, Douglas. 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Vintage. Hunt, Harry T. 1989. The Multiplicity of Drams: Memory, Imagination, and Consciousness. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kovačević Vučo, Biljana. 2005. Guest appearance on “Prazne klupe,” 16 September, episode of Radio Peščanik (Hour-glass Radio). Belgrade: Radio B92. Transcript and sound file. Retrieved 17 October 2021 from https://pescanik.net/prazne-klupe/. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1995. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, George. 2001. “How Metaphor Structures Dreams: The Theory of Conceptual Metaphor Applied to Dream Analysis.” In Dreams: A Reader on Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming, ed. Kelley Bulkeley, 265–284. New York: Palgrave. Lincoln, Jackson Steward. 2003 (1935). The Dream in Native American and Other Primitive Cultures. Mineola, NY: Dover. Lukić, Svetlana. 2005. Introduction to “Prazne klupe,” 16 September, episode of Radio Peščanik (Hour-glass Radio). Belgrade: Radio B92. Transcript and sound file. Retrieved 17 October 2021 from https://pescanik.net/prazne-klupe/. Mead, Margaret, and Rhoda Métraux, eds. 1953. The Study of Culture at a Distance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pearce, Howard D. 1980. “A Phenomenological Approach to the Theatrum Mundi of Metaphor.” PMLA 95(1): 42–57. Pesmen, Dale. 1991 “Reasonable and Unreasonable Worlds: Some Expectations of Coherence in Culture Implied by the Prohibition of Mixed Metaphor.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez, 213–243. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Russia and Soul: An Exploration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pietz, William. 1993. “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz, 119–151. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1950. Hollywood: The Dream Factory; An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Róheim, Géza. 1952. The Gates of the Dream. New York: International Universities Press. Stewart, Kilton. 1969. “Dream Theory in Malaya.” In Altered States of Consciousness, ed. Charles T. Tart, 161–170. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. “Commentary: Concrete Topographies.” Cultural Anthropology 3(1): 88–96. Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tedlock, Barbara, ed. 1992. Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Traube, Elizabeth G. 1992. Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies. Boulder: Westview.

dreams inside out



91

Tsing, Anna. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tucker, Robert, ed. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton. Turner, Terence. 1991. “We Are Parrots, Twins Are Birds: Play of Tropes as Operational Structure.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez, 121–158. Stanford: Stanford University Press. White, Hayden. 1999. “Freud’s Tropology of Dreaming.” In Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, 101–124. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Živković, Marko. 1990. “Representing the Balkans: Symbolic Geography of the SouthEastern Margins of Europe.” Unpublished manuscript. Chicago: Anthropology Department, University of Chicago. ———. 1997a. “Stories Serbs Tell Themselves: Discourses on Identity and Destiny in Serbia since the Mid-1980s.” Problems of Post-Communism 44(4): 22–29. ———. 1997b. “We Are Gypsy People Cursed by Fate: Dealing with Balkan Stigma in Serbia and Croatia.” Second Conference of the Association for Balkan Anthropology (ABA), Bucharest, Romania, 4–7 September 1997. ———. 1998. “Tender-Hearted Criminals and the Reverse Pygmalion: Narratives of the Balkan Male in Recent Serbian Films.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, 2–6 December 1998. ———. 2000a. “The Dream World Called Serbia: Irrational as Explanation in Recent Serbian Feature Films.” Soyuz Symposium—Views from Within: Ethnographic Perspectives on Post-Communist Culture and Society, Columbia University, New York. ———. 2000b. “Jelly, Slush and Red Mists: Poetics of Amorphous Substances in Serbian Jeremiads of the 1990s.” Anthropology and Humanism 25(2):168–182. ———. 2000c. “Telling Stories of Serbia: Native and Other Dilemmas on the Edge of Chaos.” In Fieldwork Dilemmas: Anthropologists in Postsocialist Societies, ed. Hermine De Soto and Nora Dudwick, 49–68. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2001. “Serbian Stories of Identity and Destiny in the 1980s and 1990s.” PhD dissertation. Chicago: University of Chicago. ———. 2011. Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

CHAPTER 4

On Conversion A Theory of Ruins Joseba Zulaika       

A City in Ruins In Dante’s Divine Comedy, transcendence is downwards. Dante descended into hell and it was from there that he made the radical claim that poetry is the foundation of all possible knowledge, and hence that our rational and scientific discourses are essentially metaphorical displacements of the insights of a community’s poetic culture. Anthropology compellingly supports this perspective. Such Dantean poetics of descent and return were very much present in my mind when, during the late 1990s, I went back to the Basque city of Bilbao in northern Spain to do fieldwork on the “Guggenheim effect.” I was, of course, struck by the magnificence of Gehry’s building, but I was no less impressed by the twelve kilometers of ruins that preceded the museum, strung along the Nervion River. In earlier visits, I had walked for days through Bilbao’s neighborhoods and embraced the same old, bourgeois, industrial, grimy city I had always known. The revelatory vision appeared to me when I decided to go to the place known as “Margen Izquierda,” the final section of the Nervion’s Left Bank, site of all the iron mining and extraordinary industrial development that fueled the economic engine of the entire region for more than a hundred years (Zulaika 2001). I had seen those blast furnaces many times before, during my student years in Bilbao. I knew that the fabled Altos Hornos de Vizcaya, the emblem of the steel industry, had closed. But I could never have suspected that

on conversion



93

the kilometers of rusted, silent, phantom-like abandoned factories and blast furnaces would become such a unique spectacle of industry in ruins, derelict neighborhoods, and ecological devastation. The soil of the valley that stretches from Bilbao to the Cantabrian Sea holds three times more pesticides than the entire African continent, according to the local newspaper. There were about 450 industrial ruins in the region—former bursting factories that now were silent and shut down. A hundred years ago, Max Weber (1994: 31) could write that “nothing in the world is more magnificent than these mines. . . . The panorama of the mountains . . . rising up above the sea and the Nervion Valley smoking with a hundred chimneys, forming a spectacle that is simply so stunning that it becomes unforgettable.” Now there was only one smoking chimney in sight. Suddenly I was seeing the entire valley, and Bilbao’s celebrated museum, and the experience of my own student years there quite differently. Ruination appeared as a necessary dimension of the entire process of renewal and further development. My fixation with ruins became even more poignant when, on a Carnival Monday, I visited another building on the Right Bank of the river, less than a mile away from the Guggenheim Museum. It was my old convent, the very church where some thirty years ago I, dressed in a friar’s cassock, was intent on saving the world while committed to the religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. For a seminarian, sainthood was the only possible vocation, and I pursued it earnestly for ten years. But it was not to be. I read Nietzsche and Unamuno and Dostoevsky and ended up an atheist and utterly shipwrecked. Expelled from the order by the same monks who had nursed me for all those years, I ended up writing poetry in London with the help of William Blake’s imagery.

“Miracle in Bilbao” But I had not returned to Bilbao to write my religious autobiography. My goal was to examine its urban and cultural transformations as the result of the flamboyant and much-heralded, newly franchised museum built by Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry on the old city’s river waterfront. The spectacular museum has been likened to a ship, a bird, a plane, Superman, a whale, an artichoke, and the miracle of the rose, as well as to Marilyn Monroe’s voluptuous form. The New York Times had titled the lead article in its Sunday magazine “The Miracle in Bilbao.” The caption under the front-page, furnace-like photograph of the pallid building read, “The word is out that miracles still occur, and that a major one is happening here. . . . ‘Have you been to Bilbao?’ In archi-

94



joseba zulaika

tectural circles, the question has acquired the status of a shibboleth. Have you seen the light? Have you seen the future?” (Muschamp 1997). I was very conscious of the glowing presence of such a miraculous building when I visited my former monastery, an imposing nave of nothing but bare concrete topped with a huge cross. Accompanied by the noisy sounds of the Carnival cuadrillas in the streets, I entered the church where I used to be the organist. In the entrance stood a small statue of the friar who was my confessor during my novitiate year, a small man known as Aita Patxi (Father Francis) and considered a saint by the people who knew him. He was now the object of a religious cult while undergoing the beatification process; the only requirement needed was the missing certified miracle. As I walked home from the convent of my youth, right across the river from the Guggenheim Museum, there was another major building that I could not ignore: the Jesuits’ University of Deusto. It was there that I became a philosophy student, much attracted to the ontology of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, on which I wrote my master’s thesis (logic could still provide some order to a ruined universe). But salvation was elusive; as my religious career had ended in atheism, similarly, my philosophical hopes for firm knowledge were replaced by anthropology. My new ethnographic vocation led me to chase cod in the North Atlantic with Galician fishermen, later forced me to return to my childhood friends now turned terrorists, and now had me revisiting the convent where I once wanted to become a saint. Had it not been for that spiritual bankruptcy, I would not have become an anthropologist. At the monastery I learned from experience about the realitymaking power of religious discourse and about the nature of belief and unbelief—issues that are crucial to an ethnographer, even when dealing with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and its “politics of belief.” But my experience was typical among the rural and lower-class youth of my generation, who had no alternative other than the seminary to receive a secondary education. How could I make sense of it to myself and to the potential readers of my Bilbao ethnography? It would take me twenty years of fieldwork and self-analysis to produce such an ethnography (Zulaika 2014). The prospect of writing an ethnography of Bilbao forced me to question what was left of my old city. Ruins became a fixation, a trope that inevitably turns our attention toward change and renewal (Buck-Morss 1989). Ruins encompassed not only Basque industry and ecology but also Basque politics and culture, as well as the demise of that well-organized working class and the ruins of an authoritarian Spanish state deprived of most of its former powers. There was also the urban and social degradation of that old red-light quarter immortalized by Bertold Brecht (1929) in his “Bilbao Song.”

on conversion



95

An-trope-ology “Visibile parlare” was Dante’s counsel, reminiscent of Augustine’s “verba visibilia”—the same Augustine who devoted an entire chapter of one of his books to a theoretical description of conventional signs versus natural ones. For tropologists, too, what matters is the synesthesia between words and images that results in a formal and sensorial totality, not in order to designate God’s art but as the play of tropes in the work of culture. The primary concern here is with images, rather than symbols, and one must learn to think them imagistically. It is in the complex analysis of such formal realities, as Gregory Bateson (1972) never tired of repeating, that we are faced with the task of theory. This is also the domain of Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) demanding an-trope-ology, much expanded by the school of symbolic anthropology (Geertz 1973) and metaphor theory (Fernandez 1986a). As the central ideas of our discipline—symbolism, interpretation, culture, context, holism, fieldwork—became problematized, the uncertainties regarding anthropological theory became an aspect of my Bilbao ethnography as well, as if theories too were threatened by a state of ruin. Still, these were the theories that could singularly challenge and enrich ethnographic works. In fact, if change and ruination are inevitable for any disciplinary advancement, there is a sense in which the link between anthropology and ruins is constitutive of the discipline. The Basque is but one case providing a grand instance of such foundational connection. For what else has Basque anthropology done besides its persistent attempt to find and catalogue the ruins of Basque culture? A relentless search for prehistoric fossils and relics of extinct times was later supplemented with salvaging vestiges of folkloric and artistic expressions, with the addition in the era of modern ethnography, of the study of vanishing rural institutions and mentalities. My venturing into the life of the industrial city seemed but one more reflection of the anthropologist’s passion for collecting ruins. With the inauguration of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, a tale of two museums presented vividly the antinomies between Basque ethnographic culture and the current postmodern city. San Telmo is the ethnographic museum in San Sebastián that houses the archeological and ethnographic legacy of Father Barandiaran, the man who, with his disciple, the social historian Julio Caro Baroja, embodies Basque classical anthropology. San Telmo formerly served as a convent and later as military quarters until transformed into an ethnographic museum in the 1920s. During the late 1990s it was declared to be in a state of ruin and had to be closed down. The politicians ultimately responsible for this are the same Basque nationalists whose primary culture is based

96



joseba zulaika

largely on representations provided by linguistic and archeological anthropology. Not only did the Basque authorities place their wager on the Guggenheim franchise, but they also did not seem to care about the ruins of anthropology. (I wrote a book on the plight of Basque anthropology [Zulaika 1996], in which I envisioned Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, the one impelled backwards by a hurricane of debris growing at its feet, pausing by Barandiaran’s ethnographic museum.)

Thrice Born: Autobiography and the Ruins of the Self No matter what happened to these bygone religious and ethnographic cultures, they are always waiting for the work of reflective writers who will rescue their historical grain and rebuild amid the chaff of their ruins, phoenix-like, as it were, from their ashes. “Explaining” to one’s own generation these movements and “conversions” is, whatever else it may also be, a theoretical task. For these too are in a real sense religious conversions, although inversely. The work of such initiatory logic, the very same described so masterfully by Augustine in his conversion to the idea of God, might be observed as well in the inverse movement of returning from a transcendent God to the profane illumination of an immanent whole. Kenneth Burke (1961), in his The Rhetoric of Religion, applied his “logological” insights to the epiphanic moments in Augustine’s conversion. Such an apostasy from Catholicism to aestheticism and philosophy, and then to literature and anthropology, I was to find described later in James Joyce’s (1964 [1916]) Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Had Augustine lived in the twentieth century, the logic of his same religious passion might well have forced him into an inverse “conversion” à la Joyce. Conversion as death and resurrection of the self, described as the journey through hell: that is also what my generation was forced to experience when we ended up losing our faith. There is a sense in which the anthropologist is the specialist in understanding such transitions or conversions. One of my instructors used to say that an anthropologist is someone born not twice but thrice. The second time you are born you realize the wonders of cultural differences, and there is a new belief in the powers of your mind to master and translate them. The third time, you realize that you yourself are not that different from those kings and cannibals you presume to explain. Ultimately, the task of the ethnographer is not that different from the command Augustine (1992 [c.400 CE]: 235) received from the distant voice of the child: “Take up and read.” Taking up the intertwined tasks of reading/writing Bilbao and those of reading/writing portraits of various cultural formations is

on conversion



97

a demanding anthropological challenge. In both cases, it is a task having to do with ruins and allegories—industrial, biographical, anthropological. What do these industrial and ethnographic and autobiographical ruins symbolize? The new mythologies of architectural spectacle and discourses of global futures are all very well. But one needs the critical power of allegory, of ruins, of the debris of history to make them speak to the past as well as to the present. Similarly, in order to understand the import of the foundational pretensions of Basque anthropology one has to work through its archeological and theoretical ruins. It is at this conjunction of allegory and autobiography that, once again, theory becomes crucial, such as the one developed by an-trope-ology. Dan Sperber (1975) argued that symbolism, being largely individual, integrates various data into a single system within the individual and that, being cognitive, remains throughout life a learning mechanism. Contrary to language— whose data are distinct percepts, whose grammar excludes other grammars, which allows for learning several grammars, and whose learning is soon over—symbolic data, Sperber shows, are not perceptually defined, are not defined by belonging to a set that excludes other sets, never determine more than one symbolic mechanism in the individual; the symbolic mechanism does not process new data without itself being modified. The relevance of these observations can be tested in discussing conceptual representations such as a belief or a figure of speech that have some shared properties. The notion of belief, like that of symbol, is neither universal nor homogeneous within a culture, and Sperber (1975) characterizes it as a conceptual representation in quotes that figures in our encyclopedic knowledge as true. But while beliefs are consciously considered to be part of ordinary language, and are therefore only unconsciously symbolic, the symbolicity of the various tropes, of figures of speech (metaphor, metonym, irony, etc.), can be explicit or implicit. It is when the symbolic character of a belief is made explicit and reaches consciousness that its status as belief is modified. Symbolic knowledge in its various tropic forms is therefore knowledge about knowledge. This theoretical perspective helps to understand the effectiveness of the “politics of belief ” in Bilbao or the conversions/deconversions in and out of religion.

Conversion and Writing: A Matter of Will Conversion implies crisis, confession, transformation, initiation, symbolism. To convert is prima facie to turn away, to pass from a certain mental, religious, political, or social state to a different one. It implies the Augustinian conversion to the idea of God as much as the Sartrean literary vocation leading to

98



joseba zulaika

atheism. In both cases, the identity of the subject endures a permanent change. If every generation is likely to feel that it has suffered profound transformations in relation to the previous one, in a “postmodern” world that celebrates diversity and hybridity, “conversion” to other forms of life and identity is increasingly a personal option and a topic for reflection. Much like conversion, deconversion too is preceded by intense conflict, guilt, anxiety, and uncertainty and leads to changes in the conception of the world, in the basic civic and ethical principles, in forms of behavior and social sensibility, in the relationship toward the traditional beliefs and rituals—in short, in one’s sense of identity. The loss of faith is a decisive event in many autobiographies. It leads to the negation of a belief system, which usually elicits emotional shock, and to the rejection of the community to which the individual belonged (Barbour 1994: 2). “Apostasy” is the classical name for this phenomenon. The possibilities of deconversion have increased with generalized education and the globalization of religions. Similarly, in this “post-ideological” era, political programs and ideologies provide platforms for deconversion. We academics tend to assume that the central questions around which world views and personal identities coalesce are basically intellectual. A different perspective would hold that the true problems in thought and the interpretation of the world reside more in our self-definitions and our disposition to change our own lives. Wittgenstein (1980 [1970]: 17e), for instance, thought that What makes a subject hard to understand—if it is something significant and important—is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect.

If the difficulty is not theoretical but of a different order, what is it? What is that “overcoming” of the will? As the philosopher Antonia Soulez (1998) has noted, it points out the theme of “conversion” in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Such a privileging of the “will” over the intellect implies an active decision on the part of the subject in a practical rather than theoretical sense, a selfcorrecting job that Wittgenstein compares to the work of an architect. Thinking is, after all, a “practical” activity; concepts affect us by producing mental images that force us to react. Free will expresses itself by freeing certain forms of language and imagination that the subject experiences. Words possess the double capacity to be a mirror of a community’s speech while at the same time the element that can redeem that speech. The second aspect requires that the subject is ready to recognize its conceptual errors or to produce a change in

on conversion



99

one’s life orientation by means of a sort of conversion. In this sense, Wittgenstein’s ([1970] 1980: 53e) view of Christianity is telling: “I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That they have to make a significant and consequential turning, they have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.) It says that wisdom is all cold; and that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold.” This Wittgensteinian “conversion,” emphasizing not so much an intellectual regeneration as a change in life, is beyond religion. His epiphany is not Saint Paul’s illumination on the road to Damascus, nor is it the result of any religious faith. Neither was he converted to the intellectual discoveries of semantic analysis or the Vienna Circle’s scientific empiricism. Such conversion of the will, beyond God and science, is simply a new way of seeing language in order to better understand the world. But where does this “will” necessary for conversion come from? What is this “seeing” in an alternative manner? Wittgenstein leaves in the dark what moves the will, whose contrarian sources come only from the subject. Beyond the desire to explain everything, this desire to “see” is the domain of aesthetics/ethics and the enigma of his philosophy; much as there is an alternative way of seeing to the actual seeing of something as it is, there is an alternative way of living proposed by conversion. Symbolic anthropology has also dwelt on language as a system that, beyond the instrumental use of signs, can produce other sorts of effects in ritualized contexts. In Sperber’s view, the symbolic mechanism is necessary as a feedback system linked to the obvious shortcomings of the conceptual mechanism. The hypothesis suggested by such a symbolic approach is that conversion can be seen similarly as a feedback mechanism of symbolic order and that, therefore, it includes, beyond the intellect and the communicative language, also the will, the imagination, and Wittgenstein’s “the saving word” as a solution to the aporias of existence. In situations of unsolvable crisis, conversion appears to be the last recourse left to the subject, which requires, beyond the intellect, a change of will. In modern autobiography’s typical secular conversion, the place of God is taken by the intellectual or authorial vocation of the writer. But not surprisingly, even if modern conversions have to do with transformations in the intellectual vocation of the author, new world views and new models of subjectivity, such as those of Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Unamuno, or Sartre, have had recourse to the rhetoric of religious conversion. Conversion’s structure implies a breach with any stable definition of the subject and thus serves the subjective reinventions of modern autobiographers. The rhetoric of conversion becomes seductive in a postmodern culture in which, faced with the ruins of stable identities, it becomes a symbolic mechanism capable of producing a change of self.

100



joseba zulaika

Conversion promises “another” subjectivity, yet the author who is narrating his autobiographical story is using the same pronoun “I” as before. This is the first paradox of the converted who is trying to convince us that he has changed completely, when he has still so much to live and change. The breach between the totalization and fragmentation of experience sought by conversion is problematic even for narratives such as Saint Augustine’s. Those narrations of events previous to conversion that later, from a different consciousness, the author wants nothing to do with raise the question: Can they be considered autobiographical? Even in clearly autobiographical cases such as Rousseau’s, the relation between the autobiographical narrative and self-identity is not less problematic, as shown by Paul de Man (1979). The precursor of modern individualist conversion, Montaigne, rejected conversion’s radical breach with the continuity of experience. His own Essays (Montaigne 1962 [1580]) give voice to an undivided identity of mini-conversions. Even if you can hear in his work the echoes of Saint Augustine, what characterizes Montaigne is his denial of a narrative totality as well as the possibility of localizing a subjective essence. The problem of the self presents itself in Montaigne as a question, as something one has to “essay.” If repentance were central to Saint Augustine, Montaigne is basically happy with himself, and he has hardly anything to be repentant about. For Montaigne, to repent means to abdicate a part of one’s past and hence of one’s identity. Montaigne insists on accepting the past in its totality and is against any denial of its parts for the sake of conversion. If for the saint the true essence of identity is beyond the self, what matters to Montaigne is its autobiographical representation, which is what the saint leaves out. Montaigne’s self creates itself indefinitely while he “essays” himself in writing, life and text becoming consubstantial to each other. Rousseau is the author who, in his Confessions (1964 [1770]), makes autobiography an antidote to conversion. Beyond the rhetorical and structural similarities between Rousseau and Saint Augustine, two very different world views and two very different conceptions of human subjectivity are offered by the two authors. The crucial conversion in Rousseau’s autobiography is his decision to become a writer. Writing is for him the most decisive and dangerous activity that the subject can engage in. Even if he dresses his texts with religiously confessional garments, in fact what he does is distance his conversion from the divine. “What emerges is a redefinition of conversion not only as repetitious and disastrous but as totally passive and unavoidable” (Riley 2004: 93). Far from a new spiritual birth, conversion is for Rousseau a destructive and never-ending experience, the painful moment of having to confront the ruins of one’s subjectivity. Rousseau’s critical moment of conversion consisted in succumbing to writing. It is only through writing that the true self reveals itself, but far from

on conversion



101

being the self opened to Augustinian divine revelation, what Rousseau feels is “the fall” into the world of authorial representations beyond the “natural” state of his previous existence. There is a well-known moment in his Confessions when such a conversion is reflected dramatically: following Diderot’s advice from his jail cell in Vincennes, Rousseau decides to write an essay on whether the progress of the arts and sciences have purified or corrupted the moral life of the people. The consequence was that afterwards he “was lost” and that all the disgraces of his life happened to be the inevitable result of that moment of aberration. The conversion to writing signals the divorce of the self from its most proper essence, the fall into a hell from which he could only be rescued by further writing. If he finds all the forms of representation and mediation (artistic, political, communitarian) contemptible, none is more so than writing. Sartre retakes Rousseau’s conversion games and pushes them to far more complex situations in his autobiography, Les Mots (1964). The vocation for writing is for Sartre the true autobiographical moment, a “priesthood” based on “the religion” of the book. His deconversion consists of liberating himself from the bourgeois ideology acquired in his infancy in which the figure of God is replaced by that of enlightened culture. His rejection of aesthetic redemption implies rejection of such an ideology and world view; getting rid of such “impostures” (posthumous fame, the writer’s vocation for martyrdom) is the Sartrean equivalent of religious conversion. Much like Rousseau, Sartre feels himself a captive of writing and, like Rousseau, he will try to escape his fate by further writing. The difference is that while Rousseau laments the violence of writing, Sartre condemns his own relationship to writing, the subject of his autobiographical conversion. Such a history of errors does not conclude in any moment of particular lucidity. By questioning his own capacity for selfdefinition, Sartre breaks with the models of conversion, both Augustinian and Rousseauian. After his deconversion, Sartre continues being a writer but with a subjectivity beyond the book and committed to political activism. Deconversion thus becomes the central metaphor in Sartre’s personal transformations. His vision of life includes the rejection of any form of faith, including writing, while his commitment to writing until the end demonstrates his belief in the power of the written word. Atheism is not for Sartre a fixed position but a process and a project, a non-ending deconversion. In John D. Barbour’s (1994: 134–135) words, “he used the narrative form of a conversion story as rendered from the perspective of a deconverted nonbeliever to express his beliefs in individual freedom and responsibility.” Even if Sartre rejected the myth of literature, he continued to believe in the myth of self-creation by means of writing. His own confession in the final paragraph of his autobiographical book is most significant: “my only task has been to save

102



joseba zulaika

myself—with nothing in my hands, nothing in my pockets—by means of work and faith” (Sartre 1964: 212). His salvation, the values and beliefs of his maturity, they all derived from a long and cruel process of deconversion. What these testimonies reveal is the degree to which the interpretation of the world and of oneself depends on the subject’s will, not on possessing a correct theory. When life crises force a change and, as Sartre saw his own myth of literature, “the edifice is going to rack and ruin,” it is the changes in the will that compel us to conversions and deconversions.

Conclusion: A Theory of Ruins In conclusion, faced with Bilbao’s vast industrial and cultural transformations, and having dwelt on the various kinds of anthropological ruins and biographical conversions, here is the sketch of an ethnographer’s theory of ruins that I formulate in homage to my mentor James W. Fernandez and his own tropological ethnography (Fernandez 1986b, 1986c): 1.

The first mission of ruins as emblems is to condense and identify the meaning of buildings, theories, historicities, and biographies. Ruins fix a clear meaning—a skull, a fossil, a closed factory, a fallen building. It is by redirecting our attention to their ruins that we learn the most about historical and biographical phenomena. That is, they provide residual identity for inchoate and conversion-hungry subjects and cultures.

2.

The second mission of ruins is to serve as ultimate emblems of the passage of time. As such, their role is to unveil the mythic claims to eternity of any building, project, or life. Ruins reflect the ephemeral quality of the commodities on display. They must reveal, destructively, that in even those constructs that, in Kenneth Burke’s (1996: 3) view, are most “rotten with perfection,” the ultimate truth has to do with ruins. There is no better antidote to the ambitious fallacies built by myth, dream, desire, or urban phantasmagoria than to contemplate their ruinous outcomes. That is, they provide the movement of histories and of subjects by visualizing the transience of any construct. Epochs such as fin-de-siècles or fin-de-millennia are, in particular, aptly emblematized by ruins. Historical periods of great social and economic transformations are likewise rich in the production of ruins. This is the case with Bilbao’s industrial history. Nothing can better depict capitalism’s passage than the ruinous devastation it leaves

on conversion



103

behind. Nothing tells more about one’s former religious beliefs than their ruins. 3.

Ruination is the precondition of economic and social change. Ruination decides when the new stages of urban gentrification, architecture, technology, and other cultural phenomena transpire. By doing so, it provides a positioning of societies and peoples in the continuum of decadence and renewal.

4.

Ruins authorize and call for new beginnings. That is why Basque anthropology was the foundational discourse of a newly reinvented Basque Country, and that is why a ruined postindustrial Bilbao can authorize a new franchised museum that no other European city had previously wanted. In short, ruins legitimize the mythology of an altogether new beginning based on the expectations and promises of future progress.

5.

Ruins call for allegory as their trope. Symbolic plenitude is the reward of a stable cosmos, whether religious or psychological. Allegorical mirroring is the bond that glues together transient periods and worlds. Building and ruin are as antithetical as myth and allegory. If the shining Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is well suited for the workings of myth, the closed blast furnaces Altos Hornos has entered the realm of allegory. The role of Altos Hornos as allegory derives from the fact that they are no longer. The ruin is the antidote of a building’s pretensions of eternity. The ruin does not belong to nature and to work; it belongs to a dead past that remains only as meaning. The greater the ruin, the greater its meaning. Thus, ruins fill the frames of urban life as well as social experience.

6.

Ruins enable societies and people to visualize the vulnerability of their projects. If the function of spectacular buildings is to cosmologize and mythologize, that of ruins is to fragment, condense, and disperse. By spoiling any attempt at the false pretensions of harmonious totalizing, ruins invoke a different kind of whole. The “truth” of ruins derives from the fact that ruinous reality cannot be part of a performance, a narrative, or a promise. Seduction is based on the performatives of promises of fulfillment. Ruins are a corrective to such carving out of meaning from global promises. If the nature of advertisement is to blur the commodity character of things, the purpose of ruins is to make such blurring of advertisement and seduction impossible. The ruins are the ultimate witness that hell rages within the soul of a commodity. By dissembling the illusory appearance that

104



joseba zulaika

proceeds from any given order, ruins free the subject from a preoccupation with history, biography, spectacle, and commodity fetishism. 7.

Finally, ruins can lead to nostalgia, melancholy, hopelessness, and the search for allegorical refuge in an idealized “other world.” But ruins can also transform themselves into hope and dream, thereby pointing to the mythology of a brand new future. A critical use of ruins and allegories can provide the blueprint for the most anti-idealist agenda and bring about the radicalness of profane illumination (Benjamin 1968). Thus, ruins free subjects from their preoccupation with perfection. They free the arts from their preoccupation with aura. They free societies from their preoccupation with progress and spectacle. By authorizing such new visions and new freedoms, the critical allegories of ruins become the strongest antidotes against myth. The phantom-like objectivity of the commodities and their hollowed-out meanings require the emblematic and liberating presence of their ruins.

Joseba Zulaika (PhD Princeton 1982) is an anthropologist and professor emeritus at the Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Zulaika conducted fieldwork and published ethnographies of deep-sea fishermen, farmers, soldiers, terrorists, hunters, and artists. He has published extensively on terrorism and counterterrorism, including his most recent book, Hellfire from Paradise Ranch: On the Frontlines of Drone Warfare (2000). He has also worked on the urban and political renewal of the city of Bilbao; among his publications is That Old Bilbao Moon: The Passion and Resurrection of a City (2014).

References Augustine. 1992 (c.400 CE). Confessions. Oxford: Clarendon. Barbour, John D. 1994. Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken. Brecht, Bertolt. 1929. “The Bilbao Song.” In Happy End, act 1. A play in three acts by Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht. Berlin. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. “Historical Nature: Ruin.” In The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 159–204. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burke, Kenneth. 1961. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

on conversion



105

———. 1966. “Definition of Man.” In Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method, 3–24. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fernandez, James. 1986a. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1986b. “Persuasions and Performances: Of the Beast in Every Body and the Metaphors of Everyman.” In Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture, ed. James Fernandez, 3–27. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1986c. “The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture.” In Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture, 28–70. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Joyce, James. 1964 (1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Time. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Montaigne, Michel de. 1962 (1580). Essais. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères. Muschamp, Herbert. 1997. “The Miracle in Bilbao.” New York Times Magazine, 7 September. Riley, Patrick. 2004. Character and Conversion in Autobiography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964 (1770). Les Confessions. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1964. Les Mots. Paris: Gallimard. Soulez, Antonia. 1998. “Conclusion: ‘Le mot qui sauve.’” In Leçons sur la liberté de la volonté, suivi sur le libre jeu de la volonté, ed. Antonia Soulez, 307–336. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Sperber, Dan. 1975. Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1994. “Letter to Helene Weber.” Bilbao 4: 31–36. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980 (1970). Culture and Value. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zulaika, Joseba. 1996. Del Cromañón al Carnaval: los vascos como museo antropológico. San Sebastián: Erein. ———. 2001. “Tough Beauty: Bilbao as Ruin, Architecture, and Allegory.” In Iberian Cities, ed. J. R. Resina, 1–17. New York: Routledge. ———. 2014. That Old Bilbao Moon: The Passion and Resurrection of a City. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada.

CHAPTER 5

Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer, or “Witnessing a Shipwreck” German Figurations in Facing the Past to Face the Future Michael Carrithers       

Prologue: Orientation and Reorientation The suggestion from which this essay grew was planted by James W. Fernandez, who asked me to write on the topic of “the figuration of social thought.” It is a rich and suggestive phrase that could mean—and did mean, in the hands of Clifford Geertz (1983)—the style of thought adopted by social scientists. In this essay, though, I will mean something rather different: the use of figured thought by people to understand and guide themselves in the turbulent flood of social life. The figures that concern me here are evoked in the German word Aufarbeitung. This is a difficult word for a translator, but also for many Germans—though for very different reasons—and no single English equivalent is adequate to render the set of images and stories it may call up for one German speaker or another. Yet, in any case, its interest is quite straightforward: Aufarbeitung is the keyword purposefully singled out by post-1989 legislators and government officers in Germany to designate what might be called official “orientation work,” the public narration of the pre-1989 past in East Germany, with special attention to abuses of power in the newly defunct German Democratic Republic. At this most official end of things, Aufarbeitung covers such work as the production of voluminous parliamentary reports on the GDR, the use and publication of materials from the files of the Stasi (the GDR’s secret

witnessing a shipwreck



107

police), and the trials of East German officials, such as those responsible for killings at the Berlin Wall, especially insofar as the narratives of such trials and the events giving rise to them were publicized. In this essay I interrogate the keyword “Aufarbeitung” and the net of images, stories, practices, and ironies that weave tightly around it. I take the phrase “orientation work” (Orientierungsarbeit) from the sociologist Wolfram Fischer-Rosenthal (1995). He noted that, alongside the tumultuous events of 1989 and 1990—the mass demonstrations, the fall of the Wall, the fall of the Stasi, the demise of the GDR altogether, and the unification—a wave of autobiographical talk swept over East Germans. People started telling each other what one East German friend of mine called “all kinds of strange stories” (allerlei seltsame Geschichten), often stories from childhood concerning family life or school, but also extraordinary encounters or memorable scenes witnessed. Fischer-Rosenthal argues, I think rightly, that such stories had one general topic, one’s own experiences and character, and one general purpose, to lay down “who one is, who one has become in what way, what one has experienced, and what oneself and others can reckon on in the future” (Fischer-Rosenthal 1995: 44).1 But orientation work is a phrase that deserves much wider application, for it captures that sense in which people, especially in times of such upheaval and uncertainty, have at once to find a convincing interpretation of the rush of events and then to persuade both themselves and others of that interpretation. People have to find themselves in a trajectory: it is the very stuff of social life that we orient ourselves by finding a larger story, a larger plot line, so that “who one has become in what way” can be seen to lead to “what oneself and others can reckon on in the future.” Orientation work is at once the effort to make an interpretation and the effort to urge it on others. East Germany became a great industrial center of orientation work in 1989 and afterwards: on one end of the spectrum there were the cottage industries of personal talk and the swift manufacture of personal stories, and at the other end the ponderous fashioning of the governmental accounts I am concerned with here. In between there were the various tempos—Michael Warner (2002) calls them “temporalities of circulation”—of orientation work in video and print, from the swifter cycle of news and current events publishing and broadcasting to the slower collection and publishing of documentaries, autobiographies, collections of life stories, and apologia of public figures, and the even slower production of scholarly work weighing and interpreting the political and economic structures of the GDR. And meanwhile, more routine orientation work carried on—such as the yearly theatricals in a small East German village, chronicled by Daphne Berdahl (1999a, 1999b), with their sly commentary on the events of village life. The special effort of orientation called forth in

108



michael carrithers

the peaceful revolution only added to the more routine, but continual, orientation work that permeates social life. In placing Aufarbeitung in this wider setting of orientation work I have two purposes in mind. First, I mean the fact that Aufarbeitung occurs in respect of a public—as a kind of publicity and as dependent on publication—to be seen ultimately in the light of face-to-face interaction. What a fragment of personal history recounted in a bar and a fragment of national history recounted in the published report of a parliamentary commission have in common is an intense awareness of audience and a shared rhetorical purpose, to orient oneself and others and to persuade the listener/reader of that orientation. Both the awareness and the purpose are stamped on their forms. Where they differ is in the existence of that so concretely imagined thing, a public, which informs the work of Aufarbeitung but not the personal conversation. As Jürgen Habermas (1990 [1962]) showed us so well, the practice cum idea of a public is largely an invention of the modern age, and as Warner (2002) has demonstrated, this invention is a thing whose strangeness is only just beginning to dawn on us. Nevertheless, both Habermas2 and Warner perforce use face-to-face interaction as the benchmark by which the peculiarities of public discourse can be measured and delineated, not as something entirely different but as part of the same continuum of human experience. And so Aufarbeitung, even at its most governmental and official, can be best understood as part of the larger continuum of orientation work that East Germans undertook as their old world was replaced by a new one. My second aim in setting Aufarbeitung among this spectrum is to establish some more nuanced perspective on it. The narratives of Aufarbeitung concern themselves chiefly with abuses and injustices in the GDR and so represent a particular set of views and moral judgments. There is an “Aufarbeitung scene” (Aufarbeitungsszene) comprising “Aufarbeitung initiatives,” voluntary associations of those who rose in opposition to the GDR, now supported by government and devoted to research and publishing on GDR injustice and on the opposition in the GDR. Organizations of the victims of Stasi or Party action belong to this scene as well, as do the government officials of the bodies set up to support Aufarbeitung. This scene is dominated by people who were subjected to the destructive edge of stories told by the Party and made concrete by the Stasi, stories that were a harshly lit version of the larger narrative matter of the Cold War. The Stasi’s narrative understanding was focused on one set of figures, condensed in the ominous word Feindbild. This is a typical German compound, translating simply as “enemy image” but in practice capturing the constant imaginative work of projecting upon the events and persons of social life a hidden, cruel, cunning, and pervasively penetrating class enemy motivated from across the

witnessing a shipwreck



109

Wall. This work of imagery and narrative was then realized in the social practice of clandestine surveillance and intimidation, leading often to punishing solitary imprisonment and interrogation or to more subtle covert efforts to destroy a person’s social stature, self-respect, and health: false rumors spread, obstacles at work, children’s education truncated. The nature of Stasi motivation, and the emotional tone of their performance on the bodies and minds of their targets, is perhaps best captured by the entry for “hatred” in the Stasi’s official dictionary. Hatred is a “determining component of the emotions of the secret police [tschekistischen Gefühle].” The “strengthening and deepening [of hatred] in the praxis of class war and against a concrete and real image of the enemy [Feindbild] is the task and goal of class education.” Hatred is therefore an “enduring and strongly effective motive for action,” whose purpose is the “destruction or damage” of the enemy (Suckut 1996: p). And that was the motivation they carried through into brutal fact and enduring misery for many. The official, governmental story of post-Wall Aufarbeitung stands diametrically opposed to that of the Party and Stasi. The act of the Bundestag that provides funds for a foundation to support the victims’ associations and Aufarbeitung initiatives, for example, reads in part thus: “the purpose of the foundation is to support . . . contributions to a comprehensive Aufarbeitung of the causes, history, and consequences of the dictatorship in the . . . GDR, [and] to preserve awareness of the victims and the injustices that were done.” This is a far less deleterious purpose than the Stasi’s and, in its concern for those damaged by the Stasi and the Party, far more humane. Nevertheless, its language is hardly more nuanced. “Dictatorship,” “injustice,” and “victims” are part of a vocabulary of stark and terminal judgment. Such rhetoric—when taken together with the stark and terminal judgments of Party and Stasi rhetoric— forms the larger matter of the Cold War. In the German case, the Cold War was also a long-standing civil war, as people in Berlin sometimes remarked to me; that circumstance lent a local and topical sharpness to Cold War rhetoric on both sides, and certainly to those of the conservative party standing in a majority when this legislation was passed. Users of these rhetorics seek to master the social world by offering a comprehensive, totalizing view that categorizes and stigmatizes the opponent and, in its moral simplicity, excludes nuance and complexity. But in fact the Aufarbeitung scene, for all the greatness of its issues, is small and thinly spread across East Germany. Moreover, much of the actual social world in East Germany, both during GDR times and during the transition, escaped Cold War simplicities. The Stasi targeted the intelligentsia, but not all of them were substantially affected. For people in any situation, concerns about jobs or the workplace, or education, or children or spouses or parents or friends might determine their significant world and the stories they tell of

110



michael carrithers

themselves and others. For many, the Cold War, its narratives, and its practices therefore provided not the chief characters and the governing emotions and motives of their stories but only a backdrop against which their own very different stories took form.

The Argument The background to my argument is a general hypothesis about our human existence that might be captured in the word “historicity.”3 Historicity in this usage refers to the relentless flow of events, the unstoppable unfolding play of action and response, crisis and resolution, sometimes high tragedy, sometimes just soap opera, in human social and physical existence. There is no time out, as Harold Garfinkel said, and that is true both in the very short term, from moment to moment, and in the longer term of our lives as a whole and our greater projects. So historicity is the very antithesis of any assumption that people live in cultures as if in solid and enduring houses, or in societies as if in tightly girdled buildings. It is better captured by imagery showing human exposure and vulnerability, and it is in that spirit that the philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1997 [1979]: 9) has written of the metaphor of “a risky sea voyage” through which so many thinkers have sought to characterize “the movement of [the human being’s] existence as a whole.”4 In this light, the stormy fall of the GDR and rise of the new Germany is only an amplified example of the constant, precarious, and relentless “ongoingness” of human existence. Against this turbulent background the devices of culture take on a different significance, not so much an entire and settled housing for people but rather a set of instruments they employ ad hoc to establish comprehension and control against the flood of events. In general, this creative cultural intelligence—this figurative thought—works by making connections and finding analogies. Fernandez has been especially influential in studying one form of connecting: the use of imagery and metaphor. Metaphor applies images from one well-understood sphere of experience to another, in order to render the latter comprehensible, to make a judgment on it, and to suggest appropriate action. As Fernandez (1986) put it, metaphors make a “movement” of mind, to both understanding and judgment, and that in turn leads to “performance,” to appropriately formed action.5 Thus, opponents of the Stasi sometimes depicted it as a Krake, a repellent monster squid with its spreading tentacles,6 an image that captures the ubiquity of Stasi surveillance and intervention but also makes an evaluation of it and suggests how it might be treated after its fall from power. In one image I have seen, for example, a sword is cutting off its tentacles. The performance that ensued was Aufarbeitung, the business of

witnessing a shipwreck



111

laying the Stasi and their machinations open to view. The Stasi spoke of themselves, however, as the “sword and shield” of the Party, the heroic defenders of socialist hope, struggling against the foe on the “invisible front.” This was quite a different use of the sword image, and quite a different performance ensued. This work of making connections to arrive at understanding and evaluation is not limited to metaphor alone. I have been especially concerned—and will be especially concerned here—to regard narrative thinking as another form of connecting, figurative thought (Carrithers 1992, 2005, 2009). The force of narrative is to turn impenetrable and opaque happenings into charactersin-a-plot and thus to furnish the trajectory within which a person or persons, and a flow of actions, can be understood or evaluated. As with metaphor, the fundamental movement is from an inchoate situation to understanding and evaluation. Adapting Fernandez’s formulation,7 one could say that stories insert inchoate pronouns (an “I,” a “you,” a “we,” a “they”) into a plot line in order to create sense and evaluation. Thus, the official history of GDR spoke of East Germany’s liberation from Fascism by Soviet troops in 1945. This made that inchoate “they,” the Soviet army, into heroic liberators. A different set of connections was made by the countervailing Western Cold War narrative, which regarded their intervention not as a liberation but as a brutal conquest leading on to dictatorship. So, here, those inchoate “they” are lent the character of oppressors. Note a fundamental feature of such narrative thinking: once characters in a plot line are known, then entire stories can be suggested by a very brief story seed. The very mention of Margot Honecker—wife of the long-standing leader of the GDR, and Education Minister in her own right—can suggest her entire policy of politicizing and militarizing school education. So I have heard the phrase “Margot’s children” used to refer to that generation and their experience. Or a story seed could be a quotation: “But certainly I love you all!” (Ich liebe euch doch alle!) was a famous statement uttered by a bewildered Erich Mielke, Minister for the Stasi, when he was barracked in the GDR legislature after the Party’s grip had loosened after the Wall fell. But I have heard the quotation used with dark irony to remind listeners of the actual hatefulness of Mielke’s Stasi. My argument is twofold. First, Aufarbeitung comprises a practice that recommended itself to many East Germans in the particular circumstances of the fall of the GDR and the unification of Germany. It was certainly orientation work, though often at the other end of the scale from the first-person-singular orientation work of everyday talk: it concerned plural subjects made concrete as “the victims” or “the perpetrators,” or as “East Germans” or “we Germans.” Moreover, this orientation work was based in the practice of publication, with all the subsidiary practices that go with publication: reading, watching, or lis-

112



michael carrithers

tening; interviewing; scripting or writing; broadcasting, printing, distributing; and archiving. This presupposes a public. A public, as Warner (2002) points out, is consummated by acts of attention, for if no one read or watched, there would be no public; in this dual movement, of publication and attending, a public is autopoetic, self-making. Publication, in this light, both assumes and calls into being the contemporaneous public for which it is intended. Or, to put it another way, the public is imagined, in a very concrete sense of “imagined”: those engaged in the labor of publishing act as though that public is present and alert to the message and, in so doing, lend the public an effective reality— and this is so even though neither the attention of those addressed nor their agreement to the message’s significance is necessarily guaranteed.8 Moreover, Warner argues, in the course of this poetic world-making, texts prepared for publication are molded, so to speak, around the shape of that presupposed audience. Sometimes the projected public is deeply implicit and must be read from the form of the text alone, but sometimes it takes a more palpable form, as history—or, I should really write, History, Geschichte. History includes in part an extension of the present public to the future, to posterity, and is in that light just a more capacious addressee and possesses some of the same imagined, but effective, character as does “public.” But History, in the context of Aufarbeitung, has a special potency: it makes final and definitive judgments. Since much of Aufarbeitung concerns grievances over injuries that, for one reason or another, could not be judged or redressed in other ways, History becomes the court of final appeal. So, to do orientation work before the judges’ panel of History—to show “who one is, who one has become in what way, what one has experienced” as a victim, for example—is to appeal to that panel for a judgment on the perpetrators. Second, the word “Aufarbeitung” bears—for its users, at any rate—a special moral and spiritual weight not entirely visible in the practice of Aufarbeitung alone. This weight is drawn from another setting, that of Germany’s response to the Nazis and their deeds. In commenting on the present German public sensibility about the Nazi past, the East German commentator Christoph Dieckmann (1999) exaggerates, but only slightly, in drawing an analogy between the “memory of the Jews’ murder” and that of Christ’s murder: both establish a collective understanding of the event as a “dreadful happening from which history [is] defined.” In that setting, the word “Aufarbeitung” connects to a rich power source, a trove of images, story seeds, and texts that are directed in part to the deeds of the Nazis but also to the response of Germans after the end of the Nazi imperium. West Germany in particular has been continuously reproached for its failure to deal directly with the Nazi heritage, and that reproach has been sharpened by such images and story seeds as “the second guilt” (die zweite Schuld) (Giordano 1987): that is, the first guilt was in-

witnessing a shipwreck



113

curred by the commission of the Nazi crimes themselves, the second by refusing to acknowledge them properly. With that moral force behind them—and through a great deal of careful politicking and appeal to the Cold War rhetoric of the anti-Communists then in power in the newly united Germany—a handful of public figures and members of the Bundestag from the East were able to establish Aufarbeitung as an extensive and expensive government-sponsored activity.

Practices and Institutions: The Rule of Law I now sketch the practices and institutions of Aufarbeitung. Germany’s postWall efforts to deal with the aftermath of a past conflict have probably been more thorough and expensive than those in any of the similar post-conflict nations in the late twentieth century, including Argentina, South Africa, El Salvador, and the post-Communist states of central and eastern Europe.9 This lies ultimately with those who drove the legislation through, but the circumstances were also favorable. The end of the conflict in Germany involved the wholesale takeover by one state of another, such that the compromises that were reached elsewhere in postsocialist Europe, for example, were unnecessary. Moreover, Germany is, for quite good reasons, obsessed with history (Assmann and Frevert 1999), and the fall of the Wall and the unification were seen as historical—here meaning so important as to be written into the record straightaway through acts of Aufarbeitung. Of the five acts of the newly expanded West German state that count under the heading of Aufarbeitung proper, four were passed by the Bundestag. The fifth—really a large series of executive acts—is commonly referred to as a special case of Aufarbeitung: “legal” Aufarbeitung.10 Even before the fall of the Wall, federal prosecutors had been assembling materials on crimes committed in and by the GDR. A few prosecutions also began under GDR law within the brief life of the democratic GDR before unification. Once the Treaty of Unification came into effect on 3 October 1990, however, a special unit of federal prosecutors, under the title “Governmental Criminality,” was set up in Berlin, and other prosecutors in the new Länder of East Germany went to work as well. This legal Aufarbeitung took place under strong constraints. The Treaty of Unification, at Russia’s insistence, provided that no one could be prosecuted for the normal discharge of their duties. This meant, in effect, that Stasi personnel in particular, but also other officials, were largely beyond the reach of the law. And this in turn meant that, for the most part, those who were victims of the Stasi could not expect legal redress for their complaints. So there was to

114



michael carrithers

be nothing like the Nuremburg trials, namely, prosecutions undertaken under special circumstances and special rules fitted to the occasion. But the Treaty of Unification did provide for the prosecution of crimes committed during GDR times, and those prosecutions had to strictly follow the ordinary provisions of the Rechtsstaat, the rule of law, and particularly the criminal law, as common to both East and West. Hence, any simple sense of grievance and redress had to be abandoned as prosecutions entered the tangled undergrowth of the German variant of North Atlantic legalism, which in all its variants is the territory of specialists and specialized forms of argument and reasoning (Rosen 1989; Stolleis 2001). Among other prosecutions, those of East German border guards who had shot people attempting to leave the GDR and of the chain of command of the border guards right up to the most famous trial of all, that of the Politburo of the GDR, attracted the greatest attention, as well as the greatest puzzles. The general procedure worked out was that such crimes should be tested first against GDR law and then against West German law, and the milder result imposed. But that was only the beginning of the thicket: since the guards were trained and commanded from above, and praised and given rewards and medals for shooting effectively, how much of the responsibility was theirs? Since the commanders did not actually kill anyone—nor did they intend to kill specific persons, which would have been the requirement for them to be judged as Anstifter, or instigators—what responsibility did they bear? And what responsibility did those at the top bear, since there was no evidence of any specific command to kill, and still less to kill specific persons? The relevant codes, the criminal law of the GDR and West Germany, respectively, are naturally framed to deal with one perpetrator, or at most a small handful of perpetrators and conspirators in face-to-face situations, and so could say little about the huge militarized state apparatus controlling the border, or about the power of the Soviet Union ultimately to influence that apparatus. The outcome was that many guards were freed, and others were given sentences of very few years, mostly commuted to probation. The commanders received at most a handful of years in prison. As Uwe Wesel (1994) shows in his magisterial discussion of the trial of the Politburo members, this was the best the Rechtsstaat could manage, since it is not an instrument aimed at the judgment of an entire state apparatus. These judgments, however, corresponded to few people’s ideas of grievance and redress. Many people I spoke to cited Bärbel Bohley, a figure prominent in the GDR opposition who was imprisoned by the Stasi and later exiled, who allegedly said, “we wanted justice, but we got the rule of law” (Wir wollten Gerechtigkeit, aber wir haben den Rechtsstaat bekommen).

witnessing a shipwreck



115

This expression became a widely used cliché, a commonplace applied to any circumstance where some assumed standard of just deserts was transgressed in the post-unification world. Its popularity suggests, I think, two conclusions. First, any effort at Aufarbeitung would inevitably be tinged with a sense of justice and injustice, of grievance and redress; this was never going to be a matter of wholly cool and disinterested scholarship. And second, the other works of Aufarbeitung, which involve in one form or another a morally informed narration before a public and before History, would have to form a surrogate for the imperfections of legal redress; justice by other means, inadequate but at least better than silence.

Aufarbeitung by Legislation The other four acts of Aufarbeitung were passed by the Bundestag, extraordinary measures taken by the state for extraordinary times. The first act was directed at the preservation, organization, and use of the Stasi archives. The movement thus to preserve this vast hoard of secret information had already begun before the fall of the Wall among the Bürgerrechtler, the “citizens rightists” who formed the backbone of the peaceful revolution. It is they who occupied Stasi offices, and eventually Stasi headquarters in Berlin, and it is they who formed citizens’ committees to oversee the Stasi archives until more enduring arrangements could be made. It was also Bürgerrechtler who insisted that the files—as they said, “our files,” speaking for themselves and other victims—be preserved and opened. This movement met many obstacles and many sincere and plausible arguments. It was thought, for example, that the release of the files would lead to attacks on informers or even inflame civil unrest. Some of these fears seemed justified by the revelations that flowed for years from the files, sometimes through the later official authority overseeing the files and sometimes through files that had fallen into private hands. The effect was exaggerated by sensationalist journalism, rendering a sometimes lurid and certainly exaggerated picture of a people in the East consisting solely of victims and informers. And it was only through a protracted struggle, involving the re-occupation of Stasi headquarters by Bürgerrechtler and hunger strikes, that the files were neither destroyed nor sealed away for a hundred years—both lively propositions at the time—but preserved for immediate use. And indeed I want to stress this struggle, because seen from the perspective of historicity and of life lived forward (as Kierkegaard expressed it), the events leading to the preservation and use of the files were highly contingent and the outcome was far from certain.

116



michael carrithers

But in retrospect (life understood backwards, as Kierkegaard put it) we can see that once a decision was made, everything was done to lend that decision weight and institutionalized firmness. A law was finally passed in the united Germany in December of 1991 that provided for a large bureaucracy— at present well over a thousand employees—to oversee the roughly 180 kilometers of file shelves, held in the original structures built for the Stasi. Offices were set up with strict procedures to release files to individuals under carefully controlled circumstances, and provision was made for journalistic and historical researchers to have restricted access to the material. Many sober works of scholarship have been commissioned or encouraged by the authority overseeing the Stasi files, as well as traveling exhibitions, such as the one in Leipzig, as I write, about surveillance and control of the mail in the GDR. The second and third acts of legislation were to appoint Commissions of Enquiry of the Bundestag. These are perhaps best understood against the alternative measure proposed at the time, namely, a system of tribunals across East Germany that, while not empowered to hand out sentences, would nevertheless deliver publicized judgments on individual deeds, such as the shooting of would-be emigrants at the Wall, and also on acts of the Party and on the system of government in the GDR as a whole (see Schorlemmer 1992: 245– 266). This proposal gave more than lip service to the sense of grievance many harbored in the aftermath of the GDR, though it also stressed reconciliation through mutual acknowledgment, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was later to do in South Africa. But instead the Bundestag—driven in part by fears that public tribunals would lead to the sort of political instability in East Germany that was then running through Russia and other parts of eastern Europe—fastened on the idea of the commissions, which would aim not at broad publicity and wide public participation but rather at establishing the facts of the matter. It was a solution designed much more for the leisure and obscurity of the historical profession than for the excitement and exposure of the news cycle or the decisive judgments of a tribunal, though inevitably it was still tinged to a degree by those practices; it was to be the judgment of History. The first commission, established in law in mid-1992, was subtitled “Aufarbeitung of the History and Consequences of the Communist Party Dictatorship in Germany” and published its report in 1995. Its published deliberations ran to 15,187 pages distributed over eighteen volumes. A second commission followed, under the title “Overcoming the Consequences of the Communist Party Dictatorship in the Process of German Unity,” with a similarly lengthy report in 1998. The work of this second commission led to the final act of legislation in 1997: the establishment of the Aufarbeitung Foundation, to be funded by both government subvention and the remaining funds of the former East German

witnessing a shipwreck



117

Communist Party, to support various archives, research projects, and publication by victims’ associations and Aufarbeitung initiatives. The argument for such a foundation was tied in part to the authority responsible for the Stasi files. An unintended consequence of making the Stasi files available was that the Stasi perspective on GDR life was given undue precedence in public. The Aufarbeitung Foundation, in contrast, was to assist in promulgating the perspective of the victims and the Bürgerrechtler, whose experiences and attitudes would otherwise disappear from public discourse. There was a second form of reasoning behind the Aufarbeitung Foundation. By the time the foundation was mooted, in the mid-1990s, public interest in the GDR and its revolution had begun to wane. In the view of those active in Aufarbeitung, this was not because the GDR, with its causes and consequences, had been widely understood. On the contrary, it was simply a loss of interest. The public had followed the trials of guards at the Wall and the chain of command above them, as well as the lurid revelations from the Stasi files: husbands spying on wives, budding politicians and famous writers in the East unmasked as Stasi informers. But now such stories were fewer, and in any case, people were jaded, tired of hearing about the GDR and its aftermath but without having achieved a mature understanding of the GDR and its revolution. So the case was made for the Aufarbeitung Foundation to reinforce the steady work of scholarship, museum work, film, and public exhibitions that had already been started by the Stasi files authority. In that way, the public could be re-engaged and educated by the work of Aufarbeitung.

That Famous Character, “the Public” Note that both the detailed practices here—researching, writing, broadcasting, preparing exhibitions—and the reasoning behind them assume the existence of that great, if invisible, being, “the public.” Whether through speculation, assumption, or talk, that plural third-person presence, “the public,” is an omnipresent, mercurial, and many-sided character for those involved in Aufarbeitung and is perforce a constant presence in their rhetoric. Thus Rita Süßmuth, then president of the Bundestag, wrote a very brief preface (less than a page) to introduce the huge report of the first Commission of Enquiry but nevertheless managed to refer to “the public” (die Öffentlichkeit) six times in that space. The very first sentence gives some idea of the unease associated with the public, for she begins by pointing out that a parliamentary committee responsible for the “Aufarbeitung of contemporary history” (Zeitgeschichte) must be prepared for skepticism “in public and not least from specialists” (in der Öffentlichkeit und nicht zuletzt bei der Fachwissenschaft) (Deutscher Bundestag 1995: v). Here,

118



michael carrithers

“public” (Öffentlichkeit) reveals its etymological source in the idea of “openness,” but it is already associated with two further ideas. First, the public may in general be skeptical of this utterance or publication. And second, the public may in fact, despite the collecting and summarizing rhetoric of politicians and of Süßmuth herself, be divided into many publics, including in this case the public of the historical profession and other relevant social scientists. Süßmuth then carries this implicit rhetorical question further, noting that it is very unusual for parliamentarians to “consult” about history and “reach verdicts” about it, and she asks whether their efforts might be judged “bureaucratic” or “party political” (Deutscher Bundestag 1995: v). To this set of rhetorical doubts about the report of the commission she then provides the following answer: The Commission of Enquiry, whose materials are here laid before a wider public, has been able to counteract these and similar fears. It has done its work before the whole public and thereby has demonstrated a great, finally indeed a necessary, service to them [the public] as well as to specialists and not least to the victims of dictatorship. For above all it was a matter of salvaging the still fresh experiences of the second dictatorship on German soil and giving satisfaction to the victims—both before the eyes and ears of the public and with the intention to arm and strengthen democratic consciousness. (v–vi)

The rhetorical bestowing of eyes and ears on that collective subject, the public, has the function here of presupposing a collective act of attention to the commission. It stresses again the openness of this parliamentary process, as does the phrase “laid before a wider public.” Moreover, these attributions to the respective characters of the plot—the openness of the committee and the (supposed) receptiveness of the public—are enlivened by commonplaces, key words, values, and further story seeds of German political discourse. The “second dictatorship” is a story seed reminding listeners of the first, the dictatorship of Hitler. The reference to “German soil” is to lift even this short text into the company of all those other texts—many of them quite suspect today—that have called on “German soil,” in solemn tones, in the name of nation and nationalism (and it must be borne in mind that Professor Doctor Süßmuth spoke also as a member of the conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union). So here there is an implicit connection between the public and the nation. Moreover, this connecting of public to nation has a further sense of treating that public as possessing a consciousness that is democratic; in turn, the public’s democratic consciousness is enhanced by this exercise of open government. This attribution to the public reminds one, by the same token, of its opposite, of an undemocratic consciousness that might support dictator-

witnessing a shipwreck



119

ship, and of the opposition between dictatorship and the democracy of West, and now unified, Germany. This has a particular poignancy among Germans, whose attitudes in the first half of the twentieth century, and arguably after World War II as well, were extraordinarily antidemocratic. And indeed the imagery of “arming and strengthening” democratic consciousness has concrete counterparts in such institutions as the Federal Agency for Political Education (Die Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung), which takes an active and often imaginative role in promulgating the ideas and practices of democracy. Note, too, the argumentative structure of this passage. The beginning of the preface sets up a problem: the skepticism of the public and the inappropriateness of a parliamentary committee to deal with historical matters for that public. The answer to this supposed skepticism, however, is the stark assertion that the committee has done its work “before the whole public and thereby has demonstrated a great, finally indeed a necessary, service.” This is hardly a compellingly argued answer. It relies instead on an underlying story line, an implicit story seed, in which the characters of government carry out their work, whatever it may be, in respect of, and before the metaphorical gaze of, that other character, the public. The implication here is that whatever the nature of that governmental work, that work is validated by the sheer fact of its openness,11 which in turn strengthens democratic consciousness, and so on in a virtuous circle. Let me extend this argument a bit further. Though it is not fully evidenced in this passage, I believe that the general ideology of Aufarbeitung—as well as the general conception of “public,” “democratic consciousness,” and “openness” of knowledge—amounts to a folk theory of a public and that that theory is basically a Habermasian one. By this I do not mean that those involved have read Habermas, and I certainly do not mean that they would all agree with him. Rather, there is an underlying idea of a public that he shares with them. That is not surprising, since so much of Habermas’s writing on the “public sphere”—the English translation captures his sense rather better than the German Öffentlichkeit—originates in the shared German assumptions and the shared historical experience. Habermas assumes that the public sphere is the counterpart of the state and that the two can only be understood together. He assumes that the public sphere is at its best when characterized by openness and the free and rational exchange of knowledge and opinion. And these assumptions are the more compelling because of the German experience of the opposite, the closed, dark, and irrational press that was so widespread in the Weimar Republic and that was brought to a perfection of darkness and irrationality by the Nazis (the view of the public as open and rational debate, rather like a conversation, is splendidly exemplified in a peculiar genre of German publication, books that assemble the various writings and editorials from

120



michael carrithers

newspapers and magazines on some contentious current issue in one handy volume). It is in part a totalizing, perhaps even a dictatorial, view in that it posits only the single and all-embracing public rather than the many publics— fly fishing magazines and their readers, the gay press, the radical left and its pamphlets, anthropologists and anthropology journals—that are closer to our experience. But it is also a hopeful and generous view, in that it presupposes that the public, that imagined singular/plural agent, can judge for itself. Nevertheless, an awareness of the fickleness of the public—or better, following Warner, of the voluntary and autopoetic character of a public—is revealed by the final, valedictory sentiment in Süßmuth’s preface. She writes, “I wish the work the attention and acceptance among the interested public that it deserves” (Deutscher Bundestag 1995: v). It is a pious wish, optimistic but hopeless, since even those who could afford the eighteen volumes would be unlikely to read very far in them. And in recognition of that, four slender volumes of excerpts from the report were later offered for sale.

From Public to History I turn now to the link between this notion of public and notions of history. The idea that history delivers judgments is a commonplace of German, as well as anglophone, discourse; I have already remarked that the Aufarbeitung—morally informed narration—of GDR history also bears an extra tinge of unredressed grievance, as if the narration itself were also, to a degree at least, a surrogate for legal verdicts. But it is tinged by another peculiar circumstance as well, for the unification of Germany was also widely understood as a reunification. This posed a special problem for those politicians addressing the public, because that public was at the very least two very different publics, with two very different experiences of the forty-five years prior to the fall of the Wall. So putting together the public with the nation and narrating their single history presented a special problem to the rhetoricians of Aufarbeitung in their orientation work. The following is taken from Rainer Eppelmann’s speech to the Bundestag on the occasion of the debate concerning the establishment of the first Commission of Enquiry. Eppelmann had been the pastor of the church in East Berlin that became a center for the opposition in Prenzlauer Berg in the final period of the GDR. He joined the conservative Christian Democratic Union and was eventually elected to the Bundestag. He was one of those especially influential eastern Bundestag members who united to create an all-party consensus over the various measures of Aufarbeitung, and he was destined to be the chairman of the Commission of Enquiry. His was the initial speech in the

witnessing a shipwreck



121

debate over the commission and so was meant to set the tone for both the debate and the subsequent Aufarbeitung. Here is how it began: Madame President! My very honored ladies and gentlemen! Our past lays hold of us again and again. It is strong and lively, and we are witnesses—all of us—that it daily lays hold of us. It is—at least still—near. And that is good; for our past is a treasure, because it contains our experiences—those that please us and make us happy, and those that pain us or make us sad and angry. Our past contains at once our insights, that which we have learned, and that which was taught us; so we will do well to confront our past—jointly as East Germans and West Germans, as one people. (Deutscher Bundestag 1995: 26)

Let me begin with Eppelmann’s evocation of the “one people” (ein Volk). In the first place, this directly addresses a problem that had begun to arise from the moment the Wall fell, a growing sense of profound difference between Ossis, or East Germans, and Wessis, or West Germans. This difference appears not just in different political attitudes and a lack of common references in experience but even in bodily habitus and the minutiae of everyday conduct (see, for example, Berdahl 1999a, 1999b). In the vernacular this is sometimes spoken of as the “Wall in the head” (die Mauer im Kopf), which remains standing mentally even though the Wall itself has fallen. Sociologists even speak of the “ethnicization” (Ethnisierung) of the East Germans vis-à-vis the West (Howard 1995). So this “we” who should confront our past is, in the first instance, a story seed that makes a mental movement from that experienced, uncomfortable, even threatening division to a desired national unity. Later in his speech, Eppelmann would go on to connect this movement from divided many to desired one with the implicit problem of creating a public for the work of Aufarbeitung. He will speak of the experience of the prior forty-five years in the GDR as being much more than just a problem for the victims of the Stasi and the perpetrators. He will wish that “as many as possible of the 80 million Germans [i.e., the whole country] should concern themselves intensively with the questions and problems of our past” (Deutscher Bundestag 1995). He will say that there can never be too many who do so, only too few, and then will state that “every person, every group, every party, every lobby group” should ask what they have done right or wrong in the last forty-five years and what could be learned and mended in that reflection. So he is calling for national conscience searching but wishes it to be carried out by every agency of society. This is certainly hyperbole, rhetorical exaggeration, in aid of capturing the “eyes and ears” of the supposed national public and of moving a nation to unified assent to his purpose. Such an invocation of nation, public, and their unified attention performs another task as well: the legitimation of this proposed governmental under-

122



michael carrithers

taking. While the funds that would be spent on the Aufarbeitung commission were not great compared with other expenditures, those funds were nevertheless raised from general, and not just East German, taxation. Moreover, the authoritative character that members of the commission and the Bundestag wished to bestow on that Aufarbeitung would be the more secure by its being a task both of and for the nation as a whole. But, at the core, the diction and the totalizing rhetoric are necessary because this speech, and the speeches that were to follow, had continually to achieve one task among others, and that is to demonstrate that the government is fit to govern because it is possessed by a loftiness of purpose and an orientation to the nation as a whole. As Rodney Barker (2005) has pointed out at length, such work of legitimation must be continuous and expensive in time, effort, and goods if it is to remain effective. I return to the beginning of Eppelmann’s speech. He lends figurative agency to “the past,” which “lays hold of us.” The verb that I have translated as “lays hold of,” einholen, could as well be rendered as “catches up with,” or to convey its most vivid physical sense, it “hauls us in,” like fish in a net. That vivid physical sense may be most appropriate, because the “we,” the national and public “we,” is hauled in by a “strong” and “lively” agency: “the past.” “The past” is, I suppose, a synecdoche, the whole used to designate the parts—in this case, the whole of past events being used to designate the parts, that is, events associated with the GDR. So then the question is this: What particular events are meant here? At the time of the speech, early 1992, prosecutions of guards at the Wall were underway and the Politburo trial was in the offing. Revelations were still coming out of the Stasi files. And the whole business of unifying the country in practical terms—including the application of Western funds to the antiquated infrastructural legacy of the East—meant that the legacy of the GDR was still very much on the media agenda, so one would not have had to search far for a reminder of the GDR past. But “the past” could be heard in many ways. It could be heard by anyone as bearing an echo of the Nazi past and therefore as an invitation to see the GDR past in the same stern light; indeed, Eppelmann’s whole rhetoric could in principle have been lifted out of the many speeches in the Bundestag that had earlier been devoted to that topic—Helmut Dubiel’s (1999) book about the Bundestag and the Nazi past, tellingly titled Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte (No one is free from history), attests plentifully to that. For those who had felt the rough edge of the Stasi’s institutionalized hatred, “the past” could call up their own personal experience and, in particular, the sense of unredressed grievance that many felt. In any case, “the past” is usefully vague and general, comprehending a “treasure” of both happy and unhappy experiences, and so well in keeping with Eppelmann’s effort here to project, and to speak to and for, the imagined whole.

witnessing a shipwreck



123

This fundamental notion, that the national “we” should learn from its past, lies at the base of Aufarbeitung and provides the most enduring rationale for doing history in this highly official and comprehensive way. Later in his speech, Eppelmann will say that “we” should learn to correct ways of behaving so that “we” will not end up in the stupid situation of a child who burns its fingers for a third time on the oven, i.e., ends up with a third dictatorship. This is consonant with the assertion that “we will do well to confront our past,” rather than to ignore or bury it, as had been suggested for the Stasi files. One can also hear a strong echo of a Christian ethic of facing up to sin, and it is no accident that both Eppelmann, here urging a public “facing up to” of the GDR past, and Joachim Gauck, who was so instrumental in opening the Stasi files for a similar “facing up to,” began as pastors.

History as Truth So Eppelmann’s proposal is to transform experience into History through the moralizing orientation work—the public narration of stories—of the events of the GDR. The writing of such stories, he suggests later in his speech, is the moral equivalent of a fair trial: I find that many of the fundamental decisions, and detailed decisions, of those responsible and in power in the GDR were false, not only through a lack of knowledge and insight, but also against custom and morality, and in part against current law. That must all be established, worked through thoroughly and explained; for we want not only fair trials but honest and objective history books, written from the point of view of those affected, the victims. (Deutscher Bundestag 1995: 27)

So this “objective history” is to be a narrative, or collection of narratives, that is of and for the entire public and the entire nation. This touches on a deep assumption of nationalism, that to be a nation is not only to be a public but also to have a common story. But note as well the equation Eppelmann makes between “objective history” and history from the point of view of the victims. This does not in itself correspond to professionals’ ideas of the craft of history, in either the anglophone or the German world. But it does make sense if we think of history writing, as Eppelmann does here, on the analogy of conducting a trial, for the demand in either case would be to establish the facts and to make a judgment informed by a moral standard. Moreover, the truth of that narrative is ensured as well by its rationality, that is, by the careful consideration of connected causes and consequences that will inform it. That is one implication of the very title of the commission,

124



michael carrithers

“Aufarbeitung of the History and Consequences of the Communist Party Dictatorship.” In contrast, Archbishop Desmond Tutu—as Philippe Salazar (2002, personal communication) has pointed out to me—relied on a series of topoi, commonplaces, or as I would say, story seeds, from South Africa’s violent past in his introduction to the Report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These commonplaces were not a rational and causal history but evocations of commonly known trials and tribulations. In contrast, the German Aufarbeitung was to be a connected and clearly argued causal account, based in sober gray evidence rather than on highly colored stories. So the practice of Aufarbeitung aims to render a version of History that is understood as absolute, true, rational, and improving by being diametrically opposed to other practices, such as those of secrecy, deception, delusion, and ill will. For Eppelmann and others, this History is necessarily connected to those collective pronouns given form in the nation, the state, and the public. In contrast, for many Bürgerrechtler—who, it must be remembered, joined neither the church nor the Bundestag and who often stood somewhat to the side as nonconformists, after the fall of the Wall as before it—History has a rather different character. Ideas of grassroots democracy (Basisdemokratie), radical egalitarianism and even anarchism were, and are, common among them, consciously echoing the egalitarian soviets of sailors, soldiers, and workers that arose during the Russian revolution. In the GDR, this was a reasoned reaction against one form of smothering state, and there was nothing about the takeover of the GDR by the Federal Republic of Germany that changed their orientation. So the collective noun “nation” was of little significance to them, and that other collective noun, the “state,” represented a curse but not a necessity. Yet some did repose confidence in one overarching noun, History itself. I asked one Bürgerrechtler why he was devoting his considerable talents to insecure and lowly paid work in a voluntary Aufarbeitung archive. He looked at me as though I were a fool and said, “For History, of course!” (für die Geschichte, natürlich!). In subsequent conversation with him and others it became clear that the work of Aufarbeitung is, from this perspective, pressing and noble just insofar as it establishes a metaphysical judgment on one particular chapter in the larger book of History. History, so understood, circumscribes the horizons of human action and takes the place that, for others, could be taken by God or gods. There is a touch of Marxism here, with its sense of History as decisive and ultimate reality; these are, after all, children of GDR education. But I was not prepared for one implication of this view that I met in discussion (and that was also expressed by the Bürgerrechtlerin Katja Havemann in Stacheldraht in January 1999), namely, that the trials of GDR officials for various reasons were important not because they rendered judgments by the state but rather because their adversarial proceedings guaranteed that they rendered a supe-

witnessing a shipwreck



125

rior version of History. So the final account—reposing, I think, more in the transcript of the trial than in the verdict—would be robust and would stand the test of, well, History.

Images and Story Seeds So far I have laid out figurative landmarks that characterize the governmentsponsored landscape of Aufarbeitung. But the word “Aufarbeitung,” as a rhetorical token in itself, bore a further initial emotional and persuasive charge, and I turn now to those evocations. In his speech to the Bundestag introducing the first Commission of Enquiry, Eppelmann notes that the word was consciously chosen to label such orientation work. And in a later essay, he suggests briefly why that decision was made. He writes that “we were concerned with the Aufarbeitung of our history and not at all with ‘overcoming the past,’ as had been attempted with the first dictatorship on German soil” (Eppelmann 1997: 116). The phrase “overcoming the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), like the phrase “Aufarbeitung of the past,” originates in a particular call to do history, though Vergangenheitsbewältigung is now associated with looking back upon the Nazis, as Aufarbeitung has come to be associated with looking back upon the GDR. Eppelmann, like many Bürgerrechtler, wishes to draw a sharp contrast between the two processes. For him, Vergangenheitsbewältigung in respect of the Nazis was a failure, but Aufarbeitung is to be a success. But straightaway I must note that, for others, among them both journalists and scholars, the words are treated instead as synonyms, words for one kind of approach to a particularly traumatic period: namely, to narrate it for politically therapeutic purposes before a presumed public. So the plain question “What does Aufarbeitung evoke?” is further complicated by the observation that, if we are talking about the meaning of a German word, then that meaning is not shared by all Germans. How are we to make sense of this? A bit of history is in order. In the specific sense of orientation work aimed at a traumatic episode of collective experience, both Vergangenheitsbewältigung and Aufarbeitung were coined in the 1950s. The image of Vergangenheitsbewältigung probably first entered the awareness of a public through Erich Müller-Gangloff, a lay Christian who began a speech in 1955 by stating that “the shadows of a past which has not been overcome show themselves more powerfully than ever” (Die Schatten einer unbewältigten Vergangenheit zeigen sich mächtiger denn je) (cited in Hanusch 1999: 121). The “shadows” to which he referred were those cast by Nazism, and it was Müller-Gangloff ’s muscularly expressed view that the Germans had not yet actually confronted the deeds committed by them or in their name during Hitler’s twelve years of

126



michael carrithers

dictatorship. Instead of forgetting the Nazi past, he argued, Germans should remember it; instead of repressing it, they should confront it plainly; instead of holding it in silence, they should make it public, before themselves and the world. And by present standards he seemed on the right track: in the late 1940s, the 1950s, and much of the 1960s, public discourse was dominated by what Hermann Lübbe later famously called a “communicative silencing” (kommunikatives Beschweigen)—a tactful reticence about the Nazi period, a reticence that was understood at the time to support social solidarity and the integration of all parties into the postwar democracy. So, Müller-Gangloff ’s was then a minority point of view. In 1958 he was joined in that minority by Theodor Adorno, recently returned from exile in the United States, who gave a speech with a roughly similar message, titled “What does Aufarbeitung of the past mean?” It was to this speech that Bürgerrechtler directed me when I asked after the origin of their concept. In his typically allusive and elusive style, Adorno (1977 [1959]: 555) offered little direct answer to the question asked in his title, though he did mention in passing the notion of “seriously working on what had happened” and “breaking its spell through bright consciousness” (seinen Bann breche[n] durch helles Bewußtsein), which was rather reminiscent of some of Müller-Gangloff ’s ideas. Later in the speech Adorno also referred in passing to Müller-Gangloff ’s imagery of “overcoming” the past. Indeed, the two phrases, “overcoming” the past and Aufarbeitung of the past, not only had a similar import in their contemporaneous setting but also evoked a set of analogous figures. In the first place, each is a metaphor, in that it applies a plainly understood process to a more complex and inchoate circumstance. In Bernhard Schlink’s (1998: 433) keen observation, “Overcoming,” or bewältigen, involves “a task that first stands before one, and then is handled, and through the handling changes its shape and is finally done and disappears as a task.” Similarly the concrete sense of Aufarbeitung, in its form as the verb aufarbeiten, means “to finish off something left unfinished” (liegengebliebenes erledigen) (Duden Deutsches Universalwörterbuch 2001: 175), as, for example, answering the post arriving at an office. These relatively plain and graspable processes are then applied to far grander, more nebulous and difficult mental, emotional, and physical processes—the events of 1933 to 1945 plus their continuing aftermath—and through that application the images begin to suggest a shape to the nebulous: something unfinished that needs to be dealt with and finished properly. Moreover, these metaphors also entail story seeds, kernels of still more complex processes. For Müller-Gangloff, Germans after the war were “sick and degenerating despite glowing outward health” (cited in Hanusch 1999: 122), and that sickness was spiritual, the consequence of failing to confront their sin.

witnessing a shipwreck



127

Adorno, too, spoke of disease, but for him the disease was psychic, the result of the “repression,” or Verdrängung, of traumatic memories and deeds. What Müller-Gangloff expressed in Christian terms, Adorno expressed in Freudian terms. Nevertheless, they shared a common story line, and that story line gave the plain “dealing with something and finishing it” a richer and still more persuasive hue and a strongly moralizing evaluation. The story line begins with (1) evildoing (or trauma), which is followed by (2) unacknowledged guilt (repression). There then ensues either (3) confession (self-awareness) and (4) salvation (a return to health), or, in the absence of confession (self-awareness), the affliction continues or grows worse. This story seed therefore elevates the plain “task to be done” into a spiritual, psychic, and indeed political necessity, a therapy and a healing. And of course it is this general idea that was much later to animate Eppelmann and Gauck and many other Bürgerrechtler in their advocacy of Aufarbeitung of the GDR past. Nevertheless, the relative clarity of this purpose, as first conceived by Adorno and Müller-Gangloff, was from the very beginning modified by a sharp ironic awareness of other possibilities and other responses to “the past.” Just as the rhetoricians of GDR Aufarbeitung would have to contend rhetorically with opposition, apathy, or distraction in others, so Adorno and Müller-Gangloff had to frame their arguments against countervailing opinion. This is made painfully clear at the very beginning of Adorno’s (1977 [1959]: 555) speech: The question, “what does Aufarbeitung of the past mean?” must be clarified. It proceeds from a formulation that has made itself highly suspect as a slogan in the last few years. In that usage, Aufarbeitung of the past does not signify that one seriously works on what has happened and breaks its spell through bright consciousness. But one wants to draw a final line underneath it [i.e., the past] and if possible wipe it away from memory. The gesture [i.e., statement] that everything should be forgiven and forgotten, which would be appropriate to those who experienced the injustice, is being practiced by the cronies of those who committed [the injustice]. . . . That the tendency to unconscious and not at all so unconscious defense against guilt should connect itself so absurdly with the Aufarbeitung of the past is occasion enough for reflections that relate to a realm from which such a horror still proceeds that one hesitates to call it by name.

Adorno makes two allusions here. The first—“everything should be forgiven and forgotten” as applied to the cronies of the perpetrators—is directed to the many measures, undertaken in the late 1940s and the 1950s by Adenauer’s regime in the Federal Republic, whose purpose was to rehabilitate those former officials and others who had suffered from the “denazification” policies of the Allied occupation through, for example, job loss and/or criminalization

128



michael carrithers

(see Frei 1996). The overall justification of such measures of rehabilitation at the time was political stability. But the effect was to support the second process to which Adorno alludes, and that was the continual attempt to “draw a final line” under Nazi crimes and to act more or less as if they had not happened. So here the figurative language of “finishing something left unfinished” or, as a German friend glossed Aufarbeitung in English, “dealing with something urgent” takes on a sense that is a grotesque distortion of that desired by Adorno and Müller-Gangloff: it is ex-Nazis and their “cronies” who are the victims, and it is their (postwar) past that is dealt with urgently. Adorno’s strategy in this passage is first to tag this then-current version of Aufarbeitung as a Freudian defense mechanism and therefore as an “absurd” travesty, masking a reality too painful to face. Then he contrasts that travesty with reality itself, the “realm from which horror emanates,” the war crimes and genocide actually perpetrated by the Nazis, which are urgently in need of genuine Aufarbeitung. So, a strong sense of a contending opposition was already written into the rhetoric of Aufarbeitung at its source. At the time, Adorno and Müller-Gangloff were joined by only a handful of other West Germans who recognized a pathology in the “communicative silencing” of the 1950s (see Fröhlich and Kohlstruck 1999). But they did have one lasting result: the notions of Aufarbeitung and “overcoming” the past were set into the public domain with a moral purport. Over the next decades the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung made its way into the awareness of the newspaper-reading public in West Germany, less through the work of MüllerGangloff than through its adoption by journalists, who perhaps found the image of “overcoming” vivid enough for their purposes. Adorno’s usage of Aufarbeitung of the past, on the other hand, passed into a collection of his essays (Eingriffe) that was widely printed and reprinted and read by Western leftist intellectuals through the 1970s and ’80s and thus played before a more limited public until taken up by the Bürgerrechtler. In the long run, the West German government was increasingly subjected, through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, to public moral commentary—indeed, to what might be called a prophetic censoriousness, which is so well exemplified in this passage from Adorno. The GDR too was able to capitalize on its own highly publicized antifascism to conduct an enduring campaign against the FRG and its supposed sympathy with Nazism (Herf 1997). These conditions led gradually to a series of measures, starting slowly with the trials of concentration camp guards in the early 1960s, that did indeed amount to an Aufarbeitung of Nazi crimes. By the late 1980s, West Germany had developed a sort of negative patriotism, based on a widespread consensus, reinforced through historical education about Nazism in schools as well as by public ceremonial acts, that the nation was united by general moral condemnation of its own Nazi past. The Nazi period, that is, became a sort of unifying national myth of

witnessing a shipwreck



129

shared criminal responsibility, surely one of the most unusual manifestations of nationalism the world has seen (see Fulbrook 1999). Under these circumstances the position of prophetic censoriousness opened up by Adorno and Müller-Gangloff remained open, so that even into the 1990s the view that West Germany had done nothing but try to forget its crimes was a viable, even useful, public stance. Thus, for example, Ralph Giordano published his book on “the second guilt” of the Germans, meaning the guilt of not admitting to the Nazi crimes, in 1987; and in 1988 Lea Rosh began her long campaign to establish a monument to the murdered Jews of Europe. This (successful) campaign lasted till shortly before the present writing, often in tones that spoke of the “shame” (Schande) of Germans that they had not acknowledged their guilt. Hence, when Eppelmann and the Bürgerrechtler began to look for a vocabulary in 1989 to describe the desired orientation work for the GDR past, they could not use “overcoming the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), for that was the term that had been bandied by popular journalism in the West whenever efforts to memorialize the crimes and victims of the Nazis, or failures to do so, were discussed. It was tainted by association. And so Aufarbeitung was retrieved for use from its more modest Western leftish public and wielded for the new purpose.

Conclusion The work leading to this essay began, for me, with a troubling opacity I found in the word “Aufarbeitung” as I began to look into the way East Germans represented their history after the fall of the Wall. So, in this essay I have tried to give as comprehensive and satisfactorily rounded an ethnographic interpretation of Aufarbeitung as I could manage, covering both the rhetorical use of the word and its meaning as a set of practices. But there are still embarrassing socks and shirtsleeves hanging out of the suitcase I have had such trouble in closing. One of the research methods I was reduced to using was to ask people I happened to come across what they thought Aufarbeitung meant and what they associated with it. Of course, the answers of people in the Aufarbeitung scene were largely consistent with the rendition I have given here, since it is their version I have tried to reflect. Among many others who fell into my hands were postgraduate students in the arts or social sciences, and their answers fell roughly within this cone of light as well. One graduate student in psychology from the East satisfied me very well by saying that he associated Aufarbeitung with durcharbeiten, which is what one does to one’s past in Freudian psychoanalysis: one “works through it.” And he mentioned verarbeiten too, as something that people in a commune might do: “working over” their problems.

130



michael carrithers

Other responses fell in the penumbra or outside the cone of light, but in an accountable way. Some students, and several neighbors, waiters, waitresses, and taxi drivers, were puzzled and had little to say. These responses, at least, strengthened me in my intuition that Aufarbeitung is not the universal concern, even in East Germany, that the rhetoricians of Aufarbeitung would wish it to be. But there were other very puzzling responses. I encountered “to renovate something” (etwas wiedergutmachen) and “upgrade, like a computer” (in English). These reflect quite another sense of the verb aufarbeiten: it is something you can do to furniture, an old steam engine, or your wardrobe; you renovate it or make it over. You can do something similar to complicated machines, upgrade them. So there, perhaps, is just a matter of misunderstanding, or of the ignorance of the Aufarbeitung of the past I have already noted. But I sometimes found this association in the Aufarbeitung scene as well. In a speech on a public occasion concerning the government’s Aufarbeitung Foundation, a young ex-physicist from the GDR spoke of Aufarbeitung as a “horribly technical” (schaurig-technisches) word, and he later spoke of it in private as a matter of “renovating” (wiedergutmachen) our understanding of the past. On another occasion a man with a similarly technical background mentioned “renewing” (wiederherstellen) and “repair” (Reparatur), though in this case I sensed some tentativeness in the explanation. More self-confident, however, was the prominent eastern member of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Thierse (2003) when he recently mentioned that he rejected “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” but found “Aufarbeitung” more appropriate, because he associated it with the repair of old clothing in poorer times, such that “an old shirt would get a new collar.” Thus, he said, we should always do that with our history, “so that we can wear it as a [suitable] garment in the present.” I think I can fold these shirts and socks back into the suitcase, but perhaps only at the price of using a larger one, comprehending not just Aufarbeitung but ideas of culture, history, and rhetoric in general. My general explanation is rooted in the idea of historicity, among whose attributes I noted a continuing flow of events, of action and reaction: people act now as agents, now as patients, in conversations, games, consultations, speeches, trials, disputes, and warfare, to give a few examples. At any given time there is already an irreducible plurality of viewpoints and interpretations across the participants in these reciprocal activities. I have already recognized this by drawing a contrast between the totalizing aspirations of those addressing a public and the actuality of those addressed, some of whom may be pleased, convinced, and cooperative, while others may be absent, distracted, preoccupied, uninterested, irritated, enraged, and/or opposed. I suggested a second term, culture, which stands against this flow of events. On this view, culture is not a unified or settled whole in which people

witnessing a shipwreck



131

take shelter but rather a collection of mental and emotional tools they use creatively to grasp and, where possible, manipulate that flow. Important here is the rhetorical edge of culture, the way in which people are able to use images and narratives to make sense of inchoate events and to urge that interpretation on others. And key to this essentially imaginative activity is that very making of connections, the finding of useful analogies between what is known and what could be known, between what is understood and what is hard to understand. So one may wish to give past events a crisp narrative form and orient oneself and others to what might be expected in the present and future. Or one may find handy practical images, such as “overcoming,” “catching up with,” or even “renovating,” to capture and convey a particular orientation to past events that may otherwise be forgotten or falsely understood. Yet even such devices, though skillfully applied, may spur the imagination of others in an unexpected way and so lead to further diverging historicity. A third term has crept in as well: practices. For example, the public addressed by Aufarbeitung is, on the one hand, an imagined one, a plural character set into a plot line before the mind’s eye. On the other hand, there are practices, involving skills of hand, eye, ear, and mind, that make that public manifest through writing, directing, reading, watching, and listening. The practice side of a public reminds us that such an entity can have a life beyond its mere imagining by a writer, director, scholar, or politician. And through the concrete practice of Aufarbeitung, people with startlingly different ideas of the term itself can nevertheless work together quite well to make it happen. Yet the imagined side reminds us that the practical skills contributing to a public can be deployed, or withheld, depending on the policy created through imagination and rhetorical thought. And it is only by imagining Aufarbeitung in the first place that resources can be assembled to support the practice of Aufarbeitung. This may or may not be the larger suitcase required, but I would not like to finish with the impression that either Aufarbeitung or our social science that is so similar to Aufarbeitung can ever actually gather in all the dangling ends. The East German writer Günter de Bruyn wrote an essay in December of 1989 to practice his own Aufarbeitung before the Aufarbeitung initiatives, or the official Aufarbeitung, got going. At the end of an account of various bitter-making episodes at the hands of GDR authorities and the Stasi, he invented a Central Memory Bureau (Zentrales Erinnerungsbüro). He leaves us in no doubt that this Bureau is wholly imaginary, but if it could exist, then the Bureau should collect memory with consent among wide circles of the population, right up the whole ladder of society . . . a database of persons would make the fate of individuals easily available . . . a network of information would arise that

132



michael carrithers

would bring together what is separated in an illuminating way. With the press of a button it would show who, where, and when Fate had been determined by whom—though certainly any attribution of blame would be pointless, for everyone had promoted bad causes indeed with the best belief, or obeying necessity, or against their will, but in any case pursuing their duty. . . . As a place where one could lay down—and correct—both oppressive and happy memories, the CMB [Central Memory Bureau] would soon be proven indispensable for the people’s psychic hygiene. (de Bruyn 1994: 15)

A moment’s reflection should persuade us that neither the work of social science nor that of Aufarbeitung will ever quite match the certainty conjured up by that simple pressing of a button. Michael Carrithers has done fieldwork in Sri Lanka, India, and East Germany and is at present an emeritus professor in anthropology at Durham University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. He has done fieldwork on the forest monks of Sri Lanka, on Digambar Jains in western India, and on Germans’ sense of recent history. He has also written on the Buddha and his world, on the category of the person, and on theories of culture, history, and the nature of anthropology. He is a member of the international Rhetoric Culture Project and has pursued that enterprise into the imagery of species conservation, the use of tropes to deal with the vicissitudes of life, and hyperbolic tropes in public culture.

Notes 1. On the rhetorical and creative character of everyday conversation, see Linde 1993 and Ochs and Capps 2001. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this chapter are mine. 2. Especially in his later work on communicative action. 3. I have adopted, and adapted, this word from J. D. Y. Peel. See Carrithers 1992 and the references therein. 4. Blumenberg (1997 [1979]) writes here of a broad swathe of imagery and scenarios running through European thought, but the use of the sea and the sea voyage to capture the precariousness of existence runs through India and beyond as well. 5. Fernandez’s (1986: 8) whole formulation is this: a metaphor is “a strategic predication upon an inchoate pronoun (an I, a you, a we, a they) which makes a movement and leads to a performance.” Or, to gloss this formulation less compactly, the metaphor or image is (1) applied skillfully (“strategic predication”) (2) to oneself and others (“an inchoate pronoun,” a phrase capturing the salience of persons and their appropriate characterizations for social life) (3) to interpret or convince (“makes a movement” of mind) and so (4) to lead to appropriately formed action (“leads to a performance”).

witnessing a shipwreck



133

6. Early issues of the journal Horch und Guck, published for purposes of Aufarbeitung by the citizen’s committee that took charge of Stasi headquarters in Berlin Normannenstraße, used a drawing of a Krake to depict the Stasi. 7. See note 5 above. 8. So the public is an imaginary, in the sense originating with Castoriadis (1987). Charles Taylor (2003) has written of the imaginary of a public sphere. 9. See McAdams 2001 and Hayter 2001. Some of the measures taken, such as the vetting and dismissal of civil servants in the east who were too implicated with the Stasi and the huge effort to deal with claims on property expropriated in the GDR, belong to Aufarbeitung in its most expansive sense, as sometimes used by political scientists, but not in the usual sense of the practice as public narrative, as it appears in legislative and other discourses. See Pampel 1995. 10. Justitielle or strafrechtliche Aufarbeitung (e.g., Marxen and Werle 1999). 11. Though not used here, the metaphor of transparency is not far away. Ralph Cintron reminded us of its importance in the Western world generally at a session of the International Rhetoric Culture Project. It is significant that when the Bundestag later moved to Berlin, the rebuilt Reichstag building was, and is, meant to embody transparency, allowing visitors from up high to look down through glass upon the deliberations of the politicians below.

References Adorno, Theodor. 1977 (1959). “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit.” Gesammelte Schriften 10(2): 555–572. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Assmann, Aleida, and Ute Frevert. 1999. Geschichtsversessenheit: vom Umgang mit deutscher Vergangenheiten seit 1945. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Barker, Rodney. 2005. Legitimating Identities: The Self-Presentations of Rulers and Subjects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berdahl, Daphne. 1999a. “‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.” Ethnos 64(2): 192–211. ———. 1999b. Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1997 (1979). Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Carrithers, Michael. 1992. Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Cultural Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. “Anthropology as a Moral Science of Possibilities.” Current Anthropology 46(3): 433–456. ———, ed. 2009. Culture, Rhetoric, and the Vicissitudes of Life. New York: Berghahn Books. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. De Bruyn, Günter. 1994 (1990). “Zur Erinnerung.” In Jubelschreie, Trauergesänge: deutsche Befindlichkeiten. Frankfurt am Main: Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag, 7–15. Deutscher Bundestag. 1995. Materialien der Enquete-Kommission “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland,” vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

134



michael carrithers

Dieckmann, Christoph. 1999. “Der deutsche Berg.” Die Zeit, 21 January. Dubiel, Helmut. 1999. Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte: die nationalsozialistisch Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. Duden Deutsches Universalwörterbuch. 2001. 4th edition. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut & F.A. Brockhaus AG. Eppelmann, Rainer. 1997. “Erbe und Aufarbeitung unserer Geschichte im vereint Deutschland.” In Eine Deutsche Zwischenbilanz, ed. B. Baule and R. Süßmuth, 111–125. Munich: Günter Olzog Verlag. Fernandez, James. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Fischer-Rosenthal, Wolfram. 1995. “Schweigen-Rechtfertigen Umschreiben: Biographische Arbeit im Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten.” In Biographien in Deutschland: soziologische Rekonstruktionen gelebter Gesellschaftsgeschichte, ed. W. Fischer-Rosenthal and P. Alheit. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Frei, Norbert. 1996. Vergangenheitspolitik: die Anfänge der Budes republik und die NS-Vergangenheit. Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag. Fröhlich, Claudia, and Michael Kohlstruck, eds. 1999. Engagierte Demokraten: Vergangenheitspolitik in kritischer Absicht. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Fulbrook, Mary. 1999. German National Identity after the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. “Blurred Genres: The Re-figuration of Social Thought.” In Local Knowledge, 19–35. New York: Basic Books. Giordano, Ralph. 1987. Die zweite Schuld, oder von der Last, Deutscher zu sein. Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990 (1962). Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Hanusch, Rolf. 1999. “Erich Müller-Gangloff—ein Bürger auf der Grenze.” In Engagierte Demokraten: Vergangenheitspolitik in kritischer Absicht, ed. Claudia Fröhlich and Michael Kohlstruck, 121–131. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Hayter, Priscilla. 2001. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. London: Routledge. Herf, Jeffrey. 1997. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howard, Marc. 1995. “Die Ostdeutschen als ethnische Gruppe? Zum Verständnis der neuen Teilung des geeinten Deutschlands.” Berliner Debatte INITIAL 4/5: 119–131. Linde, Charlotte. 1993. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McAdams, A. James. 2001. Judging the Past in Unified Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marxen, Klaus, and Gerhard Werle. 1999. Die strafrechtliche Aufarbeitung von DDR-Unrecht: eine Bilanz. Berlin: de Gruyter. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pampel, Bert. 1995. “Was bedeutet ‘Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit.’” Aus Politik und Geschichte 1/2: 27–38. Rosen, Lawrence. 1989. The Anthropology of Justice: Law as Culture in Islamic Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schorlemmer, Friedrich. 1992. Versöhnung in der Wahrheit. Munich: Knaur.

witnessing a shipwreck



135

Stolleis, Michael. 2001. “Furchtbare Juristen.” In Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. 2, ed. Etienne François and Hagen Schulze, 535–548. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck. Suckut, Siegfried. 1996. Das Wörterbuch der Staatssicherheit. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. Taylor, Charles. 2003. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Thierse, Wolfgang. 2003. Die Zeit. Forum der Wissenschaft, 12 December. Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Wesel, Uwe. 1994. Ein Staat vor Gericht: der Honecker-Prozeß. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.

CHAPTER 6

An Apologia for Filthy Lucre Gustav Peebles       

Prologue In the summer of 1843, Bronson Alcott—the New England father of the celebrated Alcott sisters and leading figure in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle of “transcendentalists”—decamped in a fit of disgust and disappointment from Boston’s “filth” for the pristine countryside of Harvard, Massachusetts. He had it all planned out: In this zone of purity, he would build a utopian “consociation,” a place he dubbed “Fruitlands.” At Fruitlands, everyone would be equal (including animals: all the humans at Fruitlands were surely some of America’s first vegans) and their labor would be remunerated only with enlightenment and with nature’s bounty. Complete autarky from outside society stood as the ambitious goal (see Shepard 1966; Dahlstrand 1982; Kesten 1993; Francis 1997; Bedell 1980). Money would be banished from Fruitlands, as it was the sullying sign of sin emanating from the soulless city. Alcott, aside from being a contributing founder of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, had begun life as a petty peddler (Shepard 1937; Dahlstrand 1982). Perhaps as a result of his early career, he was sure of one thing, and that was that money would not make the world at Fruitlands go ’round. Love of one’s neighbor and pride in one’s work would be their own rewards; social relations would not be contaminated by economic relations (Bedell 1980; Herrnsstadt 1969). Revealing his heritage in the same intellectual milieu, Marx (1967: 131) would also write about a moneyless world only a year later: “Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust

an apologia for filthy lucre



137

for trust, etc.” At least at this early stage in his life, Marx could not broach this metaphoric power of money, its ability to bring about equivalencies between dissimilar domains such as those of love and work. But money was not the only thing banished from Fruitlands. Alcott and his consociates also announced that manure would not be used for farming. Excrement, he reasoned, could never be a sound path toward health and exuberant life; food that was derived from it was itself sullied. Interestingly enough, this idea was attached to the notion that manure aided in producing surplus product, and surplus product was only necessary if one wished to truck and barter with money (Francis 1997: 140–217). Six months after Alcott’s circle arrived, Fruitlands would close its doors, an embarrassment and a failure (Shepard 1937: 380).1

Productive Transgression This dual banishment of money and manure are facts always mentioned but never explored as a united phenomenon by the biographers of Alcott and the chroniclers of Fruitlands. But I would very much like to dwell on this seeming curiosity, this twin desire to eliminate money and excrement from within the bounds of Fruitlands, for in it we see the pathological extreme of a general pairing of money with fecal matter that reigns in numerous societies. Alcott banished both money and manure because he saw them as identical embodiments of dirt that had the capacity to suck life out of the things they touched and thereby produce an unhealthy overabundance. The cyclical flow of nature, its movement back and forth between death and life, between pure and impure, was something Alcott, apparently, could not broach. Fruitlands would be free of such waste products, a zone of the spirit elevated over the crass material state of the body (see Alcott 1843: 135). Mediating forces such as money and manure could not be present if this vision were to become reality. But was this more obvious split between body and soul the only thing our guide Alcott could not broach? Perhaps there is more to this seemingly ordinary pairing of money and excrement. Alcott, in seeking autarky, was revealing the selfish side of utopia, the side that—as we have seen so often in the history of utopian movements—holds disdain for anything or anyone that mediates between two realms, that is to say, for things that exchange. Here it is worth recalling Lévi-Strauss’s (1969: 496–497) closing remarks in The Elementary Structures of Kinship: To this very day, mankind has always dreamed of seizing and fixing that fleeting moment when it was permissible to believe that the law of exchange could be evaded, that one could gain without losing, enjoy without sharing.

138



gustav peebles

At either end of the earth and at both extremes of time, the Sumerian myth of the golden age and the Andaman myth of the future life correspond. . . . [In these myths, mankind removes] to an equally unattainable past or future the joys, eternally denied to social man, of a world in which one might keep to oneself.

As Lévi-Strauss tells us, then, most golden eras aim to create zones of purity and autarky, a place where money becomes not so much insistently banished as cast aside as useless. This is the paradox of the moneyless utopia: it is a place, according to Lévi-Strauss, where selfishness reigns, try as Alcott might to make selflessness reign. Because of the abundance of the economy, economic exchange becomes unnecessary and thus people can be selfish without being antisocial. In this utopian age we will have our social bonds crafted by means other than through economic exchange, and thus, these same social bonds will be more pure, unsullied by market transactions and market valuations (see Dumont 1977 for an interesting opinion about Marx as a supreme individualist in this regard). But at the risk of sounding apologetic about economic exchange (not exclusively incarnated in capitalism), such analysis misses the many benefits of it. Economic exchange, as Lévi-Strauss points out so assiduously, is one of the premier paths to becoming human, for we are social beings. According to Durkheim’s (1984) arguments in The Division of Labor in Society, it helps to produce sociality itself, by aiding in the development of a sense of belonging to a larger whole and intertwining people’s variant interests. Economic exchange is a human activity par excellence—as human as the excrement that emanates from the material bodies in which our souls are inevitably trapped. In turn, the blind acceptance that “excrement” is exclusively a denigrating predication upon money may, perhaps, be missing the many benefits of that substance. Feminist anthropology pointed out long ago that menstrual blood may be encircled with taboos because it is so powerful, and not necessarily because it is “dangerous” and “polluting” (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988: 36–38). A similar rehabilitation may be in order for excrement and the money with which it is so often associated. If this pairing of dirt and money occurs in so many different times and spaces (e.g., Brown 1959; Comaroff and Comaroff 1990; Fisher 1999; Foster 1998; Freud 1963; Harris 1989; Herbert 2002), then we must probe the reasons. By relying on the arguments of Bakhtin and Durham and Fernandez, I hope to elevate the status of both excrement and money in our lives and in our social theory. Not the most seemingly noble of causes, the reader may say. Still, perhaps by the end the nobility of excrement will be clearer. The matter at hand becomes more ethnographically discernable because of an apparently universal human phenomenon (universal, at least, for those

an apologia for filthy lucre



139

societies that rely on money). Money, despite being famously anonymous and general, is subjected to “earmarking” of various sorts in every society that anthropologists have studied. Viviana Zelizer (1997) is responsible for putting this term into circulation, but anthropologists recorded acts of earmarking prior to her seminal book, and frequently afterwards. Apparently people refuse to think of money as abstract and fungible; rather, they battle this central quality of money constantly, by “naming” individual pieces of it and setting these pieces aside in special categories. Specific money can be labeled good, evil, base, high, fast, slow, future, past, and any number of other predications depending upon its destination and/or origins. And once a society has categories, a society has the conditions ripe for transgression of these categories. As Mary Douglas (2004 [1966]: 44) so famously pointed out, “dirt is matter out of place.” Thus, I will argue here, money becomes openly proclaimed as dirty simply when it is “money out of place.” It is in money’s nature to be constantly transgressing boundaries of all sorts, as many a social theorist has asserted. It is, therefore, constantly “out of place” and thus dirty in its very nature. But, following Bakhtin, I will be arguing that this transgressive aspect of it, this constant “out-of-placeness,” this capacity to serve as a mediating device between separated realms, is precisely what makes it beneficial to human society. Bakhtin allows us to come to the counterintuitive conclusion that dirt or, in its stronger sense, excrement is good, natural, and helpful; indeed, it is fertility incarnate.

Money as Metaphor Sir Thomas More (1993 [1516]: 63) informs us that the moneyless Utopians craft their chamber pots out of pure gold, casting aspersions on money in a quite literal manner that must have, indeed, pleased Freud. And, deriving from this tradition, we have seen an array of scholarship focusing on popular and private associations between money and excrement. Freud (1963) tantalizes us with only brief inspections of the “money complex,” wherein he explains that it is a sublimation of the anal complex. He then explains that The connections which exist between the two complexes of interest in money and of defaecation, which seem so dissimilar, appear to be the most farreaching . . . wherever archaic modes of thought predominate or have persisted—in ancient civilizations, in myth, fairy-tale and superstition, in unconscious thoughts and dreams, and in the neuroses—money comes into the closest relation with excrement. (Freud 1963: 31)

Based on this, Freud makes an announcement that is crucial for our purposes here. People who were anal erotics in an earlier stage of their life’s devel-

140



gustav peebles

opment tend to share the traits of parsimony, orderliness, and obstinacy. The way they treated their excrement, in other words, is now the way they treat their money: they refuse to let it go (for it is a part of them, as Freud explains) and they make sure it stays in its proper place. The sublimated anal erotic is a possessive individual, one who seeks mastery over objects. This has become the most commonplace explanation for why money is considered dirty. Norman Brown (1959), in his exquisite and lengthy investigation of these matters, spins this commonplace into an entire theory that explains what is wrong with the capitalist economy writ large—and thus, by extension, the entire modern world. His book Life against Death stands as perhaps the most influential among the elaborations upon Freud’s insight. Brown wholly relies on the money/feces interface to reveal the “psychology of the capitalist spirit as a whole” (235). In a series of complicated but logical steps that cannot all be related here (see 234–304), he argues that money represents human guilt and thus self-punishment. According to Brown, this guilt not only causes us to enter into the social contract itself (so that we might give our guilt to others to reduce our own burden) but even leads us to build cities (as monuments of our guilt to the past). These urban monuments reveal that money is a manifestation of our fight against death and time. Paradoxically, however, our fetishistic desire to preserve life and endless drive for power (which is an effect of the money/anal complex) causes us to forget to enjoy life itself; we are endlessly and hopelessly seeking to become the the father of ourselves. Instead, Brown recommends that we banish the money complex by disavowing the guilt to our past (our fathers) and thereby embrace life over death (hence the book’s title). This call to action is not so different from other notions of false consciousness that social scientists have seen in the past. Only this time, our chains will be broken as soon as we recognize that we should become debtless men, we should “be strong enough to cancel the debt by deriving it from infantile fantasy” (that is to say, overcome money and its origin in the anal complex) (Brown 1959: 292). Note here that the radical desire to be free of debt is identical to the desire that Lévi-Strauss discerned in the vision of all golden ages and that is “forever denied” to social man. Following Lévi-Strauss then, we would have to say that Brown, by eliminating money and the excreta attached to it, hopes to bring a Nietzschean “asocial man” into this world. Furthermore, following the logic he has already laid out, we see that the fascination with money is tantamount to a fascination with death: “Excrement is the dead life of the body, and as long as humanity prefers a dead life to living, so long is humanity committed to treating as excrementa not only its own body but the surrounding world of objects” (Brown 1959: 295). Another word for this “world of objects” is, of course, “culture.” For Brown, “culture origi-

an apologia for filthy lucre



141

nates in the denial of life and the body” (297). Culture is death, and we treat our very own bodies as horrible, guilt-encrusted filth to boot. Such is the undeniable, and, shall we say, extraordinarily depressing, logic of any society that equates money with feces—of any society, in fact, that uses money at all, or builds cities, or thinks of the past. Where is a body to go that hopes for some way out of this indictment of our time here on earth, a body that believes culture may well be something more joyous? Following a sort of Durkheimian logic, a body that hopes culture can be instead an exuberant celebration of social life? Brown recommends the overcoming of the infantile fantasies, the banishing of false consciousness. But we have the pessimism of knowing how far that has gotten us in the past. Perhaps Brown just had the misfortune of not reading his contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, I argue, can salvage our moneyed society from Brown’s obdurate and cloacal pessimism.

Money as Metonym Let us move, then, from Brown’s tour de force exploring the play of changes on the money metaphor, his guideposts that send us dizzily jumping from one domain of predication to the next: money is excrement, money is guilt, money is time, money is the city, money is death. Let us move away from this focus on money and focus instead on the baseline domain upon which all else in his argument is predicated: excrement itself. By reading Bakhtin and attending to the metonymical, rather than the metaphorical, aspects of feces, we can see that Brown may just have been unfairly debasing what was, to him, the ultimate debaser. Bakhtin’s assessment of Rabelaisian marketplace language—billingsgate— also focuses heavily on excrement. Crucially, however, Bakhtin (1968: 146) insists that excrement and other bodily excreta always have a dual meaning, a “deep ambivalence.” They are at once debasing and generating. He claims that the modern reading public has entirely missed this generative side of excrement and thus have had trouble digesting Rabelais’s “coarseness,” “naïveté,” and “cynicism.” Bakhtin goes on to show how deeply misguided these notions are. Instead, he writes, we should be noting how “these forms of gay Shrovetide cynicism are transferred to a historic spring, to the new era.” Though he does not make it explicit, in his chapter entitled “The Language of the Marketplace” Bakhtin completely depends on what he views as some basic similarities between the functioning of money and that of language.2 The “deep ambivalence” of billingsgate (fecundity vs. excrement/waste, praise vs. abuse) (Bakhtin 1968: 150) directly parallels the deeply ambivalent nature

142



gustav peebles

of the commodity and the money-form as described by Marx (not only use vs. exchange value but also creation vs. destruction, fecundity vs. excrement/ waste, quality vs. quantity) (Marx 1967: 126–131; 1990: 125–177). Bakhtin (1968: 165) grants us an allusive hint of the use of this parallel: “Praise and abuse are, so to speak, the two sides of the same coin.” If I am correct in making this Bakhtinian claim for money, then we see that the correlation between money and feces can be plausibly read in an entirely different vein. Primarily, Bakhtin relies heavily on Marx’s notion of money’s power to “level” social relations and break through social boundaries by creating a universal equivalent. In fact, it is basically a transposition of Marx’s discussion of capital and money to the sphere of language. Abuses, curses, profanities, and improprieties are the unofficial elements of speech. They were and still are conceived as a breach of the established norms of verbal address; they refuse to conform to conventions, to etiquette, civility, respectability. These elements of freedom, if present in sufficient numbers and with a precise intention, exercise a strong influence on the entire contents of speech, transferring it to another sphere beyond the limits of conventional language. Such speech forms, liberated from norms, hierarchies, and prohibitions of established idiom, become themselves a peculiar argot and create a special collectivity. (Bakhtin 1968: 188)

And just like money, the language of the marketplace plays no favorites. It affects all equally. The high are denigrated by it, the low are raised by it (see, for example, Bakhtin 1968: 167, 173). Language’s “laughter”—“the most simplified festive expression of the ambivalent lower stratum”—levels and reduces to a common denominator (Bakhtin 1968: 171) and creates its own community, just like Marx’s money. In the marketplace, all speech is permitted to transcend societal rules and draw other value-schemes within its wide net.3 Hierarchies are blatantly overturned and upended. Now, consider this near-perfect analog to Bakhtin, gleaned from the 1844 Manuscripts: Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc. . . . It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy. Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things—the world upside-down. (Marx 1967: 130)

an apologia for filthy lucre



143

It is precisely this “world upside-down” aspect of the marketplace that fascinates Bakhtin (1968: 147), and it is precisely excrement that effects this toppling; as he mentions, “Scatological liberties played an important role during carnivals [an iteration of marketplace culture].” Dung was literally thrown everywhere and upon anyone, particularly upon representatives of the court, the higher-ups. But Bakhtin insists that people of Rabelais’s era understood the double meaning of excrement intimately. He informs us that “such debasing gestures and expressions are ambivalent, since the lower stratum is not only a bodily grave but also the area of the genital organs, the fertilizing and generating stratum. Therefore, in the images of urine and excrement is preserved the essential link with birth, fertility, renewal, welfare. This positive element was still fully alive and clearly realized in the time of Rabelais” (Bakhtin 1968: 148). Yet this Bakhtinian insight was not realized, we can safely assume, in the time of Norman Brown. Brown (1959) failed to note that excrement is an “organic part” of—that is to say, it is metonymic to—an “entire system of images” (Bakhtin 1968: 153). Brown, in fact, begins to look a lot like Bronson Alcott, another modernist who mistakenly believed that manure was associated exclusively with death. As an author, Rabelais also knew that excrement was “closely linked with fertility” and he “saw no sacrilege” in using these images astride mentions of God or king (Bakhtin 1968: 149). So-called “gay matter” (feces) represents a “world which continually grows and multiplies, becomes ever greater and better, ever more abundant. Gay matter is ambivalent, it is the grave and the generating womb, the receding past and the advancing future, the becoming” (195). This idea that excrement, in its very nature, multiplies and continually grows sounds like nothing so much as Marx’s notion of capital, a mysterious, dialectical power of “productive consumption” and “consumptive production” that remakes the world (see Marx 1973 and Marx 1990).4 Thus, pace Brown, excrement is telling one of the oldest stories of all: “the drama of laughter presenting at the same time the death of the old and the birth of the new world. . . . Through its participation in the whole, each of these images is deeply ambivalent, being intimately related to life-death-birth” (Bakhtin 1968: 149). After consulting Bakhtin, then, we can hopefully liberate ourselves from the (urban/urbane) bias that the only thing to say about fecal matter is that it is only deadly dirt that needs to be kept at bay.5 Bakhtin’s notion that feces is “participating in the whole” should confirm all of this for us, for it opens up the metonymical aspects of feces/money that further clarify its relationship to social exchange and economic growth. In this regard, we should follow Durham and Fernandez (1991: 196), who recom-

144



gustav peebles

mend a renewed attention to the metonymical attachments embedded within metaphorical predications: “Metaphors often rest upon linkage to highly conventionalized domains, and the metonymic ‘entailments’ that a source domain carries over to the target domain provide for the target an internal structure paralleling that of the source. . . . Understanding a metaphoric assertion implies an understanding of the structure of the domains involved in a predication.” They also argue that there has been, historically, a tendency among scholars to focus on metaphor at the expense of metonym; this has certainly been the case in the analysis of the feces/money dyad, not just for Brown but for countless others. In their analysis, Durham and Fernandez (1991) reveal just how fruitful it can be to look closely at metonymy as well. Metaphors seek to bring together dissimilar domains (e.g., money and feces), thus relying on the existence of equality between those two domains. Conversely, “metonymy is, par excellence, the hierarchical trope; to extrapolate a bit, it is obliged to feature and thus exalt some part for a whole or vice versa” (208). It is this inherently hierarchical nature of metonymy that makes it suitable for a study of the money that circulates through a competitive economy; noting the metonymical attachments within its parallel domain—the domain of feces—illuminates entirely new spheres of analysis that are lost if one only looks at the baseline metaphorical correspondence. It follows from the arguments of Durham and Fernandez (1991: 198) that a focus on metonymy is unusually productive in illuminating and overthrowing conventional hierarchies. And thus, like Bakhtin, they assert that this overthrowing is precisely what allows for the new “creation of a world contained in a metaphor and the liberating manipulation within the hegemonies of that world made possible by metonymy” (209). It is to this ability of money to make the world anew via metonymy that we should turn now. As mentioned above, in the anthropological literature on money we have a great deal of discussion of “earmarking.” To argue against Simmel’s (1991) “rationalization via money” thesis, Zelizer (1997) points out the manner in which people are constantly dividing up and giving identities to cash as if it were not fungible, as if pieces of cash had individual histories, even though they are anonymous and generic. That is, they are enabling money to remain concrete and individual rather than exclusively abstract and general. Here, perhaps needless to say, I am only concerned with the way in which money—across many societies—continually becomes earmarked as “dirty.”6 From a survey of the literature on earmarking, one notices that there are only a few paradigmatic instances wherein money becomes labeled unclean. It turns out, I am arguing, that all of these instances relate to moments when people are being accused (fairly or unfairly) of refusing the play of meton-

an apologia for filthy lucre



145

ymy within money; they are being accused of trying to hide or ignore money’s metonymical attachments to the community at large. They are alleged to be trying to detach the money from the social whole and attach it instead to a new whole, a whole that is often constituted by the individual body but could also simply be a different community. The community responds by reminding them, vociferously, of money’s role as a fertilizer that needs to be spread around, so that, once again, money can serve its purpose of bringing the high low and the low high. In other words, “dirty money” is an economic regulatory apparatus, forcing (or at least attempting to force) the remobilization of cash that otherwise was becoming attached to false (or at least new) wholes. If we accept that the metaphor equating money with feces is effective, then, as Durham and Fernandez (1991: 195) explain, there may well be a set of “highly conventionalized” metonymic relations latently invoked by equating these two distinct but similar domains. First, we can acknowledge, along with both Freud and Bakhtin, that “excrement is conceived as something intermediate between earth and body, as something relating the one to the other” (Bakhtin 1968: 175; see Freud 1962).7 Aside from being the interface between self and society, feces—as Bakhtin shows us lucidly—also emanates from the “lower body stratum.” That is to say, it comes from the part of the body that is simultaneously fecund and filthy. Freud (1962: 62) claims to have case studies (and to know of fairy tales) where he found that young children believe babies come from eating and the consequent movement of bowels, thereby, in such primordial circumstances, clarifying our excrement/fecund dyad still further. And let us not forget that money, in its form as gold or silver, is often said to emanate from the “bowels of the earth” (Graeber 2001: 102). Thus, in holding back one’s money, one is holding back a detachable and fertile part of oneself that ordinarily moves into the world and transforms into a vital part of it. One is, in Freudian terminology, selfishly denying the world one’s “first gift.” Freud (1962) insists that infants believe that feces are part of their body, and they take pleasure in granting the world what it wants, or, alternatively, withholding it like a miser.8 This, specifically, is the connection with fecal matter and money that allowed Freud (1963) to claim that parsimony is a sublimation of anal eroticism. Constipation is a form of cheapness, a pathological desire to retain the part. This links up with our second metonymical attachment, which proclaims all money to be a fungible part of an abstract whole. Thus, we are here moving from the whole of the body to the whole of the body politic. By spreading out its monetary fertilizer, the individual body partakes of the whole body politic, and according to economic theory—and according to folk theory, I am arguing here—the entire whole benefits from such sharing. But this interface between the whole individual body and the whole body politic can also take

146



gustav peebles

on transgressive meanings. We then encounter a desire for sharp delineations and zones of purity and cleanliness. Thus, for example, in the “world market” seen as a whole we have a history of nation-state tariff barriers, sumptuary laws, and other obstacles to trade that, whatever their potential merits, also represent a national desire to keep some circulating part to itself and stop it from “returning to the whole” (Fernandez 1986: 201). In Freudian terms, this is a manifestation of the desire to “become the father of oneself,” to remove oneself from outside influences and stop partaking in the external world, for one can provide everything for oneself; in short, this is the desire to make oneself a new and independent, fecund whole, separate from the world whole.9 In this regard, Alan Dundes’s (1984) deep study of German folklore is highly instructive, for he argues that in the German popular tradition we find a preoccupation with dirt and fecal matter, preoccupations that serve as guideposts to the ethnic cleansing preoccupations characteristic of German fascism vis-à-vis the body social and political.10 Finally, the most conspicuous metonymy present in the money/feces predication: virtually all currencies and coins the world over have heads stamped on them. Or faces, to be more exact. And it has been so since classical times. Though this is certainly not true of all cultures, and especially not true of socalled “primitive money” (e.g., iron bars, wampum, cowrie shells),11 it is generally true of societies where a state is trying to regulate the economy. It is worth recalling, in this regard, that the very word “capital” derives from the Latin word “head,” as in “capital city.” In the discussion here, this would mean that the governing authority is seeking to take credit for the fertility of money—the power of circulating capital—by putting its likeness upon it (see Graeber 2001: chap. 4). Lest this sound too far-fetched, recall that it has always been one of the sacred duties of kings to bring their people fertility, and it remains a secular duty of governments today to bring their people prosperity. Simultaneously, there is an interesting dialectical movement here, wherein the king lends the prestige of his figure to the otherwise crass material of money, thereby elevating it. At the same time, the citizenry debases (de-faces) the currency (and, therewith, the king) by frequently renaming it fecal matter. In other words, the head brings the lower bodily stratum high and vice versa. Indeed, this is precisely a daily and ongoing enactment of the Bakhtinian carnival, wherein the members of the high court have dung thrown upon them in moments of ritual inversion. In a fluid money economy, then, “laughter” is cast upon government at every moment, but this laughter is productive, bringing about the precise fertility that the king claims to guarantee. One is also reminded of Michael Taussig’s (1999) book Defacement, wherein the “labor of the negative” is celebrated as a productive force in a similar manner.

an apologia for filthy lucre



147

But the productive play of metonymy is nested further still, in the economy itself and not just in the government and its citizens. In its incarnation as “capital,” money is high, the head that magically controls the economy, seemingly beyond human control (see, e.g., Marx 1990: 342). And yet, it is also fecal matter, representing the effluvia of the lower body stratum and all of its deeply ambiguous fertility cum excrement.12 All this would seem to confirm Durham and Fernandez’s (1991) point, that metonymical relations have a better hope of rearranging social hierarchies than metaphorical ones, for here we have a system that continually, by parsing the whole, insults those powers that would claim authority over it; in so doing, it creates an economy that does, in fact, shift hierarchies around more than what would otherwise occur, even if it is almost never as much as we would like.13

Returning to the Whole To summarize so far, I am arguing that the money economy, as Marx would have also insisted, forms a “totality,” an abstract whole. Individual pieces of money have, as we have seen, quite vivid metaphoric attachments to the human body, which then also have parallel metonymical attachments shared with the domain of the body. These individual pieces of money, therefore, operate in a manner similar to the entire economy, as fecal matter does in the interplay between body and earth. Given all this, we should be able to reassess some of the critiques of “dirty money” that are common throughout the ethnographic record, and in this manner, I hope to show how the play of metonyms can serve as a regulatory apparatus for the money economy.14 In short, can the notion of “dirty money” explain why certain activities become labeled as antisocial economic behavior? Quite often, money is labeled “dirty” because it is believed to be hiding in a “hoard,” not circulating for the general benefit, and remains jealously attached to an individual. An entire school of monetary thought—that which inspires the “local currency” movement today—was spun out of this hatred of the hoard (Gesell 1929), but it occurs elsewhere (see Peebles 2020 for a review of hoarding literature in anthropology).15 For example, variations on this theme can be found on the island of Gawa, in the South Pacific, as related by Nancy Munn (1992). It is true that, in this book that focuses so heavily on eating practices, we never hear any actual details about feces; it is also true that Munn is discussing the circulation of value rather than money per se. Nevertheless, her discussion of the dialectics of positive and negative value is helpful here, for there is, in fact, much talk of dirt and its relation to value.

148



gustav peebles

Munn presents a totalizing system of value-production, and she also describes one of the premier threats to value-production: the desire of an individual to not share enough. This unleashes a self-regulatory mechanism in the form of witchcraft, wherein the “greedy” witch—an unnamed female—forces the victim to release more food into the cycle, such as a ritual pig offering. Munn (1992: 226) writes that “in distribution a division or piecemealing of an undivided or collected whole results in a dispersal into many hands of what has been held by one. . . . This sacrificial partition and disaggregation is a fundamental icon of equalization on Gawa.” For our purposes, it is vital to note two things here. For one, the food value that was initially retained unfairly is associated with blackness and death (because withholding food asocially reduces the community’s potential to create value). Second, the witch serves as an equalizing force of society. As this force, she is in fact herself “deeply ambiguous,” representing both greediness and death (she likes to consume dead bodies) but also quickness, lightness, and upward mobility (she flies)— all the things that Gawans hope to infuse into their canoes in order to guarantee successful kula journeys. Sounding a good deal like Marx’s capital (or Hegel’s spirit), the witch, as an embodiment of “destructive hierarchization,” has the power to appropriate “the other within her own body” by flying around the earth and transgressing boundaries that constrain other normal Gawans (Munn 1992: 265, 230). Like circulating money itself, this commitment to destructive hierarchization paradoxically restores a degree of equality to the system that had been lost by the victim’s initial greed. Perhaps the most famously unclean money is the money that seems to be making more of itself without any apparent labor on the part of its owner. The socialist critique of rotund “middlemen” comes to mind here. However, the most common form comes in the indictment of usury, where money’s fecundity becomes not only palpable but a grotesque form of hypertrophy. Marx and Shakespeare are not the only people to critique usury; it occurs all over the world. Chris Gregory (1997: 212, 230) informs us that, according to the ancient Indian Law of Manu, usury carried with it the extreme punishment of “loss of caste”; in a more current example he provides, moneylenders’ limbs have been chopped off. Furthermore, usurers are frequently outsiders (Gregory 1997: 227–228; Weber 1958: 39), which already suggests the possibility of a slightly sullied status.16 Recalling the specifics of usury, as against interest, will clarify my argument that the indictment of usury occurs because usury openly flouts the part/whole relations of money and feces cum fertility. Usury is relied upon, as Gregory (1997) points out, under the pressures and possibilities of extreme instances, whereas simple interest remains part of the daily usage and flow of capital. Thus, unlike interest, usury does not follow a steady pattern, instead

an apologia for filthy lucre



149

popping up sporadically as any given desperate situation of need arises. As such, usury discourages the normal and cyclical flow of risk; it stops fertile parts from participating in the whole. In short, it discourages—rather dramatically, in fact—the flow of money. If interest is the boring, quotidian weather of the money economy, usury is its destructive gale force winds.17 Finally, anthropologists’ most typical discovery of “dirty money” relates to the history of particular aliquot quantities of money, where they have been and where they are going. In other words, the source or destination of the money can demarcate it as dirty money; we have such things as drug money or money earned extraterritorially that then must be “laundered” in various ways. The threat to the system with this form of dirty money, I would argue, is twofold. On the one hand, it relates to the same denigration of hoarding that was discussed above. When money is earned “illegitimately,” it has a very tough time entering back into “proper” circulation and therefore has a tendency to be hoarded and hidden. Thus, many societies (including our own) have all sorts of ritual and legal methods for washing the dirt off of this money so that it can recirculate. One particularly compelling example comes from Janet Carsten’s (1989) contribution in Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry’s (1989) volume. She describes how money that accrues to an individual can threaten the notion of Malay equality that reigns in the village. Thus, the woman receives all the “polluting” money that the man earns while fishing and “cooks” it, by passing it through the household and redistributing it (Carsten 1989: 136, 127–128).18 Similarly, money gained in “foreign” spaces also has the capacity to become dirty money in some—but far from all—instances. Many governments assert that large amounts of cash cannot be transferred across nation-state borders; rather, it must be cleansed by a proper institution and declared so that it can become a part of a new whole. The local currency movement that periodically rises and falls in global popularity—a movement to set up non-national currencies in much smaller bounded units than the nation-state, often called LETS, for “local exchange trading system” (see Hart 2001: 272–285; Peebles 2011)—is interesting in this regard. The entire concept of setting up a local currency evidences a dislike of “the extraterritorial flow of money,” and the usual justification holds that the group desires that a local currency will be non–interest bearing. But I would argue that there is more to it than this. The local currency movement idealizes the autarkic community. Though most local currency advocates are well aware that they will never achieve autarky, a strong branch of adherents nevertheless strive toward it. The desire for autarky—a globe in miniature—is the desire for a new whole, a whole that is separate and independent from the whole that one currently trucks with and suffers under.19 The fear of money earned abroad thus represents a sort of “communal hoarding”

150



gustav peebles

practice, wherein the aim is to keep the part from slipping away into some other whole, where it might be fertile in foreign space rather than at home. In this regard, the local currency movement sharply illuminates what is actually a standard practice of nation-states the world over. Money from other social wholes is penalized, which thus serves as an inducement to keep one’s fertile powers at home and not share them with others; in short, the labeling of foreign money as dirty stands as testimony to an ongoing argument over the bounds of the whole. All of these various examples attest to my point that the metaphorical equation of money with feces is no mere denigration; the predication itself is doing “productive work,” in that, by bringing with it a host of metonymical attachments, it is reminding people of the fecundity of money.20 It arises in places where people have tried to stop the fecundity of money by stopping its mobility; as a consequence of its newfound immobility, money becomes sterile. This manifests itself, generally, as various forms of hoarding, usury, or fear of extraterritorial money. I have argued that these are all instances of people arguing that individual pieces of money need to be reattached to the whole, to money in the abstract, so that it may proceed with its primary duty: providing fertility to society and continually making the world anew. In other words, money is denigrated as feces whenever someone is affronting its very nature, its nature to be fertile and to be a flowing part of the cycle of birth/life/death. It appears to be a reminder, that is, that all money is feces—it is not sanitary or natural to keep it too close to one’s body. The demand is for the person to be sociable with their money, to partake and contribute to the whole (see Fernandez 1986: 188–213). But, as with most social life, there is a constant battle over what constitutes the precise lineaments of the whole, and thus, any movement into or out of perceived wholes can cause tension.21 As a consequence, societies the world over have “reconversion” rituals, wherein specially earmarked money is returned to the whole. Bloch and Parry’s (1989) volume provides examples (see also Guyer 2004; Comaroff and Comaroff 1990), but here I want to relate a particularly illuminating one: the well-known case presented by Parker Shipton (1989) of “bitter money” among the Luo of Kenya. Shipton’s example is fascinating because it “tells it like it is”; that is to say, the return of fertility to the sterile money (the moment it returns to the whole), is effected by making it actually dirty.22 So-called bitter money is generated, Shipton explains, by antisocial accumulation, just as we have found with many other earmarking practices. It occurs, for example, when someone sells a plot of land as an individual owner even though it belongs to an entire kin network, thereby illegitimately accruing social wealth to his own individual person. Consequently, the money loses its fertility; the owner knows that anything purchased with this money will come

an apologia for filthy lucre



151

to naught or, worse, will die. For example, cattle purchased with it will not breed; using it as a bridewealth payment would be similarly disastrous. Fascinatingly, the only thing that can be successfully purchased with bitter money is non-investment-quality goods, such as clothes that are purely for ephemeral consumption and will not increase in value. Equally interesting is the fact that the money itself can continue on its merry way—the sterility remains with the owner, not with the money (Shipton 1989: 28–34, 42). Thus, owners of bitter money are compelled to immediately hire ritual specialists who can return the fertility to the money, and then the owner can circulate this previously antisocial money effectively. A proper ceremony involves the sacrifice of a bull or ram. A feast occurs as well, with singing and drinking. But then the ritual specialist “openly prepares a mixture of water and herbal medicine . . . together with chyme from the animal’s stomach [italics added], in a small calabash. The possessor of the bitter money sips it, and the [ritual specialist] sprinkles it onto the money [italics added]” (Shipton 1989: 41). Shipton tells us that the “ostensible aim of a purification ceremony is to thank the spirit or spirits that provided the bitter money” (40). But in a footnote (47n41) he mentions that he never managed to witness the ceremony, and thus I feel justified in speculating that the additional purpose of it is to return the productive excrement to the money so that its sterility is banished. And besides, these two aims are not at odds: gods and spirits are frequently asked to bestow fertility, so it would not be surprising that a ceremony thanking them would also undertake the pragmatic task of dirtying the money with sacramental fragments from the fertile lower body stratum. Once sullied, it can return to the marketplace and behave like proper money should.23 It is the grand paradox that excrement is fertile, even beautiful, if we are to judge by the many instances in the literature in which dung is decorative. Except perhaps it may not be a paradox at all; it may be the dialectic of nature incarnate.

Conclusion One hesitates to pen such an apologia for money. One hesitates to seek redemption for it, for to do so feels almost . . . dirty. But like the Luo, we would do well, I suggest, to also start getting our hands a little dirty, to stop being so suspicious of money. The frequent fear of the power of money may be misguided, for it can play a role in producing sociality and a sense of belonging to the whole; indeed, it can also serve a vital role in making the world anew and upending age-old hierarchies. Thus, we should stop trying to deliver an exclusively clean world unto mankind. A clean world is a sterile world, a world that has somehow cast aside the vital labor of the negative (Taussig 1999).

152



gustav peebles

Certainly the farmers know better; they are more inclined to know the benefits of excrement than those of us in the city. This fact is instructive, for America’s most famous speech about monetary policy, William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896, was precisely a plea for more money to be put into circulation for the farming and laboring classes. The people in the city were demanding a strict gold standard that would keep the amount of money flowing through the economy highly constricted. Bryan stood as the premier advocate of “bi-metallism,” that is, the policy of adding silver to the nation’s currency circulation. His complaint was against “aggregated wealth” and the “idle holders of idle capital,” the people in the cities who, according to Bryan, were keeping their money attached to false wholes. The addition of silver would spread more money into the economy, and farmers and workers would prosper (see also Rockoff 1990): You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. . . . Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. (Bryan 1896: 234)

Insofar as we can assume that, as a Populist, Bryan was truly in favor of a more egalitarian society, we should recall that his method for bringing this about was to embrace the power of money, not to try to defeat it. The metonymic entailments of money will reliably keep the hierarchies shifting around and bring more equality; with so much money hoarded up in the cities, Bryan argues, hierarchy was instead ossifying.24 He nicely manages, I might add, to evoke the magic of fertility and link it here to the power of money. Money here is mimetic of nature’s fecundity; money would disappear if the original perishes, whereas the original can survive without its epigone. Bryan is insisting, like many others before and since, that it remains the task of governments to help the flow of this fertility. As Bryan shows, then, an embrace of money need not be an embrace of any given status quo; indeed, my point all along has been that money can be quite helpful in upending age-old status quos.25 In a paradoxical manner, money’s metonymical cavorting with hierarchy might actually bring a great deal more equality to social life than we ordinarily expect out of a money economy. As Durham and Fernandez (1991: 209–210) point out, “metonymic rework-

an apologia for filthy lucre



153

ings [can] . . . challenge conventional, culturally specific structuring of the social order implied in conventional metaphor.” But in suggesting this, am I not falling into the age-old trap pointed to so vociferously by Marx: the false notion that circulation produces value in and of itself, and thus the sphere of production is hidden and forgotten by bourgeois economists and politicians? In response, I would say that the Grundrisse complicates this simplistic separation between exchange and production, and I believe that Bakhtin’s model does too. The Bakhtinian embrace of money is not some claim that money produces more of itself magically, without the labor of mankind. On the contrary, it is a call to recognize the manner in which excrement, and money as excrement, serves as a vital and necessary interface between the spheres of production and exchange, just as it is between the individual body and the earth.26 To claim otherwise betrays a disdain for the productive work of transgression and interactive interfaces, a disdain for the vital labor of the negative; it suggests a desire for purity, for separated and clarified zones of the soul vs. zones of the body, rather than acknowledging their mutual intertwinings. Arguments about money should be about which complex wholes we hope to build, to belong to, and to cycle within as parts (see Fernandez 1986: 188–213) rather than about eliminating this “root of all evil” from our environs altogether. In other words, the critique of all cash (as in Brown, and not as with societies such as the Luo, which only critique some cash) has an aristocratic and priestly air about it—whether people harbor it secretly or openly.27 Brown (1959: 254) disdainfully announces that psychoanalysis has scientifically recognized “what common sense and the poets have long known—that the essence of money is its absolute worthlessness” (i.e., constructed out of things that we would otherwise dispose of as waste, as excrement). Following the logic of the argument made here, he is exactly wrong: money is worth something precisely because it is constructed out of societal waste products, not in spite of that. Excrement represents and sustains the dialectical formation of life and its increase. Where would we be without it? On something very much like Bronson Alcott’s pure, and thus sterile, farm.28

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editor of Anthropological Quarterly, Richard Grinker, for kindly offering permission to reproduce portions of this chapter from an earlier article in that journal (Peebles 2012). This chapter is the result of longterm interactions over many years with many people, who have all influenced

154



gustav peebles

my thinking on the meaning of money, beginning with classes with James W. Fernandez, who opened up the metaphorical and metonymical associations of money for me decades ago. I also greatly appreciate the hard work and dedication of Marko Živković and Jamin Pelkey in bringing this project to its completion. Amanda Pollak provided her usual excellent skills in helping this essay come to fruition. All remaining mistakes remain the fault of the author. Gustav Peebles is an associate professor of anthropology and global studies at The New School in New York City. His research has long focused on the history and debates over monetary policy. Currently, he is delving into the Swedish Central Bank’s potential interest in introducing a national digital currency, the e-krona. He can be reached at [email protected].

Notes 1. Still a strong proponent of autarky a few years after the Fruitlands debacle, Alcott wrote, “The State is man’s pantry, at best, and filled at an immense cost—a spoliation of the human commonwealth. Let it go. Heroes will live on nuts, and freemen sun themselves under the clefts of the rocks, sooner than sell their liberty for the pottage of slavery” (in Shepard 1966: 189). 2. The similarities between linguistic and monetary systems has been remarked upon at great length by many people, including Marx (1973: 162), Saussure (1995: 113–114, 117), and Bourdieu (1991: 55–56), among others. Whether or not one believes the comparison to be a legitimate one, it has proven to be a fruitful comparison for many scholars. See also Shell 1993. 3. It is worth noting here that Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Forms of Kinship (1969) performs the reverse operation to that of chapter 2 in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1968). Instead of bringing economic and philosophical analyses of capital into the sphere of linguistic analysis, Lévi-Strauss endeavors to use analytic techniques from linguistics in order to understand the economic realm. 4. To bolster my case, note also that Bakhtin (1968: 168) echoes this Marxist language directly when he writes of “abusive praise and praiseful abuse.” This also has echoes in Schumpeter’s (1975) notion of “creative destruction” and “destructive creation,” taken up by David Harvey (1990). 5. This plea for the dual meaning of feces as both polluting and life-giving is, of course, also of a piece with the old Frazerian notion that the tabooed object is simultaneously polluting and holy (Frazer 1922). It is a notion most recently revived by Agamben (1998). 6. Money also frequently becomes earmarked as “bloody,” but this is a metaphorical association that cannot detain us here. Suffice it to say that many of the same elements of fertility that I am discussing would be equally relevant if the argument revolved around the blood/money nexus rather than the feces/money nexus. Indeed, in the medieval tradition there was much overlap anyway, since all this flowing bodily matter represented some sort of “humor.” Perhaps consequently, Hobbes (e.g., 1981 [1651]:

an apologia for filthy lucre

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.



155

373–374) and others of their era thought of money as a “humor” that needed to flow in order for society to thrive. Freud (1962) speaks of the erotogenic zones as being a conduit between the inside life of the body and the outside life of the world. Conversely, Jean Comaroff (1985: 236) tells the evocative story of how members of the Zion Church in South Africa think of the money they are giving to the church not as “alienated” but rather as a part of themselves that is going to circulate with a larger whole. Alcott indicts the state as merely a manifestation of the individual’s weakness. If all were independent (as he wished), the state would disappear. He wrote, “Why should I need a State to maintain me and protect my rights? The Man is all. Let him husband himself. He needs no other servant. . . . He who founds himself in freedom and maintains his uprightness therein founds an empire” (in Shepard 1966: 189). Eric Santner’s (1996) My Own Private Germany makes a similar argument, but through the history of an individual—Daniel Paul Schreber—rather than through an entire culture. Although, one nonetheless wonders if even these currencies are somehow tied to the body. Brown (1959: 298) claims that cowrie shells are called “the excrement of the sea,” but he fails to provide a citation. Munn (1986:114) argues that kula shell valuables have an “anus” and other human properties, but she does not discuss these as money strictu sensu. Dalton 1996, Strathern and Stewart 1999, and Weiss 1997 stand as three especially helpful studies of the way in which the deeply ambiguous imagery of money and other valuable objects (good/bad, clean/dirty, life/death, male/female) is related to their status as embodiments of the power of fertility. Whatever critiques of the money economy we wish to draw upon, a moneyless utopia may be perfect, but the entire point of utopia is that it is perfect—which is to say, stable—and the hierarchies have either stopped moving (e.g., Fourier 1996; More 1993 [1516]) or ceased to exist altogether (e.g., Bellamy 1996 [1888]; Morris 1995 [1890]). Bloch and Parry (1989) and Shipton (1989) provide similar, but not identical, theories. Admittedly, this was not a very influential school of monetary theory, and thus it hasn’t been granted a particular moniker. However, Keynes did take inspiration from it, and it is recrudescent today. Suffice it to say here that the school of thought relied on the idea that money should lose value if it was not circulating, thus making “hoarding” unattractive for the individual (for more information on this school of thought, see Peebles 2011). Certainly there are all too many instances of people being unfairly and dangerously attacked with the claim that their money is dirty, so we should be careful here. I am only pointing out here that the concept of “dirty money” behaves like an economic regulatory apparatus; I am not making any claims that it is a “fair” apparatus or that whenever dirty money is “discovered,” the apparatus is inherently correct in its assessment. It is a human institution and as such is obviously fallible. Following the logic of the argument presented here, we can see that accusations such as these are most likely arguments about the size and the shape of the whole that people want to construct. In other words, people are mapping their arguments about social inclusion and exclusion onto their arguments about money, with odious consequences. In an excellent study of the relationship between money and excrement, Olivia Harris (1989) provides ethnographic evidence that normal debts and loans can be thought of

156

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.



gustav peebles

as “dirty” in the sense of “manure” and thus highly fertile of new value; she emphasizes that this correlation with manure is not a denigration of money. This suggests that some societies do not see a problem with equating money and feces, that they are pleased that money follows the patterns of agriculture and produces more of itself. Danilyn Rutherford (2001) also extensively analyzes the power of money earned in foreign spaces and how it is attached to images of decaying skin. Sharon Hutchinson (1992) provides another example of this, when discussing the “money of shit” that literally comes from the people who clean toilets and then spend their money in local bars in southern Sudan. The Nuer bar owners, according to Hutchinson, then carefully remove the “money of shit” (304 passim) and send it “straight to the government” (304). Here again we see the desire to keep other people’s “parts” separate from one’s “wholes.” Clearly in this instance, people see excrement as dangerous. Nonetheless, Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (1969: 30) shows that the Nuer use excrement to adorn their bodies, so perhaps in other situations it is acknowledged as a source of fertility. In many societies, this sort of fertility would be associated with a god. In Christian countries, the god is supposed to be unsullied and pure, and thus the association with excrement becomes problematic. Sure enough, we find that the dirtiness of money is transposed onto the devil in these societies (see, e.g., Freud 1963; Fisher 1999; Taussig 1980). Thus, the devil is the “king of this world,” just as Martin Luther feared. But since I am arguing that excrement is actually a force of good and a blessing, it is as if these societies are unconsciously celebrating the Devil rather than seeing him and his money as “the root of all evil.” In many other societies, culture heroes, tricksters, and gods are all permitted to be “deeply ambiguous,” so no such contradiction arises. The United States has an interesting example of this, taken from presidential politics. Many years ago there was a “Chinese money scandal” that stirred the Clinton administration. Republicans had discovered that President Clinton had taken campaign money from the Chinese. This money was alleged to be dangerous to the system, for it could influence the president in the direction of some outside force. Comically, politicians of all stripes have to insist on a daily basis in America that they are specifically never influenced by campaign money, that it is never a bribe; it is merely a “token of appreciation” and not a quid pro quo. Even though all money is theoretically fungible and generic, in this instance the Chinese money was seen as part of a quid pro quo because it hailed from a different whole. In my opinion, with these vociferous complaints, Republican lawmakers clarified the true, “dirty” secret that in fact all political campaign money is a form of bribery. See Altshuler 2001 for a detailed story of how money is seized from the whole in the Czech Republic. Though the methods David Altshuler describes are technically not illegal, money gained this way is still seen as “corrupt.” It is also worth noting that this ceremony is similar to Munn’s described above. That is to say, it forces the owner of the accumulated bitter money to redistribute some, if not all, of the bitter money to his kin network (and to the ritual specialist). In this regard, the bitter money complex represents a sort of nonstate taxation regime, for only a percentage of the bitter money is taken away and returned to the whole. At the same time, some of Bryan’s followers fell in with an intolerant backlash against money and the city per se (just like Alcott before them). I have addressed the dangers of this indictment of the city elsewhere (Peebles 2003). The way in which certain left-

an apologia for filthy lucre

25. 26. 27.

28.



157

wing monetary reform movements have ended up with right-wing tendencies is the subject of a forthcoming article. As the early anthropological literature on money in colonial situations always claimed. Keith Hart (1986) points out another “deeply ambiguous” aspect of money: its role as mediator between states and markets. Bakhtin (1968: 166) clarifies this point by writing again about the deep ambivalence of excrement: “[This ambivalence] is based on the conception of the world as eternally unfinished: a world dying and being born at the same time, possessing as it were two bodies. The dual image combining praise and abuse seeks to grasp the very moment of this change, the transfer from the old to the new, from death to life. Such an image crowns and uncrowns at the same moment. In the development of class society such a conception of the world can only be expressed in unofficial culture. There is no place for it in the culture of the ruling classes; here praise and abuse are clearly divided and static, for official culture is founded on the principle of an immovable and unchanging hierarchy in which the higher and the lower never merge [italics added].” Furthermore, Rabelais’s celebration of “gay matter” was a critique against the Scholastics (172). One summer my family and I traveled to Nova Scotia. While there, we visited a farm that had a progressive view toward the environment, using solar power and harvesting both lumber and produce with sustainable methods. And yet, this farm certainly tries hard to make a profit, aggressively selling unique products to niche markets; its operators are manifestly not interested in creating an autarkic ecotopia. When you drive into their parking lot, the first thing you see is their outhouse. Upon it, they have placed a sign that encourages you to do your part for the cycle of life. A fitting tribute to the gods of the cultural whole, I say.

References Akin, David, and Joel Robbins, eds. 1999. Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Alcott, Bronson A. 1843. “Intelligence.” The Dial 4(1): 135. Altshuler, David. 2001. “Tunneling towards Capitalism in the Czech Republic.” Ethnography 2(1): 115–138. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bedell, Madelon. 1980. The Alcotts: Biography of a Family. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. Bellamy, Edward. 1996 (1888). Looking Backward. New York: Dover. Bloch, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry, eds. 1989. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, Norman O. 1959. Life against Death. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Bryan, William Jennings. 1896. “Cross of Gold.” In Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Held in Chicago, Illinois, July 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, 1896, 226–234. Logansport, IN. Buckley, Thomas, and Alma Gottlieb. 1988. Blood Magic. Berkeley: University of California Press.

158



gustav peebles

Carsten, Janet. 1989. “Cooking Money: Gender and the Symbolic Transformation of Means of Exchange in a Malay Fishing Community.” In Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, 117–141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1990. “Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods: Cattle and Commodities in a South African Context.” American Ethnologist 17(2): 195–216. Dahlstrand, Frederick C. 1982. Amos Bronson Alcott: An Intellectual Biography. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Dalton, Douglas. 1996. “The Aesthetic of the Sublime: An Interpretation of Rawa Shell Valuable Symbolism.” American Ethnologist 23(2): 393–415. Douglas, Mary. 2004 (1966). Purity and Danger. New York: Routledge. Dumont, Louis. 1977. From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dundes, Alan. 1984. Life Is like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture through Folklore. New York: Columbia University Press. Durham, Deborah, and James Fernandez. 1991. “Tropical Dominions: The Figurative Struggle over Domains of Belonging and Apartness in Africa.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James Fernandez. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1984. The Division of Labor in Society, trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1969. The Nuer. New York: Oxford University Press. Fernandez, James. 1986. Persuasions and Performances. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fisher, Will. 1999. “Queer Money.” English Literary History 66(1): 1–23. Foster, Robert. 1998. “Your Money, Our Money, the Government’s Money: Finance and Fetishism in Melanesia.” In Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer, 60–90. New York: Routledge. Fourier, Charles. 1996. The Theory of the Four Movements. New York: Cambridge University Press. Francis, Richard. 1997. Transcendental Utopias. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Frazer, James George. 1922. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edn. New York: MacMillan. Freud, Sigmund. 1962. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1963. Character and Culture. New York: Collier Books. Gesell, Silvio. 1929. The Natural Economic Order. Berlin: Neo-Verlag. Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. Gregory, Chris. 1997. Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. Guyer, Jane. 2004. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harris, Olivia. 1989. “The Earth and the State: The Sources and Meanings of Money in Northern Potosi, Bolivia.” In Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, 232–268. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hart, Keith. 1986. “Heads or Tails? Two Sides of the Coin.” Man 21(4): 637–656.

an apologia for filthy lucre



159

———. 2001. Money in an Unequal World: Keith Hart and His Memory Bank. New York: Texere. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwells. Herbert, Christopher. 2002. “Filthy Lucre: Victorian Ideas of Money.” Victorian Studies 44(2): 185–213. Herrnsstadt, Richard L., ed. 1969. The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 1981 (1651). Leviathan. New York: Penguin. Hutchinson, Sharon. 1992. “The Cattle of Money and the Cattle of Girls among the Nuer, 1930–83.” American Ethnologist 19(2): 294–316. Kesten, Seymour R. 1993. Utopian Episodes. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon. Marx, Karl. 1967. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress. ———. 1973. Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus. Baltimore: Penguin. ———. 1990. Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin. More, Thomas. 1993 (1516). Utopia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Morris, William. 1995 (1890). News from Nowhere: An Epoch of Rest. New York: Cambridge University Press. Munn, Nancy. 1992. The Fame of Gawa, 2nd edn. Durham: Duke University Press. Peebles, Gustav. 2003. “Jesus Hates New York.” The Believer 1(8): 41–49. ———. 2011. The Euro and Its Rivals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012. “Filth and Lucre: The Dirty Money Complex as a Taxation Regime.” Anthropological Quarterly 85(4): 1229–1255. ———. 2020. “Hoarding and Saving.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Retrieved 30 July 2021 from https://oxfordre.com/anthropology/view/10.1093/acrefore/ 9780190854584.001.0001/acrefore-9780190854584-e-80. Rockoff, Hugh. 1990. “The ‘Wizard of Oz’ as Monetary Allegory.” Journal of Political Economy 98(4): 739–760. Rutherford, Danilyn. 2001. “Intimacy and Alienation: Money and the Foreign in Biak.” Public Culture 13(2): 299–324. Santner, Eric. 1996. My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1995. Course in General Linguistics. Peru, IL: Open Court. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1975. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper. Shell, Marc. 1993. Money, Language, and Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shepard, Odell. 1937. Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott. Boston: Little, Brown. ———, ed. 1966. The Journals of Bronson Alcott, vol. 1. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press. Shipton, Parker. 1989. Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities. American Ethnological Society Monograph Series no. 1, ed. James Watson. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. Simmel, Georg. 1991. The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. New York: Routledge. Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela Stewart. 1999. “Objects, Relationships, and Meanings.” In Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia, ed. David Akin and Joel Robbins, 164–191. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

160



gustav peebles

Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Weiss, Brad. 1997. “Northwestern Tanzania on a Single Shilling: Sociality, Embodiment, Valuation.” Cultural Anthropology 12(3): 335–361. Zelizer, Viviana. 1997. The Social Meaning of Money. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 7

“Down the Garden Path” On Path-ologies of Inquiry and of “Progress” in Understanding James W. Fernandez       

The thinker is the child of the hunter. —Fang (Western Equatorial Africa) maxim

Gardens and Paths in the Practical Pictorializing of Everyday Life In this essay,1 I will focus upon two commonplace tropes, that of the garden and that of the path, bound often together, as in the title of the essay, in the notion of the garden path. This figure of speech, the idea of a garden path, suggests different things in different cultures according to their conditions of possibility and the structures of their lifeways (already we see a version of the path trope appear in the very setting up of our argument). In some cultures, among the far northern Inuit or among desert nomads and pastoralists, for example, it will suggest nothing at all. These cultures surely have paths made mainly by the animals on which they depend, but they do not have garden paths. For English speakers at least, and perhaps for most Europeans of the accommodated classes, the phrase suggests the possibilities of dalliance and betrayal. To take a young woman down the garden path suggests leading her to the betrayal of her honor. The phrase suggests a proper caution in going down paths. We may note that this essay will also be cautious about path dependency

162



james w. fernandez

in thinking, which, while indispensable, may also be excessive and lead to a betrayal of sure-footed understanding. This essay is in its way intended to complement another (Fernandez 1998), which examined another commonplace, the tree trope, in various cultures, African and European. Together these essays are part of a recurrent interest in tropology, a focus (or we might well say “path”) of reasoning about the commonplaces of social thought and action. It is part of a branch of knowledge, part of the discipline of rhetoric, dealing with “the play of tropes” in culture. But it is always knowledge anchored in anthropological fieldwork. If we can be allowed some playfulness ourselves, we might say our particular interest here is in “path-ology”; that is to say, it is an interest in what a close reading of the path trope can add to the branch of knowledge we pursue and to our understanding of the logic of the tropes in social interaction. This playfulness is not simply gratuitous, however, because unreflective or compulsive commitment to pathlike behavior can become pathological in social interaction. The purpose of tropology is to reflect upon such matters as social commitments and social compulsions so as to add to anthropological understanding of social dynamics. To get a sense of the prevalence and ever-presence of our subject matter, let us first harvest a few plantings from Freud’s (1965 [1900]) The Interpretation of Dreams. In chapter 6 (“The Dream Work”), section D, p. 374 (“Considerations of Representability”), he discusses pictorialization in dreaming. He is speaking of the visual images of which dreams are full and by which the abstract dream thoughts, impoverished and unusable by their nature, are enriched in associations and made interpretable by such visualization or pictorialization. This kind of displacement, Freud argues, is fundamental in dreams. We are told that the dreamwork is doing nothing original in making substitutions of this visual kind (Freud 1965 [1900]: 381). In order to gain its ends—in this case, the possibility of a representation unhampered by censorship—it merely follows the paths already laid down in the unconscious. Freud then goes on to treat one of those typical dreams and ever-present “paths” by discussing a dream of two gardens, one belonging to the dreamer under analysis and the other to a problematic male acquaintance. The garden dream here provides, in both cases, a kind of horticultural resolution of irresolute sexual desire, transmuting the conflictive desires of waking life into the complementarity of garden arrangement and thus letting multiple flowers bloom in the surcease of social sorrows, as it were. We need not follow Freud “down the garden path” of his determination to encounter a sexual interpretation of this recurrent symbol in dreams. We can simply inform ourselves, out of his wide experience with dreams, with the knowledge that gardens and gardening are a frequent strategy of dream

“down the garden path”



163

pictorializing. They are dream images that provide a path or paths of available deep thought, at least as far as Europeans—that is to say, those with a gardening tradition combined with a courtship tradition characterized by sexual tension—are concerned. And these “gardens in the mind” enable the dreamwork to flourish. They cut back the overgrown and tangled banks of human perturbation, enabling the working out of persistent problems and arriving at some interpretable and actionable understandings in pathlike ways. For these dream gardens generated by perturbed minds all have, for the psychiatrist, their garden paths to psychological resolution, or at least denouement. To be sure, we do not necessarily have to begin with the role of the garden trope in the actual dreams taken from Freud’s consultory at a specific time and place. For the fieldwork-oriented anthropologist, of course, such anchorage in the specifics of context in time and place of individual and social action is of fundamental importance. Still, we might otherwise begin by recognizing that the garden and the path tropes are ever available in the analytic tradition and its compilations and compendiums of symbols as archetypes, readily interpretable, independent of individual circumstance and social and cultural context. For example, in one such compendium—Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s (1971: 115) A Dictionary of Symbols—we are given the following primary reading of the garden, among other frequent associations for it:2 “a place where Nature is subdued, ordered, selected and enclosed.” Hence, it is, we are told, a symbol of consciousness, as opposed to the forest, which is the unconscious, in the same way as the island is opposed to the ocean.

Following Victor Turner’s Paths of Pilgrimage toward Symbolic Understanding This reference to a prevalent association for the forest trope evident to compilers of symbol dictionaries or compendiums, such as Cirlot, puts an anthropologist in mind of the work of Victor Turner, particularly his first important collection of articles, The Forest of Symbols (1967) but especially his key article on hunter’s rituals among the Ndembu, “Encounter with Freud” (V. Turner 1992: chap. 1). In this article, published posthumously, Turner examines the usefulness of following Freudian insights into the dynamics of the semiconscious and unconscious in one’s informants and as an aid to the anthropologist interpreting and explaining what is involved in these rituals. Taking advantage of our own trope of interest, “the path,” we may briefly follow Turner’s “thoughtpath” in exploring and developing his interpretative theory of symbolic meaning among the Ndembu-Lunda (central Africa). We are not actually imposing a trope entirely alien to our author here because, as

164



james w. fernandez

we see, the editor of the posthumous collection of Turner’s (1992) later essays, the anthropologist Edith Turner, entitled it Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols. The referent here in Edith Turner’s title is to what was for Victor Turner one of the dominant Ndembu ritual symbols, the “landmark” or “blaze” (chinkikijilu from kujikijila [“to blaze a trail by cutting marks on trees”]).3 The Ndembu, Victor Turner tells us, refer to what the Western student, whether anthropologist or psychoanalyst, would call ritual symbols as “blazes,” that is, as mechanisms for connecting known and unknown territories. For just as the hunter who is carried into unknown territory in following his prey leaves blazes on trees so that he can find his way back to known territory, so ritual symbols to the Ndembu were seen, in their discussions with Turner, as devices that when focused upon can lead the participant from the unknown—that is, one presumes, the unconscious territory that the ritual is exploring—back in a revelatory manner to the known or more explicitly conscious territory. That is to say that paying attention to these “blazes,” the interpreter is led back to the much better known and vividly experienced problems of “schism and continuity”4 in personal, family, and social life generally. Those problems, that is, that generated the ritual in the first place and that it attempts to express or relate to. Turner makes here, as is frequent in his work, an insightful interpretive elaboration of the Ndembu term “blaze” as something that provides a path or pathway back from the ritual exploration of the unknown to the known. This interpretation works in two ways. It gives us insight into Ndembu thinking, a thoughtway heavily influenced by hunters and the hunter’s way of life,5 about the way the elements of their rituals work for them. But also, it gives us insight into our own, Western ideas of symbol. For, in a sense, a symbol in Western parlance can be seen as an element of thought that appears in the unknown territory of the dream but whose interpretation can also lead the inquirer back into the known territory of the schisms and discontinuities of everyday life that are at work in the dream in their symbolic ways. To be sure, this interpretation, as far as the reader can tell, is suggested in the data but not given to Turner in so many words by his Ndembu informants. But it was just such suggestive—often inspired—thoughtpaths anchored in close study of Ndembu tropes, in this case the trope of the path sign or pathway, that Turner discovered and followed in his rich ethnographic data that enabled him to present his much admired, creative, and instructive work. Indeed, it must be said of Turner that he was both highly sensitive to and stimulated by the figurations, the tropes present in his rich data on Ndembu rituals (particularly hunting rituals), as he was himself a fertile user of his own tropes in communicating his thoughts to the reader.6

“down the garden path”



165

Our focus on Turner’s specific attention to the path trope and his thoughtpath in following it—in this specific instance, of Turnerian symbolic interpretation of Ndembu—leads to a much larger question of his career thoughtpath, the question in fact posed by Edith Turner in the title she gives to his posthumous collection: Blazing the Trail: Waymarks in the Exploration of Symbols. This is not an easy question to answer in simple terms. For as Edith Turner makes clear in her prologue to the collection, Turner’s “trail blazing,” however fertile, was quite variegated7 and involved him over the years in following many paths to understanding. This variegated and rather wayward inquiry came finally, in the last decade of his life, in the company of Edith Turner herself, to a focus on pilgrimage and the pilgrim’s way, the most convincing, widespread, and ultimately revelatory elaboration of the path trope. Withal it has to be said that Victor Turner was one of the great anthropological pilgrims of the twentieth century and, however wayward he may have become in pursuing a multitude of paths, in respect to his and our understanding of the dynamic of symbols he was indeed a trailblazer. There is an additional lesson in Turner’s work that our alertness to the paths he followed provides for us. That is the lesson—always useful for those who would address the interpretation of the symbolism and figurations present in human interaction—of his constant caution, even tentativeness, in pathfinding and path-following. In those years in which he was following the Freudian path to understanding of his informants’ unstated thoughts and actions, for example, years in which he was committed to suggesting in his interpretations what was semiconscious or unconscious to them, he was yet cautious about this path and where it might lead. Turner found it to be both suggestive and perilous to work the frontiers between the conscious and the unconscious, or between the known forest and unknown forest, in Ndembu terms. It was difficult to strike a proper balance between these realms of the known and the unknown. In the end, Turner shudders back, as he says, “into the light of social day,” back from full entry into the forest of subconscious or unconscious symbolic interpretations to which a Freudian-enriched theory of symbolic interpretations and his hunter’s impulses might otherwise lead him. Our analysis almost inevitably will be incomplete when we consider the relationship between the normative elements in social life and the individual. Here we come to the confines of our present anthropological competence, for we are now dealing with the structure and properties of psyches, a scientific field traditionally studied by other disciplines than ours. At one end of the symbol’s spectrum of meanings we encounter the individual psychologist and the social psychologist, and even beyond him (if one may make a friendly tilt

166



james w. fernandez

at an envied friend), brandishing his Medusa’s Head, the psychoanalyst ready to turn the foolhardy interloper into his caverns of terminology. We shudder back thankfully into the light of social day. Here the significant elements of a symbol’s meaning are related to what it does and what is done to it by and for whom. (V. Turner 1967: 46)

We might understand Turner’s caution and hesitancy to embrace fully psychoanalytic meanings as final at this point in his career as a consequence of the idea of multivocality of symbolic meanings. This is an idea that Turner originally found in Freud and that he applied fruitfully in his interpretations. It is an idea that challenges and conditions the completeness or adequacy of any set of interpretations, particularly those that would embrace appeal to the subconscious and the unconscious and the various Freudian mechanisms for discussing them. Also, in his Freudian years at least, the analytic notions of repression and suppression were central to Turner’s method of symbolic analysis and contributed to his sense of the tensions and contrarieties of the social order always present to complicate symbolic interpretation. This gave his analyses their impressive groundedness in just such complexities and contrarieties of social thought and action. He was well aware of contrarieties in his informants’ discussions, as they reflected with him upon the “blazes” or trailmarks that were present to them as they followed their ritual paths. For example, in the instance of the mudyi, or milk, tree—a dominant symbol of the girl’s puberty ritual, or Nkang’a (V. Turner 1967: 19–47)—the Ndembu, in offering native interpretation when away from the rituals, stressed the harmonious, integrative aspects of the milk tree’s meaning, but in the ritual activity itself the tree could be seen clearly as a catalyst of conflict (V. Turner 1992: 22–23). Multivocality lay in the fact that for every verbal statement of social solidarity there was an action statement of social conflict that was repressed or suppressed by informants. The symbolic prey of the symbol hunter was illusive, appearing here, disappearing there.

An Evolutionary Path: The Forest Path, the Garden Path, and the Pilgrimage Path Perhaps with Cirlot’s explanations above—which emphasize the garden rather than the forest as the site where the consciousness of everyday social life reigns—in mind, Turner, as the astute student he from the first was of that everyday family and village life, might better have titled his 1957 book “A Garden of Symbols.” This would have been difficult given that the hunter’s way of life had such high valuation, and social status was such a dominant referent for

“down the garden path”



167

Ndembu social idealism. This is a valuation, Turner (1957: 25) tells us, “consistently made among many Central and Western Bantu,” and it is a valuation confirmed for this present author in his work among northwestern Bantu, the Fang and related Western Equatorial peoples, as we see in the epigraph. There is also the fact that the open forests of northern Rhodesia provided the Ndembu with most of their ritual and therapeutic products and that tree symbolism was a particularly rich multivocal source of symbolic understanding. We see this in much of Turner’s work and particularly in his work on the mudyi (milk) tree. Nevertheless, the central, western, and northwestern Bantu were also gardening people; they had kitchen gardens close to their villages, and cassava and yam gardens farther off in the known forest. Later, under colonialism, they planted coffee and cocoa gardens. The forest and the garden were therefore in constant tension in their thought and, as colonialism evolved, became even more so. Hunting had its drama and high masculine evaluation, but “cutting down trees,” one of the most dramatic forms of activity preparatory to cultivation of their gardens, was also a masculine task and highly dramatic in its nature. It was an intensely meaningful male experience for the Ndembu and related Bantu peoples of central and northwest equatorial Africa (Moore and Vaughan 1994). The interactive vector of complementary associations, between forest and garden, the unknown and the known, the conscious and the unconscious, which Cirlot points out, is present among them as well. It is certainly present among the African peoples I have worked with (mainly Bantu but also in West Africa among Fon, Ewe, and Ashanti), where the tension between the meanings of the proximate and closed kitchen gardens, the more distant bulk crop and cash crop plantations, and the peripheral deep forest of hunting and gathering provided for potent distinctions and, through a variety of ritual enactments involving these different zones, for presentations and transformations of meaning in their religious imaginations. In the religious movement of Bwiti (Fernandez 1982a) the path of birth and death (zen abiale ye awu) metaphor was a dominant trope for organizing ritual activity, as a main motivation of the movement was to recapture the lost relationship with the ancestors. Paths (zen) generally were central to ritual action. The primary path was in the chapel itself, from the troubled entrance portal around the central pillar of the chapel to the tranquility of the altar. But subsidiary paths were constructed out through the enveloping zones, through the well-known and daily visited enclosures of the kitchen gardens, to the more distantly supervised plantations, and eventually out to the scarcely known deep forest and back again. At certain moments during the all-night worship, members would file out by candlelight along these paths out to the deep forest to appeal to the estranged ancestors wandering there to rejoin them and return with them in increasing familiarity on the path through plantations (efekh),

168



james w. fernandez

through the kitchen gardens (fala), into the intimate familiarities and saving circularities of the chapel (on these zones and the paths of ritual progressions, see Fernandez 1982a: chaps. 4, 15, 17). It is well-known Fang proverbial wisdom that “the thinker is the child of the hunter,” a maxim (which opened this chapter) that expresses not only the high esteem in which male hunting was held traditionally but also a view of the anticipation of uncertainties with which any thinker must grapple, in the same way that the hunter must grapple with the uncertainties of wily and unpredictable game.8 This more traditional view of thinking is different than that espoused in the Fang religious movement of Bwiti, where the maxim might instead be (though none was elicited) “the thinker is the child of the pathfinder or pathmaker.” This is apt because the members of this religious movement are so intent not only on following the guiding implications of their central trope of “the path of birth and death” but also on quite practically constructing garden-like ritual paths by which the membership can periodically proceed from the chapel out through the decreasingly familiar agricultural zones into the possible perdition of the deep forest. Particularly, this ritual of going out into the strange forest and returning again to the salvation of the familiar chapel is enacted at midnight of the all-night ritual proceedings. There is, in any event, in this pathmaking for ritual procedures a quite different view taken toward the aleatory and the contingent than is found in the hunter’s view. It is the gardener’s view! It uses constructed paths to tame the wild and make it familiar and domesticate it! To be sure, Bwiti is a religious movement much influenced by the missionary presence, by missionary ideas, and by the orderliness and pathfulness in life that missionaries, convinced of the disorderliness of Fang life, as of most unredeemed African life, constantly tried to impart. Missionaries almost everywhere devoted much time to building gardens and much time to instructing their African charges in garden building. They understood it, along with bible study, as a civilizing strategy par excellence.9 The evangelical idea of garden orderliness in the missionary message was quite widespread in late 1950s to mid-1960s work on religious movements in Africa. In several years among Fang, missionaries came by our villages of residence with regularity, checking into the manner in which their adepts, the local evangelists, were keeping their kitchen gardens to serve as an example to their unredeemed neighbors. A good example of this garden strategy of evangelization occurred in mid-1960s work among the Celestial Christians of coastal West Africa, Nigeria, Benin, and Togo (see Fernandez 1982b), a religious movement that later expanded into a presence of chapels in Europe and America. I noted and made inquiry into a neatly raked sand-covered plot

“down the garden path”



169

maintained outside and alongside their chapels. It was called a “garden of holy dreams,” a kind of Gethsemane of prayerful meditation where the agonies of everyday life could be worked out in dreams. Troubled members would lie out under the palms full length in their spotless white robes, faces upward toward heaven, eyes closed, and with a lit candle placed at their head. Here, often for several hours of quiet soul searching and meditation, they sought in semisomnolent states for visions or less pictorial understandings by which they might address the troubles and the agonies of everyday life that had been troubling them. They were looking for intimations of a benevolent presence, whether of a deity or of sainted ancestors that might bring them a more hopeful future. There was no casual entrance into this carefully laid out plot of meditation and assuagement. One had to very carefully step into the garden along certain paths traced in the sand until one found one’s power spot of meditation. And one also in the same way had to exit with great care along the “garden paths” of this “dream garden.” One final note may be added to this discussion of comparative ethnographic data, this author’s and others’, on paths and gardens. We have seen how Victor Turner’s progress along the path of symbol study led him in his final years to the study of pilgrimage itself—perhaps, as we said, the most powerful and widely experienced kind of path-following and pathmaking. We are unable in the scope of this essay to treat to any degree this pervasive manifestation of the path trope, or the instructive way that Turner expanded his interest in paths to follow the path of pilgrimage into a number of cultures. But we can register briefly and confirm from the experience of our own ethnographic work in Asturias, northern Spain, and, in respect to the thousand-year-old pilgrimage to Santiago, the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of Saint James, the importance of this pilgrimage path to local identity. The principle and best known pilgrimage route to Santiago wends across the northern provinces of the central plateau of northern Spain, through Navarre, Logroño, and Leon, and into Galicia. Recently in Asturias, a mountainsurrounded seaside province north of Leon, there has been a promotion and an investment of considerable funds in laying out and signaling to potential pilgrims what has been called the “winter route.” This route wends its way along the milder Cantabrian coastal piedmont. This investment serves a clearly compensatory function. The Kingdom of Asturias was originally, from the eighth to the tenth century, the only part of Spain entirely free of the Moorish conquest; hence, it was the original “modern” Spain. But, gradually through the centuries, it lost centrality and power and influence to Castilian hegemony over the mountains. This historical withdrawal has left the province feeling itself increasingly isolated. The symbolic importance of the winter route to Santiago for Asturians, then, is that it provides a “road back” to both a fuller and more influ-

170



james w. fernandez

ential participation in Spanish affairs writ large and an inclusion in a greater Spanish enterprise, the pilgrimage to Santiago. Indeed, Spain itself has over the centuries experienced an isolation from Europe, not only by reason of the barrier of the Pyrenees but, more recently, because of the isolation imposed by the rest of Europe on the authoritarian Franco regime. The Santiago pilgrimage is to be valued not only over the longue durée by Iberia entire but also, in more recent decades, as a way of tying the nation once more into western Europe entire. The Way of Saint James in Spain, the Spanish road, has numerous French, German, and Low Country tributaries.

The Mythical Garden, the Mythical Wilderness in the Modern Mind Such, in the anthropological experience, are just several of the multitudinous examples of the paths and gardens that are available to troubled minds and troubled societies and of which they avail themselves in finding direction or redirection in their affairs. In this case it is the minds of individual soul or salvation searchers—whether middle-class missionary Europeans or the rural or peri-urban semi-evangelized proletariats of Equatorial and Guinea Coast West Africa peoples influenced but not fully redirected and re-enabled by The Mission. They enable themselves though religious movement to come to terms with their destinies, by getting back on “the path of birth and death” in spite of a paternalistic colonial world not really of their own making and alien to their interests. And a path can also be an assuaging trope, indeed a salvation, as we have only been able to suggest, for a province like Asturias troubled by its peripherality. For setting pilgrims on the winter route to Santiago can put a province long on its own pilgrimage to escape peripherality on the road again. But just as the pilgrimage path is a projection on a much larger scale of the hunter’s path, the garden trope can predicate if not a saving then surely a challenging identity on a much larger scale than the colonial world from which most of our anthropological data derives. It can operate on a national scale, indeed, on the scale of the identity and manifest destiny of nations. That, at least, is the argument made by such students of the American mind as Leo Marx, in The Machine in the Garden (1964), and Roderick Nash, in Wilderness and the American Mind (1982). For they find in the garden trope a master image of aspiration that has come frequently to the American mind. It came to mind first as early Americans contemplated the bountiful land they were settling and putting to the plow, finding in this blessing the divine charge to them that they bring this wilderness into fruitful cultivation, turn it and the society they were creating into a vast garden, an approximation in the New World of the

“down the garden path”



171

Garden of Eden! For environmentalists, this New World garden trope can be evoked to stand against the obsessions and the pathologies of the pathmaker and road builder who is driven to pave over the continent. But these authors also recognize that, like the Garden of Eden on which it was modeled, this has been a complex image with its problematic side—a master metaphor of American life provoking as much of a challenge for the organizing of lives in community as a resolution. For Leo Marx (1964: 142), the garden symbol embraced a cluster of biblical metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth. But as a consequence this biblical and pastoral image—particularly its blissful labor part—conflicted with another biblical charge, the growth and increase part, the part charging the faithful to be fruitful and multiply and to use nature industriously and productively for personal purposes of righteous gain. Leo Marx (1964) discusses that ambivalence in Thomas Jefferson’s writings, where the Founding Father espouses his pastoral-agrarian ideals while at the same time finding them in conflict with his desire for a prosperous nation not subservient to the industry and industries of other nations. For Nash (1982), the antagonism of the Garden of Eden image to the wonders of wilderness is more clear-cut and challenging. The garden reactivated in the discovery of the New World is an image of control and cultivation of nature and an image basically hostile to what it regards as the immorality, the actual evil, of wilderness. For it is that wilderness into which Adam and Eve had been cast out of Eden. The garden image is an image, then, that has come into contest with the appearance in the late nineteenth century of another master metaphor, wilderness itself, with all the restorative possibilities the pristine wilderness offered from the abuses, exploitations, and pollutions of industrial capitalism, in a sense simply an extension of the dominating and controlling ethic present in the garden image however romanticized it might be. Environmentalists of Nash’s persuasion devoted to the appreciation and preservation of wilderness—the preservation of the unknown part of the forest, in Ndembu parlance—return us to the contingencies of the hunter’s experience of the forest, unpredictable and always potential. In any event, there has been, at least in this northern part of the New World, the United States and Canada, a complex contest between reigning tropes: between soft environmentalists with their garden vision of “eco-topia”; hard environmentalists with their image of a reigning wilderness full of contingencies; and Christian capitalists under the obligation to be fruitful and multiply with their vision of nature subdued, efficiently exploited, and made maximally productive. But underlying these complexities of the current culture wars in respect to nature’s bounty we still find something similar to the tension in our African materials between the attractions to the wilderness—that is, the unknown and pathless

172



james w. fernandez

forest, a never fully known space of opportunity and adventure—on the one hand, and the all-too-well-known, domesticated yet conflicted, multi-pathed village and nearby village lands, on the other. Both of these authors, Leo Marx and Nash, speak to a necessary reconciliation of antagonistic tropes. Leo Marx (1964) also speaks of the major reconciliation demanded in the American mind not only between agrarian ideals and the destructiveness of industrialization but also in the reconciliation demanded in the pastoral ideal itself between the felicities of animal nature and the necessities of rational constraints, between the natural condition and the opportunities and discontents of civilization. Some might argue that this is just the kind of reconciliation offered by the Garden of Eden myth, at least until Eve led Adam down the garden path. It was the inability of humankind, overmastered by their impulses, to make that reconciliation, it could be argued, that cast our ancestors out into the wilderness and the inevitable necessity of confronting it in self-interested domination and exploitation—the inevitable necessity, as it were, of laying the grid of domestication and civilization upon pathless nature. The plot is simple, and the path out of perdition of the lost Garden of Eden evident: the failure of self-mastery led to the compulsive mastery of the other, that is, of wild nature! After humankind’s exodus from paradise by imposing the garden notion on nature, which is to say by imposing pathlike thinking, we could retrieve something of the Paradise we had lost. Alas, here too, as the environmentalists argue, we have been led down the garden path to the pathology of an abusive mastery of nature and a consequent contamination and pollution of the very gardens that an expelled humanity, in their necessity and out of their knowledge, had been enabled to create. No wonder that for many the idea of wilderness, a primordial paradise as free of the gardening impulse as possible,10 recurs to enchant us. It is interesting and instructive to compare that contemporary enchantment with wilderness to those attractions felt by Bantu hunters and Bantu priests and pastors to the unknown part of the forest. But this primordial mythological plot and its denouement, in which the garden image is central and intended to be morally instructive, must still be for an anthropologist, by definition interested in human evolution in a less mythological way, too cryptic and enigmatic. For one thing, as we remark, the Garden of Eden can hardly have been a garden in any normal sense of the word since Adam and Eve are not biblically featured in Genesis as gardeners or blissful laborers and appear as such only in latter-day aphorisms: where Adam delves and Eve spins, etc. Indeed, one might more aptly argue that the Garden of Eden myth takes us down the garden path in this respect and contributes to one kind of what we are calling a path-ology of thought in two senses: first, it shows an inability to deal straightforwardly with the contingency of life that

“down the garden path”



173

is common and fundamental knowledge to hunters and gatherers; second, it assumes perfection in pathmaking as a primordial condition whereas it is the product, however ambivalently regarded, of significant cultural evolution. We must suppose from what we know of the primordial human condition, independent of biblical mythmaking, that primary awareness was the hunter’s alertness to contingency—a primacy that the excesses of path commitment can lead us to overlook, transgress, infringe, and defile. The connection between (1) the orderliness of cultivation and domestication and the corresponding orderliness of culture and (2) the impact of the idea of the one upon the idea of the other has been frequently made. Did not the orderliness of lifeways suggested in the culture concept, it is asked, rest upon and rise out of, or at least proceed in conjunction with, the orderliness achieved in cultivation and domestication in agriculture? In recent decades, the link between culture properly understood in communitarian terms and agriculture properly practiced has been frequent.11 The logic of the path is present in both. Cultivation, whether horticulture or agriculture, in comparison with hunting, gathering, and pastoralism, is intensely path-oriented in the sense that rows and grids of planting and harvesting of various kinds are imposed upon the random pursuits and aleatory walks in nature. In these former lifeways, whether the hunting, ever alert and reactive to wayward prey, or the gathering, pursuant of uncertainly distributed wild fruits and plants, or yet in the herding of animals, wayward and with minds of their own, the logic is that of the game, of the wild fruits and plants, or of the beast being driven. To be sure the progress of husbandry, horticulture, or agriculture meant the everincreasing imposition of a logical purpose in the evolving minds of the gatherer or hunter or herder or drover or planter as civilization advanced. Cultivation agriculture is, among other practical things, a measured attempt to place the logic of paths upon nature and thus to abolish its difficultto-predict contingencies. Agriculture’s attendant anxieties have mainly to do with the reassertion of the unpredictable and the contingent in nature. Horticulturalists (gardeners), or agriculturalists on a larger scale, have always sought to take strong measures against contingency before often enough having to resign themselves to it—in the long run, mainly, to meteorological unpredictability. These differences embedded in evolving human lifeways are played out in the various path tropes found in different cultural imaginaries, which we have considered here. These tropes can be regarded as variable efforts to grapple with, here accept, and there deny, control over the contingent in nature. By playing upon the path trope itself, as we have, to suggest a “path-ology” of thought in human affairs, we point up the possibility of overcommitment to paths and to the denial of contingency in nature and human affairs. To be sure, we cannot forget that this playful keyword is intended to bring into contrast

174



james w. fernandez

the different logics by which, in the end, the adventitious world is enclosed, controlled, and made productive and, eventually, made an object of meditation and appreciation. In respect to paths, what we are dealing with here are matters of moderation and excess, where pathology is in every instance a matter of excess. As industrial and technological cultures in the dynamism of their self-confidence seem unrelentingly to pave nature over, their pathmaking and roadbuilding has become, in the eyes of many, a pathology, an object of excessive and obdurate dedication. The contemporary wilderness ethic is especially antagonistic about such obduracy and the price that nature pays for it. Wary about the laying of paths upon nature, those guided by this ethic thereby wish to preserve the ancient art of aleatory and very personal pathfinding. To be sure, it also has to be said that in some holders of this ethic their commitment to this very personal pathfinding passes over to a pathological aversion to pathmaking of any kind, not just a paved-over world. Indeed, pathologies of every kind—the etymology, though played upon here, is of course accidental—in general, however else they may be defined, might most aptly be first discussed in terms of excessive attraction to or rejection of routine and method, for both routines and methods, as we see in their etymologies, are derivatives of ways of proceeding along a path; they are examples of path dependency.

Discussion: Mind and Method There is something quite obvious in treating of such commonplace tropes as the path and the garden, so recurrent and ever-present as they are in the rhetoric of everyday popular and more occasional and lofty intellectual argument. Of course, for that very reason, the reason of their ever-presence, we may easily overlook their presence and importance. It is useful, therefore, to return from time to time to focus upon them and their importance in expressing ourselves and guiding and justifying our actions. The two tropes we have been pursuing or cultivating, as the case may be, have taken us further afield than we anticipated, from ethnographic materials to pathlike considerations of the evolutions of culture, from point A (hunting and gathering) to point B (horticulture and agriculture) to point C (industrial capitalism) and finally along to the present culture wars between environmentalists and capitalists. It is well in this concluding discussion to tighten our argument and to find, if we can, some “method in our madness.” We might best return to the “logy” part of path-ology by repairing to the cultural logics involved in our argument. We might begin by observing that our key term is to be found in the etymology of the word method itself, derived as it is from the Greek meta (after, along,

“down the garden path”



175

or over) and hodos (way or path): thus, action that involves the going after or along or over a path! Methodological action, in short, by etymological precedent, is pathlike or path-following behavior.

Field Paths in Ethnographic Inquiry Any method, following this etymological cue, is a following of specified paths and any methodologist is a specifier of paths to be followed in the pursuit of truth. This is, for the most part, an unstated implication of the meaning of being methodical in the sciences and social sciences. Occasionally, that obligation to path-following behavior that the method requires is made explicit. One example is seen in the collection of articles edited by Roger Sanjek (1990), Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology, where in a final chapter the editor highlights the importance for purposes of ethnographic validity12 of keeping track in field notebooks of the field paths that the ethnographer has followed in obtaining information from informants. To whom, to what end, and when has his research led him or her, and what are the subsequent paths he or she has followed in writing up the field notes and in the final ethnography? Ethnography as a method is, as Sanjek suggests, a kind of pathfinding in strange and foreign circumstances, and ethnographers are obliged to make clear where and to whom their paths of inquiry have led. Making explicit account of field paths makes clear in a reliable way whom the ethnographer has relied upon, his or her system of reliances, as it were, that were a consequence of the field paths followed. To be sure, any ethnographer recognizes the possible pathology in being too rigid in the field in following only a limited and reiterative number of paths to information and understanding. Openness to other possible field paths, one might argue, is of the essence of fruitful ethnography.

Momentous Events and Path Dependency Another example of the making explicit of the path trope, this time in respect to historical method, is found in the work of the social historians who have, under the influence of anthropological ethnography (see Sahlins 1981, 1991), become increasingly interested in “making a turn” (see McDonald 1996) and focusing historical analysis not only on ethnographic detail but also upon the contingency contained in events that can bring about significant change in the paths along which a culture and its society are proceeding. In particular, the historians focused on these momentous events have been interested in escaping certain kinds of obsessions in previous historical narrative (“pa-

176



james w. fernandez

thologies,” as we are calling them) such as teleological thinking—for example, the evolutionary progressions from tradition to modern or from unlettered to civilized—or the fascination with pursuing historical explanation by means of an experimental science methodology, and thus exposing, in a parsimonious way, what are triumphantly discovered to be underlying master processes in history.13 At issue in this critique and this “historic turn” is the weight to be given to the contingencies contained in events and their capacity to change social structures and cultural norms—the understanding of social categories, for example—and thus affect significant turnings in the social order. We would argue here that this is mainly a question of the weight to be given to path dependency and the degree to which social processes are or are not “path dependent” over time, which is to say these are questions of the power of precedence or of tradition to resist the contingency of events.14 This debate about the sequencing of causalities is a debate about the eventful nature of history, that is, the momentousness of events, and the historian’s obligation to study events in as much ethnographic detail as possible. In the terms developed in this essay, the debate is about the possible path-ology in historical narrative of giving too great credence to path dependency and not enough to the contingency of events. In any event, we note how central an issue path dependency is in this debate in narrative history and historical anthropology, and we note also that central to that debate is the question of path-ology, that is, too little or too great a dependence on pathlike thinking. We should also note that this eventful turn in historical inquiry focuses on the turnings in path dependency wrought by the contingency of events and that this focus is, in ways similar to that of tropology itself, focused on the recurrent turnings in thought and action in social life. But one might add tropology’s argument that the impetus to such turnings in thought and action are very often found in the tropes themselves, the very instruments of the imagination that embody and express the mind’s turnings in its search for understanding and fruitful and fulfilling activity! For significant events are, with great frequency, accompanied by rhetorical claims and disclaimers, narrations of situations that give significance to the events and make them or deny them effect in respect to the antecedent paths of causation in society. There are many references we could make to recent work that contain these forms of tropological wisdom in the sense that they recognize what we are calling the path-ologies of thought. For Hispanists, for example, there has been a rise of recent work exploring just this overcommitment to one particular thought path: the overcommitment to the decline metaphor in the analysis

“down the garden path”



177

of the historical dynamics of Spain, an overcommitment, that is, to the notion of a path of steady decline in Spain’s history after the seventeenth century.15 For the student of development, there is also recent work on the development project in the third world that points out the inconsequence of much so-called development work in changing existing and failing path commitments because of the resistance of reigning bureaucratic elites. In effect, the apparently eventful bringing to bear of the development project on third-world poverty turns out to be, under analysis, a pseudo-event and a kind of political path-ology.16 Another path-ology particularly remarked in the human sciences, and treated by evolutionists as a subject of precaution, is teleology—an overcommitment, as regards the long-term contingencies of survival, to progress in evolution: the presumption that the course of human events and the human career of institutions is set upon a certain path leading to some future assured steady state of improvement, say, in its classic form, from hazardous savagery to volatile barbarism to the securities of civilization. There are many possible explanations for this path-ology. But in the context of our argument here, we might blame such recurrent denial of contingency on the overinfluence of the garden trope with its own imagined control of contingency. We surely cannot, as we have said, blame it on the hunter’s sense of path dependency. He is well aware of the contingencies, the presumption, the path-ology, of knowing a priori the course that things will take and where they will end up—of knowing that the “intelligent design” (as it is currently phrased) of the garden path beforehand, as it were, has surprisingly continued to be the case in respect to the difficult Darwinian message of contingency in evolution, as Davydd Greenwood (1984) has shown. Thinkers convinced by the “intelligent design” evident to them in the gardens of paradise have been much challenged by this wild message, this hunter’s message. And consequently, in Greenwood’s parlance, they have “tamed it down.” The “contingencies of evolution” is an obvious message to a hunter in the wild but a hard message, apparently, for the good gardeners of social life to accept. It is informative to our understanding of method to see instances like these where the path trope, widely present if not omnipresent in an implicit way in much thinking, emerges into the light of day and becomes subject to criticism. If we might finally in our discussion consider the road trope, however—the more civilized version of the path trope, we might say—we find ourselves dealing with a trope that continues to enjoy a much more open, even everyday, status. It is to be noted how fundamental and widespread the “road” and “road to” trope is as a figuration of the vectors of argument, particularly political and political economic argument. A consultation of the library holdings of large research universities would regularly yield more than 500 books

178



james w. fernandez

and monographs (619 for the University of Chicago library) with “the road to” in the title, from the conservative thinker Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) to the radical socialist George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). As far as the field research site of the present author in Asturias, I might mention Adrian Shubert’s The Road to Revolution in Spain: The Coal Miners of Asturias, 1860–1934 (1987).17 And there are as many books in which “the road to” is a silent presence, as in Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940), a study of Lenin’s planning and realization of the Russian Revolution. It is thus not surprising that Bakhtin argues in his theory of chronotopes, and most pointedly in his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (Bakhtin 1981: 84–258), that the road metaphor is a particularly salient example of a chronotope. That is to say that “the road” is a particularly revelatory configuration or syncretism of time and space: a space, that is, over which a narrative and a narrator can move in time toward denouement, revelation, realization, discovery, fulfillment, unrequitement, whatever may be the nature of the final resting place of a narrative argument carried along its over determined path to conclusion and final closure.

Conclusion: The End of the Road What then is our final resting place, and the final resting place for the road we have taken in this essay? The elements of our argument are plain enough. The path of the hunter is a different path than the path of the gardener. The former is a more or less random pursuit or walk, cautiously, if not stealthily, undertaken in never fully predictable, and always, to some degree, contingent, nature, while cultivation, particularly horticulture but also the agriculture that has succeeded it, has been a very measured, meditative attempt to abolish the contingencies and randomness of such nature. The Garden of Eden myth takes us naïvely down the garden path insofar as it works to convince us that the primordial condition—the condition well known to the hunter and the gatherer, in the face of which they must take thoughtful precaution—is that of not uncertainty and contingency but rather that wishful condition of perfection and intelligent design always intended by the garden trope. It is that of a paradisiacal nature subdued, ordered, and enclosed, made predictable and comfortable in cultivation—the cosmos as orderly until unruly humankind violates the terms of the intelligent design of the garden with which it has been primordially blessed. In this myth, and as we have seen more generally, “the garden is a trope that comes to mind to aid us in our difficulties in a contingent world. The

“down the garden path”



179

garden is a trope that we can use in a difficult world to organize our thinking about it. But just as the Garden of Eden myth is a recurrent image used to confront the contingent world in a simplifying way, our further point is that we do not wander, walk, or pursue our goals in the world in a perfectly pristine and unconditioned way, as tabulae rasae, as it were, to be straightforwardly written upon by our experience out there. There are preexistent, ever-present images of thought, the various tropes that are always and already there, since the earliest times indeed, prepared to influence us in organizing our views of the problematic subjects of our concerns and to direct our inquiry into them. That body of knowledge that focuses on an awareness of these recurrent images is tropology, and it pursues and cultivates an awareness of the various recurrent paths that the mind takes in its problem-solving activity. Within tropology is the study of this pathlike thinking we have referred to rather captiously as path-ology: the knowledge of the logic of path dependency in the thinker, whether the child of the hunter or the child of the gardener or, perhaps, as is indeed the case in the complex modern world, the child of both. It is a study of pathlike thinking, but it is also a cautious reflection on the overcommitment to, the possible path-ology in, either negligence or overdependence on pathlike thinking! But let us not oversimplify. As tropologists we are mainly interested in cultivating an awareness of the various paths the mind takes, its path dependencies, as it were, its path-ologies according to the tropes that one finds appealing and convincing. We should not want to exaggerate our overcommitment to certain sedate horticultural tropes nor, on the other hand, to overcommit here to the hunter’s adventurous sense of path contingencies. The thinker, obviously—this may be, as much as anything, what tropology teaches—is the child of the hunter, the gatherer, and the gardener (if not the mechanic). He or she pays his or her money and makes his or her choices. The point is to be aware of the reservoir of our aides pensée that are on offer and the possibilities of inflexibilities and overcommitment to particular ones in contrast to others; that is, the point is to be aware of the very real path-ologies of thought in everyday life. James W. Fernandez is professor emeritus of cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. He taught previously at Smith College, Dartmouth College, and Princeton University. For the first quarter century of his career he carried out ethnographic research on religious revitalization in Africa, and his second ethnography in that pursuit, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (1982), won the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association. A focus on the “play of tropes” and the “figuration of cultural realities” has been a constant in his career and ethnography since the 1950s.

180



james w. fernandez

Notes 1. This essay was originally presented in a much reduced form as a paper at the 74th annual meeting of the Central States Anthropological Society, in Milwaukee, April 1997, in a session titled “The Cultivation of Contested Spaces: Gardens of Verses, Gardens of Versus” and organized by Myrdene Anderson. 2. Cirlot also credits feminine attributes to the garden symbol because of its character as a protected precinct and, with the dream Freud discusses in mind, sees it as a site of fertile conjunction of treasure hunts with a sense of the female treasure, or, more specifically, that which the male treasures in the female, in miniature. The Herder Dictionary of Symbols similarly sees the enclosed garden as symbolizing the intimate areas of the female body. So the dream Freud analyzes has plenty of corroboration in the symbol dictionaries, which are not themselves, of course, free of Freudian influences and theory. 3. On this master or dominant symbol, see the frontispiece to Blazing the Trail, and also p. 10. 4. The reference is to Victor Turner’s (1957) classic social anthropology of Ndembu life, Schism and Continuity in an African Society—classic because of its exceptionally detailed attention to the conflicts (and resolutions) of everyday, personal, family, and matrilineage life. 5. As Turner (1957: 25) tells us in Schism and Continuity, in a long section on the hunting way of life, “It can almost be said that the Ndembu social system is pivoted on the importance of hunting.” 6. Most notably the “social drama trope”: the notion of social dynamic of schism and continuity as a drama but also the application of the flow of trope to social process, of the limen metaphor to grasp betwixt and between-ness in ritual process, and ambiguity and ambivalence in social dynamics generally. He also fruitfully employed “loop,” “flow,” and “mirror” metaphors. Along with Clifford Geertz (1983), Turner was one of the most fertile tropologists of late twentieth-century Anglo-American anthropology. 7. As Edith Turner points out in her prologue to Blazing the Trail (V. Turner 1992: xi), Victor Turner moved from social structuralism and Durkheimian social facts to the nonrational in social life, as found in ritual symbolism and in the form of the Freudian subconscious and unconscious, and then finally to a Kierkegardian sense of the paradoxical and mystical in human affairs, as seen particularly in the paradoxes of liminality (betwixtness and betweenness) and in the revelatory “center out there” toward which the pilgrim, and Turner himself, is gravitationally attracted and wends his way. And after his intense 1950s ethnographic work with the Ndembu, Turner in his later years journeyed for short periods of anthropological pilgrimage and of variegated comparative work to Mexico, Japan, Ireland, Israel, and the Islamic Middle East. 8. See also the discussion of this maxim in Fernandez 1982a: 11 and passim; see also the extensive index of this ethnography treating of “Birth and Death, path of ” (p. 682) and “paths” (p. 717). 9. Missionary, doctor, musician, and theologian Albert Schweitzer, the famous midtwentieth-century polymath, argued repeatedly that until Fang were tied down to careful and responsible agricultural practice, they would never become fully civilized. See Fernandez 1964. 10. To be sure, wilderness must itself be protected and managed in an aggrandizing, exploitative world.

“down the garden path”



181

11. For examples, see Wendell Berry’s (1977) environmentalist and communitarian argument for family, as opposed to industrial, farming, where culture and cultivation go hand in hand and are not overwhelmed by the mindless exploitation energized by the profit motive run amuck, as occurs in industrial farming. This is one of many arguments put forth in favor of a holistic integration of culture and agriculture. See also the general orientation and interests of the journal Culture and Agriculture (published by the American Anthropological Association) devoted to the anthropological investigation of similar communitarian themes. 12. As validity is a “hard science” concept, and anthropology is hardly a hard science, perhaps “reliability” and “credibility” would be better terms for the consequences of being explicit about field paths. See Fernandez 1993. 13. See the astute treatment of these “obsessions” among historians in Sewell 2005. 14. See, for example, the discussion of “path dependency” in the work of William H. Sewell Jr. (2005: 100–101, 105, 120). 15. See by way of comparison David Ringrose’s (1996) questioning of the abuse of the decline metaphor in respect to the Spanish economy. See also Herman 1997. 16. The important and pioneering argument here is that of James Ferguson (1990). 17. The Road to Revolution itself is a title that is so repeatedly represented in the literature as to be almost habitual among scholars accounting for change, whether violent or benign.

References Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Berry, Wendell. 1977. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club. Cirlot, J. E. 1971. A Dictionary of Symbols, 2nd edn., trans. Jack Sage. London: Routledge. Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fernandez, James W. 1964. “The Sound of Bells in a Christian Country—In Quest of the Historical Schweitzer.” Massachusetts Review 5(3): 537–562. ———. 1982a. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1982b. “The Cultural Status of a West African Cult Group: On the Creation of Culture.” In African Religious Groups and Beliefs: Papers in Honor of William R. Bascom, ed. Simon Ottenberg, 242–260. Delhi: Archana. ———. 1993. “A Guide to the Perplexed Ethnographer.” American Ethnologist 20(1): 179–184. ———. 1998. “Trees of Knowledge of Self and Other in Culture: On Models of the Moral Imagination.” In The Social Use of Trees, ed. Laura Rival and Maurice Bloch, 81–110. Oxford: Berg. Freud, Sigmund. 1965 (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams, 8th edn., trans. and ed. by James Strachey. New York: Avon. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

182



james w. fernandez

Greenwood, Davydd. 1984. The Taming of Evolution: The Persistence of Non-Evolutionary Views in the Study of Humans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Herman, Arthur. 1997. The Idea of Decline in Western History. New York: The Free Press. Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press. McDonald, T. J., ed. 1996. The Historic Turn in the Social Sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Moore, Henrietta L., and Megan Vaughan. 1994. Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in Northern Zambia, 1890–1990. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Nash, Roderick. 1982. Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd edn. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ringrose, David, R. 1996. Spain Europe and the Spanish Miracle: 1700–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Early History of the Sandwich Islands. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1991. “The Return of the Event, Again: With Reflections on the Beginnings of the Great Fijian War of 1843 to 1855 between the Kingdoms of Bau and Rewa.” In Clio en Oceania: Towards a Historical Anthropology, ed. Aletta Biersack, 37–100. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Sanjek, Roger, ed. 1990. Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sewell, William H., Jr. 2005. “Three Temporalities: Towards an Eventful Sociology.” In Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, 81–123. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shubert, Adrian. 1987. The Road to Revolution in Spain: The Coal Miners of Asturias, 1860– 1934. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Turner, Victor W. 1957. Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1992. Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols, ed. Edith Turner. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

CHAPTER 8

Sí teanga na muintire a shlánós an mhuintir Ó Cadhain, Rhetoric, and Immanence Steve Coleman       

Introduction This chapter examines the rhetoric of Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–70), an Irishlanguage writer and activist. Ó Cadhain developed a few key tropes in Irishlanguage expression—“dead,” “live,” and “clay”—to reveal a series of analogies that he used to interrogate the views and policies of the Irish state and its cultural, intellectual, and political representatives. His writing and oratory drew its power from its use of these key figures to effect a reversal of perspective in terms of what we see as “living” and “dead” in Irish social, cultural, and political life. Cré (“clay”) functioned as a key trope for Ó Cadhain, standing for sociality itself—the language and social life of people, especially the Western, Irish-speaking lower classes. “Clay” was also the soil they are formed by, soil that is largely man-made in many communities where Irish is spoken. I suggest that, like our bodies and the clay they return to, tropes have this quality because they are made of the same stuff as ourselves. Ó Cadhain’s poetics point to a radical immanence within human sociality, and I argue that this is the stance from which his interventions gain their power.

The Béaloideas Lecture Dublin, February 1950. We are in the company of Cumann na Scribhneoirí (The Writers’ Society), who have asked Ó Cadhain to speak on the topic of “folklore.” Ó Cadhain: a native speaker of Irish from a poor rural Gaeltacht

184



steve coleman

(Irish-speaking) area. A republican, IRA member, detained during World War II in the Curragh internment camp. Author of a novel, Cré na Cille (The graveyard clay), radical in form, scandalous in content. It has been serialized in a national newspaper, the Irish Press, but otherwise is not yet published. He is here to mess with your head. He begins by asserting that he himself was “squeezed out” of the world of folklore, from a community where folklore was the only form of learning available to most of his neighbors. He describes how as a child he used to listen to his elderly grandfather telling hero-tales to a neighbor to pass the time of day. The two old men would argue on the accuracy of the telling, until the neighbor was silenced with this proverb: Nuair a bhíos clann na gaisce ag inseacht scéil, Bíodh clann na gcaiIleach i sost a mbéil When the sons of valor are telling stories, let the sons of hags be silent (Ó Cadhain 1990: 130; translation in Ó Giolláin, 2000: 151)1

Here, “folklore” is fodder for old men’s endless pedantic arguments. Folklore is trash, leftover things from obsolescent life, like the school copybook in which the eight-year-old Ó Cadhain tried to write out Fenian tales. Ó Cadhain has just described to us finding it on a trip home and, out of a kind of dread, being compelled to read his own juvenile writing, staring at it intently before throwing it into the fire, “putting it out of its torments forever” (1990: 129). The copybook spooks Ó Cadhain as something undead that needs to be destroyed. But what about that proverb: its perfect form as a poetic couplet— in his grandfather’s mouth, a thumping put-down and closer of discussion. Its powerful assertion that some are born to tell, others merely to listen. “Clann na gaisce ag inseacht scéil . . .” Gaisce: feats of valor. The hero (gaiscíoch) whom the teller gives voice to, and who in turn gives voice and authority to the teller. If you insist on thinking about folklore in terms of something like “culture,” something “out there” in some sort of abstract social universe, or even worse, as representations of something (tradition, beliefs, old ways of speaking?), think about this: It animates us as we animate it. Its life becomes ours and vice versa. Transubstantiation: the living Host emerges from our mouths. Reanimated, it walks the earth. We are all made of the same stuff as this “folklore.” Ó Cadhain calls it “clay,” that which we come out of and return to. Ó Cadhain wants us to know that we are badly underestimating both how dead and how alive this stuff is, this “clay.” We need to be punched up a bit, and these tropes, BEO and MARBH, are his right and left hooks to the head. ALIVE! DEAD! Do we even know which is which?

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



185

He wants us to see folklore as existing on a plane of life and death rather than merely at a place in a historical continuum: Dead: “The sword of light I got from the king’s young son, long ago life’s bile made a rusty stump of it in my hand.” Alive: “And yet, whenever I read certain things in Béaloideas (the national folklore journal) don’t I feel the sword back in my grip.” Dead: “That sword will never cut off another head.” (Ó Cadhain 1990: 130–131)

And the typical characters of folklore, Clann na Bardscoloige, Cab ar Dosan, Darby Beag Produm, Cailin an Staicin Eorna, Connla, “won’t get the respect they deserve from the faint sarcastic smile of commerce these days . . . they can take their rest with the gods of the race, with history’s cancelled checks” (Ó Cadhain 1990: 130–131).

Máirtín Ó Cadhain as Nation-Builder It will not be long until the police arrive to eject the rioting audience (Ó Cathasaigh 2002: 127). Time enough to learn a bit about the speaker and his reasons for delivering such an unsettling oration in such distinguished company. Máirtín Ó Cadhain was born in 1905 in the Connemara Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking community in Co. Galway. He was a native speaker of Irish, which became the official national language of the newly independent Irish state (in 1937; the Irish Free State was declared in 1921). As a young man he collected folklore in his own community and worked as a schoolteacher, from 1926 to 1936. After moving to Dublin, he was hired as a lexicographer and translator of government documents (1947–56) and was involved with official committees for coining Irish-language terminology. He became a highly regarded novelist, short story writer, and essayist and ended his life on the faculty of Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a lecturer in Irish from 1956 to 1969 and professor of Irish from 1969 to 1970. At first glance, Ó Cadhain’s life seems like a typical biography of a nationbuilding intellectual of the type described by Benedict Anderson (1983), helping the Irish state assemble its own national language and recover its common heritage. But the Irish state achieved neither the political nor the linguistic unity characteristic of many European nation-states. Ireland’s consolidation as an imagined community was effected mainly through the medium of English. Although Ó Cadhain became a national intellectual and member of the educated elite, he retained the language, values, and perspectives of his or-

186



steve coleman

igins and felt acutely the contradictions engendered by a postcolonial state that based its sense of national identity on the language and culture of some of its most marginal areas. The Gaeltacht areas remain among the poorest in Ireland, and their identification with the Irish language strengthens the associations between language, culture, and class: Class distinctions are more prominent in the Gaeltacht than anywhere else in Ireland. Marx, Engels, and Lenin would get a fine proof [there] of their theory that it is the upper classes and the merchant classes—the capitalists— who are the first to abandon the wisdom or culture of the people. [To them,] poverty and Irish were the same thing. This class hatred was ingrained in me long before I ever read a word of James Connolly or of Das Kapital. (Ó Cadhain 1987: 327)

Ó Cadhain spent most of his life in active opposition to the Irish state and its policies. He joined the Irish Republican Army as a teenager, fighting on the losing side of the civil war of 1922 and 1923. In the 1930s he led a campaign for land, fishing rights, and linguistic rights for poor rural Irish speakers. His lifelong membership in the IRA led to his dismissal (in 1936) from his job as a schoolteacher. Along with many other leftists and republicans, he was interned in the Curragh prison camp—“Ireland’s Siberia, surely the coldest place in Ireland” (Ó Cadhain 1969: 7)—for most of World War II, a place he compared to Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead. This experience transformed Ó Cadhain’s life and gave him the experience that formed the basis of his career as a writer: “I spent the equivalent of five years in three or four prisons but most of it was in the prison camp in the Curragh of Kildare. I don’t wish to say much about it although it is relevant to these issues. I learned as much about humanity [there] as I would if I’d lived a hundred years. Knowledge of humanity, of life, is necessary for a writer” (26). The internees managed to turn the camp into a kind of university where Ó Cadhain taught himself and others several European languages, reading through the Russian and French classics (Ó Cadhain 1969, 1973). Over the course of his life, his politics expanded from republicanism to the Irishlanguage revival to socialism (Ó Tuathail 1999). In a 1969 speech criticizing the Irish-language movement, Ó Cadhain (1987: 327) wrote, It is the duty of Irish-speakers to be socialists. Irish-speakers in the Gaeltacht are the most oppressed and impoverished class of our people in Ireland. To me, it is the same thing to save that class, the Irish-speaking community, and to save the Irish language [itself]. The only way to achieve this is through the Reconquest of Ireland—to give ownership of Ireland and its wealth back to the Irish people.

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



187

An “underground politician,” Ó Cadhain frequently intervened in public occasions to embarrass the anglophone state into honoring its nominal commitments to the Irish language (Mac Aonghusa 1978; Ó Glaisne 1971). The current occasion at Cumann na Scribhneoirí is best considered in this light. Folklore is not history, Ó Cadhain is telling us, because the social classes who nurtured it were not the active makers of history; rather, folklore itself was “the great actor, for thousands of years of barbarism and civilization, in this phantasmagoria [dráma doilfeach] that eternally plays in the human mind.” This deep layer of everyday drama was “more interesting to us in many ways than any well-defined educated arrangement [of thought]” but “it crept off the stage [of history] in a single day” (Ó Cadhain 1990: 131). Later he will claim that it was changes in the social organization of work, especially the collective work of turf-cutting, that banished this world of the imagination (167). Yet he will also claim that the world of folklore lives eternally in the human imagination, that “new” folklore is constantly made. These arguments are reminiscent of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s later claims, both that what he considered undomesticated, “wild thought” is part of universal human nature and that, in the types of society we think of as “primitive,” this “wild thought” is constitutive of society itself (Lévi-Strauss 2021). By claiming both the universality of folklore and its historical and imaginative rootedness in particular social conditions and in the deep past, Ó Cadhain positions himself to make a powerful critique of the stance taken by professional folklorists, Celtic scholars, philologists, dialect scholars, and antiquarians. He claims that these scholars unerringly identify, value, and abstract precisely those aspects of culture that are “dead”—that have lost their function in social life and the collective imagination. By valuing the most archaic, unreflective, and localized cultural forms, these scholars deliberately cut themselves off from the great sweep of change that flows through human society and culture. Anything, as long as it is archaic, fragmentary, and not actively an object of thought or reflection by a conscious human subject, is of value to the scholar, although he quotes them as saying that the true value of any bit of folklore cannot be established—such judgments are indefinitely deferred as more and more millions of pages of text are collected and archived. Worse still, these scholars identify this archived material with culture and civilization itself, while constituting it as things (texts) that by design exclude precisely the likes of Ó Cadhain himself and his audience of Irish-speaking writers. In prose that boils with rage, Ó Cadhain (1990: 138–139) turns the scholars’ own words against them—their methodological dictates, their disciplinary self-celebrations, and their predictions of the always-imminent demise of “the old ways” and of the Irish language itself—a demise that will only increase the scholars’ own value as the only true custodians of the past:

188



steve coleman

There are no skills except the old skills. There is no learning but the learning of old people without learning. . . . The importance of the Gaeltacht isn’t that one can learn Irish there. Nor that Irish could spread from there to the rest of the country. Little chance. It’s there that “the old-ways” are practiced. It’s there above all where there is folklore. The Gaeltacht is only a branch of folklore.

Ó Cadhain contrasts a dynamic view of the Gaeltacht and its cultural forms as a site for transformation with the conservative view that sees the Gaeltacht only as a wellspring of tradition. The collection of Gaeltacht speech as “folklore” paradoxically removes it to new forms and contexts where its community life ceases; for the bourgeoisie, reified folklore becomes “a string of shiny baubles from the trinket-shop of the gods” (Ó Cadhain 1990: 140). Taking a metaphor from his novel Cré na Cille, Ó Cadhain referred to archived folklore as “dead clay.” From the point of view of folklore scholarship, it is exactly the effects of poverty, illiteracy, and colonization that make Ireland an ideal site for folklore collection. Quoting folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair (1987: 138), “Ireland is in an exceptional position among the countries of Western Europe, for here the normal course of education and social development was interrupted for centuries.” Ó Cadhain (1990: 138) adds that “this is not cause for joy for most of us!” Likewise with Robin Flower’s lament for the effects of literacy—“Twenty years ago [a particular storyteller’s] mind was alive with antique memories, and in him and men like him, an old stable world endured still as it had endured for centuries. But now the fatal drip of the printer’s ink has obliterated the agelong pattern” (quoted in Ó Cadhain 1990: 138)—and Séamas Ó Duilearga’s praise for a schoolteacher who “spoke Irish from his youth, and only Irish, so that he had every turn of talk and old saying, and he was completely free of the discipline of books [smacht na leabhair]”—to which Ó Cadhain adds, “strange praise indeed for a schoolmaster!” (138). Folklore as the absolute, retrojected past (McLean 2004) was continually re-presented as the foundation and warrant for the modern state, underwriting the state’s modernity (Ó Giolláin 1996, 2000). The folkloric discipline of the archival state constituted itself as a project of rescue and cultural retrieval, founded on the romantic notion that authentic culture belongs to a forever-receding past. Ó Cadhain mercilessly interrogated this discourse of cultural “death,” revealing the hidden affinities between romantic antimodernism and the “homogenous empty time” (Benjamin 1969: 263) of the new Irish state. As a native Irish speaker from one of the most folklorized communities in Ireland, Ó Cadhain had a unique perspective on the pragmatics of textuality at both “folk” and national levels. He pointed out that both the state and local

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



189

tradition-bearers assumed that their role was that of the faithful transmitter of “texts” for future generations. The state saw itself as engaged in a gigantic archival/rescue program, as the repository and final interpretant of a vanishing language and a set of cultural texts. As the case of Ó Cadhain’s grandfather shows us, the right to recount traditional tales was always restricted and jealously guarded in local communities; from the local point of view, the state had now arrogated to itself the locally defined role of authorized teller of tales. Symptomatic of their inadvertent role as authorized tradition-bearers, folklorists did little to encourage local tradition-bearers to actively pass on their skills in new environments, such as the school system. School was seen as the domain of literacy, and as we have seen, literacy was seen as poisonous to (officially) “authentic” folklore. Insisting that “genuine” folklore is exclusively oral in nature led scholars such as Ó Duilearga to dismiss the written traditions of Ireland. Thus, discussing the manuscript tradition, which he claims died out at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ó Duilearga writes, “These poor tattered copybooks mark the end of a continuous literary tradition; they are the last link in the long chain of Gaelic literature” (quoted in Ó Cadhain 1990: 151). Ó Cadhain objects that he had a handwritten manuscript that was made in 1930 and that songs, prayers, and even newly composed poetry are still written out to send to American relations. His main objection to Ó Duilearga’s statements, however, is that his image of a dying manuscript tradition and an absolute break with the past ignores the reality of the Irish writing of the Gaelic Revival, already underway in the period Ó Duilearga speaks of: Before the “tattered copybooks” or the “last links of Gaelic literature” came to a halt, wasn’t the school of the [Gaelic] Revival—an tAthair Peadar [Ó Laoghaire], [Pádraig] Pearse, [Pádraig] Ó Conaire—under way? Isn’t Irish-language literature growing more than it has for 150 years? Séamas Ó Duilearga gets a great taste out of talking about “last links.” (Ó Cadhain 1990: 152)2

Throughout his lecture Ó Cadhain is careful to point out that Irish folklore and linguistic scholarship constitutes its authority in part on the basis of the vanishingness and/or obscurity of its object of study. As Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs (2003: 16), observe, creating and maintaining “intertextual gaps” is the key to this process: There will inevitably be an intertextual gap between the source text, however conceived, and the [scholarly] text-artifact. Most importantly, the source text is conceived as oral, collectively shaped by the traditionalizing process, premodern in form and provenance, while the text artifact is written, individually rendered, and presented in a printed book, a quintessentially modern

190



steve coleman

venue. And it is precisely in the space of hybridity defined by these contrastive qualities that the politics of authenticity—one of the key tropes of modernity—are contested.

Folklorists’ and linguists’ avoidance of standard orthography is a case in point, where scholars seek to emphasize the gap between oral culture and their own scholarly output, but at the same time to attempt to minimize it through what Ó Cadhain (1990: 147) would consider excessive attempts to render their texts phonetically true to their sources: Scholars and collectors are not more numerous than orthographic systems. And of course, they love that; it is their aspiration. Anyone who wants a scholarly reputation or a reputation in the Irish language will do the same. [He] is a person without a genealogy without it. It will exaggerate the differences between the dialects and make them more permanent. It is a solace to the native speaker who didn’t sleep a wink last night worrying that his own Irish would be betrayed in the morning. It is a solace to the professor who got his chair from the dialect and place-lore of Tóin le Gaoith [Arse-to-theWind, a common place-name]. It is a solace to the scholar who is creating a [professorial] chair for himself before Tóin le Gaoith slips out of arse-lore [tóinseanchas] forever.”

Thus the words of Irish speakers, both as writers and as folkloric informants, were to be committed to written text as examples of “dialect.” Ó Cadhain (1990: 147) pointed out that in effect, “the only ‘Irish writers’ are the English-speakers. The Irish-language writers are ‘idiomatic Munster writers’ or ‘colloquial Connemara writers’ or ‘racy Rosses’ writers.’” The state’s efforts to lovingly preserve its Irish-language heritage had the unforeseen effect of making English the locus not only of “national literature” but of linguistic convergence, standardization, and state-building. English was the language of the future, Irish the language of the past. Obsessed with death and the passing of old ways, Ó Cadhain tells us, folklore scholars’ attention is continually misdirected. Thus Ó Duilearga, saying that when the currently living old-timers in the Gaeltacht pass away, it will mean “the end of the Middle Ages in Western Europe,” and after quoting several similarly elegiac passages from these scholars Ó Cadhain (1990: 153) reads us a passage from a news story in the 21 January 1950 issue of the Sunday Independent: Penniless, footsore and hungry, a 17 1/2 year old boy from the Galway Gaeltacht wandered into the Lancashire town of Wigan one night recently. . . . The boy spoke very little English. So the official in charge rang up a member

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



191

of the Council, who is a native Irish speaker, and requested him to call at the office to act as interpreter.

Then he comments on “the end of the Middle Ages in Wigan, in South Boston, in the Bowery. . . . Have these longers for the Middle Ages ever opened their sweet little mouths in order to maintain these remnants of the Middle Ages as a community? They were prudent in their day. They grabbed a leprechaun and never took their eyes off it” (1990: 153). Here, he refers to the popular superstition that if one catches a leprechaun, one must not take one’s eyes off of it lest it escape. Folklore scholars’ fixation on the old and passing elements of culture effectively blinds them to the reality of the people and communities who produce it. This fixation amounts to a fetish whereby the life and spirit of the Gaeltacht is seen to adhere not in the people themselves, or even their own active creativity and imagination, but rather in the decontextualized products of the folklore collection process. Thus, quoting critic and translator Arland Ussher, Ó Cadhain comments that “the Middle Ages are still destined for a long life”: In those circumstances [the decline and death of the Irish language, which Ussher claimed was imminent], why oh why is not an “oral library” founded in the capital, an Aeolian cave of voices, where the student could turn up in the catalogue the dialect and subject of his choice, and be handed the appropriate phonograph records—with a printed translation—bottles, as it were, preserving for a more leisured posterity the flavour and “body” of the old indigenous speech? (Ussher quoted in Ó Cadhain 1990: 153–154)

Ó Cadhain then quotes folklorist Seán Ó Súilleabháin: “If the Irish language dies we will have collections from and recordings of the stories of the storytellers so that the people who come after us can understand the life of those who came before them” (154). And his voice rises at this point: Death! Death! Death! This is the sin that is being cursed to God, the Delargyan lamentation, the Medieval murmuring that is sucking the very marrow of hope from our race. All riches and gain are gone, going, or will soon go. There won’t be the least ember left and if there is, it won’t be worth noticing. (154)

What follows is an astonishing statement that transforms the sovereignty myth that underlay the precolonial Gaelic political order, in which the king is married to a goddess of sovereignty who represents both the land and the people of Ireland: If Irish is dead she is dead and ten million more pages of folklore will not bring back for our posterity any glimmer of the life it lacks. If Irish is dead

192



steve coleman

our future generations will be as proud of this “past of a dead civilization”— Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s wax cylinders—as a bride who finds the corpse of her husband’s first wife in her marriage bed. (154)

Ó Cadhain then suggests that we draw a circle on a map of central Dublin, inside of which would be “the administration, directly or indirectly, of the race” (1990: 154)—the Irish Folklore Commission, the universities and museums, and the Institute for Advanced Studies (with its “Indo-European Sahibs” [155]). Within it we can find stored up everyone who is important and everything that is dead in Irish culture, including his grandfather and “myself and my little pile of Medieval clay”: “This narrow circle is Newgrange: the earthly paradise of the Ordinary Public: The Burial-Ground of the Irish Language: The Chief-Cemetery of Ireland: The Dead Clay” (154–155). What is missing here, for Ó Cahdain? Why is this stuff “dead?” Why call it “clay?” We have seen how Ó Cadhain seems to attribute life and power to cultural elements themselves insofar as they are “alive” and also that these materials can, to some extent, be reanimated. We have seen how certain scholarly approaches, which Ó Cadhain (1990: 175) typifies as “the point of view of the folklorist” (dearcadh an bhealoideasa), seem to focus on, or even impose or foreground, the “dead” aspects of culture.3 And we have met with Ó Cadhain’s impassioned plea for the Irish state to recognize living persons—working to preserve people and their communities rather than their abstracted and processed cultural texts. We have encountered his plea, similar to that made much later by Johannes Fabian (1983), to recognize the coevality of these people rather than seeing them as representatives of an ever-retreating past. His “clay” trope focuses on the immanence—the livingness and indeed the inseparability of persons, their cultural imaginations, and their cultural products—of their talk and texts. Cultural forms that the scholars have “saved”—collected, archived, etc.—lack this livingness, this connection to the lives of actual people and to their imaginations: I asked myself at the beginning of this talk, what is folklore? . . . There’s no folklore without a mouth [the word for folklore, béaloideas, comes from the roots béal (“mouth”) and oideas (“instruction”)]. The mouths in the Cemetery are silent/dead [béil mharbha], and let the lovers of the Middle Ages sniff at them as long as they like. Let them benefit, if they can. To us there is no mouth but the living mouth, no clay but living clay. As a guide to folklore the Circle is no help to us. (Ó Cadhain 1990: 175)

Using a basic etymology (folklore as “mouth-education”) and a few puns (the term marbh can mean both “dead” and “silent”), and perhaps another pun on the Irish words for “sniff ” (bolaigh) and “collect” (bailigh), Ó Cadhain

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



193

reorients us to “the living clay,” his trope for sociality—persons in community, their imaginations, and their speech. What seems to be lacking in folklorists’ collected material, for Ó Cadhain, is any sense of futurity or emergence within folkloric material itself; it is precisely this aspect of folklore that scholarship has excised—Ó Cadhain identifies this aspect with “life.” Ó Cadhain’s trope of “dead” and “living” “clay” has a lot to do with the difference between his own relationship as a writer to the prior speech of his community and that of the scholars he criticizes. Here, he resembles the Bengali poet Arunkumar Sarkar as discussed by Chakrabarty (2000) and Bauman and Briggs (2003). For Sarkar, Ever since I was a child, I was attracted to [the] sound [of language], and it was this attraction that gave rise to the desire to write poetry. My mother used to recite different kinds of poems, my father Sanskrit verses of praise [to deities], and my grandmother the hundred and eight names of [the god] Krishna. I did not understand their meanings, but I felt absorbed in the sounds. (Quoted in Chakrabarty 2000: 251)

Chakrabarty (2000: 251) comments, This is how the archaic comes into the modern, not as a remnant of another time but as something constitutive of the present. Whatever the nature of these pasts that already ‘are,’ they are always oriented to futures that also already “are.” . . . The “having been” of Sarkar’s mother’s recitation of poetry, his father’s of Sanskrit verses, and his grandmother’s of the names of the Hindu god Krishna is (re)collected here in a movement of existence whose direction is futural. The futural direction of the movement is indicated by the phrase “the desire to write poetry.” It is within this futurity that Sarkar’s poetry writing happens. (Chakrabarty 2000: 251; Bauman and Briggs 2003: 319)

Like Sarkar, Ó Cadhain sees his own work, his own desire to write, emerge from his entanglement with the speech genres he encountered as a child. He rejects the version of modernism that would view that speech as archaic, an artifact of an “epochal gap separating antiquity from modernity” (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 320), instead identifying Irish-language writing with a future that already “is,” to use Chakrabarty’s phrase. Ó Cadhain repeatedly insists that Irish-language writing represents the genuine imaginative life of the community, and thus is a continuation of the life and function of folklore, and he identifies “life” with a rootedness in “living speech,” naming several Irish-language writers from his own and the previous century. In his discussion of “living clay” he cites Yeats as an exemplar of the approach that he advocates. Even across the great social difference between Yeats’s class and that of the “peasants” whose

194



steve coleman

speech he sought out, Yeats never denies their coevality, and, sometimes in a confused fashion, he identifies these people themselves with Ireland’s future. Ó Cadhain quotes the Yeats poem “The Municipal Gallery Revisited”: John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

He then comments: The “primitive speech”—this “living speech as against a bookish speech”—this was the guiding sign [treoirshaighead] for an Chraoibhín [Douglas Hyde] in his English translation of “The Love-Songs of Connaught.” Yeats followed this guidance, cultivating living speech and limbering it up [dhá aclú], for the rest of his life. (1990: 156)

In Ó Cadhain’s view, it was speech above all else that constituted the “living clay” of community life, its sociality. Speech was the element in which the struggle of old and new life occurred. He saw this as a dynamic aspect of all communities; he was especially sensitive to these dynamics within the Gaeltacht, where older “fossilized” forms were constantly being recycled and supplanted by new fashions of speaking (Ó Cadhain 1990: 156). He singled out the flourishing of popular (sung) poetry in the Gaeltacht, which thrived even as the older ornamented hero-tales (which had attracted the majority of attention from folklorists) died out. This poetry was continually being composed out of the “living clay” of the community’s speech, as local poets altered and recycled older, calcified forms. The lack of attention paid by folklorists to this poetry was, paradoxically, the “secret of its longevity”: “It has the public’s affection, and is serving a purpose. Beyond every other aspect of folklore, of verbal literature, it belongs completely to the community, and that is the secret of its longevity” (Ó Cadhain 1990: 166; Denvir 1989, 1997). The strength of a community’s traditions is directly linked to its sense of local autonomy, immanent in its sense of the nature of its own speech. For Ó Cadhain, this sense of local autonomy played a role in language shift as well as linguistic change. The “living speech” of the community of Kiltartan (in East Co. Galway), which inspired Yeats, came from speakers who had recently abandoned Irish in favor of English; Ó Cadhain (1990: 156) compared their “wrestling” with their “new medium of speech” to a writer’s creative struggle with his or her artistic material. He equated Yeats’s own struggle with “Kiltartanish,” “working living speech and making it more adroit” (ag saothrú urlabhra beo agus dhá aclú), to both his own and local folk poets’ struggles with the “living speech” of the Gaeltacht (156). Essential to this “life” are processes

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



195

of remediation, which involve struggles to create and possess new media and to create or renew genres, while still maintaining and giving precedence to situatedness and point of view of the speech forms of one’s community. This is an ontological commitment for Ó Cadhain, who, in an important late memoir, maintains that Irish itself (as a literary vehicle) is a “new medium” and that “it is my own, something I can’t say about any other medium.” He immediately follows this statement with a reflection upon what he hears in Irish: “the cackling of the Blackbird of Leitreach Laoigh and the musical chant of the Fianna” (Ó Cadhain 1969: 41). The historical depth and resonance of Irish intensifies both Ó Cadhain’s commitment to his medium and the seriousness of his struggle to “make it more adroit” and fully possess it. The fact that Irish was in danger of being abandoned as a community language made his ontological commitment even more serious (Nic Eoin 2015: 3). It is important to note, however, that these commitments are no less serious than those of Gaeltacht people themselves; Ó Cadhain saw a perfect continuity between the process of folkloric creation and transmission (as a process of reworking and recycling older forms) and the activities of modernist writers, like Yeats and himself, who immersed themselves in “folk speech” but were not beholden to the fossilized forms it took in the folklore archive, or to the ideology of disappearance and preservation that motivated the academy. Yeats and Ó Cadhain were aiming not to accurately represent “folk speech” but to develop and use it as a medium of expression, as a form for the writer’s own thoughts. In Ó Cadhain’s case, unlike Yeats, there was a further ontological commitment, to the community itself and its people as fundamentally “the same” as the writer himself. Cré is not just a metaphor for mutuality of being (Sahlins 2013: ix) as a writer’s textual strategy but is an expression of Ó Cadhain’s experience as having originated in a “local organic community” (Ó Cadhain 1969: 9) whose members, in Marshall Sahlins’s words, “are persons who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence; they are members of one another” (Sahlins 2013: v). Late in his life, Ó Cadhain participated in a documentary film (Ó Gallchóir 1967) in which he revisited his ancestral townland, An Cnocán Glas near An Spidéal in Co. Galway. Visiting the ruins of the house where his parents’ marriage was celebrated, Ó Cadhain insists that he remembers the wedding well—not, as one might suppose, because he had heard so many stories about it, although he had, but because he had been to so many other identical weddings and had witnessed the same events. He goes on to visualize these events: the performances, the element of competition between his father’s and mother’s “people,” and so on. The fundamental unity of these wedding celebrations is like that of different iterations or replicas of a legisign in Peirce’s sense (Ness 2016), in this case a type of complex cultural performance, precisely the kind of event where performative talk is

196



steve coleman

created. Here we sense the fundamental unity of expressive culture, kinship relations (including tensions therein), and the immanent being of Ó Cadhain and his neighbors and relations. Ó Cadhain’s relationship to the people of An Cnócan Glas is one of mediation rather than representation; his people mediate his own thoughts and work, a point driven home later in the film when he is shown having a drink with his neighbors in the local pub. As he engages in banter with a neighbor, Ó Cadhain’s voice can be heard on the soundtrack, addressing “his people”: Here they are. You’re here, I declare. Seáinin, Máirtín, Maidhc. The Cois Fhairrge family. I never put pen to paper without you on my mind, you pack of devils. Weren’t you coming between myself and the paper, going on the paper whether I intended it or not. (In Ó Gallchóir 1967)

The people of his townland “come between” Ó Cadhain, his thoughts, his work, and even the paper he writes on—the very definition of a medium, that which comes between, that which facilitates and animates. In his memoir of 1969, Ó Cadhain relates how the discovery of one of Gorky’s short stories made him realize he could be a writer. His locality, with its landscape and the faces of its men, women, and children, “began to create itself ” (1969: 26) behind his closed eyes. Media operate on three levels, I surmise. At their most superficial, they allow one to describe things: for instance, the form and generic attributes of Gorky’s short story, by means of which Ó Cadhain realizes he could describe his locality and its people. At a more intense level of engagement, the forms of media become involved directly with what they give access to, as with the “coming between-ness” Ó Cadhain attributes to “his people.” At their most intense, media enable the co-animation that, following Ó Cadhain, I attributed to folklore itself insofar as it is “living”: it animates us as we animate it.

Cré na Cille Making our escape from the rioting members of Cumann na Scribhneoirí, we can move on to a few reflections on Ó Cadhain’s masterpiece, the novel Cré na Cille (Ó Cadhain 1949), in which the characters are all dead and buried in a Connemara graveyard. Since I have already written about Cré na Cille (Coleman 1999, 2004), and considering the subsequent publishing of two excellent English translations (Ó Cadhain 2015, 2016), I will keep my description of this astonishing work to a minimum. Like his “folklore” lecture, Cré na Cille is dominated by, and could be considered a reflection on and intervention into, our concepts of life and death. As I and others have noted (Coleman 2004; L. de Paor 2014) it makes a mock-

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



197

ery of the notion of death as transcendence: with few exceptions, in death Ó Cadhain’s characters remain exactly as they were in life, their posthumous attempts to “get ahead” coming to nought. Following Alasdair Macintyre (2014), Pádraig de Paor (2016)4 suggests that Ó Cadhain was responding to the modernist lack of faith in human ends, in the sense of a telos or redemptive evolution; thus the novel is “endless” as in an unchanging but repetitive stasis. Ó Cadhain’s theatrical note on the frontispiece says “Time: Eternity.” But the term he used, de shíor, has the basic meaning of “eternally, continually, unceasingly,” as in repetitive unchanging action (P. de Paor 2016: 78; Coleman 1999: 300). We should also note that Cré na Cille conforms closely to the genre Bakhtin (1984) identifies as Menippean satire, in which, through a series of carnivalized encounters, a mockery is made of ultimate ends. As Jim Fernandez (1995, personal communication) observed about a much earlier version of this paper, “the Voices of the Dead, in their struggle against oblivion, the forgetfulness of time, to maintain their social identity, can shed light or afterlight upon the pretensions, passions and pettyness of the living. This use of a society of ‘Dead Souls’ to make comments on the ‘moral topography’ of living ones is an ancient device.” Bakhtin locates the modern avatar of the Menippea in Dostoevsky’s short story Bobok, which Ó Cadhain read and which features both the dialogue of corpses in a graveyard and the theme of organic decay: “The main thing: two or three months of life [e.g., as relatively conscious corpses], and finally— bobok!” (Dostoyevsky 1979: 54). In Dostoevsky’s story the Menippean form is intensified, and Ó Cadhain’s novel intensifies it further. The sense in Cré na Cille of “end-less-ness” as nontranscendance is complemented by the voice of “Stoc na Cille” (the Graveyard Trumpet), who, in highly poetic prose, periodically reflects on the relativity of life and death, perhaps inspiring us to notice the much greater cycle of decay and regeneration underlying Cré na Cille, in which the deceased are gradually forgotten, while the community carries on, the names of the local dead recurring in future generations (Ó Crualaoich 1981); Ó Cadhain’s next major work was a novel, unpublished in his lifetime, entitled Athnuachan (Renewal). I would like to suggest that we can read Cré na Cille, through Ó Cadhain’s Béaloideas lecture, as making a powerful contrast between the “homogenous empty time” of historical progress, as exemplified in nationalism, and a more organic, immanent, and recursive space-time, evoking a politics that Ó Cadhain perhaps never managed to fully articulate in his lifetime—although its lineaments are visible in, for example, Ó Cadhain’s slogan, “Sí teanga na muintire a shlánós an mhuintir” ([It is] the people’s own language [that] will save them). Here, speech itself as essentialized sociality is imagined as a medium of political salvation. In this slogan we can perhaps feel a basic tension in Ó Cadhain’s literary politics. As

198



steve coleman

we have seen, he saw the loving preservation of “dialect” as pointless in itself, compared with the potential of the Irish language to generalize itself across the wider speech communities of Ireland. This latter potential he identified especially with writers and their struggle to develop Irish as a “new medium.” But he did not appear to identify with the impulse of the modern nation-state to create a superposed “Standard,” imposed from above, nor with the transcendence, purification, and standardization of dialect that have been felt to be a contribution of the novel form to nationalism. The rhetorical structure of Cré na Cille—lacking a narrator and written entirely in direct voice of its characters—perfectly expresses this tension, as will be discussed below.

The Novel as Medium and Trope The novel form itself has been theorized as a rhetorical trope, which is to say, a figuration of something else. Several theorists have maintained that the novel as a genre bears a special relationship—whether figurative or literal or somewhere in between—to the nation, the public, the linguistic community, modernity, the human condition, and so on. In the thought of Anderson and Bakhtin, the novel performs as a trope, to dynamically “figure,” and thereby help bring about, complex new social realities. In the course of this process, the tropic qualities of the novel are partially superseded or otherwise fade from consciousness. For Anderson (1983), the novel’s importance to the nation depends on its particular relationships to space and time; its use of standardized language enables it to encompass and represent the speech of vast territories, which in turn gives it the ability to represent simultaneity. It is this latter quality that enables the novel to trope the nation-state: “[The novel] is clearly a device for the presentation of simultaneity in ‘homogeneous, empty time,’ or a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile’” (1983: 25). It is with the portrayal of multiple lives unfolding within the same temporal framework, which is also found in the newspaper—“reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot” (Anderson 1983: 33)—that the novel comes to accurately represent modern time. As readers of novels and newspapers, we learn to position ourselves, along with the people we read about, within the same temporal “envelope,” and thus we come to imagine ourselves as inhabiting the large collectivities that we call “nations.” Anderson saw “print-capitalism”—the production of standardized and commodified language—as necessary to this process; standardized language and the commercialized print genres it enables construct a sharable space-time. There is a question about the literality of this “trope,” however.

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



199

As Michael Silverstein (2000: 126) points out, Anderson did not fully see the space-time of the novel as a trope, preferring to “to mistake the dialectically produced trope of ‘we’-ness for the reality.” Anderson thus seems to envision, then partially forget, the novel’s creative, rhetorical force in bringing the nation into being. He ultimately settles for a view of the novel as merely revealing, through its representation, a genuine sociotemporal reality, although he maintains that the large-scale collectivities that inhabit it are (merely?) “imagined.” And yet in Anderson’s system nationality itself, as an “anthropological” quality of the person of the same order as kinship and gender, is felt to be primordial, not bound to the dynamics of homogenous, empty time (Silverstein 2000: 109, 117). So the novel both performatively figures nation-ness as coexistence in historical time and ideologically obscures its own figuration. In Cré na Cille, however, we are made aware of the extent to which the “Andersonian” properties of the novel are really the product of the existence, or possible existence, of a more or less omniscient narrator, since “simultaneity” implies the power to judge that different actions in different places are happening at the same time. Because Cré na Cille has no narrator and exists only as the direct speech of characters who are not even named, except in the speech of other characters, there is no possibility of a narrator’s point of view. The corpses’ knowledge of historical events in the outside world is hopelessly distorted, relying as they must on news and rumors brought by newly arrived corpses but also on folkloric prophecies, contested, biased “retellings” of past events, and so forth. Almost every definitive statement made by a corpse is instantly contradicted and ridiculed by another. The characters are trapped in the claustrophobic repetitiveness of hidebound habit alluded to above. The action of Cré na Cille takes place within a chronotope in which both time (as mere repetition and decay) and space (consisting only of the rudimentary division of the graveyard into three sections according to the amount spent on a corpse’s plot) are reduced to practically nothing. We can view this as complex political space as well, in which are overlaid the space-times of the Curragh prison camp in which Ó Cadhain was interred, that of the Gaeltacht as a claustrophobically small, marginalized community, and that of the Irish state itself. It is from this that Cré na Cille draws its power as a satirical antinovel and as a critique of the stasis in which Ireland found itself in the decades following independence. Indeed, “representation” in its political sense is impossible in a space where all peoples’ voices are audible, all the time. Ó Cadhain dramatizes this through a hilariously portrayed, disastrous attempt to found a local Rotary Club and hold elections within the graveyard. In this sense, there is an almost utopian striving toward a very different “imagined community,” aligned much more with the space-time of Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary history, a cyclic

200



steve coleman

time of recurrence that Ó Cadhain (1999 [1963]) identified with the insurrectionary politics of Wolf Tone, who, Ó Cadhain (1990: 142) reminds us in his folklore lecture, had no folklore but nonetheless “brought two navies to Ireland” (see Whelan 1996). If Cré na Cille lacks both the industrially produced standardized language and the sense of “traveling together” through homogenous, empty time that Anderson celebrates, it also lacks much of the “orchestration” of voices that Bakhtin discovers in the novel. In Bakhtin’s case, the novel plays a particular role in the development of the modern linguistic community, society, and indeed consciousness itself, to the extent that its creative function—its role in bringing these things into being—perhaps outweighs its representational role as merely a complex diagram of social life. In Bakhtin’s (1981) view, the novel emerges from the heteroglossia (social diversity of ways of speaking) of the nation-state as a socially and linguistically stratified society. Social diversity gives rise to a multiplicity of ways of speaking; Bakhtin thought of this process in terms of “centrifugal forces” that work to diversify language. These are opposed by the “centripetal” forces that tend to “unify” language—and that are exemplified in state institutions such as the educational system, the machinery of academic normative grammar, formal linguistics, and certain genres such as literary poetry. The novel takes this diversity of speech types as its artistic medium, bringing them, in the form of its variously “voiced” characters, into dialogue. Speech becomes “voiced” when particular forms (“words,” styles, etc.) become infused with the points of view and value systems of particular social strata. This process is enabled by the unique ability of language to represent speech in speech (Voloshinov 1973; Bakhtin 1981; Lucy 1993). In this manner, heteroglossia becomes represented as a system of social “accents.” Bakhtin thought of these in terms of “tastes”: it is when words come out of our own mouths that we “taste” the “socially charged contexts” in which they originate. Social dialogue is in no small measure a struggle to “appropriate” linguistic forms to one’s own intentions—to assimilate them to one’s own social context. This, then, is the basis of “centrifugal forces” within language, as this struggle gives rise to more and more highly differentiated forms of speech. The novel is the perfect medium for the emergence of heteroglossia and its transformation into something more profound. In the novel, heteroglossia is “orchestrated”—as different social “voices,” as embodied in the speech and thought of characters, are brought into dialogue and artistically arranged by the author: “The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of [heteroglossia] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions” (Bakhtin 1981: 263).

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



201

“Polyphony”—the novelistic expression of heteroglossia—“is precisely what happens between various consciousnesses, that is, their interaction and interdependence” (Bakhtin 1984: 36). As an accentual system, in Silverstein’s (1999: 104) analysis, the Bakhtinian novel evokes a (sometimes hidden) center, a point of view that emerges as relatively neutral or “unaccented” in contradistinction to the styles of various characters, a social position that the reader feels him- or herself as potentially inhabiting. This neutral center may be identified with the voice of a narrator, a hero/protagonist, or even no one at all; it may still be felt to be “present” virtually, perhaps identified with socially “standard” speech—the target of centripetal forces in society. In this way the novel figures the linguistic community itself, as a collection of socially diverse, linguistically accented, personal “types.” The novel helps bring together (bring into dialogue) socially diverse strata of society, thus helping to create the complex unity that it describes. In Bakhtin’s theory, the novel as a genre is thus performative; it is a powerful means of bringing about the unified yet sociolinguistically diverse linguistic community that it represents. Silverstein evokes Peirce’s trope of a map of an island drawn in the very sand of that island to illustrate the way that the polyphonic novel constructs its indexical center. Peirce observes that within such a map there is always one point that perfectly corresponds to the point it represents. Likewise, there is a point within the novel’s polyphony around which all of its “voices” take their relational meanings—they gain their “tastes” in relation to it (Silverstein 2000: 117–118). Just as with the polyrhythmic music of West Africa, where the central unifying “beat” is heard but not performed (Chernoff 1979), in the realist polyphonic novel such an indexical center need not be explicitly voiced in order to be sensed. All of this is only a prelude, however, to what Bakhtin saw as the novel’s main accomplishment as a still-emerging genre in modernity. The fundamentally dialogic and socially charged nature of language—plus the ability, inherent in language, to represent speech and thought linguistically (through various types of quotation)—creates a new semiotic potential, realized completely only in the novel, to represent, and by doing so, to model, consciousness (Banfield 1993). The novel thus allows us to explore and extend the interanimation of human consciousness through various types of dialogue between characters and among characters, narrators, and readers themselves. Bakhtin saw the novel, in the hands of authors such as Dickens and especially Dostoevsky, as bringing about a transformation in human consciousness. He saw this accomplishment in terms of Dostoevsky’s refusal to “finalize” his characters— to fully objectify them. One encounters a Dostoyevskyan character from both “outside” (through descriptions of their features and language) and “inside” (via their own thought), and furthermore, these perspectives are indivisible, as

202



steve coleman

both narrative consciousness and that of other characters are infused with that of his or her own consciousness as a “living” character. The novel, for Bakhtin, thus becomes an immensely complex trope of social life itself, as well as a revolutionary instrument for the transformation of that very social life. Needless to say, the orchestration and dialogicization of heteroglossia are largely absent in Cré na Cille. We have the direct speech of characters but little or none of the interpenetration of consciousness that Bakhtin (1984: 32) celebrates. What of the novel’s role within a complex, multilingual, postcolonial polity such as that of modern Ireland? In the Irish case, we see the novel as never fully superseding its tropic character, as the social reality it represents never develops into the fully fledged national order on which Anderson and Bakhtin base their analyses. As several theorists have pointed out, Irish realities challenge both the Andersonian and the Bakhtinian models. Luke Gibbons (1996, 2005) points out that there are two, largely incompatible, nationalist traditions in Ireland: constitutional nationalism, which largely follows the pattern mapped out by Anderson, but also an insurrectionary nationalism, which both James Joyce and, as discussed above, Ó Cadhain identified. Modern Ireland is the product of both of these traditions, which have their own (opposed and incompatible) space-times. Any sort of realist representation of Irish reality would have to somehow represent both of these as “simultaneously” present, the “homogenous, empty time” of constitutional nationalism coexisting in consciousness with an insurrectionary, nonlinear time in which the past is always virtually or potentially present. In Joyce’s work we can find a vivid sense of the copresence of these two space-times, provided we understand that this situation is not represented (in the sense of a definite description, which would be impossible) as much as it is indicated, via depictions of characters’ (often uneasy) relationships to the landscape and to cultural forms such as songs and ballads. David Lloyd (1993) points out similar problems with Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of “orchestration,” arguing that the Irish postcolonial order poses insurmountable problems for the achievement of a unified “voice,” in effect suggesting that Irish heteroglossia is not “orchestratable” in the relatively straightforward way that Bakhtin suggests. As a result, instead of the great humanist interanimation of voice and consciousness that was achieved by the likes of Dickens and Dostoevsky, writers like Joyce resorted to an “adulteration” and “contamination” of voices by incompatible others: Thus, for instance, [Leopold] Bloom cannot be the exemplary hero of what might be an Irish epic, not only because of his status as “neither fish nor fowl,” to quote the Citizen, but because Ulysses as a whole refuses the narrative veri-

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



203

similitude within which the formation of representative man could be conceived. The aesthetic formation of the exemplary citizen requires not alone the selection of an individual sociologically or statistically “normative,” but the representation of that individual’s progress from unsubordinated contingency to socially significant integration with the totality. This requires in turn what Bakhtin describes as “a combining of languages and styles into a higher unity,” the novel’s capacity to “orchestrate all its themes” into a totality. . . . Ulysses’ most radical movement is in its refusal to fulfill either of these demands and its correspondent refusal to subordinate itself to the socializing functions of identity formation. It insists instead on a deliberate stylization of dependence and inauthenticity, a stylization of the hybrid status of the colonized subject as of the colonized culture, their internal adulteration and the strictly parodic modes that they produce in every sphere. (Lloyd 1993: 110)

“Unsubordinated contingency” describes very accurately the qualities of both character and voice that we find in Cré na Cille. Ó Cadhain’s novel more closely follows the pattern of Gaeltacht verbal art than the modern novel (Ó Crualaoich 1989; Coleman 2004), intensifying the generic form of agallamh beirte, or poetic dialogue (a popular form of Gaeltacht verbal art), bringing it into the realm of the Menippean satire discussed above. These generic forms aim not for transcendence but for what Bakhtin (1984: 114) terms “the testing of an idea”—in the case of Cré na Cille, the very idea of a future for Ireland as a modern nation-state in which Irish speakers fulfill roles as “representative man” or “exemplary citizens.” Frantz Fanon (2004: 160), in his essay “On National Culture,” criticizes “intellectuals” in much the same way that Ó Cadhain criticizes the Irish folklorists of 1950: The culture with which the intellectual is preoccupied is very often nothing but an inventory of particularisms. Seeking to cling close to the people, he clings merely to a visible veneer. This veneer, however, is merely a reflection of a dense, subterranean life in perpetual renewal. . . . Instead of seeking out this substance, the intellectual lets himself be mesmerized by these mummified fragments which, now consolidated, signify, on the contrary, negation, obsolescence, and fabrication.

Observing the cultural transformations of prerevolutionary Algeria, Fanon describes the reawakening of “traditional” arts—storytelling, music, sculpture, etc.—as they cast off rigid forms, becoming future-oriented and reconnected to life. We can see Ó Cadhain yearning for the same transformation, trying to bring it about in both his literary and polemical work. Like the people of An Cnocán Glas who mediate Ó Cadhain’s thought and writing, his sense of

204



steve coleman

them as “living clay” animates Ó Cadhain’s aesthetic choices, even to the point of leading him to the impasses of Cré na Cille. His refusal or inability to write an “Irish novel” that would function transcendently to figure the nation in the manner described by Anderson and Bakhtin is a measure of his belief in the language and culture of the Gaeltacht and his desire to stay true to the life of its inhabitants. “Clay,” as his master trope, is alive to the extent that Ó Cadhain uses it to mediate his own thought and writing. As signs in Peirce’s sense (Ness 2016), not only do tropes in general move us—so that we are not in the same place or on the same footing after encountering them meaningfully—but they are themselves alive; they are what Peirce (1976: 243–244) called “powers” active in the world, which can grow, decline, and die.

Postscript November 2020: revisions are due today on this chapter. Ó Cadhain is fifty years dead. On Raidió na Gaeltachta, local folklore has come under local control (de Mórdha 2019). The pithy sayings of beloved aunts are captured by Gaeltacht people and blasted out live to the universe on social media. The people are reclaiming their own speech. I am thinking about my fellow contributors to this volume who have passed away. I am thinking about how some of us drunkenly looked for Ó Cadhain’s grave once, by the sea in Connemara; eventually I discovered that he is buried behind my house in Dublin. I am thinking about how I used to imagine anonymous blog commenting as the most Cré na Cillish medium yet. But we are in the Age of Animation now (Silvio 2019), and the age of mass extinction, and most living humans are natives of a world where Ó Cadhain’s “dráma doilfeach” has a new type of materiality, and “our environment is in a state of constant mutability and flux, and . . . the division between the world of mutability, dreams, and the unconscious, and the hard and fast ‘real’ is an increasingly ambiguous one” (Napier 2005: 74). It is level 5 lockdown in Dublin, and I am thinking about how COVID-19 enters a community invisibly and then fades into view as symptoms appear through the population—you do not “get” COVID, you discover you have already gotten it, and already passed it on, and maybe people will die. I wonder sometimes if we are already dead, translated into that world of mutability; is this what it feels like to wake up as graveyard clay? I am thinking about those policemen in 1950, young Gardaí Síochána, big country lads in the city, as they prepare to enter Cumann na Scribhneoirí to break up the melee. It is cinematic, a close-up: the intake of breath, the opening of the door, the pause as the host lets them in. That blue light. They silently rebuffer, in

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



205

a darkened room, in their little rectangular boxes. Up on the screen are two young men from the Royal Irish Academy (the Gardaí remove their caps), discussing Ó Cadhain’s lexicographic work, which they are preparing for publication in April 2021.5 In Ó Cadhain’s handwritten manuscripts, the headwords are illustrated with snatches of conversation he has collected from the visitinghouses of Connemara, by real, named individuals, each entry a miniature extract from some long-extinct social drama, a rough draft of a short story (Dillon and Ó Cuaig 2020). Of course. Ó Cadhain wouldn’t make any other kind of dictionary, would he? Steve Coleman (PhD Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1999) is lecturer in anthropology at Maynooth University, Ireland. His research focuses on politics, identity, and performance in the Irish Gaeltacht, via linguistic anthropology, semiotics, ethnomusicology, and performance studies. Recent interests include the politics of nature and autonomy in minority-language communities and new practices of remediation and animation in the national and transnational spheres. Notes 1. All other translations in this chapter are my own. 2. See also Briody 2014: 60. Phrases in Ó Cadhain’s statements that originally appear in English are italicized. 3. This “folklorist’s point of view” derives from two different lineages; note that Ó Cadhain criticizes both: “The antiquarian line focuses on survivals of custom and belief, is not primarily concerned with poetics and textuality except insofar as texts encode custom and belief, and tends to valorize progress, though it may allow a bit of nostalgic regret to enter in, lamenting the inevitable loss of old pleasures, while the philological line in its romantic-nationalist guise, centers more on texts as such, with attention to poetics and textuality, though the texts are seen as distressed, sacred objects” (Richard Bauman 2000, personal communication). 4. I am indebted to Máirín Nic Eoin for this reference. 5. See https://focloiruichadhain.ria.ie.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. London: Verso. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Banfield, Ann. 1993. “Where Epistemology, Style, and Grammar Meet Literary History: The Development of Represented Speech and Thought.” In Reflexive Language: Reported

206



steve coleman

Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. John A. Lucy, 339–364. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken. Briody, Mícheál. 2014. “‘Dead Clay and Living Clay’: Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Criticisms of the Work of the Irish Folklore Commission.” Approaching Religion 4(1): 55–65. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chernoff, John Miller. 1979. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coleman, Steve. 1999. “Return from the West: A Poetics of Voice in Irish.” PhD dissertation. Chicago: University of Chicago. ———. 2004. “The Nation, the State, and the Neighbors: Personation in Irish-Language Discourse.” Language & Communication 24(4): 381–411. de Paor, Louis. 2014. “Irish Language Modernisms.” In The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary, 161–173. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Paor, Pádraig. 2016. “Ends, Endings, and Endlessness in Cré na Cille.” In New Trails and Beaten Paths in Celtic Studies, ed. Maria Bloch-Trojnar, Robert Looby, Mark Ó Fionnáin, and Aleksander Bednarski, 75–89. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL. de Mórdha, Dáithí. 2019. “RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta & Cultúr Phobal na Gaeltachta.” PhD dissertation. Cork: University College. Denvir, Gearóid. 1989. “The Living Tradition: Oral Irish Language Poetry in Connemara Today.” Éire-Ireland 24(1): 92–108. ———. 1997. Litríocht agus Pobal: Cnuasach Aistí. Indreabhán, Connemara: Cló IarChonnachta. Dillon, Charles, and Colm Ó Cuaig. 2020. “Máirtín Ó Cadhain: Foclóirí.” Máirtín Ó Cadhain 2020 conference, Trinity College Dublin (via Zoom), 20 November 2020. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. 1979. “Bobok: Notes of a Certain Man.” In The Diary of a Writer, translated and annotated by Boris Brasol, 43–57. Santa Barbara, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. “On National Culture.” In The Wretched of the Earth, 145–80. New York: Grove. Fernandez, James W. 1995. Commentary on “Voices of the Dead and a ‘New Medium’: Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille,” by Steve Coleman. American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, November 1995. Gibbons, Luke. 1996 “Identity without a Centre: Allegory, History and Irish Nationalism.” In Transformations in Irish Culture, 134–147. Cork: Cork University Press. ———. 2005. “Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland, and Colonial Modernity.” Field Day Review (1): 71–86. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2021. Wild Thought: a New Translation of “La pensée sauvage,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Harold Leavitt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lloyd, David. 1993. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment. Dublin: Lilliput.

Ó cadhain, rhetoric, and immanence



207

Lucy, John A., ed. 1993. Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mac Aonghusa, Proinsias. 1978. “Máirtín Ó Cadhain: Fear Cúise ar Bhealaí Conspóideacha.” Scríobh 3: 87–107. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2014. “Ends and Endings.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 88(4): 807–21. McLean, Stuart. 2004. The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Napier, Susan J. 2005. “The Problem of Existence in Japanese Animation.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149(1): 72–79. Ness, Sally Ann. 2016. Choreographies of Landscape: Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park. London: Berghahn. Nic Eoin, Máirín. 2015. “Léirmheas: Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe.” COMHARTaighde 1: 2–10. Ó Cadhain, Máirtín. 1949. Cré na Cille: Aithris i nDeich nEadarlúid. Dublin: Sáirséal agus Dill. ———. 1969. Páipéir Bhána agus Páipéir Bhreaca. Dublin: An Clóchomhar Tta. ———. 1973. As an nGéibheann: Litreacha Chuig Tomás Bairéad. Dublin: Sáirséal agus Dill. ———. 1987 (1970). “Gluaiseacht na Gaeilge gluaiseacht ar strae.” In De Ghlaschloich an Oileáin: Beatha agus Saothar Mháirtín Uí  Cadhain, ed. An tSr. Bosco Costigan and Seán Ó Curraoin, 317–331. Indreabhán: Cló Iar-Chonnachta. ———. 1990 (1950). “Béaloideas.” In Ó Cadhain i bhFeasta, ed. Seán Ó Laighin, 129–181. Dublin: Clódhanna Teo. ———. 1999 (1963). Tone: Inné agus Inniu. Dublin: Coiscéim. ———. 2015. The Dirty Dust: Cré na Cille, trans. Alan Titley. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2016. Graveyard Clay: Cré na Cille; A Narrative in Ten Interludes, trans. Liam Mac an Iomaire and Tim Robinson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ó Cathasaigh, Aindrias. 2002. Ag samhlú troda: Máirtín Ó Cadhain 1905–1970. Dublin: Coiscéim. Ó Crualaoich, Gearóid. 1981. “Domhan na Cille agus Domhan na Bréige.” Scriobh 5: 80–86. ———. 1989. “Máirtín Ó Cadhain agus Dioscúrsa na Gaeilge.” In Léachtaí Uí Chadhain, ed. Eoghan Ó hAnluain, 166–180. Dublin: An Clóchomhar Tta. Ó Gallchóir, Aindreas, dir. 1967. Ó Cadhain sa gCnocán Glas. Dublin: RTÉ. Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid. 1996. “An Cultúr Coiteann agus Léann an Bhéaloidis.” Léachtaí Cholm Cille 36: 137–158. ———. 2000. Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity. Cork: Cork University Press. Ó Glaisne, Risteárd. 1971. “Máirtín Ó Cadhain: Fear Poiblí.” Comhar 30(10): 16–21. Ó Tuathail, Séamas. 1999. “An Cadhanach, An Ghaeilge is an Polaitíocht.” In Criostalú: Aistí ar Shaothar Mháirtín Uí Chadhain, ed. Cathal Ó Háinle, 158–167. Dublin: Coiscéim. Peirce, Charles S. 1976. The New Elements of Mathematics. The Hague: Mouton. Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is—And Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1999. “NIMBY Goes Linguistic: Conflicted ‘Voicings’ from the Culture of Local Language Communities.” Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 35(2): 101–123.

208



steve coleman

———. 2000. “Whorfianism and the Linguistic Imagination of Nationality.” In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Paul V. Kroskrity, 85–138. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Silvio, Terri. 2019. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Voloshinov, V. N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whelan, Kevin. 1996. The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830. Cork: Cork University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Parapraxis Today The US Flag and the Mythopoesis of Self and Other in Post-/ New England Bernard Bate       

And here is now another example: I am at the barber’s, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. —Roland Barthes, “Myth Today”

When considering the uses and meanings of the US flag, one is tempted to appeal to the concept of fetishism, specifically state fetishism, an aestheticized misrecognition of the ultimate sources of power (Mbembe 1995; Taussig 1993; cf. Abrams 1988; Radcliffe-Brown 1955 [1940]; Trouillot 2001). The concept of the fetish emphasizes the ways people misrecognize things, imbue certain objects with powers or inherent attractions that hide or erase the reality of the social or psychic relations that are their true source (Apter and Pietz 1993; Freud 1928, 1971 [1900], 2000; Graeber 2005; Marx 1976, 1990). And indeed, the use of the US flag—especially during times of war or crisis, as in the United States in the years following the terrorist attacks of September 2001—lends itself easily to such analysis. Repeated congressional attempts to pass constitutional amendments to protect the flag from “desecration,” for instance, have been broadly criticized by scholars, journalists, and members of the general public, for confusing an object (the flag) with the true source of our freedoms (laws enacted in the Bill of Rights).

210



bernard bate

In this essay there will be moments in which we meditate on such exquisite forms of misrecognition, on the blessed rage for order that underlies extreme forms of nationalism. But there are several good reasons why the concept of the fetish might trouble us: as Jean Baudrillard (1981) put it, fetishism never entirely eschews its colonialist and Abrahamic underpinnings as it asserts a phenomenological superiority (of an evolutionary or rational kind) over those who behold the object of their fetishistic desires (see also Apter 1993; Foucault 1978: 153–154; Nye 1993). The European missionary, for instance, who encounters the savage worshiping an “idol” (a fetish) that he thinks is his god knows that the savage misrecognizes whom he is really worshiping. Likewise, when Marx (1990) deploys the concept in the opening chapter of Capital, volume 1, to demonstrate the fetishistic qualities of the commodity, he does so ironically, turning the usual stance of European phenomenological superiority on its head (Althusser 1971: 162–170; Pietz 1993). But in doing so, does his irony not imply that there really is something to turn on its head? At this moment, Marx engages the anthropological trope of seeing the savage in the civilized, thereby reconstituting the opposition in the process. Freud’s (1928, 1971 [1900], 2000) notion of sexual fetishism also appears as a kind of ontological superiority over those who, in our estimation, misrecognize one thing for another as the object of their desire. If we push the concept further, might we also say that all concepts of desire, love, attachment, passion, and all such human powers and failings are fetishistic in some way? Indeed, perhaps we might say, following David Graeber (2005), that all gods (and devils, our highest values, our deepest fears, and so on) are created in such fashion. We may not like it as semeiosic rationalists and “children of the Enlightenment” (Keane 1997, 2007) but saying, then, that human beings engage in fetishistic practices of one sort or another becomes like saying that human beings breathe. We will not claim that there were no moments of misrecognition, or erasure, no instances of what appeared to be fetishism writ large in the kinds of pervasive ultranationalism that characterized a great deal of the post-9/11 United States—and with such tragic consequences for so many around the world. But we will also argue that such obviously powerful signs as the US flag do not so much erase things as refract them in new ways (Voloshinov 1973: 17–24). And we will also suggest that to explore what the sign appears to reveal in its refraction rather than erase and hide may be more fruitful than to erect a phenomenological prophylaxis about our own scholarly insights as the scholarly appeal to fetishism, in some respects, does. To account for this refraction, this essay appeals to Freud’s (1965 [1901], 1966 [1916]) concept of parapraxis: the slip. Freud discusses parapraxis at length in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; parapraxis also forms the first part of his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. In addition to the embar-

parapraxis today



211

rassing “Freudian slip,” other “everyday psychopathologies” include forgetting names or events and suppressing childhood memories. Parapraxis forefronts not misrecognition but true revelation of an awkward and embarrassing sort. It is in some respects the opposite of the fetish. Parapraxis permits us to see that nationalist mythologies do not so much hide or erase elements of social existence but refract and transform them, turning the things of history and ideology into the stuff of nature (Barthes 1972 [1957]; Bourdieu 1977 [1972]: 72–95).1 Indeed, the maximally refractive qualities of the US flag—that is, its penchant for being seen quite differently from a great many socioideological positions (Voloshinov 1973: 9–15)—makes it a particularly productive object of semiotic cum anthropological analysis and critical inquiry more generally. Further, we will explore the mode of parapractic refraction by which the flag appears to expand and contract from a sign of the collectivity, the nation, and its people—“all of us”—to a sign of particular parts of that collectivity, in particular, the military and, peculiarly, the president and his policies. When we speak of how one inchoate topic (e.g., the state, the nation) is expressed by another, we speak of poetic processes, specifically tropes, or “movements” of meaning (Fernandez 1986, 1991). Here we will focus on what appears to be the central trope of parapractic production in this case: synecdoche, the master trope of self and other, particularly in crisis situations such as war (Friedrich 1979a, 1991). The chapter is ultimately a meditation on the mythopoetic processes inherent within nationalism and the production of historically discrete images of self and other. We will illustrate the general problem of the synecdochal expansion and contraction of the parapractic flag through a number of examples derived mostly from events in southern Connecticut (Bridgeport and New Haven) over an eighteen-month period between spring 2004 and fall 2005 (though we will travel as far away as New Jersey and as far back as the Vietnam and Gulf Wars). In the final sections we will think through the case of Stephen Kobasa, a schoolteacher who was fired from his job in Bridgeport. The period, not coincidentally, overlapped with a hotly contested general election in the United States along with the growing awareness among the American people that George Bush’s war in Iraq was not going to end as soon as they were told or well in any way at all.

Keeping It Up It embarrasses us to be caught out in parapraxis. It embarrasses us when we say what we really feel under certain conditions. The US flag does this to Americans more often than most people care to admit—or, more pointedly,

212



bernard bate

are prepared to admit. Two examples of the parapractic qualities of the flag demonstrate the point. The first example embodies the canonical and popular concept of the Freudian slip, that is, a self-betrayal and true revelation of sexual desire. Driving into New York City from New Jersey during the lead-up to the Gulf War in 1990, the “Desert Shield” stage, I passed a large billboard of a US flag somewhere near Patterson. The caption read, “Keep it up, George!” The sponsor of the billboard no doubt wanted, first, to assert the sense of keeping the flag up, flying high, “standing tall,” to deploy Ronald Reagan’s iconic phrase, and second, to cleverly augment that primary sense with the idea of perseverance, staying the course, President George H. W. Bush (the father) keeping on keeping on. But there is a third sense to the phrase, and it seemed impossible to me that anyone could have thought anything other than what the billboard seemed to literally suggest about the extraordinary prowess of President Bush. In this case, parapraxis appears to be wrapped up in a true revelation of the psychosexual properties of nationalism and we are tempted to suggest that the example represents a parapraxis of state fetishism. But it is all so surface level, so obvious, that the fact that this could be read as anything other than a self-revelation—a self-betrayal—of a rather awkward and embarrassing sort needs explaining. The second example is less transparent, less canonical, than the first but is far more revelatory of nationalist parapraxis. It also embodies the central problematic of this essay. It occurred in the late spring of 2004 as the entire world and about half of the United States reeled in horror as President George W. Bush (the son) marched the country, along with the people of Iraq, off the edge of an abyss. At that time, the insurgency was significantly intensifying, and many dozens were dying each day. The situation had become so shocking that I began standing on street corners again—after some twenty years—holding antiwar slogans. I joined with the New Haven Peace Coalition, which, in this case, was a group of senior local protesters—“withered flower children,” as one chipper Yale student described us in the Yale Daily News (Urbahn 2005: 2).2 But fair enough: at forty-three years old I was frequently the youngest there. We stood on either side of the south-going traffic on Broadway in New Haven, carrying painted banners that said “No US empire” and “US out of Iraq” and other things of that sort. Most people who drove by honked in support, flashed peace signs, or ignored us. Some flashed vulgar hand signs, of course, but surprisingly very few. Most were either indifferent or supportive. Connecticut is, after all, a blue state. Enter a man I always called The Flag Man but later learned is named Zeqir Brisha, better known as Ziggy (Bass 2006; Lawrence 2005; Urbahn 2005; Werme 2002). An immigrant from Kosovo, we were told, Ziggy spoke in a thick but clear Albanian accent. He dressed in red, white, and blue baggy pants

parapraxis today



213

cinched at the waist by elastic with a matching shirt and a flag bandana around his forehead; he sported dual flags on either side of his aged pickup truck, and he was frequently spotted in strip malls and other places in the greater New Haven area challenging all who might challenge America. He was a counterprotester, perhaps a professional—or at least chronic—counter-protester. He certainly had a way of showing up at various outings of the New Haven Peace Coalition. One imagined he was on their email list. His arrival to these encounters was always rather spectacular. He would drive in, sometimes circling around the parking island in the middle of Broadway, flags snapping jauntily in the wind, sometimes greeting us with a cheerful wave, sometimes not. He then marched past us sternly with a flag over his shoulder to position himself on an opposite street corner and begin his routine. He muscularly waved a large US flag, sang “God Bless America” charmingly off-key, and shouted out to the world at large, to generic Broadway, “Go Bush!” or “USA!” always in a distinctly lower pitch, a hypermasculine display of oratorical bravura. Sometimes there were quiet moments in which Ziggy just held up his flag, pointed to it waving above his head, and cried out, “Aiyee!” At other times he turned and confronted us to ask how we could stand there like that. He shouted that we, the withered flower children, hated America. We were communists. We supported Saddam Hussein. He asked how we could be so ungrateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq. How we were on the side of the terrorists. How we would have let Hitler alone back in World War II. How we would not have challenged and ultimately destroyed the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. How we supported Slobodan Milošević. We were “cowards,” “commie bastards.” And one time he challenged us asking, “Why don’t you have a flag? Why don’t you fly a flag, too? Like I do? The US flag is a flag for all of us. It is the flag of the nation. You should fly a flag. You hate America.”3 In the next breath he turned back to address the imagined nation crossing New Haven’s Broadway and yelled out, “FOUR MORE YEARS!” and “GO BUSH!” And he waved his flag back and forth, wide and high, like a kid in the Cultural Revolution. I was amazed by Ziggy, though the other flower children did not like him at all. This was a band of not more than six or eight scruffy old people standing on a street corner with painted sheets. We were hardly a threat to anyone or anything. But Ziggy showed up week after week to confront us; I may have stood opposite him some fifteen times or more. And he did so not to celebrate the nation like it was some perpetual Fourth of July but to stand opposite other peaceful people exercising their right to dissent and to shower them with abuse—sometimes vulgar abuse. I confess, despite my cheerful attitude toward him I started to chafe a bit at the word “bastard.”

214



bernard bate

Even so, I found in his presence a singular opportunity to meditate on the nature of nationalism. I saw him as the embodiment of the United States. He was the nation festooned with flags, a red, white, and blue Uncle Sam with an Albanian accent. Ziggy was a grateful American Immigrant who had suffered abroad and understood things that we who took the freedoms of the United States for granted could not possibly understand. The chipper Yale student wrote in all earnestness that we thank Ziggy “for displaying his patriotism in a way most among us would be ashamed to do” (Urbahn 2005: 2). Indeed. He was Patriotic America. He was nationalism embodied. And he was manifestly insane.

Synecdoche, Self, and Other What was striking about Ziggy was his ability to shift so cleanly and unselfconsciously from the flag as a sign of the nation to the flag as a sign of a particular part of that nation, that is, the president and his policy. It is not that I had not seen this before or that the move he made was uncommon. On the contrary, it is all too common and has been for some time, especially during wartimes. But Ziggy took it all too far, and in so doing he forefronted a semeiosic process that was instantiated in the use of the US flag over roadways, pasted outside convenience stores, worn on bodies, and, especially, stuck on the backs of cars. Ziggy’s betrayal of himself was parapractic. But more precisely his parapraxis was embodied as a perfect synecdoche. A synecdoche is a trope, a movement of meaning, a poetic form that the twentieth-century rhetorician Kenneth Burke (1945) called “representation.” A trope based on relations of contiguity, like metonym, synecdoche generally moves from part to whole, or whole to part, as in its classic example, “You’re all heart.” In my admittedly idiosyncratic view, synecdoche is distinguished from metonym by virtue of the intentionality of those who deploy—and analyze—them and the representational effects of the trope. A metonym such as “wheels” to refer to a car (part-whole) does not make any claim regarding the quality, the wheel-ness, of the car. To make a claim such as “Saddam attacked Iran,” on the other hand (again, part-whole), is to make some kind of representative claim regarding the Iraqi army or Iraq as a nation, its Saddam-ness, its Saddam-like qualities, its Saddamitude. As Burke (1945: 508) writes of the “noblest synecdoche,” the trope projects an identity between a microcosm and a macrocosm. A metonym, properly defined, has neither this intentionality nor this effect.4 Synecdoche frequently appears to move from the noncorporeal to the corporeal, from some kind of abstraction to some kind of bodily

parapraxis today



215

incarnation of that abstraction. And vice versa, a bodily incarnation can trigger an abstract idea of a larger whole, of which that incarnation is a part, and in so doing instantiate an entire imaginary of complex relations in which that incarnation makes sense. By virtue of its penchant to move from the concrete to the abstract, from micro- to macrocosm, synecdoche is the ultimate trope of the self and of the other (Friedrich 1991: 36–37). The synecdoche embodies the transformation of abstract ideas of ourselves and our others as social entities into concrete images that we can understand. Ethnicities are abstractions, as are races, castes, classes, genders—any social category, in fact. Such abstractions are embodied in particular persons, sometimes in the organization of space, in neighborhoods, kinds of dwellings, genres of speaking and music, of clothing, of playing and interacting. The embodiments are all contiguous with that which they represent: the young Black man in baggy pants and sweatshirt riding a stunt bike through the Yale campus in the fall of 2005 sparked my white lunch companion to note that there were a lot of “bicycle gangs” patrolling New Haven lately. For my companion, one young man was an embodiment of some plural, and threatening, young Black man-ness. His body and movement through that privileged—and white—space a synecdoche of, first, a plurality and, second, a category of something my companion feared. Or my own presence in an airport during those years, bearded, with black curly hair, brownish, gave some fellow passengers pause and moved police officers to look at me a little more closely, check my ID, listen to my voice, and leave me alone once they found that my full name is John Bernard Bate. Synecdoche after synecdoche, from someone they fear to someone they do not, all by virtue of embodied signs indexing genres of social being—in fact, indexing entire social, global, and historical orders in which those genres make sense. We are all semblances in one another’s perceptions of the world (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 10). And when the stakes are highest, those semblances are markedly synecdochic. Nations work that way too. The nation is an abstraction, a quality of being, one in which we can be seen as parts of a larger whole. As enemies, we frequently find a way of concretizing them, as in one of the most powerful of synecdochal embodiments since Adolf Hitler: Saddam Hussein. President George H. W. Bush deployed this synecdoche when he characterized the invasion of Kuwait in 1991: “While the world waited, Saddam Hussein systematically raped, pillaged and plundered a tiny nation, no threat to his own. He subjected the people of Kuwait to unspeakable atrocities, and among those maimed and murdered, innocent children” (“Presidential Address” 1991). The terrorist is the post-Saddam synecdoche of choice. During the buildup to the war and ever since, the terrorist has been the image that we focus on to

216



bernard bate

the exclusion of all others. During the first years following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, vast percentages of the population thought that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the attack on 11 September 2001 despite the 9/11 Commission finding no evidence of such a link. When I was standing on street corners in New Haven in the spring of 2004, people were still capable of making that connection seamlessly. One woman slowed down as she passed us to comment, “Why are we in Iraq? 9/11. Need I say more?” She pulled away just as I was about to suggest that yes, she did. The synecdochal image of ourselves also arrests the attention. We might be vulnerable, torn clothes falling from our breasts as Liberty or Britannia. Or we are a young soldier, a man-boy far from home, missing his wife and his newborn daughter whom he has never seen.5 The soldier is a particularly powerful and beguiling synecdoche of ourselves as the sole image of suffering and loss, of loneliness and post-trauma. We can and almost always do think of his loss, his sacrifice, as the only loss, the only sacrifice. Remember: Iraq-ness is embodied by Saddam, or, after Saddam, by the terrorist. It is never embodied by, say, dead villagers, men, women, children, and goats who were unfortunate enough to live where a wayward piece of American ordnance happened to go astray. An index of the power of this synecdoche of suffering was demonstrated during the last week of October 2005 when it was reported that the number of US servicemen and women killed in Iraq had reached two thousand. There were discussions of this figure throughout the US public sphere on TV, radio, newspapers, and blogs. Some pointed to it with outrage against those who perpetrated this war, others with grim resolve to honor this sacrifice by seeing this thing through, staying the course, keeping it up. A letter to the editor of the New York Times summed it up perfectly: As terrible as the 2,000th death is, we have not reached the toll of 9/11.6 Those who died in this war have given us a crippled enemy who fights on his own soil instead of in the streets of New York. The sacrifice of our soldiers paves the way for a changed Middle East, so we can have a future without planes flying into buildings. (Haas 2005)

But the idea that there may have been tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths in all of this, from targeted soldiers, collateral damage, or terrorist bombings in what appears to have become a war of sectarian fratricide, was all but ignored. One example: on 27 October 2005, the New York Times published seven letters to the editor regarding the previous day’s announcement of the new death toll. Among those seven, three were overtly critical of the war, one was supportive, and three more were indeterminately meditative. Not one mentioned the Iraqi dead.

parapraxis today



217

Mythopoesis and the Nation As the letters for and against the war indicate, this was not a partisan matter. This same synecdoche was common among antiwar intellectuals in American universities (often considered “hotbeds of anti-Americanism,” remember) who provided the number of US dead when asked how many people have died in the Iraq War. It is as if the country, left and right, existed in some kind of dream world in which they could not, or refused to, recognize what any group of reasonably aware people anywhere else in the world could see. And it seems that the nature of that dreamworld was built upon poetic processes, in particular, synecdoche. The poetic dreamworld looked very much like myth, specifically, a mythopoesis of nationalism. Roland Barthes (1972 [1957]) was expressly concerned with nationalism in his famous 1957 essay, “Myth Today.” His strange, sometimes incoherent, and very angry essay was published in one of the grimmest phases of what was then called an “insurgency” in Algeria, now known as the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62): the National Liberation Army (ALN), a “terrorist” group by the French standards of the day, conducted some eight hundred bombing and shooting incidents per month, and the French military led by General Jacques Massu infamously responded in kind. It was not unlike the situation in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, except Iraq has been far bloodier in the long run: the Americans had significantly more efficient and powerful technologies of violence, and Iraqis demonstrated a willingness to commit mass murder against other Iraqis in what became a civil war of sectarian fratricide. Barthes’s essay also described the use of the soldier as a sign of the nation and the need to support him, as well as the affective bond evoked by an image of the loyal colonial subject saluting the tricolor. Barthes’s mythology was written, thus, in a time very much like that in the United States of 2004 and 2005. He described how we can think of myth as a kind of second-order language that takes language itself as its object and creates whole new systems of meaning with it. In what he called “ordinary language,” the I-order semiological system, a sign is a tripartite relationship of (1) a signifier, or form, (2) a signified, or meaning, and (3) the sign itself. Signifier and signified are purely ideational entities; they exist only in the lair of the skull. The third element is the singular synthesis of these two in some real-time instantiation of the material sign. In this Saussurean paradigm it is by arbitrarily matching up an abstract signifier with an abstract signified (a concept) that signs are formed and language has its foundation. In the second-order semiological system, though, myth is parasitical on language; that is, it uses the already meaningful linguistic sign that synthesized form and meaning, signifier and signified, and deploys it in a new form of

218



bernard bate

signification that takes as its object ordinary language. Myth is, as Barthes puts it, a metalanguage. To illustrate this process, Barthes evokes the image of a soldier he saw depicted on a 1955 cover of the magazine Paris-Match. At the level of ordinary language the photograph depicts a young African soldier in a French uniform, saluting, eyes uplifted. Again, in ordinary language, his uplifted eyes are no doubt gazing upon the French tricolor. That is all. But Barthes knows, and we know, that the image signifies something altogether different. The Blackness of the African, his French-soldier-ness, and his fidelity become signs in a new universe of signification, one that includes grateful people from all over the world—in particular, Algeria—who pledge allegiance to the flag of the French Empire and do so gladly. Barthes’s essay is obviously applicable to the parapractic object of desire here, the US flag. As a sign within “ordinary language,” the flag as form means the nation in its deployment outside people’s houses on the Fourth of July. There is a mythology evoked here, to be sure, an aestheticized history. And ironically enough, the “ordinary” use of the US flag is found in ritual.7 But perhaps we might see it as a passive evocation, an inert or inactive presence, an aesthetic attachment to the childhood delight of red, white, and blue flags marching down the street in parades, bunting around a bandstand, fireworks at night, Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The flag hanging on a house for the Fourth of July was rolled up and put away again, like Christmas ornaments carefully stored for the following year. Or, the flag in ordinary language means the nation for which it stands to the child pledging allegiance to it in the morning. Insofar as it means anything at all to most children in that context, it may simply be something they do and always did with very little meaningfulness attached to it. Remember, for most Americans it was not the Pledge of Allegiance but rather the pledgeallegiance, a nation indibizible. Again, a relatively inert presence, an object of a fairly empty ritual obeisance with very little larger significance or entailment. It means the nation, but it really means a group of youngsters standing together to participate in a ritual of the nation that is really more about the group of youngsters than the abstraction—at least then and there. The Flag Man, Ziggy, very clearly, and expressly, sees the flag as representing the nation, pure and simple. There is no ideology in it, no history, no politics. The flag is as natural, as unquestionable as the sun. We cannot challenge him that the flag “means” supporting the president’s policy of war in Iraq because the flag expands and contracts synecdochally from “God Bless America” to “Go Bush!” In Ziggy’s parapractic and synecdochal flag, the soldier, or the troops, are the element that mediates between the nation and the president. To

parapraxis today



219

“support the troops” is to support the president, and by supporting the president we support the nation. So, now the flag signifies something else altogether in this new mythological realm, something that Ziggy knows but probably would not intentionally state out loud. It no longer stands only for the nation, indibizible, but for another entity and another purpose. It is taken out of its singular and appropriate place and time—note, a ritual place and time—and becomes a sign of other things. That odd juxtaposition of the appropriate place and time, the ordinary language of the flag, with this new mythological, almost magical sense of it was shot through President Bush’s 2005 Fourth of July radio address: In this time of testing, all our troops and their families can know that the American people are behind them. On this Fourth of July weekend, I ask every American to find a way to thank men and women defending our freedom—by flying the flag, sending letters to our troops in the field, and helping the military family down the street . . . At this time when we celebrate our freedom, we will stand with the men and women who defend us all. (“President’s Radio Address” 2005)

This particular flag emerged after the events of 11 September 2001. At first, and from some points of view, the flag appeared to be a sign of unity, of a shared experience, of a family in mourning, of a nation resolved to transcend tragedy, to rebuild. It was a sign of fidelity to civilization, to a way of life, to freedom. It was triumphant as it streamed behind a speeding fire truck in New Haven, an icon resonating with the fire trucks of New York that fall. It was ubiquitous on every bridge crossing the Merritt Parkway and Interstate 95. It was defiant as it loomed over Ground Zero. And even folks who would normally never fly a flag ordered nice ones off the internet and lined their leafy Middle American neighborhoods with them. Americans were a nation united. It was quite a time. But for some people of color, the flag during this period was something different. History repeated itself again, not as tragedy (World War II) or farce (the Gulf War) but as terror. If you were brownish, bearded, South Asian or Arab, you flew the flag not only as a sign of unity but more pointedly as a talisman of protection, like a string of garlic around your neck. Post-9/11 convenience stores flew oversized flags or posted them ubiquitously on windows and doors. “Proud to be an American,” they cringed, praying that would be enough to keep people from hurting them. Like garlic, it did not always work. And things morphed further with war. Along with yellow ribbons, flags became mandatory car decorations for those who would support the country,

220



bernard bate

the troops, and the president. The yellow ribbon was first deployed during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980, and again during the Gulf War, an “ordinary language” sign of support for a particular soldier.8 From this sign denoting one family’s longing, affection, and fear for a soldier at war, the yellow ribbon became mythologically a signification that you supported the troops in their prosecution of a war. Note that the new mythological sign functions semiotically in a nearly opposite process from that of the flag, moving from part (soldier) to whole (nation) and finally to another part, i.e., the president. Magnetized yellow ribbons for the backs of cars first emerged during the Iraq War of 1990 and 1991. In the beginning, they were simple things with the italicized phrase “Support the Troops” on them. But by 2004 we began to see other ribbon slogans such as “Pray for the Troops,” some with a little cross in the loop. It seems that for some, at least, the adventure in Iraq was going to resurrect the “cross” in the forgotten etymology of the English word “crusade.” But the best of them all for the purposes of this essay is the one that I believe emerged in early 2005, the magnet that merged the yellow ribbon on one end with the stars and stripes on the other. “Support the Troops,” it read. It perfectly blended a complex synecdoche that moved in two directions simultaneously, laminating significations one on top of the other. And in that move, the semeiosic fate of the flower children was sealed. They could not fly the flag for it no longer signified what it did when they were children waving it alongside a parade. It was no longer a sign of us all, one nation, indibizible. It had broken free of its ritual containment; it had become a feral sign, wild, shifting from the indibizible nation to a president and a policy that many US citizens did not support. There were some who were critical of the war and deployed the flag, but that deployment was almost always a reappropriation of something that did not really belong to them. For instance, a left bumper sticker depicted a flag with the phrase “These colors don’t include the word ‘Think’” in the field of stars, suggesting that if Americans did so they would not be in the mess they found themselves in. The flag was almost never deployed in critique of the war without such framings and qualifications. It did not belong to those who opposed the war. The use of the flag was a support of the troops, and the support of the troops was, bizarrely, the support of continued war. And so, for the flower children to call for the troops to come home, and therefore to leave harm’s way, could never be seen as supporting the troops but only as opposing them. And in opposing the troops, they betrayed the nation. Mythopoetically, Ziggy was right: the flower children holding up banners protesting the war and flying no American flags demonstrated unequivocally that they hated America.

parapraxis today



221

One Nation under God Magnetized flags and yellow ribbons on the backs of cars were looking a bit faded by the end of 2005. Many yellow ribbons by then had been bleached white. Those of us who thought the war in Iraq was a bad idea, or at least a questionable one, were relieved but found little cheer that Bush’s war was finally under unprecedented scrutiny. In the fall of 2005, a sense of doubt began to pervade the country, a worry that this is all going to end very badly for everyone. The bleached-out yellow ribbons and neglected flags on the backs of cars were only signs of that larger uncertainty. But, it seems, the imperative to fly the flag, salute, pledge allegiance to, and indeed, worship it, was, at least in some quarters, as strong or stronger than ever. The flower children endured some rather unpleasant insults from Ziggy, but Ziggy never really had any power over them. Others, however, endured worse at the hands of people who did have the power to significantly affect their lives. I first met Stephen Kobasa and his wife, Anne, back in the spring or summer of 2004 on Broadway among that little clutch of protesters. I came to know him better over the next year as our children, who attended the same high school, had become close friends. I knew that he was a committed peace activist, a practicing Catholic, a leader in his church, a long-time English teacher in Catholic schools, a husband and a father of two. The Kobasa house is famously well decorated with colorful and pointed political banners. And perhaps not coincidentally, he played a prominent role in sponsoring Cindy Sheehan’s visit to New Haven in September 2005 during her fifty-one-city, twenty-eight-state “Bring Them Home Now” bus tour from President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, to Washington, DC. In essence, Stephen Kobasa is a fairly well known and liked person in and around New Haven. But New Haven came to know Stephen a great deal better following events that fall. After some twenty-six years of teaching in parochial schools, Stephen was fired on 13 October 2005 from Kolbe Cathedral High School in Bridgeport in the face of an ultimatum that he either permanently display a flag in his classroom and lead his class in the Pledge of Allegiance or lose his job. Throughout his career, he had refused to display the American flag or lead his class in the pledge based on the principle that the only sign of authority in his classroom was the cross. For Stephen, “the Cross cancelled all flags.” He had also become uneasy by what he felt was the use of the American flag as a sign of support for the military adventures the US government had seen increasingly fit to conduct. The flag, as a sign of war and hatred, he said, was incompatible with the cross, a sign of peace and love. The Diocese of Bridgeport disagreed.

222



bernard bate

Late in August 2005, the principal of Kolbe Cathedral announced that the pledge would be conducted every morning along with the usual prayer. Over the following few weeks, the diocese made it clear that it would accept nothing but total compliance. In the end, Stephen was offered an ultimatum: fly the flag and conduct the pledge or lose his job. He chose the latter and was fired; he finished his last day of school, to the protests and tears of his students, on 13 October. In a discussion with Stephen shortly after, I asked him what kind of principles the flag represented to him. In response he quietly began to discuss the use of the flag, along with yellow ribbons, on the backs of cars in support of the troops and therefore the war. He felt that it represented not only a policy of warfare and violence but a kind of silencing of debate. “The flag is the last word,” he said, to any criticism one might offer against the war in Iraq, for instance. “The flag is used by those who pretend to extol things like freedom of speech, freedom . . . But once someone dissents then you are said to betray the flag . . . The icon that would license you to dissent is also the sacred icon from which one cannot dissent.” What prompted the diocese to make an issue of this after Stephen had been teaching for six years at Kolbe Cathedral School? The official position was highly legalistic: in an official press release the diocese asserted its right to make decisions based on “private property” considerations.9 It also refused to discuss any cases concerning personnel. The diocese’s refusal to discuss the matter beyond official statements renders any speculation just that. However, based on a series of interviews with associates and members of the diocese, combined with what we know about how the flag operated semiotically during this period, we can say several things. First, many of Stephen’s colleagues, and officials of the diocese, were deeply offended by his refusal to fly the flag—one might say viscerally so. The teachers’ association (i.e., his union) refused to take his side in a grievance petition, citing, again, “private property” concerns. Stephen reported that one person even said to him that she was surprised he had not been let go before this for not flying the flag, that she would have fired him much earlier had she been in a position to do so. Some of his colleagues said privately that what happened to him was wrong, but they did not speak up because of a climate generally hostile to Stephen in the school. Indeed, only four of his twenty-eight colleagues openly supported him and protested the decision. It appears that most people simply agreed with the policy and thought Stephen was wrong. Second, when considering the timing of the diocese’s renewed concern with Stephen’s classroom practices associated with the pledge and the US flag, one cannot help notice that these events coincided with the high-profile visit to the area of antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan. The extreme vitriol engendered against Sheehan, at first glance, appeared out of proportion to her role in the

parapraxis today



223

antiwar movement. Sheehan, whose son was a US soldier killed in Iraq, violated core ritual strictures of her role as mourning mother in a time of war. The mourning mother is in many respects the synecdochal embodiment of the nation at war: her individual sacrifice is a microcosm of the sacrifice of the collectivity (cf. Loraux 1998; Butler 2002, 2006). The mourning mother receives the body of her son, transformed into a flag ceremonially folded by an honor guard in a state-sponsored military funeral. She bears the unbearable just as we all do: in silent resolve to sacrifice and persevere toward ultimate victory. Her ritual role involves silent acceptance followed by removal from the scene. She must certainly not enter the “political” realm of verbal (a fortiori oratorical) discourse; she does not address the nation, she embodies it. Sheehan, of course, was empowered precisely in this ritual role and proceeded to violate its ritual strictures by refusing to silently accept the death of her son. Like the antiwar protesters of the Vietnam War who “desecrated” the flag, she pulled herself out of the ritual context in which she, as an emblem of national sacrifice, gained her original power. She therefore gained disproportionate voice in the national debate over George Bush’s war in Iraq and drew disproportionate rage by those who support the president’s policy. Stephen was the media spokesperson for the New Haven Peace Coalition when the group sponsored Sheehan’s visit on the New Haven Green on 18 September 2005. Showing up on TV, on radio, and on blogs, he was by far the single most prominent member of the flower children that fall associated with Sheehan’s visit. It may be that someone in the leadership of the diocese took umbrage at this.10 While there is no direct evidence to suggest that this is the case, the timing seems suspect: the diocese hardened its position and called Stephen into a meeting within a week of Sheehan’s visit; he was given the ultimatum within twelve days. Regardless, no one would have gone after Stephen unless they felt personally and profoundly offended by his simple refusal to fly the flag—a practice he had followed for the previous five years. Given the resounding silence from his colleagues, the refusal on the part of his union to support him, and indeed, indications that most of the other teachers at least passively approved of the decision to confront and fire him, we might assume that they were evaluating Stephen’s actions in terms not dissimilar to Ziggy’s mythology that would damn the flower children to treason.

The Flag Today Here is a Catholic schoolteacher, reverent, a leader in his church, whose principled decision to not fly a flag leads to his dismissal after decades of service to the church. While we might speculate on the precise motivations of his su-

224



bernard bate

periors and colleagues, all we really know is that firing Stephen was no more capricious than his refusing to fly the flag. And both decisions were mediated by a sign turned against its people. At one moment during our discussion of these events, Stephen quietly regretted his alienation from the flag, or his “not being able to identify with the flag.” He recalled, “Certainly when I was growing up, the image of it, that sentimentalism, it gave you the illusion of an orderly universe somehow. There’s something of the Norman Rockwell image caught in that stereotype. Flags lining the street for the Fourth of July parade.” Stephen’s intuition of a loss points us to a transformation the flag has undergone since he was a child in the 1950s and 1960s, from an object of solidarity deployed in ritual spaces and times to a highly refractive sign of solidarity for some, alienation for others. We might speculate that the parapractic qualities of the flag during the period covered in this essay is a result of this transformation from ritual sign to bumper sticker. The flag achieved its power in its ritual uses, in classrooms that bound groups of schoolchildren into Durkheimian communities of solidarity, on parade grounds and battlefields that bound soldiers together and provided for them a sign simultaneously of their homes and of their sacrifice. As Stephen ruefully recalled from his childhood, the flag was a sign of a community spilling out into the streets on the Fourth of July, on Memorial Day or Veterans Day, moments when we ritually celebrated ourselves and our nation, gathered together to blow up firecrackers, watch our veterans march through town, and then—importantly—put it all away again. The flag today seems to have broken free of those limiting bounds of ritual action where its signification was fixed. It has instead become a feral sign, unbounded by ritual statements of signification, by ritual space and time. This ferality was first unleashed in the late 1960s and the 1970s by young activists protesting the war in Vietnam. In those days to wear a flag on one’s clothing, for instance, was seen as an affront to the nation; to rip it from its proper ritual contexts, to treat the flag without the ritual respect it deserved, was a critique of the nation’s conduct. And such acts were treated as such. People who wore the flag on their clothes, for instance, might find themselves reviled or even attacked. Compare this with the use of the flag on clothing—or other media—today: to wear a flag is a sign of the right, not the left, a sign of support for a national center, not a sign of some counterstructural challenge to that center. Whereas the flag ripped from its ritual context in the 1960s was a centrifugal sign, it has been reappropriated since at least the first Gulf War in 1991 as a centripetal sign (Bakhtin 1981: 259–300), an emblem of a hegemonic center.

parapraxis today



225

Strangely enough, the “ordinary language” of the flag, in Barthes’s terms, was a ritual language, hardly devoid of mythology (see note 7). Instead of “ordinary language,” perhaps we could call it a first-order mythology, in this case a Norman Rockwell, “Stars and Stripes Forever” affair that found its life in the face-to-face ritual workings of little communities: schoolrooms, small towns, and bands of military men. Its second-order mythological qualities, however—that mythology that is parasitic on the first-order mythology—appear to emphasize something else altogether, a virulent nationalism insistent upon compulsory expressions of identity with a large-scale and abstract community synecdochally reduced to the president and his policy. Support the nation (i.e., the president) or stand in opposition to it (and its warriors) and outside its protections. Ultimately, this second-order, parasitical mythology begins to take on the qualities of totalitarianism, the kinds of compulsory state-sponsored rituals that would deny any who refuse to participate the rights of those who comply. As Stephen Kobasa can attest, this compulsory expression can even trump faith within a church setting. Truly, a sign turned against its people.

Embarrassment and Nationalist Parapraxis Let us return to the billboard, our first example of parapraxis. “Keep it up, George!” The sponsors went through the entire process of commissioning a patriotic billboard and no one stopped (one imagines) to consider the wider senses of the term. Recall here, too, that parapraxis is not merely a self-betrayal but a forgetting as well, in this case a forgetting of some obvious senses of the term “keep it up.” But nationalist parapraxis is not merely embodied in a flag standing in for a nation’s (or a president’s) phallus; it is also embodied in a statement of nationalist unity that betrays a partisan support of George Bush’s war. It is embodied in a sign that vehemently claims to stand for the unity of an imagined community but betrays the intentions of those who make such claims. As it betrayed Ziggy. We use the flag to stand for one nation, and the first-order mythology of the flag in ritual does just that: it enables us to imagine ourselves, standing in our classrooms, on the parade grounds, as one indibizible people. But the second-order, parasitical mythological language of the flag as feral sign reduces nation to part, from America the Beautiful to “Go Bush!” We might end this discussion with thinking through the opposition between nationalist parapraxis and state fetishism. I would argue that the parapractic qualities of the flag are far more dangerous and insidious. Contrary to the disproportionate consideration given to fetishism in contemporary schol-

226



bernard bate

arly writing, the flag in its fetishistic modality is fairly banal. We might think of the fetish as a condensation of an abstraction—e.g., the state—into a concrete object, person, place, or ritual act. The Pledge of Allegiance, ironically enough, might be said to involve a number of these elements: the ritual regimentation of it in space and time and the object itself. Some of the most common, homely, or hometown rituals of the flag involve just such relatively benign fetishisms. Sometimes, we might say, a flag is just a flag. More disturbing are such condensations of the state into the person of a leader—but it is precisely at these moments that fetishism merges with parapraxis and takes on its totalitarian qualities. The late Saparmurat Niyazov (aka Turkmenbashi) of Turkmenistan, the object of an extraordinary personality cult, is an extreme embodiment of state fetishism; J. Jayalalitha, sometime chief minister of India’s Tamil Nadu, worshiped by her faithful as a goddess or even the Virgin Mary, is another fine example (Bate 2002, 2009). But these are merely extreme instances of a general pattern of the embodiment of state power; to make this practice extraordinary is to forget (parapractically?) that this is as common as the earth, as human as falling in love. And to call such things fetishism belies the usual sense of “misrecognition” that the analyst ordinarily attributes to those who behold the objects of their desires. For when we look carefully at such instances of state fetishism as Niyazov or Jayalalitha where individual leaders have developed such cults, the vision of the people is closer to true recognition of the ultimate sources of power than some naïve expression of folk deification. Rather, we might recognize that it is parapraxis, with its synecdochal slippages, refractions, forgettings, and, indeed, even fetishistic condensations, that is the modus vivendi of the totalitarian sign. The flag was unleashed upon the people as a ferality that fed precisely upon the freedom it was said to embody. And the failure to reign in our passions, our all-too-human failures to contain ourselves and our signs in the face of shocking tragedy and, indeed, devastating attack, led us to unleash the violence of our armed forces against a people, misruled as it was, that was no threat to us. In the end, the flag was a key element in a self-betrayal—a nakedness before the whole world—that led us to a tragic, embarrassing, and fateful betrayal of our passions, our own best interests, and our own highest ideals.

Acknowledgments For close readings, criticisms, and suggestions on earlier drafts, thanks to Noah Bate, Joe Borlo, Richard Bribiescas, Durba Chattaraj, Valentine Daniel, James W. Fernandez, Michael Friend, Ajay Gandhi, Andrew Hill, Jack Hitt, Jennifer

parapraxis today



227

Jackson, Kathryn Johnson, John Leavitt, Paul Manning, Aliza Shvarts, Sarah Stillman, Raphael Soifer, and David Watts. Very special thanks to Stephen Kobasa for sharing his experience and his thoughts about the flag. Bernard Bate (1960–2016) was a linguistic anthropologist specializing in the Tamil (India) language and its rhetorical usages. He was assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University and at Yale-Singapore College. His book Tamil Oratory and Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India (2009) describes the democratic rhetorical play developing in the Tamil language during the Indian independence drive. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2000. He was a much-appreciated organizer of sessions on the tropes in various antecedent annual anthropology meetings.

Notes 1. The concept of refraction is taken from Voloshinov (1973). Many scholars have noted how ideology and ideological signs transform cultural or historical phenomena into things of nature, including Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci (cf. Pierre Bourdieu’s [1977: 159–197] discussion of doxa, heterodoxa, and orthodoxa). For the moment, I take the idea from Roland Barthes (1972 [1957]). 2. Urbahn’s alternate Wednesday column in 2005–6 was entitled “Unchained Reactionary.” 3. Another moment of confrontation that spring was less benign. A man in his early to mid-twenties wearing a sleeveless undershirt drove past us in a pickup truck, glared angrily at us, and then found a parking place. He returned to stand next to Ziggy and hurl vulgarities and threats at us. He was incandescent with rage. He shouted, over and over again, “Why do you hate America?” He repeated several times that he hoped members of our families would suffer agonies as a result of a terrorist attack. Ziggy had been a source of some wonder and amusement. This man was truly frightening. 4. Of course, such fine distinctions are also a function of intentionality of the analyst who may wish to forefront the semeiosic effects of one trope over another. 5. The synecdoche may cut both ways, and those prosecuting the war in Iraq work hard to keep certain synecdoches at bay. A dead body in a flag-draped coffin is one that is particularly dangerous; during the post-9/11 wars they were brought home under the cover of night, on military bases free of reporters, and interned in a speedy and hyper-ritualized ceremony. Men with horrible wounds, too, might be held up as synecdoches of ourselves, but only very, very rarely and only in moments of dark introspection about what we were doing and how wrong it all seemed to have gone. 6. The number of American dead in Iraq surpassed the death toll of 9/11 (2,973) sometime in late December 2006. As of July 2007, the American death toll had surpassed 4,000. For an account of all casualties to date, see Burnham et al. 2006. 7. This, of course, is a significant problem with Barthes’s notion of “ordinary language” operating in terms of Saussure’s basic structural paradigm, i.e., abstract signifier and conceptual signified comprising a fundamentally arbitrary sign that contains its full “sense” prior to any practical instantiation of it. The paradigm forefronts semantic

228



bernard bate

“meaning” (i.e., referentiality) over more pragmatic functions of language such as indexicality and iconicity that ground the sign within larger semeiosocial systems of signification. For an early and foundational statement in linguistic anthropology on functions of language beyond the semantic, see Hymes 1995. For a challenge to the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, see Friedrich 1979b. For a classic discussion of indexicality, see Silverstein 1976. 8. As far as I know, the yellow ribbon phenomenon has its roots in a very popular song of 1973, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree,” written by Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown and performed by Tony Orlando and Dawn. 9. The official spokesperson of the diocese, Joseph McAleer, responded to interviews during the first week or two following 13 October. McAleer said in a subsequent conversation with me that the diocese does not discuss personnel matters. Margaret Dames, superintendent of schools in the Diocese of Bridgeport, agreed to speak with me in a telephone interview. A teacher, she claimed, had made a complaint, that school officials had not been aware of Stephen’s practice of not flying the flag. When I pointed out to her that Stephen’s room had been used as the meeting space for faculty meetings for the previous two years, that the entire school was well aware of his classroom practices, she asserted (and repeated several times during the interview) her position that this was “Stephen Kobasa’s responsibility” and that the diocese had given him “every opportunity” to comply with the rule. When I asked if I might contact the principal of the school, Ms. Jakab, Dames was quite adamant that I not do so. When I suggested that I might discuss this with the bishop, she indicated that she and the bishop agreed that she would handle the situation. Though I had previously interviewed several associates of Stephen’s from the school, I did not contact any other official of the church or school thereafter. 10. William E. Lori, Bishop of the Diocese of Bridgeport, was elected Supreme Chaplain of the Knights of Columbus the previous April (“Bishop Lori” 2005). The KoC, of course, considers patriotism the fourth, final, and highest degree of membership in that organization (the first three are charity, unity, and fraternity).

References Abrams, Philip. 1988. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977).” Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1): 58–89. Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 127–186. New York: Monthly Review Press. Apter, Emily. 1993. “Introduction.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz, 1–9. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Apter, Emily, and William Pietz, eds. 1993. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. “Discourse in Poetry and Discourse in the Novel.” Selections from “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 259–300. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. 1972 (1957). “Myth Today.” In Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, 109– 159. New York: Hill and Wang.

parapraxis today



229

Bass, Paul. 2006. “Red Flags over New Haven.” New Haven Independent, 21 April. Retrieved 27 December 2020 from http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2006/04/ red_flags_over.html. Bate, Bernard. 2002. “Political Praise in Tamil Newspapers: The Poetry and Iconography of Democratic Power.” In Everyday Life in South Asia, ed. Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb, 308–325. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2009. Tamil Oratory and Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India. New York: Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. “Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction.” In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin, 88–101. St. Louis: Telos. “Bishop Lori Elected as New Supreme Chaplain.” 2005. Knights of Columbus. News release, 18 April 2005. Retrieved 27 December 2020 from http://www.kofc.org/en/news/re leases/4539.html. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977 (1972). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burke, Kenneth. 1945. “Four Master Tropes.” Appendix A in A Grammar of Motives, 503– 517. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burnham, G., R. Lafta, S. Doocy, and L. Roberts. 2006. “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey.” The Lancet 368(9545): 1421–1428. Butler, Judith. 2002. Antigone’s Claim. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2006. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Fernandez, James W. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———, ed. 1991. Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Friedrich, Paul. 1979a. “Poetic Language and the Imagination: A Reformulation of the Sapir Hypothesis.” In Language, Context, and the Imagination: Essays by Paul Friedrich, ed. Anwar S. Dil, 441–512. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1979b. “The Symbol and Its Relative Non-Arbitrariness.” In Language, Context, and the Imagination: Essays by Paul Friedrich, ed. Anwar S. Dil, 1–61. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1991. “Polytropy.” In Beyond Metaphor, ed. James W. Fernandez, 17–55. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1. New York: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund. 1928. “Fetishism.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9: 161–166. ———. 1965 (1901). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 1966 (1933). “Part I: Parapraxes (1916 [1915]).” In The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 15–79. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 1971 (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon. ———. 2000. “Unsuitable Substitutes for the Sexual Object—Fetishism.” In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 19–21. New York: Basic Books. Graeber, David. 2005. “Fetishism as Social Creativity, or Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction.” Anthropological Theory 5: 407–438. Haas, Julia. 2005. Letter to the editor. New York Times, 27 October, A30. Hymes, Dell. 1995. “The Ethnography of Speaking.” In Language, Culture and Society: A Book of Readings, 2nd edn., ed. Ben G. Blount, 248–282. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.

230



bernard bate

Keane, Webb. 1977. “From Fetishism to Sincerity: On Agency, the Speaking Subject, and Their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversion.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39(4): 674–693. Loraux, Nicole. 1998. Mothers in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lawrence, Jill. 2005. “Bush Backers Get Warm Feeling.” USA Today, 20 January. Retrieved 11 July 2021 from https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-20bush-scene-usat_x.htm. Marx, Karl. 1976. “Exzerpte zur Geschichte der Kunst und der Religion.” In Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, 2:1. Berlin: Dietz. ———. 1990. Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. Mbembe, Achille. 1995. “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony.” Africa 62(1): 3–37. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. “An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty.” In The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cobb, 3–11. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nye, Robert A. 1993. “The Medical Origins of Sexual Fetishism.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz, 13–30. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pietz, William. 1993. “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz, 119–151. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. “Presidential Address: Bush Announces War on Iraq, Assures ‘We Will Not Fail.’” 1991. Congressional Quarterly, 19 January, 49(3): 197–198. “President’s Radio Address.” 2005. President George W. Bush, Radio Address Archives, 2 July. Retrieved 11 July 2021 from https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2005/07/20050702.html. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1955 (1940). “Preface.” In African Political Systems, xi–xxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1976. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description.” In Meaning and Anthropology, ed. Keith Basso and H. A. Selby, 11–56. New York: Harper & Row. Taussig, Michael. 1993. “Maleficium: State Fetishism.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz, 217–247. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind.” Cultural Anthropology 41(3): 125–138. Urbahn, Keith. 2005. “The Elm City’s Non-American American.” Yale Daily News, 7 September, 2. Voloshinov, V. N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Werme, Jordan E. 2002. “From Kosovo to America, with Love and Pride.” Connecticut Guardian, September, 3(9): 11, 18.

CHAPTER 10

Irony’s Arrow Launching Contraria in Chinese Linguaculture Mary Scoggin       

Sticks and stones may break our bones, but effectively launching an arrow takes tools, learned skills, and just the right posture and position, and especially when the arrow is made of written texts, they will be imbedded in ideology, political economy, history, institutions, and culture. In this chapter I propose “poetic launch”1 specifically as a subjective process in producing texts that project key tropes, pressured and twisted out of the subject’s argument into an acutely targeted campaign of predication. Poetry, in the traditional sense of deliberate verbal art, makes use of this launching process, but so does the polemic and even some of the everyday vitriol that spills ever more easily into our ordinary textual experiences. Like Paul Friedrich’s (1989) formulation of linguaculture more broadly, the verbal launch decenters both language and culture, by entangling each in the other’s mission. Anchored in sociocultural and especially political terrain, words, images, and moods are released from myriad constraints, which in turn overdetermine the import of the texts, the messages, and the illocutionary and the perlocutionary impacts of those words in specific temporal and often very personal, chaotic, and unpredictable packages. In delineating for analysis “a” linguaculture—a small universe of meaning circumscribed by contingent social settings, patterned speech events, and ideological commitments and operated by unique individuals—Chinese linguaculture of the modern period serves here to highlight culturally significant forms and flavors. Politically this period may be characterized by the global

232



mary scoggin

emergence of the newest superpower, but culturally, economically, and imaginatively (from individual as well as collective standpoints) the relevant modern project has been about presenting key Chinese textual practices in a global environment, as art, as petition, and as inspiration. The first part of this chapter discusses historical and cultural practices of poetic launch, which modern writers use to locate themselves and their practices. These practices include traditions of projecting visually autonomous literary form through images, traditions of great poetry, and significant control by text-centered bureaucracy. Within these, Chinese censorship is a trope of its own, steeped in historically dramatic and punitive precedents that haunt the massive surveillance strategies in modern times. In this chapter I also propose to decenter censorship by distributing its load between subjective experience, everyday practices, and the unpredictable staging of specific events. The examples I present here, all public and well-known cases, are self-consciously produced as complaints, protests, verbal acts of poetic launch that are pressed out by top-down external forces as well as inner pressures. I group together here a class of text events and call them “contraria,” unified by a mood of protest and outrage, flavored also by an awareness that these messages are unwelcome in a political context that leaves the agent of these text events vulnerable to severe constraint and punishment. This is an outline of a modal trope (Friedrich 1991) that lacks a clearly recognized genre and yet forms a recognizable pattern. Where this trope diverges from the well-worn image of Chinese political dissidents is in its divergence from rhetorical concealment rooted in other “macrotropes” (22–26) that are so popular in Chinese writing, such as metaphor, analogy, and contiguity. Specifically in Chinese literary and political writing styles, hiding and circumlocution (Goldman 1988; Link 2000; Schneider 1980; Veg 2019) and the ghostly erasure of “knowing what not to know” (Hillenbrand 2020) are prominent, valued and viewed as necessary to political survival. But it is the failure to even really try to conceal that characterizes many of these writing practices. The quintessential launcher of modern Chinese fiction and also fashioner of the modern Chinese polemic, Lu Xun (1881–1936) neatly doubles down on the difference between these two choices, the first side concealing protest and outrage by “point to the mulberry to revile the ash” or “using the past to serve the present” (Unger 1993) specifically in Lu Xun’s fiction, as contrasted with the seemingly more direct and angry “daggers and spears” of his polemics (杂文, “miscellaneous essays”). Some scholars and critics of Lu Xun take sides in loving or hating one or the other of these sides to his work, adding another modal layer to the rhetorical stratum. The balance between them under the influence of Cold War politics fell heavily in favor of the art of obfuscation as the more noble poetic pursuit (Hsia 2016 [1961]) and scholars continued despising that Lu Xun’s later career fell into the

irony’s arrow



233

dirty business of bald literary combat (Lee 1985). In this study I focus on the poetics of the latter, literary combat, finding no less rhetorical force in the less escapist events, and gaining from these a better view of subjective embeddedness in sociocultural context. What follows is a kind of literary ethnography of cases that reflect this trope of pointed, righteous, animated poetic launch as discursive action in the changing terrain of modern China. In preparation I will review the central historical tropes of contraria and its continually resituated aftermath, forming the symbolic repertoire of ancient antecedents upon which contemporary figures draw. Then I will sketch the processes through which three prominent “straight shooters” configure their person as contraria launchers and root their practice in highly individualized projection of self as a vulnerable ghost, monster, or childlike subject. They launch their messages in the embedded metaphor of archery, illustrating the rocky, crevice-pocked ground upon which these figures perch, the bending and unfurling process of how these tropes are hurled onto a public mediatized platform, and the unpredictable results of these shots.

Ancient Antecedents: Textually Martial Arts The poet Qu Yuan, particularly his “Encountering Sorrow” (离骚), is, as Laurence Schneider (1980) so ably showed, not just a celebrated artifact of ancient genius but rather a living myth that Chinese writers have been drawing upon since the third century BCE as model and inspiration for radical individualism, martyrdom, and emotional expression of turmoil and resistance. “Encountering Sorrow” is an expression of the pain and disillusionment of an exiled minister, protesting his fate in both lurid and veiled terms, styling himself, for example, as if the jilted lover of his king. Qu Yuan’s life embodies a pitched battle between the factions of a warring state, and this poem is one particularly poignant volley in the cycles of slander and revenge that demonstrate the long range of verbal sparring. While Qu Yuan’s poems, like his death, may historically mark his losses, his “elaborate suicide note” is remembered, reinscribed, and launched across kingdoms and eras, and it fulsomely broaches the divide between ancient and modern writing in China. “Encountering Sorrow” was studied for imperial civil service exams that began centuries after Qu Yuan’s death and continued until the end of the last dynasty, and this poem continues to be taught just as commonly in schools today. As contraria, Qu Yuan presents a perfect poetic trope of madness, righteousness, and emotional fierceness. As a writing strategy, however, it contains a key ambiguity. Does this passionate and extravagant writing model teach clever literary circumlocutions? Or are

234



mary scoggin

the spreading fantastical elements the muscular engines used to launch speed, distance, and intensity? In Qu Yuan as historical case it is clearly the latter, but these poetic flights contain other lessons. Poetic technologies were central among topics incorporated in the canons of classical Chinese education for centuries. Circumlocution, the “crooked pen,” emerged, ironically, as a morally ambiguous term. While it is sometimes glossed as a neutral poetic feature of borrowing and triangulating for rhetorical effect, the crooked pen was well established as a metaphor for various types of politically expedient literary circumlocution by the time it appears in the history of the later Han dynasty (2–189 CE), which castigates the “crooked pen,” urging scholars to 不曲笔以求存，故身传图像名垂后世, which I render as “do not use crooked pen to save your lives if you want to create an image of yourselves to last through the ages” (Fan Ye, History of the Later Han, vol. 58: Biography of Zang Hong, my translation). Personalized images, supported by the energetic practices of Chinese linguaculture, certainly do seem to last through the ages, but the life-saving effects of the crooked pen are more ambiguous. At another turning point, as the modern Chinese state emerged, Lu Xun again explicitly decries the practice of using a “crooked pen” yet used it both in his celebrated fiction and also in his signature so-called miscellaneous essays, the daggers and javelins of contemporary political commentary built specifically to repurpose the pen from its traditional circuitous literary style for more modern and straighter shooting. The crooked pen is inherently ironic; it is not really the point to cleverly avoid detection. While sly rhetorical devices and constraints are evident in both, the result, and likely the purpose, of embellishment is to amplify protest, not to mute it. Writers shooting contraria seek to hit their targets and profess the desire to “shoot straight” and “speak the truth.” If this process also involves dodging, crouching, or coming from an unexpected angle, it only highlights the metaphor of learning to shoot straight with unwieldy tools.

Arrows as Literary Technology in Chinese Myth The arrow, being lightweight and silent, is a crafty weapon above all because it can be deployed at a distance, obscuring its source. And yet for all the celebrated practice and skill required, its results remain unpredictable. Targets may be hit, or missed, or indeed turn back upon the archer. Parallels between arrowcraft and the craft of writing are bundled together in Chinese mythology, in the figure of Fuxi, who taught people also to read the signs that allow for maps and divination as well as the knowledge and tools for hunting, fishing, cooking, and, together with the goddess Nüwa, the institution of marriage.

irony’s arrow



235

One aspect I would like to highlight from the seemingly practical arts that Fuxi taught to humans is that these practices emphasize skills of indirection and embellishment. We do not learn to eat by Fuxi’s gifts, but to cook. Women are not taught to give birth (in pain, as Eve was), but to trace inheritance and lineages established through marriage and birth. Learning to hunt is not about learning to kill, but rather the art of tracking, trapping, and reading the signs of prey. We may learn to speak without prompting, but Fuxi supplies the principles that guide how to read the trigrams and decipher the messages revealed in oracle bone firing. All of these crafts require a layer of embellishment and are subject to misreading and misapplication. They are risky, promising great harvest and the potential for great loss. It is not surprising that the essentials of the archer’s skill should be expressed in terms of achieving a straight shot. In a book that traces symbolic significance of archery in China through copious historical reference, Stephen Selby (2000) draws extensively from not only myth, legend, and historical narratives but instruction manuals, epistolatory accounts, and even civil service examination documents that describe the straightness of the arrow itself, the upright stance of the bowman “like a flagpole,” the way of keeping the drawing arm horizontal “being able to balance a cup of water on the elbow,” and, of course, the finding of the true “path” of the correctly aimed shot. These straight lines are not only physical but parallel moral codes of clear-eyed vision, unflappable mental calm, and righteousness in ritual and in social relations across the varied field of premodern Chinese religious and political ideologies. And yet, tucked within these instructions and exhortations, the bow is curved, the draw arm “folds,” the hips must bend, and the back “concentrates” as the “fierce tiger gathers himself to spring” (Selby 2000: 200). Quite a lot of twisting, it turns out, is required to achieve the true path of the straight shot. In a larger perspective, Selby describes the ironic fate of the best-known archer of Chinese mythology, Hou Yi, who with his bow and arrow saved the moon from eclipse and also the world from burning by shooting excessive suns out of the sky. In one reading, according to a passage in Warring States period history, “Yi, the great hunter, becomes hunted. . . . Yi’s own killers, in a horrible parody of the hunter’s meat sacrifice, cook him to serve to his sons”; in some versions he is killed by his own archery student (Selby 2000: 22). For Selby, this mythic reversal provides support for the figure of a “shaman archer,” not most significantly a model for practical skills but rather the carrier of transcendent ritual practice that underwrote martial traditions throughout the dynasties, finally disintegrating with the Chinese imperial cycle in modern times. In this view, the gallant age of mystical allegiance, like the classical Empire of the Text, is over. However, I suggest that the tragic elements in the model are the ones that future generations energetically point to and recap-

236



mary scoggin

ture. The perversity of periodic defeat is precisely the point; even without the mysterious and distinctly premodern sacrifice of the shaman, the betrayal of skill and reversal of benevolence are embedded in the very sophistication of the tool itself. In literary discourse the straight-shooting arrow may be prized, but it is perilous and unpredictable. Its launch is rooted in coiled postures and propelled with a twist. The fate of Hou Yi not only demonstrates vulnerability of the archer hero but lays open a multiply meandering path between nature and technology, teacher and student, loyalty and treachery. Just as the flight of an arrow casts long ghostly shadows that portend dramatic reversals, plunging in and out of the alternate world of spirits, mystery, and death, the straight pen (or brush) bends and curls to navigate a myriad journeys through complex social relations. The sense of instability and tension embedded in the mythology of the archer can be traced through political discourse as central to literary craft in China in order to understand the crafted stance of the modern writer.

Learning to Shoot in the Labyrinth of Political Power Archery lessons begin not with arrow manufacture but with the stance of the archer. Rather than focus upon the rhetorical form within textual content, that is, the words and references with which critical literary texts are composed, I will focus upon the subjective grounding that prepares the launching of such messages. Central to the technologies of persuasion, or battle in public discourse, is the writer’s individually demarcated identity, or stance, that participants take while deploying these missives. We may understand this in contemporary literary theory as “context” or the structural position of a writer as a sort of identity politics including nations, ethnicities, races, and genders in unequal measure of advantage in society, seeking a justice of redress. To be sure, similar attention to biographical background ingredients play a role even in very early Chinese literary analysis, rooted in region, class, and gender identity. But beyond these set bandwidths, my aim here is to drill down to acts of writing, reading, and interpretation as deployed from a particular and individual stance. When the literatus, the writer, the artist, or the critic raises a bow to shoot, they do not see themselves as mere vehicles in battle trying to level a social field. Rather, they twist themselves to the launch, themselves figures of deformity and tragedy, responding to (as they must see it) perversity. The launch point is created through these crooked and distorted positions. Their work is the cultivation of a stance in counterpoint to the deformity, mirroring it. These literary archers are neither senseless canon fodder nor talented athlete, but rather, like the images cultivated here, they are misfits, ghosts,

irony’s arrow



237

babies, and fools, brought to extraordinary conclusions by twisted postures. Irony’s arrow is not a trope that projects genius, or transcendent inspiration for the writer’s ease, but rather a trope that figures writers as self-reflectively monstrous, some more, some less sympathetic, caught in troubled times and places. The specific metaphor of archery is also embedded in the same literary, political, and historical canon that brought us the crooked pen. Christopher Leigh Connery (1999) employs the phrase “empire of the text” to refer to a specific central structure of authority consolidated in the Han dynasty (by 200 CE) that knit governing and social practices together through a separate register of literary text: 文言文 or Classical Chinese. This robust textual culture included careful collecting and sourcing of poems, histories, essays, and accounts, along with the delineation of variants and annotations, wide promulgation and access through educational, epistle, and other social practices as well through bureaucratic reports, interpretations, and commentary. While particular texts have been canonized, protected, and promulgated to this day, the authority they represent, Connery argues, was more like a ritual than direct instruction. Solidarity was created through processes of recitation, “reading, writing, mimicry” all bundled into what is called “study” (the Chinese term 学, then as now) which, as Connery notes, may have first referred to an archery hall. “The first university (大学) which referred either to the same or an adjacent building (for Zhou ritual instruction) was for educating young royalty not in textual learning, as the greatly expanded Han dynasty institution of the same name would do, but in ritual archery and other physical activities” (10). The metaphorical link from arrow to text is carried upon a physical model of self-cultivation, discipline, and a thoroughly integrated political subjectivity that saturated society and represented civilization. A key point that Connery makes is that there can be no dissent in this model: “In the Empire of the Text there is no dissent. To write at all is to perform allegiance” (75). How can we square this position with legions of figures in Chinese literary and political history (these two categories generously overlapping) whose impertinent words lead to exile, madcap hermitage, or 文字狱 (“prison of words,” another Han dynasty expression to refer to the dire results of all of the above)? Connery’s structure is conceptual and ideological, leaving ample territory for the collisions and mismatches of actual practice on the ground, such as contradictions between words and facts, establishments and change, theory and application. It is precisely the expectation that participation in and public expression of sociality is inherently political and relevant to the imperial center that leads to all this messiness and reflects directly upon not only the words but the agent that produces them. Censorship, in this context, is not merely the overt production and suppression of messages that contradict a political line but the collision between rough blocks of reality that interrupt the imaged

238



mary scoggin

processes of ideas and intentions. Finding themselves in crooks and crannies between hard spaces is simply the fallout of real time and space, channeling human meaning and action between things. Censorship and self-censorship are not much different in this projection of disconnection. These are some very practical constraints on human agency, which block not only talking or writing but also being. The “empire of the text” draws specifically from the social and bureaucratic practices of Classical Chinese. While one could pinpoint the beginnings of modernity in many times and places, clearly one of the self-conscious launching points of modernity in China was the movement to dismantle the systems built upon the Classical Chinese language, from the production of aesthetic literature to the imperial service exams, to the Chinese system of successive dynasties and the very use of Classical Chinese itself as language in literature and in common reference, in favor of volatile versions of Chinese vernaculars. In what sense does modern Chinese “dissident” emerge as a new possibility and a radical departure from the “impossibility” of old? My examination here of self-consciously modern texts, written in self-consciously liberated language, illustrates that the appearance of radically new forms of language and text production, the give and take between structure and possibility of expression, is similarly embedded in “the socially mediated capacity to act,” to call upon Laura Ahearn’s (2001: 112) definition of agency. Contraria, as pure opposition or pure difference, may never be possible within any socially interactive context and in any case remains impossible if what we mean by it is a radically independent expression of free will, or an entirely new or different type of language and consciousness brought into being by a new place or time, a new language, a different language, or literacy itself. This position is consistent with theories of dialogic production and practice theory and is not supported by the logic of radical relativism or divides between tradition and modernity, or any rigid concept of cultural purity. What these cases show is the significant social and psychological price of textual practice, in terms not just of the tyrant or the system’s punishment for speaking truth to power but, most painfully, of the configuration of the subject as the cost of launching it. Below, I aim to show that the drive to “shoot straight” is a continually recreated act, drawn deliberately from old models and known referents to keep emerging even more broadly and urgently than the classical textual cultures that emerged from the governing, legal, educational, and social practices of China’s imperial past. However chaotically derived from ancient texts, disparate traditions, and randomly selected heroes from an increasingly large and available corpus of sources, writers who traditionally produced reports, memorials, testimony, commentary, and interpretative annotation go to great lengths to present public texts including cartoons, poetry, and art to the more diffused authority of

irony’s arrow



239

modern power. The phases of an emerging modern Chinese polity covered in this chapter provide an especially interesting illustration of this textual culture precisely because political authority has been particularly ambiguous and insecure through civil wars, cultural revolutions, and other instabilities. What binds these practices together is common effort to legitimize individual actions by reference to ancient antecedents, acknowledging the mixed character of agency, intention, and structure.

Miscellaneous Arrows Following in Lu Xun’s footsteps, Mu Hui (1930–2010), by day a key editor of the central Chinese Communist Party publications but also a “Taoist by night,” launching sharp-shooting “miscellaneous essays” and deploying them from obscure publications on the sidelines, sought to explain the mysterious power of the written missive by tying it to a model from a well-known collection of ghost stories published in the late Ming dynasty, Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Mu Hui’s take on these fantastical stories devotes many chapters to praising the humanity of ghosts, dogs, and other ill-fated creatures in comparison with the treachery of humans. The magical mechanics of textual launch are outlined in an essay on “The King,” a ghost story located on nearly every literate Chinese writer’s bookshelf. The eighteenth-century story describes a magistrate wrongfully accused by a corrupt governor of stealing a sum of money in his care. Possibly dreaming, he was mysteriously led through hilly wilds and brought before a king, styled in the fashion of ancient courts of a thousand years previous. The fearful magistrate admits that he has been accused of stealing; to his surprise, the king reports that he has the cash in his possession and considers it a gift, or a bribe, from the magistrate’s governor. Weeping, the magistrate asks for written evidence that the money had remained with the king, and not himself. “That is easy enough,” replied the king, and put into his hands a thick letter, which he bade him give to the Governor, assuring him that this would prevent him from getting into any trouble. He also provided him with an escort; and the magistrate, who dared not argue the point further, sorrowfully accepted the letter and took his departure. The road he travelled along was not that by which he had come; and when the hills ended, his escort left him and went back. In a few days more he reached Ch’ang-sha, and respectfully informed the Governor of what had taken place; but the Governor thought he was telling more lies, and in a great rage bade the attendants bind him hand and foot. [Before they could do so,] The magistrate then drew the letter forth

240



mary scoggin

from his coat; and when the Governor broke the seal and saw its contents, his face turned deadly pale. He gave orders for the magistrate to be unbound, remarking that the loss of the treasure was of no importance, and that the magistrate was free to go. (Pu 1880 [1740]: 160–161)

Mu Hui has chosen this story to refresh the trope of the maligned and overwhelmed civil servant and to insert his predicament into modern times, a clear case of “using the past to serve the present.” The king’s missive, however, models the arrow-like trajectory of a magic text. We never even learn the contents of the letter; we just know that it hits its target. Our hapless magistrate is merely a cog in the wheels of bureaucratic society. He is neither a martyr nor a brave hero who persuades his detractors. Instead, he deploys a letter via a ghost king and only this powerful shot can diffuse the danger of an oppressive, corrupt governor. This, according to Mu Hui in a Qu Yuan-esque lament composed in a Lu Xun-style essay, is the tragic role the honest man can expect to play. In corrupt and dangerous circumstances, the best he can hope for is to be haunted. This modern view can help explain haunting twists within the sketches of the writers to follow. The enchanted past serves the present through indirection and displacement. Modern Chinese writers command an implement, modern written Chinese, that sustains both great changes and great continuity. The past is compelling as a resource, but it is also a trap. Lu Xun, as pioneering author of the first recognized pieces of literature that abandoned Classical Chinese for the emerging vernacular, forged his modern identity by pitching battles not only against corrupt politicians but also against the Chinese tradition he conceived on the whole as hypocritical and against literary practice as an instrument of obfuscation and a weapon of the powerful that needed to be transformed for use by real people. Modern writers shoot straight, except, inevitably, every time they actually put pen to paper and become tangled in misdirection. Even when irony is pointedly out of favor, it proves to be a very stubborn figure, impossible to exorcise. Lu Xun was not alone in lamenting it. Irony, especially ironic literary strategies, is frequently recognized and analyzed with a sense of critical ambivalence. This is true in contemporary warnings about the dangers of misconstruing sarcasm on digital platforms, but warnings of the corrupting nature of irony also abound in classical Greek rhetoric, Persian poetics, and the prescriptions of church-inspired grammarians (such as, notably, Puritans like John Eachard [1670: 45–46] warning preachers against “affronting God and clouding truth with their frightful metaphors”). At the same time, each one of these traditions provides ample displays of ironic prowess. Modern instructions to Chinese editors include warnings, even as explicit censorship instructions issue alerts about secret circumlocutions and

irony’s arrow



241

code that creep into media submissions and commentary. Even more explicitly than in ancient Greek rhetoric, Chinese disapprobation of irony, oral and literary, is widespread and loud. This Chinese distrust of deliberately circuitous, backhanded, indirect language strategies may be surprising, since the art of “reading between the lines” is presented as a constant throughout the extraordinary depth and consistency of the Chinese language, spanning historically, geographically, and linguistically over dialectical gulfs of equal magnitude. This “art of reading dragons,” argue Bob Hodge and Kam Louie (1988: 19), is not so much an elite and rarified skill as it is a possibly “paranoiac survival strategy” within successive and self-referring discursive regimes. The study of irony as a trope emerges not only from the study of rhetoric, as demonstrated, but also out of human social practice, moving beyond the technology of words to display the workings of social engagement and human behavior. The “turning” in trope is the interplay between things, a “figuring out” process. Thinking through tropes is a way to see through imposed barriers between language and culture, form and content, intention and accident. Examining the way tropes work is a way to see what people do, not only with words, images, and ideas but also with sticks and stones, walls and blinds. Like the other three of the Big Four (metaphor, metonym, and synecdoche), irony is a human tool of social interaction so broad and universal, if defined roughly enough, that it can be discovered at all levels. It ranges from the surface sarcasm of the famous negation through double positive “yeah, right!” to the depths of death as a part of life. If irony, as it is often described, is the gap between what is said and what is meant, is there any utterance, or even any action, entirely without irony? Is there any language or culture without irony?2 In any act of meaning, as semiotics has taught us, the mismatch of gaps and surpluses are part of the signifying process. The misfitting itself, then, is not enough to define irony. The Chinese cases examined here illuminate another key ingredient of irony that may be good to think more broadly: the disjuncture of irony includes someone’s awareness of someone’s failure, ignorance, or inadequacy at being human in the world. These two “someones” can of course be one and the same, even simultaneously. This is often what supplies the tragic flavor of irony, a belated or frustrated knowledge of how these gaps and leaks prevent the expression of meaning, the trajectory of intention, or the unfolding of truth. Euro-American discussions of irony (e.g., Booth 1974; Muecke 1969), and the Chinese discussions reviewed below, present a problem in consistently forcing a categorical separation between style and content, rhetoric and meaning, language and life. For example, there are contrasts between “rhetorical irony,” “situational irony,” “irony of fate,” and “cosmic irony.” Instead of forcing a classificatory separation between language and life, I argue that, beyond the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant that defines irony, we can

242



mary scoggin

seek illustration of the awareness of that which can block the operation of a particular human, or perhaps any humans at all. Whether it is “rhetorical” or “situational,” irony is the “but . . . ,” the “actually . . . ,” reflecting the often cold and hard awareness of limitations and contradictions. Irony often comes to our attention precisely when it lands where it hurts. With the pain, however, can come a little power; irony hurts the downtrodden and overmatched, but, as the present demonstration will show, it has a rather unique capacity, through confounding expectations and highlighting ambiguity, to humble overt power and rally the seemingly powerless. While it has been argued that irony (especially when expressed as cynicism) is a trope of defeat and deflection, irony is also a limber trope of escape and release. To illustrate these points, the discussion to follow presents slices of contrariness writing in Chinese literary life, expressed in three cases by Chinese writers: a poet, a cartoonist, and a political prisoner. In life and in death, all three are publicly noted ironic figures. By no innocent accident, all three have been publicly affiliated as a ghostly child, childlike, or obsessed by children in ghostly ways. The child figure included in each case serves to highlight the immediacy, the ignorance and awareness, the innocence and tragedy, all highlighted in the ironic experience of life. These child/ghost figures present a stance of innocent ignorance. Through this examination we can see the inexhaustible mining of irony from ancient texts, the recycling and reformation of irony in the transitions of the emergence of Modern Chinese writing, irony’s rich and haggard life in mass media and in contemporary censorship practices (a circuitous experience to be sure). Much writing on irony, including my own, has focused upon “crookedness,” circumlocution, and indirection (Scoggin, 2001, 2006). By contrast, the point I seek to illuminate in this chapter is that is that crookedness is a common tactic but not a necessary feature of irony. These children/ghosts are trying to shoot straight. The illustrations chosen here focus on the clearest juxtaposition of ignorance and awareness. While these stories are “political” and “cultural,” taking place primarily in China and reflecting the spectacular death of specifically political dreams, the human experiences illustrated below are remarkably universal, with many possible connections to common global problems. I have chosen this set of characters and events not to praise or condemn them in their particulars but rather because these social situations are relatively accessible, having played out in the public eye like theater, with stock roles and familiar appeals to the fates. Even if unfamiliar with the specific texts set forth here, the reader is likely to have formed an impression of Chinese ghost stories, of war and revolution in China, of Chinese censorship systems, and of the ironic possibilities of the Nobel Peace Prize. These acts and settings allow a more generalizable

irony’s arrow



243

examination of a relatively concrete set of meanings and events that present an irony defined by sharp points, soaring flights, and pain, illuminated through the eyes of children once removed, having gained just enough wisdom.

Ghosts Against the Wall As irony is difficult to define, it is naturally difficult to translate as well. A catalogue of modern Chinese terms used to express irony as a speech act include a preponderance of references to thorns, pricking, sharpness, and bitterness. Many of these terms emphasize the formal crookedness of everyday irony, beginning with the most common translation, 讽刺 (literally “satirizing prick”: to mock). Related are 刺耳 ( “prick ear”: speech that stings), 带刺 (“with thorns”: to speak with veiled aggression), 挖苦 (“dig up bitterness”: to humiliate), and 恶搞 (“wickedly manipulate”: to lampoon). A more scholarly, analytical term would feature 反语, literally “turned-back language,” which sounds like a definition of “trope” but with special focus on the twisted, backwards-bent direction (a related term, 反话 [“back talk”], has the sense of a cheeky comeback). However many different terms we might pursue, irony is relatively easy to see in modern Chinese and no less in ancient Chinese works that form foundations of Chinese literary/political/cultural theory. The Chinese classical canon includes not only primary works of history, political speeches, and literary compositions but a large corpus of supplementary commentary on the primary works, with the supplement frequently supplanting the original in significance. This centrality of annotations as models of intellectual production is a distinct feature of the Chinese literary tradition. As these works continue to demand canonical space in cultural and educational institutions, ongoing enthusiasm for interpretive commentary provides constant opportunities for critical awareness and the study of irony. While irony is deeply baked into the Chinese literary tradition, ancient teachers in China (in the same vein as Socrates and Plato) were both well informed and alarmed about the ironic arts of rhetoric. In his article “Efficacious Persuasion in the Guiguzi,” Garret Olberding (2002: 2) writes, “This antipathy towards the art of ‘word-twisting’ finds fertile soil not only in European culture but in China as well. The canonical thinkers of classical China, ranging from Confucius to Zhuangzi to Mozi, warned about the perplexities of speech and, more insidious, those who teach the shaping of speech for the attainment of political ends.” The work under discussion, Guiguzi, is called “China’s first treatise on rhetoric,” but it was never considered a fully accredited member of the clas-

244



mary scoggin

sical canon and was sometimes deliberately rejected as a “wicked” tool of magic (Wu 2016: 17). Guiguzi, or 鬼谷子, is a pragmatic and skeptical guide to political persuasion compiled by the (possibly composite) sage the Master (子) of Ghost Valley (鬼谷) during the Warring States period, around 400 BCE. As a guide for the well-educated, though not well-connected, freelance diplomats of the times (Confucius followed this profession) the text teaches strategic ambiguity as a survival skill and at the same time warns about mendacity. Recognition of and instruction on the deployment of irony are key to its mission. Metaphorical description of how rhetoric works frequently takes the form of flow and obstruction. For example, “Open and Shut,” the first chapter of Guiguzi, tells us, “The sage keeps watch at the door,” because an objective observation of change is the first task of navigating nature, human life, and social relations. In keeping with well-known contrasts we now associate with Taoism and Chinese Buddhism, open and closed is associated with yin and yang, life and death, soft and hard, relaxed and tense. The lesson that follows describes when to open the mouth and speak and when to keep it shut and stay silent, also described as “flying” versus “pinching.” Mastering rhetoric in this work consistently requires observation of the objective facts of life and understanding of flow and obstruction. This section proposes “understanding the doors between life and death,” through which the ancients, a sage, and by implication you, dear reader, can “divine the beginning and end of all things.” In modern times the mystical image of carefully watching the doors between life and death is captured by a leading writer in the modern “misty poetry” movement, Gu Cheng (1993; my translation), in the following graphic poem, “Ghost Enters the City”: 0Ѣ ϡ૤ ҵբۘ‫׶‬ЩК ‫ܜߛؚ‬࿉ٰӳ Ըю ϦϪ Zero hour Ghost Walks the road very carefully It’s afraid of taking a tumble and becoming human

The arrangement of the lines of this poem replicate a cross-section of the gate in a city wall. While “midnight” would have been a smoother transla-

irony’s arrow



245

tion of “zero hour” (for which Gu Cheng could have used a Chinese character but chose not to), I wanted to preserve the interruption of the time reference, which in Chinese is even more graphic with the rounded opening of “0” like the open-mouthed expression of terror in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, matching Gu Cheng’s deliberate cosmopolitan and modernist imagery (the city under invocation here is in some senses Berlin; Lupke 2008). Gu Cheng invokes Chinese folk images as he describes a ghost traversing an ancient city wall. Significant among them is the sense that Chinese ghosts, while frightful and dangerous figures in Chinese folk ideology, are also frequently presented in Chinese narratives as stupid, clumsy, and helpless. Observers of traditionalstyle doorways will know that the high thresholds that force humans to step over, and the decorative screens or walls that force us to make turns, are explained by the reasoning that these obstacles impede knee-less ghosts who are only capable of traveling in straight lines. Here, as happens frequently throughout the volumes of beloved Chinese ghost stories, the reader finds an empathetic viewpoint on the relatively innocent and childlike problems of ghosts, who have all of our human needs but are less capable of fulfilling them. The irony of this poem depends upon our tender sympathy with the lonely ghost, gingerly treading along in the dark . . . until we realize that it is we ourselves who are terrifying it; the ghost fears the dangerous accident that would mean becoming one of us! The presentation of this poem provides a vivid view of a key poetic feature that allows us to understand ironic function on the other side of “launch.” Poetry critic David Orr (2008) calls this feature the “stop.” He argues that other genres of language can be equally vivid or concentrated, moving, ornate, or ceremonial, but poetry is defined by the art of the stop. Metrical beats, poetic lines, and strategically placed revelations are the building blocks of poetry. This opening passage of “Ghost Enters the City” displays the poetics of “stop” in a number of vivid ways. The two character chains graphically counterpoising the city wall and the city gate squeeze the words between these crisscrossing boundaries. The narrative of the poem leads us along a small, humble flow between the confines until it dumps us into the surprising realization that we have taken the ghost’s point of view against our living selves. Irony describes the key trope here; we are suddenly aware of the walls and the frightful door between life and death, and just as suddenly we question to which side our allegiance belongs. Gu Cheng, son of an army poet and member of the “misty poets” school that emerged in the late 1970s, as a writer was a product of the Chinese censorship apparatus as it shifted to confront the contemporary age of mass media. While at least some ambiguity over the treatment of the misty poets lingers, as centered in the quickly exiled magazine Today, this movement represented

246



mary scoggin

a new start in an ongoing and robust series of artful movements to play cat and mouse with the modern Chinese censorship apparatus. The misty poets engaged in an expressive critique of the Cultural Revolution, out of which this generation was then emerging, and the embrace of specifically Western models of poetics. Gu Cheng’s uncompromising critique not only of political phases but also of a brand of Chinese patriotism in general (see outrage over his representation of the Yellow River as stream of urine) ensured his early expulsion. He moved to New Zealand in 1987, as the precursor to the 1989 student protest movement was emerging. Gu Cheng is not a “good” model for “speak truth to power” heroes. A few years later, suffering from depression, he murdered his wife, the poet Xie Ye, and committed suicide, shocking the nation and ensuring that future memorialization of his work would be censored in China and condemned abroad, on evidence of his criminal failure of personal morality and not only for political reasons. Huang Yibing argues that, taken separately from his horrific act, Gu Cheng’s simultaneous expulsion from Chinese literary and political life is unwarranted; it should be seen as an illuminating and “inflected expression” of his generation and times (in Lupke 2008: 124). The fate of his record demonstrates how censorship is not merely an exercise of the overt suppression of words within embedded political processes but a general process of productions and responses that channel human meaning and action between walls and through doors. The creative and ironic effects of censorship in action are not always so clearly marked as they are in the peculiar tragedy of Gu Cheng and Xia Ye. A more holistic analysis that includes varied types of expression and treatment deployed in social relations can help us understand the complicated relations between words, images, meanings, and impact and see the constant interaction of expression and obstruction. Any examination of censorship must also consider a launch and flow, channeled by obstacles, in the form of the words, ideas, and connections that are allowed, encouraged, prescribed (like Grice’s maxims), or even forced (like Foucault’s “avowal”). Gu Cheng had been well known as a child prodigy, producing some of his most famous lines at twelve (“dark nights give me black eyes, I use them to find light”). Among his early productions, “I am a Willful Child” (1981) shows his awareness of his childlike character and, along with romantic notions of the child’s place in nature and inevitable discomfort with the city and the bloodiness of human social and political life, drives Gu Cheng’s poetics (Huang 2008: 127). Huang argues that this is, as it poetically should be, a highlighted expression of the common predicament, despite the clear progression from child to monster-child and ghost-child along which Gu Cheng’s poetry and his life traversed. It is cynical and disingenuous to dismiss this progression as arrested childhood or deliberate manipulation of innocence (often critiqued now as 卖嫩, literally “selling

irony’s arrow



247

tenderness”). Beyond the critical assessment of Gu Cheng’s work, fair or not, he is not the first or the last to present an ironic juxtaposition of child and monster. The following two cases share the image of the troubled child, while differing in the way the deathly “stop” lands.

Cartoons Are Not Always Funny The child-monster figure, with its robust roots in Chinese folklore, is constantly recycled in modern media, including in vastly popular cartoon versions of the ironic juxtaposition, for example, of the Red Boy 红孩儿 and other monsters from the classic novel Journey to the West. For our purposes of illustrating a full iteration of irony, however, it is not enough to project an incongruous juxtaposition of contrast. The key to examining a course of irony is locating awareness of the displacement. For this I propose a look at Feng Zikai, the “father of China cartoons” and another transitional figure. As the later artists like Gu Cheng and the misty poets transitioned from a post–Cultural Revolution and emerging global generation, Feng Zikai represents a key sensibility as well as poignant social and political predicaments from the Chinese Communist revolution leading up to the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Gu Cheng, who lived a life of political and personal rebellion and, even before murdering his wife, had a tumultuous marriage marked by discord over whether or not to raise their own child (see Weinberger 2005), Feng Zikai in most ways presented the opposite social persona: a conservative gentle soul, visibly defined by his orientation to family. And yet over the final two decades of his life he suffered a similar type of retreat from reality, marked by isolation and political suppression, finally dying in 1975 secluded in a self-imposed isolation of an apartment room in Shanghai he called the “Sun-Moon studio,” self-styled as a Buddhist retreat, meant to recreate in an impossibly tiny form the romantic dreams of his idyllic family home. Feng Zikai was born in 1898, the waning years of the final Chinese dynasty, and raised as the doted-upon only son, groomed for imperial examinations and a literati career. After the Qing court collapsed, and with it the traditional institutions of civil and social advancement, he partly acquiesced to his family’s fanciful dreams of an eventual reinstatement of court-supported gentry, a dream the invading Japanese forces also later attempted to cultivate (Lary 2010: 58). In 1919, just as the battles for China’s next transformations were beginning, he left the comfort of his rural estate to continue his education at a prestigious regional school. He accepted an arranged marriage to the daughter of a prominent local family at age sixteen, and over the tumultuous ravages of the next three decades raised six children together with her and his extended family, through repeated moves and disruptions (Barmé 2002).

248



mary scoggin

Feng Zikai, as a pioneering cultural figure and active intellectual leader, particularly among artists, can be considered a part of the political and Westernizing May Fourth Movement that formed the ground for political and cultural debate throughout the subsequent war period. He went to study in Japan intending to study Western painting but was captivated by the blossoming creative arts of Japanese-style manga, essentially a cross between a Chinese sketch and a Western cartoon; it was this art that he brought back to China, and he provided the leading voice for its development in the fertile environment of China’s complex navigation of European, Japanese, and Chinese traditions. Feng Zikai established a categorization of cartoons into three types; propaganda, satirical, and his own favored genre, lyrical. It is revealing that the first two types might seem to have the clearest relationship to familiar types of irony. Propaganda is deliberately presented to express a clear and un-ironic point of view, while satirical cartoons are the full-blown circuitous twists launched from the most obvious critical quiver. Feng Zikai devoted his efforts to building a space for the kind of lyrical cartoon more like the kind you might see in the New Yorker (the ones that are not trying to be funny). As the invasion of China by Japan encroached, Feng Zikai’s political identity increasingly diverged from his more leftist colleagues as he energetically sought a position above the fray, earning the derision and anger of (however vaguely) leftist fellow travelers like Lu Xun. Feng Zikai developed a public form of Buddhism and pacifism, with a focus upon a “cult of the child” (Barmé 2002: 128). Decrying and protesting authoritarian forms of education and the corruption of the adult social world, Feng Zikai sought to portray the unsullied heart of the child. Many of his works from this time feature children, facing down the scowls of a headmaster or escaping the structure of the schoolroom. He uses them to express sweetness, nature, and pastoral innocence. In 1937 concentrated attacks and Japanese air raids drove the family into exile and Feng Zikai himself to fury and despair. This period saw his most violent cartoons. The traditional Chinese-style inscription still reflects Feng Zikai’s efforts to indigenize his art form and preserve the form of lyricism, even as he skirted the edge of propaganda. One macabre example of this style entitled “Air Raid” features a breast-feeding infant at the moment a missile explodes the head from the nursing woman in a spray of inky blood. It is accompanied by an inscription running along the right side, which reads: In this aerial raid, On whom do the bombs drop? A baby is sucking at its mother’s breast, But the loving mother’s head has suddenly been severed. Blood and milk flow together. (In Hung 1994: 101)

irony’s arrow



249

In each of these images, one sweet and one macabre, irony’s arrow is straight. The children innocently and directly pursue their own aims, oblivious to the harsh and perverse adult world. Feng Zikai was least interested in what has turned out to be the most successful and widespread format, satirical cartoons with their crooked and saturated social embeddedness. Feng Zikai’s “lyrical cartoons” embody a form of irony that emphasizes a straight view of irony’s arrow, emerging from the muddy depths of human society, observed by the eye of self-awareness. Explicitly focused on children and families, he sought the straightest path to the promote awareness of perversity.

From Lampoons to Ashes From 2006 to 2008, when he was confined for the final time leading to his prison death in 2017, the political critic Liu Xiaobo published short articles under the title “Post-Totalitarian China’s Joking Politics” in Radio Free Asia, in which he parsed and analyzed the emergence on the internet of a specific genre of visual and literary sarcasm, called 恶搞 (“wicked manipulation” or “lampoon”). He defined it as phenomenon that “它以戏仿、变造、拼贴等 手法来表达民间的反讽精神，主要是针对的是传统、权威、名流、时 尚和公共事件,” which I will translate as “uses parody, perverted meanings, and collage to express people’s sardonic spirit, mostly aimed at tradition, authority, famous people, fashions, and public events” (Liu 2008). These are, of course, the common tools of irony and form only the most recent instance of cat-and-mouse games of expression in China. Liu (2012: 179) argued that although the term “wicked manipulation” is new and specific to internet production, it is an extension of the sort of black humor and sarcasm that emerged in the 1980s “quasi-hippie culture of the post-Mao years,” which included the misty poets discussed above, the Communist parodies of rebellious rock star Cui Jian, and the absurdist sarcasm of fiction writer Wang Shuo. These young artists flourished through their contrast to the pompous seriousness of official discourse, at play with everything with spirited fearlessness, and continually played edge ball with the censor’s clampdown. Liu observed that this lively sword was a double-edged one, engendering passive cynicism as much as sharpened sensibility. Still, he argued, the benefits outweigh the costs, considering the role that this sort of humor played specifically in “tearing down the Iron Curtain” in the style of Milan Kundera (Liu 2012: 186). Liu himself eschewed all such circuitous means. He was more in the style of Václav Havel, and the immediate cause of his demise was his role in promoting “Charter 08,” a deliberate echo of Havel’s “Charter 77” in the form of a proposal for political reform in China. Charter 08 listed a number of demands

250



mary scoggin

for rights of freedom of expression, assembly, religion, and the like—many already included in the Chinese constitution but insufficiently protected, according to the signers—as well as more organizational changes such as separation of powers, elections, and a kind of federalism that had been suggested previously by modern China’s national founder, Sun Yat-sen. In other words, this document, while far reaching, was sober, substantial, and mindful of Chinese conditions, quite the opposite of the flights of fancy embodied in lampooning. And yet, the launch, trajectory, and final fate of this document, and of Liu Xiaobo personally, was profoundly ironic. Liu’s own manner of speaking was precisely the “truth-telling” politics he attributed to Havel, straight shooting and direct. His celebration of the weaseling twisting of “wicked manipulation” artists was nevertheless an assertion of how he saw them as fellow travelers. The key to the symmetry in these two types of mismatched juxtapositions was in their mutual awareness. Liu had been jailed several times previously for shorter periods, beginning from his role in negotiating for the students in the Tiananmen student movement of 1989. At this point Liu fully adopted his nonviolent signature, “no hatred, no enemies” but consultation, debate, mutual respect, tolerance, and compromise. It was also at this time that he met his wife, Liu Xia, an artist with a strongly professed disinterest in “politics.” With his public connection to Charter 08, Liu was quickly detained and in 2009 was sentenced to eleven years in jail for inciting the subversion of state power. In 2010, in an ironic collaboration of events and strategy, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his troubles. When Liu Xia brought news of the award, as Perry Link (2017) recounts in his article “The Passion of Liu Xiaobo,” Liu Xiaobo remarked, “This is for the aggrieved ghosts,” referring to the students and workers who had died in the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June 1989. In 2017 reports came out that Liu had late-stage cancer. A few weeks later, on 13 July 2017, he was dead. Writing on the news of Liu’s death, Link notes that his peers and models Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, and Aung San Suu Kyi had all survived their imprisonment to write their own subsequent chapters. He wonders about the fate of Liu’s own legacy. Liu’s death, while noted among his friends and in foreign press accounts, was largely muted. Is this the end of his history? The answer to this question is not, of course, up to Liu Xiaobo. His role in this affair is now passive; the next step belongs to those who pick out the scraps of this life and shoot it up and out of the abyss and into the realm of awareness elsewhere. This state of future ignorance and incapacity was one Liu (1988: 57) anticipated: “The unique thing about man is that he is capable of being aware of his tragic fate; he can be aware of the fact that he will die; he can be aware that the ultimate meaning of the universe and life itself is unknowable. A nation that is without an awareness of tragedy and death is to some extent a nation that is still in the mists of primal ignorance.” The play between aware-

irony’s arrow



251

ness and ignorance is not stopped by death but depends upon the seedlings left behind and their uptake by others. One immediate piece of significance in this uptake is the fate of Liu Xia, the martyr’s wife. Never accused of any crime, Liu Xia lived under an excruciatingly isolated form of house arrest from 2010 until 2018. Some of her photographs, which were never explicitly banned, project an awareness of this painfully ironic state, including troubling childlike dolls perched on Liu Xiaobo’s shoulder or posed in cages. Geremie Barmé (2009: 6) has written about Liu Xiaobo’s transition from fiery critic to calm thorn in the side: he who had developed a reputation as “the evil champion of nihilism and the irrational was, ironically, now the chief advocate of positive and rational civil action.” Along with that transition came an awareness of his fate. He and Liu Xia publicly discussed their decision to not have children, anticipating the undeserved troubles of having a jailed parent. These dolls, then, become the emblems of their children generalized and projected onto the world of the living. In a widely distributed statement prepared for his final sentencing, Liu Xiaobo (2009) said the following: I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested, and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies. . . . Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience. Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of the nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation’s progress toward freedom and democracy. That is why I hope to be able to transcend my personal experiences as I look upon our nation’s development and social change, to counter the regime’s hostility with utmost goodwill, and to dispel hatred with love.

Finally, in the same statement, he turned his attention to his wife with this this line: “Even if I were crushed into powder, I would with my ashes embrace you.” After Liu Xiaobo died, he was quickly cremated and, with Liu Xia in attendance, his ashes were scattered at sea. Messages featuring empty chairs representing his absence at the Nobel Prize presentation ceremony swept the internet, and ashes and waves were also frequently shared, referring to Liu Xia’s disbursement of them in the ocean. Liu Xia herself remained mostly isolated and under house arrest, growing increasingly gaunt and desperate, until the summer of 2018, when she was finally released and relocated to Germany. One might argue that the audience of Liu Xiaobo (with Liu Xia forming a part of his poetic stance) has increasingly faded as a “Chinese” message and continued prominently as an international image. In part, this is surely the intent of Chinese censorship of Liu Xiaobo. Following a well-worn path of cen-

252



mary scoggin

sored filmmakers, writers, and other artists, especially after his death, mention of Liu Xiaobo’s name was erased with substantial success within China’s borders, not only all over the internet in China but on social media, even including messages on the Chinese-based platform WeChat in the United States (my own WeChat platforms in the United States had references removed). Images of candles met the same fate. At the same time, the Liu duo also deliberately pursued the globalization of their message and made no effort to sneak through domestic limits until Liu Xia’s eventual landing in Germany. As “ocean” serves explicitly in Chinese as a reference to “foreign,” this image is spectacularly reinforced even in this tightly scrutinized moment of Liu’s “funeral.” The images described in this chapter share the trope of contraria and also a complex aura of irony. If “irony” is to be defined as a semiotic process that confounds expectations and highlights ambiguity, it frequently turns out to be comical. When it does all this but turns upon the movement between ignorance and awareness, we are better able to see how it goes beyond the funnies. On the one hand, they are dissidents persecuted by a vengeful Chinese apparatus made visible by heavy-handed censorship. To some, they may look like simple heroes or pure fools, standing up to tell truth to power merely because they have no filter, because they are mad, innocent, or stubborn. Beyond this image, however, each proves to share a bitter awareness of his own crazy, childlike, or intractable position. Their monster nature is their launching point and a key piece of infrastructure to the motion of their art. A prominent Harvardbased study using large-scale data curated broadly from digital sources in China concluded that Chinese digital censorship “may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented” (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013: 326). While Chinese censors have indeed illuminated an impressive exhibition of censorship made visible by massive measures, this data demonstrates only a surface layer of agency, pushed to an excruciatingly public level. Public messages build the berms and walls, sloughs and furrows that channel human meaning. Complex relations between explicit expressions and the chaotic substance they are supposed to carry is a consistent feature of irony’s arrow. The contiguous trajectory of launch, flight, and stop, as poetic figures, captures an intense concentration of meaning. These figures are sought in poetry, of course, and also often activated in more mundane linguistic forms including other specialized genres like titles, curses, coded images, and laments. The outrageousness and monstrosity of the figures and events reviewed in this chapter merely serve to demonstrate the movement of meaning from quiver to impact. Mary Scoggin (PhD Anthropology, University of Chicago 1997) is professor of anthropology and Chinese studies at Humboldt State University, California State University. Her research focus is on the study of writing, language cul-

irony’s arrow



253

ture, and politics. Her recent research on verbal engagement, censorship, and community explores the constraints of expression in and around institutional contexts. Publications include articles, chapters, and an edited volume on topics including political discourse, publishing, cultural representation, and the rhetoric of everyday poetics from the perspective of linguistic anthropology.

Notes 1. When I first delivered a paper on this concept in one of those AAA conference ballrooms, Barney Bate in his role as discussant highlighted this term for me, saying, “Poetic launch, I don’t think we’ve heard this proposed before, it’s important.” 2. Perhaps not, since, according to a discussion on the blog Language Log in 2009 (Liberman 2009), no contest has been offered since Wilson and Sperber raised the question in 1984.

References Ahearn, Laura. 2001. “Language and Agency.” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 30: 109–137. Barmé, Geremie Randall. 2002. An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai, 1st edn. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2009. “Confession, Redemption, and Death: Liu Xiaobo and the Protest Movement of 1989.” China Heritage Quarterly 17 (March). Retrieved August 17 2017 from http:// www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/017/features/ConfessionRedemptionDeath.pdf. Booth, Wayne. 1974. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Connery, Christopher Leigh. 1999. The Empire of the Text. Latham: Rowman & Littlefield. Eachard, John. 1670. The Grounds & Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion Enquired into a Letter Written to R. L. London: Tyler and Holt. Friedrich, Paul. 1989. “Language, Ideology and Political Economy.” American Anthropologist 91(2): 295–312. ———. 1991. “Polytropy.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez, 17–55. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goldman, Merle. 1988. China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gu Cheng (顾城). 1993. “The Ghost Enters the City” (鬼进城). Today Literary Magazine (今天文學雜誌) (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press). Hillenbrand, Margaret. 2020. Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China. Durham: Duke University Press. Hodge, Bob, and Kam Louie. 1998. Politics of Chinese Language and Culture: The Art of Reading Dragons. London: Routledge. Hsia, C. T. 2016 (1961). A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press. Huang, Yibing. 2008. “The Ghost Enters the City: Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis in the ‘New World.’” In New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry, ed. Christopher Lupke, 123–144. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hung, Chang Tai. 1994. War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press.

254



mary scoggin

King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2013. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.” American Political Science Review 107(2): 326–343. Lary, Diana. 2010. The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liberman, Mark. 2009. “Is Irony Universal?” Language Log (blog), 22 October. Retrieved 27 July 2018 from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1835. Lee, Leo. 1985. Lu Xun and His Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Link, Perry. 2000 The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2017. “The Passion of Liu Xiabo.” New York Review of Books, 13 July 2017. Liu, Xiabo. 1988. A Critique of Choice: An Exchange with Li Zehou (选择的批判 – 与李泽 厚对话). Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House. ———. 2008. “Post-Totalitarian China’s Joking Politics.” Radio Free Asia. Retrieved 18 August 2017 from rfa.org/mandarin/pinlun/weyitiandi-cite/liu_xiaobo-11032008104415.html. ———. 2012. No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, ed. Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Xia Liu. Reprint. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Lupke, Christopher, ed. 2008. New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mu Hui. 1997. Xian Kan Liao Zhai. Tianjin: Baihua Wenyi Chubanshe. Muecke, Douglas Colin. 1969. The Compass of Irony. London: Methuen. Olberding, Garret P. 2002 “Efficacious Persuasion in the Guiguzi.” Unpublished paper. Orr, David. 2008. Poetry. New York: Vantage Press. Pu Songling. 1880 (1740). “The King.” In Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, vol. 1, trans. Herbert A. Giles. London: Thomas de la Rue. Schneider, Laurence A. 1980. A Madman of Ch’u: The Chinese Myth of Loyalty and Dissent. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scoggin, Mary. 2001. “Wine in the Writing, Truth in the Rhetoric: Three Levels of Irony in a Chinese Essay Genre.” In Irony in Action: Anthropology, Practice, and the Moral Imagination, ed. James W. Fernandez and Mary T. Huber, 145–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006.“The Tragedy of Words: Human Agency and Some Chinese Doubts.” In Language, Culture and the Individual: A Tribute to Paul Friedrich, ed. Catherine O’Neil, Mary Scoggin, and Kevin Tuite, 205–213. Munchen: Lincom Press. Selby, Stephen. 2000. Chinese Archery. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Unger, Jonathan. 1993. Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China. New York: Routledge. Veg, Sebastian. 2019. Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals. New York: Columbia University Press. Weinberger, Eliot. 2005. “Next stop, Forbidden City.” London Review of Books 27(12). Retrieved 13 October 2021 from https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n12/eliot-wein berger/diary. Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. 2012. “Explaining Irony.” In Meaning and Relevance, 123–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wu, Hui. 2016. Guiguzi, China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

CHAPTER 11

The Tropes of Music William O. Beeman       

Introduction: Tropes in Music Tropes are generally understood to be figurative representations that invoke cultural understandings other than would be understood were the representations to be regarded in a prosaic and literal fashion. Symbolic expression, metaphor, metonymy, and other devices through which something represents or stands for something else have been explored by anthropologists almost since the beginning of the discipline. A revival of interest in this work in the last decade is due in no small part to the inspired work of James W. Fernandez (1986, 1991). Most work with tropes has involved either linguistic or visual representation. With regard to language, emphasis has been placed on semiotic representation through discursive form. What has rarely been treated in anthropology, even regarding language, are tropic sound structures. Of course, the most developed sound structures in any society aside from language are musical structures. This chapter deals with tropes in music, emphasizing the ways in which music can reflect symbolic meanings external to the music itself. For clarity, it is important to differentiate my usage of tropes in music from the term “trope” used in two other senses in the history of music. In medieval music, a trope was an addition to, or an extension of, a traditional church chant, appended in order to render the chant appropriate for a particular occasion (Summers 2017). In the twentieth century, composer and music theorist Josef Matthias Hauer devised a technique for building twelve-tone compositions embodying

256



william o. beeman

building blocks of chord structures derived from the twelve-tone row, which he called “tropes” (Šedivý and Friesinger 2011; Šedivý 2012). Though both of these historical uses of the term “trope” involve extensions of the musical “text,” the present discussion deals with the tropic references found in music to other nonmusical dimensions of symbolic meaning. Musical structures are fascinating for several reasons. First, in every instance of their existence they constitute purposive, performative behavior. Second, they are nondiscursive in nature. Third, they seem to have an astonishing effect on humans, bypassing language, logic, and other “left brain” functions and working directly on autonomic and emotional systems. Like other forms of culture, music can have tropic functions. When these musical tropes are invoked, they have the power to infuse members of a culture with the symbolic values of their society without the use of words or visual forms. As philosopher Suzanne Langer (1993) pointed out in her classic work, Philosophy in a New Key, music constitutes an essential nondiscursive form of symbolic representation. As I argue below, however, musical tropes as nondiscursive symbolic forms not only show all the characteristics of discursive and visual tropic forms but also add an additional channel of tropic representation to these others.

Musical Tropes and Peircean Pragmatics In this essay I would like to present some examples of tropic form in music and try to provide an explanation for their power as forms of cultural expression. I am using a framework, explicated in other of my writings (see Beeman 1986), derived from Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1955) pragmatic analysis of sign phenomena, which posits representational structures that range from simple resemblance to complex representation through cultural mediation. Peirce labeled his categories of phenomenology “Firstness,” “Secondness,” and “Thirdness.” Firstness is “the mode of being which consists in the subject’s being positively such as it is regardless of aught else” (Peirce 1955: 76). “Positive quality possibility” refers to a situation in which an actual identity exists between a sign and its object—the kind of relationship that is reflected in the mathematical equation x=y (Cornell 1989: 583). Secondness is “a mode of being of one thing which consists in how a second object is” (Peirce 1955: 76). This refers to a relationship in which the thing, although qualitatively different from its object, is imagined to “share” something in common with this object or leads one to automatically think of it when perceiving that particular sign. This level is called “Secondness” because

the tropes of music



257

perception of the relationship between the sign and its object involves a twostage process (“first x then y”) (Cornell 1989: 583–584). Thirdness (symbolism): “The mode of being which consists in the fact that future facts of Secondness will take on a determinant general character” (Peirce 1955: 77). The third level of meaning—that properly occupied by the sign as an actual symbol—comprises a three-stage process of cognition and expresses the relation “first x, then y, so z.” Such a sign can act either through itself or through another sign that Peirce called the interpretant of the original sign (Cornell 1989: 584). A relationship of Firstness implies identity. It is iconic. Something is not the actual thing but it “seems like the real thing.” Secondness implies connectedness. It is metonymic. In performative terms, it means something “pretending to be the real thing.” This is akin to what Erving Goffman (1959) called “role distance” and what Brecht elevated to a theater doctrine in his theory of Verfremdung, or alienation. Thirdness is a conventional relationship between the signifier and the thing being signified. It is metaphoric. It is conventional because it requires a social or other convention to work. The conventional relationships best known to anthropologists are symbols, although there are others such as propositions and arguments that are hypersymbolic in that they not only use symbols but use them according to special conventionally determined procedures to create meaning. Peirce’s categorization of sign phenomena is actually considerably more complex than this three-level schema. He applies Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness to the type of sign itself, to the object of the sign, and to the nature of the connection between sign and object. This yields a sophisticated matrix of sign relationships that has been widely analyzed in anthropology and other disciplines (Beeman 1986; Cornell 1989). Although I am not using Peirce’s full analytic schema in this discussion, I would like to include a musical trope that might be considered to be the most minimal possible sign phenomenon in Peirce’s schema—a kind of “Zero-ness.” In the discussion that follows I present musical transcriptions where practical. In other cases, where conventional transcription is problematic, especially with non-Western or avant-garde music, sound files are available and I provide links to presentations on YouTube.

Zero-ness: What Is Music and What Is Not? In dealing with tropes and tropic structures in music, a fundamental question arises: What is music, and what is not music?1 The boundary between “music” as organized sound and “not music” as unorganized sound is a very old philo-

258



william o. beeman

sophical question. The common distinction is often described as the difference between “sound” and “silence.” This is a fictional distinction. There is no such thing in human life as an absence of sound except for those for whom the absence of sound is part of the steady state of existence because they are profoundly deaf. Arguably, silence is also not a part of the universe of the deaf, because they have no sound environment with which to contrast it. In short: silence is itself a tropic concept. As a phenomenon it can be defined only in contrast to sound; moreover, it is established in contrast to particular, culturally designated sound. Therefore, silence is de facto a type of sound, contrasted with other types of sound. It is the element of contrast that is important, and this contrast is likewise a tropic construction. One cannot use any “essentialist” definition to delineate silence as, for example, “the absence of sound,” since nothing we can identify as silence lacks sound. It could possibly be thought of as the absence of purposefully constructed sound, but in music, as well as in speech—two areas where silence plays a substantial role—those episodes where the vibration of the air that we identify as sound is lacking are also constructed. Moreover, the cessation of purposefully constructed vibrating air allows literally “the sounds of silence” to be heard. These “sounds of silence” are the ambient environmental vibrations not intended by the musician or the speaker of language. This is the way in which “silence” is a trope, a name for that sound environment that we designate as “ground” as opposed to an intentionally constructed “figure” in speech, music, or other culturally designated meaningful sound. The figure-ground relationship between “silence” and “sound” has a concomitant function, in that it delineates the difference between “low information” and “high information” material. Information is the inverse of predictability, according to the classic definition by Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949), and “organized sound,” being less predictable than “unorganized sound,” carries higher information content.

Pauses and Rests A pause or a rest in the course of music has high information content because it becomes a “figure” against the “ground” of the constant musical expression. In music, “silence” frames musical expression. It forms the “ground” boundary that allows music to be heard. Several years ago, I came to San Francisco to record a new, original piece of music written by a California composer. As I read through the music for the first time, I realized that there was something drastically wrong with the piece. It had no rests. Besides posing a practical problem

the tropes of music



259

Figure 11.1. Georg Friedrich Handel, “Hallelujah Chorus,” from Messiah, 1741. Public domain. Listen here: https://youtu.be/BBZ7AfZR9xs.

for a singer—there was no place to breathe—there was a more serious musical problem. After a while it was impossible to hear the piece. Its elements were buried in the overall wall of continuous sound. Working with the composer, I was able to create a performable piece of music by introducing pauses and rests. There are some poignant examples in music, perhaps the most familiar being the “grand pause” at the end of the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah, seen in Figure 1.1 in the third measure from the end. In practice, the two-beat rest is frequently lengthened considerably. The drama in this pause is so great that unsuspecting audience members, thinking that the piece has ended, will frequently begin to applaud during the “silence.” This is a “roll one’s eyes” moment for the musicians and chorus in silent contemplation of the lack of sophistication of the audience. Such examples are memorable because they are somewhat rare.

Silence as Boundary Music consists of phrases and statements much like human discourse. Except for certain minimalist works, such as seen in the works of composer Philip Glass, these phrases are separated from one another by spates of silence. In

260



william o. beeman

Figure 11.2. Johann Sebastian Bach, Cello Suite #1—Prelude in G Major, c. 1717. Public domain. Listen here: https://youtu.be/1prweT95Mo0.

this manner, silence serves to mark boundaries between the basic segmental units of music. The principal boundary is that which marks the beginning and the end of a piece of music. The secondary boundaries mark sections within a musical work, such as the movements of a symphony or the pauses between songs in a song cycle. Audience conventions in the presentation of live music require that the integrity of a whole work, such as a concerto, symphony, song cycle, or section of a recital not be broken by applause but be sanctified by silence. Tertiary boundaries mark breaks in musical statements. Musical analysis generally starts by showing how these boundaries operate. There is not space in this discussion to examine a whole symphony or song cycle to demonstrate the primary and secondary boundary mechanisms, but tertiary phrases are easily illustrated in solo instrument works such as the partitas for violin and cello by Bach. These works are fascinating, because in them, Bach does not indicate rests or pauses. Nevertheless, they illustrate perfectly the concept of relative volume as an interpretative mechanism. The music must be phrased to be comprehensible to the listener. Simply giving every note equal value destroys the figure-ground relationship in the music and makes it “unhearable.”

the tropes of music



261

In Figure 11.2, the lowest note in every figure of four notes, the low openstring G is de-emphasized. In effect the low G becomes the “silence” that separates each phrase. It is the tonic note of the harmony and thus is present throughout the piece as a harmonic “anchor.” It becomes the ground against which the implied harmonies of the piece develop.

Silence as Turn Taking Nothing can illustrate the concept of “relative silence” better than contrapuntal forms in music. In contrapuntal music, instruments and voices, or multiple voices, engage in “conversation” during the course of a work. Musical statements are followed by silence in which the other instrument or instruments produce a response or an extension of the original. An instrumental duet usually plays on this important function. Schumann uses this feature extensively in his justifiably famous songs, including “Im Wonderschönen Monat Mai” (Figure 11.3) In this song the piano and voice are in equal collaboration. The piano figure in the beginning with the rising arpeggios becomes the “ground” against which the vocal line is displayed. The voice pauses, as indicated by the rests shown in boxes in Figure 11.3, to allow the piano once again to emerge as figure against the ground of the vocal pause. This turn taking converges in concerted form as the two musical voices overlap in harmony. This is seen in particular in jazz idioms, where every instrumentalist usually gets a turn to “take the floor” as in face-to-face conversation. Thus, the individual “voices” in music (which can be instrumental) are seen to adopt silence vis-à-vis the other voices as music proceeds. In a typical performance by a jazz ensemble, each instrument gets an opportunity to “riff ” against the ground of an accompaniment, usually by a bass instrument playing minimal rhythms and chords.

4´33˝ No discussion of silence in music would be complete without a discussion of John Cage’s pathbreaking work 4´33˝. For those who are unfamiliar with the piece, the following is a brief description of the piece by Larry J. Solomon (2002 [1998]), paraphrasing Calvin Tomkins (1965), who witnessed it: The piece lasts for four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing. . . . It was first performed by the young pianist David Tudor at Woodstock, New York on August 29, 1952. Tudor placed the hand-written score, which was in conventional notation with blank measures, on the piano and sat motionless as he used a stopwatch to measure the time of each movement. The score indicated three silent movements, each of a dif-

262



william o. beeman

Figure 11.3. Robert Schumann, “Im Wonderschönen Monat Mai,” 1844. Public domain. Listen here: https://youtu.be/2nZvPvM1DYQ.

ferent length, but when added together totaled four minutes and thirty-three seconds [30˝, 2´23˝, 1´40˝]. Tudor signaled its commencement by lowering the keyboard lid of the piano. The sound of the wind in the trees entered the first movement. After thirty seconds of no action, he raised the lid to signal the end of the first movement. It was then lowered for the second movement, during which raindrops pattered on the roof. The score was in several pages, so he turned the pages as time passed, yet played nothing at all. The keyboard lid was raised and lowered again for the final movement, during which the audience whispered and muttered. Although designated as a “silent piece,” this is a misnomer. Cage was quite clear in his belief that there was no such thing as silence. After having visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard and having experienced a low and a high tone, he was informed that the low tone was his heartbeat, and the high tone his circulation system. His conclusion was, “Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. One need not fear for the future of music” (Cage 2011: 8). 4´33˝ was also not an isolated work but rather an extension of Cage’s random com-

the tropes of music



263

positional technique, which had evolved starting with his association with Arnold Schoenberg (Solomon 2002 [1998]). Cage’s intellectual point in 4´33˝ has been interpreted variously as indicating that ambient sound is music, that ambient sound is a part of music. Cage himself was clear that he was trying to redefine the relationship between music, the figure, and everyday life, the ground against which music is played: “I’m trying to find a way to make music that does not depend on time. . . . [It’s] nothing but the continuation of one’s daily work. . . . What the piece is trying to say is that everything we do is music, or can become music” (in Kostelanetz 2003: 69–70). Composer and musician Larry Solomon takes the performance of 4´33˝ very seriously. The performance conditions mark the absence of all but ambient sound as “framed” in an artistic sense. By providing a beginning, ending, and specific transitional structures, the ambient sound—the “silence” of 4´33˝—emerges as the artistic figure of the piece. In this way Cage has taken the very notion of “silence” as “non-music” and has foregrounded it so that it becomes “music,” and as such, it becomes a trope of itself. Please “see” (“hear”) a famous performance of 4´33˝ here: https:// youtu.be/JTEFKFiXSx4.

“Noise” as Music Following Cage, the idea that any sound could be seen as “music” became accepted in musical circles. Indeed, the term “Noise Music” has become a full-blown musical category. However, the existence of “noise artists” predates Cage by many decades. A full treatment of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this discussion, but one pioneering composer should be noted. Luigi Russolo devised a whole series of instruments called intonarumori (roughly: “noise intoners”) that were designed to create ambient sounds such as urban clatter, falling water, sirens, and motor noises. Russolo (2004 [1967]: 6) saw the expansion of the sound palette as inevitable, as the classical structures of music exhausted their own possibilities: Each sound carries with it a nucleus of foreknown and foregone sensations predisposing the auditor to boredom, in spite of all the efforts of innovating composers. All of us have liked and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For years, Beethoven and Wagner have deliciously shaken our hearts. Now we are fed up with them. This is why we get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds, than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies.

264



william o. beeman

Figure 11.4. George Gershwin, handwritten notation for taxi horn, measure 30, An American in Paris, 1928. Public domain. Listen here: https://youtu.be/BuQY b5KTlSs.

Several modern ensembles have tried to duplicate Russolo’s performances and his instruments. One of the very best was presented by Performa, a nonprofit performing arts organization known for the Performa Biennial, a festival of performance taking place in various locations in New York City. One of the performances of the Performa09 Biennial was titled “Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners,” in which modern musicians attempted to reconstruct Russolo’s instruments and perform a full concert with them, including reconstruction of two of Russolo’s original pieces. (Listen here: https://youtu.be/ Lqej96ZVoo8.) Russolo’s spirit has continued to inspire avant-garde musical development down to the present. We have conventional examples of Gershwin using taxi horns in his tone-poem An American in Paris (1928), as can be noted in Figure 11.4. Another example comes from pop-classical composer Leroy Anderson, who has composed for orchestra and typewriter (The Typewriter—a concerto for orchestra and solo typewriter). Listen here: https://youtu.be/jinGW7ZDGPM.

Firstness: Iconicity in Music A great deal of musical form is iconic in nature. It imitates something in the external culture. One celebrated anthropological study involving musical iconicity is Steven Feld’s study of vocal musical expression in mourning among

the tropes of music



265

Figure 11.5. Antonio Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, Spring, first movement, violin solo, 1725. Public domain. Listen here: https://youtu.be/TKthRw4KjEg.

the Kaluli of New Guinea (Feld 2012). The mourners imitate birds in their mourning songs. This ties the musical expression to a grand tropic structure for the society as a whole, since birds are metaphors for human beings. Composers everywhere in the world also use musical elements that evoke cultural traditions from distinct geographical areas of their own and other nations (Beeman 1976). Every musical tradition in the world has such iconic structures. Consider some examples that are particularly easy to see. First, consider the southern Siberian “throat singers” of Tuva, who produce overtones that can sound like a whistle or a bird call. In the following example, called the “Song of the Caravan-Driver,” it is easy to hear several forms of iconicity. The camel’s lumbering gait is heard in the instruments, then the camel driver’s voice, and the whistling of the birds flying overhead. (Listen here: https://youtu.be/D7EQr3L_Cc4.) Next, consider a more familiar example. Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons contains numerous instances of iconic representation in sound. In the first section, “Spring,” illustrated in Figure 11.5, we hear the twittering of numerous birds represented in the violins as spring comes alive.

266



william o. beeman

Figure 11.6. Franz Schubert, Die Biene, 1860. Public domain. Listen here: https:// youtu.be/1Pm6kBXkqT4.

Many composers have imitated nature. The sea is represented in La Mer by Claude Debussy. The flowing of the river Moldau by Bedřich Smetana (all the more amazing since he was deaf when he composed this famous piece) and the buzzing of the bee as in Franz Schubert’s Die Biene/L’Abeille (The Bee), op. 13, no. 9. In this, the buzzing of the bee is imitated by the violin with piano accompaniment, as can be noted in Figure 11.6. The barest form of iconicity is self-referentiality, most often seen as imitation in music. This is one of the most common forms of musical expression. In the following example from Iranian classical music, the instrumentalist imitates the voice almost perfectly just behind him in time. The singer is improvising within the classical Persian mode Abū ʿAt. ā. (Listen here: https://youtu .be/7nFPjOyPg6I.)

Secondness: Indexicality in Music Music often has an intrinsic relationship to the context in which it is performed, or to a larger context in which it is consumed. The addition of text aids in the indexicality. A dance tune is a good example of a musical form that implies a cultural action. When the tune is played, it prompts people to dance. However, there are other metonymic forms one can see in music. The following Navaho example is a Yeibichei Song, referring to the Talking God, also known as the Grandfather of the Gods (Yé’ii Bichii), who appears

the tropes of music



267

Figure 11.7. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Two Armed Men, in The Magic Flute, 1791. Public domain. Listen here: https://youtu.be/5ci9aHWnJco.

during the Nightway ceremony, a nine-day healing ceremony that invokes harmony and balance, along with six male dancers, six female dancers, and a “water sprinkler” who is a trickster figure. Masked dancers representing the gods appear in selected Navaho ceremonials, and these songs are characteristic of them and their appearance. The songs, unique in Navaho music and ceremonial tradition, always mark this particular performance context and are thereby indexical of a specific ceremony and its spiritual function. (Listen here: https://youtu.be/i1DwiTxZafs.) Some musical genres, like this Navaho example, are always evocative of particular performance contexts. A church hymn is a good example, as a hymn is rarely sung outside of a church service; however, hymns are often quoted for other purposes and they evoke the contextual quality of their origins even in their new context. Mozart used a setting of a famous church hymn composed by Martin Luther in 1524, “Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein,” in The Magic Flute to evoke the solemnity of the Trials of Fire and Water that the heroine and hero, Pamina and Tamino, endure toward the end of the opera (see Figure 11.7). Though taken out of its traditional context, this hymn tune is thoroughly metonymic in its function in the dramatism of the work.2

268



william o. beeman

Thirdness: Symbolism in Music Peirce’s idea of Thirdness prescribes that the relationship between the sign and the thing it represents be mediated by a cultural convention, understanding, or law. The intrinsic connections of icons and metonyms are not present here. There must be some element of external interpretation to link the tropic structure to the meaning it invokes. Purely musical sources for this are the modal structures of Indian ragas, Persian dastgāhs, and Arabic maqams. These “modes” are associated with times of day, emotional moods, and even colors as a matter of cultural convention. Thus, whenever they are played it is either for an appropriate occasion or to invoke one of these complexes of what Edward Sapir would surely call “form-feeling.” An example is the Persian mode of Homayun, which has a heroic quality and is used in conjunction with the recitation of epics. When played it evokes this cultural feeling. (Listen here: https://youtu.be/m67X5NgMRks.) In music, such structures are created through reference to external sources of meaning—often puns. Mozart uses this device many times in his operas and orchestral works. In The Marriage of Figaro, the title character is complaining about the infidelity of women. At the end of the song, he complains that women are hard-hearted and fickle, and “everyone knows” how it all ends. In case the audience does not understand, Mozart adds French horns in the orchestra in prominent arpeggios. The horns signify the horns of the cuckold, of course. But to understand this musical pun one must understand the association of horns with cuckolding prior to hearing the music. Finally, some symbolic interpretations in music require that one know something about music itself as a system. In this final example, German popular singer Max Raabe and his satirical 1930s-style Palast Orchester sing about bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease (Rinderwahn), which reached epidemic proportions in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. Raabe’s setting includes an instrumental break in which the music disintegrates in a “crazy” manner. The music perfectly symbolizes the song not only by showing musical insanity but also through its use of “Rule, Britannia,” reminding listeners where mad cow disease came from. (Listen here: https://youtu.be/gzrASI_DGa8.)

Conclusion: Tropes in Music and Tropes Elsewhere The principal difference between tropic structures in music and those in language and visual art is the auditory, nondiscursive component of music. However, this is not an inconsiderable difference.

the tropes of music



269

Figure 11.8. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Aprite un po’ quelgli occhi,” from Le Nozze di Figaro (Marriage of Figaro), 1786. Public domain. Listen here: https:// youtu.be/8l9CQb1cv3w?t=198.

This nondiscursive function allows musical tropes to coexist with linguistic and visual tropes in the same cultural product as a distinct symbolic communicative channel. This perhaps gives additional meaning to Paul Friedrich’s (1991) term “polytropy.” Song, dance, music drama, and many other combined forms are universal in human society. The coexistence of these symbolic forms allows flexibility of function. They can reinforce the others or produce ironic juxtapositions of contradictory messages in the same presentational period. Because this is so, different tropic structures in human culture can imply and reinforce one another. Poetry cries out for musical reinforcement, as Friedrich (1991: 29; 1998) has implied. Instrumental music gets set to words. The rhythmic structures of verse inspire both movement and music in dance. It is as if human beings can never be satisfied with just one channel for symbolic expression. When the need to communicate spills over, music is one of the channels that is immediately sought. Iconic, metonymic, and metaphoric musical forms stand as powerful tools for human expressive needs—needs that are essential for the evolution and development of the human species (Beeman 2010). William O. Beeman is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He is author or editor of more than 150 scholarly articles and of fourteen books dealing with linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and the performing arts, with special interest in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. In addition, he is a professional opera singer and has written extensively on performance traditions both Western and non-Western.

270



william o. beeman

Notes 1. Parts of this section of the discussion have been abstracted from an earlier paper (Beeman 2005), which presents a fuller discussion of the concept of silence. 2. This hymn was set by Johann Sebastian Bach and is the subject of a whole cantata BWV 2. It was also set by Johann Pachelbel. Undoubtedly Mozart was familiar with these settings.

References Beeman, William O. 1976. “You Can Take Music Out of the Country, but . . . : The Dynamics of Change in Iranian Musical Tradition.” Symposium on the Ethnomusicology of Culture Change in Asia. Asian Music 7(2): 6–19. ———. 1986. Language, Status, and Power in Iran. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2005. “Silence in Music.” In Silence and Culture, ed. Maria Luisa Barrio, 23–34. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2010. “Performance Pragmatics, Neuroscience and Evolution.” Pragmatics and Society 1(1): 118–137. Cage, John. 2011. Silence: Lectures and Writings. 50th anniversary edn. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cornell, Vincent Joseph. 1989. “Mirrors of Prophethood: The Evolving Image of the Spiritual Master in the Western Maghrib from the Origins of Sufism to the End of the Sixteenth Century.” PhD dissertation. Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles. Feld, S. 2012. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 3rd ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fernandez, James W. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———, ed. 1991. Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Friedrich, Paul. 1991. “Polytropy.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. ed. James W. Fernandez, 17–55. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1998. Music in Russian Poetry. Middlebury Studies in Russian Language and Literature, vol. 10. New York: Peter Lang. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. Kostelanetz, Richard. 2003. Conversing with Cage. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Langer, Susanne K. 1993. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. 3rd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1955. “The Principles of Phenomenology.” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler, 74–97. New York: Dover. Russolo, Luigi. 2004 (1967). The Art of Noise (Futurist Manifesto, 1913), trans. Robert Filliou. New York: UbuClassics. Originally published as a Great Bear Pamphlet. Retrieved 9 January 2021 from http://www.ubu.com/historical/russolo/index.html. Shannon, Claude Elwood, and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

the tropes of music



271

Šedivý, Dominik. 2012. Tropentechnik: Ihre Anwendung Und Ihre Möglichkeiten. Salzburger Stier, vol. 5. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Šedivý, Dominik, and Günther Friesinger. 2011. Serial Composition and Tonality: An Introduction to the Music of Hauer and Steinbauer. Vienna: Ed. Mono/Monochrom. Solomon, Larry J. 2002 (1998). “The Sounds of Silence: John Cage and 4´33˝” Unpublished paper, rev. edn. Retrieved 7 March 2021 from https://web.archive.org/web/ 20180109031457/http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm. Summers, William John. 2017. “To Trope or Not to Trope? Or, How Was That English Gloria Performed?” In Music in Medieval Europe: Studies in Honour of Bryan Gillingham, ed. Alma Santosuosso and Terrence Bailey, 95–111. Aldershot: Ashgate. Tomkins, Calvin. 1965. The Bride and the Bachelors. New York: Penguin/Viking.

CHAPTER 12

Tactics For Working Anyway Dale Pesmen       

Wendell: It’s a mess, ain’t it, sheriff? Ed Tom Bell: If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here. —Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, No Country for Old Men, 2007

We’ve been raised by particular images in whose voices we end up speaking, uncontrollably. This imagery is the context for how I interpret situations; it conditions what I do and what I experience. As I live in terms of my inherited images, the reality and authority of their world snowballs; the images set stages for me to act on, guide me in becoming characters to walk on those stages, feed me my lines, pull the strings. Of the everyday tropes that most influence us (ones we inhale without noticing, ones we come to collude with or even love, ones we intellectually abhor or aesthetically pooh-pooh as clichés, plus ones we try not to acknowledge), many are debilitating. For example, images of human beings as, each of us, having one deep, enigmatic, complex, internal, spatialized center that harbors and generates value lands us in a huge mess.1 To a great extent, we’re stuck with the images. We do get stuck, don’t we? Tweaking one’s philosophical position on “reality” is of limited practical value here, since imagery of reality itself spins, skews, and makes complicit those interested in discussing it just as energetically as those who couldn’t care less. In fact, there is nothing I can do, violently or calculatedly, to yank what seem like operating-system-level habits out by their imaginary roots, not with these hands.

tactics for working anyway



273

It’s not that these arms aren’t long enough; they’re made of wrong stuff. In this essay I “identify some images” that influence the activities of thinking and writing and I “examine effects” of this imagery’s ascendancy. But, since I am convinced that these images do not use us wisely or treat us right, I then offer a few examples of tactics for working anyway and sketch an attitude that can lead to finding tactics like that and making them palatable. This might be interesting to those who ever get stuck or who, when they find it difficult to think or create, may wonder if it is supposed to be so hard; to academic prose and nonfiction writers who occasionally find themselves narrating in voices they’re not so crazy about; maybe to others. The inevitable clumsiness of this project has not been much edited out. *** Although not choosing our dominant stories is choosing, and we cannot just transcend them by thinking, disagreeing, analyzing, or satirizing, I think we have wiggle room. As I have discussed elsewhere (Pesmen 2007), making art can help us think. One step toward using it that way involves questioning the wisdom of aspiring to grand, organic, coherent gestures of creation. Then it involves choosing to value and even learning to sort of enjoy uneven, open-ended, fumbling processes, as well as getting lost. What I focus on here, however, is not just that important open-endedness; it is teaching oneself to approach writing, and thus thinking, in terms of play and then acknowledging that any play is enabled by some kind of constraint or premise, be it “I’ll be the princess this time,” the rules of chess, the texture of graphite paste, alliteration, “using whatever’s on hand” (see Lévi-Strauss 1966: 17), or a funny way of talking like that guy the other day, you remember which one. —Who’s this preaching? Pedantically? —You mean, “By not choosing . . . “? That’s William . . . —No, I mean, who do you think you’re talking to right now, with your “our” and your “we”?

*** —They say that those who can’t do, teach. —Do you think it’s true? I’ve heard it. Maybe I’ve heard that. —Mean-spirited thing to be saying, is what it is, as if whoever’s talking has never gotten stuck. Maybe Shaw had a handle on realizing abstract

274



dale pesmen

thoughts as new creations, but why can’t a lot of people “do” as easily? What if it’s not . . . —Not because they’re not good enough? Or lucky enough? —Stop interrupting. What if not being able to “do” is just the tip of it? What if that’s trying to show . . . —I’m in awe of how some people teach. —But where does the idea even come from that there’s a contradiction, that thinking and saying smart things is easier than doing powerful things? Lots of people who teach also create. Isn’t ethnography “doing”? Some educators write spectacularly well, even when they don’t have particularly entertaining material. —It wasn’t me who said they contradict. Although if you ignore the mean spirit and counterexamples, something about observing extravagantly can make you feel way more powerful than you are. Being able to notice things, value them, have ideas about them, as if it gives you, can give you, a sense that, since you’ve been faced with “truth,” have observed it, you can turn around and . . . —That sounds like a lot. —What? Seeing unbiased reality, catching it, wrangling it, owning it, thinking new, true things about it, and then clearly, masterfully representing it to others in a linear narrative? —“Representing”? Like politically? —Well, speaking for the actual truth would call for power. But even with that power, even when you can think something smart and formulate it well, it’s mysteriously hard to tell if you’re able to act on what it might suggest or embody it.

Part : Size, Ambition, and Corresponding Powers and Disabilities Three Kinds of Abundance Abundance #1: What is inside As people began to value and identify themselves based on “their” ability to think (a shift associated with the Enlightenment), they increasingly began to look for their future creations right inside themselves. The individual became

tactics for working anyway



275

the source, the genius, rather than a conduit for one, which led to the Romantic image of creativity, experienced as an inborn, personal power to express from within, often uncontrollably (called “naturally”). There have been intellectual and practical challenges to Romantic narratives of creativity over the last century, but I think that often, when we run into problems thinking substantial thoughts or writing them, we are being set up by the old stories. No one asked each of us if we agreed to “having” a centralized internal source of what is most precious, but now we seem to have one, and despite being our own, these images, which indicate how our resources are distributed over our landscape, can make creative processes excruciating and results lackluster. They entail, among other things, misleading assumptions about what it takes to turn observation into action. “There it is; I saw it, I’ve got it!” If the essence of what we say or create preexists “inside,” somehow in our heads or hearts, “bringing it out” should not be any big problem. But it is often a big problem. If having an acute thought is what really matters, “giving it form” should be a fairly straightforward task of execution, although that does not sound fun. There are plenty of stories about people creating successfully from their “souls,” but what if those “talented” elites are chance survivors of their imagery of the self (Pesmen 2007)? What if the metaphor of “giving birth to” what we sign our names on is responsible for a whole range of miserable inabilities to develop good observations into rich artifacts? Maybe the problem with “doing” is not lack of talent; maybe we are in abusive relationships with our souls, relationships that “naturally” lead to suffering. A related—and common—symptom of misunderstanding the relationship between an observer’s “distance” and an active stance is how easy it is to slide from strongly disagreeing with something into assuming that you have already “got what it takes” to respond to it subversively. Sarcasm, irony, and parody announce that you can observe and judge, but this is just a preliminary kind of protest. This psychological blur between the power of thought and the ability to act on a thought, like a virus, transforms the most earnest critics into vehicles for reproducing exactly what they hate and set out to destroy. By flipping “positively” valued to “negatively” valued, or by adding visible or implied quotation marks, one is usually propagating the same imagery (Pesmen 2007). *** —Right, and wanting very badly to perform well can freeze you up too. But it’s just a fairy tale that . . .

276



dale pesmen

—Fairy tale? Hm. Let’s try one with a princess. What does it teach? It teaches us . . . hm. That a genuine princess is sensitive and easily damaged, especially her body, especially asleep, but fake princesses don’t feel much and, as you implied just now, wanting desperately to be a princess isn’t good enough. —Keep going. —How about . . . when you’re asleep it’s problematic to keep trying to fake things? You stop patrolling against danger, too. —A sleeper doesn’t stop protecting herself altogether. —It’s a story. It’s not real sleep. It’s used to make a point. Her alleged enormous sensitivity transcends her consciousness; she can’t control it. The flesh is used, and feelings, including passion, which is, you know, also an obligation you’re compelled to follow once you feel it, because it’s powerful and not freely chosen. Passion is a dictator, right? —Did you just make that up? —Look, if a real princess is sleepy after running to the next village for a sack of peas, unlike other females of childbearing age who perform a run of similar distance and incline, which they may well have had to do at that time . . . —Which time? —. . . even after her run she’ll have a revolting night’s sleep on a mountain of feather beds if conspirators have hidden, underneath, a pea. Assuming a dried pea rather than a fresh one. Did you know that in the Age of Discovery ships carried rations of dried peas? They didn’t know that dried peas have negligible vitamin C; they didn’t know anything about vitamins.2 —Alternately, you could stage this in ancient Greece and have her run a marathon, but I have no idea if they valued sensitivity this way in Greece. —They also sometimes provisioned ships with powdered peas. —So why is it good if she gets painfully, visibly bruised? Who needs so much feeling? —Someone does, to verify that she’s real. I don’t remember, maybe to use her to reproduce princesses. It’s a story. Maybe she has amnesia, doesn’t know she’s a princess, but she’s still real. In fairy tales, like soap operas, you can be unaware you’re something but still be it. —In fairy tales?

tactics for working anyway



277

—Maybe she grew up alone in a forest and will now rule the land if the parents are dead or also in the woods. —So, a person with no awareness of a pea gets black and blue from it. Do you think it makes her feel weird about herself that her body works like that? —Right, and there are at least three pretenders to be princess. Fairy tales can’t make their point with fewer. —That may also be a form of hypersensitivity, the “three.” —Or lack of sensitivity. I read that Age of Exploration sailors who didn’t get vitamin C became excruciatingly sensitive to certain minuscule, trivial details while ignoring more important ones. No proportion. Revolted by one new plant, ecstatic about another. —Sailors who eat some things see differently than those who don’t. —The first two women in the story have no problem sleeping on a peaprepared bed and are thrown out and derided for their dearth of reality. Of prin . . . cess . . . ness. Maybe they execute them or maybe that only happens to male pretenders. But this one, she wakes up whining. You get points for suffering. —You’re going to tell me she felt that it was round and green too?

Abundance #2: What is out there Our inherited imagery can lead to experiences of an overwhelming abundance of raw but meaningful stuff (for example, impressions or data) “out there.” This is intoxicating and is also a problem if you have to write about that material. —Of course I’m not about to discuss how it is and is not “really out there.” What’s not stupid, though, is asking how to best use ourselves if we are already organized in terms of “out there” and “in here.” It may feel as if one’s duty or even desire is to give this vibrating cloud of unsorted, inchoate, true information you see “the correct” shape. Or crystallize it, make a crystal. Reel it out into linear time. I don’t feel “big enough,” for example, to match or reproduce with my writing the complexity of what I observe. If I miss one connection it’ll be less brilliant. —What it will be is open to criticism. —Right. What’s worse, the more skilled you get at noticing value, the higher the stakes. Importance gets exaggerated. They say some scorbutic sailors died of ecstasy at the sight of land and vegetables (Lamb 2017: 15–16).

278



dale pesmen

Abundance #3: Everyone —I’d only hear George W. Bush’s voice when I didn’t turn off the radio quickly enough. Then I’d notice I was banging the steering wheel. I assumed it had to do with what Bush was saying. But then I was swatting Obama off my radio in identical, horrified self-defense. It apparently had nothing to do with who a president or pretender was or what they said. —You’re such a formalist. —Am I? I mean, presidential voices speak to everybody. They speak in a genre in which individual-sounding tones all project “Every word of mine is going out to everyone, where it will be powerful.” —That power corrupts is a commonplace. —But it happens entirely by mistake! You may love painting and not even notice you also want to make a painting that’s loved by everyone, and then you step back and look, and if you’re not too seduced because it’s your own work, you’ll see that it’s kitsch. —Who are you to decide what’s bad art? Are kids focused on complicated things like that? —What are you talking about? Let me finish. Adopting a result as a goal while ignoring the process by which that result came to be admirable is how art ends up “derivative,” first and foremost looking like familiar art. —True! I’ve caught myself squinting, especially early on, when the painting’s still a slop of possibilities only I can see, to try to catch a glimpse of what it looks like. It’s not exactly even seeing; it’s hallucinating. It tastes like chicken. It’s like the faces people don’t know they’re making in restroom mirrors.

*** Like presidents’ voices, the voice we speak or write in is shaped by an imagined audience and who we are to it. The impersonal, dispassionate tone of scholarly prose corresponds to the sense that, since this writing is about knowing truth, (1) the language ought to let that truth shine right through “purely,” without artsy or passionate distortions, and (2) it does not have to speak to anyone in particular. The problem (besides the truth and language problems) is that it is all narration. We do everything for somebody. Purity may not be such an interesting challenge. Speaking to a vague everyone, you may default to a bland narrator you never chose. This chapter has not transcended that at all.

tactics for working anyway



279

The issue is not that we are possessed and speaking in voices; the thing is, which ones. Abundance #4: Brilliance Just as our admiration for beloved artifacts and performances can make us want to make things with exactly that same kind of broad appeal, complex, multivalent creations may inspire us to want to make similar things. That is intimidating and can be paralyzing or it can coopt the genre of what we make, the voice it speaks in, and the power it pretends to. With reason; the qualities we admire and that are successful usually do not result from their creator having wanted to achieve exactly those ends. There were tools and fascinations in the process that we cannot see now; we are just shown the results. —Four? You said three abundances. —You trust narrators. —Well, what if an unacknowledged audience is vague, but you earnestly want to edify “it” using something genuinely important you’ve figured out? What about a manifesto, if you fervently believe what it’s saying? —It’s even harder to notice if it’s a highly technical scholarly article. —It’s harder. Imagine trying to write a paper that no one could find fault with.

Academic prose is often not only “written for everyone” in the sense I describe above but also written for a critical audience of specialists. Whereas being able to invent exquisite new terms in response to one’s acute observations is a genuine skill of which there are masters, it is not the only possible way of playing your cards. Awesomely polysemic and/or complex phenomena do not necessarily require a correspondingly complex, novel lexicon. There’s rarely one possible way of playing your cards. Bright, revelatory, muscular, scholarly vernacular, easily gotten only by a trained elite, has a fringe perk of narrowing the pool of peers qualified to pick on it. Conceived in these narrow, chilly waters, academic writing can be hard to read with pleasure. Earlier I quoted something mean about teachers; now it’s students’ turn. In the fancy pseudoacademic writing too-densely deployed by some smart students, one can see how genre can be a goal. Imitation almost always starts out clunky and approximate; with practice, using professional terminology

280



dale pesmen

can develop into a skill for communicating and communally working on ideas. Alternately, or simultaneously, that increasing proficiency can hide imitative thinking and lead to isolation from specialists in different domains. —Now there’s irony. There’s formalism. A drive to make something huge nets work humbler than the author is capable of; the drive to be broadly appealing yields texts few can parse. —It happens by mistake. No one teaches you how to play and you end up seeking power for its own sake, even if you are basically a good person and have a lot to say.

***

Time (in terms of wasting it) —We’re sitting. She tells us to each write a sentence where all words start with the same letter. It makes me squirrelly, when there are real things we should probably be spending our time on. It’s too arbitrary . . . or minimal . . . to pay off, you know? —Pay off? —A waste of time. Embarrassing. Spending my life on a little word exercise. Too simple. You can tell without even trying that it won’t pay off. —Spending your life on it? So when you’re going to play, it has to be framed that way, introduced as “rest”? Announced? And this was like slacking off . . . on the clock . . . again? —You’re saying I waste time? Well, yeah—there are landmines . . . seductions, obligations. I get sucked in, it lasts. I’m weak, it’s strong. Eventually I notice I’m not doing what is, when I can do it, revelatory, fun. Hm. I love it and I’m resisting it. I’m lazy? Or maybe the kind of person who would, deep down, rather have limited little tasks to execute? —Where’s that “deep down”? And explain to me what’s wrong with limited tasks. What if limitations . . . —Plus I don’t always recognize it as resistance; it’s like, “I have a sacred right to blow time; you have no right to steal my freedom.” I get busy flaunting my rights. —At a certain point the license to waste time starts wearing thin as a reason to waste it. And that freedom . . . yeah, lots of pathology.

tactics for working anyway



281

—And at the same time I beat myself up about procrastination. —But look from the point of view of . . . uh . . . kindness. You can try to flog yourself into getting to work, but that’s as likely to hogtie as motivate you. Maybe there’s something about the stakes, the size, the seriousness, the reality, that we should be going on strike against and wriggling away from. So we get stuck. Sometimes for a long time. Maybe the impulse to evade isn’t the problem. I mean, what humane imagery would result in creative process being anguishing? Maybe “serious, real” time is exactly the kind of time that gets frittered away. —That we waste, right. I waste it very precisely on garbage. —Not on wandering around lost or exploring. Not on well-used boredom, where you come out somewhere different. Remember how, when his motorcycle breaks down in the desert, Robert Pirsig (1974: chap. 24) tries and fails and eventually realizes that “if your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas”? Getting stuck and lost isn’t the worst thing that can happen, he says; it can be played as a kind of beginner’s mind to be cultivated on the way to a discovery. —They don’t always work that way, stuckness and boredom. —When I’m doing something open-ended and occasionally surprising, that anxiety about wasting time isn’t there. Or guilt. —Even if I’m desperately bored, I can’t make myself start to spend time on exercises. Honestly, you can write or you can’t. If you can’t . . . —You mean talent? —I mean that taking a break, even for a minute, for something like an exercise feels juvenile. Binge-watching isn’t half as embarrassing. Do I even have the right to . . . —You have the right to decide to play a tiny game by a rule you just made up. There are precedents. Maybe no one’s lazy. As I said, maybe our rich repertoire of ways to piss away time to avoid getting down to work is in response to positions some default imagery lands us in. What our images demand, we’re no good at.

A Bit of Summary Trying to make huge, complex, widely appealing, admired, true work has an ironically high probability of yielding generic results, bland presentations,

282



dale pesmen

conventional performances, or elitist, impenetrable language—in other words, products suffused with exactly “universality,” “commonness,” and/or “superiority,” “power.” Significant original research gets presented; penetrating, revolutionary thoughts delivered; but, with all respect, even these are often unintentionally (and unnecessarily, when the work stands on its own virtues) manipulative in how they rely on genre and voice. Relying unmindfully3 on genres is an unwitting gambit to succeed by using recognizable devices or fashions to flip blunt switches in one’s audience. They speak to the part in people that recognizes them. At least they are safe. You can be unaware of it but still be a princess. Believing that one “has” one’s hypothetical future creations “inside” already can be paralyzing, as is the feeling that one “has” no ideas “in one’s head.” These terms frame creation not as a process but as administering property one already owns, inside, by bringing it out. Trying to write something that “matches” the great complexity of what one has observed can also get a person stuck. Failing to do what these narratives imply one ought to be able to do, like failing to see the emperor’s nonexistent clothes, may lead one to assume one is unworthy or unfit. *** —I’m afraid the traps, the mistakes, they’re too strong, too old. Too deep. —Look, his father brought him to me for piano lessons. This little kid. Maybe on the spectrum. He refused to touch a key. I offered him all kinds of toys. —Why did you show him toys? It wasn’t in your job description. —None of the toys were a problem. It was just piano keys he wouldn’t touch. His father was paying me but I didn’t want to force the kid to play piano. I love piano. I don’t know why he didn’t want to touch it, but what if it had been me resisting touching it? One day I had colored pencils. He was making these tiny, different-colored dots on paper. You have to be willing to move away from your goal for a minute. —How did you come up with dots? —I just noticed that I had colored pencils; he came up with the dots. We couldn’t just sit there. He was so focused on making those dots. It was so not-like touching that black piano. Dark brown. Then I . . . he had discovered dots; what if I ask him to choose one pencil? —You asked him if he wanted to choose something.

tactics for working anyway



—He chose something, which happened to be a pencil. Now what? I looked . . . one pencil, one dot, one . . . hmmmm, what other “ones” can we find? It was a game for me, too. I asked which one piano key he wanted to color one dot on. He hunched over them, curious, pencil suspended. You should have seen how his hand hung there and twitched. He made a mark. —Wait . . . you’re using colored pencils directly on ivory? —Then I asked him how he’d touch his mark. Not touch the key, touch his color. He touched it. You couldn’t hear anything. That happens; if you touch a key a certain way it doesn’t sound. That’s OK. Later he showed me how other colors needed to be touched differently, and lots of those colors did make sounds. I couldn’t have known about all that. —He must not have felt violated. —No, that’s how he made friends with them. After he taught me how to touch the different colors we started to play around, putting them one after another, changing the order. We told stories and asked questions and played practical jokes with them. —How’s that different from pretending a forkful of food is a train? You disguise food as an unrelated, beloved choo-choo, and then you use that metaphor to get that food in, to exploit the child’s desire to play. You pull a fast one. —The difference relates to power: when you made your kid eat his peas you didn’t risk losing sight of your goal for a second. —Or meat. —Your kid, who likes to play, was hoodwinked into not-seeing peas as food. You made her less observant in order to get her to eat. With the dots I didn’t pull the wool over his eyes. There I am, with a live, stubborn child. I’m not in control. I don’t know where it’s going either and I definitely don’t know how it’s going to get anywhere. I didn’t blind him to it being a piano; we broke the piano and music itself up into tiny parts and limited choices. The playing and the piano were relocated into a world where their qualities and components were free agents. Under those conditions it wasn’t too gross or dangerous or whatever to touch a piano. And I didn’t psychoanalyze him to find out why he was disgusted by or afraid of keys. That could stay his own private business. —I’m only partially convinced. —The steps were little. I had no idea if it would go anywhere. But there’s a kid, I mean, you don’t want . . . he’s a kid, his time’s valuable.

283

284



dale pesmen

—You’re saying you had no guarantee for your . . . whim. —I used to think Gauguin must have been unimaginably brave. To conceive of putting a dot of red there. Then, by making pictures, I realized courage had nothing to do with it. Zero. That Gauguin, he was just curious. He loved painting. He was entertaining himself. Fascinated with trying things. The ones who make discoveries are the ones who . . . —I saw a video where this cat was walking along the top of a fence with his two right legs up on top and his two left legs walking on a board a few inches lower. All four of his legs could have fit on one level and he wouldn’t have walked so weirdly and probably would’ve gone faster, but he was lazy or it didn’t matter or . . . why not let those legs stay there, I can still walk in this asymmetrical left-right thing. —. . . on first-name terms with the material.4

Part : A Few Tactics, Then Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. —John 20:29

It is a commonplace that what we see is as much a product of blocking out other things as anything else. You have to not-see a lot to see anything. “Not-seeing” must be the most incessant trope. In this spirit, one can also see rich, generative tropes and worldmaking images as constraints. Constraint is the essence of being interested, when you focus on one thing and your world temporarily becomes a circle of wagons around it. Your promising launching point, your point of view, your muse, what makes you a specific thinker, all grow out of limitation and bias. —That which you don’t see is your coauthor. You can’t reflect reality. Written worlds are all fabrications. —That’s a just incredibly crude exaggeration. —It’s also a commonplace, but look, if I can’t tell the whole truth anyway, why not deliberately incorporate constraints? I can’t create a new system of constraints to have been born in, but if those ones lead to objectionable results, nothing’s stopping me from adding constraints, limiting my palette by choice. —Well, something’s stopping me; you can tell without even trying that that sort of thing won’t pay off. Little games are for kids.

tactics for working anyway



285

—Who’s watching? You can sweep over your tracks afterwards.

*** One powerful use of constraints deliberately addresses the problem I discuss above of a too-general audience. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that he had always written for his sister Alice; she was “the secret of whatever artistic unity [he had] achieved” (in Strand 2015).5 When in an art class at the University of Chicago in the 1980s Professor Robert Peters recommended “making it for someone in particular,” I did not take it seriously. I took it seriously, but listened peripherally. I hardly heard. That one did not pertain to me. Somebody Else’s Problem (Adams 2002). I could tell without even trying that it wouldn’t pay off. Now I see the power in it. Sometimes I ask myself who I’m going to try writing for this time. Scanning for an invisible witty colleague, a smart, no-BS layman, the author of a particular book, or a small group of friends to see what effect it has on what you write is a muscle that, if developed, can grow into a subtle and generous skill. Playing “write for that person,” you engage with a phenomenally complex set of details (including, but not limited to, what that person believes, does, likes, abominates, or stands for in your current world). A rich constraint conveniently packaged as the image of a specific audience. Constraints are wise and sneaky helpers. When I have a real reader, something also happens: as soon as I send off a draft I run to reread it myself. What am I doing? What hybrid have I morphed into by shooting you an email? Is it an acting exercise, do I think I am reading as you? I am not, but the character I am performing gets a different angle on my writing anyway. The black box of “your point of view” works as a generative constraint that moves me toward a next draft. And when you email back saying, “This one word here doesn’t work for me,” just moving that one word from the category of unmarked to marked starts another chain reaction. A constraint can be a trope, the rules of a game, or the qualities of a ripped-up piece of paper. Choosing constraints, playing with them and being surprised, assures, as someone said above about Gauguin, that we ourselves are the initial audience. Grave, overblown goals often treat enjoying the process as an extravagance, whereas it is exactly having a blast ourselves that increases the probability that others will also be entertained. *** —Speaking of audiences, “those who can’t do, teach”? I personally know people who do both.

286



dale pesmen

—You’re still stuck on that? That’s not good. Let’s grab an arbitrary tool and play around.

THOSE touchy temporary tutors try timidly to tactfully taste-test torpidly tinted turbulences. Their trippingly tied tongue-tips torque, twining tormentedly toward teasing terribly tuned tenure-track timbres. They tank, tragically. Tank truly, twice. WHO wonders why wobbling worriers won’t wander with words, wrangling working worldviews, when what Wittgenstein wisely wondered was why we wanted watermelon? Without wearying, wild watermelon’s wide, woody wedges were what we wanted. CAN’T . . . mmmm . . . can’t craftily carved curved, curling counterclockwise, complex, cumbersome concepts careen, crossing crawling connecting carriageways cartlike, coming closer, carrying correctly cast comedic characters criticizing Kant’s contemplative core? Can’t cockeyed custodians courting costly cumulative credit cautiously collect crudely crushed crumbs? “DO deft, dire, disciplined, due duty!” drones dancing dust, dully decaying distance, distorting detailed distinctions, defying definition, distributing dreamy doubt, delaying diligent daily deliveries, doing desperate debt double-dare damage. Denial dawns dramatically, distracting dangerously, dictating deletions, drowning dry docks. TEACHing taking too-tock tedious time to tick to tilt to test-thump teak trunks. —What . . . the . . . hell. —I inserted myself into a blatantly abnormal, ridiculous world without demanding immediate, usable results. I attended a minor, fairly entertaining event at which Kant and Wittgenstein put in appearances. This product isn’t valuable; what is useful is that, rather than staring, frozen and beaten down, at something disturbing, like “those who can’t do, teach,” I put myself in a position to be reminded of how it feels when ideas appear with the enigmatic ease of unpacking a metaphor. —How does that work? —Alliteration wasn’t all that was going on. Alliteration’s almost absolutely arbitrary, but the reason I opted to adopt an arbitrary constraint . . . is not.

tactics for working anyway



287

In the beginning, a constraint can feel like a straitjacket. I throw a tantrum: “No! No more good words starting with K exist!” Since I do not have the freedom to say anything I want, any way I feel like it, I need a world to be in; so I tune in, become sensitized to language. The tantrum passes. And since anything we are sensitized to strikes us as being “alive,”6 part of us starts writing that . . . that already knows perfectly well how to treat language as a collaborator rather than a slave or a tool. Words starting with K start riding out of the horizon. —Where did we learn that? That’s one question I have. And then, why do they call it “unpacking”? As if something’s inside language.

*** Constraints can be too capricious, extreme, or prohibitive. If a constraint becomes the topic, that is probably formalism. If I choose a constraint in order to think, though, I have a better chance of noticing when I veer into self-indulgence. Most any little trope can bravely shoulder a bit of the burden of choice, providing fresh material to work with, but we do not think of them that way. Alliteration’s secretive colleague, Lipogram, which even more shamelessly flaunts that it has obviously been chosen for no rational reason, has long had a reputation as not just arbitrary but trivial. Since antiquity, Joseph Addison hissed in 1711, “letter-droppers . . . would take an Exception, without any Reason, against some particular . . . reprobate Letter.” They’re sparked. The tangent is improvisation’s master trope. To use one you have to choose to believe that you have the absolute right, on a whim, with no guarantee it will go anywhere—to pluck a random word or specificity, midsentence, and blunder off into its territory as we all do perfectly well when telling an everyday story to a friend. Nikolai Gogol (1842) was a master of this, which is how his surreal fiction is so generously ethnographic: Pulling up to the porch, he noticed two faces glancing out the window almost simultaneously: a woman’s, in a bonnet, narrow and long like a cucumber, and a man’s, round, as wide as the Moldavian gourds known as gorliankas that in Russia they make balalaikas out of, light two-string balalaikas, the flourish and fun of a nimble twenty-year-old . . .7

and on for a while about people flirting in villages; then he returns.

288



dale pesmen

Going off on a tangent is taking hold of the unmanageably big world by some quirky, skinny thread you suddenly notice sticking out. You shake it. What drops onto the table, as with Dadaist juxtapositions, may be surprisingly relevant, for reasons I avoid thinking about. If you go off on a tangent and it does not help you narrate your data or idea, you can always throw it out. The sizey ambitions I discuss in part 1 preclude spending “good” time on this kind of unsteady thread because little things seem de facto stupid and unworthy of gambling on. That trifles do not strike us as promising is exactly a function of imagery that treats what we “see” as an authoritative, coherent, finished, spatialized structure and (thus) prioritizes that which we see all at once over what may happen in time if we start playing around with some tiny doodad that, for a second, seemed to glitter at us. What you begin with says nothing about ultimate limits of your work. It should calm us down to know that we can choose starting points lightly. If your lightly chosen launching point itself becomes obsolete or starts sounding dumb, hide it. Brazenly keep the fruits of the exercise and fictionalize the beginning. If deliberately using constraints can help us say more than we knew, it is not because any constraint itself “contains” truth or goodness; it does not. That’s not why they work. It is hard to remember that tropes are not true when they work so well. Thus the peculiar disingenuousness of social scientists such as Herbert Spencer (1967, 1981) and Radcliffe-Brown (1952) who treated metaphors both as simple illustrations and as real pathways to truth, “essential parallelisms” that had been “disclosed by modern science” and which, as science progressed, would be an invaluable source of further scientific revelations (Pesmen 1991; Spencer 1981: 388–392). Valentin Kataev’s story “Things” centers on a character whose husband has just died: I kept sayin to him, “Here, take it, eat burgers! Din’ wanna. Lookit how many are left! Where am I gonna put ‘em now? And who’s gonna take care of me now, you so bad Geooor-gi-ee-eee! Left me and didn’t want to take me with, and didn’t wanna eat my burgers . . . Geooor-gi-ee-eee!” (Kataev 1989 [1929]: 277–282)8

The story might have been no more than a moralizing critique of petty materialism, but what makes at least this part of it less judgmental than ethnographic (and psychologically familiar) is how the narrator, buzzing, lights on the recent widow’s food and rides a platter of lovingly fried, tragically untouched ground meat through her mourning. Kataev wagered his abstract

tactics for working anyway



289

classist condescension on that one idiotic detail in hopes of a discovery that was more than didactic and more than decorative. Turning on a dime to spin some absurd specific (any-height pile of burgers too puny to embody grief) is a nice constraint. This smallness should not be feared but gambled on as a heuristic guide. You could call it metonymy, but why? *** Although we are not accustomed to looking for promise in things that are flawed or diminished, even one’s spotty memory can be a fruitful constraint, since memory also selects some things and, ignoring others, gives birth to a specific narrator. Cook’s coercive dietary theories, including Sour Kroutt and not even his own, result in a boneless sailor recovering from the Scurvy. A different seaman, P. H., though himself following the captain’s every order and not sick, sees the scurvy sailor on his feet again and gets drunk. Getting drunk is accomplished the usual way, except that they begin fermentation with gnawed bones and filter the spirits through volcanic rocks. Most of the crew finds it convenient to gloss over the thing about the bones. They look the other way. Let the bones slide. His cup is a simple tin cup. His cup is like all others on board, a heavy crockery mug, unchipped, any color. The last time they paused at a colony, P. H. purchased a bottle of fiery sauce, distilled from fish, from barbarians. To demonstrate to all that it was not a paper tiger, the local administration would occasionally outlaw trade in fish sauce. Paper tigers are outwardly powerful or dangerous but inwardly weak or ineffectual. Sauce was nicely positioned in relation to outer and inner, thus fine to outlaw. P. H. bought it when it was legal and outlawed. He clutches the dented tin handle harder as he drinks, then his grip relaxes. The glaze is flawed. The glaze has a flaw: the surface is a little stained. While drunk, P. H. fixes on the idea that even though Cook’s diet keeps your teeth and eyes in your head, it is a damned Godless way of preventing the Scurvy. P. H. politely requests God send him one minor Scurvy symptom, the appearance of which, in a diet-abiding man, would knock Cook back a notch or two. P. H. wakes up with no hangover. (Pesmen 2020) —This is not accurate, historically.

290



dale pesmen

—Not in the least. I didn’t promise accuracy. I remembered bits and made the rest up. But some sailors really didn’t like the diet thing, and it took a long time to crack scurvy, although at many points they were staring right at the answer, looking straight at it and couldn’t see it.

Breaks —What’s the difference between what you call seductions and going off on a tangent? —In order to decide to do an exercise you have to make a break. When you’re seduced, it’s usually continu— —Take a break? —Make one. Breaks you take, you end up reading rude responses on the internet. I mean create a tiny pause in what you assume is the uninterrupted, “real” flow of natural time. That’s how constraints work; they’re deliberate infections from what’s unnatural, from art, and some of what you’re allowed to infect is time.

Breaks are the essential trope of collage. Although breaks are ellipses, absences, the vast range of what can be dissociated from what and juxtaposed to what makes them subtle and incredibly varied. What is fascinating, though, is that the feeling of not being able to leave a break tends to not be varied at all. I introduce breaks to ethnography students by asking them to improvise aloud a short account of something—say, a party. Two constraints I impose are that a. the final, arbitrary, line will be “Then we ate cake” and b. no “and,” “then,” or other subordinating or coordinating conjunction may be used to connect the story they tell to this required, fixed ending. There has to be a break before the cake.

Few students manage it on the first try, even when I remind them. Some say that the constraint gets plucked out of their memory. In other cases they remember perfectly well but can’t . . . manage . . . to resist quickly tacking a shamefaced “and” onto their fascinating, funny ethnographic tangents, smoothing out the ending to match the fiction of continuous time. As if they were shy about pulling something so “poetic” or “theatrical” as omitting one “and.” Other times they clearly remember dutifully avoiding “and” or “then” when in fact everyone heard them say it. Such psychological aberrations sparked by a microscopic request to acknowledge that storytelling is performance?

tactics for working anyway



291

It gives a disturbing, even icky, visceral sense of how it feels to make a break where it is not habitual to do so. How it feels to be briefly in a broken structure is essentially different than how it feels to refer to broken structure or to drop the term “liminality.” You cannot tell without tr ying. Tangents can begin with seductions: some association distracts you, you abruptly change direction and run, but nake d breaks require a little musical muscle. As if we have no right to cause startled curiosity; as if jumping is too melodramatic. A disjunction may loo k like a mistake or technical error. —I told you it was embarrassing. —It can be even more embarrassing to try an exercise when you’re alone. It’s like going rogue. It doesn’t have the authority of reality. Because you just decide. There’s no smooth transition and no workshop makes it official.

*** Some breaks, in acts of fiat, separate unmarked from marked, creating both. A frame is a little rectangular break between the living room and that . . . on the wall, or a big glass one between here and the street. Frames easily and flamboyantly demonstrate constraints at work. Looking through your camera’s viewfinder, moving and pausing, creates one composition after another, each offering you temporary residence in a world with its own rules. Music and visual art are riddled with breaks. Dadadadadada. Jokes and surprises—break-based. Unapologetic contrasts, such as those that create the discontinuities of collage and of everyday, wandering, thought, are breaks. Breaks can break the uninterrupted flow of knowing what’s what that keeps us from being surprised more often. Breaks in artworks leave room for audiences to choose their own interpretations rather than being force-fed. Everyday life (as well as everything ethnographers observe) is full of awkward juxtapositions. Making art helps notice them. —Are you seriously suggesting that there are “breaks” in actual time? —I didn’t say a thing about reality. Why assume that time flows smoothly?

*** —No, that’s surrealism. This is different. I can’t picture it. I don’t know what this is yet. Ford Prefect said that we have a predisposition not to see anything

292



dale pesmen

we don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain, even if we look straight at it (Adams 2002). —I know what it was, it was a velvet sofa on a cricket pitch. That’s what it was. —That’s surrealism. This is different. —Our dishwasher, when I was a kid, would chant like the Wizard of Oz flying monkey guards, this rhythmical, rough grumble. —Must’ve been terrifying. —It was fascinating how it muttered to itself in there in a theatrical voice. Our toilet had two voices: too-rumbling and too-skittery. Our pet store turtles climbed into a pile in their plastic tropical thing on the counter next to it. Next to their palm tree. This was at night. —You were dreaming? —No, I could be sitting right with everyone when I heard it. —When I was a kid I used to have this nightmare. I am about to get caught for a horrific crime I did not commit. I’m trying to bury this big, bad bunch of blatantly bloody evidence beneath boards. Ineptly. I can’t organize it. —That’s just anxiety. An anxiety dream dressed up as drama. Like emptying mouse poop out of your printer but there’s more and more blah blah blah. You can’t organize it. Or you’re in the wrong terminal without your suitcase late for a lecture you’re dressed too idiotically to be so unprepared to pull off. It goes on until intense anxiety is pretty much balanced out by pettiness and boredom. You wake up wrung out by banality, wondering why, with all our wherewithal, we waste whole nights unable to organize things. —When something tastes like chicken at least it has a name.

*** It is not hard to find a flaw in someone else’s work. We need critique, not because writers who screw up deserve to be caught and punished but because if we cannot catch sloppiness, we are easily seduced by propaganda and prettiness. But it is a great coup only in an impoverished world where one slams others for not being perfect and feels pressured to produce flaw-free texts oneself. If you discover or a friend or foe confronts you with an unfounded, awkward, or contradictory moment in your work, it can even be wasteful to eradicate it too quickly. When thinking sloppily early in a process, you may hallucinate a firm path just long enough to say or think something that sug-

tactics for working anyway



293

gests a new insight—a jump. A stupid slip can lead to a lot. An unfounded guess may eventually earn its keep, but not if you censor it too quickly. It is possible to arrive at a good thought by following a ridiculous trajectory. You can tidy up afterwards. *** This has been a discussion of making time for things that specific paradigms of self, others, human activity, and certain habits of consciousness do not leave room for when they divvy everything up. We are trained to filter for “powerful, strong, impressive” and to ignore, disrespect, or shun things the size of a mustard seed. Runts. We expertly “unsee” them (Miéville 2009). Who’s got the time, when you can tell without even trying that they won’t pay off? I am not saying my way is right, but I do think that there is reason to ask if power, intensity, and inheritances always have to trump. It is not profitable to discount easy, nonviolent tactics. You can’t tell if it will pay off without trying. It does not much matter where you start. You have to start somewhere; it’ll change a hundred times anyway. The tools of art show that we already have not only the right but the ability to fairly easily pause real life, to break real time, to try a limited game. It’s a legitimate tactic.

Acknowledgments Gratitude to comrades and collaborators: Steve Coleman, Tania Fel, Robert Peters, Perry Sherouse, Michael Wasserman, and Marko Živković. Dale Pesmen (PhD Anthropology, University of Chicago 1998) is an anthropologist, visual artist (painting, drawing, collage), writer (fiction and nonfiction), and educator. Her publications include articles, book chapters, reviews, and Russia and Soul: An Exploration (2000). She lectures and runs workshops on boundaries between a range of disciplines for, among others, the Fieldschool for Ethnographic Sensibility, University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Notes 1. A primary topic of Pesmen 2000 (and 2007, 2017 . . . sigh). Some of the “size” of the human “soul” that makes it seem to defy reckoning exploits and perverts human multiplicity—moments, impulses, versions, tropes, identities, approaches, and practices.

294

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.



dale pesmen

The image of the “whole” gets much of its power-complicit “vastness” by mistaken, often violent, acts of rhetorical conflation of multiplicity over time. Some, but not all, detail on scurvy is from Lamb 2017. The word “mindful” was first documented in the fourteenth century, when Western Europeans ate something called frumentee (alternately, fromity). A fictional dialogue inspired by the work of Tania Fel, who is brilliant in inventing small exercises for her piano students. Another time, Vonnegut said he always wrote for (his then wife) Jane. Things we’re not sensitized to tend to strike us as inhuman or dead. Translation by Michael Wasserman and Dale Pesmen. Translation by Dale Pesmen and Michael Wasserman.

References Adams, Douglas. 2002. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Random House. Addison, Joseph. 1711. The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele 1(59), 8 May. Retrieved 31 May 2021 from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/SV1/ Spectator1.html#section59. Breton, André. 2010 (1924). First Manifesto of Surrealism—1924, trans. A. S. Kline. Retrieved 31 May 2021 from http://uploads.worldlibrary.org/uploads/pdf/20121102214233man ifestopdf_pdf.pdf. Dreyer, Benjamin. 2019. Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. New York: Random House. Gogol, Nikolai. 1842. Dead Souls. Moscow. Harries, Karsten. 1968. The Meaning of Modern Art. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kataev, Valentin. 1989 (1929). “Вещи” (Things). In Железное кольцо (The Golden Ring), 277–82. Leningrad: Sovremennik. Lamb, Jonathan. 2017. Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miéville, China. 2009. The City & the City. New York: Del Rey Ballantine Books. Pesmen, Dale. 1991. “Reasonable and Unreasonable Worlds: Some Expectations of Coherence in Culture Implied by the Prohibition of Mixed Metaphor.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed., James W. Fernandez, 213–243. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Russia and Soul: An Exploration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. “An Engaged Critique of Imagination / Imagining Engaged Critique.” In “Engaging Imagination: Anthropological Explorations in Creativity,” ed. Steve Coleman and Stuart McLean, special issue, Irish Journal of Anthropology 10(2): 35–43. ———. 2017. “‘A Boggy, Soggy, Squitchy Picture, Truly’: Notes on Image Making in Anthropology and Elsewhere.” Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader, ed. Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2020. “Bones.” Unpublished short story. Pirsig, Robert M. 1974. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Morrow.

tactics for working anyway



295

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Societies. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Spencer, Herbert. 1967. The Evolution of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1981 (1860). “The Social Organism.” In Man versus the State. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Classics. Strand, Ginger. 2015. “How Jane Vonnegut Made Kurt Vonnegut a Writer.” New Yorker, 3 December 2015. Tzara, Tristan. 1920. “To Make a Dadaist Poem.” In “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love.” 391.org. Retrieved 31 May 2021 from https://391.org/manifestos/ 1920-dada-manifesto-feeble-love-bitter-love-tristan-tzara/. Wallace, David Foster. 1997. “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 3–20. Boston: Little, Brown.

CHAPTER 13

Tropes, Frames, and Powers Terence Turner       

Tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony were first recognized and systematically studied as rhetorical devices, but anthropologists have increasingly recognized that they constitute fundamental forms of relationship and association common to cultural representations and the pragmatics of social interaction. Interest in the pragmatics of interaction has also stimulated the analysis and theoretical elaboration of the notion of framing. Tropes and frames have almost invariably been treated, at least for theoretical purposes, in isolation from each other, by theorists with divergent interests. The thesis of the present essay, however, is that tropes and frames are constructs of the same kind and normally operate interdependently, as complementary levels of the same composite cultural representations. I argue, furthermore, that the interdependence of frames and tropes is integral to the understanding of how complex social and cultural forms such as ritual or political demonstrations generate power that can be projected beyond the frame in which the actions that produce the power take place, to cause effects in other frames.

Tropes as Meta-Constructs The Oxford English Dictionary defines “trope” as “a figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it.” By “proper,” the author of the OED gloss presumably means the normal sense of the word or phrase in ordinary usage. A trope such as metaphor, for example, employs some aspect in which a term, phrase, or idea resembles another thing not normally considered related to it in order to highlight

tropes, frames, and powers



297

or foreground the relational aspect in question. The trope, in such a context, comprises a meta-statement about the two terms (the “source” and “target”) of the tropic relation, which consists in an indication of how the target is to be interpreted. The trope thus acts as a mini-“frame,” defining the aspect of the tropic relation that is to determine its interpretation. A “frame,” then, is a category of activity or propositional relations that also serves as a schema for the interpretation of those activities or propositions to which it is applied. It is, in other words, an indication that the activities or statements it contains should be interpreted in a certain way, which may in some cases be at deliberate variance from the way the activity in question is normally framed and interpreted. Such framing schemas can be understood as meta-frames, which direct that the message recipient should understand the framed act or discourse differently from the way the classes of objects or acts in question would normally be understood. A frame in these terms is thus a construct of a higher logical level than the types and instances of behavior or the symbols, tropes, and discourses it comprehends. The notion of framing as a meta-relation between levels in a hierarchy of logical types was originally formulated by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972; see also Goffman 1974). Bateson applied the concept to animal as well as human behavior in his studies of play and fantasy. When a dog strikes a certain pose that signals that it wishes to play at fighting with another dog, it is framing its mock-aggressive actions so that the other dog will not interpret them as real hostility. The “frame” defined and conveyed by the stylized posture is a schema signifying that actions performed within the limits of the frame are to be interpreted as a certain type of activity (play) that must therefore be interpreted in a different way than the same actions performed in a different frame. The sociologist Erving Goffman (1974) further developed the concept of frames in analyses of ordinary social interaction. Goffman’s basic concept of frames is essentially similar to Bateson’s, with the important difference that he did not follow the latter’s lead in conceiving frames as embedded in hierarchies of logical types. Like Bateson, Goffman was interested in ambiguous situations, including deliberately ironic behavior, in which actors behave in ways that depart from the meanings or expectations implied by the frames in which their acts occur, or attempt to frame their actions in terms that belie their real motivation or intent. Bateson, also interested in such situations, developed his concept of the “double bind” to deal with them. As the reference to irony in the preceding paragraph suggests, consideration of the role of framing in communicative interaction inevitably requires attention to the tropic aspects of the relation between frames and their behavioral contents. The thesis of this essay is that the same applies in reverse: to wit, that a full understanding of the tropic aspects of interaction must include analysis of

298



terence turner

the interdependence of tropes and frames. Both forms of this principle become obvious the moment analysis shifts from synchronic representations of tropic relations abstracted from the social or discourse processes in which they are created and transformed to diachronic processes in which semiotic elements and relations shift their tropic character in response to changes in framing.

Framing and Tropes in Ritual Action Consider the case of ritual. Ritual is activity that reflexively frames itself as ritual. The framing is conveyed by signs or patterns of behavior, usually but not necessarily repetitive and commonly recognized (e.g., specified places and times of performance, specific role-actors, clothing, speech patterns, music). The frame of ritual activity also includes an implicit or explicit expression of intentionality: the purpose for which it is performed or the reasons why its performance is appropriate in the context at hand. In framing itself as ritual, ritual objectifies itself in a certain way. This is true of all framed activity, of course. The distinctive attribute of ritual action is that it objectifies itself in a way intended to produce an effect beyond the limited frame of the ritual action as such. Ritual performance involves the effective use of bodily strength and skills, often employed in the construction of ritual symbols, the chanting or singing of verbal formulas, dancing or moving in prescribed ways, as well as, often, the coordination of the actions of many persons. In all of these and other ways, ritual necessarily involves the effective execution of objectified forms of performance. It also involves the implicit or explicit projection of the efficacy of the performance itself within the frame of the ritual activity beyond that frame to produce some effect on the world, on the ritual actors, or on both. Whatever the specific nature of its object and intended effect, in sum, ritual sets itself apart from ordinary activity as action that reflexively draws upon its effectiveness within the frame of its own performance to produce effects beyond that frame, in space, time, or both. Ritual action thus intrinsically involves a transformative relation between frames.

Tropes, Frames, and the Projection of Efficacy The question is, how is this accomplished? How, in other words, is the power and control exercised in the performance of ritual converted into a power capable of controlling or affecting ritual-external phenomena? In seeking to answer this question, let us start by recognizing that ritual performance has the character of meta-action. The ritual act, in other words, includes the framing of itself as a ritual act. It thus becomes the object of its own performance.

tropes, frames, and powers



299

This is one aspect of ritual objectification: the act becomes its own object. A second aspect is that the objectified action takes on the character of a self-existing schema. My use of “objectification” draws upon the work of William Hanks (1996), in particular, his formulation of the fundamental role of objectification as a condition of the possibility of linguistic reference in what he calls “communicative practice.” As Hanks explains, “As surely as it corresponds to the world, speech helps to create it through objectification . . . in the properly analytic sense, every time language stands for something, it stands for it as its object. To put it strongly, we always objectify, without which we could not make reference” (121; italics in original). For the purposes of the present discussion, the word “action” could be substituted for “speech” and “language” in this passage, if by “standing for something” we understand, in the case of ritual action, being directed toward something as an intentional1 object. Ritual action, however, differs from ordinary action by virtue of its reflexive focus on the process of objectification. Ritual consists in general terms in framing the process of objectification so that it becomes foregrounded as itself the object of control in the ritual performance. The performance of the ritual thus becomes a self-objectifying process, which means that it implicitly becomes a force for “creating the world” (in Hanks’s terms), or at least that part of it which it purports to affect.2 This is tantamount to raising the operations of ritual to a higher logical level. By objectifying the effectiveness of the operations constituting the performance of ritual acts so that it becomes a detached power capable of projection beyond the frame of the ritual act, ritual attempts to constitute those acts as a higher level of transformational operations analogous to those comprising the medial stage of rites of passage. Frames are categories in the double Kantian sense of classes and schemas. Projecting effects from one frame to another involves transformational operations of a higher level of logical power than those comprising either frame or category in itself. A critical step in this process is the symbolic embodiment of this reflexively objectifying process and its intended effects in one or more symbolic acts or constructs that can then serve as “pivots” for transmitting the internal force of the ritual performance to the external frame of object relations (or, conversely, conveying the force of some aspect of the external field to the participants in the ritual performance). Examples of this are resolutions or petitions collectively signed and sent by the participants in a rally to a political leader; figures of a saint paraded through the streets of a city on the saint’s day; the evergreen trees brought into homes as the focal objects of Christmas celebrations; and the “milk tree” that serves as the symbolic focus of Ndembu girls’ initiation (V. Turner 1967). The “pivoting” effected by such objects or acts3 implies a projection of the effect of the ritual action beyond the limits of the ritual frame, through which

300



terence turner

the efficacy of the performance of ritual acts within the frame is transmitted as a power to affect conditions within another frame. The pivotal element (the symbol or symbolic act) that encodes or implicates this effect acts as the pragmatic conductor of this projection and thus constitutes the vehicle for the extension of the frame. This projection or mediation of the effectiveness of ritual action beyond the frame of the ritual act itself is the principal function of pivotal ritual symbols like the Ndembu milk tree, or the feathered parrot costumes of the Kayapo and Bororo dancers analyzed below. As these examples indicate, the functioning of ritual symbols as “pivots” for the projection of efficacy between frames involves the use of symbols as tropes. The tropic uses of symbols in ritual specify the aspects of their range of meaningful associations that enter into the determination of the effects projected by the ritual performance.

Play of Frames, Play of Tropes Tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, in other words, play a role in articulating the clusters of conceptual and affective associations constituting complex ritual symbols, and at higher levels of complexity, in mediating the relations of symbols, frames, and ritual acts to one another. Tropes function as connectors between elements and between levels of structure by virtue of their construction as modes of identity and contrast between entities, rather than as individual symbols. Tropes can be understood as patterns of activity (in other words, schemas) that bring into association or transform relations among the elements of ritual action. Such transformations, as the following examples show, typically involve a shift in frames and/or levels or logical types of structural relations. Tropes may also interact with other tropes: a trope (e.g., a metonymic association) may become an element in different trope (e.g., a metaphor) and thus undergo a transformation of its tropic identity. Deborah Durham and James W. Fernandez (1991) have called such processes of shifting tropic identities “the play of tropes.” The projection of performative force from one frame to another that I have suggested is a basic feature of ritual may equally be called a “play of frames.” A principal thesis of this essay is that such “plays of frames” are typically grounded in, or correlated with, a play of tropes. An example of how the play of tropes can serve as a framework for the construction of ritual symbols and the ritual process in which they are used is afforded by ritual performances of the Kayapo and Bororo Indians of Brazil, in which the performers are said to “become parrots.” I have analyzed these performances in a paper on uses of tropes in ritual and cosmological symbolism (T. Turner 1991: 146–149). In the performances in question, the

tropes, frames, and powers



301

dancers decorate themselves with parrot feathers. The feathers and the dancers become metonymically associated parts of the new whole constituted by the dancer in his regalia. Parrot feathers are metonymically associated with the power of flight. The Kayapo term for ritual dancing means “flying,” and flying is metaphorically associated with the power to transcend the level, or frame, of human social existence by getting outside and above it. The Kayapo speak and sing of birds as having the power to perch on the sun’s rays and gaze over the whole world; for similar reasons, the Bororo associate parrot feathers of the type used in ritual costume with “lightness,” which is also associated with transcendental power or “spirit.” To become a flying being, such as a parrot, thus metaphorically implies the power to separate oneself from everyday social existence and to transcend, or assume an external relationship to, the frame of society as a whole. This power is also metaphorically figured by the character of the parrots as natural beings, from a frame external to the social order. The parrot-dancers, by transcending the distinction between social and natural frames, as well as between terrestrial and celestial levels, gain access to form-transcending and form-changing power. This power is directed to the intentional effect of the ritual, the transformation of social identity (the rituals in question are rites of passage, in the Kayapo case involving the bestowal of “beautiful” and “powerful” names and other attributes of social identity on children, and in the Bororo case, a boys’ initiation). The ritual performance of the dancers who put on the feathered costumes and sing parrot songs as they “fly” (dance) becomes a synthesis of the powers metonymically associated with their component feathers and the parrot identities metaphorically connoted by the parrot costumes in their totality. In the rituals, the parrot maskers symbolically induct the initiands or baptisands, thus projecting onto them their own parrot identities and powers. This act invests the initiands/baptisands with the power to support the transformation of their own identities in the frame of secular social relations into adult men or bearers of the valued name-identities of their name-giving relatives, respectively.

Conclusion The analysis of the functioning of ritual symbols and tropes as “pivots” in the sense I have suggested is, in sum, inseparable from an understanding of ritual structure and efficacy as a “play of frames.” This play of frames, mediated by the pivoting of symbols and the play of tropes, in this view, is the principal mechanism through which the power generated by the reflexive projection of the effectiveness of ritual action within the ritual frame is projected beyond

302



terence turner

that frame. These interrelated processes comprise the essential form and dynamic of the ritual process. At each step in this process, tropic elements are combined in ways that entail transformations of their tropic character as they mediate the transcendence of the boundaries between frames. The whole ritual process, at this level, has the form of a “play of tropes,” a series of transformations from metonymy to metaphor to synecdoche. (I use “synecdoche” in the sense of a combination of metonymy and metaphor, such that the parts of a whole or instances of a class also resemble the configuration or distinctive features of the class or whole to which they belong). At another level, however, this series of transformations also and equally consists of a series of shifts between frames: from the initial frame of the preparation for the ritual performance, including the construction of the costumes; to the ritual performance proper, with its dancing and feasting in the village plaza; to the cosmological frame that emerges from the performance, in which the ordinary members of human society acquire the creative powers of natural beings and “fly” as red macaws, transcending the boundary between “natural” and “social” frames. The series of tropic transformations and passages from frame to frame converge in the pivotal act, which in the Kayapo case empowers the projection of the beautiful names of the senior relatives, who bestow them onto their nephews and grandsons, or in the Bororo case transforms the boy initiands into men. The passage of names is both a passage between frames (the social persons of the name-bestowers and name-receivers, with their respective generational identities) and a complex tropic construct combining metaphorical identity (the sharing of the same name) and metonymical connection (the kinship relation of name-givers and name-receivers). The relation of Kayapo name-receivers to name-givers produced by the culminating act of name transmission is thus one of synecdoche in the sense that I have employed the term. The process has the form of a dialectic between changes in the framing of acts or relations, on the one hand, and transformations in the tropic construction of symbolic elements, on the other, where the two processes relate to each other as successive levels in a hierarchy of logical types. In general terms, the play of tropes comprising the construction and transformations of the identities of the ritual participants and/or their relations with sacred or symbolic entities initially takes place within the frame of ritual activity, which may itself be divided into successive microframes corresponding the successive phases of the ritual. The transformations comprising this “play of tropes” map out the steps of the process by which the ritual participants can return, with new powers and/or altered identities, from the ritual frame to the frame of secular society or, alternatively, can project the transformations and/or powers constructed in the ritual to effect transformations within the frame of secular

tropes, frames, and powers



303

social reality. The power to affect these transformations and passages between frames, however, comes ultimately from the actions of the ritual performers, as they construct and animate the ritual frame, with its constituent symbolic and tropic elements, as a stage for the objectification of their own actions. It is their intentionally directed activity as ritual performers that energizes and empowers the forms of intentionality encoded in the frames and tropic play of the ritual performance as effective objective forces capable of detaching themselves from the frame of the performance itself and remaking or changing the profane world beyond it. The formal analysis of ritual action as a dialectical interplay of the play of tropes and the play of frames thus converges with the analysis of ritual as framed, self-objectifying activity outlined in the earlier part of this essay. Terence Turner (1935–2015) was a cultural anthropologist renowned for his long, virtually lifelong, research among the Kayapo of the Amazon Basin and also for his long-term activism in defense of Indigenous rights, for the Kayapo and for all exploited Native peoples. Turner was admired as a theorist of the dynamics of social reproduction. His essay in this collection shows the tropes effecting powerful reproductive reframings of the social order. Turner spent most of his professional career at the University of Chicago, but he began his career at Cornell University and after retiring he returned there as an adjunct professor.

Notes 1. I use “intention” in the sense of the purpose of an actor or speaker in performing an act or utterance. 2. A powerful use of the concept of objectification is to be found in Munn 1971. P. S. Sangren (1991) employed the concept in a Marxian sense in a series of penetrating studies of Chinese ritual. 3. I borrow the term from Arnold van Gennep (1960: 18) and his notion of the “pivoting of the sacred,” although I use it in a different context.

References Bateson, Gregory. 1972. “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 177–93. New York: Ballantine Books. Durham, Deborah, and James W. Fernandez. 1991. “Tropical Dominions: The Figurative Struggle over Domains of Belonging and Apartness in Africa.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez, 190–210. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

304



terence turner

Gennep, Arnold van. 1960. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge & Paul. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hanks, William. 1996. Language and Communicative Practices. Boulder: Westview Press. Munn, Nancy D. 1971. “The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth.” In Australian Aboriginal Anthropology, ed. R. M. Berndt, 141–163. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. Sangren, P. S. 1991. “Dialectics of Alienation: Individuals and Collectivities in Chinese Religion.” Man, n.s., 26(1): 67–86. Turner, Terence. 1991. “We Are Parrots, Twins Are Birds: Play of Tropes as Operational Structure.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez, 121–158. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Turner, Victor W. 1967. “Symbols in Ndembu Ritual.” In The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, 19–47. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CONCLUSION

Imaginative Leaps and Embodied Grounding Marko Živković and Jamin Pelkey       

Tropes of Tropes: Moving toward Movement The imaginative leap is a trope of tropes. It is reflexive—a trope that reflects the nature of tropes, helping us to reflect on tropes in turn. Leaps of imagination, like leaps through space, can be dangerous and exhilarating, leading to new progress and insight or fresh delusion and disappointment. But risk or no risk, we take the leap, make the move, stretch the concept, target the domain, blend the spaces, spin the yarn, weave the spell, or simply yearn to close the gap between what we think we understand and what we need to understand. We move, in a word, or long to be moved. We move and are moved by tropes. In thinking about how best to coalesce the insights and contributions of these essays on the role of imagination in rhetoric culture, and their relation to the broader project, the notion of movement eventually made its way to the top—as indeed was anticipated in the introduction. In this concluding essay, we trace themes of movement through the volume to highlight their ubiquity and necessity while making a case for bringing bodily movement to the forefront of the rhetoric culture movement. This was not a preconceived aim. We considered a range of other possibilities first. Could we attempt a comprehensive study of thematic connections and debates among the chapters collected here? Should we attempt to make systematic connections explicit between the content of this ninth volume in the Studies in Rhetoric and Culture series and representative works from each of the other eight volumes? We considered

306



marko Živkovi and jamin pelkey

more modest explorations of thematic groupings as well, such as the identification of particular tropes or families of tropes within specific contexts. Seven of the essays in the collection, for instance, explore tropologically derived concepts while carefully unpacking their situated entailments in specific cultural contexts. John H. Leavitt considers twilight in this connection; Bernard Bate reflects on flags; Gustav Peebles examines money; Marko Živković explores dreams. For James W. Fernandez it is paths; for Steve Coleman, clay; for Joseba Zulaika, ruins—all with their own resonances, demonstrating the robust insights that can emerge from paying attention to the role of imagination in specific cultural domains. Another family of tropes that emerges from these essays centers on themes of national(ist) politics, as we find in at least six chapters, including Michael Carrithers’s focus on German unification after the shipwreck of Nazism, Zulaika’s analysis of Basque temporal melancholy, Coleman’s focus on Irish language politics, Mary Scoggin’s analysis of Chinese dissent, Bate’s focus on US patriotism, and Živković’s analysis of Serbian anomie. Other authors train their interests on tropological relations that mark more formal, theoretical approaches to language and the arts. Terence Turner offers a tropological reassessment of general categorical semantics in this connection, while Ivo Strecker does something similar for general pragmatics. Similarly, William O. Beeman and Dale Pesmen consider tropological aspects of formal properties from music to writing, including tangents, breaks, constraints in poetry, art, music, and writing at all levels. Eventually, though, developments within the broader project brought us back to dynamics of movement—and, more specifically, the phenomenology of movement: that is, the felt experiences and memory structures of embodied movement. In a 2016 review of the Rhetoric Culture Project, Jamin Pelkey suggested that the project could benefit from more attention to issues of grounding. Easier said than done. Complex issues of validity, reliability, and transferability are, if not intractable, at least par for the course in qualitative inquiry. More specifically, as Michael Harkin (2010: 27) notes, “anthropology has never been entirely clear or confident about its epistemological standing.” The same could potentially be said for the field of rhetoric in general, were it not for recent advances in cognitive semantics, cognitive poetics, and cognitive semiotics. While each of these interrelated approaches owes its existence to earlier theories of rhetoric and poetics to begin with, over the past fifty years these approaches have also benefited from developing a surer footing through theories of body-based imagination, or “embodied cognition” (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Johnson 1987, 2007; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Gibbs 2008: Foolen et al. 2012; Zlatev, Konderak, and Sonesson 2016; Pelkey, Melanson, and Rosenbaum 2019; Brandt 2020). Among other possible ways to find some degree of grounding, then, Pelkey (2016) suggested that the Rhetoric Culture

conclusion



307

Project might benefit from alignments with theories of embodied cognition as well. To be clear, nothing about the Rhetoric Culture Project is anti-embodiment. Indeed, intimations or inclinations toward grounding in embodied experience are implicit from the beginning. In volume 1 of the series, Culture and Rhetoric, editors Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler (2009: 23) insist that the project is just as intent on “sensemaking, feeling, and empathy” as it is on issues of translation, imagination, and understanding. A curious assumption that runs parallel to this affirmation might explain why these values, which are themselves aligned with theories of embodied cognition, have led to limited cross-fertilization between the two so far. Notably, this issue centers on the concept of “meaning.” Tyler and Strecker argue that rhetoric culture is concerned with understanding rather than meaning, on the assumption that theories of meaning cannot be expanded to incorporate sensibility (“sensemaking, feeling, and empathy”). Until recently, to Strecker and Tyler’s credit, most theories of meaning that have emerged in Western traditions have tended to neglect the vital roles of affect and emotion (Johnson 2007; Thompson 2007). Many theories of embodied meaning, however, seek to reverse this trend by making phenomenological experience just as focal in theory as it is in our everyday lives. On an implicitly related note, later in volume 1, Anthony Paul (2009: 114) asks if art and rhetoric can help us not only to “fit chaotic experience into orderly forms and patterns, but also to find such patterns and forms within experience.” This may be the strongest intimation toward embodied grounding to be found in the opening volume of the series. Incremental progress has been made in this direction in the ensuing volumes, especially related to the chiasmus figure (see, e.g., Hariman 2014; Pelkey 2021). The movement-oriented nature of tropes provides a natural trajectory for integrating rhetoric culture with patterns and forms of embodied experience.

On Moving and Being Moved: Grounds for Rhetoric Culture Rhetoric culture insights are well positioned to dialogue with movement- and emotion-oriented theories of embodied meaning. A landmark collection that illustrates this well is Moving Ourselves, Moving Others: Motion and Emotion in Intersubjectivity, Consciousness and Language (Foolen et al. 2012), a timely cross-disciplinary collection. The volume brings together “philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, primatologists, and linguists” who are intent on “bringing motion and emotion back together again,” observing that in “moving ourselves, we move others; in observing others move—we are moved our-

308



marko Živkovi and jamin pelkey

selves” (Zlatev 2012: 2, 5–6). Anthropologists and rhetoricians are notably absent from the collection. In spite of its strengths, then, the volume is short on layered attention to situated cultural practices and theories of persuasion that should eventually be integrated. The role of culture is frequently mentioned in the work, at least, and several contributors set out to explore the nature of metaphor and movement in different languages. But when it comes to moving others and being moved by others in culturally embedded intersubjective contexts, who is better suited for such discussions than scholars of rhetoric culture? Whether or not rhetoric culture scholars wish to dialogue extensively with cognitive semioticians and other embodied theorists, tropology and its tropes can scarcely be discussed or theorized without being grounded in bodily movement. First it is helpful to recall that tropes in general, and metaphor more specifically, find their origins in movement. The latter descends from Greek μεταφέρειν (“to carry across”—from μετα- [“over, across, between”] + φέρειν [“carry”]—or “to carry between”). “Trope,” in turn, descends from Greek τρόπος (“turn, style”), from τρέπειν (“to turn”). Relationships between motion and emotion are necessary for theorizing what happens when we activate the tropological imagination in any given act of understanding and interpretation. As Fernandez notes in his introduction to this volume, “imaginative movements that take place intersubjectively involve . . . a kind of dance between puzzling subjects of interest and objects of meaningful predication/postulation made upon them.” Frank Kermode (1957) strikes a similar chord in developing Yeats’s dancer and the dance motif as an analogy for a thinker and their thought. I. A. Richards (1936) provides further evidence in his discussion of the “interanimation of words,” as does Paul Ricoeur (1981), who names his account of metaphor-as-text the “interaction” theory of meaning. Ricoeur’s theory, in turn, interacts well with Northrop Frye’s (1983: 77) observation that “all language is permeated by metaphor simply because words are juxtaposed.” Frye himself relies on a movement-oriented metaphor to encapsulate his own theory, calling it “centripetal meaning,” i.e., interanimated meaning moving in toward the center. More recent imagination-centered theories of meaning discuss such dynamics as “conceptual blending” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Turner 2014). Fernandez invokes a kind of blending trope in the introduction to this volume by offering two additional movement-oriented tropes of tropes: “weaving” and “coupling.” He focuses especially on movement by coupling, in part because of its connections with the copula, but also because of “how movement by coupling can be, in the association established, evocative and rich in imaginative meanings, in how we can be edified, and meaningfully moved, by our puzzlements.” Clearly then, without intending to make it so, we have produced

conclusion



309

a volume that suggests the rhetoric culture agenda is already grounded in embodied meaning—at least in terms of tropological imagination, where movement and emotion are not only already unified but inescapable. To make these connections more explicit, we turn to a tumbling tour of various chapters in this and other volumes in the series that further develop this theme.

An Invitation to Tropological Acrobatics and the Kinesthetic Imagination To move and be moved, to turn and be turned in the give and take of social life—what models based on bodily experiences come to our aid as both practitioners of everyday tropologies and those who also try to expose their lineaments for scholarly scrutiny? Isn’t trying to move somebody while at the same time being moved, to twist and turn while being twisted and turned in turn, what wrestling is all about? This is, of course, persuasion at close quarters in a combative catch-as-catch-can. In his introduction, Fernandez reminds us that the “play of tropes” may fruitfully be seen as “palaestral,” just as F. G. Bailey (2009) demonstrates in volume 2 of this series, where he unpacks an ironic wrestling match between a peasant and a wealthy corporate executive in Italy’s Maritime Alps, an archetypal Sancho Panza/Don Quixote relation if there ever was one. Wrestling is a particularly apt model for irony, especially in its more combative modes. We should all have immediate corporeal access to wrestling if only from childhood tussles on the playground. But wrestling as a bodily model could be expanded into a richly complex domain. Our foundational philosopher, Plato the “Broad,” was a wrestler and so was, in his method, his hero Socrates. Socratic irony, says Bailey (2009: 117) in a delightful deployment of wrestling metaphors, is “bare-knuckle stuff, rhetorical assault and battery, intended to wear opponents down, to exhaust their capacity for logical combat, to knock all the ideas out of their heads, and thus render them unable to resist an implantation of ‘the truth.’” It is interesting that Bailey (2009: 117) contrasts Socratic irony with Gandhi’s satyagraha (struggle to find truth), “in which the debaters are not seen as contestants but as mutual critics, partners in a cooperative endeavor to find the truth that is waiting there to be discovered.” As a student at the University of Chicago, Živković assisted sociologist Donald Levine in teaching “Aikido and Conflict Theory,” Levine’s course that was built precisely on that contrast between two models of conflict resolution—Gandhi’s passive resistance vs. modalities of direct confrontation, with Aikido acting as the third, superior model that enfolds passivity and confrontation into a higher synthesis.

310



marko Živkovi and jamin pelkey

This was, moreover, a class that boldly combined Aikido mat practice with the classroom parsing of texts to bring embodied experience and scholarly literature into a mutual illumination (see Levine 1989, 2007). In short, the palaestral domain can indeed exhibit a rich complexity—from childhood tussles through complexities of Greco-Roman wrestling to Eastern “gentle ways” and higher-level synthesis of these opposed modalities.1 It is clear why it is irony among major tropes that exhibits a particular affinity to wrestling. Irony, however, as Scoggin shows in this volume, may also be illuminated by another martial art —archery—with its own set of culturally inflected associated commonplaces. Instead of combat at close quarters, we now have action at a distance; instead of bare knuckles, a highly efficient machine: the Chinese traditional composite bow. The scene is one quite different from the Italian Maritime Alps of Bailey’s “revelatory incident” (Fernandez 1986: vi).2 Irony is now a game, sometimes with life-and-death stakes, played between critics and censors in a culture where thousands of years of literate missives enter the internet era. Now, we are in a world of crooked pens and straight arrows, of dodging and crouching in order to shoot straight. Plato was a wrestler while Confucius was an archer. Just as gymnastics went together with philosophy in ancient Greece, so calligraphy, music, and archery went together in ancient China (as three of the Six Arts a perfect Confucian gentleman should master). And like wrestling, upon closer inspection, archery offers a rich complexity concealed under the most commonplace associations of “straightness” and precision.3 The straightness of the arrow itself, the upright stance of the bowman “like a flagpole,” and, “of course,” Scoggin writes, “the finding of the true ‘path’ of the correctly aimed shot . . . are not only physical but parallel moral codes of clear-eyed vision, unflappable mental calm, and righteousness in ritual. . . . And yet, tucked within these instructions and exhortations, the bow is curved, the draw arm ‘folds,’ the hips must bend, and the back ‘concentrates’ as the ‘fierce tiger gathers himself to spring.’” She concludes that “quite a lot of twisting, it turns out, is required to achieve the true path of the straight shot.” This physical twisting and bending, in turn, provides a powerful bodily analogy for the literatus, the writer, or the critic who “twist themselves to the launch, themselves figures of deformity and tragedy, responding to (as they must see it) perversity. The launch point is created through these crooked and distorted positions. Their work is the cultivation of a stance in counterpoint to the deformity, mirroring it. . . . Irony is also a limber trope of escape and release.” In sum, like modalities of wrestling, archery offers complex tropological bounties of the acrobatic kind. A transformative technology with a long history, as rich in lore as in a variety of uses and styles, it offers precise analogies

conclusion



311

for technologies of the body that can in turn illuminate ever more abstract domains, as we will show in the next section on the modalities of flexible inquiry. Let us then turn to some other acrobatic skills as a potentially fertile ground for tropology but stay close to the twisting, turning, and contorting in both wrestling and archery. Attempts to develop a comprehensive model of tropological transformations could be seen as resembling the efforts of protein modelers to extract 3-D models of complex molecules from the fuzzy X-ray crystallography images, as analyzed by Natasha Myers (2015). Neither the knowledge of molecular geometries, distances and intramolecular forces, nor the fuzzy electron density map—”near-ghostly, dancing shadows of diverging and converging waves”—provide a sure recipe for constructing correct models of protein molecules (Myers 2015: 57). Automation does not work. Students, instead, have to meander through the “jungle of amino acids” groping4 toward their models in a months-long trial-and-error process. A master modeler, such as “Diane,” the head of a lab studied by Myers, has through a long practice incorporated the “structural knowledge in her kinesthetic imagination,” her body becoming a proxy or a model for the molecule. When her students show her computer graphic renderings of their models in the early stages of the building process, Diane will sometimes contort “her entire body into the shape of the misfolded model” as she tries to “feel the pain” of the molecule” (99). “Rearranging her contorted limbs, Diane conducts a body experiment to relieve tension in the model so she can get a feel for the correct structure” (102). But as she anthropomorphizes the molecule by projecting human pain into it, she herself becomes “molecularized at the same time as her molecule becomes humanized” (101). Molecules are obstinate and wily in Myers’s account. They are hard to kill and crystallize and will not stand still. They move, and if you want to know them you have to move with them. Scientists try to control them but are in turn controlled. Groping toward their molecular renderings, they often switch among metaphors that may alternate between animistic and mechanistic but are often chiasmic—they cannot make living organisms mechanistic unless they at the same time make the machines lively. Twisting and contorting their bodies as they kinesthetically model their wiggly molecules, the scientists perform little dances that Myers, an anthropologist with a microbiology degree and serious dancing background, is beautifully poised to discern and bring to the fore in the lab, just as her scientists conjure their molecules out of their jungles of amino acids. Yes, the point of it all is to contribute accurate 3-D models of important proteins to the growing Protein Data Bank, but what the lab produces even more significantly are the sensitized scientists. There is a tacit Goethean subtext to Myers’s book—what we see is Goethe’s “delicate empiricism” at work tracing the metamorphoses

312



marko Živkovi and jamin pelkey

of molecules and producing not just the molecular analogs of Goethe’s urplant but metamorphosed scientists as well (Goethe 1946; Seamon and Zajonc 1998). It is not hard to see fruitful analogies between what ethnographers and protein modelers do.5 Both confront the fuzzy “dancing shadows of diverging and converging waves” in unfamiliar settings armed, to be true, with knowledge of the sociological equivalents to “molecular geometries, distances and forces” that offer no more than clues for informed groping, not the recipes for mapping out the terrain (Myers 2015: 57, 95). Eventually, by slow apprenticeship, both ethnographers and protein modelers train their kinesthetic imaginations and become sensitive instruments in ways they cannot completely specify. An ethnographer can become a very fine instrument for detecting a complex play of tropes in everyday revelatory incidents of fieldwork, be they a shouting match about the meaning of the US flag in New Haven (Bate, this volume) or a cat-and-mouse play of Chinese critic with censorship (Scoggin, this volume), but we also want to specify, as much as possible, the formal models, our equivalent to chemistry and physics of proteins, that help us along the way. This is what most of our contributors do in this volume, and this is the purpose of our invitation to tropological acrobatics—an attempt at grounding our ethnographic skills in the felt experiences and memory structures of embodied movement.

Poetics and Acrobatics So, what does attunement to the poetics, tropology, or rhetorics of social forms and practices we study have to do with acrobatics? We started this section with wrestling and launching, and circled back to twisting and contorting, but let us now go into the acrobatics of leaping and jumping with which the chapter began. Just as accomplished investigators are to scientific apprentices, just as professional wrestlers, Aikido masters, or Olympic archery champions are to children tussling on the playground and shooting crooked arrows from their handmade bows, so we expect of acrobats to be significantly more skillful than ordinary people. What is that leaping and jumping, then, at which master tropologists are highly accomplished acrobats? We should not lose our double perspective here. Bailey’s Italian peasant is, in his account, a master of palaestral irony, and Scoggin’s critics are master archers even when they lose their battles and sometimes their lives. The Balinese are, similarly, master tightrope acrobats, as described by Gregory Bateson (1972) in what is now a classical account of their steady-state ethos.

conclusion



313

In Bali, “neither the individual nor the village is concerned to maximize any simple variable. Rather, they would seem to be concerned to maximize something which we may call stability, using this term perhaps in a highly metaphorical way” (Bateson 1972: 124). In a move that combines mechanical with bodily metaphors, just as Myers’s modelers do, Bateson then likens the Balinese ethos with “the steady state of an engine with a governor” that is “unlikely to be maintained if the position of the balls of the governor is clamped,” just as “a tightrope walker with a balancing pole will not be able to maintain his balance except by varying the forces which he exerts upon the pole” (124–125). In a word, the Balinese have a system “which presents a number of analogies to our balancing acrobat” (125). In this example, the Balinese are balancing acrobats, but so is Bateson himself an acrobat who manages to extract “differences [that] make a difference” (489) from his observations, and then higher-order relations between relations, isomorphisms and homomorphisms among these, and up and up the ladder of ever higher logical types until the reader starts to get dizzy. It is this vertigo, this dizziness produced by nimble leaping from frames to meta-frames, to meta-meta-frames, and so on that we should perhaps focus on here, for these are the hallmarks of accomplished acrobats. A circus acrobat will be at ease in a world that would make an ordinary person sick from vertigo. So perhaps we should go to the kind of situation where the “play of tropes” induces the kind of motion sickness in ordinary people that acrobats could handle with ease. Pesmen (1991, 2016), a contributor to this volume, alerted us precisely to this kind of situation when she talked about mixing metaphors. Our general disapproval of mixing metaphors reveals that we expect a certain kind of coherency from our metaphors, a coherency that she argues is very much aligned with a kind of realism we expect in painting. Since we usually use metaphoric predications to elucidate the inchoates of our existence, and since metaphors are selective, we usually need to multiply them, to circle around the inchoate by predicating many other (supposedly more coherent and better known) worlds upon it.6 Thus perplexity proliferates metaphors. And such a switch from one metaphor to another could be highly illuminating, but there are ways of switching metaphors that tend to provoke sometimes quite acute uneasiness. As Pesmen (2016: 55) puts it, Once a metaphor has been predicated, engaging in another image-union seems to adulterate the first world, diminishing its realism, that is, its ability to persuade us. After several such leaps, critics of mixed metaphor move from moral censure to motion sickness, alleging nauseating ontological and rhetorical shiftiness. . . . Foucault (1970: xv) says that the juxtaposed points of view of Borges’ “Chinese encyclopedia” make us aware of our thought’s

314



marko Živkovi and jamin pelkey

limitations. Mixed metaphor’s images similarly defy us to understand “where we stand”—as Foucault calls it, the site on which propinquity of these things would be possible. But maybe we’re never standing like that anyway. Maybe where we’re standing, legs aren’t enough.

Or, to pursue our acrobatic analogy, if our legs are not enough perhaps acrobatic training in twisting, turning, and leaping among incommensurable worlds would help to reap the benefits while avoiding the nausea of such “ontological and rhetorical shiftiness.”7

Modalities of Flexible Inquiry The domain of archery offers a useful distinction. A traditional Chinese composite bow, formed through centuries of refinement as primarily a weapon to be shot from a horse in motion at a moving target, involves several degrees of freedom that are eliminated in the modern Olympic recurve bow that is shot standing still at a standard target from the standard distance. With its calibrated sight, finely tuned arrow rest, and stabilizers, the Olympic recurve is to the Chinese traditional bow what laboratory controls are to natural conditions. In other words, the traditional shooter has many more variables to control than the Olympic one and is thus prone to risks that the modern bow largely eliminates. What an arrow rest on a modern bow regulates mechanically, for instance, the traditional shooter, who uses his bow hand as a rest, has to interiorize as body routine ingrained by long practice. This contrast corresponds neatly to David Pye’s (1968) distinction between the “workmanship of certainty” and the “workmanship of risk” in the domain of craft. The important point is that this is not a binary opposition but a continuum. Even the most freehand carving of wood would have an element of certainty—since the tool will be guided by the wood grain and by the groove it already made; conversely, almost no woodworking jig, no matter how rigidly precise in guiding the process, will be entirely free of risk. Sciences, especially those on the hard part of the spectrum, project a sense of their methods as extremely precise jigs that eliminate all risk—follow the protocol and you will get reliable and repeatable results, always. In the lab, however, as anthropologists of science such as Myers (2015) have amply shown, improvisation and jerry-rigging, even animism and superstition, rule. Rigor and standardization are indispensable to science, but they tend to be overvalued and misapplied. Labs are messy; textbooks are clean. To be good, scientists have to be soft and supple in what they do, and yet they often present themselves as hard and rigid. How can tropological acrobatics help us understand this contradiction?

conclusion



315

To keep with the metaphors of motion, when Myers’s modelers meander through their jungle of amino acids in which no formal knowledge of physics and chemistry will inevitably lead them to their molecular prey, are they not the descendants of the hunters and gatherers Fernandez writes about in chapter 7, moving through the forest “ever alert and reactive to wayward prey”? We can then contrast “the aleatory and the contingent . . . found in the hunter’s view” to the gardener’s “constructed paths to tame the wild and make it familiar and domesticate it!” This contrast, which turns out to be a graded continuum, maps well on Pye’s workmanship of risk and certainty or traditional and modern archery. The point is not to embrace one end of the spectrum and renounce the other; rather, the acrobatics needed here are of a higher logical type—an ability to decide, for every contingent situation, what is the most salient blend of risk and certainty, improvisation and standardization. A nimble tropologist is, then, a purveyor of the same family of skills that every good scholar and scientist practices—those of flexible inquiry. The thinker, Fernandez (this volume) concludes, obviously—this may be, as much as anything, what tropology teaches—is the child of the hunter, the gatherer, and the gardener (if not the mechanic). . . . The point is to be aware of the reservoir of our aides-pensée that are on offer and the possibilities of inflexibilities and overcommitment to particular ones in contrast to others; that is, the point is to be aware of the very real pathologies of thought in everyday life.

And just as primacy belongs to the “hunter’s alertness to contingency—a primacy that the excesses of path commitment can lead us to overlook, transgress, infringe, and defile” (Fernandez, this volume), Carlo Ginzburg (1983: 110) considers hunters as the original conjectural scientists adept at practicing what, in a felicitous chiasmus, he calls “elastic rigor.” How then to think about this elastic rigor, this Goethean “delicate empiricism”? What are the modalities of flexible inquiry in tropology, as in all sciences from the “softest” to the “hardest,” and what are the lessons that collections like this could offer? Here are some distinguishable components of this skill: The first is that you have to have a good repertoire of different models or metaphors. Moreover, you have an obligation to deepen them either on your own or with the help of experts. It helps to be a very good mechanic if you are using a mechanical model to figure out protein molecules, as Myers (2015) noted, or a skilled contact improvisation dancer if you are figuring out how scientists improvise in their labs (Dumit 2018; Dumit and O’Connor 2016; Little and Dumit 2020). Second, you should acquire the knack of trying them out on any new, inchoate material and in quickly or nimbly switching among them.

316



marko Živkovi and jamin pelkey

The flexibility of elastic rigor or delicate empiricism may then be seen as a skill in rapid switching between frames, or metaphors. Anthropologists, by the very nature of their discipline, need to be extremely nimble frame-jumpers. If flexibility is, among other things, a matter of nimble metaphor switching or jumping between frames or worlds, then unpacking this anthropological skill may be a source of insight. Switching sensory modalities or communicative channels is a great model for switching frames or metaphors. Beeman, in chapter 11, points to the “auditory, nondiscursive component of music” that “allows musical tropes to coexist with linguistic and visual tropes in the same cultural product as a distinct symbolic communicative channel.” These channels, in turn, may reinforce each other, or “produce ironic juxtapositions of contradictory messages.” In chapter 12, Pesmen gives us yet another set of “tactics for working anyway,” of wiggling/wriggling, that adds to our repertoire of acrobatics. These are the tricks of painters, musicians, poets, and writers, Dadaists and surrealists. When too much freedom oppresses, introduce constraints. When constrained too much, go on a tangent, the “improvisation’s master trope.” Develop musical muscles for breaking continuities. Breaks are hard because continuities are seductive—that is why you need muscles. Jumping among the domains of painting, literature, and ethnography, as Pesmen does, enables some convergences to come into clearer view: in the arts training and practice a common tension between habit-forming and habitunlearning could be discerned. In drawing classes, for instance, students first need to unlearn some habits of seeing as they learn new ones. Apprentice ethnographers need to train their Sherlock Holmesian skills of noticing seemingly trivial details. Minute observation is accomplished by extreme dilation of attention, or simply by slowing down. Natasha Myers and Joseph Dumit (2011: 244), among others, discern the same underlying “haptic creativity” in scientific practice. And they draw from a particularly rich metaphorical domain of dance, and especially contact improvisation (a modern dance form partly inspired by Aikido),8 to talk about the “improvisational, exploratory aspect” of scientific research. Scientists move with and are moved by what they track; they lean into data, torque their bodies to manipulate their data sets; they hesitate in the “wandering, wavering and indeterminate responsivity” (247). In their “intra-action,” “ontological choreography,” and the “dance of agencies,” scientists “scale and rescale,” orient and reorient and hover “in a space of not knowing, mid-embodiment . . . the space in which improvisation and creativity flourish” (255). This flexible “play of haptic and metaphoric creativity,” however, is always in tension with the “proper form of scientific expression”: quantification, objectification, and reduction required of journal and textbook science. Keeping both scientific practices he had observed and contact im-

conclusion



317

provisation he had practiced and used as a model in teaching ethnographic methods simultaneously in view, Dumit (2014: n.p.) then summarizes the lessons: “Don’t systematize your method prematurely, suspend belief in what you already know or think you know. Learn to stay in the gaps, long enough to be surprised.” And just like learning about conflict through Aikido, Dumit’s students learn, bodily, how to practice flexible inquiry by wire-walking, or learning to fall in contact improvisation. Like Pesmen, Dumit uses constraints and simple scripts to teach the subtle art of ethnographic sensibility. What these various “acrobatic” models teach, in short, is that flexible inquiry is not just the ability to jump between worlds without motion sickness. It is also, more subtly, about how not to freak out when caught in the place in between. A practitioner of elastic rigor is then able to nimbly jump between richly structured worlds as well as stay suspended between them without prematurely embracing the enticing coherence of any. This is the skill of seasoned improvisers who know how to avoid the fear of void and do not fly away from ambiguity (Levine 1985). There is yet another way in which flexible inquiry relies on a species of acrobatics: the skill not so much of jumping between worlds on the same plane but the ability to scale up and down, zoom in and out, or rapidly oscillate between the most microscopic detail and the most synoptic view. This is the skill needed to approach one of the most vexing problems of all systematic inquiry, that of delimiting the scope of one’s problems. When scientists, as they must, “start by partitioning the world of study into the system they designated and its environment,” says William Wimsatt (2007: 80), they tend to be “primarily interested in the entities and relations internal to the system of study.” The properties of the systems that scientists assume to be independent of context would then frequently turn out to be “disguised relational properties.” The problem is of the “proper scope of the system under analysis” (239). Now this is where anthropologists with their acrobatic skills in jumping between worlds could be useful. Bateson posed this same question of proper delineation of systems under study in his refusal to confine the mind to the boundaries of our skin. In explaining the “locomotion of the blind man,” another of his famous examples, “you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round” (Bateson 1972: 466). How large does the system you cut out for study have to be then? Just large enough for each situation so that you “don’t have to leave things inexplicable,” Bateson would say. But how do we determine that in practice? “Claims may be made that phenomena are at a given level, or are to be viewed from a given perspective,” says Wimsatt (2007: 240), “and any level of analysis or perspective that has successful associated theories will attempt to claim disputed territory. But that is just the point—there will be a lot of dis-

318



marko Živkovi and jamin pelkey

puted territory—and the disputes will often turn on how the system is to be cut up for analysis.” In such struggles, Wimsatt warns, “you’d better get an overall sense of geography before you decide on your colonizing strategy.” It is in this sense of overall geography that anthropologists excel because of their acrobatic skills. It is this ability to move, as it were, on the vertical dimension of scale that one could best determine the scope of contextualization most salient for the problem at hand. This is the wisdom of the osprey who strikes for fish with unerring precision—hovering high above the water, spotting the fish, and then adjusting the angle of its dive to accommodate refraction.9

Symbiotic Back-and-Forth: Moving in Between Leaps of imagination, twists and turns of thought, wrestling with new ideas, grappling with old concepts, unpacking arguments, grasping meanings, tracking fresh leads, reeling from a discovery, rolling with uncertainty, groping through ambiguity: this is how we find our way. Tropes of imagination and reason inform all processes of inquiry, and tropes of movement model the movement of tropes. No process or theory of inquiry would make sense without memories and habits of bodily movement. In selecting this focus as a conclusion for the volume, we have uncovered three key possibilities in need of ongoing development: 1.

Insofar as it grows out of tropology, the rhetoric culture movement is already richly (if only implicitly) grounded in embodied cognition.

2.

As multiple contributions in this collection and elsewhere illustrate, a more deliberate, explicit embrace of bodily movement dynamics can provide helpful integration between distant domains, ranging from novice play to expert craft, from mundane activities to the scholarly pursuits, from the practical to the theoretical, from the quantitative to the qualitative.

3.

Properly blended with anthropology and phenomenology, the study of tropes offers up important lessons for developing habits of flexible inquiry—lessons that are just as relevant for daily life as they are for empirical investigation.

In closing, we would like to focus still further on the promise of this third possibility, since it brings together the other two, endowing them with meaning. The action of bringing together while keeping apart is arguably the ultimate function of chiasmus (Pelkey 2016). Floyd Merrell (2010: 2) describes the

conclusion



319

process as “complementary, contradictory, coalescence.” And chiastic dynamics resulting in the mediation of extremes work hand in hand with the lessons of embodied tropology. Consider again Scoggin’s archer. In paying attention to the layers of twisting and turning that are necessary for the archer to shoot straight, we participate in visceral patterns of imagined and remembered movement. In the process we learn to be more comfortable with paradox by inhabiting the space between crooked and straight. We also gain mundane insight into related passages in the wisdom literature that might otherwise seem inscrutable, such as the opening lines of chapter 22 of the Dao De Jing: “To remain whole, be twisted! / To become straight, let yourself be bent” (Lao Tzu 1958: 23). Živković’s firsthand synthesis of insights from Bailey and Levine provides another instance of the chiastic reconciliation of opposites that is grounded in both anthropology and phenomenology. The “bare-knuckle” irony of Plato’s Socrates contrasts with Gandhi’s passive resistance as two opposite approaches to conflict resolution. These, in turn, find a kind of dynamic synthesis in the bodily movements of Aikido, which affirms both passivity and confrontation. In the process, both wrestling and sitting are affirmed as valid strategies, but we also become dissatisfied with either on its own—preferring something of both, something beyond either, something in between. The list goes on, from Dumit’s wire-walkers to Myers’s molecular scientists to Pesmen’s metaphor mixers and beyond: all offer analogous lessons in retraining habits toward flexible inquiry via blends of cultural anthropology and embodied phenomenology. And the lessons work both ways, enabling anthropologists to revisit the chiastic interplay of key paradoxes encountered in ethnography, such as the paradox of the observer and the observer’s paradox. The first reminds us that by observing something we change it. The second reminds us that by observing something it changes us: “In moving ourselves, we move others,” as Jordan Zlatev (2012: 2) notes; “in observing others move—we are moved ourselves.” Marko Živković is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. His publications include Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević (2011) and chapters in Vehicles: Cars, Canoes and other Metaphors of Moral Imagination (2014), Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader (2016), and Everyday Life in the Balkans (2019). Jamin Pelkey is associate professor of languages, literatures, and cultures at Ryerson University, Toronto, where he directs the Meaning Lab and serves as a core member of the Ryerson-York Graduate Program in Communication and Culture. His books include Dialectology as Dialectic (2011) and The Semiotics of X (2017).

320



marko Živkovi and jamin pelkey

Notes 1. “Gentle” martial arts such as Tai Chi, Baguazhang, jiujutsu, judo, and especially Aikido are very good as body models for the dialectic of encapsulating/being encapsulated, locking by getting out of locks, trapping the trapper, and so forth, which in turn are good bodily analogies for chiasmus. Another interesting source of anthropological insight from martial arts is Greg Downey’s (2005) work on capoeira. 2. It has been Fernandez’s ethnographic practice, at the beginning of each chapter of the ethnography (e.g., Fernandez 1982), to introduce a revelatory incident from his field notes usually involving some personage of the “dramatis personae” indicated in the introduction  and with tropological implications to be further examined as a leitmotif in the chapter itself. 3. As archers know quite well, the arrow doesn’t fly straight at all. Instead, it “wiggles” in the horizontal plane like a fish, or in the vertical one like a porpoise, in what is called the archer’s paradox—another tropological resource yet to be explored. 4. Myers (2015: 97) uses “groping” (an embodied metaphor par excellence) in explicit reference to the way Michael Polanyi, who was a crystallographer before becoming a philosopher and sociologist of science, uses it to describe the largely tacit, ultimately unspecifiable process of scientific inquiry where “progress is made incrementally, by trial and error.” 5. The revelation here is not that “softer” sciences want to emulate the “harder” ones, but that the harder ones turn out to be much softer than they present themselves to themselves and others. 6. On metaphor as predication upon inchoateness of existence, see Fernandez 1986 and his introduction to this volume. 7. If we had to offer a definition, I would say that “a world” or “a frame” is a mass of unspecifiably associated commonplaces that are taken as a tacit background for attending to something at hand. We can theoretically designate every moment of shifting consciousness to constitute “a world” of its own because it will theoretically involve a different assembly of tacit subsidiaries (for the distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness, see Polanyi 1962). But in practice, we tend to rather seamlessly pass from one moment to another and to shift our attention smoothly. So the pragmatic criterion of what we take as a “finite” or “bounded” “world” or “frame” would be the experience of “perturbation.” We will infer that a passage into a different “world” has occurred only when the change is perceived as of a sufficient abruptness or radicalness. Whatever is smoothly transited into is still a part of the same world. That is to say, worlds could be defined by a certain level of comfort and ease. A world is where we have found our feet, that is, where we can trust our tacit awareness for smooth functioning, or where we are on an automatic pilot we have developed by training and practice. We should then start not from the description of domains but from the effects produced by border crossings, since it is the shifts among them that define what counts as a domain, rather than vice versa. That is to say, we proceed from motion sickness to the description of the roller coaster design. 8. Describing how Dan Hijiko, a cell biologist and biological engineer, performs the movement of a white blood cell, Myers and Dumit (2011: 244) note that “rather than resembling a choreographed score, this performance is closer to a movement practice known as ‘contact improvisation,’ where two or more dancers engage in a tacit conversation, experimenting with the push and pull between bodies, and playing dynamically

conclusion



321

with tension, weight, and gravity. It is a viable metaphor to capture the improvisational play as bodies (human, nonhuman and machine) and meanings get made inside experiments. This is an example of the improvisational, exploratory aspect of scientific experiments that we call haptic creativity.” 9. Drawing on Shirley Campbell’s study of Trobriand carving, Alfred Gell (1992: 55) uses the omnipresent osprey motif on Kula canoes as an example of “scheme transfers” between perfection of performance and success in Kula expeditions.

References Bailey, F. G. 2009. “The Palaestral Mode of Rhetoric.” In Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life, ed. Michael Carrithers, 107–120. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Brandt, Per Aage. 2020. Cognitive Semiotics: Signs, Mind, and Meaning. London: Bloomsbury. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books. Downey, Gregory. 2005. Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Dumit, Joseph. 2014. “Don’t Know Where You Are Going: Embodying Improvisation in Dance, Theatre, Neuroscience, and Anthropology.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 6 December 2014. ———. 2018. “Sensing Oneself Balancing: Dancing with Concepts as Research.” CorpoGrafías 6(6): 88–108. Dumit, Joseph, and Kevin O’Connor. 2016. “The Senses and Sciences of Fascia: A Practice as Research Investigation.” In Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human, ed. Lynette Hunter, Elisabeth Krimmer, and Peter Lichtenfels, 35–54. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Fernandez, James W. 1982. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Foolen, Ad, Ulrike M. Lüdtke, Timothy P. Racine, and Jordan Zlatev, eds. 2012. Moving Ourselves, Moving Others: Motion and Emotion in Intersubjectivity, Consciousness and Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House. Frye, Northrop. 1983. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gell, Alfred. 1992. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, 40–63. Oxford: Clarendon. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr., ed. 2008. The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1983. “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes.” In The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and A. Sebeok Thomas, 81–118. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

322



marko Živkovi and jamin pelkey

Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von. 1946. “Goethe’s Botany: The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and Tobler’s Ode to Nature (1782),” trans. Agnes Arber. Chronica Botanica 10(2): 63–126. Hariman, Robert. 2014. “What Is a Chiasmus? Or, Why the Abyss Stares Back.” In Chiasmus and Culture, ed. Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul, 45–68. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Harkin, Michael E. 2010. “Uncommon Ground: Holism and the Future of Anthropology.” Reviews in Anthropology 39(1): 25–45. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kermode, Frank. 1957. Romantic Image. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. 1989. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lao Tzu. 1958. The Way and Its Power, trans. and ed. Arthur Waley. New York: Grove. Levine, Donald N. 1985. The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1989. “The Liberal Arts and the Martial Arts.” In The Overlook Martial Arts Reader: An Anthology of Historical and Philosophical Writings, ed. Randy F. Nelson. New York Overlook. ———. 2007. “Somatic Elements in Social Conflict.” In “Embodying Sociology,” ed. Chris Shilling, special issue, Sociological Review 55(s1): 37–49. Little, Nita, and Joseph Dumit. 2020. “Articulating Presence: Attention as Tactile.” In Thinking Touch in Partnering and Contact Improvisation: Philosophy, Pedagogy, Practice, ed. Malaika Sarco-Thomas. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Merrell, Floyd. 2010. Entangling Forms: Within Semiosic Processes. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Myers, Natasha. 2015. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter. Durham: Duke University Press. Myers, Natasha, and Joseph Dumit. 2011. “Haptic Creativity and the Mid-embodiments of Experimental Life.” In Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, ed. Fran Mascia-Lees, 239–261. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Paul, Anthony. 2009. “When Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair: Lessons from Macbeth.” In Culture and Rhetoric, ed. Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler, 104–114. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pelkey, Jamin. 2016. “Symbiotic Modeling: Linguistic Anthropology and the Promise of Chiasmus.” Reviews in Anthropology 45(1): 22–50. ———. 2017. The Semiotics of X: Chiasmus, Cognition, and Extreme Body Memory. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2021. “Embodied Chiasmus: From Alienation to Participation.” In Rhetoric in Social Relations: Dialectics of Bonding and Contestation, ed. Jon Abbink and Shauna LaTosky, 30–54. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pelkey, Jamin, Sophia Melanson, and Richard Rosenbaum, eds. 2019. “Cognitive Semiotics.” Thematic double issue, American Journal of Semiotics 35(1–2).

conclusion



323

Pesmen, Dale. 1991. “Reasonable and Unreasonable Worlds: Some Expectations of Coherence in Culture Implied by the Prohibition of Mixed Metaphor.” In Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez, 213–243. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2016. “‘A Boggy, Soggy, Squitchy Picture, Truly’: Notes on Image-Making in Anthropology and Elsewhere.” In Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader, ed. Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson, 51–59. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Polanyi, Michael. 1962. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, corrected edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pye, David. 1968. The Nature and Art of Workmanship. London: Cambridge University Press. Richards, I. A. 1936. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. “Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thomson, 165–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seamon, David, and Arthur Zajonc, eds. 1998. Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature. New York: State University of New York Press. Strecker, Ivo, and Stephen Tyler. 2009. “The Rhetoric Culture Project.” In Culture and Rhetoric, ed. Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler, 21–30. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, Mark. 2014. The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wimsatt, William C. 2007. Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zlatev, Jordan. 2012. “Prologue: Bodily Motion, Emotion and Mind Science.” In Moving Ourselves, Moving Others: Motion and Emotion in Intersubjectivity, Consciousness and Language, ed. Ad Foolen, Ulrike M. Lüdtke, Timothy P. Racine, and Jordan Zlatev, 1–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zlatev, Jordan, Piotr Konderak, and Göran Sonesson, eds. 2016. Meaning, Mind and Communication: Explorations in Cognitive Semiotics. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Index       

abundance, 9, 37, 57, 81, 137–38, 143, 274, 277–79 acrobatics, 309–18 Adorno, Theodor, 126–29 affectation and manneredness, 12 agents of fantasy, 11 agents of redirection and redescription, 13, 170 agglutinative elements, 2, 4, 6 Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio, 12 aides pensée, aides parler, 1, 16, 20, 179, 315 Aikido, 309–10, 312, 316, 317, 319, 320n1 alam.kāraśāstra, 49 Alcott, Bronson, 136–37, 138, 143, 154n1, 154n9, 156n24. See also Fruitlands alliteration, 273, 286–87 ambiguity, 5, 17, 71, 86, 180n6, 233, 242, 244–45, 252, 317–18 amorphous substances, 68, 84–85, 88n13 analogy, 36–37, 40–41, 75, 77, 79, 84–85, 87n3, 110, 112, 123, 126, 131, 142, 183, 232, 299, 308, 310, 312–14, 319, 320n1 analysis, 28, 49, 51–52, 75–76, 78, 80–81, 83–84, 88n12, 94–95, 99, 129, 138, 144, 153, 154n3, 162, 165–66, 176–77, 201, 209–11, 231, 236, 246, 256, 260, 296–98, 301, 303, 306, 317–18 ancestral clay as revitalizing trope, 20 figures for this volume, xiv language of modern Kumaoni, 52 townland, 195 volumes to this one, xiii

Anderson, Benedict, 185, 198–200, 202, 204 animation, x, xi, xiv, 127, 184, 192, 196, 201–2, 204, 205, 233, 303, 308 anthropology, xi–xiii, xv–xvii, 6, 21–22, 29, 33, 41–42, 48, 55, 62–63, 70, 73–74, 76, 80, 82, 86, 93–97, 99, 103, 120, 132, 138, 147, 154, 175–76, 179–81, 205, 227–28, 252, 253 an-trope-ology, 95–96 historical nature of, 176 and social dynamics, 162 and tropology, 255, 257, 269, 293, 306, 318–19 arbitrariness, 217, 227, 228n7, 280, 286–87, 290. See also random archery, 21, 81, 116, 170, 233–37, 310–12, 314–15, 319, 320n3 archetype, archetypal, 8, 18, 23n13, 82, 163, 309 argument of images, 1, 14, 17 Aristotle, 6, 48 arrows, 21, 36, 231–32, 234, 236–37, 240, 249, 251, 310, 314, 320n3 art, xiv–xvi, 12, 27, 29, 33, 38, 70, 72, 73, 78, 95, 174, 203, 231–32, 235, 238, 241, 243, 245–46, 248, 252, 268, 273, 278, 285, 290–91, 293, 306–7, 310, 317 artful artfulness, 40 displacements, 39 placements, 38 verbal play, 10

326



index

artists, xiv, 31, 78, 95–96, 101, 104, 194, 200, 236, 247–50, 252, 263, 285, 293 ascription (figure), 50 associations, 5, 15, 50–52, 55–59, 61, 72–73, 108–9, 117, 139, 154, 162–63, 167, 186, 300, 310 atheism, 94, 98, 101 audience, 46, 81, 108, 112, 185, 187, 251, 259–60, 262, 268, 278–79, 282, 285, 291 Aufarbeitung (“working through” a difficult past), 106–13, 115–17, 119–32, 133n6, 133nn9–10 autarky, 136–38, 149, 154n1 autobiography, 93, 96–97, 99–101. See also conversion: ruins and autosymbolic function, autosymbolism, 78–79, 85 awakening, awakener, reawakening, 41, 45, 69, 77, 79, 85, 203 Bach, Johan Sebastian, 83, 260, 270n1 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 138–39, 141–46, 153, 154nn3–4, 157n27, 178, 197, 198, 200–204, 224 Baldambe, 33–39 Bali, 313 Bantu, 167, 172 Barañano, Asensción, xvii, 23n10 barjo—creative power, 36, 39 Barthes, Roland, 49, 63n4, 209, 211, 217–18, 225, 227n1, 227n7 Basque anthropology, 19, 92, 94–97, 103, 104, 306 and ruins, 102–4 Bate, Bernard, xi, xiv, xvi, xvii, 20, 62, 63n4, 209, 215, 222, 223, 227, 253, 306, 312 Bateson, Gregory, 70, 72–73, 95, 297, 303, 312–13, 317 Beeman, William, 21, 255–57, 265, 269, 270n1, 306, 316 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 263 Benjamin, Walter, 70, 76–79, 86, 88n11, 96, 104, 188, 199 Berdahl, Daphne, xv–xvi, 107, 121 Berlin wall, 107–21 Bhāmaha, 49, 60 Bilbao, 19, 92, 93 ethnography of, 94–97

Guggenheim Museum, 92–96, 103 “Miracle in,” 92–97, 102, 102n2, 103nn4–5, 104 song by Brecht, 94 Weber and, 93 bitta—ritual leader, 34–37 Black, Max, 2, 30, 78, 87n8 blooming buzzing confusion, 14 body, xv, 3, 9, 39–40, 44–45, 51, 56, 58–59, 75, 85, 137, 140–41, 145–48, 150–51, 153, 155n7, 155n11, 179, 180n2, 191, 215, 233, 227n5, 276–77, 306, 311, 314, 320n1. See also embodiment boredom, 263, 281, 292 Borges, Jorge, xi, xiv, 83, 313 Bororo (Brazil), 300–302 break, breaks (n.), 189, 260, 268, 281, 290–91, 306, 316 break, breaks (v.), 101, 127, 142, 189, 204, 231, 281, 290–91, 293 and ellipses, 290 in music, 260, 268 with the past, 189 Bronner, Yigal, 51, 61, 63n4 Brown, Norman, 140–41, 143–44, 153, 155n11 Bryan, William Jennings, 152, 156n24 Bürgerrechtler (campaigners for citizens’ rights), 115, 117, 124–29 Burke, Kenneth, xiv, 15, 22n9, 30, 38, 96, 102, 214 Calderon de la Barca, 4, 83, 88n10 call systems (closed and open), 3, 13–15 capital, 67, 142–43, 146–48, 152, 154n3, 191, 210 capitalism, 75, 77–79, 85, 138, 171, 174, 198 capturing the imagination, 6, 15, 17, 24n21 Carrithers, Michael, xi, 19, 22n1 Cátedra, María, xvii, 23n10 ceremony, ceremonies, 37, 39, 45, 51, 59, 151, 156n23, 227n5, 251, 267 Cervantes, Miguel de, 7, 9–11, 23nn10–11, 27, 31–33 chemistry, 312, 315 chiasmus, 29, 30, 76–77, 87n8, 88n14, 307, 315, 318, 320n1

index

as figure in materialist dialectics, 76 impossibly convoluted, 77 three-level, 76 China, 21, 233–38, 242–43, 246–50, 252, 310 chrono-tropes, 54, 61, 72, 87n6, 178, 199 circus, 313. See also acrobatics civilization, 172–73, 177, 179, 187, 192, 219, 237 class, social, 183, 186, 187, 188, 193–94 cognitive linguistics, 9, 15, 70–72, 84, 109, 272, 277, 279, 281–82, 285, 286, 300, 310 Cold War, 108–11, 113, 232 Coleman, Steve, xi, xiii, 20, 183, 196, 197, 203, 205, 293, 306 collage, 77, 249, 290–91, 293. See also juxtaposition collocation, 30 collusion, 34–35 colonial, 21, 157n25, 167, 170, 186, 191, 202, 210, 217 wars mistakenly fought in the name of liberty, 21 colonialism, 167 commonplace, 87n8, 115, 118, 120, 124, 140, 161–62, 174, 278, 284, 310, 320n7 communication, communicative channels, 1, 11, 14, 16, 19, 23n17, 28, 30, 87n4, 87n6, 194, 197 communicative interaction, 3 complexity, 9, 15, 70–72, 84, 109, 272, 277, 279, 281–82, 285, 286, 300, 310 configuration, 8, 19, 20, 72, 178, 238, 302 of a class or a whole, 302 crepuscular, 19 cultural, 72 Freudian, 20 revelatory, 178 of social thought, xvii, 8 of the subject, 238 conflict, social, 166 Confucius, 243, 244, 310 conscience, 19, 121, 251 consciousness, 19, 28–29, 63n5, 71–72, 75, 82, 87n9, 88n9, 97, 100, 118–19, 126–27, 140–41, 163, 166, 198, 200–202, 238, 276, 293, 307, 320n7



327

constraint, 57, 59, 113, 172, 231–32, 234, 238, 253, 273, 284–91, 306, 316–17. See also limitation conversation, x, 5, 8–12, 14, 16–19, 21, 31, 34–35, 42, 46, 51, 108, 119, 124, 130, 132n1, 205, 228n9, 261, 320n8 conversion, 92, 96–102, 150 Augustine’s, 95, 96, 100 autobiography and, 96–97 as a matter of the will, 97–102 Montaigne’s rejection of, 100 Rousseau and, 99–101 ruins and, 102 Sartre and, 101 in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, 98–99 writing and, 97–102 coupling, understanding by predicative coupling, 3, 308 craft, 34, 48, 123, 138, 139, 234–36, 286, 314, 318 of history, 123 of writing, literary, 234, 235, 236 crafty, craftily, 234, 286 creation, 16, 35, 39, 101, 142, 144, 154n4, 195, 273–75, 279, 281–82, 284, 290–91 creativity, 34, 41, 191, 275, 316, 321n8 criticism, 73, 78, 82, 88n9, 177, 222, 226, 277 critics, 275, 309 art, 72 Chinese, 310, 312 literary, 48, 51, 73, 86, 232 of mixed metaphor, 313 social, 84 critique, 41, 75–76, 147–48, 153, 155n13, 157n27, 176, 187, 199, 220, 224, 246, 288, 292 dada, dadaism, 288, 291, 316 dance, 3, 46, 56, 58, 76, 266–67, 269, 301, 308, 311, 316 Dan.d. in, 60 Dante, Alighieri, Divine Comedy, 92, 95 Debussy, Claude, 266 deconversion, 97–98, 101–2. See also conversion deep, 28, 31, 104, 123, 141, 146, 157n27, 163, 167–68, 187, 273, 280, 282

328



index

dialectic(s), dialectical, 14, 75–77, 82, 143, 146–47, 151, 153, 199, 241, 302, 303, 319, 320n1 dialogic, 70, 201–2, 238 discomfort, uneasiness, 246, 313 displacement, 38–40, 69, 85, 92, 162, 240, 247 dizziness, 77, 141, 313. See also vertigo domains, 1, 3, 6, 14–15, 22n3, 39, 72, 73, 87n8, 137, 144–45, 280, 306, 311, 316, 318, 320n7 Don Quixote de la Mancha, 7, 8, 11, 18, 27, 31–32, 40, 41, 309 double bind, 297 dramatizing social animals, 15 dream, 4, 19, 20, 41, 68, 70–72, 74–86, 87n3, 88nn10–14, 162–64, 169, 180n2, 204, 242, 247, 306 Dunbar, Robin, 4, 15–16 Durkheim, Emile, 138, 141, 180n7, 224 earmarking, 39, 144, 150 edification, 3, 13, 16, 17, 18, 22, 24n22, 102, 279, 308 elastic rigor, 315–17 Eliot, T. S., 49, 50 embodiment body memory, 82, 137, 148, 155n12, 214–15, 223, 226, 299, 307, 316 embodied cognition, 306–7, 316 See also phenomenology emotion, 39 and motion, 307–9 (see also phenomenology) enchantment of hieroglyphs, 77 of modern capitalism, 78, 85 with wilderness, 172 environmentalists, 171–72, 174, 181n11 Eppelmann, Rainer, 120–25, 127, 129 erasure, erase, 39, 209–11, 232, 252 ethnography, 5, 9, 12, 14–16, 18, 21–22, 22n7, 23n13, 40–42, 45, 52, 74, 86, 88n16, 94, 95, 102, 175, 179, 180n8, 233, 274, 290, 316, 319, 320n2 evolution of culture, 173–74 human, 15, 80, 172, 176–77, 210, 269

of language, 4, 15 redemptive, 197 of scripts, 77 theory or theories of, 80, 177 excluded middle, 4–5 excrement, 20, 137–38, 140–43, 145, 147, 151–53, 155n11, 155n17, 156nn19–20, 157n27. See also feces exercises, 280–81, 285, 288, 290–91, 294n4 fairy tale, 275–77. See also story fantastic, fantastical, 11, 30–35, 37, 41, 69, 234, 239 feces, fecal matter, 140–48, 150, 154nn5–6, 156n17 feeling, 2, 14, 31, 50–51, 58–59, 61, 169, 268, 276, 282, 290, 307. See also emotion Feindbild (image of the enemy), 108–9 Feng Zikai, 247–49 Fernandez, James W., xi, xiii, xvii, 30, 34, 37, 62, 68, 69, 138, 143–45, 147, 153, 197, 211, 255, 300, 306, 308, 309, 310, 315, 320 fetish, fetishism, 21, 72, 74–78, 80–82, 85–86, 140, 191, 209–12, 225–26 commodity, 74–76, 80, 85, 86, 104, 210 fiction, xii, 9, 11, 20, 22n2, 40, 41, 232, 234, 249, 258, 273, 287–88, 290, 293, 294n4 Chinese, 232 of continuous time, 290 ethnography stranger than, 40–41 fact/fiction pendulum, 9 fictional coin, 20 fictional distinction, 258 Lu Xun’s, 232, 234 Nikolai Gogol’s surreal, 287 of Wang Shuo, 249 fictionalism, 9 in philosophy, 22 figuration, 4, 5, 13, 22, 27, 30, 34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 68, 70, 71, 72, 77, 79, 164, 165, 177, 179, 198, 199 dream as figure of, 83 of social thought, xvii, 106 (see also under configuration) figure (n.), 6–7, 22n7, 23n11, 27, 31, 36, 46, 47, 49, 50–52, 54, 55, 58, 60, 68, 70–77, 79, 82–83, 85–87n3, 87n8, 88n10, 88n14,

index

97, 101, 114, 136, 146, 161, 198, 204, 216, 234–35, 240, 242, 247–48, 258, 260–61, 263, 267, 297, 307, 315 Don Quixote as, 27, 31 Fischer-Rosenthal, Wolfram, 107 flag of the United States, 209, 212, 218, 223 flexible inquiry, 311, 314–19 flexibility, 71, 269, 316–17. See also elastic rigor folklore archives, 87n3, 146, 183–85, 187–96, 200, 204, 247 Chinese, 247 collecting, 185, 187–88, 190–93, 205 German, 146 scholars, 187, 189–93 Serbian urban, 87 Irish, 183–85, 187–200, 204, 205n3 forest, 42, 45, 53, 54, 57–58, 75, 132, 163, 165–68, 171–72, 277, 315 form transcendence, 16, 21, 56, 58, 92, 96, 197, 198, 203, 302 Foucault, Michel, 210, 246, 313–14 frame, frames, 21 definition of, 297, 320n7 jumping, vaulting, switching between, 83, 88, 313, 316 meta-, 297, 313 nominal form, xiii, 1, 3, 21, 22n4, 55, 83, 88n15, 103n5, 291, 296–303, 313, 316, 320n7 of and in ritual, 298–303 and tropes, 296, 298 verbal form, 16, 127, 258, 282, 298 framework, 34, 198, 256, 300 Freud, Sigmund, 71, 74, 77–80, 83, 85, 88n10, 138–40, 145–46, 155n7, 156n20, 162–62, 166, 180n2, 209–10 Freudian, 20, 74, 127–28, 145–46, 163, 165–66, 180n2, 180n7, 211, 212 Friedrich, Paul, xii–xiii, xvi, xviii, 22n9, 178, 211, 215, 228n7, 232 Fruitlands, 136–37, 154n1 Frye, Northrop, 308 Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking district), 183, 185–86, 188, 190–91, 194, 195, 199, 203–5



329

Garcia, José Luis, vii garden, xi, 20, 59, 80, 161–63, 166–72, 174, 177, 180n2 of forking paths, xi Garden of Eden, 171–72, 178–79 kitchen garden, 167–68 path, 161–63, 169, 172, 177–78 of verses, 180 gardener, 20, 178–79, 315 gardening, 162–63, 167, 172 Geertz, Clifford, 95, 107n6, 180 Gell, Alfred, xv, 56, 80, 321n9 genre, 68–69, 83–84, 119, 193, 195, 197–98, 200–201, 215, 232, 245, 248–49, 252, 267, 278–79, 282 Germany, 107, 109–14, 116, 119, 120, 124, 128–30, 132, 251–52 Gerow, Edwin, 49–50, 60, 63n4 Gershwin, George, 264 Ginzburg, Carlo, 78, 315 Giordano, Ralph, 112, 129 Goffman, Erving, 257, 297 Gogol, Nikolai, 287 gossip, 4, 9, 15–16 Gourgouris, Statis, 70, 71, 84 Gracián, Baltasar, 7, 8, 10, 12, 23n10 grooming, 4, 15 grounding, 236, 305–7, 312 Gu Cheng, 244–47 Habermas, Jürgen, 108, 119 habit, 199, 272, 291, 293, 316 Hamar, 19, 27, 33–42 hatred, 109, 122, 147, 186, 221, 250–51 Herriman, George, 62 hieroglyph, 70, 74–75, 77–78, 83, 86, 88n15 Hindu, 45, 50, 52, 55–56, 193 cosmology, 55 gods, 45–46, 193 universe, 199, 272, 291, 293, 316, 318, 319 world, 45, 52, 55, 56 historicity (eventfulness), 110, 115, 130–31 History (capitalized), 96, 112, 115, 116, 120, 123–25, 219, 234 history (Geschichte), 107, 112, 117, 122, 124 history and historians, x, 6, 7, 55, 70–72, 78, 82, 97, 101–2, 104, 108, 109, 111–13,

330



index

117, 118, 120, 122–25, 129–30, 132, 137, 146, 149, 154–55, 175–77, 181n13, 185, 187, 199, 211, 218, 231, 234–35, 237, 243, 250, 255, 310 hoarding, 147, 149–50, 152, 155n15 Holmes, Sherlock, 78, 316 Hunt, Harry, 79, 84 hunter, hunters, 20, 24, 161, 163–66, 168, 170–73, 177–79, 235, 315 hunting, 33, 164, 167–68, 171, 173–74, 180n5, 234 iconicity, 228n7, 257, 264–66 identity, xiv, xvii, 9, 21, 45, 84, 98, 100, 102, 169, 170, 186, 197, 203, 205, 214, 225, 236, 240, 248, 256–57, 300–302 ideology, xi, 10, 75, 101, 119, 195, 211, 218, 227n1, 231, 245 idiom(s), 68–70, 84–85, 142, 190, 261 image, imagery, 272–73, 275, 277, 281, 284, 285, 288, 294n1 images, 1, 2, 14, 17, 29, 51, 53, 55–56, 59, 61, 68–69, 71–72, 75, 78, 88n13, 95, 98, 106–7, 110, 112, 125–26, 131, 143, 156n18, 162–63, 179, 211, 215, 232, 234, 236, 241, 245–46, 249, 252, 262, 272–73, 275, 281, 284, 311, 314 image-word battles, 83, 240, 247, 312 imaginary, Serbian, 69–71, 87n3, 87n16, 319 imagination, xi, xii, 1–4, 6, 7, 11, 13–17, 19, 21, 22n7, 23n10, 24n21, 31–32, 37–38, 76, 81, 86, 98–99, 131, 167, 176, 179, 187, 191, 205, 305–9, 311, 318–19 imagined communities, 2 imagistic, imagistically, 79, 83 implicature, 34 inchoate, inchoateness, 4, 23nn17–18, 83, 86, 88n13, 102, 111, 126, 131, 132n5, 211, 277, 313, 315, 320n6 indeterminacy, 11, 23n17, 30, 77 indexical, indexicality, 201, 228n7, 266, 267 inquiry, 2, 5, 17, 23n17, 23n18, 73, 86, 165, 168, 175, 176, 179, 211, 306, 317, 318, 320n4 flexible, 311, 314–15, 317–19 inside, internal, 272, 274–75, 282, 287 Institutio Oratoria, 7

intellectuals, 203, 248 antiwar, 217 leftist, 128 nation-building, national, 185 public, 22n2, 69 intelligentsia, 67, 84–85, 109 intention, 30, 40, 118, 142, 200, 225, 238, 239, 241, 303n1 intentionality, 214, 227n4, 298, 303 interactive interfaces, 153 properties of metaphors, 78, 87n8 (see also Black, Max) vector of complementary associations, 167 wholes, 2 interdependence of consciousness in polyphony, 201 (see also Bakhtin, Mikhail M.) of tropes and frames, 296, 298 internal rhetorics, 27, 31–32, 40 intersubjectivity, 22n2, 307 intersubjective imagination, 2 intersubjective truth, 2, 22n2, 22n5 Iraq, 21, 211–27 Irish (language) as endangered, 191, 195, 191–92 literature in, 186, 187, 189, 190, 193–96, 198 speech community (see Gaeltacht) irony modal trope, 10, 40, 78, 97, 111, 210, 240–45, 247–49, 252, 275, 280, 296–97, 309–10, 312, 319 jāgar ritual, 45–48, 51, 52–54, 58–59, 63n1 Jefferson, Thomas, 171 Joyce, James, 96, 202 Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, 96 juxtaposition, 29, 219, 242, 247, 250, 269, 288, 291, 316 and collage, 288, 290–91 ironic, 247, 316 Kataev, Valentin, 288 Kayapo (Brazil), 21, 300–303 Kermode, Frank, 308 kinesthetic imagination, 309, 311, 312

index

Kracauer, Siegfried, 70, 76, 77–79, 86, 88n11 Kumaon, 45–48, 52–59, 61, 63n3 laboratory, lab, labs, 311, 314, 316 Lakoff, George, 30, 31, 83 Langer, Suzanne, 256 Lao Tzu, Laozi, 319 Leavitt, John, xi–xiii, 19, 51, 55, 58, 62, 227, 306 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 34, 62, 95, 137–38, 140, 154n3, 187, 273 liminality, 19, 180n7, 291 limitation, 280, 283–84, 288, 293. See also constraint Liu Xiaobo, 249–52 Lu Xun, 232, 234, 239, 240, 248 Luther, Martin, 156n20, 267 Lydall, Jean, and Ivo Strecker, 11, 33–35, 38–39, 42 madness, 32, 174, 233 magic, 19, 37–38, 41, 48, 61–62, 74, 76, 147, 152, 153, 219, 239–40, 244, 267 Magic Flute, 267 (see also Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus) magic realism, Balkan, 69 Mammat. a, 60–61 manure, 137, 143, 156n17. See also excrement; feces marginal, 77, 84, 86 polities, communities, 69, 186, 199 market, 138, 141–43, 146, 151, 157nn26–28 marriage, 35, 37, 39, 41, 45, 57–58, 63n6, 192, 195, 234–35, 247, 268–69 Marx, Karl, 71, 74–78, 80, 88nn9–10, 136–38, 142–43, 147–48, 153, 154n2, 170–72, 186, 209–10, 227n1 Marxist thought, theory or tradition, 71, 74, 84, 88n14, 124 maz (neophyte), 37 meaning, xii, 2–6, 13, 18, 21, 28, 40, 48–49, 61, 63n9, 78, 86–87n9, 102–3, 113, 125, 129, 141, 143, 154, 154n5, 163, 166, 167, 175, 197, 211, 214, 217, 228n7, 231, 238, 241, 246, 250, 252, 256, 257, 268–69, 307–9, 312, 318–19



331

deficit, 4 as mental movement, 13 meditation, 169, 174, 211 metaphor, xi, xiii, xvi, xviii, 5, 10, 18, 30, 39, 46, 48–51, 59, 62, 73–74, 76, 79, 87n8, 95, 97, 101, 110–11, 126, 132n5, 133n10, 137, 139, 141, 144–45, 147, 150, 153, 167, 171, 176, 178, 180n6, 181n15, 188, 195, 232, 233–34, 237, 241, 255, 275, 283, 286, 288, 297, 300, 302, 308, 313, 316, 319, 320n4, 320n6, 321n8 biblical, 171 conceptual, 83 (see also Lakoff, George) mixed, xiii, 88n13, 313–14 metonym, metonymy, metonymic, 4, 5, 10, 36, 37, 48, 56, 57, 78, 97, 141, 143–47, 150, 152, 154, 214, 241, 255, 257, 266–69, 289, 296, 300–302 metonymic misrepresentation, 74 misrecognition, 209–11, 226 missionaries, 168, 180n9 model of subjectivity, 99 models and modelling, 2, 72–73, 78, 81, 82–84, 87n8, 153, 201, 233, 235, 239, 243, 246, 250, 309, 311, 312, 315, 316, 317, 318 archery as, 235, 237, 238, 240 Bakhtin’s, Bakhtinian, 153, 202 of conflict resolution, 309–10 of conversion, 101 dream as, 81–85, 87n3 martial arts as, 309–10, 320n1 of protein molecules, 311, 312, 313, 315 Montaigne, Michel de, 100 motion, 38, 58, 252, 307–8, 313–15, 317, 320n7 movement, 47, 49, 50, 54–56, 58 and conversions, 96 embodied, phenomenology of, 305–9, 312, 318–19, 320n8 mental, imaginative, predicative, in meaning of tropes, 1, 2, 3, 13, 18, 19, 62, 110, 111, 132n5, 308 in stillness, 61 of swinging, 56 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 267–68

332



index

Mu Hui, 239–40 Müller-Gangloff, Erich, 125–29 multivocality, 6, 166 Munch, Edward, 68–69, 86, 245 Munn, Nancy, 147–48, 155n11, 156n23 music boundaries in, 259–61 and dance, 266–67 and human discourse, 259 hymns, 267 and imagination, 21 in John Cage’s 4´33˝, 261–63 and mourning, 265 musical structures, 256 musical tropes, 21, 258, 268–69 and noise, 263–64 pauses and rests, 258–59 and poetry, 269 and symbolism, 268 and Tuva throat singers, 265 mythopoetics, 69, 211, 220 narrative, narratives, x, xv, 21, 24n21, 87n2, 100, 103, 107, 108–9, 110, 111, 123, 131, 133n9, 175–76, 178, 202, 235, 245, 273–75, 278–79, 282, 288–89 bardic, 55 of conversion, 100 dialogically intertwined, 70 elements, 68 forms, 84 thinking, 111 nation, nation-state, 82, 85, 146, 149, 150, 185, 198, 200, 203 nationalism, nationalists, 118, 123, 129, 197, 198, 202, 205n3, 210, 211, 212, 214, 217, 225 Basque, 95 Irish, 202 Navaho, 266–67 Nazis, Nazism, 20, 70, 112–13, 119, 122, 125, 126, 128, 129 Ndembu, 164, 167 Nienkamp, Jean, 27–29 nightmare, 69, 85, 292 Northrop, F. S. C., 5 novel (literary genre), 9, 32, 178, 184, 188, 196, 197, 198–204, 247

Ó Cadhain, Máirtin, 183–205 Öffentlichkeit (public, the public sphere), 117–19 opacity, opaque, 17, 129 poetics of, 84, 86 of social life, 68, 72, 82, 84, 86 oppositions, 9–10, 55, 58, 238, 314 agriculture vs. hunting, 173, 178 birth vs. death, 167 body vs. soul, 137, 153 and complementarity, 9, 14, 23n19 conscious vs. unconscious, 163 of day and night, 54, 55, 58 of dictatorship and democracy, 119 garden vs. forest, 163, 167 island vs. ocean, 163 between nationalist parapraxis and state fetishism, 225 sound vs. silence, 258 tame vs. wild, 177 orality, 189–90, 191–94 orientation work (Orientierungsarbeit) overcoming the past. See Vergangenheitsbewältigung overdetermination, 11, 69, 85 parable, 68, 77, 84 parapraxis, 210–12, 214, 225–26 parrots, xiii, 80, 300–301 paths, 20, 292, 306 and agriculture, 173 of arrow, 235 Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James), 169 causal, 5 dependency, 174 and domestication, 173 field paths in ethnography, 175 forking, xi, xiv (see also Borges, Jorge) garden, 161 meandering, winding, x, 236 pathlike thinking, 179 path-ology, 20, 177, 179 pathways, 164 ritual paths, 166 signs, waymarks, 164–65 trail blazing, 164–65 Peebles, Gustav, 20, 154, 306

index

Peirce, Charles S., 195, 201, 204, 256 Peircean categories, 256–57, 264–68 and Zero-ness, 257–58 pendulum of affect, 19 of argumentation, 9, 14, 31 fact/fiction, 9 performance, 30, 62, 103, 109, 110, 111, 132n5, 195, 205, 320n8, 321n9 cultural, 195 drumming, 46 musical, 261, 263, 264, 267, 269, 279, 282, 298 oral, 49, 52 poetic, 52 ritual, 298–303 in storytelling, 290 peripheries, peripherality, 16, 70, 73, 74, 76, 82, 87n2 of capitalism, 85 of Europe, 67, 68 peripheral nations, 84 peripheral wisdom, 79 Pesmen, Dale, xi, xiii, 21, 306, 313, 316, 317 phantasmagoria, 76, 102, 187 phenomenology, 22n2, 256, 306, 307, 318, 319 philosophy, 17, 18, 22n2, 94, 96, 98, 99, 310 Pietz, William, 75, 76, 210 pilgrims, 165, 169–70 Plato, 243, 309, 310 play, 273, 279–83, 285–86, 288 of association, 5 of frames, xiii, 21 of tropes (see tropes: play of) poetic process, 211, 217 poetics, xii, 41, 62, 205n3, 233, 245, 253, 306, 312 anthropological, Chicago school of, xi cognitive, xiii, 306 Dantean, 92 Gu Cheng’s, 246 Indian, 48–52, 60, 63n4 (see also alam. kāraśāstra) Ó Cadhain’s, 183 of opacity, 84, 86 Persian, 240 tropological, xiv



333

Western, 48–51, 246 poetry, xi, xii, 18, 51, 93, 189, 193, 194, 200, 231, 245, 252, 269, 306 of bricoleur’s sort, 84 Chinese, 232, 238, 244, 245, 246 Western, 50 power, 274–76, 278–80, 282–83, 285, 289, 293, 294n1 pragmatics, 188, 296, 306 Peircean, 256–57 predication, 1, 3, 4–6, 9, 13, 14, 16, 19, 84, 132n5, 138, 139, 141, 144, 146, 150, 231, 308, 313, 320n6 proverbs, 57, 168, 184 psychoanalysis, 78, 81, 83, 129, 153, 164–66 puzzlement, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14, 16, 17, 22n5, 309 Qu Yuan, 233, 234, 240 Quevedo, Fracisco de, 7, 8, 10, 12, 23n10 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 7, 8, 10, 12, 23n10, 49 Quixote, Don. See Don Quixote de la Mancha Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 209, 288 random compositional technique, Cage’s, 262–63 pursuits, 173, 178 words, 287–88 (see also arbitrariness) real, reality, 32, 40, 48, 68, 109, 204, 205, 238, 240, 257, 272, 274, 276–77, 280–81, 284, 288, 290–91, 293 Rechtsstaat (nation-state governed by laws/ justice), 114 reconversion rituals for money, 150 refraction, 210–11, 226, 227, 318 religion, 9, 23n13, 73, 76, 97, 98, 99, 101, 250 dream theory of, 80 religious movements, 166–68 repression, 166 of the past, Verdrängung, 127 returning to the whole, 9, 146–47 revelation, revelations, 70, 101, 115, 117, 122, 178, 211, 212, 245, 288, 320n5 Revista de Antropología Social, 1, 16 revitalization, 2–3, 14, 16, 20, 21, 22n1, 22n7

334



index

Rg Veda, 46, 59–60 ˚ rhetoric, xii, 6–8, 10, 12, 23n5, 27–31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40–42, 49, 99, 109, 113, 117, 118, 122, 128, 10, 162, 174, 184, 240, 241, 243, 244, 253, 305–9, 318 Richards, I. A., xiv, 30, 49, 50, 308 Ricoeur, Paul, 30, 48, 308 ritual, 14, 21, 38–40, 42, 45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61, 76, 146, 148, 149, 151, 156, 166–68, 180, 218–20, 223–26, 235, 237, 296, 298–303, 310 Rorty, Richard, 17, 18, 24n22 Rosh, Lea, 129 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 99–101 Confessions, 100 ruins, 19, 77, 78, 195, 306 as allegory, 97 anthropology and, 95–96 a city in, 92–94 industrial, 93 of the self, 96–97, 100 theory of, 102–4 Sapir, David, 30, 37, 39, 40 Sapir, Edward, 59, 72, 268 Sappho, 60 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 99, 101, 102 Les Mots, 101 savage, savages, 81, 82, 177, 210 of Cuba, 75 and dreams, 74 and fetishism, 76, 78 lands, 74 mind, 72 Schumann, Robert, 261, 262 Scoggin, Mary, xi, 21, 231, 252 self, 275, 293 semiotics, 205, 241 cognitive, xiii, 306 Shakespeare, William, 4, 83, 88n10, 148 Shannon, Claude, 258 signifier-signified, 217–20, 227n7 silence, 57, 115, 126 as boundary, 259 in music, 259–63, 270n1 resounding, 223 and rest, 258–59 and turn taking, 261 Silverstein, Michael, 52, 199, 201

sleep, 61, 71, 190, 276 country of the slumbering masses, 85 dream-filled, 78 onset imagery, 79 sleeping potions, 85 sleeping on a pea-prepared bed, 277 slip (of tongue, Freudian). See parapraxis slumber, 69, 76, 82, 85. See also sleep Snyder, Gary, xii, xiv, 47, 62 social theory. See under theory Socrates, 243, 309, 319 soul, 10, 45, 80, 88, 103, 138, 169–70, 197, 275, 293. See also oppositions: body vs. soul Spencer, Herbert, 288 Sperber, Dan, 38, 97, 99, 253 Stasi, 106–33 story, x, 20, 31–32, 46, 77, 100–101, 107, 109, 111–13, 118–19, 124–30, 273, 275–77, 283, 287–88, 290. See also fairy tale storytelling, 9, 16, 22, 24, 79, 290 Strecker, Ivo, xiii, 8, 18, 23, 29, 42, 306–7 stuck, stuckness, 69, 272–73, 279–82, 286 surrealism, 77, 83, 287, 291–92, 316 Süßmuth, Rita, 117–18, 120 synecdoche, 4, 36, 40, 48, 56–57, 78, 122, 211, 214–20, 223, 225–27, 296, 300, 302 synthesis, xi, 30, 80, 217, 301, 310, 319 tactics, 242, 273, 284, 293, 316 talent, 124, 236, 275, 281 tangent, 21, 287–88, 290–91, 306, 316 Taussig, Michael, 76, 80, 82, 85, 146, 151, 156, 209 teaching, 7, 273–74, 276, 279–80, 285–86 theory, xv, 22–23, 48–52, 59, 63, 69–71, 73, 79–87, 95–98, 119, 132, 140, 145, 155, 163, 165, 201–2, 237–38, 243, 257, 289, 296, 306–8, 317, 318, 320 anthropological, 95, 96 of chronotopes, 178 collusion theory, 35 conspiracy theories, 68, 72, 85 frame theory, 21 metaphor theory, 95 of rhetoric, 7, 28 of ruins, 92, 102–4 social theory, 67, 71–73, 86, 138–39

index

theoretical coherence, xiii time, 44–63, 69, 102, 176, 178, 187–203, 168, 276–93 transcedence, 21, 56–59, 62, 92, 96, 142, 197, 198, 203–4, 235, 237, 251, 273, 276, 301–2 of boundaries between frames, 302 of puzzlement, 16 tropes, 1, 2, 4, 5, 183–84, 188–204, 272, 284–93 convertible trope of ruin, 19 definitions of, 255 modal tropes, 232, 268 musical tropes, 257, 268–69 play of, xiii, 8, 10, 11, 21, 22, 34, 95, 162, 179, 300–303, 309, 312, 313 (see also tropology) trope, Greek etymology of, 308 tropes that prick without drawing blood, 21 tropic logic, 5 tropic representation, 257 tropic sound structures, 256, 268 tropic speech acts, 243 tropic volatility of human conversation, 21 tropological revelation, 18 tropological wisdom, 176 tropology, xi, xiv, xvi, 1–6, 63, 91, 162, 176, 179, 311–18 truth, true, 273–74, 277–78, 281, 284, 288 speaking truth to power, 21 two kinds of, 2 Turner, Mark, 308 Turner, Terence, xiii, xvi, xviii, 21, 22, 296, 300, 303, 306 Turner, Victor, 15, 22, 80, 163–69, 180, 299 twilight, 19, 30, 44–63, 69, 306. See also amorphous substances Tyler, Stephen, x, 11, 23, 29, 30, 307 unconscious, unconsciousness, 38, 72, 74, 79, 82, 97, 127, 139, 156, 162–67, 180, 204 univocal interpretation, 30



335

usury, 148–50 value, values, 8, 10–11, 52, 70, 102, 118, 142–56, 170, 185, 187, 200, 210, 232, 256, 260, 272–77, 301, 307, 314 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“overcoming” the past), 125–30 vertigo, 77, 313 vicissitudes, 1–2, 22, 82, 132 Vietnam, 20–21, 211, 223–24 voice, 6, 58, 96, 100, 184, 191, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, 215, 223, 248, 261, 265, 266, 272–73, 278–79, 282, 292 waking, 45, 69, 71, 76, 85, 87, 204, 277, 289, 292 Warner, Michael, 107–8, 112, 120 waste, 137, 141, 153 of time, 280–81, 292 See also excrement Weaver, Warren, 258 wilderness, 170–72, 174, 180n10 witchcraft, 148 wrestling, 10–11, 194, 309–12, 318–19 writing, 29, 100, 112, 117, 123, 131, 236, 238, 252, 306 Chinese, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 242 and conversion, 97–101 ethnography, 112, 114, 175 of history, national, 71, 123 Irish, 189, 193 Ó Cadhain’s, 183, 184, 203, 204 poetry, 193 systems, 77 tactics for, 273–75, 277–82, 284–85, 287, 292 Yeats, William Butler, 193–95, 308 Zelizer, Viviana, 139, 144 Živković, Marko, xiv, 4, 19, 62, 68, 86, 154, 293, 305–6, 319 Zulaika, Joseba, 19, 92, 94, 96, 104, 306