The Material Culture of Failure: When Things Do Wrong 9781474289085, 9781474289108, 9781474289092, 1474289088

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The Material Culture of Failure

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The Material Culture of Failure When Things Do Wrong

Edited by TIMOTHY CARROLL, DAVID JEEVENDRAMPILLAI, AARON PARKHURST AND JULIE SHACKELFORD

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK  USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Selection and Editorial Material: Timothy Carroll, David Jeevendrampillai, Aaron Parkhurst, Julie Shackelford, 2017 © Individual Chapters: Their Authors, 2017 Timothy Carroll, David Jeevendrampillai, Aaron Parkhurst and Julie Shackelford have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​4742-​8908-​5 ePDF: 978-​1-​4742-​8910-​8 ePub: 978-​1-​4742-​8909-​2 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image © Timothy Carroll, courtesy of UCL Ethnographic Collection Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Figures  vii Notes on contributors  ix Foreword: Failure and fragility: Towards a material culture of the end of the world as we knew it  xii Dimitris Dalakoglou

Acknowledgements  xvi

1 Introduction: Towards a general theory of failure  1

Timothy Carroll, David Jeevendrampillai and Aaron Parkhurst

2 Miracles and crushed dreams: Material disillusions in the design industry  21 Camilla Sundwall

3 When Krishna wore a kimono: Deity clothing as rupture and inefficacy  39 Urmila Mohan

4 Whitened anxiety: Bottled identity in the Emirates  57 Aaron Parkhurst

5 Holy water, healing and the sacredness of knowledge  75 Alexandra Antohin

6 Haredi (material) cultures of health at the ‘hard to reach’ margins of the state  95 Ben Kasstan

7 Failure as constructive participation? Being stupid in the suburbs  113 David Jeevendrampillai

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8 Destruction of locality: On heritage and failure in ‘crisis

Syria’ 133

Julie Shackelford

9 Axis of incoherence: Engagement and failure between two

material regimes of Christianity 157 Timothy Carroll

10 The materiality of silence: Assembling the absence of sound and the memory of 9/​11  177 Pwyll ap Stifin

Afterword: Failure  197 Victor Buchli

Index  209

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Figures 2.1 Chemiwood getting shaped by the CNC router for prototyping  30 2.2 A range of material samples in various sizes and forms, used by designers to imagine applications and better understand the materials  31

3.1 Altar decorated for Krishna’s birthday, Janmastami, Mayapur, 2012  43

3.2 Photos of two failed garments affixed to the wall of the temple sewing room, Mayapur, 2012  46

4.1 Black and white cultures in Dubai  69 7 . 1 The PPGIS ‘Community Map’ from the Adaptable Suburbs Project (ASP) with sample test points placed by the ASP  117

7.2 Thamas the Giant leading Seething Villagers on the annual Lefi Parade, accompanied by Steve wearing a Lefi ‘head adornment’  120

8.1 Nationalist-​oriented advert featuring the statue of Salah al-​Din and slogan, Suriyyah bakheer, from the ‘Syria is fine’ campaign, Damascus, July 2011  140

8.2 Obverse side of the 1997–​98 issue of the Syrian 200 lira banknote featuring the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Damascus and the statue of Salah al-​Din  141

8.3 ‘Imprint of loyalty on the wall of history’ rally at the Damascus Citadel, 5 July 2011  142

8.4 Obverse side of the 1998–​2014 issue of the Syrian 500 lira banknote featuring the monumental archway and tetrapylon of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra and a profile bust of Zenobia, the ancient city’s celebrated queen  146

8.5 Still shot of video uploaded to YouTube depicting the anti-​regime protest in the ruins of Palmyra, 28 October 2011  147

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8.6 Still shot of video uploaded to YouTube depicting the anti-​regime protest in the ruins of Palmyra, 28 October 2011  150

9.1 Fr Theophan standing before the Holy Table  164 10.1 The firefighters’ moment of silence, 11 September 2012  190

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Notes on contributors Alexandra Antohin is a research associate with the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies (Cambridge, United Kingdom). Her interests include urban religion, socio-​economic development and the political dynamics between church and state. In addition to her work on Orthodox Christianity, she has recently begun research on faith-​based organizations and interfaith advocacy in Ethiopia. Pwyll ap Stifin completed his PhD in material culture anthropology at University College London in 2015. His doctoral research, titled ‘The Post-​ 9/11 Voice: Sound, Materiality and Relationality as Memory’, examines post-​ 9/11 culture in the United States, and specifically the way that memory is contructed and becomes ‘contagious’. He currently lives and works in Wales, facilitating programmes for prisoner education and reform. Victor Buchli is Professor of Material Culture within the Material Culture Group in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. He works on architecture, domesticity, the archaeology of the recent past, critical understandings of materiality and new technologies. His latest book An Archaeology of the Immaterial (Routledge, 2015)  examines questions surrounding immateriality, particularly the significance of material cultures that paradoxically attempt to deny their own physicality. In addition, his An Anthropology of Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2013) examines the materiality of built forms from an anthropological perspective. Timothy Carroll is a social anthropologist of material culture and conducts research among Eastern Orthodox Christians. He currently lectures at University College London, teaching courses in the anthropology of art and religion. Carroll’s research has been conducted principally in the United Kingdom and the United States, looking at Eastern Christians in Western contexts. His current research engages the role of the body as a cultural artefact within mortuary custom and remembrance of the dead. Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije University Amsterdam. Professor Dalakoglou’s research has focused on the anthropology of infrastructure, urban public spaces and post-​socialism. He has co-​produced several documentaries and edited volumes, including Roads and Anthropology

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(2014, 2012), Revolt and Crisis in Greece (2011) and Crisis-​Scapes: Athens and Beyond (2014). His recent work, The Road (2016), explores anew classical anthropological and sociological categories of analysis in direct reference to infrastructure, providing unique insights into the political and cultural processes that took place across Europe after the Cold War. David Jeevendrampillai is an anthropologist at UCL. His research explores the relationship between people and place through practices of contestation and commensuration in places marked by sociopolitical difference. His doctoral thesis examined practices of knowing and representing place, including mapping, walking, parading and ‘local’ carnivals and how indigenous or ‘local’ claims are incommensurate with planning policy, academic research and systems analysis. Overall his interests include body-​land relations, material culture, the politics of affect, geographies of knowledge, phenomenology, ideology and spatial thinking in anthropology. His current research explores the narratives produced through space exploration and conceiving of earth as ‘home’. Ben Kasstan received a 2013–​16 Wellcome Trust (Ethics & Society) PhD grant to explore the relation between the Haredi minority and healthcare services in the United Kingdom. He completed his postgraduate studies at Durham University, where he developed a research interest at the intersection of marginality, minority identity and bodily counter-​conducts. Urmila Mohan is a 2016–​18 postdoctoral fellow in museum anthropology across the American Museum of Natural History and the Bard Graduate Center, New York. She is also an honorary research associate at the Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL). Her doctoral research at UCL was on clothing as materiality and sociality in a contemporary Hindu group. Her previous education was in art, design and anthropology. She has contributed articles and chapters to international publications on the anthropology of religion, praxeology and material culture, and is the co-founding editor of the Material Religions blog (www.materialreligions.blogspot.com). Aaron Parkhurst is a medical anthropologist at University College London (UCL). His early ethnographic work included changing perceptions of the ‘self’ in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Oman; cross-​cultural understandings of biomedicine and genetics; and humanity’s anxieties and struggles with modernity. Parkhurst currently lectures in medical anthropology at UCL with a focus on the anthropology of the human body and the anthropology and bioethics of emerging technology and cyborg living. He also works on men’s health issues and the effects of urban life on both physical and mental health. Julie Shackelford is an honorary research associate at University College London (UCL). She completed her PhD in anthropology at UCL in 2015 and

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also holds an MA from the University of Chicago and a BA from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her PhD research, upon which her chapter is partly based, explores the social role of heritage both prior to and during the first year of the Syrian uprising. She is currently working on a manuscript which builds upon her PhD findings. Camilla Sundwall trained as a product designer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and has since been working as a materials consultant, user researcher, designer and project manager. She joined one of the world’s leading design and innovation agencies in 2014 to head up the CMF (colour material finish) offering. Working with global clients in areas like consumer electronics and products, packaging and automotive she has helped leading brands innovate through materials and create short-​and long-​term CMF strategies. Alongside industry work she is undertaking a PhD parttime in anthropology at University College London where she researches cultures of materials and design. She has a passion for understanding how people interact and engage with the material world and how the material affects people and practices.

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Foreword Failure and fragility: Towards a material culture of the end of the world as we knew it Dimitris Dalakoglou

The surgery was successful, but the patient passed away. —​GREEK PROVERB

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uring the past two years we have had a number of airplanes fall from the sky. Germanwings Flight 9525 was attributed to the suicidal co-​ pilot. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was downed by military force on the Ukrainian front, while their Flight 370 simply vanished for unknown reasons over the Andaman Sea. The EgyptAir Flight 804 plane fell due to terrorists, or possibly something else. It is never simply a case of poor quality control or the standards of training within a market of wild competition, or the pressures within the industry to cut down in costs of labour and material. Nor can it simply be that this is a world of savage inequalities that fails to provide happiness and peace, or anything similar. It is always a bad apple who caused the catastrophe. The protocols of each industry, the laws of state apparatuses and all the bodies of written rules are enshrined as holy and ensure health and safety for humanity; and, yet, they are constantly revised, sometimes to such a point so as to deny what was the absolute truth for decades. As Paul Virilio (2007) suggested, the invention of each technology is the invention of its failure. The

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invention of the car is the invention of the car accident, and the invention of mechanical flying machine is the invention of the airplane crash. The invention of capitalism is the invention of its systemic failures. All failures ensure the sustainability of their systems as they allow them to reconfigure constituent elements, reflect, revise and restart with new rules –​ or even new rulers, yet without challenging the basic systemic structures. Each restart, though, creates a more and more anthropophobic and suffocating environment. It is in the world like it is with passwords. Each time an online security system is breached, when password or PIN repositories are accessed by hackers, an extra security measure is added. Thus, from four-​digit PIN codes, we now need to have at least eight-​digit ones. It must have at least one alphabetic and one numeric character; it needs one non-​alphanumeric character and at least one capital letter. This allows access to a second stage where you need a twelve-​digit unique number sent to you last year by carrier pigeon, just to make sure. This is for your own security. Each failure in the system to maintain the privacy of private information ends up making life more difficult for the users. The foundational ideas of private property, fencing, control and exclusion  –​from which arise the entire security systems and constant need for ever-​changing passwords –​is never challenged. The breach was not the system’s fault; it was the failure of this specific vulnerability, or that specific password. Mass-​produced material objects are affordable for the masses, now more than ever before, but they are of a poor quality and simply do not last long. Most devices and machines die at the end of the factory-​guarantee period. Your grandfather’s claim, that they do not make things the way they used to, holds true. Simultaneously, passing the labour costs associated with assemblage on to the consumer, via the mantra of low-​cost DIY, makes, on the one hand, the technologies of everyday life less of a mysterious blackbox for non-​expert laypersons. On the other hand, it makes things even worse when it comes to material failure, as the non-​experts often forgets bolts and screws and lack the right tools or the know-​how to perform the construction. Meanwhile, the crisis in Western capitalism that broke out in 2008, the rising unemployment, the devaluation of labour and the rest of the social paraphernalia drive people to seek cheaper and cheaper products that last shorter and shorter lifespans, creating an explosive mixture of semi-​functional material worlds. As ethnographers of post-​socialism can confirm, in the late 1980s it was apparent to the commoner in Eastern Europe what was invisible to the leadership of the Party, namely, that the world around them fails and collapses. Materialities of everyday life were failing with disproportionate frequency. In Albania, for example, people were requested to build roads and other infrastructures via voluntary labour. One story is particularly apropos: Once,

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an official from the capital, Tirana, was to visit an agricultural cooperative. As such, the local officials mobilized the entire village to surface and make ready the road over which the convoy would travel. In spite of the preparations, bad weather prevented the Tirana VIPs from leaving the village at the appointed time, and they spent the night in the village instead. However, by the next morning the brand new road, which had been badly made, had washed away. People in Albania continually recall such stories from the last days of socialism. The failing materialities were metonymic of the failing political and economic system; at the same time the failing objects were an ever-​present reality of this world that was breaking. Matter on earth (and off world, too) fails due to friction and atmospheric conditions; stuff falls apart, but this statement never held as much truth as it holds today at the present stage of the crisis of late capitalism. It is of course a matter of speed and temporalities, namely, things fail much faster than ever before within the Western World. This fragility implies a more general situation; it signifies the end of the entire political and economic system, as we knew it for so many decades. We live in a condition similar to the one that people experienced when socialism was collapsing; it is just that there is no enthusiasm, expectation and optimism of the sort that happened at the end of socialism. Today this world of cheap and fragile stuff makes things and the ways we engage with them much more visible. The values of things are changing completely  –​not only the exchange values of things but more importantly their social values. Gradually the right to ‘fix it myself’ has become a demand voiced by an increasing number of people. The phenomenon observed in various contexts –​among hackers, anarchists, the global poor, self-​organized refugee camps, and so on –​namely, decentralized, self-​organized peer-​to-​peer modes of material production and reproduction seem to become a demand within the globalized ‘modernity’ as an increasing number of people are faced with the temporalities of late capitalist materialities. Politically, this is probably our collective future: a future of self-​organization, made of the socio-​material discarded behind the failing carcass of the previous paradigm that cannot afford to sustain itself anymore anyway. Maybe this is a dire outlook on life at this present juncture. Maybe it is grotesque realism in the face of certain failure. Eventually the systematic breaching of password security will bring about a new invention  –​or those seeking to breach the security will bring the whole system down. Between these two options, however, there is opened the space of possibility. It is a space of intense social engagement, and thereby a space of productive investigation. It is in this space that this volume resides. Each failure discussed in these pages is productive of something, be that the cataclysm of war or simply the nuisance of remembering a twelve-​digit PIN. And while some

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failures can be washed away with a heavy rain, some come to lie, strewn upon the mountainsides. With each mechanical flying machine plucked from the air, a black box (which, mind you, is orange) records the failure. In the wreckage of failure, this small contraption  –​a technological interstice  –​is sought, uncovered, analysed, and, only then, is a moral judgement made. And whether it is, in toto, mechanical error, a ground-​to-​air missile or on-​ board terrorists, it is in the recording, and careful analysis, of failure that the full pragmatics –​material, social and political –​of the end of the world may be known.

References Virilio, P. (2007) The Original Accident. Cambridge: Polity.

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lot of hands have helped make this Failure a success. First and foremost, we would like to thank the Department of Anthropology at University College London (UCL) for playing host to the early stages of conversation out of which this volume has grown. At a time when most of the contributors to this volume were in the late stages of doctoral research, the department’s role in fostering an active and engaged research environment afforded us the support needed to pursue these conversations. Our extreme gratitude must be extended to the editorial board of the Journal of Material Culture, whose generous support allowed us to participate in the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, in Chicago, in 2013. Many of our colleagues at UCL have been formative in the shaping of these conversations, and particular thanks go to Susanne Kuechler, Christopher Pinney, Allen Abramson and, of course, Victor Buchli, who has been a constant dialogue partner and source of advice throughout the stages of development. This book is the product of a long conversation, and we are grateful to our colleagues who participated in earlier stages but could not be included in this volume. Gareth Breen, Charlotte Loris-​Rodionoff and Fiona McDonald were each part of these early discussions and the Chicago panel, and added greatly to the formation of this conversation. We thank all at Bloomsbury publishing, in particular Jennifer Schmidt and Clara Herberg, who have been as patient as they were encouraging and helpful. All authors would like to make a collective thank you to those who lend themselves to ethnographic engagement and generously work with us to make the anthropological enquiry that this book represents. Without our interlocutors we are nothing. We are also indebted to the Council of Noor and the spirit of thinking that the council engenders. Finally we would like to thank our family and friends. They have been supportive, attentive and generous in spirit, time and love, and they have made this whole process much more enjoyable than it would have been without them.

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1 Introduction: Towards a general theory of failure Timothy Carroll, David Jeevendrampillai and Aaron Parkhurst1

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hings sometimes misbehave. In fact, all things tend to behave, at some time or in some way, other than how ‘we’  –​their owners, keepers, subjects  –​want them to behave. When things do wrong, when things fall apart, when systems collapse, it is common practice to move on. This ability to move on, to persevere and to recover, is important, and much academic work has been poured into understanding that aspect; in some places it is called resilience, or development. Natural sciences might consider perseverance in terms of adaptations or elasticity. Within social sciences it has been couched in terms of techniques of the self and autopoiesis. However, this volume does not address these moments of resilience and recovery that so thoroughly pervade common discourse on failure –​though at times some of this is mentioned. Rather, this volume dwells in the moments before recovery, the moments before what Roy Wagner (1981 [1975]) would term as cultural ‘invention’ (see below). It is in these small spaces, these interstices of breakage that this volume sits. This book dwells in the concept of failure, in order to give this mode of social living the respect it deserves. 1 The ‘general theory of failure’, as it is presented in this chapter, draws upon the collaborative work of each of the co-​editors of this volume, including Julie Shackelford, whose efforts and insights have helped shape this theory as it stands today. We acknowledge and thank her for her thoughts and ideas included in this chapter.

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By taking failure seriously, and by making it paramount within the scope of investigation, not as the lesser brother of success, and not as a linguistic convention, but as a robust mode of living embedded within the ways in which people move through their world, the authors and their subjects demonstrate how failure exists as a rich space for the growth and development of new social relations. This volume is the culmination of several years of discussion, reading groups and conference panels. The four editors and the contributors have each fed into the project in different ways and the polyphonic quality of the discussions leading up to this volume are preserved within the pages here. This means that there is (we think productive) disagreement between how each author constitutes ‘failure’ and the theoretical frames upon which they draw in order to do so. There is, however, a general theory of failure that weaves through the discussion. This is the idea that ‘failure’ occurs when objectification ceases to adhere. This is to suggest that in the individual subject’s (or collective societal) project of inscribing themselves in the world, failure happens when the material and social stuff of that inscription behaves in ways other than intended. There is, implicitly, within this working definition a temporal and a moral aspect. Failure, as we understand it, is a moment of breakage between the reality of the present and the anticipated future. Furthermore, this breakage carries moral gravity as what ought to have happened, what should be the case, has not come to pass. This volume is predicated on the recognition that these variously constructed definitions of failure are, themselves, profoundly reflective of the socialities that produce them. Constructs of failure are often overlooked in the social sciences –​with work on ritual failure and mistakes in performance, such as by Edward Schieffelin (1996, 1997) and the contributors to the volume When Rituals go Wrong (edited by Ute Husken 2007) as notable exceptions. In much of the contemporary globalized context, failures are actively ignored by society at large in the ongoing drive towards ‘success’. In a sense, failure is the gap that follows the collapse of one mode of life and precedes the development of a new one. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species (1859), biological notions of evolution and progress were taken by early scholars within the social sciences, such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1877). Morgan’s schema of unilinear cultural evolution was, in turn, deeply influential on other scholars, such as Karl Marx (1996 [1867]), as well as the society at large. This more cultural line of evolutionary thought, human behaviour and even physicality was premised on Darwinian forms of evolutionary theory, emphasizing ‘survival of the fittest’ as the core dynamic of social life. These models serve to remind actors in society that what they ‘see’ is that which has ‘succeeded’. What ‘failure’ is, then, and how it behaves, becomes tied

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to this perception, where the ability to understand one’s place in the world is made coherent through the myriad disruption of all the paths that did not, or could not, work. For many people, failure, in its broadest sense, can only be made tolerable through its alignment with a certain type of intentionality, deeply intertwined with notions of duty, responsibility and blame (Weber 1998 [1930]). In the Euro-​American tradition, failure has been located within the evolution of a rationalist drive for betterment, however the role of sentiment and belief –​ aspects that may be best seen as parts of an embedding framework used to make failure (and success) tolerable  –​is, as Maria Hovemyr (1998) shows, still a major factor in personal drive and self-​appraisal. Following the work of Max Weber, and his understanding of the modern sociological aversion to failure, it is not difficult to see this relationship as embedded in the spirit of competitiveness derived from capitalism, premised on the legacies of Protestantism (Weber 1998 [1930]). This mentality extends from financial pursuits to intellectual endeavours and through to the essence of creativity and inventiveness. It is exemplified through the notoriously aggressive entrepreneurship in the manner of Thomas Edison (Sundwall, this volume) or San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll’s (2006) assertion that ‘failure is a good thing’. In its common usage, failure is aligned with processes of learning and discovery. As such, failure is made a living practice in research labs across the world, where Aristotelian models of hypothesis and deduction (discussed at length in his Prior Analytics II), adapted into scientific pragmatism (most notably in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey), have led to ‘the scientific method’ being affectionately called, by many who work in scientific labs, ‘the art of failure’. This way of thinking partly defines modern pragmatism and science through a binarism between success and failure, that is, hypothesis cum theory/​fact is induced from that which does and cannot work in a system, illuminating that which does and can. But the ‘art of failure’ can be a dangerous art, and the term can take radically different meanings. It can take the meaning of striving for something better, but can also do so with the ironic pity of society’s well to do  –​as seen in Oscar Wilde’s quip:  ‘ambition is the last refuge of the failure’ (The Chameleon, December 1984). Part of the problem, at least analytically, with investigating ‘failure’ is that, as Sarah Lewis (2014: 18) points out: The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it’s hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else –​a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention –​no longer the static concept of failure.

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This is the slippage apparent in Edison’s and J. Carroll’s respective forms of optimism. And while it is socially productive to allow, and even foster, that slippage, analytically the careful framing of an event as it moves across categories is important. There is also another aspect to this school of pragmatism that is pertinent to the study of failure, particularly in terms of its futurity. In Dewey’s own words, ‘When we take the point of view of pragmatism we see that general ideas have a very different role to play than that of reporting and registering past experiences. They are the bases for organizing future observations and experiences’ (in Cherryholmes 1992:  13). By investigating these ideas, and particularly the contestations as they play out in the field, following in this pragmatic line of thought pushes us to not simply ask ‘how did this failure happen’, but ‘how will this failure be shaping society to come’. It is not surprising, then, that many of the chapters in this volume play on the border between explaining how these moments of failure arise and casting an eye forward to what these interstices indicate about the ongoing shaping of society. Before outlining the contributing factors in this constitution of failure, however, it is important to highlight one other guiding principle of each chapter. From the outset, our goal has been to have the volume ethnographically driven. As such, each of the nine main chapters draws heavily upon original ethnography coming from the diverse areas of the authors’ respective areas of research. Arising out of this panoply of ethnographic accounts is also the productive dialogue between ‘failure’ as an analytical trope and ‘failure’ as an ethnographic fact (cf. Brubaker and Cooper (2000) on ‘categories of practice’). The authors are cautious to not apply the term ‘failure’ to their fieldsites, as accusing informants of ‘failure’ is a moral accusation (see below) unbecoming of anthropological work. However, in thinking through what failure is as a normative category, and working through the idea of the cessation of objectification, a conceptual framework is afforded through which a greater sense of what ‘failure’ (as an etic, analytical category) actually is (as an emic, lived reality) can come to be seen. In this way, the polyvocality of the volume is not only the product of the participation of its contributing authors, but also a product of the ethnographic witness offering voice to the local articulations, paraphrases and avoidances of things doing the unexpected or undesired. So, while the ethnographic contributions in this volume are drawn from a wide range of diverse contexts, each chapter works through failure ethnographically, focusing on moments of breakage and disjuncture that most accounts of society tend to gloss over. These seemingly inconsequential moments of breakdown can have a very profound influence on human experience and the lived world. It is the overriding argument of the volume

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that failure affects the human experience, often quite deeply, and often does so in a highly productive way. The subsequent sections of this introduction outline major aspects, themes and contributing theories that have helped shape the development of this volume and our general theory of failure. As the volume is situated broadly within discussions of material culture, this introduction starts by grounding the discussion in material culture theory and then moves through wider literature related to failure. It then addresses some key theoretical background that helped shape the discussions held in this volume, and then offers a brief description of the narrative arc moving through each chapter.

Material failure and the materiality of failure By suggesting that failure happens when things do wrong, we highlight the place of things in the human experience of expectation and anticipation. While there is some difference in how these key terms are applied throughout the individual chapters, it is useful at this stage to clarify –​even if only in general terms –​what words like ‘material’ and ‘materiality’ mean. As we understand it, ‘material’ is inherently social. The physical, mechanical, ‘actual’ thing in the world becomes ‘material’ when it enters into social relations. ‘Materiality’, then, is the social impact of the ‘material’. In asserting this, we are following Christopher Tilley’s (2007) excellent elucidation of these terms. Tilley offers the parallel such that material : materiality :: social : sociality. That is to say –​using the example of stones carried through a longer conversation (Tilley 2004; Ingold 2007)  –​that ‘the concept of materiality is one that needfully addresses the ‘social lives’ of stones in relation to the social lives of persons’ (Tilley 2007: 17). Drawing out the relation between ‘material’ and ‘materiality’ also opens up a useful distinction between ‘material failure’ and the ‘materiality of failure’. The difference here is a distinction between the constitutive substance of the failure and the analytical frame of investigation. In this sense, a ‘material failure’ is something that goes wrong. ‘Material failure’ is when the thing, object or artefact fails to behave correctly. Fernando Dominguez Rubio’s (2016) discussion of the immense infrastructure that is required to maintain the Mona Lisa as the object it is held to be, for example, outlines the inevitability of materials –​as changing things –​to, as he puts it, ‘slide’ from their object position. Things change. Objects, however, are held in specific relationships to specific subjects. Artefacts, that is, things which are made and endure through time, that should be one thing, but become something else, trespass upon the boundaries of their object position. This is socially dangerous. It would be a catastrophic failure, for example, to lose the Mona Lisa. Such a loss would

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be a failure of the magnitude Michael Thompson (1979) calls ‘impossible’, not because it cannot exist in reality, but because it is a social aberration. This same sort of thing happens regularly on smaller scales: a kitchen appliance breaks, a beauty product does not do its job, a pair of trousers rips or fades. Whether this is by design (such as in planned obsolescence) or by the simple fact of the degeneration of matter, things fail. Sometimes, however, the cessation of objectification does not rest on, or in, the material thing. When infrastructures fail, when democracy fails, the ‘things’ that fail are not artefacts in the strictest sense of a unique item of material culture. Nonetheless, failures of state are no less inscribed in material forms. In this way, social failures can be investigated through careful attention to the materials involved, and their social implications –​in other words, the materiality of failure. Within this collection, there are a range of material culture approaches to failure:  some specifically on material failure, some on the materiality of failure, some that touch on both, as failures on one scale ricochet ‘up’, as it were, into larger social spheres. When things go wrong, we tend to shift the blame to other people (as discussed by Kasstan and Shackelford) or things (as discussed by Antohin) or simply ignore the problem (as discussed by Jeevendrampillai). This blaming, and the specific articulation of who or what failed, is inherently political. It is in this aspect of the wider social and political implications of failure that the material culture approach offers particular advantages. Many, but not all, of the contributors to this volume are trained in material culture studies within anthropology. Two of us writing this introduction have led tutorials in the Ethnographic Collection, held in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. The objects in the collection, such as the Admiralty Island obsidian dagger seen on the cover of this volume, come from around the world and each have a unique biography. In teaching students how to assess an artefact, one of the key places of investigation is any scratches, fissures, cracks or wear seen on the surface. It is in these places of material rupture, whether gained in design (such as the contours of a flint blade) or use (such as the bald patches worn in the pattern of a handle) or after collection (such as the chipped and broken pieces), that the architectonic form of the material becomes visible to the naked eye. What is usually concealed is made visible in distress. This is true both in the material and the social. We investigate the material cultures of failure, therefore, because it is at these points of breakage, when the ‘normal’ (ideal) means of objectification cease to adhere –​or never manage to adhere in the first place –​that crucial dynamics of social life are revealed. For example, it is in the failure of skin whitening creams to produce the social outcomes associated with white skin, as discussed by Parkhurst, that the social value of the objects and materials

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in question are seen to have far more to do with the anticipation and ever-​ evading hope of the present tense of the objects, as opposed to their patterns of production and consumption. With this understanding of materials, materiality and what grounding our approach in the material culture of failure allows us to accomplish, these next few sections outline what we understand failure to not be. After clearing the table of related terms that have helped shape our understanding of what failure is, we then turn our attention to failure itself.

Failure is NOT the binary opposite of success The first thing to highlight is that failure and success are not necessarily binary opposites. Thus, while ethnographically, we may employ these terms and their corollaries in a manner which works within this binary (by embracing them, rejecting them, ‘playing’ with them, etc.) we do so only inasmuch as our informants do. Even when paired, ‘failure’ and ‘success’ often exist on different scales or frames of reference. This is often a part-​to-​whole relation, but not necessarily so. There is also the related term of ‘serendipity’. In some spaces the unexpected success is serendipitous, just as the unachieved success is failure. However, this needs not be the case. These articulations of failure are very common in both vernacular English usage and various English dictionaries. Such a perspective, however, means that failure can only exist in opposition. In this volume, we are more interested in the ways in which failure functions socially. In these cases failure may, in fact, not be part of a binary. It may be part of a continuum (Parkhurst); it may exist within an ambivalent mix of outcomes (Antohin); it may be an absent node, even though, analytically, success is also absent (Jeevendrampillai). It may, as a binary, be couched within other terms, such as heresy (Carroll), or appear in the field only in retrospect, as compared to other options (Mohan). Each in their own way, the chapters in this volume examine the role of materials when the ‘common’, conventional meanings, values and understandings that a particular group shares fail, breakdown or fall apart.

Failure is NOT incommensurability One of the closest analytical tropes to failure is that of incommensurability. At the risk of being overly simplistic:  incommensurability is failure drawn out and given permanency as a structural element. If, following the work of the economists Espeland and Stevens (1998:  314), commensuration is ‘the transformation of different qualities into a common metric’, then

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incommensurability is the failure to achieve that unifying translatability. Working with this idea, Elizabeth Povinelli (2001:  320)  describes social and linguistic systems to be ‘incommensurate’ when they exist in ‘a state in which an undistorted translation cannot be produced between two or more denotational texts’. Povinelli’s work on the legal provision of land and resources in Australia highlights the incommensurability between the state and Aboriginal ways of life. It is not, for Povinelli (2011), however, that the projects fail, but rather that repressive violence endures within the gap between the projects. There is no success, no commensuration but the endurance of a situation wherein social projects continue in a harmful dialectic, but no accusation of failure (see below) is given from either party. In Povinelli’s (2002) analysis, the disjuncture between Aboriginal ways of life and the infrastructure of Australian law requires careful balance. Aboriginal persons, she says, face the task of making the incommensurate discourses, desires, and imaginaries of the nation and its subalterns and minorities arrive at a felicitous, although unmotivated, end point. If they slip, if they seem to be opportunistic, to be speaking to the law, public, or capital too much or not enough or in a cultural framework the public recognizes as its own, they risk losing the few judicial and material resources the state has made available to them. (189) In a situation similar in some ways to Kasstan’s discussion of the ‘hard to reach’ Haredi community in Manchester, Aboriginal Australians do not align themselves with the institutional presuppositions of the Australian state. Povinelli works with this disjuncture and argues that the incommensurable nature of indigenous and state values produces a structural antipathy that, in turns, re-​ enforces the disjuncture. An important aspect of Povinelli’s understanding of incommensurability is that it is only when there becomes sufficient social pressure to commensurate that there can arise a voice to make the accusation of failure; as such, incommensurability itself can, in fact, be highly productive in the maintenance of power hierarchies. Unlike Povinelli’s case of incommensurability, however, Kasstan’s work among the Haredi demonstrates that it is not a mutual disjuncture at play, nor the inability of the Haredim to grasp modern medical practice, but rather the failure of the British state to actually provide for the needs of its citizenry. Thus, while both incommensurability and failure have implicit moral underpinnings, and both can be taken in the context of societal structuration, the temporal duration of incommensurability maps a different future than that of failure; whereas failure marks a breach from the anticipation of an ideal present and/​or future, incommensurability admits the breach as a matter of stasis.

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Incommensurability, we understand, can grow out of the moment of failure. As it grows, and is sustained, it becomes an element of structural stasis. This process can be highly productive, as is seen in Jeevendrampillai’s chapter. In the context of the material failure of a digital ‘auto-​ethnographic’ map, Jeevendrampillai shows the cleavage between a local citizenry group and institutional (governmental and academic) interests in democratic participation. Here incommensurability between what can be seen as democracy from above and democracy from below opens up an immense field of highly socially productive play. The sustained incommensurable nature of local democratic ideas and the ‘local’ as a democratic ideal allows the local community to invent themselves in new, weird and, as Jeevendrampillai points out, ‘stupid’ ways. This leads to the next aspect of which failure is not.

Failure is NOT alterity In certain circles of queer theory, such as in the work of Judith/​ Jack Halberstam, failure is seen as a means to subvert the (hetero)normative hegemonic society and allow the individual to live a more fulfilling life. Failure, in this sense, specifically the failure to be a proper woman, or the failure to achieve certain ideals, and generally the failure to meet the expectations of normative society, is an opportunity  –​Halberstam argues  –​to find success in the other. Halberstam’s inversion of (social) ‘failure’ as its own (personal) success plays on the political desire for social change and personal fulfilment in order to offer something different. Halberstam (2011: 187) encourages us to ‘revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures’. In their acknowledgements, Halberstam thanks those who ‘inspire me and encourage me to fail better every day’ (xii). This, however, produces a paradox. If you want to fail, is it failure if it is achieved? Failure is only acceptable (and thereby productive in its own right) within the confines of a particular domain, set of parameters, norms, conventions and so on. It is our contention that while the momentary misfire (i.e. the failure to be a ‘proper’ woman –​with all the moral baggage that accusation assumes) can be constituted as ‘failure’ in the normative sense –​that is, in the context of the larger, universalizing context of society  –​the particular frame of the productive acceptance of the fact is invented as ‘alterity’, not ‘failure’, in an analytical sense. Said in another way, Halberstam’s ‘queer art of failure’ is best read as an ‘indigenous’ (emic) classification, not as an analytical category. If hegemony is the main discourse and alterity is the conscious choosing of another one (while simultaneously reinforcing the hegemony), failure would then be the critical point (crisis of alignment) at which one social structure has

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broken down and another has not yet taken its place. Analytically, we find it useful to draw a point of distinction between the ‘failure’ of doing something ‘wrong’ and the inventive inversion of that social ‘wrong’ as a new social ideal. In this way, alterity can be understood as a process of subjectification  –​ wherein the subject makes or remakes themselves –​in alignment with the objective reality of the world. Alterity, then, is a scenario wherein the intention driving the process of objectification is redirected back on the individual, so as to change the self in line with the object. Alterity is an inventive process, as is the stasis of incommensurability, that follows from and works to amend the gap produced by failure.

What failure is Failure is always relational. Failure is a moral accusation –​and specifically a devaluation  –​of something or someone. Failure occurs when the subject’s process of inscribing themselves in the world  –​that is, the process of objectification –​is interrupted or aborted. As phrased above, failure is when objectification ceases to adhere. This may be the point when an object slips from its object position, or when it becomes clear that an artefact will never quite fit correctly into that desired object position. Our understanding of failure within its constitutive process is largely dependent on the work of Roy Wagner (1981 [1975]) in his Invention of Culture. Wagner actually gives very little overt attention to the idea of failure, as his work in Invention focuses primarily on the iterative and creative process of cultural, individual and anthropological production. In Wagner’s (1981: xvi) usage, ‘invention’ is like invention in music, it refers to a positive and expected component of human life. The term seems to have retained much of this same sense from the time of the Roman rhetoricians through the dawn of early modern philosophy. In the Dialectical Invention of the fifteenth-​century humanist Rudolphus Agricola, invention appears as one of the ‘parts’ of the dialectic, finding or proposing an analogy for a propositus that can then be ‘judged’ in reaching a conclusion –​rather in the manner in which a scientific hypothesis is subject to the judgment of ‘testing’. In this way, invention is the dialectical response to the preceding element of the dialogue. Wagner spends most of Invention unpacking how this kind of response works, but does give a couple of insights into what precedes this invention. For example, he argues that in scientific research ‘each failure motivates a greater collectivizing effort’ (131), and again:  ‘Progressively

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sharper and more compelling critical insights were born of the failure of each successive holding action, and in every instance these insights were used as the groundwork for new synthetic theories’ (154). What emerges is an understanding of cultural production wherein constant inventive responses to the given contexts shape and mould the immediate context, thereby setting the stage for the next invention. This dialectical setting rests on the continual reapplication of cultural tropes to always-​new contexts. If you pause the cycle, however, and look at the moment before the subsequent invention, it is here that one can see failure. It is not to say that the previous invention was ‘wrong’ in some sense, but that the previous invention no longer suffices for the continued dialogue. Failure, in this dialectical sense, is the awkward silence before the next person responds. There are two other important aspects to Wagner’s theory that help shape our understanding of failure. The first is that Wagner’s ‘cultural dialectic’ operates within the dynamism of the macrocosmic and microcosmic contexts –​ what he calls the controlling context and the implicit context, respectively. Each inventive act is taking a symbol available from within the broader cultural milieu of the controlling context and deploying it in the specific lived event of the implicit context. The act of a man caring for his child, for example, draws upon a cultural framework of what fatherhood is –​including ideals of paternal love, protection, nourishment –​and it invents this trope in the specific context of changing a nappy or fixing dinner. This specific action, within the implicit context of a father and child being together, also then works to reshape the trope of, in this case, fatherhood. As Wagner (1981: 39) summarizes: ‘Every use of a symbolic element is an innovative extension of the association it acquires through its conventional integrations into other contexts’. In other words, meaning is performative, dialogic and has the potential to shift. The changing nature of the trope of fatherhood, for example, is markedly distinct between Wagner’s own use of the trope (38ff; and his relationship with his daughter e.g. in p. 83) and ours in the preceding lines. The second aspect of Wagner’s theory worth pointing out is that –​at least in our reading of it –​Wagner’s dialectic is more akin to Bakhtinian dialogue as opposed to Hegelian dialectic. Hegelian dialectic (for a conversation of this, see Rosen 1982) is based on a process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, wherein two elements  –​through interaction, conflict and cooperation  –​produce a third, new thing. The new thing –​the synthesis –​has elements of both the original components  –​the thesis and antithesis  –​but it is neither of them. Bakhtin (1981), however, argues against the synthesis. Rather, his dialogical model is comprised of a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, each with equal rights and each with its own world. To Bakhtin, the unity of the voices/​consciousnesses is not their interrelationship of ideas, thoughts and attitudes gravitating towards a single consciousness

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(i.e. synthesis) but, rather, their polyphonic unity  –​each participating in the ‘conversation’ but never merging. In this way, the elements of the dialogue, instead of merging into a new thing, continue being themselves, but have been changed, and change the other element, irrevocably. For Wagner (1981: 52): Invention and convention stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, a relationship of simultaneous interdependence and contradiction. This dialectic is the core of all human (and very likely all animal) cultures. The concept of ‘dialectic’ may well be familiar to readers in its Hegelian and Marxist formulation as a historical process or working out involving a succession of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. My formulation, much less explicity [sic] typological, is both simpler and, I  think, closer to the original Greek idea –​that of a tension or dialogue-​like alternation between two conceptions or viewpoints that are simultaneously contradictory and supportive of each other. As a way of thinking, a dialectic operates by exploiting contradictions (or, as Lévi-​Strauss would call them, ‘oppositions’) against a common ground of similarity, rather than by appealing to consistency against a common ground of differences, after the fashion of rationalistic or ‘linear’ logic. It follows that cultures that conventionally differentiate approach things with a dialectical ‘logic’, whereas those that conventionally collectivize (like our own rationalistic tradition) invoke a linear causality. (Emphasis in the original) The more Bakhtinesque quality of Wagner’s theory is particularly important when exploring Wagner’s model as applied in a social (i.e. people and things in relation) sense as opposed to the cultural (i.e. the system of beliefs and practices used and held by people) sense from which he originally wrote his work. Within the subject-​object dialectic of material failure, like in the invention-​ convention dialectic of Wagner’s model, there is no need for synthesis. Rather the inevitable failure of things operates as another aspect of the multivoicedness of human life. There is an important conversation in linguistics, semiotics and rhetoric that, in many ways, runs parallel to our own. Roman Jakobson (1971), in his observation that a sign must be interpreted as a sign in order to carry meaning, laid the groundwork for investigations around and within the space between the articulation and reception of signs. Michael Silverstein’s (2003a, 2003b, 2004) work on context and translation, similarly, highlights the complexities around meaning and performance of the communicative sign (also see Buchli’s contribution, this volume, for more on this). Following from J.  L. Austin’s work in How to Do Things with Words (1962), scholars such as Judith Butler and Jacque Derrida highlight the fact that the possibility of failure is intrinsic within the sign. Particularly in the work of Shoshana Felman

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(2002), one can see a critique and interpretation of Austin that moves the focus into what Austin calls the ‘misfires’  –​that is, when the speech act fails  –​and also broadens the rhetorical frame away from language itself to the bodily instantiation of these signs. In the movements of these related conversations, there is an increasingly large emphasis on wider context (such as in the work of Silverstein) and the material aspect of those signs (Felman, and also Appadurai 2015; for more on this, see Jeevendrampillai, this volume). While these theorists fall across a broad range of disciplines and approaches, we mark a general growth in the conversation towards increased focus on the spaces of relation and certain ambiguity of communication, cultural invention or social relation that calls for a new appraisal of the attention given to (or withheld from) the moments of failure and misfire within a system. In a sense, it is doubtful if ‘failure’, in a normative dictionary sort of way, exists at all. Rather, Bakhtin’s model offers a potential alternative dimension of ‘failure’ not yet explored. In his dialogical model, two (or more) voices/​ ideas/​ arguments come together in a carnival of multivocality. However, rather than a Hegelian dialectical thesis-​antithesis-​synthesis, to Bakhtin, the voices just keep talking. To Bakhtin, the conventional conceptions of ‘failure’ discussed above would not only be productive, they would actually be crucial components of the convention itself (inherent both in its reproduction and its evolvement into something ‘other’); on this Bakhtin and Wagner agree. Thus, ‘failure’ from a Bakhtinian perspective (if it even exists) would perhaps be the artificial or intentional silencing of the other voices in the carnival (in other words, multivocality reduced to monovocality). From this perspective, the ‘failure’ (if it can actually be called that) would exist as a cessation of proper functioning (itself a kind of cessation of objectification or mutual subjectification) in the form of not listening (Jeevendrampillai), or not being heard (ap Stifin). Or, perhaps, when the dialogue becomes so one-​sided that multivocality collapses into monovocality  –​although it is doubtful that, at least to Bakhtin, true monovocality could ever actually happen. As Bakhtin (1984: 21) argues: The essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony. If one is to talk about individual will, then it is precisely in polyphony that a combination of several individual wills takes place, that the boundaries of the individual will can be in principle exceeded. One could put it this way: the artistic will of polyphony is a will to combine many wills, a will to the event. It may appear as if the voices are silenced, but as the case of Syria demonstrates, silence does not necessarily equal complicity (Shackelford).

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Even in this sense, however, failure (here it being the silencing or not hearing of voices) is a moment, specifically a moment of anticipation and motivation. It is here, in this moment, that the motivation to invent produces either stasis (incommensurability) or, as in Syria, revolution. Failure is inevitably productive (although it may not be perceived as such). There is a productive/​generative capacity to failure; it is the primordial goo of constant evolutionary invention, though often attempts are made to identify, contain and preemptively stop ‘failure’. In this sense, failure is always pending and must forever be prevented. Failure as an ever present possibility brings in notions of responsibility and accountability wherein the ‘failure’ could be in the person (Kasstan, Parkhurst, Shackelford)  –​or ascribed to (in)animate things (Antohin, Carroll, Sundwall). Ethnographically, failure may be felt as the moment of disconnect between what one wants or expects to occur as the result of one’s actions (or the ecological context) and that which actually occurs. In this sense, there is a certain agency (or counter-​agency?) and intentionality with failure, as well as a temporal focus on the future. In other words, one acts with a desire to materialize a future potentiality into being and is thwarted, unexpectedly, in this materialization. Alternatively, rather than seeing this in terms of agency, it could also be framed in terms of Tim Ingold’s (2010) ideas concerning the generative flow of making. In such a framework the generative flow of materials does not align with the actions of the person: the wood cracks from ill-​applied force, the kite tosses in the wind too strong for its lead. Either way, failure produces a change in which a thing ceases being that which it was (or was expected to be), and radically becomes something other. It is in this sense that material failure is the collapse of a thing’s object status (cf. Dominguez Rubio 2016).

Failure is a moral accusation As has been pointed out above, failure can be highly productive. As such, we reject the necessarily negative associations of ‘failure’, but do assert that there is an underlying moral assumption embedded in the term ‘failure’. While our informants may see failure as inherently ‘good’, ‘bad’ or whatever, as an analytical category, we do not. It is, however, this moral underpinning that makes failure such a horrible affront to the ego. As mentioned above, there are two domains of failure:  analytic and ethnographic. Failure, as a moral accusation, comes from somewhere and adheres to something. As such, it clings to the stunted trajectory of a possibility not come into being. Thus, not only is failure social, its relational existence is one of directionality.

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Ethnographically, the accusation of failure is an inventive act that assumes in the accused some fault, and in this there is also an implicit devaluation carried in the charge. For example, in Mohan’s contribution, the efficacy and worth –​ married together as the ‘success’ –​of a particular garment is gauged by its ‘frequency of vision’. While a ‘successful’ garment may be reused and, thus, viewed many times, the particular garments under discussion were ‘never used again’ and, therefore, deemed to be ‘failures’. The moral quality of any given failure rests in the aptitude of the performative act to sit in continuity with, or discontinuity from, the anticipated outcome of a given thing or action within a given context. The issues of performance and continuity seen in framing the morality of failure work both backwards and forwards in time. For example, in Halberstam’s form of failure, the alterity performed  –​being inventions in tension with convention  –​cast themselves as failures only from behind. As the cultural tropes are shaped, by the inventions of people like Halberstam, the normative conventions will likewise change, and in retrospect the ‘failures’ will –​even from the new normative perspective –​not be charged as morally ‘negative’.

Failure is a moment of time The inherent temporal aspect of failure has been touched on a few times already, but deserves some attention in its own right. Alluding to Aristotelian models of hypothesis, deduction and scientific ‘pragmatism’ mentioned earlier in this introduction, when things behave as expected, they are expected because they are similar to situations we have been in before and we project that past experience (along with its outcome) into our present situation, expecting the same result (in the future). When things behave unexpectedly, we are thrown suddenly, and forcefully, into the present, trying to figure out what thing/​ person did wrong. Extrapolating from Wagner’s model, we have asserted that failure is a moment before invention. Most failures, because they are so ubiquitous, are simply ignored and moved past. The accusation of failure is itself a kind of invention that marks a situation or thing as not being in accord with expectation. In this context, failure is consigned to be a thing of the past, while success is deemed a condition of the present aligned with a desired future potentiality. Past failures come to stand for the various alternative potentialities lost or abandoned along the way –​a present or future that ‘could have been’, such as described within the New York Times’ ‘Brief History of Failure’ (Bradley 2014). In this ‘brief history’, past and future technologies run parallel to one another and are understood by the author as failures at the level of operation; they became outdated, replaced or inefficient (even before

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they are concretized). We emphasize, here, that they also engaged in material failure –​ they functioned (or in some cases, could function) well enough, but they ceased to be ‘socially’ meaningful, and objectification could no longer socially cohere. Related to the issue of temporality is the issue of maturation. There is something inherently premature about failure. If something has ‘matured’ in a seemingly ‘natural’ way, then it has not failed. Death of old age, in common and traditional standards, is not failure, but death by car accident at a young age is seen as a failure in some sense  –​a failed opportunity to live life to the fullest; it is a premature cutting short (see e.g. Danforth and Tsiaras 1982). Failure, like premature death, is an abortive effect from an external cause. Although, in truth, failure is inherent to the system, its implicit moral underpinnings make it appear as if it lies outside in order to bring a sense of coherency within. This aspect of the constitutive outside brings us to the next point: that of categories and boundaries.

Failure is a category error We have already outlined how material failure can be constituted as the slippage of a thing out of a specific object position. This is, in a sense, a category error. Thing X of Type Y is no longer of Type Y. This is also true of failure more broadly. As things go wrong, their wrongness rests in the border-​crossing and, as matter out of place (a la Douglas 1966; Thompson 1979), becomes a foreign contaminant. Failure only becomes comprehensible within set parameters and is, indeed, productive of the very parameters themselves. This is particularly insightful in the ethnographic context, as it helps make sense of when and how failure is articulated. The accusation of failure can only be productive when boundary-​making is socially productive. Take as examples, resting on a continuum: in Jeevendrampillai’s case, ‘failure’ is never mentioned, and –​in the democratic ideal of inclusion  –​uptake of participation along proscribed means is simply pushed into a further future; in Antohin’s case, ‘failure’ rests along ambiguous fissures between traditional and modern knowledge bases and their respective technologies; in Kasstan’s example, the political boundary around the Haredi religious minority is seen as mutual accusations of failure, couched in politically correct terms of medical non-​compliance; in Carroll’s example, the accusation of failure  –​couched in the language of ‘material heresy’ –​is explicit. What one can see across this sample set is a trend such that, in cases where a high value is given to inclusion (Jeevendrampillai), or progress and modernity (Antohin), the boundary reification achieved through the accusation of failure is not overtly productive. In cases wherein the

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communities involved have something to gain, however, from emphasizing failure as emblematic of the constitutive outside, here failure accusations appear as a means of maintaining the moral values of the in-​group. Kasstan’s chapter is particularly interesting in this regard, as both groups –​the British state and the Haredim –​point to the failure of the other. For Mary Douglas (1966: 162), ‘The quest for purity is pursued by rejection’. In this sense, failure becomes productive because it motivates social actors to continue their quest for ‘perfection’. Failure thus becomes productive in the sense that it motivates us to try again, in a different way, or to do the same again but ‘try harder’ and ‘do better’ the next time. It becomes a part of design strategy (Sundwall).

The order of discussion The nine ethnographic chapters comprising the meat of this volume could, really, be organized in almost any order at all. The reader might even flip back and forth between the chapters, if they wanted to have a more fully multi-​voiced experience of Failure. Even in reading one chapter at a time, there are resonances and whispers –​and at times shouts –​heard from one author within another’s chapter. Such is the nature of a conversation as it has circled and revisited itself. But, due to the tyranny of material, we have had to assemble these chapters in a sequence  –​and Buchli, in his Afterward, offers a different one. For our purposes as editors, we have arranged the order with emphasis to the development of how –​out of what and in what way –​failure is experienced as a social fact within the ethnographic contexts of the chapters. We begin, in Chapter 2 with Sundwall’s discussion of the failures of material in contemporary design, and the productive place these sites of conflict between designers’ vision and materials science become. In Chapter 3, Mohan moves this forward and discusses the failures in design and implementation of Iskcon deity clothing, within a complex network of the local, the global, innovation and precedence. In Chapter  4, Parkhurst further opens up the complexity of sociality around failure, looking at the failure of the social outcomes of the implementation of skin whitening beauty products in Dubai that at once do what they are supposed to, without any of the effect they are supposed to have. Antohin, in Chapter 5, then builds on the disparity between the material and social effects of different knowledgebases and technological regimes, looking at the religious use of holy water in Ethiopia alongside medical treatments for HIV and the certainty of chemical agents. Kasstan, in Chapter 6, develops the theme of failure in the boundaries between health,

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religion and the state further, looking at a ‘hard-​ to-​ reach’ Haredi (Jewish) community in England, and the failure of the state to care for its citizenry. In Chapter 7, Jeevendrampillai further explores the problems of participation in contemporary Britain, looking at the failure of democracy. Shackelford’s contribution, Chapter 8, then develops the issues of failed politics, tracing the use and appropriation of heritage sites within the failure of the state in the early part of the Syrian uprising. The disparity in the imaginations of space is then carried further in Chapter 9, where Carroll examines the making of an Orthodox Christian temple in an Anglican parish church. Chapter  10, by ap Stifin, then, highlights the immense work of assemblage required to make the materialities of affective space, examining the materiality of silence in the 9/​ 11 memorials in New York. Following these ethnographic chapters, the final contribution, by Victor Buchli, draws out the methodological implications of this collection, and points to the importance of social scientific enquiry into the gaps where failure lies as a means of exploring transduction. The reality is that all things eventually fail (Bevan 2006), in fact ‘all human activities are equivalent . . . and . . . all are on principle doomed to failure’ (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Conclusion II). In other words, failure is something which society, in order to maintain its façade of longevity, must deny. However, it is nonetheless an ever-​present potentiality. It does not exist in its own right, rather it is the spectre of certain decay and the ghost of sociality now gone. Implicit in every utterance of social longevity, tradition, heritage, unity, solidarity, convention and so on is a rupture in the dialectical relationship between the discursive conception of self and society, on the one hand, and the material world through which it is constituted, on the other. In this gap lies ‘failure’.

References Appadurai, A. (2015) ‘Success and Failure in the Deliberative Economy’. In Deliberation and Development: Rethinking the Role of Voice and Collective Action in Unequal Societies, edited by P. Heller and V. Rao, 67–​84. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by C. Emerson. University of Minnesota Press. London. Bevan, R. (2006) The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books.

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Bradley, R. (2014) ‘A Brief History of Failure’. The New York Times Magazine. The Innovations Issue. Online at: http://​www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2014/​11/​12/​ magazine/​16innovationsfailures.html (retrieved 25 June 2016). Brubaker, R., and F. Cooper (2000) ‘Beyond “Identity” ’. Theory and Society Vol. 29, No. 1, 1–​47. Carroll, J. (2006) ‘Failure Is a Good Thing’. Special Series: This I believe. Commentary heard on Morning Edition 9 October. Transcript available online at: http://​www.npr.org/​templates/​story/​story.php?storyId=6196795 (last accessed 29 June 2016). Cherryholmes, C. H. (1992) ‘Notes on Pragmatism and Scientific Realism’. Educational Researcher Vol. 21, No. 6, 13–​17. Danforth, L., and A. Tsiaras (1982) The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Darwin, C. (1859) On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray. Douglas, M. (1966, 2013) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge Classics. Espeland, W. N., and M. L. Stevens (1998) ‘Commensuration as a Social Process’. Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 24, 313–​43. Felman, S. (2002) The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hovemyr, M. (1998) ‘The Attribution of Success and Failure as Related to Different Patterns of Religious Orientation’. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion Vol. 8, No. 2, 107–​24. Husken, U. (2007) When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers. Ingold, T. (2007) ‘Materials against Materiality’. Archaeological Dialogues Vol. 14, No. 1, 1–​16. Ingold, T. (2010) ‘Textility of Making’. Cambridge Journal of Economics Vol. 34, 91–​102. Jakobson, R. (1971) Selected Writings: Word and Language. The Hague: Mouton. Lewis, S. (2014) The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. London: William Collins, p. 18. Marx, K. (1996 [1867]) Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Gateway Editions. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Morgan, L. H. (1971 [1877]). Ancient Society: or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Povinelli, E. A. (2001) ‘Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability’. Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 30, 319–​34. Povinelli, E. A. (2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Povinelli, E. A. (2011) Economies of Abandonment. Durham, NC. Duke University Press. Rosen, M. (1982) Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Rubio, F. D. (2016) ‘On the Discrepancy between Objects and Things: An Ecological Approach’. Journal of Material Culture Vol. 21 (March), 59–​86. Schieffelin, E. (1996) ‘On Failure and Performance’. In The Performance of Healing, edited by Carol Lederman and Marina Roseman, 59–​90. London: Routledge. Schieffelin, E. (1997) ‘Problematizing Performance’. In Ritual, Performance, Media, edited by Felicia Hughes-​Freeland, 194–​207. London and New York: Routledge. Silverstein, M. (2003a) ‘Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life’. Language & Communication Vol. 23, 193–​229. Silverstein, M. (2003b) ‘Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating Glossaando on Thin Semiotic Ice’. In Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, edited by P. Rubel and A. Rosman, 75–​105. Oxford: Berg. Silverstein, M. (2004) ‘Cultural Concepts and the Language-​Culture Nexus’. Current Anthropology Vol. 45, No. 5, 621–​52. Thompson, M. (1979) Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tilley, C. (2004) The Materiality of Stone. Oxford: Berg. Tilley, C. (2007) ‘Materiality in Materials’. Archaeological Dialogues Vol. 14, No. 1, 16–​20. Wagner. R. (1981) The Invention of Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Weber, M. (1998 [1930]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing.. Wilde, O. (1894) ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’. The Chameleon. Oxford, Issue 1, December.

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2 Miracles and crushed dreams: Material disillusions in the design industry Camilla Sundwall

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ithin the mythos of American Capitalism, Thomas Edison is popularly quoted as saying, regarding his own industrial design of the modern light bulb, that ‘I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work’.1 ‘Failure’ is often a highly emotionally laden word, intimately enmeshed in moral implications. Almost on a daily basis, online platforms, magazines and popular self-​help literature discuss topics centred on both fear of failure and potential success through failure. It is clear that there is often a social drive to re-​conceptualize failure as a stepping stone to something serendipitous, morally experimental, and, perhaps even, to invoke Edison’s image, a ‘light bulb moment’. In this chapter, I will discuss the productive and constructive elements of material failure as seen through the lens of industrial design. The focus here is not necessarily on peoples’ experiences and disappointments, but instead on what happens when materials fail in industrial design: when they do unexpected things or do not live up to their promises. In the design process, failure is often perceived as something productive. Design and designers have always worked in the gap between possibility and reality, and 1 The earliest evidence for the quotation, however, actually gives it in the context of the nickel-​iron battery. Arising in a conversation with Walter S.  Mallory, Edison is recorded in the biography Edison: His Life and Inventions (Dyer and Martin, 1910) to have said, ‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!’.

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as designers today often search for the ‘one’ material to solve a range of problems, the tension between possibility and serendipity is amplified. It is in this gap, I argue, that failure is not only socially productive, but sometimes even a necessary component for designers to produce constructive social value. Material failures within industrial design provide a unique angle for social research. In examining the attitudes and engagements with materials by industrial designers, it is possible to open up new areas of investigations around material ontologies that are not commonly or easily researched within anthropology. Through this ontological perspective, anthropology can demonstrate the multiplicity of materials as they layer in multiple existential worlds, each with their own way of being. These ontologies are also informed by the underlying beliefs about the existence of materials that shape our everyday relationships between ourselves, others and the material world. By investigating material ontologies, it is possible to bring designers’ views and attitudes around the material world to the fore. Using the notion of failure provides a unique and useful framework for entering this area, as failure is deeply embedded within the creative process and, I argue, is perhaps even essential in order to advance ideas, design and thinking. Thus, the following text will focus on when materials fail –​that is, when they do not live up to the expectations put on them by people –​and why this matters. This chapter is premised on ethnography undertaken over the course of ten years as a practitioner and researcher within the design and creative industry. Following my education in product design, I began working in the design industry with a material focus by sourcing samples and information about materials. This research quickly evolved into practices of imagining and realizing how these materials might be used in novel ways and through new applications. Alongside other types of design practices, this work has continued for the past decade, and it has provided a unique opportunity for ethnography researching the connections and gaps between the design community in London and global material industries. The work has evolved throughout the years to bridge the sourcing and presentation of material solutions with how materials used in design applications and their properties align with societal, cultural and aesthetic trends and serve as physical expressions of brands. The research presented in this chapter discusses work conducted within design consultancies facilitating the processes of ‘colour, materials, and finish’ (CMF) and liaising between different industry teams (such as product, packaging, transport, research and workshop) to support productive CMF practices. This often involves direct communication with clients to develop CMF strategies that fit within broader categorical design trends (such as ‘furniture’, transport or consumer goods), economic needs and social priorities (such as sustainability, well-​being and tactility). Being initially trained as a product designer, I have come to understand the

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physical processes of creating and designing new and hopeful materials through first-​hand experience. My work as a product designer took a turn towards materials early on in my career, and, since my training, I have worked both within design consultancies bringing products to markets and as a link between material suppliers, designers and agencies. The main focus of this work has been on how materials are found, presented to different audiences and incorporated in new and innovative ways in designs. Through my long-​ term exposure to this industry, while undertaking anthropological research, it is clear to me that the way people engage with, talk about and interact with materials reveals wider ideas of the world and our place within it. Within this chapter, I  will discuss how material engagements for practitioners are changing; where, how and with whom material knowledge can be shared in industrial design; why material failures arise within industrial design practices; and how this can be productive for innovation, imagination and the production of social value. Finally, I argue that the failing of materials, those undeveloped expectations one has for the design and its promise, is itself productive and, at times, even essential for creating something ‘new’.

Changes in material engagements Material engagement as a paradigm of human interaction with the world is itself fluid and dynamic. Even calling something a ‘material’ does not come without difficulty, and it is hard to find a coherent definition. Designers, engineers, social scientists and craftsmen all have different views on what a material is and what materials ‘do’. Even within the confines of a specific discipline, the definition of ‘materials’ varies and depends upon the physical state in which a material lies, the format in which it is presented and the ways in which it was, or will be, processed. Industrial design, as this chapter will explore, sits in a slightly different position to what people traditionally have done when working with materials. Both craftspeople and scientists often have a much more ‘hands-​on’ approach to engaging with materials, which industrial designers today often lack. For example, industrial designers often work with conceptual models and materials, and they experiment with these materials in very different ways than a craftsperson. They may only be able to experiment within the limited scopes of the model, manipulating materials for a chair, for example, so that the chair is lightweight, cheap to produce, stackable and ‘sleek’ in curves and edges. They may not have any experience, however, in how the material actually behaves on the ground. This can add to complications in defining, or even agreeing upon, what we actually talk about when we say ‘materials’. Designers’ diverse approaches and fields of activity drives a need for flexibility and agility in discussing

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materials and their agency, perhaps one that has not been seen before in other areas or times. It is important to understand different views surrounding materials. For the sake of this chapter, when I refer to materials I mean, quite literally, the stuff things are made of, or, as Conneller (2011: 3) puts it, ‘a specific articulation of matter’. With this statement she broadens the definition of materials from static, isolated objects to include connections between people and the physical matter through technological processes. Materials have been the subject of increasing attention in recent years, both in design, science and social research, and there has been a shift in both the use of materials and views on what materials do. In popular discourse, ‘materials’ commonly refers to plastics, woods, metals and so on, but as mentioned, it is not easy to define what materials actually are, and these classifications are easily debated. A material scientist might claim that materials do not exist. Professor Mark Miodownik,2 an engineer, materials scientist and Professor of Materials and Society at University College London, expresses this view. Instead of relying on a concept of concrete materials, he argues that what does exist is matter –​ the atoms and molecules that the physical world is built from  –​and its structures. These combinations of matter and structures perform differently on different scales, and thus the physical world around us has different properties. The living world, it is argued, is able to communicate between these scales, while the inanimate world is not. A tree, for example, may be understood to be composed of the same ‘material’ as a wooden chair. Socially, this creates synonymy between two objects as defined by, say, oak, birch or balsam. However, the performative materialism of ‘oak’ is radically different between the tree and the chair. These questions are particularly relevant to some of the material developments we see today around smart materials that are both communicating and connected. This view is often counter-​intuitive to the normative way people often think about, and around, materials. In debates concerning materials and material culture within anthropology and other disciplines over the past two decades, problems have been highlighted with the traditional academic labelling of materials as inert, ‘natural’, carriers of meanings projected by society, that is, where the ‘raw material’ (Klein and Spary 2010) is acted upon and transformed into culture (O’Connor 2005; cf. Ingold 2000). This view of transforming raw materials may be easy to support when looking at small-​scale craft production, but as mass production opens up new ways of studying and relating to materials, such distinctions are harder to sustain (O’Connor 2005). The opposition of natural and artificial is further problematized by Bensaude-​Vincent and Newman (2007) who point out that 2 These views were expressed at the Inspiring Matter, Materials Education Symposium and Damadei conferences during 2012–​13.

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these concepts are highly dependent on the context in which the materials reside and the point of view of the individual or society that engages with them. Neither are properties of materials, as Ingold (2007:  1)  puts it, ‘fixed attributes of matter’, but rather, they are ‘processual and relational’. Within social science research today, materials are seen as neither fixed nor ‘natural’, but rather as entities created through social and cultural processes. Materials’ identities and classification methods transform with their changing associations: like artefacts, views of materials are never stable. Also, as Klein and Spary (2010: 2) recognize, knowledge about materials varies in form and may be located in a number of places, ranging from ineffable bodily skills and technical competence to articulated know-​ how and connoisseurship of materials:  from methods of measuring, data-​ gathering, tabulation and classification to analytical and theoretical knowledge. It is then clear that both the view of materials themselves and the knowledge created and shared through them are in constant flux and transformation, both ontologically and over different periods of time.

From alchemy and craft to design The search for the perfect material, ‘the one’, is not a new phenomenon. The medieval alchemist’s quest for the philosopher’s stone, or the elixir of life, for example, was premised on observations of the natural world:  namely, the ability of chemical and physical interactions to transform metals. However, it was informed by deeply rooted cultural values. The alchemist was attempting to find a way of taking control over nature by turning base metals into gold, striving for a specific construct of perfection. The alchemical methodology was driven by a quest to make the mundane sacred, making inexpensive material precious. The philosopher’s stone never materialized, but the cultural conditions that drove alchemical ambitions perpetuated practice even under conditions of recurring failure. After the Scientific Revolution, alchemy gave way to chemistry. Alchemy has since been criticized for being irrational and methodologically disordered and for having associations with the occult. However, researchers such as Moran (2005) and Newman (2006) argue that alchemy had a pivotal role in establishing the frameworks of thought which underlies much of our understanding of the material world today. Alchemy, in this context, might seem like an unlikely practice from which one can draw parallels due to its associations to the esoteric and superstitious, but Moran explains in his book Distilling Knowledge (2005) that these views are incommensurate and irrelevant to the study of alchemy as a practice. Alchemy was never something that people believed in, it was something that people did. The material transmutations and experimentations that took

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place were essential in the development of ideas and knowledge, which in turn evolved from practice. The link becomes more obvious when we, as Moran says, begin to consider physical processes and practical experiences themselves  –​the doing and the making of something through personal agency  –​as appropriate objects of discussion. The alchemists managed to bridge the physical and material, with the immaterial and spiritual. While doing so they produced knowledge and constructed ideas about the world. Creating, sustaining and sharing knowledge through material engagements is an essential part of humanity itself. Throughout times people have engaged with and created their worlds through manipulation of materials. In these close engagements, they inevitably get to know the materials in and out, how they behave under different circumstances and what methods produce the most optimal results. These forms of tacit knowledge are deeply embedded in both individuals and communities as a whole. With the Industrial Revolution came drastic changes in how people who create the objects we have around us engage with materials. When materials are known through direct bodily experience, design would stem from these engagements. After the rise of industrial design, materials started to be applied to preconceived forms, and now, for the first time in history, materials are even being designed for particular applications that can be subtly manipulated to fit specific requirements (Ball 1999a; Ashby and Johnson 2002). The Industrial Revolution led to the separation of body and material in making objects, and now human cultures are currently faced with an emerging paradigm in which even the people who might have sustained this relation between body and material the longest –​the designers –​struggle to understand and relate to the materials that constitute their creations.

Expectations on materials This lack of engagement with materials informs the ability for designers to have ideas and expectations on materials that are not always aligned with what materials actually can do. Where do these expectations come from? One explanation may be the focus on developments within the materials industry. These developments have made it possible to tailor materials to specific requirements. Materials can be built up molecule by molecule to exact specifications, and the media very quickly picks up on any advances. Materials such as graphene, comprised by a single layer of carbon atoms and is claimed to be the strongest material in the world, was described as a ‘miracle material’ by CNN (McKirdy 2014). It is thought to make it possible to fully charge your mobile phone in seconds. Spidersilk, ‘a near magical material’, which is stronger

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than steel, yet malleable and flexible, is finding potential uses in optics and computer chips, and it is reported by Wired to be made commercially viable by genetically engineered moths (Golson 2014). These super-​materials are taking centre stage in current discussions. According to the European Commission (Research & Innovation –​European Commission 2014), it is estimated that 70 per cent of product innovation is based on materials with new or improved properties. These reports, alongside media attention, tell stories of hope and the promise of endless possibilities and solutions, such as New Scientist’s feature on material innovations titled ‘Wonder Stuff: Seven New Materials to Change the World’ (2014). There is a sense among designers that ‘if it can’t do it, we’ll make it do it’. It is no wonder then that designers often think there is an instant solution to the problems that might arise within a design, provided by materials. It is when these expectations are not met, however, that the notion of failure arises within the design process.

Knowing materials in design today I started working with a materials consultancy during my product design training. It was a studio run by industrial designers that specialized in researching materials and manufacturing processes. The work was initially built upon sourcing materials to inspire designers. This involved taking often very technical and complex information about materials from suppliers and making it accessible and engaging so that designers could see the potential of the materials and become excited by sometimes very mundane substrates. Other times, work was based around state-​of-​the-​art new materials and how designers might be able to incorporate these into their concepts. Workshops, presentations and ideation sessions were used to get people talking and working with things they had often never heard of previously. As the years passed, the focus of the work became less about providing inspiration, and more about directly helping clients to innovate through materials. The design process was completely driven by the materials; the materials provided the ideas and the thinking; they became the tool by which clients could differentiate themselves from competitors. One studio that has such a materials-​led approach to design is Barber Osgerby, one of Britain’s most prominent design studios. It has in the past few years been awarded some of the highest profile projects a designer could potentially work on. In 2012, they became well known with the wider public as the designers of the London Olympic torch. Although already well established in the field of design, and especially within UK and European cities, this commission launched them to global prominence. The Olympic Torch project

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placed them at the forefront of design as the torch was a highly engineered piece with a production that utilized state-​of-​the-​art technology, while creating something recognizable and appealing for the masses, showcasing British design at its best. In 2015, they were working on a new two-​ pound coin for the United Kingdom which would not only reach the eye and awareness of the masses, but also their hands and pockets. It is quite unique for designers to work on a piece that will permeate society on such a scale, especially perhaps for a studio like Barber Osgerby that often designs products that will only reach a niche market. Being a design studio that, at least initially, verged on boutique, aspirational and exclusive projects  –​sometimes described as ‘design for designers’  –​Barber Osgerby has created an array of interesting furniture pieces, installations and products that push how things can be made and what they can look like. They are challenging materials, manufacturing and product archetypes. In doing so they alter the way people think about products, the objects in their everyday life and the expectations they have of them. The ability to do so lies inherently in their design process. At their talk during the London Design Festival in 2015, part of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Global Design Forum, they explained how much they value experimentation, and it is the urge to explore that pushes their design work. In their own terms, they envision their methodologies as those of an artist; they form a sense of intimacy with their materials and processes, proportions and scale through a playful and carefree experimentation process. These investigations often start off as a self-​initiated project outside of the client work, where freedom can sometimes be more restricted. But they make it very clear that it is these experiments and understandings that lead to the innovative and inspirational results in their work as a whole, enticing clients and users time after time. Without the desire and ability to explore, it is unlikely Barber Osgerby would be the highly regarded design duo they are today.

Experimenting as way to knowing What is it in the process of exploration that gives the secret ingredients to success? Experimentation in itself, from the point of view of practitioners, is about trying out things, testing what is possible, observing and recording and theorizing how things can be achieved, without being too fixed on an end result. It is a process of the unknown, where the map is blurry and the paths obscure. It is about having fun, being lost and the excitement of what can be found. This takes both confidence and courage; on a more practical level, it also takes stamina and the will to sacrifice time, money and energy into something that might not give anything in return. There might be more

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failures than opportunities along the way, as the whole process builds on the method of trial and error. But it is just these failures, these halfway attempts, that allow the designers to work out the way forward, to find directions that might be completely unexpected –​twist and turns that no one could foresee –​ that then will find an outlet in their work that has the allure of the new and innovative. This is what keeps design moving forward, a process where failure is an integral part in pushing the boundaries of what is possible. This approach, while supporting a romantic idealism that my informants often own in discussing their creative processes, is very rarely a reality in design projects. Very often the materials are considered last minute, when the design is already far down the line. The materials are treated as a surface finish, something that sits with the texture and colour a product should have. Other times, materials come into importance when there is a specific problem to solve. The product might be 95 per cent there, but there is something that is not completely resolved. Materials are then chosen based on the hope that they might solve a design problem in the end-​stages of the project. Designers can then draw up a list of criteria of what they want from a material, which is often long, contradictory and sometimes completely unrealistic. For example, during one end-​stage a designer specified that the project ‘needs to feel like glass, it can’t be “sticky” like plastic, but it can’t be glass. It needs to be scratch-​resistant and feel really smooth and [be] available in unlimited colours’. Others ask that ‘it can never have been seen before, but needs to be available for production at the end of the month. It can only cost 0.2 cents per unit’. Or, ‘There should be three different options for us to choose from and the deadline is in a week’s time.’ In short, expectations are both high and highly paradoxical. As an industrial designer, one might work on several different projects simultaneously, often designing things without having a clear understanding of how exactly it will be made. The concepts and forms are conceived and built on inspiration that might be completely unrelated to the materials out of which the product will be made; and engineers will always have their last say in how close to the designer’s vision the final result will actually be. Designers use sketching, computer 3D modelling and model making in foam board, blue foam and chemiwood (an all-​purpose modelling resin) to test and develop the design (Figure 2.1). Although helpful in many ways, these designers create a type of an ‘empty shell’ that requires imagination in order to ascribe materials. In other words, the modelling materials allow designers to manipulate and visualize a raw concept, but they do not necessarily reflect an understanding of the materials that will form a prototype. The materials that are going to be used in the final design are understood and experienced through small sample swatches, long documents with endless numbers of specifications. Colours are chosen using paper or plastic chips not larger than a thumbnail. Needless to

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FIGURE  2.1   Chemiwood getting shaped by the CNC router for prototyping. Shapes and proportions of a design can easily be tested with these models, but it is hard to truly understand how the production materials will perform. Photo by Jamie Cronk, courtesy of author. say, the processes industrial designers use to incorporate materials into their visions are far from the engagements of a traditional craftsman that might have worked completely embedded with the same material throughout a lifetime. The experimentation process is very natural and intrinsic to a craft-​based practice, which is also close to the heart of many design studios. When, however, a process is more industrialized, it can be harder to find means for this exploration to truly get to ‘know’ a material and its processes. In larger industrial design firms, it is common for material suppliers to come in on a regular basis to advertise their catalogues and capabilities in both general terms and in relation to specific projects. It is of great importance to have long-​standing and established relationships with these suppliers, as it is only through a great understanding of what they can and cannot do and in what ways things can be resolved that a high standard of design can be sustained. It is also in the interest of the material suppliers to make their products known and understood by designers, so that they will be considered for projects. Thus, a mutual dependency is developed where both parties benefit from a close and positive connection.

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FIGURE 2.2   A range of material samples in various sizes and forms, used by designers to imagine applications and better understand the materials. Photo by author.

A meeting is typically arranged between a sales or technical representative from the supplier, designers, colour material finish specialists and perhaps project managers from the design firm. The supplier will often show a presentation that begins with the background of the company, the chemical composition and mechanical characteristics of the material and the relevant processing information that designers need to take into consideration when designing. As creative-​ minded designers, my informants often find this information both hard to digest and difficult to translate, and it is often when physical samples are brought out that the information is truly first understood. Suppliers will, most of the time, bring samples of the raw material and describe how the material is made into parts and plaques or swatches of different variations, such as hardness, colour and texture (Figure  2.2). This gives the designers an idea of what can be made, how it will look and perform and what restrictions there are in the design. As suppliers are understandably keen to implement their materials successfully in a design, they ideally want to be involved from the beginning of a project. The sooner they can discuss opportunities and limitations of their products, the sooner the design can be adapted to fit with the materials, processing and technologies required. In some cases, this becomes the driver for the design. Design teams can be so keen to use a specific material or supplier that they consciously or subconsciously make the design fit within the scope of the supplier. If a supplier is leading in their

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field in terms of quality or range, this might be a determinant in terms of how the design is finalized. More often than not, however, the suppliers are brought in at a much later stage. As materials in industrial design can, in many cases, be considered as an afterthought, applied only at the end of the process, suppliers often find themselves frustrated as their materials are not able to meet the expectations of the designers, or, even if they are, only at a very high price. A design idea that is visualized through a hand sketch, a computer rendering or a workshop model can give a highly appealing impression and is often sold to a client on this basis. This, however, can lack the foundation of a solid material specification. Suppliers are only brought in once the design is conceptually sound and sold to the client. At this stage, the client will have their own image of the product and their own desires for its presentation and function, yet the ‘material’ design of the product might not yet be envisioned. As a result, problems and friction often arise around how to materialize the concept.

Constructive failures A lack of communication around materials can sometimes profoundly inform the commercial success or the conceptual demise of a novel product, and a failure at this stage can result in the design not meeting the expectations of either the designers, the clients and the material suppliers or, ultimately, the users. However, undeveloped relationships between suppliers and designers do not always end in the social failure of the product. When designers can explore a design freely, without the constraints imposed by materials and processes, unexpected results may happen that take a project in a different direction. The, perhaps, naivety of a designer in using materials they are not fully familiar with can lead to experimentation, and this type of creative testing can reframe the boundaries of a material. The designer in this regard becomes akin to a craftsman who knows his or her skill inside and out. The nature of current industrial design often creates a gap in knowledge of what is feasible in material expectations and processing, and I argue that it is just in this gap that new thoughts can emerge that might not otherwise have found themselves to the surface. There is clear failure here. The materials might come to perform in ways that radically disrupt the expectations of the actors within the industry, but this failure can open up new ideas in processing, producing new materialities that radically inform elements, ingredients and products. Designers commonly work with materials from emotional, functional and sensorial points of view, with an increased use of materials as a starting point for mass-​produced objects. Rather than applying a material at the end of

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the design process, materials are now for the first time in history designed for particular applications (Ball 1999b; Ashby and Johnson 2002). Within anthropology there have been recent debates of materials, materiality, objects and their relation to people and each other (Ingold 2007; Miller 2005; Buchli 2002; Küchler 2008). These studies argue that materials have been overlooked in favour of the objects they constitute and/​or their associated meanings; on these later aspects extensive research has been undertaken. Within material culture studies, Ingold (2007) expresses that some confusion has arisen around the fluidity of the boundaries of materials, materiality and objects. Furthermore, he highlights how ‘the stuff things are made of’ highlights a separation of ‘brute matter’ from the social side of materials. It is just this separation, and the focus on the social rather than the material, itself, that has lately been heavily debated in anthropological and archaeological discussion. In short, materials have often been replaced by the meanings associated with objects. This change of perspective on materials calls for further research into their role, view and function. In addition, these made-​to-​measure materials, as well as smart materials and nano-​materials, have inherent functions previously not associated with the material, such as self-​cleaning glass or auxetic materials, which expand in width when stretched lengthwise. This ‘technological materiality’, as Küchler (2008) names it, creates further separation between people and materials as mediums start to behave in often counter-​ intuitive and unusual ways. However, this novel materiality also makes it possible to pose new questions regarding peoples’ ideas of and relationships with the material world, and it even has the potential to challenge the dichotomy between categories of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ on which science has relied on for so long (ibid.). Materials that transform according to outer stimuli (such as changing colour when exposed to light, or expand and contract when temperatures change) are used to create ‘organisms’, robots and products that seem to have a life of their own. These robots are perceived simultaneously as artificial and as living organisms while our bodies, or a tree, equally can be thought of as machines. This forces us to rethink dualistic ideas around nature and artifice. The engagements between designers and materials today elucidate many views on materials, such as data from engineers and the idea in the designer’s mind of infinite aesthetic opinions, sensorial qualities and emotional associations. However, modern industrial designers often lack direct engagement with materials, leading to the paradoxical expectations described in this chapter. As materials are now, within the imagination of designers, increasingly ‘unknown’ entities, it becomes possible for those who work with these ambiguous mediums to construct high hopes and to believe in the capabilities of materials to solve problem both known and unforeseen. Yet, as designers struggle to negotiate their dealings with materials, they

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frequently find them to be incommensurate with their needs, and failure becomes inevitable.

The role of imagination in innovation In a capitalist society largely based on consumer culture, the concept of innovation has become a key parameter. Companies have embraced the idea of innovating both their products and also themselves in order to stay ahead of their competitors. This is certainly of high interest to the UK government as the health and wealth of the country’s industries hugely affects its economy as a whole. There are several schemes and projects in place to facilitate innovation. In terms of engineering, materials and manufacturing, one of the most prolific programmes is the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN). KTN was established by the UK government’s innovation agency (Innovate UK) and, as an organization, aims to connect scientists, creativity and business in order to aid innovation, solve problems and find markets for new ideas. As a major UK-​ based network, my work, both as a professional designer and an academic, has come in contact with it in multiple fieldwork and seminar contexts. In connecting sectors, disciplines and skills with the right collaborations and business approaches, they strive to help unlock the ‘tremendous hidden value in people and companies’ (as stated on their website; see KTN (2016)). They work with all areas of the economy, defence, aerospace, the creative industries and material design. Within material design sectors, they cater for people who work with traditional materials, new innovations and emerging technologies. Their services include developing industry magazines and newsletters, holding networking and educational events, providing information regarding funding opportunities and working as consultants on individual projects. All these endeavours are designed to establish connections and links between people and companies that can bring innovation to success. My ethnographic position often afforded me opportunity to attend and participate in these events. On one particular evening, about fifteen people with different backgrounds came together to discuss the needs and wishes of everyone involved in relation to KTN’s capabilities to aid material innovation. The room was comprised of designers who run their own studio, some at the beginning of their career and some who had been in the industry for decades. In addition, colour material finish (CMF) experts working for larger design studios and material scientists specializing in rubbers, composites, metals and ceramics were present. There were also visiting engineers from architecture firms, as well as several representatives from KTN, all looking after a specific segment of their activities. The composition of the attendees was carefully considered to facilitate the most constructive and engaging

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discussion. KTN designed this diversity in order to receive input on what people expect and wish from their services, as well as for the designers in the room to understand how and where KTN can help. In advance of the meeting, all attendees were able to submit specific questions or enquiries they might have come across in their work. Some of the questions were specifically related to their difficulties to innovate with materials in certain areas, such as aviation, as there are so many restrictions and certifications to which the materials need to comply. Furthermore, innovation becomes difficult in these kinds of projects because, especially within aviation, design projects are usually held to a tight timeline and a stringent budget. The bureaucratic and scientific testing processes a material needs to go through to be properly certified for use in aviation are often so timely, costly and strict that innovation can be stifled. This was a common concern expressed by designers, and they articulated their frustrations at the meetings, openly asking if there are any ways to improve this recurring paradigm. Solutions to these problems are not easily found, and no one expected to solve the issues in the session, but in the context of KTN, questions raised and conversations started could potentially lead to improvements in these processes. A second enquiry was relating to composites. A small design studio had the opportunity to work in a new area for composites and explained how they employ the process of using the material as a starting point. They were working with a supplier to really understand how their material can be used, what opportunities it has in terms of properties and characteristics and what the counterproductive aspects are. By understanding the manufacturing process in detail, it becomes possible to see where the boundaries can be pushed and how the material can be used in a novel way. This led the discussion to the role of the designer, being a person of vision, linking together realities of the material present and visions of a potential material future. One of the scientists burst out, saying: ‘Do designers think anything is possible?’, being keen to take the designers ideas and thoughts of how things could or should be as a starting point for pushing scientific research into new materials. As the frustrations within the room mounted, the intensity of participants rose and the potential of these relationships became clearer, the request ‘Tell us your dream material’ was voiced, again from one of the material scientists. With the creative and sometimes unrestricted mind of a designer, the scientists were hoping to explore ground that had previously been outside of their realm. This short but intense evening event highlighted some of the key points in creating a constructive environment for dialogue between people who can actually drive innovation forward. As designers come up against constraints and problems with materials, they can gain help from skilled scientists, engineers and researchers that are usually outside their reach. Likewise, as scientists often find it hard to bring a material innovation to successful

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application without the insights of the designers in terms of understanding how a potential user will appreciate the material, they can directly air their questions and gain insight into design requirements from a creative’s perspective. When designers, scientists and material developers hit a dead end –​where their knowledge or resources finds its limits, where a material seemingly fails –​there is potential to bridge the gaps with shared discussions. The ‘failure’ of a material not only leads to the potential to leap forward, but also facilitates social bonding and the bringing together of people that many times operate without relations to each other. The tricky, non-​ conforming and obstructive materials these people are working with have the potential to gather knowledge and expertise that can create something far more productive than ‘fixing’ a broken material, with the chance of stumbling upon something truly innovative.

Conclusion The failure of materials to live up to designers’ expectations is surely very distressing and real for the people involved in these projects. It can cause sleepless nights and cancelled holidays and eats up large parts of already tight budgets. However, these failures are also integral to imagining different futures and are often the foundation of design innovation. In addition, for an anthropologist, these material failures can be used as a unique window for understanding social relations and material ontologies within a society. As Moran (2005) points out, this intellectual space admits new possibilities; failed, as well as successful, attempts to make things converge in the messy act of conceiving knowledge. These failures, arising from the designers’ search for a ‘miracle material’, thus show us the miracle of materials.

References Ashby, M. F., and K. Johnson (2002) Materials and Design: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design. Oxford: Butterworth-​Heinemann. Ball, P. (1999a) Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ball, P. (1999b) ‘Introduction –​The Art of Making’. In Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century, by Philip Ball, new ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bensaude-​Vincent, B., and W. R. Newman (2007) The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity. MIT Press. Buchli, V. (2002) The Material Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg.

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Conneller, C. (2011) An Archaeology of Materials Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe. New York: Routledge. Golson, J. (2014) ‘Genetically-​Engineered Moths Make Spider Silk for Flameproof Pants (Wired UK)’. Wired UK. July 11. Online at:  http://​www.wired.co.uk/​ news/​archive/​2014-​07/​11/​spider-​silk-​production. Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling & Skill. London and New York: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2007) ‘Materials against Materiality’. Archaeological Dialogues Vol. 14, No. 01, 1–​16. doi:10.1017/​S1380203807002127. Klein, U., and E. C. Spary (2010) Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘The Knowledge Transfer Network’ (2016) Online at: http://​www.ktn-​uk.co.uk/​ about/​(accessed 21 June). Küchler, S. (2008) ‘Technological Materiality beyond the Dualist Paradigm’. Theory, Culture & Society Vol. 25, No. 1, 101–​20. doi:10.1177/​ 0263276407085159. McKirdy, E. (2014) ‘ “Miracle Material” Graphene One Step Closer to Commercial Use’. CNN, April 10. Online at: http://​www.cnn.com/​2014/​04/​10/​world/​asia/​ graphene-​samsung-​breakthrough/​index.html. Miller, D. (2005) Materiality. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. Moran, B. T. (2005) Distilling Knowledge Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Online at: http://​site. ebrary.com/​id/​10314277. Newman, W. R. (2006) Atoms and Alchemy Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Online at: http://​public.eblib.com/​EBLPublic/​PublicView.do?ptiID=616053. O’Connor, K. (2005) ‘The Other Half: The Material Culture of New Fibres’. In Clothing as Material Culture, edited by Susanne Küchler and Daniel Miller, 41–​59. Oxford: Berg. ‘Research & Innovation –​European Commission’ (2014) Accessed 17 November. Online at: http://​ec.europa.eu/​research/​industrial_​technologies/​promotional-​ material_​en.html. Various. (2014) ‘Wonder Stuff: Seven New Materials to Change the World’. New Scientist, October 11, sec. FEATURES. Online at: http://​www.lexisnexis. com/​uk/​nexis/​docview/​getDocForCuiReq?lni=5DC7-​HKV1-​JBPJ-​72KP&csi=1 58275&oc=00240&perma=true.

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3 When Krishna wore a kimono: Deity clothing as rupture and inefficacy Urmila Mohan

Introduction The ‘International Society for Krishna Consciousness’ (Iskcon) was founded in New York in 1966 as a spiritual revitalization movement, educational institution and corporation by a relatively unknown Indian guru named Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–​ 1977). Iskcon is a neo-​ Brahmanical, Hindu, missionizing group and a sect of Gaudiya or Bengali Vaishnavism: Vaishnavs are those who worship Vishnu, one of the main three deities in the Hindu pantheon apart from Brahma and Shiva, and Gaudiya Vaishnavs elevate the worship of the medieval saint and mystic Chaitanya as an incarnation of Krishna, in turn a form of Vishnu. The organization’s philosophy is popularly known as ‘Krishna Consciousness’, referring to a message of salvation through bhakti or personalized devotion to the deity Krishna. Krishna Consciousness initially expanded in the United States and Europe, and later in areas such as the former Soviet Union. The movement has grown over the past fifty years with approximately six hundred temples worldwide and a congregation drawn from various countries. The group emphasizes Vedic1 scripture and orthopraxy but also initiates non-​Indians and non-​Hindus A reference to the Vedas, the four texts that constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hindu philosophy. 1

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as Brahmins, the highest level in the Hindu caste system. Iskcon was initially ignored in India as a marginal sect of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. However, with support from its international congregation and the Indian diaspora, Iskcon has established a presence in most major Indian cities and towns, with its influence felt most strongly in the state of West Bengal. The organization’s spiritual headquarters are in Mayapur, a town that is a four-​hour drive north of the state’s capital of Kolkata and the place where Iskcon devotees believe that Chaitanya was born. The data in this chapter was collected during fieldwork at the Chandrodaya temple in Mayapur. Temple worship in Iskcon Mayapur, as in many other Hindu sects, centres on the deity’s sentient image (murti) and includes the offering of beautiful custom-​made garments. Iskcon prides itself on maintaining a worship standard that pleases the deities. Devotees believe that satisfied deities lead to a satisfied congregation and that the deity must be clothed opulently to make them ‘gracious’ and ‘merciful’ and to generate devotional efficacy.2 Beautiful clothing also strengthens the deity. In Hindu worship of murtis, the process of ornamenting the deities is called alankaara, which in Sanskrit means ‘to make sufficient or strengthen, to make adequate’ (Dehejia 2009: 24). To be without ornament is ‘to provoke the forces of inauspiciousness, to expose oneself to danger, even to court danger’ (24). In this chapter, I explore deity garments in Mayapur as relational networks of objects and people and focus on two instances when garments failed. The word ‘efficacy’ is related to the Latin term efficere, meaning, ‘to accomplish’. Efficacy in theistic religions often involves acts that draw upon the original ontological efficacy of God as the being that has no cause outside itself. The concept of efficacy has been explored from some different perspectives in ritual studies with scholars variously emphasizing the importance of embodiment, performativity, materiality, emergence and deviation (Bell 1992; Hüsken 2007; Mauss 2003 [1909]; Podeman 2006; Schieffelin 1996). Efficacy, according to Mauss (2003 [1909]: 51), refers to the postulated success of rituals by a community and the belief that a certain ritual will bring about a specific outcome. Mauss also invokes the value of habits and bodily techniques, taken up by Bourdieu (1990: 53) in his study of social practice through habitus or ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions’. In such studies, the shared assumption was that the boundaries of religious groups followed ethnic and geographic, if not national, boundaries. The concept of habitus deals with the tacit realm of production and transmission of knowledge and relationships. Appadurai (1996:  44)  argues that traditional notions of locatedness in habitus are insufficient in explaining sociocultural reproduction complicated by human mobility. The simultaneous For more on this subject, see Mohan (2015). 2

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mobility of images and people creates ruptures between tradition and modernity, and challenges identities hitherto bound by local, regional and national spaces. Where formerly bodily techniques and habits situated the person in a specific environment,3 skills have been increasingly pushed away from habituation towards an aesthetic of the ephemeral. This leads us to explore the affordances of the ‘virtual’ in people’s interactions with images and re-​evaluate the temporal and spatial references of digital photography and film. Appadurai (1996:  33)  analyses globalization as an uneven topography of scapes such as ethno, media and technoscapes –​concepts used to describe the landscapes of people in a shifting world. Dwyer (2004: 196) extends this paradigm to the ‘religioscape’, a dynamic space that interacts with other scapes. Appadurai (1996) suggests that we should study the phenomena of rupture or disjuncture between various scapes and the ways communities try to reconstitute themselves (and their politics) through the emplacement of practice in new locales, that is, through processes of de-​and re-​territorialization. He cautions that with re-​ location comes the need for ‘conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences’ (44). Using Appadurai’s insights, I  suggest that it is more productive to study Iskcon as a product of cultural and social translocation that involves irregularities, rather than a smooth spatio-​temporal flow. This chapter analyses deity garment failures as moments of material and aesthetic disjuncture, indicative of dynamics of de-​and re-​ territorialization in the contemporary religioscape of a preaching group. By situating the event of failure in and around the Iskcon ritual of deity dressing, I  hope to show how underlying tensions in religious efficacy are exposed during moments of disjuncture.

The visual and material aesthetics of darshan Part of the study of materiality in Iskcon involves an understanding of its anti-​ and de-​materializing ontology wherein ‘pessimism about material existence is a criterion for spiritual advancement’ (Goswami 2012:  100). Humans and objects are considered matter and as such possess a profound ambivalence in Iskcon. One needs objects and other humans to live in the world but devotees believe that the wrong kind can lead them astray towards illusion (maaya) through the pursuit of consumption and sensory gratification. Therefore, the philosophical solution has been to distinguish the ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ 3 See Mohan and Warnier (forthcoming) for a study of bodily techniques and their relation to materiality and subjectivation in religion.

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based on the user’s intentions and whether the entity can be used for Krishna. Such an orientation automatically excludes meat-​eating, gambling, intoxicants, non-​procreative sex and any kind of activity deemed licentious. Devotees believe that choosing to perform actions that are in service of Krishna helps move people away from the negativity of the material world and closer to spiritual transformation and salvation. Matter is hence not all the same, with many materials seen as potential devotional substances transformed through a combination of injunctions (vidhi) and creative-​emotive aesthetics (raaga),4 also the two axes of devotion in Gaudiya Vaishnavism. In this chapter, the success of a garment will be related to its frequent visibility on the altar and the dynamics by which some deity garments are chosen over others.5 I  propose the consideration of two outfits as failures since they were only worn once. Although devotees rarely identify deity garments as successes or failures, there is nevertheless an awareness of what is appealing in a garment and how to use materials to achieve a certain effect. To understand the importance of aesthetics let us consider how garment offerings become efficacious in the Hindu worship process of mutually embodied sight or darshan. Hindu murtis are not just figures but are believed to be the actual embodiment of divinity (saakshath bhagwaan). Darshan in temple worship involves an exchange of perspectives between devotee and deity (Babb 1981; Eck 1981). The concept of darshan harkens back to a theory of extro-​missive sight where visual rays stream from the viewer’s eye to touch the form of the object. The latter then moves back along the visual ray to imprint itself in the memory of the viewer. For the devotee, visuality thus becomes a means to substantially transform oneself through a partaking of divine form, gaze and substance. Events in Hindu mythology such as the ‘Mahabharata’6 and practices in other Hindu sects support a general belief in the power of sight as transformative substance (Bhatti and Pinney 2011; Eck 1985; Gonda 1969). For example, the accumulation of sight as potent substance helps make the early morning darshan in the Mayapur temple the most auspicious one of the day. The deities at such a darshan have just woken up and can provide freshness and strength to the congregation through their gaze and presence. 4 Non-​English (Sanskrit, Bengali and Hindi) terms have been italicized. Words that have become part of the English language (dhoti, sari, Vaishnav) are not italicized. Diacritical marks have not been used. Instead of diacritical marks, I have inserted an extra vowel to indicate emphasis as in raaga and added an h in words such as Chaitanya and achaarya. However, a single vowel is used for consistency with commonly referenced terms. Hence, Mahabharata and sari. 5 See Mohan (2016) for an exploration of how devotee garments and paraphernalia mediate ritual efficacy. 6 The Mahabharata is a Hindu epic that describes the war between the Pandava and Kaurava clans. The story of Gandhari, wife of the blind king Dritharasthra, illustrates the benevolent and terrifying results of accumulated potency in sight.

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FIGURE  3.1   Altar decorated for Krishna’s birthday, Janmastami, Mayapur, 2012. Note the various cameras being used to document the altar. Photo by author. Worship practices such as the waving of lamps in front of the deities also help to reiterate the connection between sight, light and enlightenment. Vision is hence a conduit of sensory, cognitive and metaphysical intimacy, with the deities’ garments and decoration significantly impacting the success or failure of the devotional exchange. The presiding deities of any Iskcon temple are Krishna and his female consort Radha (Figure  3.1). The Mayapur altar also includes the Astasakhis (literally ‘eight female friends’ in Sanskrit)  –​the gopiis or milkmaids who accompany the main deities. Devotion in the temple is clearly manifested as service (seva) where priests and devotees are engaged in attending to the deities much like a king in his court. The beautiful altar, priestly attendance, bathing of the deity in different substances and sumptuous food offerings for the deities help heighten the aura of the deities’ power and create a mood of festivity and opulence. Devotees in Mayapur are proud of the fact that they do not dress the deities plainly but attempt to create a mood (bhaava) in the temple through the beauty of the altar. A typical Iskcon altar depicts the two deities as youths in the sacred town of Vrindavan in north India where Krishna is believed to have spent his childhood. Krishna is depicted as a cowherd boy in a typical dancing posture. He is dressed in a long loincloth (dhoti), shawl (chaadar) and a large turban with a signature peacock feather in the turban and flute in his hands. Radha

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is a milkmaid/​cowherd girl (gopi) and her outfit consists of a skirt (lehenga), blouse (choli) and scarf (odhani). The draping of shining garments, necklaces and freshly made garlands helps accentuate the beauty of the altar and the animation of Krishna’s dancing posture. Garments are colourful and ornate, and are changed twice a day with the nightdress7 being seen at the early morning reception (mangala arati) at 4:30 a.m. and the day-​ dress being revealed at the morning reception (shringaar arati) at 7:00 a.m. The mangala arati is believed to be the most intimate one, where deities are presented in relatively simpler clothing than the decorated shringaar arati. The latter is the darshan whose images are most widely circulated and that people generally associate with the deities. Daily darshan pictures are posted on the temple’s website (www.mayapur. com) and circulated through email, social networking sites, text messages and smartphone applications. The visual and affective power of these images is resonated through other media such as calendars, posters, stickers, magnets and badges. By comparison, in a Gaudiya Vaishnav temple in the neighbouring town of Nabadwip there is far less emphasis on the altar. Here, the deities would be dressed more simply in a cotton dhoti or sari bought from the market, with people, in general, being less concerned about the representation of the deity’s image beyond the town.8

Behind the altar curtain In Mayapur, the combined effort and coordination of multiple groups of devotees is required to make the altar darshan-​worthy. One group consists of the people in the temple’s sewing and embroidery room who work to produce the clothing and the main decorations. The second consists of women and young girls who assemble every morning to make fresh garlands and flower decorations for the altar. The third consists of women and young girls who adorn the wigs for the deities and make garlands and other ornaments. And the fourth group consists of the various male priests responsible for gathering the elements produced by the other three groups, assembling the ornate turbans and draping the garments. This discussion focuses on the activities of devotees in the temple’s sewing room and the priests who dress the deities.

The term ‘dress’ is commonly used for both male and female deities and does not have a gendered connotation. 8 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe Nabadwip’s practices, but I noticed that Iskcon’s influence and the competition to attract tourists and devotees is slowly changing the town. Some of the temples I visited in Nabadwip dressed their deities in the typical opulent Iskcon style. 7

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I spoke with a senior priest Gangaprasad9 in his office in the temple where he defined an effective darshan as one where ‘you feel some relationship with Krishna’. Reflecting on this a bit further he went on: Because we are a preaching movement we want to inspire the pilgrims when they come to Mayapur. We try and create this festival mood so that they can come here and leave all their material worries and rise above their consciousness. The temple president told me to work up to a standard of worship and darshan so that the pilgrims on seeing the beauty of the deity and the decorations will faint! Everything on the altar is staged and oriented for the pleasure of the congregation during darshan with an emphasis on frontal display. The hope is that the visual impact of the deities will create an impression that lasts with the devotee through the day and brings him or her back to the temple. The word ‘faint’ invokes the possibility of a devotee being so overwhelmed by the beauty of the altar so as to lose consciousness. Simultaneously, such an experience is meant to elevate pilgrims above everyday material concerns and move them into a transcendental realm of Krishna Consciousness where every aspect of the self is filled with thoughts and activities of the deity. In the context of darshanic exchange, the aesthetics of the altar are key to the creation of an elaborate visual spectacle that attracts and orients a devotee towards Krishna. Indeed, according to a devotee who works as an embroiderer in the temple, the most important quality of deity garments in Mayapur is ‘shining’ or ‘glaze’, both of which refer to the importance of brilliance. In his view, the radiance of glittering sequins, the shimmering of silks and the flow of long garlands and draped fabric made the deities appear luminous and alive. Devotees used terms such as ‘opulent’ and ‘effulgent’ to refer both to the efficacious physical properties of the deity’s appearance as well as the qualities of absolute intelligence, perfection and beauty. Brilliance and sight are also associated with the auspiciousness and purity of newness, and effective darshans rely on the production of attractive garments and decoration.

The failed garments I will now briefly describe the case studies of two failed outfits. The events that I  discuss took place before I  arrived in Mayapur, and I  have attempted to reconstruct them from interviews with devotees and photos of the altars along with observation of the temple’s daily routine. Material reminders of Devotees have been given pseudonyms to protect their identities. 9

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FIGURE 3.2   Photos of two failed garments affixed to the wall of the temple sewing room, Mayapur, 2012. To the left is a photo of the gopa outfit and to the right is the kimono outfit. Photo by author. these outfits remain as photographic prints (Figure 3.2) taped by dressmakers and embroiderers onto the walls of the temple’s sewing room alongside calendars featuring more popular garments. The first image in Figure  3.2 refers to the gopa or cowherd outfit, made for the festival of Gopashtami in 2006, and the second image is of the kimono outfit, made for the festival of Gaur Purnima in 2007. Both outfits were made as community projects by international devotees and were supervised by senior devotees.

The gopa dress The gopa outfit celebrates the day when Krishna is old enough to tend the cows. It was designed by a pair of foreign devotees Madhavi and Daivapriya who had adopted Hindu names at the time of their initiation into Iskcon and lived in Mayapur. The design featured Radha dressed (or rather disguised) as a male cowherd. The gopa outfits were inspired by a story from Krishna’s life when Radha dressed as a gopa (male cowherd) and went out into the forest to meet

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Krishna. Madhavi described how Daivapriya had wanted to make a gopa dress for Radha and that Madhavi, being the more senior of the two, had conveyed this idea to Gangaprasad. Much later, the priest had given them permission with the caveat that not just Radha, but all of the gopis had to be dressed as gopas. Madhavi saw this as a sign of divine sanction to go ahead and make the garments. She made the outfit with the help of women and children in the community, describing the detail that went into it including the careful wrapping of ribbon on the herding sticks. Like most festival altars, the various elements of the altar, such as the background and floral decorations, had been designed to emphasize the deities. According to Madhavi, when the curtains opened: There was such an uproar! Half of the community, or more than half loved it and were like ‘Wow, it’s fantastic!’ but then some people got really uptight about it. They said there is no precedent for this in our line. But it is in our line, we are Gaudiya Vaishnavs. And we are followers of Rupa Goswami who is the one who reveals their pastimes … There is precedent for doing things on a special occasion. As noted by Madhavi, although more than half the community liked the garment, some were ‘uptight’. When confronted with this mixed response, Madhavi became anxious and unsure about the status of the garments: ‘Radharaani10 is disguising herself as a cowherd boy to sneak off into the forest and normally our mood of worshipping Radha-​Krishna is much more of reverence … So to think that we can worship him so intimately, you know, we have to be careful.’ In order to understand what dressmakers had to be ‘careful’ about, one must look at historical and contemporary concerns in Iskcon. Madhavi invoked the name of Rupa Goswami (1489–​ 1564), a Gaudiya Vaishnav saint, and validated the making of the gopa outfits as being ‘in our line’. By doing so, she was drawing on the importance of lineage and disciplic succession or paramparaa where actions and thoughts are validated by being situated within a particular tradition of gurus and scholarly interpretation. The saint, poet and philosopher Rupa Goswami is considered the most famous and influential of the ‘Six Goswamis’ of Vrindavan, associated with Chaitanya. Rupa established the theoretical and esoteric foundation of Chaitanya Gaudiya Vaishnavism with writings that claimed to uncover sacred areas of Vrindavan related to Radha, Krishna and the gopis. He described devotional practice as the way to experience aesthetic feelings (rasa) and dwelt on the loving pastimes (leelas) of the divine couple as the means to evoke spirituality. By invoking his name, Madhavi was claiming a connection A typically Iskcon term of respect for Radha as raani or queen. 10

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to Rupa Goswami and his philosophy of spiritual awakening through the contemplation of divine, mystical love. Simultaneously, she was conscious of a theological emphasis that was specific to Iskcon, dealing with the issue of what was considered appropriate practice for neophyte devotees. Madhavi was concerned that being too familiar with the deity would lead to being a sahajiya, a topic that often cropped up in my conversations with other devotees. The word sahajiya comes from the Sanskrit term for easy (sahaja) and the sahajiyas are a Vaishnav sect in West Bengal who worship Radha and Krishna but incorporate elements such as sexual practices and ingestion of human substances. For Madhavi, to be sahajiya was to be licentious and try and establish a fake and inefficacious intimacy with the deity. She was ambivalent about invoking the intimate pastimes of Radha and Krishna through their clothing. Concerns over sahajiyas indexed the tensions that arose between the need for dressmakers and priests to balance the closeness of a physical and subjective intimacy with the deity on the altar, with the distance of reverence, and the fear of crossing boundaries and appearing too ‘easy’. Let us now move on to the case of the failed kimono garments.

The kimono dress The kimono outfit was another community project made by international devotees and supervised by a senior devotee Daivapriya. Offered on Gaur Purnima, perhaps the most important day for devotees since it celebrates the birth of the saint Chaitanya (also considered an incarnation of Krishna), this second instance of failure began when a group of Chinese devotees undertook a pilgrimage to Mayapur in 2007. Bringing with them offerings of silk fabric for the deities the pilgrims spoke of austere conditions for the devotees in China where they could not openly show their religious affiliation and where physical displays such as prayer beads and body markings were forbidden. Once in Mayapur, the town where they believed Chaitanya was born, the devotees were eager to do something for the deities. In a reciprocatory fashion, the senior priest and Daivapriya also wanted to demonstrate their appreciation and recognition of these devotees who were able to sustain their devotion under such adversity. A keen proponent of ‘Krishna Consciousness’, Daivapriya also saw this as an opportunity to make something that would attract devotees in East Asia as well as signal the temple’s support of its global branches. Being of East Asian origin herself, Daivapriya designed a wraparound garment that while a fusion between Chinese and Japanese styles was nevertheless labelled a ‘kimono’. Using the floral silk fabric that they had donated, the devotees worked under Daivapriya and produced the nightdresses. The kimonos were draped on the six-​feet-​tall deities and then revealed to the

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congregation at the auspicious early morning reception on the festival of Gaur Purnima. Although Madhavi was delighted to see the deities dressed in this manner and looking so ‘jolly’, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction and the garments were never used again on the altar. As previously mentioned, Mayapur is the spiritual headquarters of a global congregation and images of the deities at darshan are circulated worldwide. Decisions on the kind of clothing worn by the deities do not affect just the immediate vicinity but impact and involve people who are not present in the temple. For example, a record of the discussion around the kimono outfit can be found on a deity worship chatroom.11 A devotee from New Jersey, United States, who attended the morning reception and shared pictures of the altar, stated that the deities ‘look amazing’ with ‘a beautiful topknot’. Another said, ‘I wish our deities here had a night outfit like this!’ with a third devotee in Ireland (who seemed to know about the origin of the fabric) agreeing that ‘all that Chinese silk has given me many great ideas’ and that he was ‘in the middle of designing a Chinese-​style outfit’ for his deities. Precedence and/​or approval by a guru is important in lending weight to the arguments of one side or another in such discussions, and a couple of weeks later, a senior devotee added some historical weight to the controversy of ‘oriental’ outfits by citing the instance of disco-​inspired outfits for the deities at the Bhaktivedanta Manor in London. She argued that, in a similar vein, the kimono outfits were allowed since the founder Prabhupada had approved of the disco-​inspired outfits when he saw them at the Manor. This brief description of an online chat session indicates that devotees in other temples did look to Mayapur for inspiration and that they responded to the aesthetic as well as normative aspects of the garments. However, despite the fact that these particular comments were positive, the deities did not wear the garments again and the latter were relegated to the wardrobe. One day during the auspicious lunar month of kartik in November 2012, I  approached the altars to take darshan of the deities. As is the temple’s practice during this month, the platform in front of the altar had been decorated to evoke the mood of the festival of ‘Damodarastaka’ with a tableau of Krishna as a naughty little boy being chastised by his mother Yashoda. These were not sanctified murtis but mannequins that were freely handled and used at festivals. I  felt a thrill of recognition when I  saw the figure of Yashoda bedecked in jewellery and a yellow floral dress of unascertainable style. Closer scrutiny revealed the dress to be the kimono refashioned into a sari, with the waist sash transformed as a veil. The kimono, it appeared, had been quietly transformed into a more acceptable, quasi-​theatrical costume. 11 See http://​deityworship.tribe.net/​thread/​929f9fcb-​b4ef-​42fa-​92c8-​d3f8c7cf5764 (last accessed 12 April 2015).

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According to Gangaprasad, the head priest in the temple, although the overall reception of the kimonos had been positive when they were revealed on Gaur Purnima in 2007, the debate over them started when photos of the deities were circulated online. In his view, this was part of a larger debate about the way other Iskcon temples dressed their deities. He spoke about a similar controversy with regard to a temple in Hungary: The deity worship minister often used to come to me and talk about it. ‘You should use your influence and stop it all.’ He was always trying to get me to commit myself. I said, ‘How can you say that? I am not in Hungary where they are doing things, but I know people who were there and they come back and say it was fantastic.’ Maybe they should just lock the doors up and not allow any videos during the festival because the mood there was fantastic … But when people start looking at photographs later on they ask ‘Why is it like this?’ But, at the time the whole temple was really into it. The whole temple is decked out and it’s beautiful with beautiful dresses and flowers. Gangaprasad described how priests developed a relationship with Krishna over decades of service and laughingly suggested that the new ideas for garments arose in their minds because ‘maybe Krishna is inspiring the priests saying, “I want this, I want this!” ’ However, Gangaprasad also reasoned that people might protest the dressing of the deities since Mayapur was Iskcon’s headquarter and other devotees looked to it for inspiration. He connected the quality of deity dressing to attracting devotees –​one of the temple’s most crucial concerns. A  beautifully adorned altar could increase the congregation while an inadequate one could result in a dissatisfied deity and devotees. Gangaprasad then went on to raise another possible objection that echoed Madhavi’s concerns about lineage and norms. ‘As a society there have to be rules and regulations and some people may think it was never done in [the founder] Prabhupada’s time therefore we should not do it.’ This issue takes on a specific political resonance when we recall that Iskcon is essentially a modern sect that attempts to revitalize Gaudiya Vaishnavism and, in turn, a specific kind of Hinduism through adherence to Vedic scripture and claims of tradition, authenticity and purity. The issue of deities wearing dhotis and kimonos may seem unimportant in the study of ritual efficacy but one only has to look at some mandates issued by Iskcon to understand that every detail on the altar is subject to scrutiny. Attempting to stabilize dressing and worship practices, Iskcon’s Governing Body Committee (GBC) issues orders that form a rulebook. In the mid-​to-​late

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1990s, for instance, a controversy arose about the appropriateness of dressing the murti of Chaitanya with a peacock feather in his headdress. A small group of devotees in the state of Orissa, who were within Iskcon but were also part of the distinct Vaishnav tradition of that region, raised an objection to the mainstream Iskcon practice of dressing Chaitanya with a peacock feather. In order to understand their objection, we must revisit the importance of devotional moods. As previously mentioned, devotees used the term ‘mood’ (bhaava) to refer to what they experienced and felt during darshan, an experience to which material aesthetics are integral. Simultaneously, the deities are also portrayed as having distinctive moods of their own. With the case of the Chaitanya murti, the dissenting group of devotees were followers of Gaur Govinda Swami (1929–​96), a prominent guru and member of the GBC, who emphasized the belief that Krishna was reincarnated in Mayapur as Chaitanya (in the loving mood of Radha) so that the former could experience the sweet separation that his devotees felt for him. Chaitanya, according to the dissenters, should preferably be depicted in the mood of bereavement and without a peacock feather. Though he is non-​different from Krishna, still he is in Radharani’s mood … I have not stated that you should never dress Mahaprabhu with a peacock feather. If you want to remember his form as Krishna, you may dress him in this way once or twice a year. We should, however, seek to please the Lord, and so should be careful not to disturb his mood of …crying for Krishna. (Das 2012: 445) As the above example indicates, by criticizing the use of the peacock feather in this way, Gaur Govinda Swami and his followers mobilized a material practice of adornment and its affective value to raise abstract philosophical questions about how devotees should worship the deity in an efficacious manner. In contrast, the more mainstream group argued that the peacock feather on Chaitanya was an acceptable standard of daily worship and strengthened their case by turning to Prabhupada’s instructions. For example, an article discussing the controversy in the Iskcon deity worship magazine Arcana (Dasa 1997: 19) notes the following. Many devotees see this as an indication that for the world preaching mission, Srila Prabhupada deemed it best to emphasize the fact that Lord Caitanya is Krsna himself … Recognizing the principle that an acarya [teacher] may stipulate details of how the Deities which he establishes are to be worshiped, many devotees feel it is appropriate to continue offering a peacock feather to

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Lord Caitanya … However, if leaders of a particular temple deem it preferable to not use peacock feathers … either for preaching or other reasons … they have the free option to follow Bengali tradition. As the article in Arcana demonstrates, this controversy exemplifies the tensions that can accompany deity dressing. It draws upon a prior knowledge of the complexities of balancing vidhi with raaga, the dangers of turning sahajiya and the proper manner in which a devotee should interact with the deity. In order to settle the matter, the GBC opted to sanction variation in worship across different temples. In doing so, it negotiated the power of doctrine as well as the possibility of acceptable deviation in a global preaching mission, and emphasized the authority of key people, such as achaaryas,12 in creating new standards for orthopraxy. Instances such as the peacock feather controversy illustrate the conflict that ensues when local traditions challenge the GBC’s standardizing mandate. Such conflicts also reinforce the power of codification in monitoring and controlling the actions of devotees. All major temples in India have established rules that govern worship and many have controversies of their own that have eventually been resolved in courts.13 A study of garments and their failure at this particular point in Iskcon’s history provides the opportunity to see how devotion is shaped through materials and how the agencies of devotees are curtailed or encouraged. The use of certain deity garments over others is therefore not just a means to create an identifiable style for ritualistic and preaching purposes but becomes entangled in the politics of tradition and authenticity. Gaudiya Vaishnav scriptures that pertain to deity worship provide general guidelines about how the deity is to be dressed14 but do not address the situated need for garment innovation that arises from Iskcon’s preaching mandate. Thus, while on the one hand, deity garments such as the kimono and gopa dress can be understood as creative attempts to infuse raaga into traditional themes and (re)vitalize the community, on the other hand, the sheer visibility of the altar and the proliferation of images serve to hinder any innovation that strays too far from the normative. 12 The word ‘achaarya’ is spelt in two different ways in this chapter. Diacritical marks are absent in both versions. Similarly, the word ‘Chaitanya’ is spelt in two different ways. 13 In a historical instance of ‘peacock feather’ trouble, lower-​caste tribal devotees of the deity Ram called ‘Ram-​naamis’ had to resort to the legal system to be allowed to wear peacock feathers in their hats since the practice was deeply resented by high-​caste devotees. The matter was finally resolved through a court ruling in 1911 that protected their right to wear peacock feathers. See Lamb (2012:  94), Rapt in the Name. Other disputes have been recorded within upper-​ caste Brahminical groups about the authority of sect members to perform worship through their adherence (or lack thereof) to ritualized body practices. 14 See the chart for deity embellishment or prasaadhana in De (1961: 187).

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Conclusion: (in)efficacy and the emergence of success and failure In traditional Hindu thought, alankaara is understood as adornment that strengthens the body. Within Iskcon, the concept of alankaara is extended to include the strengthening of both the deity and the congregation. However, this concept is problematized when the garment becomes an image, and embodied value is replaced by a representational one. Deity pictures are believed to be sentient beings in Hindu thought, but the value of an image continues to be an important, interpretive act. The style and appearance of the deity within an image could determine the life of a material object –​whether a digital photo will be marveled at, shared with others, hung on the walls of a home, used as a screensaver or deleted immediately. In a heterogeneous congregation, such as Iskcon, the failure of an image to be kept, shared or displayed may reveal a moment of rupture when devotional attitudes of individual devotees or groups come into conflict with institutional goals. On the one hand, a Chinese or Japanese congregation of Krishna devotees may be overjoyed to see the deities in an East Asian–​style dress, and view it as a gesture of incorporation and divine benevolence. On the other hand, an Indian audience and/​or people who are concerned about precedence may regard the kimonos as inappropriate. Seemingly minute details in clothing style and accessories may enhance or detract from the success of an outfit, its darshanic reception and image. For the dressmakers and priests of the Mayapur temple discussed here, the issue becomes one of balancing their personal mood of devotional service and desire to infuse emotive-​creative value into their material offerings with the recognition that even their best intentions might be subverted by the flexibility of representations within the larger Iskcon religioscape. In the case studies discussed in this chapter, we find at least two different, and, at times, conflicting, social roles for the deity garments in Mayapur. In the first, the garment is embedded within the practice of mutually embodied sight of darshan which is believed to create an efficacious mood for the assembled congregation, while in the other, the same garments act as a preaching aid that situates the temple as the temporal and spatial centre of Iskcon religioscape and the keeper of ‘tradition’. Although the kimonos performed efficaciously within the context of darshan, with the local congregation appreciative of the creative-​emotive value (raaga) of the altar, once part of the religioscape through media representations, the garments performed new duties and acquired new values. As images of the deities circulated, they were de-​territorialized from the more localized moods and experiences of devotees in the temple and re-​territorialized as part of a

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larger religioscape. In a sense, the importance of the digital existence of the deity image eclipsed its role in the actual darshan in the temple. However, as the priest, Gangaprasad, astutely commented, photographs alone did not convey the value of the altar. Rather, one needed to be physically in the temple to know what people were experiencing. This suggests that another kind of value exists and is one that surrounds deity images both as records of a spiritually transformative experience but also as aids to territorialize a spatially diffused congregation. While the kimono outfits that were displayed on the special day of Gaur Purnima held value for the designer, priest and Chinese pilgrims, they were deemed unacceptable as an image of the deities and the institution. The more localized style of the kimonos contradicted the group’s global image of normative efficacy. As such, they failed to perform the social role required and were subsequently relegated to the wardrobe. Further, one could argue that within Iskcon’s anti-​and de-​materializing philosophy, garment objects ‘failed’ because they drew attention to their status as materials rather than as seamless conduits of divine presence. This study of material failure leads us to explore religious devotion not just as adherence to an abstract set of rules and norms but as a dynamic, fluid and, at times, contradictory process that uses materials and aesthetics to scale between the individual devotee and the various spheres of the religioscape. The tensions in this scaling may be subtle and in the micro-​politics of the temple, devotees such as Gangaprasad and Madhavi could not directly confront the administration or other senior devotees who took issue with the garments in question. On the one hand, as members of the same congregation, they all subscribed to the same professed values. On the other hand, because of the diverse positions of the congregational members, a pervasive ambivalence and anxiety arose and was embodied within the kimono outfits. Ultimately, the conflicting valuations of the garments could not be reconciled and they were turned into costumes for mannequins.

References Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Babb, L. (1981) ‘Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism’. Journal of Anthropological Research Vol. 37, No. 4, 387–​401. Bell, C. (1992) Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bhatti, S., and C. Pinney (2011) ‘Optic-​Clash: Modes of Visuality in India’. In A Companion to the Anthropology of India, edited by I. Clark-​Deces, 225–​40. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Das, M. (2012) When Good Fortune Arises: Life and Teachings of Sri Srimad Gour Govinda Swami Maharaja. Bhubaneshwar: Gopal Jiu Publications.

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Dasa, B. (1997) ‘The Peacock Feather Controversy’. Arcana: The ISKCON Deity Worship Journal Vol. 1, No. 1, 18–​19. De, S. K. (1961) Early History of the Vaisnava Faith and Movement in Bengal: From Sanskrit and Bengali Sources. Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Limited. Dehejia, V. (2009) The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries between Sacred and Profane in India’s Art. New York: Columbia University Press. Dwyer, R. (2004) ‘International Hinduism: The Swaminarayan Sect’. In South Asians in the Diaspora: Histories and Religious Traditions, edited by K. A. Jacobsen and P. Kumar, 180–​99. Netherlands: Brill. Eck, D. (1985) Darsan, Seeing the Divine Image in India. Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books. Gonda, J. (1969) Eye and Gaze in the Veda. Amsterdam and London: North Holland Publishing Co. Goswami, T. K. (2012) A Living Theology of Krishna Bhakti: The Essential Teachings of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. New York: Oxford University Press. Hüsken, U. (2007) ‘Ritual Dynamic and Ritual Failure’. In When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual, edited by U. Hüsken, 337–​65. Leiden: Brill. Lamb, R. (2012) Rapt in the Name: The Ramnamis, Ramnam, and Untouchable Religion in Central India. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Mauss, M. (2003 [1909]) ‘Initial Definition’. In On Prayer, edited by W. S. F. Pickering, 49–​58. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Mohan, U. (2015) ‘Dressing God: Clothing as Religious Subjectivity in a Hindu Group’. In The Social Life of Materials: Studies in Materials and Society, edited by A. Drazin and S. Küchler, 137–​52. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Mohan, U. (2016) ‘From Prayer Beads to the Mechanical Counter: The Negotiation of Chanting Practices within a Hindu Group’. Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions No. 174, 191–​212. Mohan, U., and J.-​P. Warnier (forthcoming) ‘Editorial: Marching the Devotional Subject’. Journal of Material Culture, Special Issue, Submitted for publication. Podeman, J. S. (2006) ‘Efficacy’. In Theorizing Rituals: Classical Topics, Theoretical Approaches, Analytical Concepts, Annotated Bibliography, edited by J. Kreinath, J. Snoek and M. Stausberg, 523–​31. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Schieffelin, E. (1996) ‘On Failure and Performance’. In The Performance of Healing, edited by C. Lederman and M. Roseman, 59–​90. London: Routledge.

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4 Whitened anxiety: Bottled identity in the Emirates Aaron Parkhurst

Introduction This chapter explores a failed relationship between identity, the body and medica-​materia1 through the context of skin bleaching in the United Arab Emirates, and Dubai specifically. What is outlined here is a material failure of both human skin and the tools used to alter it, expressed and performed by those who engage with skin bleaching techniques. In this case, embedded within skin whitening creams, and in turn, white skin, is a relationship in the form of a promise:  an intense unwritten social contract imbued with both hope and hype. In this context, skin is a conduit of the ‘self’; it is a material condition that delineates an individual’s identity. Ethnography among plastic surgery in Brazil has explored how body alterations are pitted against intense social disparity, politics and values of race and sensuality (Edmonds 2010). As Edmonds highlights, discourse surrounding the ability to change bodily features is, in many ways, a language for the failures of the state. Patients in state-​funded cosmetic clinics alter their faces and their bodies under a drive towards social mobility, even if these drives are largely prone to failure. In engaging with skin bleaching technology in Dubai, what is often at stake for people is their position in society, their marriageability, their access to wealth I borrow the term ‘medica-​materia’ here from Whyte, van der Geest and Hardon (2002: 3), who reclaim this Latin term within anthropology to emphasize the material things of therapy, and to remind readers that these materials have ‘social lives’. 1

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and their very identity. Weary of societal judgements and pressures, and cognizant of what they perceive as harmful social prejudices, many Emirati advocates with whom I’ve worked speak against the use of skin whitening creams and commonly refer to the practice as ‘racism in a bottle’. As I have presented in ethnography elsewhere (Parkhurst 2014), there are strong racist elements embedded within bodily alteration practices in Dubai that reflect societal biases and values. This chapter argues, however, that while these racist sentiments provide a limited view of whiteness in Dubai, skin whitening practices are far more complex than that, and the growing practice of skin whitening is deeply rooted in local perceptions of the self, the foreigner, genetics, labour and the economy. Emiratis also make up only 9 per cent of the population of Dubai, a small minority in their own city. As a result, body alterations, including skin whitening, are also deeply situated within local kinship practices and local understandings of inheritance. I  will show that, for many, ‘racism in a bottle’ becomes a bottled symbol of the body in itself, and whiter skin is imagined as the ‘true-​self’. While the material efficacy of bleaching products are successful in physically altering the outward appearance of the body, as urban centres in the UAE become increasingly multicultural, skin whitening products and techniques begin, in local terms, to fail as effective instruments of identity and the self. I argue that the material failure of skin bleaching is defined through the broken promises for identity embedded within the creams and the skin. As the social efficacy of whitening products decreases, their use in the community intensifies; this produces often unachievable ideals of the body, and, for some, the material failures of skin bleaching are made recursive; they perpetuate themselves within circular modes of social practice.

Anthropology of the body and failure The surface of the human body has been given considerable attention within anthropology over the past few decades. Much of this attention has developed from a need to re-​analyse the body in non-​dualistic frameworks. Western rationalistic tradition, further spurred by European enlightenment, structured the body in terms of Cartesian modalities. Here, the human body was constructed as a biological ‘object’, a thing separate from a human being, a separate element of a person which was constituted first through the soul, and, as biomedical discourse developed, eventually, through concepts of the mind. Many postmodern social theorists have outlined how these dualistic values became embedded in both biomedical discourse (Foucault 1994; Rose 2007) and the social sciences at large (Latour 1987). Other academic conceptions of the body similarly contest the limitations of Cartesian thinking, demonstrating

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the roles and social forms of the technical body (Mauss 1973 [1935]), and, following Mauss, the habitual body (Bourdieu 1977), through which cultural modalities and capital can be embodied. Following both postmodern thought and existential studies of lived experience, phenomenological ideas of the body propose the human corpus as the primary conduit of selfhood, where bodies are not owned, but rather performed (Csordas 1994; Merleau-​Ponty 2012 [1945]), and ‘one’s own body is in the world just as the heart is in the organism’ (Merleau-​Ponty 2012 [1945]: 209). Furthermore, weary of the academic hegemony governing the scientific study of the human body, anthropology has responded with an analytical approach to the body that situates it inexorably within human social practice rather than examine the body as simply a ‘thing’ (Strathern 1996 Douglas 1966; Blacking 1977, among others). In this view, it is useful to conceive of the body as a ‘mirror for society’, and vice versa (Douglas 1966), that is, ‘always in the making’ (Haraway 2006:  144). In conjunction with phenomenological prospects for the body, this approach recognizes that, ethnographically speaking, people often view the human body as a subject of alteration and change in order to affect social relations, construct new socialities or reflect personal or cultural cosmologies. Rituals, habits, techniques and cultural practices of and on the human body are, therefore, culturally productive. They are informed by and, in turn elicit, relational responses. The myriad ‘things’ and technologies with which humans partner their bodies, then, produce subjectivities in participants, and these objects and relationships are often taken for granted. For Foucault (1977, 1978, 1982), these technologies come to produce disciplinary power. This view, however, has been criticized, most notably by feminist writers, as too eager to define technology as producing ‘docile bodies’ (Hartsock 1990). Instead, it is argued, the capacity for resistance must also be understood through subjective technologies (ibid.). A  material culture approach, however, examines this production of subjectivity and objectivity through the tools and objects with which people construct their world, and –​in some cases –​their bodies. This basic idea is premised on the ability of material objects to absorb and reflect human emotion and relationships; these objects can become fetishes, and as Pels (1998: 91) describes, ‘animism with a vengeance’, or even persons in their own right (Leenhardt 1979 [1947]; Geary 1986; MacGaffey 1990). In The Invention of Culture (1975), Roy Wagner has theorized how perpetual resistance and subjugation are interwoven through culture as it is constructed, themselves defining features of both invented and inventing cultural subjects and objects. Much of this attention to the surface of the skin, then, emphasizes this cultural productivity, but often in terms of social change, upheaval and body dynamisms. Very little attention has been given to the social ways in which the body is known to fail: not as a ‘failed material’ (in

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terms of biological malfunction), but in terms of material failure –​when the aspects of the human body do not elicit the embodied objectifications that are socially expected. It is in these ethnographic moments of social crisis that bodily values and responsibilities can be illuminated.

Skin and inheritance Skin colour is a sensitive issue among modern Emirati families. There is a common traditional perception in the Arabian Peninsula that skin colour is among the traits that are inherited specifically from one’s mother. Some general bodily and facial features such as silky, black hair and nose structure are also said to be inherited from  –​or at least informed by  –​the mother. These perceptions become translated into value in cultural practice. For some, skin colour is one of the most important legacies that a bride-​to-​be can contribute to a family. Some have explained that it is not uncommon for young women’s features, and especially skin tone, to be vetted and appraised by family matriarchs as part of marriage negotiations. The repercussions for this cultural viewpoint are manifest in social practice, where women are encouraged to ‘fix’ physical flaws before becoming married or having children so that their children do not absorb undesirable physical features from the unaltered parent. Such alterations include nose surgeries and skin whitening, among other cosmetic changes. The social motivation is that if a woman can lighten her skin before having children, her children will then have lighter skin naturally. These particular perceptions of engendered hereditary mechanisms are not globally unique, and they are paralleled in Lamarckist ideas of inheritance –​where the building blocks of future generations are determined in response to the physical effects of the lived experience of the parents. What follows is ethnographic data collected on the practice of skin whitening in the Emirates. It was collected as part of a much larger anthropological project on the construction of genetics, illness and the ‘self’ in the face of rapid globalization in the region. Indigenous body practices in the Emirates (as they are most anywhere) are deeply informed by a vast range of social domains and influences that are necessarily intertwined and often recursive. As part of my fieldwork, I  met with a director of the local Health Care City (HCC) to discuss the overabundance of cosmetic surgery practices at the ‘city within a city’,2 and the steps being taken to encourage diversity among

2 ‘Health Care City’ is premised on a German development model in which the massive medical complex is a microcosm of the city, with its own hotels, shops, restaurants, apartments and so on. The complex parallels similar ‘city within city’ structures in other business and social domains across the Emirates and other Arabian nations.

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the clinics and real estate of the city. The cosmetic surgery sector in Dubai is already largely successful, but it is still growing. Motivated by both heavy cultural demand for procedures in the region and prospects for capital and real estate, the government and landowners aim to make Dubai the world’s crossroad for this area of medical tourism. Plastic surgery in general has become widespread in the city. There were, at the time of my fieldwork, far more clinics devoted to this specialty than all other medical practices combined. I was invited by the German Clinic for Neurology and Psychiatry to a networking event for all the clinics at HCC in the Oud Metha neighbourhood of Dubai, of which the German Clinic is one. Of the roughly forty clinics that attended the event, nearly half were devoted to cosmetic surgery. Two of the directors of HCC, both relatively extroverted Emirati women, assure me this is not an accurate representation of clinics and is just the nature of the networking event as half the clinics were missing, but they did admit that it has become a challenge to create medical diversity in the city, and that cosmetic surgery is far over-​represented. They have complained as well that the property owners of HCC are focused on real estate, and not medicine, and as the real-​estate industry was currently stagnant in Dubai, landlords were filling space in the city with countless cosmetic clinics, which are never short of demand. It is difficult not to think that these body alteration practices, whether they are performed at home or in the growing number of clinics, are a postcolonial phenomenon. Combined with other trends in cosmetic surgery, wealthy Arab men and women appear to be mimicking Western features and deserting what they feel are stereotypic Arab skin tones and facial structures. Plastic surgeons in the HCC tell me business is booming. Women from all over the Gulf come to Dubai for plastic surgery and many go to Europe for the same. According to doctors, women most commonly want nose alterations, breast enlargements and skin whitening. While the former two are practiced at specialty clinics, the latter is usually performed at spas and parlours, or at home with creams. Medical and clinical staff tell me these women do not come to the clinics unaccompanied. Their parents, husbands or boyfriends want them to have nose ‘corrections’, as Arab men increasingly describe ‘the Arab nose’ as undesirable. These trends could be seen to echo metaphors of global miscegenation that appear in medical jargon. In Brazil, for example, valued procedures offered by the state include the ‘correction of the Negroid nose’ (Edmonds 2010:  145). This type of medical jargon, while designed to be ‘descriptive’ and direct, betrays deeply rooted cultural biases. Terminology that dictates ‘corrections’ imagines bodies that are ‘wrong’ or ‘broken’. This medicalized language is present in the Emirates, and it is invoked by Emirati nationals in terms of ‘fixing’ the Arab nose. Both men and women in Dubai visit clinics to receive reconstructive work, though the practices remain largely

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gendered, with women receiving the large majority of operations. Many procedures are, ethnographically speaking, motivated by social values and aesthetics, but plastic surgery has also become important for Emirati women specifically because facial features and skin are thought to pass on to her children. As one informant explained: ‘These places do such good business here because it has become so important to be beautiful, or we would never find husbands! It is a big problem here. Lots of men are making their girlfriends and fiancés have surgery because it is so important to the family.’ The sentiment is echoed on the street. Younger Emirati men with whom I  was able to become close admitted that they strongly encouraging their girlfriends and wives to have surgery, especially nose alterations and breast enlargements. When I pushed for a reason for it, one engineer joked over coffee one afternoon that ‘the face is good for the kids, the breasts, they are for me’. Within the Emirates, there are robust local knowledges3 of inheritance that exist quite independently from Western biomedical understandings of Mendelian and Darwinian models of modern evolutionary synthesis. That is, the influence that parents have over their child’s physical traits is often not perceived in local understanding to be egalitarian. Many men have explained to me that most traits come from the father, and that some are simply picked up from the mother, in what I understand to be mechanistic osmosis. This logic maintains that fathers provide the seed, the inherent blueprint of a new individual, but that children are able to absorb features from their mother in utero. Her traits and beauty are said to be absorbed by the foetus, but it is understood that mothers do not contribute to an inherent biological template of a child. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is understood to be absorbed from the mother as there are often conflicting opinions. The idea that a man essentially contains the human template in his semen is akin to Western debates on preformation that have pervaded recorded philosophy for at least two millennia.4 Preformation sciences that evolved from Greek philosophical tradition envisioned an already fully developed, but miniature, human being (homunculus) within semen. European thinkers of the seventeenth century searched for this miniature human in sperm using new microscope technologies.5 The homunculus was thought to be inserted into the woman’s I use ‘knowledges’ here in the plural to refer to the fact that there are many conflicting systems of knowledge in the region, many of which can be locally owned simultaneously. Nonetheless, these themes on heredity are very commonly produced. 4 See Gould (1974) for a discussion of this idea traced through Pythagoras, Aristotle, Descartes and Galileo. 5 See Nicolaas Hartsoeker’s (1694) Essai de dioptrique and Antoni Leeuwenhoek’s (1677) letters to Philosophical Transactions. Reprinted and translated in S. Hoole (ed.) (1800), The Select Works of A. van Leeuwenhoek (1798–​1807). Hill (1985) has pointed out that neither scientist claimed to have seen the miniature human, though both advocated its existence. However, both scientists wrote and drew their observations of other preformed organisms. 3

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womb where it could feed and expand, and perhaps absorb traits of the mother through menstrual blood or the placenta. ‘For Leeuwenhoek, his microscopic observation of testes and his on-​going observations of his own semen confirmed his belief that mammalian ovaries were useless ornaments, and that the sole function of the female sex was to receive and nourish the man’s seed where the future human was preformed in its entirety’ (Friedman 2008: 79). This ideology is partially influenced from certain Christian notions of creation (in Leeuwenhoek’s case, Calvinism), where ‘we ought to accept, in addition, that the body of every man and beast born till the end of time was perhaps produced at the creation of the world’ (Pyle 2003: 27). My Muslim informants did not like this idea. For them, while there seemed to be a sense of Islamic biological preformation, this was confined to adulthood. A cascading infinitum of homunculi assumes that each ‘small man’ contains a proportionately smaller one. My informants were clear that ‘only a man can do this thing (as opposed to a child), maybe when they are thirteen’, and, whatever the case, they would add, life ‘is an exhalation of Allah’. Conceptions of heredity in southeast Arabia are complex; however, as I have mentioned, in many local discourses surrounding the ‘Arab genome’, it is clear that beauty, hair, skin and some facial features are thought to be contributed by the mother. As a man is thought to provide a solid, ‘preformed’ ‘template’, and as it is the woman’s responsibility to mould these traits in utero, the failures of conception and the perceived failures in the physical appearance of children are placed upon her. The result of this knowledge encourages some women to take what they feel are the necessary steps to control these features to the best of their ability.

Identity in a bottle One way in which Emirati women navigate their role in moulding bodies is to take part in a fast-​growing Asian trend of skin whitening. It is easy to see the heavy bombardment of skin lightening advertisement on the streets and on local television. The fact that this trend seems to be ubiquitous in Asia is seen by some researchers as alarming and complex. Borrowing from Bourdieu’s theories on cultural capital as it informs the construction of taste, Li, Min and Belk (2008), for example, analyse these advertisements in four Asian contexts (India, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea). They show how the advertisements reinforce hegemonic power structures, but also empower women in a system of robust historical values. In Dubai, this contradictory power play can be striking. Many of my Filipino acquaintances hated working in restaurants and would prefer to work in the Filipino-​dominated retail sector of Dubai, but told me they could not receive employment because their skin was too dark, and,

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consequently, that they are trapped in catering careers. In neighbouring India, social values overwhelmingly emphasize the importance of white skin. Adverts and products in the UAE for whitening technologies are usually imported from India, and they often show Indian or Asian women who cannot attain their dream job or cannot catch the eye of a young man they desire. The man in one of these popular adverts, for example, ignores a darker woman, engrossed behind his newspaper while she works as a waitress and serves him coffee. After using whitening cream, however, the advert flashes to an office with a smart, successful and whiter woman being congratulated by her boss. Another scene flashes to the ignored waitress, now whiter. The young man becomes suddenly aware of her beauty and cannot help but ask her out on a date. Opponents of these ads refer to the products as ‘racism in a bottle’, and the term is used regularly in Dubai. Dr Fatma al Sayegh, an Emirati Fulbright scholar, professor of UAE and Gulf History at the University of Al Ain and a women’s rights activist, has spoken out against the practice. The extreme measures that Gulf women resort to to maintain whiter skin disturbs her. One such practice is brewing a homemade white paste derived from beauty products and home chemicals, which is then spread across one’s face when one goes outside. ‘I was scared by the customs’, she says. ‘They say it is part of their culture, that when they leave the house and they put on this powder, which is like a mask, it turns them into someone different’ (Salem 2010). There has been much social research into skin bleaching as evidence of self-​ hate and low self-​esteem outside Muslim and Arab communities, especially among black-​skinned Caribbean groups. Arguments generally propose that participants become critical of their bodies and, at times, attribute it to a form of self-​loathing resulting from the cultural legacy marked by psychological scars of slavery and subservience (cf. Abrahams 2000). To Abrahams, the result of this legacy was ‘the traditional denigration of everything black or African-​ looking … Black mothers told their black children they were ugly because their lips were thick. Their kinky hair was “bad”. Brown was better than black; the paler the brown the better. White was best. So, as in America, everybody black tried to straighten their hair and bleach their skin’ (124). Others have singled out colonization and, specifically, plantation culture as an endower of psychological scarring (Beckford 1972). Indeed, this broad category fits the Gulf region better as there does not appear to be cultural memories of slavery among the Arabs of the region, yet the hegemonic relationships produced during French, British and Portuguese colonialization are engrained in both living memory and cultural memory, more broadly. In this light, skin bleaching is more a product and adaptation of self-​hate, mechanized by the principle that David Fischer (1989) poignantly explains thus: ‘cultural legacies leave historical shadows’. Other studies recognize these historical shadows as ‘burdened with emotions’ concerning ethnic and personal identity, noting how

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these emotions might contribute to actual addictive dimensions of whitening body alterations in the Congo and among migrants in Italy (Vassallo 2009). Similar historical shadows exist in Jamaica, where colonial relationships have contributed to socially hierarchical skin tones, which still shape whitening practices (Charles 2011). However, what makes skin lightening complicated, at least in Arab culture, is that it may not be to mimic Western appearances. Dr Al Sayegh thinks that it is not a culture of fairness [of skin] as much as an obsession with the opposite. Some Emirati people here are darker than others and I remember when I was studying in America and England, the preferred skin type was tanned. The ideal man was tall, dark and handsome. It was the opposite to what western men looked like. Here, too, it is the same thing. People are obsessed with something that is not ordinary. Fair skin is not common, so people like to look unusually white. (Quoted in Bhattacharya 2010) I believe the obsession is deeper than that. According to the Emirati women with whom I  spoke, the obsession with whiter skin on women has always existed in the Gulf. ‘Traditionally’, they claim, one of the reasons Bedouin women wear a leather burga (not to be confused with the more common burka) is not necessarily for modesty, but to protect themselves from the sun and to keep the skin pale. Emirati representatives from the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding teach that before the Western world arrived in the Gulf, women in this region would prepare a paste and plaster their cheeks and nose with it under their burga to beautify their skin, and so the burga was more of a self-​imposed beauty product than an instrument of repression and patriarchal control of women. The Centre for Cultural Understanding in Dubai is often exceptionally apologetic regarding cultural practices ‘commonly misunderstood’ by foreigners to the region, and it is important to note that not all historians in the region acknowledge the same narratives of cultural motivations for tradition. Yet, if maintaining pale skin was important to women, it makes sense that they would have developed ways to utilize traditional garb in their beauty regime. In any case, skin whitening practices were known to be important long before there was Euro-​American immigration in the region. Emirati men speak about their appreciation of whiter skin, saying: ‘We do prefer whiter skin. It is more beautiful. Darker skin makes a women look hard, and lighter skin adds to a woman’s purity’. It is purity, both cultural and genetic, that is key in understanding this tradition. In this context, skin, and specifically its colour, can be seen as a normative ideal of sexual dimorphism. This next section unpacks this idea of the colouration of sexual dimorphism, and its relation to ideas of purity, looking at traditional Emirati garb.

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The dishdash and the abaya For Emirati men, a spotless dress is a public declaration of purity and the upholding of Islamic value. The dishdash  –​a long, white, immaculately starched tunic  –​is the mark and pride of an Emirati man. The pure white garment, however, is a woven piece of self-​contradiction. It is a gown used to imply that the wearer is cleaner, wealthier, more ‘pureblood’ and more powerful than non-​Emirati men in the UAE, who, even if there is no legal sanction, are forbidden socially from wearing such garments. The dishdash is simultaneously a proclamation of the modesty of its owner. In addition, it transforms  –​at least visually  –​the wearer into something he is not; its whiteness serves as an inversion of the dark figure underneath. The visual inversion is, however, a metonym for the character of the man, too. The clean white garment, bleached beyond impurity, covers what many in the Arab world know to be the impure man underneath: rife with the propensity for violent emotions, strong sexual desires and the need to eat and to expel waste. In the context of the abaya, traditionally worn by Emirati women, the inversions of purity and colouration take on a further level of complexity. The dishdash is as white as the abaya is black, and the woman underneath the abaya can, in Gulf tradition, be seen to hide herself from the eyes of others; she is a performance of purity, a fragile and delicate woman who keeps herself for her husband and takes care of her home. Janice Boddy (1982) has shown in her ethnography among Muslim women in Northern Sudan how practices on the body (specifically female genital cutting), and making the body ‘pure’, operate under semiotic mechanisms of ‘enclosedness’, constructing and protecting the community at large. As a device of concealment, the abaya operates under a similar semiotic mode:  women encapsulate their bodies with fabric while simultaneously delineating the boundaries of the community and home. As such, the white of the impure man’s dishdash is paralleled by the inversion of the black of the pure woman’s abaya. Alternatively, the colouration of the abaya and its implications in design can been seen to be psychologically opposite to that of the dishdash. Taken in the context of the world –​full of filth as it is –​it is the Emirati man who is above all else clean and secure in Islam; at this scale, the dishdash is an outer sign of his inner state, reiterating his internal whiteness as a garment over his skin. It could then make sense again that the dishdash is as white as the abaya is black, hiding a woman who –​in Gulf society –​is dirty with menstruation, who so easily tempts men and causes impure desires, polluting his mind and causing his thoughts and energies to stray from Islam. The dishdash appears to be both these things at once; its only consistent philosophy being that

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its appearance be in contrast to everything around it, a material form that separates man from woman, rich from poor, foreigner from national. This is its most useful and, perhaps, only inherent feature. It acknowledges the intensity with which many men in the Emirates battle and defend against ambiguity, and responds diminishing grey areas of lived reality, leaving a binary constructed, literally, of black and white.6 In this way, for men and women both, gown parallels skin, and part of the underlying mechanics of the garments is that they create status by exaggerating boundaries and borders. Cultural ideals of purity maintain that these boundaries be in black and white. As such, skin whitening becomes a practice in symbolic inversion.

Being white, becoming whiter The problem of white skin after globalization presents a major philosophical problem now for some Emirati. As a boundary between realms of purity and impurity, the ideal of white skin serves to perpetuate cultural secrecy, a retreat to the private culture within a culture. Whiter skin is important in local imagination not only because it is pure, but also because it is specifically not African or South Asian, at least not historically. It is here that ethnography on skin whitening informs a larger debate on individual and cultural anxieties. It is still, within common discourse, a point of pride for some Arab women to have white skin as a demonstration of their superiority over their Indian and African neighbours and, indeed, even other Arab neighbours. For example, locals claim that the Yemeni, and to a lesser degree Omani, have the unfortunate luck to be both poorer in money and darker of skin. These are traits that Emirati often see as indicative of one another. Even between other Emiratis, the desire for fair or lighter skin is a critical concern. My informants have reiterated that mothers often refuse marriage to their sons if the potential bride is too dark of skin. A major problem arises for the ambitions of these women in that, for most, light skin does not come naturally. Gulf women have to work very hard to have lighter skin, and there now exists a great social contention in which there is now a massive Western population in the Gulf that comes across this skin genetically. This presents a crisis for many women who feel subject to the terms of mobility dictated by some forms of Muslim society. Faced with newfound choices for long-​term sexual partners, Emirati men are It is important to note that this is not without contradiction. The abaya is claimed by some to be a celebration of the mystery of women. The implication is that the woman underneath is more attractive because she is mysterious, and so rather than Islam abhorring ambiguity, it values the unseen. 6

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overwhelmingly selecting whiter skin, and they are also increasingly partnering with women from abroad, from within Islamic contexts and from without.7 As the Emirati director at Health Care City, herself a sheikha who has gone to university abroad, explained: Men are allowed to go abroad, and go to school abroad, and they meet partners abroad and bring them back here. Many women are not allowed to go abroad, except on vacation. Men can marry who they want, but woman are only supposed to marry Emirati men. It cannot last forever. We have already run out of men. There aren’t any left for us women! and so, yes, this is partly why they do these things (plastic surgery, skin whitening). This, and anything else men want them to do. Many of the sheikhs, seen to be representatives of manhood and male ideology in the Emirates, wantonly advertise their white-​ European and Arab-​Mediterranean partners and lovers and the value that they place in the children produced from these relationships. The danger to women’s identity here is, therefore, not necessarily one of shifting values, but rather a question of ‘rights’ towards parallel values. Anthropologist Simon Harrison (1999: 249–​50) has theorized this contention by identifying certain colonial and postcolonial identities as scarce resources, arguing that ‘ethnic groups may sometimes conceive themselves as in conflict not so much because they have irreconcilably different identities, but rather because they have irreconcilable claims or aspirations to the same identity. In these situations, the sharing of a common culture, or of aspects of a common cultural symbolism, can be deeply divisive and contentious’. Within the Emirates, there is intense pressure for local women to succeed under these divisions. Novel discourses in the region explain skin colour as a genetic trait, but conflate this with a local knowledge system that maintains that the Arab genome is cosmologically pre-​determined. Some women now claim that they must take measures to counter the effects of genetics, or in other cases, they feel they must live up to their true genetic potential. As the concept of the local genome becomes increasingly integrated as a proud component of the local body, and as whiteness has long been owned as a category of the local self, women find themselves in a new predicament of selfhood. Skin colour becomes akin to concepts of wealth, dependency and ownership –​perhaps shielding oneself from ‘foreign eyes’, a return to It is legal in the Emirates for both men and women to marry outside tribal kinships and Islamic faith under certain conditions. However, many citizenship and kinship privileges remain strongly patrilineal. 7

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FIGURE 4.1   Black and white cultures in Dubai. Migrant workers watch European expats tanning at a free ‘public’ beach from which they are excluded. Photo by author. comfortable cultural categories. Emirati women alone spend close to AED one billion (US $272 million) per year on beauty products and treatments. Simply being lighter than average is no longer enough, and many women feel they must be as unnaturally white as possible to begin to compete with the influx of whiteness from abroad. There are many local fears that contend that this trend is unsustainable, alluding to ideas of failure. They are concerned that the body ideals and imaginations that motivate skin whitening for local Gulf women can never be objectified. Critiques concerning the destruction of the body and skin turn to pathology and race, but, as has been noted elsewhere (Brown-​Glaude 2007), pathological discourse in skin whitening often belies the underlying motivations for participating in body cultures. In viewing the skin whitening phenomenon as pathology, it is difficult to assign origins to the trend. Is the enhanced skin whitening trend simply the end product of a transition to modernity: a somewhat inevitable conclusion to ‘Westernization’? As Littlewood (2002: 79) has acknowledged in discussions on anorexia and bulimia, ‘To take a particular society with its distinctive pattern of psychopathology … and then argue that “the cause” is simply the most immediate aspect of everyday life to which it appears to have a formal relationship … is partial.’ As techniques enacted upon the body, certain contexts of eating disorders and obsessive skin bleaching share difficulties in ascribing

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causation. One can hastily blame the presence of ‘Western influence’, yet these theories do not adequately explain and incorporate why there is such a proud ‘ownership’ of whitening as a cultural tradition. Social research in Japan suggests that the underlying psychology of emerging cultural anxieties may be dependent on recognizing imbalance in the ‘contemporarilization’ of traditional society: ‘disorders of civilization’ (Lock 1992). The analogy to skin whitening is that it can then be seen as a proactive practice, to help push the modernized self forward into society. Although anorexia and skin whitening may bear some philosophical similarities as acts of phenomenological body imaging, it can be argued, especially in the context of traditional notions of Islamic purity, that skin whitening is a way of keeping the Emirati ‘self’ within the confines of tradition, vis-​à-​vis the contemporary ‘self’s’ emerging role in ‘modernized’ society. In this light, whitening becomes a protective mechanism. The whiter Gulf ‘self’, then, is not a modernized one, but an enhanced ‘traditional’ self, or perhaps even caricatured. Indeed, this idea gives fuller meaning to ‘racism in a bottle’ in which the commercial products are not simply indicative of Gulf Arab prejudices, but are bottled identities themselves. It is a present and central anxiety of those few in Dubai who abhor the trend. Such voices of opposition speak out against it with comments such as: ‘Your nationality should be part of who you are naturally, we shouldn’t have to purchase it at the store,’ and ‘There is nothing natural about [these products], they are thoroughly un-​Islamic.’ It is difficult to explain the paradox. The ‘impure product’, this chemical external presentation of the self that one can purchase at drugstores and supermarkets, is nevertheless advertised on billboards across the city, ‘for purity of skin’, or inviting the viewer to ‘be yourself’, an oversized and whiter South Asian man or woman smiling down on the polluted individual as they drive to work or walk the skyscraper-​laden Sheikh Zayed Road, and more recently, Bollywood’s most famous actor, standing tall at Dubai’s busiest intersection, holding a bottle of a Vaseline product under the slogan ‘fair and handsome’ in English and Arabic, and Facebook side-​scrolling adverts in the region with Bollywood actors and actresses that warn us ‘people see your face first’. As genetics become increasingly crucial in local knowledge and kinship systems, families become increasingly focused on the physical attributes of women in an effort to construct a category of local aristocracy that incorporates novel notions of the body into perceptions of wealth and power. With an influx of migrant and expatriate labour taking residence in Dubai who are both light and dark of skin, for many families, physical attributes become a crucial component in assessing marriage potential because of a declared need to keep contrast between different bodies. Because Lamarckist understandings of inheritance still persist in the region, often outside the discourse of genetics, many women feel that they can still take action to create a ‘true’ self, be

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what they are ‘supposed’ to be or, to borrow terms from genetics, create the ‘phenotype’ they know their ‘genotype’ to be. As Harrison (1999) has theorized above, however, these practices are not an attack against structures and values of society, but rather a comment upon the appropriation of these values. As a result, bleaching techniques, as effective as they may be as chemical materials, become, ultimately, productive modes of failure in which embodied identity ceases to coalesce.

Conclusion Given the evidence of deeply rooted biases inherent in almost all realms of social interaction in Dubai, my informants’ critiques of skin whitening products as ‘racism in a bottle’ must be taken seriously. However, the phenomenon is complex, and racist sentiments provide only a narrow view of whiteness in Dubai. My argument is that, in a sense, the true self is what is being marketed. In general, Gulf Arabs see themselves as the owners of whiteness in contrast to the world around them, both in the present and historically. They embody it in their skin, and adorn it with their clothes. Racism is fervent, yet that is perhaps not what is in the bottle. The influx of otherness into the region, especially from the West, has forced an externality of the Arab self. Whiteness remains central to identity, yet ironically no longer a phenotypic inherency at, say, birth. ‘Bottled identity’ can be seen as a set of attempts to reconcile this paradox, motivated by a premise of sociality which is constantly reproduced, but, as of yet, constantly failing to cohere. Skin, genes and whitening products have a shared aristocratic hope and promise for identity, but this identity is perpetually under threat from an increasingly chaotic world. Skin, under these conditions, becomes productively failing, reproducing anxieties and practices as it navigates gendered and globalizing contestations. The promise of commoditized identities causes skin whitening products to become fetishized, for what they can do and for what they should provide for their users. When these expectations, however, so often fail to cohere –​ when social phenotype ceases to be a socially understood genotype  –​this productive failing becomes self-​replicating. In the Emirates, like in many other places in the world, the flesh is understood to betray the person, and the promises of intervention become less of a seductive allure and far more of a perceived necessity. The body becomes a battleground between selves and society, and body industry becomes an arsenal. Both skin and creams break their promises: they fail to ‘do’, socially, what they claim to do, and until the terms of engagement for the globalized body are deconstructed and locally rewritten, this failure remains static.

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References Abrahams, P. (2000). ‘Ja, Manley and the Race Card’. The Gleaner, 11 June, 124–​ 5. Retrieved from www.Jamaica-​gleaner-​com/​gleaner20000611/​arts/​arts3.hml (accessed 20 August 2011). Beckford, G. L. (1972) Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economics of the Third World. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Bhattacharya, S. (2010) ‘When Fair Is Foul to Skin’. The National. April 3. Online at: http://​www.thenational.ae/​arts-​culture/​when-​fair-​is-​foul-​to-​skin. Blacking, J. (1977) Anthropology of the Body. London: Academic Press. Boddy, J. (1982) ‘Womb as Oasis: The Symbolic Context of Pharaonic Circumcision in Rural Northern Sudan’. American Ethnologist Vol. 9, No. 4, Symbolism and Cognition II, 682–​98. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown-​Glaude, W. (2007) ‘The Fact of Blackishness? The Bleached Body in Contemporary Jamaica’. Small Axe. A Caribbean Journal of Criticism Vol. 24, 34–​51. Charles, C. A. D. (2011) ‘Skin Bleaching and the Prestige Complexion of Sexual Attraction’. Sexuality & Culture Vol. 15. 375–​90. doi:10.1007/​s12119-​011-​9107-​0. Csordas, T. (1994) Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, M. (1966, 2013) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge Classics. Edmonds, A. (2010) Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fischer, D. H. (1989) Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Peregrine. Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality. Translated by R. Hurley. London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Foucault, M. (1994) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage Books. Friedman, D. M. (2008) A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. New York: Simon and Schuster. Geary, P. (1986) ‘Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics’. In The Social Life of Things, edited by A. Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gould, S. J. (1974) ‘On Heroes and Fools in Science’. Natural History Vol. 83, No. 7, 30–​2. Haraway, D. (2006) ‘A Note of a Sportswriters Daughter: Companion Species’. In Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations, edited by N. Chen and H. Moglen, 143–​63. Santa Cruz: North Atlantic Books,

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Harrison, S. (1999) ‘Identity as a Scarce Resource’. Social Anthropology Vol. 7, No. 3, 239–​51. Hartsock, N. (1990) ‘Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?’ In Feminism/​ Postmodernism, edited by L. Nicholson. London and New York: Routledge. Hill, K. A. (1985) ‘Hartsoeker’s Homonculus: A Corrective Note’. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Vol. 21, No. 2, 178–​9. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press. Leenhardt, M. (1979 [1947]) Do Kamo. La personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Li, E., Min, H. J. and R. W. Belk (2008) ‘Skin Lightening and Beauty in Four Asian Cultures’. Advances in Consumer Research Vol 35, 444–​9. Littlewood, R. (2002) Pathologies of the West: An Anthropology of Mental Illness in Europe and America. New York. Cornell University Press. Lock, M. (1992) ‘The Fragile Japanese Family: Narratives about Individualism and the Postmodern State’. In Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, edited by C. Leslie and A. Young, 98–​125. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacGaffey, W. (1990) ‘The Personhood of Ritual Objects: Kongo “Minkisi”’. Etnofoor Vol. 3, No. 1, 45–​61. Mauss, M. (1973 [1935]) ‘Techniques of the Body: The Techniques of the Body’. Economy and Society Vol. 2, No. 1, 70–​88. Merleau-​Ponty, M. (2012 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge. Parkhurst, A. (2014) ‘Genes and Djinn: Identity and Anxiety in Southeast Arabia’. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. University College London. Pels, P. (1998) ‘The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact & Fancy’. In Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, edited by P. Spyer, 91–​121. London: Routledge. Pyle, A. (2003) Malebranche. London: Routledge. Rose, N. S. (2007) Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-​First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Salem, O. (2010) ‘When Fair Is Foul to Skin’. The National. Abu Dhabi. April 3. Online at: http://​www.thenational.ae/​apps/​pbcs.dll/​article?AID=/​20100403/​ MAGAZINE/​704029978/​1298/​MAGAZINE1. Strathern, A. (1996) Body Thoughts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Vassallo, G. (2010) ‘The Use of Skin Whitening Products among African People: Research in Italy and the Congo’. JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies Issue 14. Wagner, R. (1975) The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whyte, S. R., S. van der Geest and Hardon, A. (2002). The Social Lives of Medicines. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

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5 Holy water, healing and the sacredness of knowledge Alexandra Antohin

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n 2007, the head of the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia, the late Patriarch Abune Paulos, made international news by contributing to a long-​standing debate on the health crisis of HIV/​AIDS in the country. His message was simple: patients who previously rejected antiretroviral treatment (ART) should instead consume the medication with holy water. This amendment was considered a landmark step for the Church, who up until this point had not articulated a clear position that sanctioned the use of ARTs. The patriarch’s proposal, to join biomedical treatment with spiritual therapy, was initially viewed as controversial because it seemingly undercut the authoritative position of holy water centres as the go-​to, cure-​all healing method. One such place was Entoto Mariam church, located on the highest point of Addis Ababa, that had a well-​developed reputation for curing HIV/​AIDS by holy water. The major challenge for health practitioners, then, became how to sensitively promote medical treatment without disrespecting popularly held beliefs regarding the healing power of faith. To this question, ‘Living Proof: Holy Water Healing’ a web video by one.org, a global campaign to alleviate and raise awareness about poverty and preventable diseases, asks whether science and faith can work together to save lives. It chronicles how one Ethiopian-​American doctor seeks the endorsement of Abune Paulos in order to advocate for the effectiveness of both treatment methods. The patriarch’s appeal was phrased in this way: ‘I told them [HIV patients] the holy water and the medicine are the same, and they were never opposed to each other. The scientists who made the medicine, who created them? God. As far as I am concerned, they

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both came from the same God’ (one.org). This partnership initiated a trend whereby information about accessing clinics and hospitals as well as the availability of free testing, medication and counselling was disseminated by the clergy. Therefore, we can see a society ameliorating certain approaches to health by incorporating new technologies. What is also evident, based on the extensive media exposure this issue has garnered, is how this cultural shift in Ethiopia promotes a political position of one knowledge-​system dominating over another. An article in the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘Ethiopians Trade Holy Water for AIDS Drugs’ (Jordan 2012) tells a story of the slow persuasion of a married couple, both HIV positive, who endure devastating social isolation from their families and the gruelling hardships of living on the mountainous periphery of the capital. They initially reject antiretroviral pills in favour of holy water, a regiment that typically entails pouring large jugs of it while naked or drinking up to three litres a day. The regime accompanies a committed focus on repentance, prayer and fasting. However, the couple remain too weak to fight the disease. The decision to employ ART as part of the healing process functioned as the turning point in their lives, attested to by the efficacy of the pills being deemed to be ‘more powerful’ than the water. Consequently, their attachment towards spiritual healing was also directly altered –​both discontinue their use of the holy water treatment. This narrative portrayal –​only mildly biased in comparison to those provided by other major Western outlets, which, on the whole, portray this phenomenon with uncontainable incredulity –​underscored the consequence of leaving one knowledge base behind, in favour of an improved way of understanding the world. From this cultural standpoint, the results were clearly successful; the great decrease in deaths and significant increases in treatment and prevention confirm this reality. Furthermore, this positive trend provided the perception of sustained changes in well-​being –​a narrative easily contrasted against the common stereotypes of HIV patients as filled with hopelessness and despair. Between holy water and the pills, the triumph for health policy was the de-​ stigmatization of the drugs. However, in the hierarchy of health treatments in Ethiopia, spiritual therapy continues to dominate, illustrated by the pragmatism exhibited by health authorities in placing clinics near holy water sites. Patients were persuaded to take ART only because of the religiously guided outlook that legitimized it. The factor of faith re-​enters the picture once again. This chapter traces the processes by which people confront and seek to address failures in their lives by looking at one specific material: holy water. The following analyses will consider several key questions for evaluating when things go wrong by specifically interrogating the processes of knowledge-​ production when using materials to achieve desired effects. In particular, what is the relationship between the expectation of individuals seeking a radical change and the reality of that change failing to take place? Some of the cases

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detailed here pull from the extensive scholarship and media coverage on HIV/​ AIDS in Ethiopia because it brings the prevalence of holy water practices into contemporary focus. However, the analysis aims to reflect on the trends of this material’s use in broader terms and not on the subjectivities of patients suffering from debilitating conditions. This chapter highlights how for certain urbanizing locales in Ethiopia, these sorts of material encounters should not be interpreted exclusively as reflections of local limits of access but as a conscious open-​ ended approach to everyday causality. Furthermore, my objective is to show how reaching a compromise between ‘science and religion’ among the religiously devout is as much about changing local mindsets as it is about revealing how Western conventions of healing and self-​transformation operate.

Healing: a matter of redemption For Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, Timqet, the feast day of Epiphany, is one of the most important events of their year and an occasion where they come into direct contact with holy water as a renewing resource of their faith. Timqet is socially significant due to the massive participation that it draws from every church community, in order to stage three days of festive pageantry that re-​ enacts a founding event for the history of Christianity: the baptism of Jesus Christ at the river Jordan. Every community, from city to village, recreates ‘Yordanos’ by holding ceremonies in a public area where a stationary or temporary pool of water is positioned, from which holy water is distributed en masse. In the capital of Addis Ababa, a large field called Jan Meda, which typically hosts football tournaments and horse races, serves as a grand scale example of how holy water is distributed and collected. The Blessing of the Waters is completed in a cross-​shaped pool, connected to a fire-​hose-​type valve that is released and the blessed water is sprayed to the many thousands participating. Those further away from the centre collect water in beverage bottles and drink and spread it over their faces, heads and, especially, ailing limbs. This yearly event is the baseline material encounter with water as a blessing and as instantiating a creedal truth: Christ’s baptism as redemption for all.1 Holy water, within this context and its central place in the liturgical sphere, permits examining its properties as a conduit of renewal and a medium 1 This moment is considered monumental for several other reasons: as the event where Christ was revealed as God. Another name for this feast day is Theophany (from the Greek Theos [God] and phainein [revelation]). It celebrates the absolution the sins of the forefathers by installing a new covenant, as prophesized by the coming of the Messiah. The feast commemorates the creation of the sacrament of baptism (also named Timqet), which is the rite of initiation for Christian membership. In Ethiopia, baptism is usually performed at forty days for males, eighty days for females.

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that locates sacramentality in concrete ways. To understand this, the relationship between matter, creation and Godly restoration becomes central. Referring to the Book of Baptism, an Ethiopian canonical source, Gebru (2012: 160) underscores how, by Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan, the sanctification of the water is understood as the restoration of its sacramental potential. The whole Christ event has rendered the entire creation ‘secretly sacramental’, allowing it to become ‘a conductor of divine grace, the vehicle of divine energies’. Thus, when the church blesses and sanctifies the created matter in its liturgical celebration, it is essentially making manifest what Christ has already accomplished. With this understanding of the event of Timqet, and thus the sanctification of all creation, the material world is retained within an encompassing domain of divine authority and life-​giving power. Russian Orthodox theologian and priest Alexander Schmemann (1998:  72)  articulates the creation of life as recounted in the Book of Genesis and later fulfilled by Christ’s baptism (i.e. the bringing of the new covenant) as ‘the liberation of the dry land from the water as a victory of the Spirit of God over the waters –​the chaos of nonexistence. In a way, then, creation is a transformation of water into life’. The emphasis on the chaos of nonexistence that is inherent in water is an important theological theme in du Boulay’s (2009) anthropological analysis of Orthodox cosmology in Greek village life, pointing to how it is harnessed and mediated between believers and the church as the key that distinguishes an acute difference between life and death. In a similar parallel of the inherent duality of water as both a curative and dangerous substance, the presence of clinics and vaccination tents at popular Ethiopian Orthodox holy sites like Gishen Mariam are scenarios where pilgrims consume holy water while at the same time worry about catching a waterborne illness like cholera. In Ethiopian Orthodox conceptual framing, potential sacramentality extends to a broader sacred ecology, such as liturgical prayers for propitious rains and bountiful harvests (Fritsch 2001). The link between nature and divine grace is well illustrated on the feast day of Archangel Raguel (September 9/​ 10), where it is believed that rain on this day is ts’ebel (holy water), causing people to run outside in order to be drenched. More commonly, it is natural springs that are classed as ts’ebel,2 sometimes at great conflict with the Hermann-​Mesfen (2012: 111) classifies five categories of holy water in the Ethiopian Orthodox context:  (a)  water blessed by a priest or high clergy, (b)  spring water (i.e. source, lake, river, waterfall) considered already blessed naturally, (c) water manipulated by traditional healers and prescribed for certain therapies, (d) thermal water and (e) mineral water consumed for mundane purposes but containing potentially therapeutic properties. 2

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municipal government or even private landowners who are resistant to accommodate the high traffic that holy water attracts. Once these resources are confirmed by clerical authorities as endowed by God, those outside the Church are powerless against public sway. Churches known for their holy water, typically located a significant distance away from the church itself, will have the spring or its reservoir fenced off and directed towards a faucet or shower plumbing structure, to be administered by clergy. In addition to the feast day of Timqet, holy water is sanctified on certain feast days or reserved occasions (i.e. grave health emergencies) and is made available to the public, where worshippers line up to receive drinks from small cups or fill up recycled plastic and glass bottles with holy water poured from a metal kettle. This liquid blessing is communicated as receiving medhanit (medicine), from the linguistic root ‘medan’, meaning to be saved or cured. In this manner, individuals who need access to simple spiritual therapy can find their supply of holy water on a regular basis and in the convenience of their local neighbourhood. Given how many Ethiopian Orthodox Christians do not partake of communion regularly, it is plain to see how holy water, as an accessible and versatile resource, might occupy a significant place in their spiritual lives. Its versatility is defined by the many different ways and contexts in which it is employed. Blessing material objects by holy water is a common occurrence in regions with dominant Orthodox Christian populations, starting with the basic blessing of the home, such as when it is initially erected, or at times of a recent birth or death. In Russia, for example, it is not uncommon to witness occasions where Orthodox priests conduct rites of blessing for military personnel or cosmonauts, followed by the application of holy water on ships, space rockets and the like. These procedures, whereby man-​made objects are brought under divine sanction and protection, is made possible by Orthodox teachings that consider ‘salvation made by Christ [as] enabl[ing] material things to act as sacraments of communion with God’ (Ware in Gebru 2012: 160). Nevertheless, under this rubric of sacramental potentially, defining objects as sanctified can be a complicated affair. The semantic range of ts’ebel is itself vast, connoting baptismal and blessed water as already described as well as ‘dust’ and ‘earth’. This refers to the practice of mixing soil from holy places, zones of intense prayers (e.g. monasteries), as well as ash from the censer used during liturgy, substances that are mixed with holy water and are consumed by ingestion or spread on the body. There are various directives of holy water in combination with other materials:  barley mixed with holy water wrapped in plastic on the wrist of a baby, in amulet-​ like fashion, is called ts’ebel; memorial bread baked and blessing in the home is called ts’ebel tsaddik (literal translation:  pious holy water). From some of these examples, sacramental potentiality can apply to various types of

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materials that have ‘blessed linkages’. Heo (2013) employs the terms hagion, holy and hieron, sacred, in order to evaluate the reception of a particular icon of Mary in Egypt, considered miraculous due to the oil it emits. Against the backdrop of historical controversies, such as iconoclasm within Christian Churches about the relationship between earthly and heavenly realms as it manifests materially, matter is understood to be imbued with spiritual power and the processes that initiate this ‘communicative potentiality of objects and bodies to be in touch with divine power’ (155). Applying this logic to the wider ecology, as it is understood by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, a spring is considered ts’ebel based on the miraculous work of a Christian saint, and, by its essence, extends the saint’s hagiographic life as a relic to be incorporated into the material world. From resolving these tensions between flesh and spirit to territorializing space as furnished with potentially sacramental force, holy water as a redemptive agent appears in everyday praxis and greatly influences how individuals remedy concrete obstacles in their lives. To present one such case, Meheret, a successful businesswoman, sought the advice of spiritually gifted individuals (awakioch) who could offer up strategies for how to lease out her commercial building that had failed to garner tenants for many months. Since this situation was gradually causing her financial difficulty and overall anxiety, a family friend suggested a technique that she used at least once annually in her home, which was to take stones from a cave church, soak them in holy water and set them a couple of metres away from the perimeters of her house. In addition to the special potency of the cave rocks, this advice was based on the understanding that holy water sanctifies any element with which it comes into contact and repels any inauspicious or destructive forces. Meheret added this technique onto her already progressed search for tenants, and several months later her building was successfully leased. Which method ultimately contributed positively to her goal was not delineated by Meheret, but by resorting to holy water, and with it prayer and a direct appeal to God to help her, she shifted the failure away from herself and reconstituted her difficult search as a problem greater than herself. In this way, the application of holy water worked practically as an agent of will. Thus, for Meheret, when things continued to go wrong, the core of the issue was removed from her own personal causality. The core of the issue, one might suppose, becomes difficult to identify once more than one interpretation of cause and effect is at play. Horton’s ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’ (1967) theorizes how ‘knowledge systems’ of a diviner and scientist, as archetypally understood within the scholastic disciplines of that era, follow certain procedural templates of attributing causality, what he contrasts as closed systems, traditional

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societies with firmer cosmological outlooks, and open systems, societies with a broader awareness of alternative theories and factors. Horton is concerned with predicaments of reason, namely, how certain cultural contexts ‘explain away failure’. In his view, compared to scientific reasoning that stops at the ‘first failure’ in which the proof or hypothesis is proven incorrect, spiritual interventions instead have the ability to leave the failure open. Horton considers this ‘the aura of fallibility [that] provides for the self-​protecting action of such a theory by making it possible, in the event of a failure, to switch from one potential sequence to another in such a way as to leave the theory as a whole unimpugned’ (171). Holy water opens up new ways of looking at personal conditions and not by linking causality to self (i.e. responsibility) but by giving opportunities for transformation that create new sequences of probable cause that directs the root of the ‘problem’ elsewhere, to a material too intangible to control. Meheret reasoned that her financial instability was rooted in an awful economic climate but then also considered the possibility that her lack of luck (iddil) was also a factor, one that became more pronounced as her problem persisted. The notion of luck can be further refined by relating to another common synonym in local Amharic colloquialism, where good luck is attributed to h’il we’ha (lit. the water in which grain is steeped, meaning ‘rich water’). This is a relational concept:  one runs out of ‘water’, goodwill, between oneself and another, between oneself and a situation. This awareness, and the material processes of holy water and prayer that coordinate with it, is our concern here. Boylston (2012: 102) considers holy water, and its applications by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, as parallel to fasting as regimes of practice that seek to reconfigure oneself, ‘as an efficacious mode of the transformation of the religious subject, as a means of drawing the person into proximity with the divine, and as a practice whose potency is widely accepted but whose interpretive meaning is indeterminate’. Bringing these comments into the field of individual everyday encounters, one that moves outside of the self and comes into contact with spaces and people, holy water is a material intervention addressing undesirable conditions by maintaining the aim of living well (i.e. achieving a closeness with God), a process that requires continued renewal and is not simply a quick fix to common problems. Holy water as a solution to common problems does not mean reaching resolution as the term might imply in Western philosophical conventions. Put differently, identifying a problem and deciding on a strategy to achieve a desired state as a response to it, the direction towards a solution changes the ground of the problem. It is not only that things do surprising things, but that people on the path to stop failing discover new ways to look at their conditions. Failure creates new modes of evaluating oneself and one’s world.

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Going to ts’ebel: merging clinical treatment with Orthodox spiritual therapy As described at the outset, holy water is most visible in relation to healing activities and spiritual renewal. Of late, it has gained greater notoriety due to its popularity with HIV/​AIDS patients who use it as a principal or complementary product for treatment. However, there is a long tradition of specialized knowledge of the body and ecology within certain schools of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church tradition, from ethnobotany to exorcism.3 Furthermore, historical work on indigenous sciences in the twentieth century (see Negwo 2008) highlights how pre-​existing therapeutic structures fuse with biomedical treatment to create new class of practitioners. For instance, injectionists, who are minimally trained medical personnel that provide basic pain relief by injection, and wagesha (bone-​ setters) are part of a larger category of bahelawi hakimoch (traditional doctors) who combine prayers, magical texts and the application of holy water (Pili 2009). In this manner, holy water is employed to cure ailments and diseases that, as of yet, are conditions one lives with, ranging widely from epilepsy, variations of schizophrenia (glossed generically as chenket, ‘agitation’ or ‘stress’) and advanced diabetes. For many who cannot afford clinical treatments and consultations, these sorts of healing practices are their main recourse. However, it is just as common to find diaspora Ethiopians who have had advanced clinical interventions, with conditions from cancer to those suffering major psychiatric conditions, who journey to holy sites in order to intake the healing properties of holy water, and declare themselves completely healed or drastically improved after these events. The fundamental thread that cuts through the demographics4 of poor and rich, uneducated and exposed (because faith has no class) is that holy water works only if one believes. However, it has taken great effort to reach this stage where clinical treatment and spiritual therapy work in hybrid fashion nor have all within the Church promoted as conciliatory a stance as the now late patriarch. In her study, Hermann-​Mesfen (2012) investigates holy water sites within the broader context of development funding to combat the epidemic and notes how bahetawis (hermits) in charge of met’emek (immersion in holy water, also the same word for baptism) and general pastoral care of ts’ebeltegnas 3 The phenomenon of exorcism and spirit possession, which I largely leave out of this discussion, has extensive scholarship in the field of Ethiopian Studies. This relates somewhat to the manifestation of the HIV virus, believed by some to be a demon. 4 A recent survey reported that traditional healing clinics for various ailments are utilized among individuals with more than twelve years of education (34.6 per cent) and that there is a general dissatisfaction with modern health services (36 per cent) (Kloos et al. 2013: 144).

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(persons taking holy water) often barred them from leaving once admitted and were generally inflexible towards other treatments aside from the spiritual, signs of a clear competitive tension. Moreover, the publicizing of holy water cures by these churches, estimated at ten thousand holy water deposits in Ethiopia (Kloos et  al. 2013:  147), has been considered a major obstacle for municipal health workers because it has perpetuated misinformation about false success. Since clinical testing is not always accurately conducted, there is real fear that more individuals are infected this way. In effect, the successful groundwork of HIV and tuberculosis (TB) initiatives and programs has been to delicately loosen the firm boundaries between biomedical and holy water treatment in Ethiopia. Modifying or abandoning certain traditional procedures and outlook is what Vitebsky (1993: 108) calls the ‘essence of “Development”’, which ‘is to declare an essence in someone else, in order to end their previous state of knowledge by transmuting it into ignorance’. The medicalization of this progress (see USAID HIV/​AIDS Care and Support Program 2011) has not only been about greater local education about infectious diseases but also to alter attitudes by increasing awareness. Currently, among practitioners of holy water, there is an acceptance of Western biomedical conventions without discarding the established spiritual therapies of the Orthodox Church. The persistence of this material is less an issue of access and exposure to medication, but a conscious choice to use multiple types of treatment. To profile this trend, I  want to refer to an HIV patient who I knew while on fieldwork (2010–​12). Senait was a vibrant woman in her early thirties, who previously ran a beauty salon but became housebound as her condition became increasingly critical. She lived in Dessie, a city well equipped to address her medical needs as it served as the main hub for emergency relief services in the region. There was a pharmacy every couple of blocks as well as several local distributors of pharmaceutical products. For Senait’s progressed condition, she accessed treatment through several different outlets; she attended one of four area hospitals for intravenous glucose transfusions on a monthly basis, and went ‘shopping around’ at the pharmacy for pain relievers. She also took herbal aids such as chamomile tea, which she was recommended might help with her sleeping, and benefited from home visits by a nurse every couple of weeks when agonizing pain would take hold and injections needed to be administered. She also sought as many opportunities of receiving God’s blessing via the mediating power of holy water, enacted through the material processes of sanctifying her home as well as having priests visit her often to offer a blessing and apply a dousing on her and anyone present. In fact, her inability to partake of the full holy water treatment greatly bothered her, since her body was too weak to fast and travel to holy water sites. Typically, the holy water regiment consists of extended exposure to liturgical time/​space, both at

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ordinary services and along with monastic clergy at specialized times, nearly always at the compound of the church. Those suffering maladies will have communicated their troubles to their father confessor and a prescribed course is devised, with a certain amount of holy water consumed per day. Senait reasoned that she was doing her best, yet frequently noted how she was not following the process fully. At the conclusion of her episodes of contact with holy water, Senait made sure to remind those present to pray for her that night as they left her house. Spiritual intercession, mediated by holy water and prayer, changed the ground of her condition. It became about mercy. Senait’s appeal to holy water reaffirmed the crucial work of intercession and emphasized how her treatment was a matter of investment by those who constituted her relational social sphere. Both medicines, clinical and spiritual, were an active part of her method of addressing problems. However, the agentive qualities of holy water required intervention of a knowledgebase cultivated by her, which pulled in individual and divine mercy to assist the perils of her deteriorating condition, in a manner that pills could not. Does the pill fail or is biomedicine a limiting domain to address deteriorating conditions? Senait’s story illustrates the shortcomings of greater awareness of knowledge systems. We can consider how one could do both methods, or argue which should come first –​the spiritual or the biomedical –​but in both cases we are talking about a cancelling out of different kinds of failures. If analysed to its ultimate end, one can never fail with holy water as opposed to the treatment of ART, which deploys a material to functionally ‘live with’ failed morality. In one scenario, the individual is adapting to their new health condition by taking medication, spurred by what certain perspectives view as poor choices committed in the past.5 In the other, the individual who focuses their attention to a spiritual cure is transcending their body by caring for their soul. While the de-​stigmatization of HIV/​AIDS in Ethiopia has gradually altered the impression that these items are antithetical to one another, there is an analytical utility of evaluating these decisions in binary terms, if only to consider how failures exist on various registers. This confrontation between holy water and ART in one specific way illustrates how materials and their processes of application presage particular relations of individuals to their environments. Here lies the crux of this confrontation between spiritual therapy and biomedicine. After nearly two decades of programs and initiatives, it is common knowledge that Western medicine has its limitations. One cannot be saved from HIV/​AIDS by ART, but one can by God’s redemption via the While not the focus of this analysis, the importance of sin when speaking about illness is critical. Tadele (2006: 154) in his study of HIV/​AIDS in an urban centre elaborates: ‘The fact that transmission is linked to “value laden behaviours” which are contrary to God’s rules and the failure of science to find a cure for HIV/​AIDS must have led young people and the public at large to associate HIV/​AID with a curse from God’. 5

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material intervention of holy water. Another video that is part of a collection on YouTube entitled ‘The Miracle at Entoto’ (2008), features this perspective via two witnesses with opposite outcomes. Amid sounds of liturgical prayer, a man assertively brandishes copies of test results that show him going from HIV positive to negative (see also Hermann-​Mesfen 2012 on the proliferation of test result copies as evidence for the veracity of holy water as curative). The second witness, a woman, frames herself as a victim of a wayward husband who gave her the disease; she is visibly distressed and ‘fed-​up’, as she phrases it, yet vows to never leave the mountain and the vicinity of Mariam church until she is healed by ts’ebel and the intercession of Mary. One contrast between these two individuals is clear, as females are at much higher risk than men, statistically. However, these videos exhibit another stark distinction, coloured by the principally Western audience of these online presentations. Are these holy water documentaries intended to demonstrate a particular tenacity of faith or instead argue for the persistence of ignorance of developing societies for their lack of scientific awareness? I posit that the phenomenon of Entoto is a scenario where local scepticism of the conventions of biomedical knowledge perform a type of voluntary failure. These dilemmas in treating HIV/​AIDS with holy water present a true epistemological conflict that plays out materially. The conflict is over which course of remedy is morally superior and, conversely, which register of failure is acceptable to live with. Analytically speaking, the decision to forgo medical or scientific-​technological intervention is an action of sacrifice in order to reinforce the dominance of one knowledge base over another. I would venture to say that these debates between pills and holy water demonstrate that its practitioners are at the threshold of this ‘acceptance of convention’, that the efficacy of medicine itself is being evaluated. This threshold, in certain cases, creates an existential stasis, what Corsín Jiménez (2011: 193) identifies as conditions ‘founded on knowledge’s own knowledge of its instability and ambiguousness’. Ways of understanding one’s world in particular moments of miracle and tragedy, fortune and hardship, are grounded in forces (social or otherwise) that ‘manage the unity of their social world through the administration of its disunity or division’ (193). Viewed from the specific perspectives profiled here, both types of treatments can be interpreted as failures, yet each type of knowledge’s recognition of the other creates greater fundamental shifts, a withering away of the sacredness of one’s knowledge (Horton 1967). The capacity of holy water to mediate a morally unstable world establishes it as a means for leaving open the real possibility for the failure of clinical treatment. This reasoning aligns comfortably with Orthodox Christian soteriology that interprets sin not as ‘inherited guilt’ from the consequences of the Fall but rather as ‘inherited weakness’ or propensity to degrade their Godly union and nature (Ware in Gebru 2012: 128). Conversely, this view of

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inherent human corruptibility can establish human actions as opportunities rife with the potential to return to a perfected state of creation. Therefore, it is worth speculating about how individuals navigate between spiritual and biomedical methods and how a positive and empowering outlook of the material world can drive these choices. This is an admittedly intellectualized interpretation, given how the actions of holy water practitioners, particularly in Ethiopia, is more closely characterized as submission to God, that is, acknowledging the superiority of divine agency. However, in the case I detail below, I evaluate how holy water as a method of problem-​solving opens up pathways for envisioning the advantage of navigating several epistemological valences at a given time. Here, the epistemic conflicts of material failures become further defined by the ways certain products objectify responsibility.

Materializing spiritual intercession In behavioural terms, we can observe that holy water and chemicals are deployed by seemingly similar methods, that is, as materials applied instrumentally to bring about certain positive effects. However, holy water escapes the harsh reality of things, situations, environments and conditions that fail to improve. Given the epistemic foundations of holy water as conduit of sacred agency, individuals who frame situations as operating under spiritual intercession are altering the groundwork of the problem as contingent upon human limitations to effect change. To apply holy water, even when failure transpires, does not cleverly circumvent personal responsibility but in fact heightens it. I  suggest further that the processes of holy water application signals for its practitioners a constant re-​evaluation of one’s relationship with God, a process that is more likely to be absent from biomedical interventions. The application of holy water to change one’s material ecology, often side-​by-​side with other technologies, presents two important principles for conceptualizing how materials objectify responsibility. First, employing a type of technological intervention is predicated upon mastering requisite knowhow in order to achieve an anticipated outcome. Second, materials and their ability to signal predictable or unpredictable outcomes, chemical and holy water procedures respectively, demonstrate a crucial bifurcation between agency and causality:  biomedicine contains predictable cause and effect while holy water installs wildly more ambiguous results yet with known agentive attributes. I refer to the actions of Wubenesh, a manager of a garden who used holy water for the sake of improvement, an action that inadvertently resulted in her implication in a number of awkward situations where interventions, intended as solutions, in effect, created new problems. She was in charge

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of a particularly sensitive horticultural environment:  culinary mushroom production. In the mushroom house under her management, the crop growth was stunted and not responding to conventional measures she was trained to apply, such as procedures of disinfection using chemical products. In her own home, Wubenesh follows her usual cleaning routine by sprinkling holy water on the thresholds of passageways in order to maintain purity and keep danger at bay. To give the process in the mushroom house a bit of encouragement, she applied a similar routine of holy water to the floors and the glass beakers of mushroom cultures. Instead of a successful yield, a massive bacterial contamination broke out, tarnishing the whole crop and requiring her to use bleach as the solvent of choice. Here, we have a marked difference between biological and spiritual technologies that produced an undesired effect by all accounts. A new problem surfaced and demanded technological adjustment, but is this a material failure? Several elements can be gleaned from Wubenesh’s material interventions, namely, the sequencing of her actions. When conventional measures for crop growth did not produce anticipated results, Wubenesh opted for another efficacious method. Her practice of trial and error of failing is part of a knowledgebase of understanding and manipulating the material world that certain technologies do not facilitate (such as biomedicine, discussed previously, and chemical disinfectants here), materials that contain causality-​ less knowledge. Therefore, I want to propose that holy water as a resource behaves as a type of common sense, what Geertz (1968: 11) characterizes as the ‘struggle for the real’, that is, how individuals sort out various influences (i.e. scientific, aesthetic, moral or practical concerns) while they figure out demands of everyday life. In a different scenario around the same time, when Wubenesh’s child got lice, the recourse to holy water was the same. Her strategy was guided by a logical calculation, based on an efficacious deployment of this material in the past. But in the mushroom house, her common sense does not deliver what she expected. Wubenesh assessed the failure of the crop as trouble that was out of her control; it was out of control precisely because her recourse to the process of intercession through the material medium of holy water did not produce the expected result. This resonates with Douglas’s (1992) work on blame as a means of reallocating responsibility; Wubenesh would not be able to shift the blame to bleach or chemical fertilizers had they failed, as they lack the space of distributive agency. Failure, depending on how it is framed as well as how it is materially mediated, can refigure the result completely. The end, I would venture to say, becomes less about achieving established expectations and more about a re-​ situation of oneself to one’s environment. Holy water is a material intervention that contains real intercessory power that places responsibility on individuals through an expanding sociality of problem-​solving but also establishes room

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for things to go wrong. It is a fail-​safe means to make sure the material condition is not willed to fail. Another helpful vantage point through which to interpret peoples’ choices for holy water treatments is to understand the appeal of surviving a miracle. Holy water is a material that requires faith and works to affirm spiritual connectedness. However, there are various methods by which spiritual intercession is materialized. The practice of vows (s’let), which requires vocalization of a personal need or desire, and bounded by a promise in the form of a material offering, falls under this category of problem-​solving by God’s hand. Gilsenan (2000: 79–​80) notes how realizing a miracle is to recognize an ‘underlying dimension of hidden reality’, such that ‘these signs transform life, if only briefly, by demonstrating that there are in fact significant inward relations between things where apparently there are only the outward routine and unproblematic succession of events in standard sequences whose interconnections are neither important, consciously thought of, nor reflected upon’. Miracles for patients healed from terminal or life-​threatening conditions (Singleton 2001) affirms the power of prayer and demotes the efficacy of biomedicine, in essence, hierarchizing one type of knowledge over another. What the practitioner of holy water or other materials of spiritual intercession are attuned to is the encounter’s spiritual importance, whether or not there is improvement. Failures are messages about oneself. Tadele (2006) notes how idioms of suffering, whether the epidemic of HIV/​AIDS or the calamity of famine, act as messages:  punishment sent by God. He retells one particular anecdote, wherein a researcher on agricultural policy and politics attempted to gain scientific facts from three university students about the causes and solutions for the country’s devastating droughts. While the first two responded saying ‘we must pray more’ and ‘we should fast more’, the third proposed ‘join[ing] a monastery to devote [him]self truly to fasting and prayer’ (Hareide in Tadele 2006: 91). Failures, or more accurately glossed as inkefat (obstacle) or cheger (problem), are understood as spiritual tests that act as tangible signs of God’s attention. The rhetoric of hazen, connoting a time of great sadness ranging from a national or personal tragedy, similarly exposes idioms for this state of being. A common response given as advice following a misfortune is to bear it (tchai). God, they say, is trying to tell you something. This lesson will become a blessing. With holy water, there is an expectation that is communicated either verbally, subconsciously, publically or performatively. I consider this expectation to be a materialization of spiritual intercession. This places holy water as a technology of common sense that is rendered by its practitioners in such a way that an external observer could perhaps call a failure. The reason why we can say that these are ‘material failures’ has to do with the consequences of expectations

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not being fulfilled, what might otherwise be called disappointment, suffering or ambivalence to certain states of being that result from problem-​solving. The attachment to several technologies and know-​how operates as a type of pragmatism, but it also creates more gaps for interpreting one’s moral universe and creating messy realities where people are mixing, matching and making muddy mélanges. Acknowledging how all things, situations and life circumstances cannot always ‘work’, holy water and its application –​part of a broader repertoire of spiritual therapy  –​is about how Ethiopian Orthodox Christians resolve inevitable human failure. Spiritual therapy such as holy water represents a reasoned expectation of outcome and the basis for why we can think of it as ‘failure’, as close to objectively possible. Senait does not get better; Wubenesh’s crop gets worse. These situations of dashed expectations and chronic disappointment open up a critical space of investigation, however, in terms of the affective quality of failed effects. What we have observed with these decisions to use holy water is a specific type of alternative calculation, what Zigon (2014: 27) considers as dwelling comfortably and having a firm existential ground: ‘an approach that posits moral ways of being-​in-​the-​world that have as their primary concern dwelling comfortably in a world one has found oneself in and reducing the anxiety one feels when the relations that constitute this world become problematic’. The failures of living comfortably are materially managed by facilitating a condition of waiting for the next  –​in this context, the next miracle. In the following section, I will consider this drift, positioning it in the gap between problem and solution, where ‘failure’ splits and the realities of ethnographic analysis and the paths people follow depart.

Learning and living in failure Concerning how failures can happen and the pathways that they open up, we have delineated several key trends. Recent debates over the practical and epistemic tensions of adopting technologies and knowledge systems, in the case of clinical treatment of HIV/​AIDS and socio-​economic development, have resulted in an open scepticism among some practitioners to accept conventions such as biomedicine. Greater awareness and knowledge does not make one knowledge triumph over another, not without critical experiences that revise one’s approach to common sense. In the case of Wubenesh, using holy water as an agricultural growth supplement creates a scientific predicament adjusted by the technology of spiritual intercession; this effectively creates a situation where the material is removed from its knowledge context. Based on new positions of awareness, based on spiritual intercession that is materially mediated, individuals reconfigure

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their failures, either as detached from individual causality or as part of a condition one must to inherit. Spiritual therapy, understood through the breadth of how one material (holy water) is applied, is reflective of how we accept the limitations of human agency. In this sense, holy water not only materializes conviction for change but also has tangible bearing on how people experience expectations. Treading the thin line between the objective and analytical and the intersubjective and ethnographic, there are complications to calling someone else’s circumstances, conditions, actions ‘failures’, when that someone might see it otherwise. Using the vocabulary employed here on the messy processes of the limits of knowledge and developing alternative awareness, Miyazaki and Riles’s (2005) article ‘Failure as an Endpoint’ describes how a particular brand of financial analyst characterizes the limits of the technologies of speculation (arbitrage) as a state of ‘permanent failure’. They interpret it this way based on what this community calls an endpoint to their knowledge base:  ‘in response to the apprehension of the endpoint of their own knowledge, they retreat from knowing. And they also retreat from the recognition of the failure of their own knowledge by locating indeterminacy and complexity “out there”, as if to be discovered, documented in real time’ (328). There are limits to knowledge and the limits of agency, specifically the capacity to stop learning from a specific technology. Moreover, this aspect of how individuals accumulate experiences and how it informs their sense of robust knowledge is determined by what Wong (2007), evaluating pedagogical frameworks of motivated learning, calls the productive factor of anticipation. He describes anticipation as a response to the potential for change where ‘imagined possibility becomes sensible reality’ (208). The temporality of living in failure is often a continued condition, that is, it is not directed by a sense that success is around the corner. What does the framing of failure, as a condition born in the field or immanent in anthropological analysis, provide? Are they productive, ‘passing through the endpoint on the way to new (but self-​consciously limited) beginnings’ or indeed an ‘endpoint in a sustained way’ (Miyazaki and Riles 2005: 328). They propose that the end of knowledge for their informants is also a concrete limitation for ethnographic representation: We want to suggest that the example of traders’ apprehension of the failure of their knowledge of the market goes beyond mere parallelism between their knowledge practices and our own:  it allows us to reflect ethnographically in turn on our own moment, and theirs, as a kind of endpoint. Under these conditions, which we term ‘epistemological sameness’, it may seem that social scientific knowledge ‘fails’ in aesthetic

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terms; that is, that the forms that define it as knowledge cease to produce the effects they once did. (328) Here, failure is an exercise of reflecting upon a past state as ‘producing the effects it once did’ and an acknowledgement of this anticipation. However, I  would push further that it is the materiality of the failure, as we have observed among holy water users in Ethiopia, that instantiates the chronicle of past actions being referenced. Miracles are one type of referential and tested knowledge, one that has the space for the suspension of belief, but that are also ‘non-​resolving’, a phenomenon of the next. Is failure a discursive dead-​end? No. I  would argue it is crucial because it delineates how common sense is constantly being revised. As this analysis has proposed, material failures place expectations in the hope for a more positive intervention through a process that inspires individuals to keep reflecting on their unachieved states. Holy water may or may not be an improvement, a solution or a cure, but its practitioners are shaped into critical examiners of the limits of knowledge systems. Rejecting, avoiding or refusing confirmed clinical solutions is an orientation and reaction to the increased availability of technological access. Yet the absent means of a vetting process, a knowledge socially aware, makes recourse to problem-​solving too risky to reduce holy water as remedial. By coordinating spiritual therapeutics with emerging technologies, Ethiopian Orthodox Christians exercise a healthy scepticism about the veracity of any source of knowledge that fails to build upon the multiple points of access that implicate individuals to administer to the objectification of responsibility. Failure within this sphere of social relations provides a constructive answer to the necessary risk without which the indeterminacy of problems, big and small, remains out of reach.

References Boylston, T. (2012) The Shade of the Divine: Approaching the Sacred in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community. London: London School of Economics. Corsín Jiménez, A. (2011) ‘Trust in Anthropology’. Anthropological Theory Vol. 11, No. 2, 177–​96. Douglas, M. (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge. du Boulay, J. (2009) Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village. Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey. Fritsch, E. (2001) The Liturgical Year of the Ethiopian Church. Addis Ababa: Master Printing Press.

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Gebru, M. (2012) Liturgical Cosmology: The Sacramental and Theological Dimensions of Creation as Expressed in the Ethiopian Liturgy. PhD Thesis, Toronto, University of Toronto. Geertz, C. (1968) Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilsenan, M. (2000) ‘The Operations of Grace’. In Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris. Heo, A. (2013) ‘The Bodily Threat of Miracles: Security, Sacramentality, and the Egyptian Politics of Public Order’. American Ethnologist Vol. 40, No. 1, 149–​64. Hermann-​Mesfen, J. (2012) L’implication Du Christianisme Ethiopien Dans La Lutte Contre Le Sida: Une Socio-​anthropologie de La ‘guerison’. PhD Thesis, Aix-​Marseille Université. Online at: https://​tel.archives-​ouvertes.fr/​ tel-​00762029. Horton, R. (1967) ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science: Part II’. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute Vol. 37, No. 2, 155–​87. Jordan, M. (2012) ‘Ethiopians Trade Holy Water for AIDS Drugs’. The Wall Street Journal. Online at: http://​www.wsj.com/​articles/​SB1000142405297020380650 4577182932291514986. Kloos, H., D. H. Mariam, M. Kaba and G. Tadele (2013) ‘Traditional Medicine and HIV/​AIDS in Ethiopia: Herbal Medicine and Faith Healing: A Review’. Ethiopian Journal of Health Development Vol. 27, No. 2. ‘Living Proof: Holy Water Healing’ (2011) Online at: www.viewchange.org/​videos/​ living-​proof-​ethiopia-​holy-​water-​healing. Lønvig Siersted, S., and S. Sztuk (2008) Miraklet På Entoto [Miracle at Entoto]. Danidas Verdensbilledlegat. Online at: https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=mw1UQLspiYw. Miyazaki, H., and A. Riles (2005) ‘Failure as an Endpoint’. In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Negwo, A. (2008) Church-​Based Healing and the State in Ethiopia, 1900–​1980. PhD Dissertation, Emory University. Pili, E. (2009) ‘Aynatela: The Shadow of the Eye: Healers and Traditional Medical Knowledge in Addis’. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, edited by Svein Ege, Harald Aspen, Birhanu Teferra and Shiferaw Bekele. Trondheim. Schmemann, A. (1998) For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Singleton, A. (2001) ‘ “Your Faith Has Made You Well”: The Role of Storytelling in the Experience of Miraculous Healing’. Review of Religious Research Vol. 43, No. 2, 121–​38. Tadele, G. (2006) Bleak Prospects: Young Men, Sexuality, and HIV/​AIDS in an Ethiopian town. Research Report 80. Leiden: African Studies Centre. USAID HIV/​AIDS Care and Support Program (2011) Light at the End of the Tunnel: HIV Treatment in Ethiopia. Online at: https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=ElLQM-​kYAO0. Vitebsky, P. (1993) ‘Is Death the Same Everywhere? Contexts of Knowing and Doubting’. In An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance, edited by Mark Hobart. London: Routledge.

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Wong, D. (2007) ‘Beyond Control and Rationality: Dewey, Aesthetics, Motivation, and Educative Experiences’. Teachers College Record Vol. 109, No. 1, 192–​220. Zigon, J. (2014) ‘Attunement and Fidelity: Two Ontological Conditions of Being in the World’. Ethos Vol. 42, No. 1, 16–​30.

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6 Haredi (material) cultures of health at the ‘hard to reach’ margins of the state Ben Kasstan

Introduction The Haredi minority in England is growing rapidly and is projected to constitute the majority of the overall Jewish population by the middle of the twenty-​ first century (see Staetsky and Boyd 2015). Despite their prominence, the Haredim remain poorly understood by the broader Jewish population as well as the non-​Jewish majority. A recent explosion of public and media scrutiny regarding the social construction of gender in some Haredi (and Hassidic1) circles, as well as government inspections of private educational institutions,2 has amplified this concern in the UK context. Haredi Judaism holds a self-​ protective stance that manifests in a preference to live in exclusive neighbourhoods, which can be a point of concern (and possibly intrigue) for those on the outside attempting to look Referred to locally as ‘Hassidish’ rather than ‘Hassidic’. Hassidish Jews are Haredi by definition and follow the particular teachings and philosophies of their rebbe (rabbi). 2 At the time of research (2014–​16), there was political and media uproar concerning a ban against women driving within the Belz subgroup. Haredi educational institutions across England were also being inspected and scrutinized by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OfSTED). Controversy centered on unregistered and unregulated Haredi schools as well as their standards of secular education. 1

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in. Haredi settlements prefer to maintain a degree of self-​protection from what is perceived as belonging to the outside or non-​Haredi world (see also Valins 2003). Possibly for the same reasons, Haredi Jews in Israel have been described as voluntarily living in demarcated and defined ‘ghettos’ (see Aran, Stadler and Ben-​Ari 2008: 32). However, the historical baggage associated with this term and the (forced) isolation it implies can conceal the complex relations between the margins and the state, as well as the material manifestations that are formed through their encounters and exchanges. The term ‘frontier’ can instead imply how overlapping and fluid cultures and cultural encounters emerge in spaces where ‘rules are disputed and authority is confronted’ (cf. Wilson and Donnan 2006:  116), and can more appropriately describe the experience of minority groups at the margins of the state. Rather than being concealed in bounded ‘ghettoes’ that demarcate Haredi settlements, frontiers can enable what is internal and external  –​or socially constructed conceptualizations of purity and danger (Douglas 2003 [1966]) –​to become entangled, and must then be carefully and continuously mediated and managed. Healthcare is no exception to this rule and previous studies demonstrate how religious authorities are entrusted to make mainstream biomedical services ‘kosher’ for Haredi Jews in accordance with interpretations of religious law (see Coleman-​Brueckheimer and Dein 2011; Coleman-​Brueckheimer, Spitzer and Koffman 2009; Ivry 2010). Relatively less discussion focuses on what happens when state services fall short of the expectations held by religious minority groups, and how this provokes fascinating responses that take increasingly material forms. As I  go on to argue, a Haredi culture of health and its appropriation of biomedical materials is a strategy for the minority to meet its own needs while also negotiating its relation with the biomedical and public health authorities.

Health and bodily care at the ‘hard to reach’ margins of the state Haredi Jews are portrayed as being ‘hard to reach’ by the English and European public health authorities, typically because of ‘low uptake’ or ‘compliance’ with certain preventive health services  –​especially immunizations  –​which present implications for ‘herd immunity’ and the control of infectious disease. Public health is a body of government that rests on the ‘moral assumption that response to the perceived suffering of others is a worthy action’ (Hahn and Inhorn 2009: 4), which arguably results in the state formulating ideals of citizenship that are expected to be expressed or performed through bodily

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compliance. From this perspective, the hard to reach label is an accusation that Haredi Jews attempt to evade mainstream healthcare services and interventions. The ‘hard to reach’ accusation can be interpreted as one of moral failure in that Haredi Jews are portrayed as shelving the expectation to act as responsible citizens –​and thereby compromising the immunity of the body of the nation. Conceptualizing groups as hard to reach is worthy of critical engagement because it is also a relational point of reference. Use of this term can be embedded in a broader context where biomedicine is cast as the self-​ proclaimed ‘centre’ and minority groups at the margins or periphery are regarded as being severed from the arterial flows of biomedical knowledge and materials (see Ecks and Sacks 2005; Ecks 2005). This warrants intervention on the part of the biomedical and public health authority, which arguably attempts to penetrate what is considered to lie beyond the limits of biomedical influence and authority. Here we see the crux of governmentality, which Michel Foucault (2006) describes as the capacity and tactics used to ‘discipline’ and co-​opt subjects into being ‘governable’ –​at both the level of the individual and the population. The control of individual bodies is then achieved through techniques and technologies of surveillance that are enmeshed in areas of everyday life and entrusted to manage subjects, such as biomedicine and public health. The margins or peripheries have historically posed a threat to the state by offering a tempting alternative to life as a subject (see Scott 2009), reaffirming the need for intervention. Margins are simultaneously within and beyond the reach of the state; they can be imagined as occupying a space that is unruly and wayward, where the state is desperately re-​establishing and reimprinting its order through various techniques of power over both territories and bodies (Das and Poole 2004). Assimilating bodies at the physical and metaphorical margins of the state –​ essentially the attempt of overcoming the margin –​is an enduring expression of sovereignty (see Asad 2004). The broader historical and anthropological discourse clearly demonstrates how biomedicine forms part of a campaign of ‘internal colonialism’3 to incorporate what exists beyond the ‘reach’ of the state into the body of the nation (see e.g. Merli 2008). Using the example of a Haredi Jewish settlement in England, this chapter argues that ‘hard to reach’ groups at the margins of the state do not evade the biomedical authority altogether (as the term implies) but may instead have a preference to negotiate, manage and oversee their health encounters. This is especially the case when the biomedical and public health authority fails to 3 See Scott (2009: 12) for a lengthier description of ‘internal colonialism’ and how it is exercised over both territories and bodies.

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understand the high regard in which health and the body are viewed in the Judaic cosmology. The ‘hard to reach’ accusation of moral failure that is propagated by the state and its public health authority can then be inverted to argue how state services actually fail to reach the expectations of Haredi Jews. Some state services are viewed with suspicion by Haredi organizations, which I  argue should be interpreted as an accusation of a state failure to uphold the importance of preserving Jewish lives as well as the material integrity of Jewish bodies. The development of a Haredi culture of health and medical care consequently buffers the shortfalls of the state and the mistrust in which state institutions are viewed. Material cultures of health or ‘medico-​materialities’ that are otherwise associated with belonging legitimately and exclusively to the biomedical and public health authority are appropriated as part of this Haredi response, which further contest the state’s responsibility and ability to manage the health of all its citizens. The term ‘medico-​materialities’ is used here to describe how biomedical objects and materials become appropriated and incorporated by specific Haredi organizations as a strategy to care for Jewish bodies –​also presenting an opportunity to control the relation of the social body to that of the nation. It signifies how biomedical materials and artefacts –​particularly ambulance and emergency brigades –​become a ‘vehicle’ to fulfil cosmological imperatives to preserve life (pikuach nefesh) and respect the dead. The contrasted use (as well as performance of) biomedical material cultures then broadens theoretical debates of how materiality exposes the complex ways in which materials are constituted and experienced differently according to context (cf. Tilly 2007).

Rescuing, recovering and returning bodies The settlement under study has a range of Haredi-​led institutions, enterprises and services that are designed to support and sustain its anticipated growth. The growing Haredi infrastructure makes dependence on the broader Jewish or non-​Jewish services significantly reduced. One local rabbi tells me: You have to realize that the Jewish community is a self-​ sustaining community. Somebody wouldn’t have to go out and buy something from a non-​Jewish shop in his whole life. That means he has a local Jewish dry cleaner, a local Jewish bakery, a local Jewish grocer that all provides local business. What this rabbi describes as ‘self-​sustaining’ is perhaps better interpreted as self-​protective, especially as a sense of dependence on non-​Jewish locals for

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day-​to-​day living is reduced. The Haredi strategy of self-​protection was made clear during an interview with a Jewish local, who explained that the Haredi settlement ‘wants to be self-​sufficient, self-​contained, and its ideal aspiration is to live separately in peace’. On the one hand, the defensive and protective nature of Haredi life is a strategy to avoid what is positioned as belonging to the outside or non-​ Haredi world, resembling what James Scott (2009: 20) describes elsewhere as ‘a zone of cultural refusal’. A strategy of protection allows for potentially dangerous aspects that emerge within the frontier to be ‘refused’ or substituted (such as secular education). It is, on the other hand, essential to add that the frontier in which the Haredim and mainstream meet  allows for the filtering of materials that could be viewed or materialized as ‘kosher’ for Jewish locals. This is especially the case for healthcare, which has been described as ‘one of the few areas in which the [Haredi] community has contact with non-​Jewish people’ (Purdy et  al. 2000:  23).4 I  would instead argue that health and medicine are one of the few remaining sites where Haredi and non-​Jewish people encounter each other, a point of intersection that becomes mediated by Haredi organizations in which medico-​materials perform an instrumental role. I am told by a local rabbi that Haredi expectations of health services are high because the body, in the Judaic cosmology, is viewed as a gift from HaShem5 and Jews are mandated ‘to look after it, maintain it, and do everything we can to live a healthy life for as long as possible’. He goes on to remark that this consequently means Haredi Jews will generally seek out the best quality services in order ‘to ensure they will meet the obligation of leading a healthy life, [but] it is often felt that the wider [non-​Jewish] community do not share the same value’. Socially constructed ideals of health and bodily care have then resulted in a need to supplement the difference between the expectations or aspiration of healthcare services in the Haredi settlement and what is offered by the state. Haredi body rescue and recovery services exemplify attempts to bridge the gap between expectations of health services and what the state falls short of providing, and such interventions also mediate the position of the Jewish minority vis-​à-​vis the state. Hatzolah6 is a rapid response service established by and for the Jewish settlement, and forms part of an international Haredi brand to provide emergency care for Jewish bodies. What makes Hatzolah an interesting case study is the way in which a religious minority group appropriates and exercises material Discussed in the context of the Haredi settlement in Gateshead (North East England). 5 Hebrew, the name. Used by pious Jews in place of ‘God’. 6 Hebrew (also Hatzalah), rescue or save. 4

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technologies from the mainstream biomedical culture, in this case, private ambulances. This is arguably a method to meet perceived shortfalls and failings of the state, especially as Hatzolah were brought to North London in 19797 after two Jewish individuals succumbed to heart attacks while waiting for NHS ambulances to arrive (see Ryan 2003). The fatally slow arrival time that led to the (possibly avoidable) deaths of these two Jewish locals can be interpreted as contravening the halachic8 obligation to preserve life (pikuach nefesh). Since these failures of the state to rapidly mobilize and respond to emergencies at the ‘hard to reach’ margins, Hatzolah ambulance brigades have been instituted in Jewish settlements across North London (Golders Green, Hendon and Edgware), Gateshead, as well as North Manchester. Hatzolah drivers in the United Kingdom have an unparalleled arrival time  –​ within minutes –​and thus surpass the local NHS ambulance services and serve as a ‘vehicle’ to fulfil the commandment of pikuach nefesh. The advantage here is that Hatzolah divisions are attending to emergency calls within the same bounds as the Jewish neighbourhoods in which volunteers live. All vehicles and ambulances are fitted with emergency medical equipment (including basic life support kits, resuscitation equipment, oxygen and defibrillators) and volunteers receive ongoing life support training. Aside from their ability to provide rapid emergency care, an additional benefit is the perceived feeling that Hatzolah provide a ‘culturally appropriate’ and Jewish service. The Haredi rapid response team is viewed as ‘culturally appropriate’ partly because its volunteers may speak vernacular languages (Yiddish or Modern Hebrew),9 but more specifically they are identifiable as an internal service. Hatzolah divisions elsewhere have been instituted out of the concern that certain Jewish subgroups (especially Shoah survivors) were ‘reluctant to make contact with a “uniformed” external agency’ (Chan et al. 2007: 639). The material expression of healthcare services and personnel can then point to a lack of acceptability for some minority groups, who, in the case of Hatzolah, respond by instituting their own culturally specific and culturally acceptable ‘uniformed’ services. Volunteers are, for instance, clearly identifiable by a black velvet kippah10 and a Hi-​Vis jacket labelled with ‘Hatzolah’ (in English and Hebrew) and ‘EMT’ as well as a six-​pointed ‘star of life’. Like many aspects of Haredi social organization in this settlement, Hatzolah is powered by (male) volunteers and funded by a redistributive economy. The

7 Haredi settlements in London replicated the Hatzolah model in the United States. 8 Halachah, body of rabbinical law. 9 Hatzolah’s (London) promotional and fundraising videos feature Haredi locals calling the emergency line and speaking in Yiddish to the operator. 10 Head covering donned by observant men (also yarmulke or skullcap). A  black velvet kippah generally identifies a man as a Haredi.

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service is sponsored mostly by a local benefactor but also through the religious imperative of financial donations (tzedokah).11 This means that Hatzolah call-​ outs are bestowed at no cost to Jewish locals in need of emergency medical assistance and their services are occasionally called upon for non-​ Jewish neighbours. A band of Hatzolah volunteers makes the service available twenty-​ four hours and seven days a week, and are also authorized to operate on Shabbat and religious festivals12 when work is otherwise forbidden. Hatzolah divisions in England work in collaboration with mainstream emergency services and receive training from NHS health professionals. Moreover, Hatzolah have partnered with fire and rescue services in North America to undergo specialist training in multiagency emergency response practices (see Newman 2014). The Haredi rapid response service is therefore designed to collaborate with, and complement, NHS services rather than replace them; they attend call-​outs and manage emergency situations until the arrival of state ambulance teams and support them with the needs of Haredi locals. Depending on the gravity of the situation, purpose-​use cars or Hatzolah ambulances are dispatched to attend accidents. The appropriation of paramedical equipment that are usually monopolized by public institutions have caused conflict between Hatzolah divisions and the local authority. Local Hatzolah recruits were, for instance, challenged in court for the use of emergency sirens and flashing blue lights (‘blues and twos’) when attending call-​outs. The material cultures of health, medicine and emergency response services can then be viewed as an expression of legitimacy for the state and its institutions, the appropriation of which by minority groups might then present a challenge to the state and its ability to meet the needs of all citizens. The appropriation and exhibition of medico-​materialities by male Hatzolah volunteers are viewed with great pride and status within Haredi Jewish populations. The sense of pride in how this Haredi brigade is viewed is reproduced through wider material culture. These ‘Jewish heroes’13 are widely revered and imitated by children –​through the use of their uniforms as fancy dress  –​ during Purim celebrations.14 Imported Hatzolah board games were also available in local Haredi stores, where players (children) morph into their Although commonly translated into English as ‘charity’, the root meaning of tzedokah (or tzedakah) is justice or righteousness. It is an aspect of halachic (rabbinical) law that requires all Jews to donate a tenth of their earnings to charitable causes. Some Jewish individuals and families would then elect to fund Hatzolah by way of this obligation. 12 Jews who observe halachic law do not work on the Sabbath (Shabbat) or certain religious holidays (Yamim Tovim). Exemption from this law is granted to those working in medical and health services due to the imperative of pikuach nefesh. 13 See Stadler (2006) for a similar regard for Haredi ZAKA volunteers. 14 Purim is a Jewish holiday that commemorates the narrative in the Megillat Esther (Book of Esther). It has become customary to celebrate Purim as a carnival, with an elaborate material culture of costumes, masks, performances, alcohol and food. 11

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Hatzolah idols and win by being the first to arrive at the accident scene. The celebration of Haredi paramedical roles resemble the case of ZAKA  –​the Haredi disaster victim identification squad in Israel. Despite the exclusive and self-​protective stance of the Haredi subgroup, ZAKA volunteers have come to play an unusually public and outwardly looking role in Israel following multiple-​casualty disasters caused by suicide bombings (Stadler, Ben-​Ari and Mesterman 2005). ZAKA has enabled Haredi Jews in Israel to redefine and negotiate their contributions as citizens when Haredim are otherwise in tension with the broader society (see Stadler, Lomsky-​ Feder and Ben-​ Ari 2008). This is particularly so because of their controversial exemption and (in some cases) outright resistance to conscription in the Israeli Defense Forces, which, for most Jewish citizens, remains the archetypical offering to the body of the nation. On the other hand, ZAKA should also be understood as a response to the Israeli state’s deficient ability to handle the implications of multiple-​ causality disasters for the halachic guardianship of dismembered bodies and disintegrated bodily materials (see Stadler 2006). ZAKA volunteers hold a particular expertise as they command both anatomical and cosmological knowledge systems:  the meticulous recovery of bodily fragments, fibres and blood for burial (or as complete a burial as possible) is conducted to uphold the halachic governance of the body and soul in Judaism. This makes ZAKA volunteers a valued human resource to collaborate with relevant medical, military and police institutions of the state (Stadler 2012). It then becomes clear how the Israeli state’s incapacity to appropriately handle bodies and bodily remains in accordance with the expectations of Haredi Jews provokes unparalleled, institutionalized and resolute responses. It is important to note that ZAKA also gather the body parts of both victims and suicide bombers for burial as part of a culture and ‘mission to honour any death’ (Stadler 2006: 846). The recovery of both victims and perpetrators might also be related to the corporeal carnage caused by suicide bombings, where the ‘literal mixing of enemy bloods’ (Linos 2010: 12) creates a potent transfusion of bodily materials that is difficult, if not impossible, to separate. Disasters then have the potential to destroy sociopolitically constructed boundaries between bodies in ways that materialize an ‘imperceptible sense of “identity contamination” ’, as Claudia Merli and Trudi Buck (2015: 13) discuss in the context of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand. The corporeal carnage caused by disasters (and political responses) then demonstrates how material failure can manifest in salient and macabre ways. These Haredi volunteers restore corporeal integrity and identity by reassembling devastated bodies belonging to both deceased victims but also providing support to survivors, offering a particular interpretation of the term

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‘human material being’.15 While ZAKA is a specific response to the unresolved Israeli-​Palestinian conflict, the work of Meshartim16 (servants) and the Chevra Kadisha (burial society, more specifically ‘Holy society’) offer a close comparison of death work and its material culture, which are inextricable from the local health system and relations between the two. These organizations form part of the same mission as Meshartim first collect Jewish bodies in their private ambulance for the Chevra Kadisha to prepare for burial in accordance with the dictates of halachah and local customs.17 There are both male and female wings of these organizations, and I  am told that (in the case of the ‘lady’s group’) serving on the Chevra Kadisha is a prerequisite to being on Meshartim in order to ensure that volunteers are not ‘traumatized by a call out’. The professional identity of Meshartim make it, as Esther18 (a senior volunteer) describes, a ‘pressure group’ in order to advocate and secure the rights and rites of deceased Jews as well as their relatives. All death attendants present themselves with material markers of professionalism and legitimacy, which consequently underlies the seriousness in how state institutions respond to them: Esther:  They [the hospital] have gotten to know the name ‘Meshartim’ and we’re run on a very professional basis. We have our very own private ambulance, we have our own equipment, we have our identity badges for all our members that go out. So they [the health authority] look at you in a different way. So it’s not just Esther who they are getting an earache from, ‘we’ve got that group at us. It’s the group’. Rather than appearing as the work of one or two Haredi individuals, the collective identity of Meshartim is materialized and displayed in a similar way to mainstream services –​enabling them to be regarded as an authoritative body. It is also worth noting here that Meshartim support families and mourners by arranging to temporarily close nearby roads as it is not uncommon for a funeral procession (levayah) to be led from the family home to the cemetery. Rather than translating as funeral, levayah means to ‘accompany’ or ‘escort’ the dead  –​which can perhaps be viewed as an intersubjective procession with the living –​which is viewed as an important commandment (mitzvah).

15 Term borrowed from Lock and Farquhar (2007). 16 A pseudonym. This organization serves as a point of contact between the Jewish settlement and state hospitals, police, coroner’s office, nursing homes and places in which death occur, who all usually contact the organization when a Jewish (not necessarily Haredi) death occurs. 17 Each Chevra within a Jewish settlement will have their own customs of how preparation for burial is performed as well as requirements of attendants. How preparation is performed in one settlement may then differ from another. 18 All names are replaced with pseudonyms in this chapter.

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On one occasion I  attended the levayah of a Haredi local and noticed how the street had been closed. The triangular red sign informing civilians of a road closure, on first glance, appeared to belong to the local authority until I noticed the Meshartim logo as well as Haredi wardens in branded Hi-​ Vis uniforms. This material expression of death work forms part of the high standards that Haredi Jews attribute to respect for the dead and to facilitate their accompaniment by the living. Being a death attendant with Meshartim or the Chevra Kadisha involves encounters with bodily and biomedical materials in a way that is not too dissimilar to how ZAKA volunteers command dual knowledge systems. The lady’s19 room of the tahara shtiebal20 (or house) is situated in the grounds of a local hospital, and Jewish bodies are prepared for burial on a donated table that was formerly used for post-​mortem examinations. The interplay between bodily and biomedical materials in death work can be illustrated by the fact that bodies arriving from hospitals and nursing homes often have intravenous drips, tubes, bandages or bed sore covers still attached, which must all be removed by the Jewish attendants before the tahara can commence. Chevra attendants perform the preparation for burial with a level of care and respect that has the potential to reinscribe a body’s experience of a ‘horrendous’ death with new meaning and materialize a sense of corporeal integrity. A  horrendous death, for one attendant, was classed as that of a child, a body subjected to post-​mortem examination (discussed later in this chapter), or a body that had been discovered sometime after death. One female attendant described the process of preparation and its transformative effect as being: Very dignified, it’s very respectful. When I went to learn about it [tahara] with a Rebbetzin,21 she said to me, ‘at the end you will see the nifteres22 [deceased woman] looks beautiful’ and I  was thinking how can a dead person look beautiful? But she was right, [the body is placed in] white shrouds, clean, fresh, [and] going to meet her maker. You feel so proud, you have helped this lady, clean and cleansed, she’s going to meet her maker. She’s pure. It’s very respectful because we believe her neshoma, her soul, is hovering around in the room. It’s quiet, nobody speaks. It’s very beautiful. Whereas Hatzolah and ZAKA are comprised of male volunteers who attend any call-​ out, Meshartim and the Chevra Kadishah have male and female wings. 20 Tahara is the Hebrew term for ritual purification. Prior to burial, the body is cleansed with water according to religious law as well as customs (minhag) in a dedicated room (shtiebel). After tahara is completed, the body is placed in the casket (aron) and sprinkled with soil from Israel. 21 Yiddish, wife of a rabbi. 22 Also nifteret. 19

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The high standards of care and respect that Chevra attendants invest in bodies in accordance with religious laws and customs therefore uphold the view that Jews are a people of the body as well as of the book (see Eilberg-​Schwartz 1993). The degree of care can also be inferred from the narrative of a senior attendant when handling what she describes as being a ‘horrendous’ death, which also alludes to the practice of burying biomedical or auxiliary materials in order to preserve the body: We had to deal with a situation that was more of a ZAKA situation than anything. We did a lot of preparation [before the body could undergo tahara]. We did things that I don’t think anyone else in the world would do. In this case, the body’s flesh was ‘falling off’, and these female attendants were faced with a situation that resembled the aforementioned work of ZAKA when handling devastated bodies. Securing the disintegrating body in absorbent material ‘in case any of the flesh dropped off’ was the only way for these death attendants to prepare the nifteres for burial. The act of burying biomedical materials in order to preserve the body or corporeal integrity is not unusual in the Haredi Jewish context, and regularly occurs following the performance of post-​mortem examinations in the work of Meshartim. Invasive or ‘traditional’ autopsies conflict with the regard for death and burial in the Haredi Jewish cosmology that bodies should not be tampered with or disturbed. Meshartim therefore uphold the view that post-​mortem examinations are a ‘desecration’. In instances where a post-​ mortem is required by law, local Meshartim volunteers try to observe the procedure out of the fear that practitioners might view materials of the body as clinical waste (when they are otherwise a materiality imbued with meaning for Haredi Jews). All materials that are separated from the body at the time of death are included in the burial. Similar to ZAKA volunteers in the case of Israel, local Meshartim attendants go to great lengths to ensure blood is not discarded as waste during their supervision of autopsies. Two senior volunteer attendants went on to discuss their intervention in a post-​mortem incident: Esther:  From a religious angle, I’m very worried about any blood or anything that what they don’t consider a necessity to keep, they won’t keep. It’s not saying they are being disrespectful, how could they know? Malka: They asked us if we wanted to keep the blood on the glove. Everything went into the yellow [plastic] bag. We took the blood off the gloves. We worked for ages, do you remember? Esther:  If you just damp cotton wool, it will wipe off. Then you bury the cotton wool because that decomposes. Malka:  Everything that belonged to the body went in there [for burial].

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In cases where there is a conjoining of biomedical and bodily substances, Haredi death attendants view the careful transfer of blood from surgical gloves to decomposable materials for burial as a cosmological necessity –​a necessity that medical professionals cannot be expected to understand or uphold. The mistrust towards the biomedical authority is indicative of a perceived shortfall or failing of the state to reach the high expectations and obligations of caring for the Jewish body  –​in both life and in death  –​which the Haredi Jewish establishment takes upon itself to oversee and intervene in. The availability of technologically mediated examinations has come to mark the relations and tensions between these Haredi ‘pressure groups’ and the biomedical authority. Post-​mortem full-​body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans23 for ‘non-​suspicious’ deaths are available in the area, but come with a financial levy of just under £1,000 that is met by either the local Jewish (and also Muslim) settlements or families of the deceased. This culturally acceptable service was made available after religious authorities in England had lobbied for technologically mediated scans due to the cosmological prohibition against invasive and ‘manual’ autopsies. According to Esther, the advocacy and intervention of Meshartim personnel in death work (as well as their social networks with local authorities such as pathologists) now means that the vast majority –​‘the 99 per cent’ –​of invasive post-​mortems on Jewish bodies are avoided through the availability of medical scanning. However, a coroner can insist upon an invasive autopsy and Esther has noticed a trend of scan results returning as ‘inconclusive’.24 This is a term which she views with mistrust, and she tells me ‘they are almost trying to neutralize this other method [scan] that they have to accept, so if you say “inconclusive” then they have to go through it [invasive], don’t they?’ It then becomes clear how this senior death attendant views the local health system as incapable of being trusted to handle Jewish bodies, but also the role that medico-​materials and technologies perform in mediating relations between the two. The material manifestation and techniques of biomedical interventions for post-​ mortem evidently have contested legitimacies. The health and judicial authority view post-​mortem scans as failing to extract a conclusive truth from the body, and are therefore not trusted compared with the alternative and invasive method (which is contrary to the Haredi cosmology). 23 In the United Kingdom, a coroner is legally obligated to order post-​mortem examinations if the cause of death is not known or has the potential to be not ‘natural’. Objections to an invasive or manual post-​mortem or requests for a post-​mortem by medical scanning must be made to the coroner. A coroner’s ruling to conduct an invasive post-​mortem can trump the petition of a family. 24 See Roberts et al. (2012) for a detailed comparison of invasive and technological post-​mortems.

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However, portraying MRI scans as ‘inconclusive’ is viewed as an attempt to ‘neutralize’ –​and thus render ineffective –​a culturally acceptable technique of post-​mortem, further fuelling suspicion of the state and its failure to tailor reach and responsibility to care for all citizens. Failure then takes another inverted form when viewed within the frontier where the minority and the state meet. When I later asked Esther whether it was the scar caused by an invasive post-​mortem which could be challenging for death attendants to encounter during the tahara process, I was told that ‘the scar is the easy part, it’s how they close them up. It’s what is cost effective’. While a post-​mortem is, in all cases, viewed as a desecration of the body, a further affront is the way in which bodies are stitched-​up in ‘cost-​effective’ and perhaps hastily manner that does not parallel the care invested by these volunteer Jewish women. The mistrust in how the death attendants viewed the biomedical authority in instances of autopsy were made explicit by Malka: BK:  Why did you need somebody to supervise the autopsy? Malka:  In order for them not to throw anything away that we needed. Not to take any parts of the body for research. They could have happed [removed] a kidney or something. Organizations or ‘pressure groups’ such as Meshartim can be seen to emerge from the margins in order to contest the authority that hospitals and the biomedical establishment hold over the corpses of patients, a contest in which bodily materials are seen to have opposing values. Rather than holding the role of a ‘spectator’ in autopsy,25 Meshartim attendants are better described as an ‘intervention’. When the state fails to gain the trust and meet the expectations of the Haredi minority, institutionalized interventions not only serve the integrity of individual Jewish bodies but also have the effect of enhancing the autonomy of the social body as a whole. The concern that autopsies may present an opportunity for the biomedical authority to appropriate materials from Jewish bodies should not be dismissed as paranoia. Anthropologists have, for instance, exposed how vital organs of the body become commoditized as ‘spare parts’ in international markets of organ procurement, which the biomedical authority performs a complicit role in perpetuating (see Moniruzzaman 2012; Scheper-​Hughes 2002). Although a discussion on organ procurement is beyond the scope of this chapter, is it important to add that there is a violent history of how the biomedical authority procures bodily materials from (and materializes the bodies of) socially marginalized and minority populations. 25 See Horsley (2008: 140), who discusses the ‘spectator role of autopsy space’ in the context of relatives and corpses in Australia.

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The material responses made by this supposedly ‘hard to reach’ group to the state and its health authority then point to an inverted failure to understand and reach each other’s expectations and responsibilities to health and bodily care. Whereas attending to devastated bodies enable Haredi Jews in Israel to uniquely perform their responsibilities –​as citizens –​to the body of the nation, Hatzolah and Meshartim instead indicate a contested relation between the ‘hard to reach’ minority and the state. Previous studies have represented Hatzolah in Australia as a successful attempt by the Jewish minority to reconcile the struggle of maintaining group identity while being ‘participatory citizens’ within broader society (see Moore 2015). On the one hand, this view acknowledges the preference to negotiate the integration between the Haredi minority and the enveloping society, which is made possible by Haredi settlements encountering the state within a ‘frontier’  –​a space ‘where the politics of emplacement intertwine’.26 On the other hand, Hatzolah as a model of participatory citizenship does not fully account for how the brigade is a strategy for Haredi settlements to reduce dependence on the state and its infrastructure. Rather than Hatzolah marking a ‘controlled margin of adaptation’ (2)  for a socio-​religious minority group, I would argue that it indicates a preference for the Haredi establishment to have a controlled margin of autonomy in order to secure their own needs –​ especially if we consider how Hatzolah in London emerged from failings of the state. The state arguably views the hard to reach minority as failing in its moral responsibility to engage with biomedical and public health interventions, which presents a risk to the body of the nation. But amid the fluidity of the frontier, Haredi settlements institute organizations such as Hatzolah and Meshartim because of failings of the state to be trusted with the care of Jewish bodies. Being ‘hard to reach’ is therefore not an attempt to evade the state altogether; instead the Haredi minority arguably attempts to evade a ‘subject status’.27 Their self-​protection and self-​sufficiency makes them graded citizens,28 causing sociopolitically constructed expectations of citizenship to be negotiated. The appropriation of biomedical materials and technologies to form a Haredi culture of health and medico-​materiality at the hard to reach margins of the state thus upholds the view that ‘marginality is a source of both constraint and creativity’ (see Tsing 1993: 18).

26 See Wilson and Donnan (2006), who conceptualize the term ‘frontier’ in the sociopolitical context of Ireland. 27 Borrowed from James Scott (2009), who describes ‘the art of not being governed’ partly as a preference to evade a subject status rather than a relationship with the state per se. 28 See Duncan McCargo (2011), who views citizenship not as ‘an either/​or, but a matter of degree’, in which minority groups negotiate their relationship with the state.

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The culturally specific services described in this chapter demonstrates how the ‘hard to reach’ margins can only be understood in relation and position from the centre (and what it offers or fails to offer). In a similar way to how Scott (2009: 39) has argued that economic, political and cultural organization at the ungoverned margins form part of a strategy to ‘avoid incorporation in state structures’, developing ‘kosher’ medico-​ materialities in the Haredi context perform a similar task in mediating  –​rather than avoiding  –​the biomedical authority.

Closing remarks The Haredi minority is portrayed as a ‘hard to reach’ group by Public Health England, a status that accuses this minority population of attempting to evade the state and its reach through institutions that Foucault would describe as instrumental to disciplining bodies into governable subjects. Rather than escaping the grasp of the biomedical authority, I  have instead argued how Haredi minorities prefer to manage their relationship with state institutions –​ especially those viewed with suspicion. By observing the (material) culture of health developed by this minority group at the seemingly ‘hard to reach’ and wayward margins of the state, the alignment of ‘periphery’ in relation to biomedicine as ‘centre’ becomes destabilized. When the state fails to understand the heightened expectations of how to care for Jewish bodies, this hard to reach group responds by instituting particular organizations which counterbalance the failings of the state and have the impact of bolstering the autonomy of the social body as a whole. Rather than the margins being characterized by a deficit of health and distance from biomedicine, the Chevra Kadishah, Meshartim, Hatzolah and ZAKA all exemplify how the Haredim fashion a sophisticated (material) culture of bodily care that sits at the intersection of religion, health and bodily care. Critically engaging with the ‘hard to reach’ label therefore illustrates how this is a convoluted and inaccurate term to use, obscuring the complex relations and inverted failures that characterize life for minority groups at the frontiers of the state.

Acknowledgements The research presented here was collected as part of my PhD thesis, completed at Durham University and generously funded by the Wellcome Trust (Society & Ethics). Thanks to Drs C. Merli, Y. Egorova and T. Pollard for reviewing material previously written and included here, and to Drs A. Parkhurst and T. Carroll for their support with this chapter.

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Moniruzzaman, M. (2012) ‘“Living Cadavers” in Bangladesh: Bioviolence in the Human Organ Bazaar’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 26, No. 1, 69–​91. Moore, T. (2015) ‘Jewish Hatzolah and the Barriers to Equivalent Aboriginal Australian Cultural Adaptation’. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture Vol. 21, No. 2, 132–​48. Newman, H. (2014) ‘New South Wales: Ambulance SW Welcomes Hatzolah to its Volunteer Family’. Big Medicine (blog), 19 May. Online at: http://​bigmedicine. ca/​wordpress/​2014/​05/​new-​south-​wales-​ambulancensw-​welcomes-​hatzolah-​ to-​its-​volunteer-​family/​#sthash.YAKJSOtn.dpbs (accessed 1 December 2015). Purdy, S., K. P. Jones, M. Sherratt and P. V. Fallon (2000) ‘Demographic Characteristics and Primary Health Care Utilization Patterns of Strictly Orthodox Jewish and Non-​Jewish patients’. Family Practice Vol. 1, No. 3, 233–​5. Roberts, I. S.D., R. E. Benamore, E. W. Benbow, S. H. Lee, J. N. Harris, A. Jackson, S. Mallett, T. Patankar, C. Peebles, C. Roobottom and Z. C. Traill (2012) ‘Post-​Mortem Imaging as an Alternative to Autopsy in the Diagnosis of Adult Deaths: A Validation Study’. Lancet Vol. 379, No. 9811, 136–​42. Ryan, C. (2003) ‘Jewish Health Service Offers Local Care. BBC News, 19 January. Online at: http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​health/​2666123.stm (accessed 1 December 2015). Scheper-​Hughes, N. (2002) ‘The Ends of the Body: Commodity, fetishism, and the Global Traffic in Organs’. SAIS Review Vol. 22, No. 1, 61–​80. Scott, J. C. (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stadler, N. (2006) ‘Terror, Corpse Symbolism, and Taboo Violation: The “Haredi Disaster Victim Identification Team in Israel” (ZAKA)’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol. 12, 837–​58. Stadler, N. (2012) ‘Recomposing Decimated Bodies’. In Routledge Handbook of Body Studies, edited by B.S. Turner, 217–​27. Abingdon: Routledge. Stadler, N., E. Ben-​Ari and E. Mesterman (2005) ‘Terror, Aid, and Organization: The Haredi Disaster Victim Identification Teams (ZAKA) in Israel’. Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 78, No. 3, 619–​51. Stadler, N., E. Lomsky-​Feder and E. Ben-​Ari (2008) ‘Fundamentalism’s Encounters with Citizenship: The Haredim in Israel’. Citizenship Studies Vol. 12, No. 3, 215–​31. Staetsky, D. L., and J. Boyd (2015) ‘Strictly Orthodox Rising: What the Demography of British Jews Tells Us about the Future of the Community’. JPR Report: Institute of Jewish Policy Research. Tilly, C. (2007) ‘Materiality in Materials’. Archaeological Dialogues Vol. 14, 16–​20. Tsing, A. L. (1993) In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-​of-​ the-​Way Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Valins, O. (2003) ‘Stubborn Identities and the Construction of Socio-​Spatial Boundaries: Ultra-​Orthodox Jews Living in Contemporary Britain’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Vol. 28, No. 2, 158–​75. Wilson, T. M., and H. Donnan (2006) The Anthropology of Ireland. Oxford: Berg.

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his chapter focuses on the continued silence of an online map. The map, I argue, continued to be productive to the various social projects on either side of the map, despite that fact that it remained unpopulated by any data. On one side of the map’s story are its creators and designers working on the Adaptable Suburbs Project (henceforth ASP), while on the other are its intended users, the suburbanites of Surbiton. It was my task as an ethnographer, working with the ASP, to engage the community of the South West London suburb with the map. I  asked them to upload text, video or photographs regarding their views on the changing nature of the suburb over time. The aim was to elicit stories that would show how the social life of the suburbs had changed and adapted to both the socio-​economic and material changes in the suburban built environment. A prominent group of local community activists, who go by the term ‘Seethingers’ (see below), added a story about a giant, a goat boy and a mountain that was destroyed, and claimed the story as ‘fact’. The ASP asserted that this was not fact but, rather, was ‘myth’, and they refused to add the story to the map as ‘historical data’. As such, the map remained silent, and at the end of the project it remained as populated, or rather as unpopulated, as it had at the start of the project some three years earlier. I use the word ‘silence’, rather than ‘failure’ as the map, I argue, continued to work and was socially productive. This productivity was not constructed

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through the map’s utility as a geographic reference. Rather, it was productive through its silence in terms of the way it enabled both a ‘failed performative’ (Appadurai 2015) for the Seethingers and an obviation of a failure in a democratic project for the ASP. That is, the map’s silence allowed Seethingers to productively fail through stupid performances of local ‘history’ as they attempted to add a Seething story to the map. Further the map’s silence, yet continued existence, allowed the ASP to demonstrate that the participatory technologies of democracy were in development for a future (which may never arrive) of inclusive policy design, thereby avoiding the accusation of failure in the present. While the map was unused, or silent, throughout the duration of the ASP, the accusation that the map had failed never appeared. Both the ASP and the Seethingers simply carried on with their own social projects. The term ‘social project’ is borrowed from Elizabeth Povinelli (2011: 6) in reference to the ‘thick subjective background effects of a life as it is lived’, that is, the moral and ethical ways in which people go about being in the world. As social projects, the ASP researchers and the Seethingers are both trying to do the same thing –​make the conditions of living and being in the suburb better. However, they do so in very different ways. The ASP works from a vantage of policy facing academia, feeding into discourses and conversations around the planning and the management of the built environment at a national to a local scale (and vice versa). The Seethingers work on producing a sense of ‘resilient’1 community that aims to give a sense of community spirit and allow people to feel a sense of belonging to each other and the local area. They do so against a backdrop of a cultural imaginary in which the suburbs form the epitome of a dull, lifeless place to live. Failure here serves as an analytic device as I, as ethnographer, switch between the scales and perspectives of the different social projects. As the introduction to volume outlines, failure is always a moral accusation, however neither social project need to accuse the other of failing to do what they need to endure. As such, the map remains as an artefact of the gap between the two social projects. However, in both cases the spectre of failure needs to be present (for Seethingers) or dealt with (for the ASP). In the case of the ASP the map’s silence is dealt with by alluding to a future where the participatory technologies of late-​liberal democracy2 will work. In the case of Seething

This term is found on a local community website, http://​www.thecommunitybrain.org/​ (accessed 13 February 2013), and was often used in conversations and interviews I had with locals about the community. 2 This term is borrowed from Elizabeth Povinelli (2011: 25–​42) who uses it to describe a postcolonial form of liberal democracies and governance that responds to forms of difference. However, I also imply that it is a form of liberal ideology that is post-​political, that is, beyond a state of global ideological difference (following Mouffe 2005) whereby the notion of democratic consensus is all pervasive. 1

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the failure to be suburban in the normative way allows them to produce an alternative local way of being citizens.

The ASP The ASP was a five-​ year academic project (2010–​ 15) based at University College London’s Bartlett School of Graduate Studies that aimed to contribute to wider planning discourses and UK policy regarding the management of the built environments of small settlements, or suburban areas. It wished to fill a perceived knowledge gap regarding the role of the suburbs in the wider socio-​economic functioning of the city. As outlined in the ‘case for support’ document, the project aimed to develop ‘an integrated theory of how town centres evolve by developing knowledge on urban sustainability, patterns of social and economic behaviour and how places adapt and change over time’ and to develop an ‘understanding [of] how suburban space fits within urban complex spatial systems … to improve our understanding the relationship between individual actions, small and large-​scale spatial order and change and emergent morphological changes’. The ASP combined data sets of building shape, building use and street configurations over time in order to model the relationship between urban movement potentials, based on predicted movement of people through road networks and the use and success of suburban high streets based around building use and shape in relation to their adaptability to new conditions over time (see Vaughan, Dhanani and Griffiths 2013). With this understanding of how the material shape of the suburb had changed over time, the project aimed to supplement their data with the memories and future hopes of the local community in order to show the social value of adaptability in the built environment. The ASP aimed to help suburban areas realize their ‘untapped potential’3 and enable certain decision makers with the ability to make ‘better’ places. As the case for support explains: ‘The project will provide an empirical, evidence-​based approach to understanding spatial/​social processes that will generate an increased understanding of how spatial structure and social conditions contribute to the ways in which people use their local areas which can benefit local planning bodies, government agencies, civic society and the Third Sector.’4 As such, the notion of ‘realizing untapped potential’ was couched within an understanding of the built environment as holding a hidden extractable value that could be utilized once the conditions needed for success were known. UCL Adaptable Suburbs Project, Internal document unpublished UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC: project reference EP/​I001212/​1) Case for Support, 2010, 3. 4 Ibid. 3

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To complement the data described above, the ASP created an interactive online map, or a Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS), using a Google API5 and a specific Adaptable Suburbs design interface. My role on the ASP was to test these maps with suburban informants. I was to ask them to populate the map with local histories, memories and hopes for the future, which, it was hoped, would illuminate the built environment with human stories and allow the ASP to gain a better understanding of the social value of places. It was hoped that such maps would eventually be run by and for the local community in order to increase participation in the discourses around planning the built environment. In so doing the community map aimed to act as a communicative device between locals, academics, policy makers and city planners, where locals could tell stories of their lives. The ASP described the map as ‘an “auto-​ethnographical” project, in which local inhabitants will be asked to report and tag their local activities and networks on the project website [that] will help inform the research project’s overall aim of understanding processes of socio-​economic adaptation in smaller settlements’ and that will reveal ‘values, meanings and signs’6 of life in the suburbs. The map acts as a form of digital ‘contact zone’, to borrow a term from Mary Louise Pratt (1991: 34) who used the term to describe ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today’. I wish to make no parallel between Pratt’s discussion of colonial relations and the relations between the ASP and the suburban informants other than to highlight that there is an attempted closing of a gap between ‘experts’ and decision makers with the people that such knowledge affects, namely, the locals. Further, through adding a ‘stupid’ story and creating The Free University of Seething, the Seethingers create alternative representations of themselves to resist the dominant cultural idea of what a suburban democratically involved citizen is. The map is an artefact of the incommensurable meeting between the ASP and the Seethingers, an artefact that is both productive and revealing. PPGIS and other Information Communication Technologies (ITCs) are perceived to hold much promise by academics and policy makers who aim to increase public participation in policy-​making practices. Emerging from development discourses, the increased use of such technologies occurred around the same time that Robert Chambers (1997) asked Whose Reality Counts? in his influential book on development practices. He argues that development should aim at ‘putting the first last’, that is, development policy practices should enable those affected by development to have more influence in the 5 Application Programme Interface 6 Adaptable Suburbs Case for Support, 2010, 3.

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FIGURE  7.1   The PPGIS ‘Community Map’ from the Adaptable Suburbs Project (ASP) with sample test points placed by the ASP.

design and implementation of such policies and practices (Chambers 1992, 1997). An emphasis upon, and recognition of, local indigenous knowledges occurred to such an extent that Henkel and Stirrat (2001: 168) declared that by the 1990s participation had become the ‘new orthodoxy’ in development. This emphasis is reflected in the language used to describe the map by the ASP, who described it as an ‘auto-​ethnographic’ tool. A UCL spin-​off company, Mapping for Change, specializes in such technologies and designed the map for the ASP. On the website, they state:  ‘The concept behind community mapping is to move away from “top-​down” mapping that so often fails to reflect the needs of people.’7 The image in Figure  7.1 shows a screenshot of the map, populated only with data for testing and demonstration. The map allows users to tag photos, videos or text on the map and assign a label (‘historical data’, ‘green space’, etc.) from a predetermined menu. The ASP designed the website, layout and labels for the map and needed a community to not only engage in the map but to use, manage and develop it as their own. So, with the aim of including the ‘needs of the people’ into a conversation around planning policies of the built environment of the suburbs I needed to find informants to populate the map. http://​www.mappingforchange.org.uk/​services/​community-​maps/​ (accessed 3 April 2013). 7

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‘Stupid’ informants The ASP appointed two suburban field sites  –​South Norwood in South East London and Surbiton in South West London –​in order to build on data developed in a previous UCL project. In both areas I needed to find members of the community to take control of the map. I needed to look beyond any vested interests of business groups and reach a population larger than that found in the traditional local history societies. I was not long in either area before I found two movements or groups that were quite simply hard to ignore. In South Norwood I found a group of locals who called themselves the South Norwood Tourist Board (SNTB). This group has declared that they are the true inheritors to the title of ‘The Lake District’ (an important tourist area in northern England) and have written to the Lake District Authority in 2013 to tell them so. Additionally, they have had birthday parties for sub-​rail pedestrian tunnels, festivals for local canine hero Pickles the Dog (the United Kingdom’s fourth most famous dog) and, during Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum, they held their own referendum on whether they should join an independent Scotland. Scotland stayed, and so did South Norwood. Meanwhile in Surbiton I found a group, the ‘Seething Villagers’, who organize a series of local events throughout the year that are all based around the spectacular tales and legends of Seething. For the purposes of this chapter, I  focus on the Seething Villages in Surbiton. However, it is the common trope of ‘stupidity’ that unites these groups and others in the suburbs of London (Jeevendrampillai 2015). The term ‘stupid’ emerges from the ethnography where both Seethingers and the SNTB would describe their activities as ‘fun’, ‘daft’, ‘silly’ and ‘stupid’. I argue that, through being ‘stupid’ and engaging in a purposeful lack of sense, the suburban informants enact a form of failed performance of being suburban to parody the common imaginary of the suburban as failed which enables a form of empowered, politically qualified subjectivity to emerge through asserting a form of vibrant active suburban life. To explain this, I will use J. L. Austin’s (1962) notion of speech acts but first we will need a little more background on Seething.

The Seething Villagers Surbiton sits within the borough of Kingston, and it was at the Kingston local studies archives where I  first found a flyer that told me the date, time and the occasion of a parade to remember the ‘legend of Lefi Ganderson’. Lefi Ganderson is the central figure in the Seething stories (see Hutchinson 2010a,

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2010b, 2011, 2012) that branch out into all aspects of Surbiton/​Seething life. Lefi, so the legend goes, is a goat boy who, being half boy and half goat, was ostracized from the ancient village of Seething for being different. He lived in a cave at the base of Mount Seething upon which a Giant, the nasty Thamas Deeton, lived. None of the Seething Villagers would talk to Lefi, that is, other than the children of Seething who, being innocent and pure, did not judge Lefi but rather brought him food and played with him in the spirit of kindness and inclusion. Every year, Thamas the Giant would come into the village of Seething and terrorize the Seethingers until one year, Lefi, seeing how frightened the Villagers were, tricked the nasty Giant into leaving. The Giant made a bet with Lefi that if Lefi could live on only the food that was passed through a gold ring for one month then the giant would have to leave the Villagers alone. Thinking it impossible the giant agreed to the bet. Lefi passed milk through a ring again and again to make cheese upon which he survived for twenty-​nine days (a Seething month8). Keeping his promise Thamas turned from Seething and left but not before destroying Mount Seething in anger as he went. In that moment of destruction and chaos Lefi disappeared and was never seen again. Only once he had gone did the Villagers realize that excluding Lefi had been mean and harmful and life felt much better when people were included and people shared. Every year, Lefi, who ‘taught the Seethingers how to love and showed them the spirit of doing things for others’, is remembered by people who call themselves the Seething Villagers. The annual Lefi Parade sees locals craft puppets of Lefi, the Giant and other Seething characters in order to parade them through the streets towards a local park where bands play while people chat, dance and drink and watch a re-​enactment of the tale (Figure 7.2). The Seething stories are a playful twist on the dominant narratives of what the suburbs are, of who lives there and of what history they have. The popular cultural imaginary of suburbs is one of overwhelming dullness, of an ahistorical dormitory devoid of character and life. They are the place you go to when you have failed at life, and they hold neither the idyllic draw of the countryside nor the buzz of the city. They are often viewed as a compromise, yet 84 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population live in a suburb (Vaughan et  al. 2009). Surbiton is perhaps the pinnacle of the suburban image; it even sounds like suburb: ‘Suburbaton’ (Masey 2012; McClellan 1999). In 1995, Liverpool City Council ‘seriously considered adopting “Liverpool  –​it’s not Surbiton” as a marketing slogan’ (Statham 1996:  xiii). The ordinariness of Surbiton, which stands as a synecdoche for ‘suburbs’, is harnessed by Seethingers who use This is the etymological origin of the month February which is derived from the Seething expression the ‘29 [rounds of cheese] fed you and me’ which became the 29 fedyouandme, 29th of February (see Hutchinson 2012). 8

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FIGURE  7.2   Thamas the Giant leading Seething Villagers on the annual Lefi Parade, accompanied by Steve wearing a Lefi ‘head adornment’. Photo by author. this prevailing context to assert forms of life by saying exactly what they are not.

Context and failed performativity It is within this context of the suburban imaginary that Seethingers play through a series of what J.  L. Austin (1962) would call a performative utterance:  a speech act that not only describes but constitutes a given reality. Austin’s approach is predicated on three terms that need clarification. Locution is that which is said; illocution is that which is meant; and perlocution is the effect of that saying. For Austin a speech act is a performative act. To have the smooth functioning of a performative utterance, that is, to have ‘illocutionary force’, to create meaning, a number of other conditions must be in place. A  key aspect of these conditions, notes Culler (1981:  18), is ‘an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect’. In other words, something can only have a signifying force if it is recognizable. Iterability of the sign, or recognizability, is central to the performative act in that an utterance must be made within the context of a convention and a known,

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shared and understood realm of signification. In this way, failure is always imminent within the performance of the sign in that it can go wrong, it can fail to be understood, it can fail to align to the convention. If the performance requires the reiteration of the normative in order to have force then, as authors such as Butler (1993) have pointed out, the political promise of the illocutionary act is called into question; that is, there is scope for meaning to fail or, vitally in this case, change. In the gap between the convention and the specific reiteration lay the possibility of failure; it is the possibility of the sign not quite iterating in the normative way. For Butler a ‘radical reticulation of the symbolic horizon’ occurs through the ‘failure in the workings of inevitable law’ (23) of the symbolic. This ‘queering’ of the normative context carves open the grounds of possibility for newness. Any failed reiteration allows us to see the normative conditions of the act through juxtaposition of what it is not; or, as Felman (2002: 55) states: ‘the transformation of the status of the referent, consists in the fact that referentiality –​analytic or performative –​can be reached and defined only through the dimension of failure: on the basis of the act of failing’ (emphasis in original). But whereas Austin (1962) calls this failure a misfire, in Seething, the stories, mythical histories and parades are purposeful performative failures. However, it requires a normative context against which to fail. In the case of Seething the stories fail against what one expects of a suburb. In the case of the map, the Seething stories fail against what one expects of a suburban fact. Through the invocation of those signs, symbols and narratives of suburbia, Seethingers assert what it is they are not. They are not the historically rich and rather serious town of Kingston (the neighbouring settlement and centre of the borough) that is rich in history of guilds, tales of ancient kings and royal association, nor are they the dull, lifeless suburban subjects commonly perceived via the cultural imaginary of suburban life. Through being ‘stupid’ and playing with the iterability of the sign, Seething guilds, histories and narratives fail to hold to a serious, authoritative history and fail to do so in particularly vibrant and fun ways. As such, they assert a rejection of the normative condition through which life is ascribed to place. In these moments, the purposefully failed performance asserts a form of life lived in a cohesive and vibrant community. This sensibility pervades all aspects of Seething life including my ethnographic involvement with the community. Upon my request to conduct ethnography with Seethingers, I  was asked do a small presentation at the local pub. Around forty people came to hear me and two others talk about particularly academic aspects of Seething life in what became known as the inaugural lecture of the ‘Free University of Seething’, which was later described as the oldest university in the world. As stated on the community website: ‘From “all people” we get “Universal” and from “love of learning of Seething” we get “learnseething” which became “universalearnseething” which in its shortened form was

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spoken as “universeethee” –​the origination of the modern pronunciation of university.’9 At this lecture, I  introduced the mapping platform and asked a few Seethingers to add data to the map. A few weeks after the event, the map still remained unpopulated. I  assumed that enthusiasm for the map was low, but when I  reminded a local Seethinger, Steve, who had organized the talks, to add data to the map he informed me that he had already done this. He assumed that I  was yet to moderate the post, however I  was not responsible for moderation. This responsibility lay with Mapping for Change –​ the company who designed the maps for the ASP –​or, more specifically, with Flo, the co-​director of Mapping for Change and the developer and moderator of the community map. Flo was not directly part of the ASP team but was responsible for overseeing its design, development and moderation. I shared a working space with Flo at the time, and her knowledge of my ethnography came primarily through the numerous small coffee breaks we shared. In these moments I told her of the weird and wonderful tales of Seething. This heritage was not to be found in archives, in past traces, but in the process of performing and doing the history. In this sense, Seething is revealed as ‘a state of mind’ whereby one comes to ‘play’ and invent in an ongoing performance of being a Seethinger. Seethingers refer to the ‘spirt’ of Seething, which is seen in the fun, the smiles and the very corporal experiences of Seething events. The affective quality of Seething events means you quite simply have to be there, in ‘the moment’ in the local context of ‘getting the joke’. In the suburb of Surbiton, the joke emanates from the excess of the utterance, there is simply too much history for Seething to hold, too much myth and too much non-​sense. This excess, states Felman (2002: 81), is the ‘pleasure of the scandal’ whereby the humour of the excess invites complicity with the joke and produces a very particular form of community alignment. For Seethingers, the excess of the utterance is key; it must be excessive to be felicitous. It is through the pleasure of this excessiveness that the force of the speech act comes through. That is, the joke works through an obvious (illocutionary) failure of a Seething myth to align to the conventional idea of a suburban history. The perlocutionary act, or the effect of the joke is a sense of togetherness and inclusion in the joke and of producing a particular sense of localness. This is best demonstrated through the discussion over the addition of data to the map with regards to the site of Mount Seething. Flo explained that the post did not pass moderation as it was entered under the label ‘historical fact’ and yet it was not historical fact; for her the presence of a Mountain in Seething was experienced as myth. Flo was concerned that, if

http://​www.seethingwells.org/​University_​of_​Seething.html (accessed 13 February 2013). 9

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the story was added to the map, other users of the platform –​who may not be from Surbiton or be involved in the Seething community –​would not be sufficiently socialized into the heritage and history of Seething to understand the post. This would result in confusion as some users would be unable to determine ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ on the map. As such she decided that she would not accept the post and would only allow ‘historical facts’ to be added. Flo later offered to create an extra ‘layer’ through which information could be added with the label ‘myths and legends’. The Seethingers refused this as the play on ‘fact’ was the productive part of the post. For Seethingers it is not fact that matters but rather the performance of ‘fact’. That is, if the location of Mount Seething were to be understood as myth or story then it would lose its productive purchase as an excessive performance of ‘fact’. The fact of Mount Seething is ‘fact’ because it cannot possibly be fact, this excess revels in the failed performance of the suburb as a historically rich mythical land and as such highlights the normative (mythless) context of the suburban imaginary. Seethingers take this lack of heritage as their heritage and revel in it (see Wickstead 2013). As Felman (2002: 57) suggests: ‘The act of failing thus opens up the space of referentiality –​or of impossible reality –​ not because something is missing, but because something else is done, or because something else is said:  the term “misfire” does not refer to an absence, but to the enactment of a difference’ (emphasis original). Seethingers go to great lengths to demonstrate the ‘factishness’ of their legends. In the case of Mount Seething, the British Society of Antiquarians and Archaeologists (BSAA)10 conducted archaeological digs at the suspected base of Mount Seething. The Dig was overseen by Brett Alderton (of famed cable TV programme Dead Boring) in the garden of the local Pub. Young archaeologists, their parents and local ‘experts’ excavated the site. Rare compressed flint, similar to that found at Stonehenge, was ‘found’, aligning the sites in their position as ‘sites of significant interest’. Other pieces of Seething legend  –​ such as a stirrup-​shaped piece from the white horse of Seething and a key in the shape of a goat boy  –​were also found. In order to gather evidence, Alderton ‘held back’ the public until the ‘experts’ could enter. The ‘experts’ held equipment that looked scientific and made noise over the site. Men in white coats and masks assured the crowd of young archaeologists it was safe to dig. The dig was undertaken using full archaeological methods, labelled pieces, square trenches and scientists and explorers. The officious nature and methods of the BSAA, the supervision of scientists and the testimony of subject specialists ensured that the required legitimate performances of expertise had been undertaken by Seethingers. After this work, the location 10 http://​ w ww.youtube.com/ ​ w atch?v=qulpWZY9aUg and http:// ​ w ww.youtube.com/​ watch?v=MGRGv2FbP2Y (accessed 8 December 2015).

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and heritage of Mount Seething was well established as ‘fact’. In particular, it was scientifically concluded that the mountain was, clearly, no longer standing, and therefore must have been destroyed by the giant. This history was well known throughout the community, and at any point where the location of Mount Seething was alluded to in conversation other Seethingers standing nearby would interject with a shouting of the word ‘fact’ at the end of a statement (FACT). As such, the story had to be added as ‘fact’ whereas the categorization of ‘myth and legend’ would simply not be able to open up a space of referentiality in order to insert the life and vibrancy of the community into the suburban imaginary. Upon Flo’s refusal, I returned to Surbiton to tell Steve and Liam, another Seethinger and local pub landlord, that only ‘historical facts’ could be added to the map. Rich, the ASP’s research assistant, who also worked extensively with Flo on mapping projects, joined me in order to help explain the decision in the context of the wider goals of Mapping for Change. He was also hoping to find ways around the problem of mapping Seething for the ASP. We met in the pub where Liam provided us with a table and some food, the atmosphere was friendly, relaxed and positive while people asserted their positions. Rich:  ‘Just as we have made a Surbiton Mini site we can actually make you a mini site that is called Surbiton historic walk … now we have a fine line to tread in regard to what goes on this, if we are working within this platform … and I don’t want to open a can of worms here but the head of community maps, the head of Mapping for Change, is not too keen on the idea of putting in, as she put it ‘false histories’. I really don’t want to get into this, I’m not behind any of this, I think technology should be there for the people and how ever they want to use it this is more a political thing, this is why we have talked about a more disconnected option where people can go out and collect factual information and we can draw a link between the two. We can make a mini site called Seething, as Seething is not a real place.’ Table: ‘errrmmmmm …’ Rich:  [quickly] ‘Don’t kill the messenger!’ Steve:  [slowly] ‘No, the nice thing is not to be precious about any of it, it’s a fascinating idea that from her perspective that if you were in Nottingham and you wrote “home of Robin Hood” then that would have to be dismissed because there is no actual proof to say that’s true or not. Which I bet she wouldn’t, she would say that’s absolutely right as there is enough folk and legend around it to make that “a truth” so it’s at what point does someone figure out … When you lay it over the business of architectural spaces etc. then legend and myth are massive influences and if you miss that off then you’ll have no concept of what an area is about.’

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Liam:  ‘If she is precious about this legend and myth then let’s just use a separate platform.’ Over a period of months, the conversation went on to discuss the possible technologies we could use to achieve the sharing stories while keeping the ‘spirit of Seething’. Rich aimed to keep the conversation centred on the PPGIS mapping platform the ASP had developed, but this seemed unachievable with the current incommensurability of the ASP’s refusal and the Seethingers assertion of ‘fact’. Eventually a separate Seething site, totally devoid of any link to the ASP or Mapping for Change was created. This allowed the Seething stories to stand on their own terms yet meant that the site was only really shared with other Seethingers. Enthusiasm for separating the site was low among Seethingers as it removed much of the productive aspects of the performative failure in the notion of a Seething ‘fact’. Neither did this separation allow Seethingers to contribute to the ‘auto-​ethnography’ through which the ASP had hoped to include the ‘needs of the people’. While the ASP wanted to include locals in data generation and the Seethingers wanted to show and demonstrate suburban life, the terms through which engagement and recognition occurred remained incommensurable. For Seethingers, if ‘fact’ became myth, then the productive aspect of the performative failure would be lost. For the ASP, if ‘myth’ became fact, then the map would lose its ability to communicate with other users in an understood and rational way. Seethingers simply turned away from the map; their focus remained on the Seething events and other productive aspects of their community. Similarly, the ASP seemed to turn from the map. There seemed to be little enthusiasm on the project to develop the map or attempt to overcome the state of incommensurability. Neither group accused the other of failing, as nether group needed the other to maintain their social project. The accusation that the map may have failed still needed to be avoided. The next section will unpack why the silence of the map was not seen as a problem of huge concern by the ASP and will outline how they avoided failure through the practice of tensing.

The productive aspect of ASP’s silent map As described above, the map was designed in order to elicit participation in the process of data generation under the ideal of expanding involvement and agency in knowledge formation to those who are affected by it. In this sense, the map can be conceived as a tool of deliberative democracy in what Chantel Mouffe (2005:  104)  describes as a ‘post-​ political’ age of governance concerned with ‘a conception of politics as resolution of

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technical problems’. In Mouffe’s description of a post-​political democratic state, democratic consensus is built through the creation of new forums that enable the citizens to establish co-​operations and communication (see 41). This situation is described by Jürgen Habermas (1990: 44–​9) as an ‘ideal speech situation’ whereby participants in a social group are able to evaluate each other’s decisions and values based off of a common sense of reason in an atmosphere free of ‘coercive’ influences. It was in the spirit of producing a technocratic solution to the problem of public participation and producing rational consensus that the ASP designed the map. What is critical in this conception is the scale at which the ‘we’ of community is understood. The ASP was working at the scale of the suburb with the explicit idea that the map would transfer local knowledge up to policy makers and planners at a wider city and national scale. As such, the information on the map needed to be understood across these scales and any incomprehensible utterance must be translated, made clear or discarded in order to maintain the communication across all actors. That is, all data needed to be made commensurate. This would see the ‘transformation of different qualities into a common metric’ (Espeland and Stevens 1998:  314). This need for clear data across the map is the source of the ethical premise of Flo’s refusal while, simultaneously, the production of vagueness and the distortion, or failure, of the reiteration of the normative trope of the suburban life is the basis of the Seethingers’ story. The dilemma of inclusion/​exclusion in regard to the map data comes down to a problem of commensuration and clarity as Espeland and Stevens note: Commensuration can change our relations to what we value and alter how we invest in things and people. Commensuration makes the world more predictable, but at what cost? For Aristotle, a price too high [as it eliminates passion]; for Plato, an essential sacrifice [to the moral need of a democratic project]. The homogeneity commensuration produces simultaneously diminishes risk and threatens the intensity and integrity of what we value. (319) The requirement to produce a common metric is what gives moral justification to the exclusion of local stories. This produces a problem in the ideals of the map because in order to include a wide population in a deliberative and rational consensus, exclusions must occur. These exclusions are based on that which is seen as irrational, stupid and of no use. This policing of the sensible (following Rancière 2004, 2010) occurs to ensure the meta value of communication is maintained. The ASP maintains the trajectory of its social project through this policing while also denying the hegemonic dimension of the exclusions. As Mouffe (2005:  106)  notes:  ‘The cosmopolitan project

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is therefore bound to deny the hegemonic dimension of politics. In fact, several cosmopolitan theorists explicitly state that their aim is to envisage a politics “beyond hegemony”. Such an approach overlooks the fact that since power relations are constitutive of the social, every order is by necessity a hegemonic order’ (emphasis original). The ASP does not explicitly deny the Seethingers’ story. It simply cannot be articulated on their map, which is aligned to a particular scale of commensuration and translatability. The map is measured through a particular scale, premised on constructed ideas of ‘we’. This construct of inclusivity is imagined as embodying a city and nation, managed by the state and its associated regimes and techniques of knowledge production. However, this leaves the ASP with the dilemma of how to justify their exclusions while maintaining its own social ideals and values within its social project, namely, inclusion, participation and communication. This was resolved through tensing, that is, moving the location of moral and ethical focus from the present silence of the map to its future promise. I argue that this tensing is an integral discursive practice in the maintenance of the hegemony needed to legitimize a social project (following Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The ASP were able to maintain the ideal of democracy by putting the location of its realization in the future and the map, in its silence, was required to do this. In other words, it had not failed; it simply was not working yet. Over the course of the project, the ASP seemed little concerned with the continued silence of the map; it rarely, if ever, came up in meetings or annual reviews. In discussions over its possible development, I was told there was neither the money nor the time to develop the platform within the project and that the designer did not ‘realize the degree to which anthropologists spend time in the field with participants’. The ASP did not anticipate, recognize or respond, in a serious way, to the alternative ‘values, meanings and signs’ that such ethnographic engagements might present to the project, and there was little, if any, momentum to accommodate alterity into the map. However, the project attributed the silence of the map not to its insistence for commensurable data but to the lack of usability and community training, issues which would improve with time and money as the map underwent development as part of the ongoing academic process of producing such technologies of participation. While the refusal of the story, and therefore the map’s silence, highlighted incommensurability in the present tense, it maintained the notion of commensurability in the future through the promise of development  –​even if this future may never arrive. The promise of this future is the performative aspect here. The map’s silence allows the perpetuation of the social project of the ASP through the promise of the extension of knowledge production from academia to the ‘out there’ community:  ‘the bottom’ able to talk ‘upwards’

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through technologies of commensuration. The realization of the social whole, the ‘we’, that is needed for democracy, exists in an anterior sense, always just on the horizon, and is imagined through objects and technologies of hope and possibly, such as this map, but they remain always just out of reach. In this way, the future is deferred and the word ‘failure’ is avoided. As a result, democracy, and its ‘ideal speech situation’, is able to endure through the promise that it is ‘to come’. This future tense of the democratic ideal is always at work. The tense obviates the failure of that ideal in the present through a promise of that ideal ‘to come’. As Derrida (1993) states regarding Fukuyama’s discussion of the nature of the universalizing project in late liberal democracies, the gap between ideal and actual democratic society is always present but not perceived as failure due to the forward momentum of the social ideal. He argues: But this failure and this gap also characterize, a priori and by definition, all democracies, including the oldest and most stable of so-​called Western democracies. At stake here is the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can only arise in such a diastema (failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being ‘out of joint’). That is why we always propose to speak of a democracy to come, not of a future democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia –​at least to the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporal form of a future present, of a future modality of the living present. (81, emphasis original)

Conclusions In this chapter I  have outlined how an online map remained silent. I  used failure as an analytic trope to unpack how two different social projects were able to remain distinct and incommensurable in an arena of deliberative democracy where they were expected to communicate and commensurate. In this sense the spectre of failure was always present both through a failed performative, or a ‘stupid’ Seething story, and through the act of tensing the potential of the map. Both projects seem to be in a mutually binding dialectic in regards to the ways in which they deal with failure. The Seethingers need the ASP to desire facts in order for Seethingers to be able to produce Seething ‘facts’, which purposefully fail to reiterate the common cultural-​ imaginary of what a suburban life is. The ASP needs a community ‘out there’ adding the wrong data in order to enable a future tensing of the map and to

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avoid the paradox of failed or nonsensical local participation in the map in the present tense. As Marilyn Strathern (1991) notes, the job of the anthropologist is to see how one set of values displaces the other. She asserts anthropologists ‘must surely include loss of knowledge as part of the data, not as loss of the data’ (97). This chapter traced the loss of the Seething story on the ASP map. This allowed me to unpack the productive aspects of the map’s silence. That is, the failed performatives of the Seething stories and the practice of tensing by the ASP allow both these social projects to endure. In the case of Seething it is the political promise of failure that is productive. Judith/​Jack Halberstam (2011:  2)  writes in her book The Queer Art of Failure that she aims to ‘dismantle the logics of success and failure with which we currently live’ through losing the idealism of hope of the normative project. Halberstam argues: To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures. (186–​7) She argues that we should take seriously the ‘stupid’ and the ridiculous as it brings about a disruption to habitual modes of thought. It offers a new ‘grammar of possibility’ (2)  which can emerge in unlikely, everyday places. Through the purposeful failure of the Seething stories, against the convention of the suburban cultural imaginary, a new space of local possibility is opened up. In this sense the chapter has followed Appadurai’s (2015) call to follow failure, in the emic sense, as a seed of potential that marks the territory of aspirations through the creation of new moments of affect, feelings and alignments of meaning. This is shown in the stupid stories of Seething. In this sense, failure is a project in itself, it is productive of something, of possibility of allowing something else to come into being. However, further to analysing the performative failure of the rhetoric of the Seething stories I  argue that using failure as an analytic trope one can see not only how spaces are opened up but also closed down. Through tracing how the map did not fail, in that it was never accused of failing, but rather it did not work, or remained silent, then I was able to trace how failure was obviated by the ASP. This allowed the continuance of the ASP’s social project and the promise of the democratic ideal is once again pushed into the future. However, as a ‘contact zone’, in Pratt’s sense, the map did fail and remains an artefact of the failure of

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deliberative democracy to commensurate across social projects and scales in the present tense.

References Appadurai, A. (2015) ‘Success and Failure in the Deliberative Economy’. Reclaiming Democracy: Judgment, Responsibility and the Right to Politics Vol. 2, 126. Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures. Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge. Chambers, R. (1992) ‘Rural Appraisal: Rapid, Relaxed and Participatory’. IDS Discussion Paper, 311. Chambers, R. (1997) Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Culler, J. (1981) ‘Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin’. New Literary History Vol. 13, No. 1, 15. Online at: http://​www.jstor.org/​stable/​ 468640?origin=crossref. Derrida, J. (1993) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by P. Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge. Espeland, W. N., and M. L. Stevens (1998) ‘Commensuration as a Social Process’. Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 24, 313–​43. Felman, S. (2002) The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Habermas, J. (1990) Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Translated by C. Lenhart and S. W. Nicholson. Cambridge: MIT Press. Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Henkel, H., and R. Stirrat (2001) ‘Participation as Spiritual Duty; Empowerment as Secular Subjection’. In Participation The New Tyranny, edited by B. Cooke and U. Kothari, 168–​84. London: Zed Books. Hutchinson, R. (2010a) The Legend of Lefi Ganderson. Seething: Homage Publishing. Hutchinson, R. (2010b) The King’s Soup. Seething: Homage Publishing. Hutchinson, R. (2011) Jack and the Golden Egg, or, How the Seething Community Sports Day Started. Seething: Homage Publishing. Hutchinson, R. (2012) The Last Sardines. Seething: Homage Publishing. Jeevendrampillai, D. (2015) ‘Being Suburban’. In Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street, edited by L. Vaughan, 287–​307. London: UCL Press. Laclau, E., and C, Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Masey, A. (2012) ‘Spotlight on Surbiton’. Homes and Property, London Evening Standard, 6 November.

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McClellan, J. (1999) ‘Everything You Think You Know about Suburbia Is Wrong’. The Big Issue 4 November. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political. London and New York: Routledge. Povinelli, E. (2011) Economies of Abandonment Durham. NC: Duke University Press. Pratt, M. L. (1991) ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’. Profession Vol. 91, 33–​40. Rancière, J. (2004) Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London and New York: Continuum Rancière, J. (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Continuum. Statham, R. (1996) Surbiton Past. Phillimore: Guildford Surrey. Strathern, M. (1991) Partial Connections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaughan, L., A. Dhanani and S. Griffiths (2013) ‘Beyond the Suburban High Street Cliché –​A Study of Adaptation to Change in London’s Street Network: 1880–​ 2013’. Journal of Space Syntax Vol. 4, No. 2, 221–​41. Vaughan, L., S. Griffiths, M. Haklay and C. E. Jones (2009) ‘Do the Suburbs Exist? Discovering Complexity and Specificity in Suburban Built Form’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Vol. 34, No. 4, 475–​88. Wickstead, H. (2013) ‘The Goat Boy of Mount Seething: Heritage and the English Suburbs’. In New Suburban Stories, edited by M. Dines and T. Vermeulen, 199–​213. London and New York: Continuum. London: Bloomsbury Press.

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8 Destruction of locality: On heritage and failure in ‘crisis Syria’ Julie Shackelford

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ince the inception of the modern state of Syria in 1946, heritage has been employed time and again to carve out a Syrian national identity and ground it, literally, in the material world.1 In this way, heritage objects, sites and idioms have played an active role in identity and community formation and what Appadurai (1996) terms the ‘production of locality’. Although never entirely without contestation, prior to the uprising that began in March 2011, the state’s monopoly over the physical and symbolic world weighed heavily in Syria, significantly impacting local conceptions of selfhood and belonging. With the start of the uprising, however, these dominant modes of identification and classification broke down, with the state no longer able to monopolize control. Throughout the first year of the crisis, numerous attempts were made by the regime and its supporters to employ the country’s ‘ready canon of myths and icons’ (B. Butler 2007: 34) in order to re-​embed feelings of solidarity and national unity and garner support for their cause. Ultimately, however, such attempts failed to produce the desired result. Indeed, as the unrest wore on, not only did such attempts fail, but they also began to counter-​invent (Wagner 1975) precisely what they were trying to prevent. Thus, rather than fostering

1 In this chapter, ‘heritage’ (turāth) is loosely defined as a relationship with the past employed to suit present-​day purposes.

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stability and national unity, such actions further engendered particularization and dissent. Likewise, instead of crystalizing understandings of ‘who is Syrian’, ‘what it means to be Syrian’ or even what sorts of objects, sites or idioms were supposed to index that, what it actually did was increase their superfluity and ‘free-​floating’ nature, opening up Syrianness2 to be ‘taken on’ (Derrida in Naas 2003) by a whole host of other individuals and groups. While the mobilization of heritage was by no means the only strategy employed by the regime or its supporters to garner support during this period, I argue that each ‘performative moment’ of heritage was nevertheless a crucial ‘site of enunciation’ (J. Butler 1993) through which heritage, as a celebration of a particular mode of nationalist belonging and manifestation of Syrianness, became mobilized for the purpose of preventing the physical and symbolic fragmentation of the nation-​state as conceived by the regime and an anticipated descent into ‘chaos’. As scholars of material culture often assert, objects do not simply reflect social worlds, they actively co-constitute them, and it is through one’s relationships with people and things that we come to apprehend the world and our place in it. In other words, objects and things create us just as much – if not more – than we create them (Miller 2008). In this light, when failure occurs, it can be understood as a rupture in this dialectical relationship between people and things, such that the process of ‘objectification’, as first articulated by Hegel (2003 [1807]), momentarily ceases (Introduction, this volume). In such a moment, ‘things’ are no longer what they seemed, and we find ourselves asking not only ‘What is this?’ but, perhaps more importantly, ‘Who am I in relation to it?’ Thus, we find that in moments of failure the seemingly-stable connections linking signified to referent are severed. Significantly, however, while the duration of such a failure may be quite fleeting, its social implications can be both profound and long-lasting. In this spirit, the present study addresses the mobilization of heritage by pro-​and anti-​regime activists in ‘crisis Syria’3 and the subsequent failure of heritage to materialize a narrative of solidarity and national unity within this context. While on the one hand, it explores key ‘performative moments’ of heritage in the face of the crisis unfolding, on the other hand, by exploring ‘the imperfections that bring them down’ (Schieffelin 1996), it seeks to reveal the inner dynamics of such moments and, thus, provide insight into the ways in which social realities are created and –​within the context of the crisis –​destroyed in Syria. Beginning with a brief discussion of key terms and concepts, the chapter turns to two ethnographic examples that were, in many ways, material and performative failures. The first focuses on the ways in which regime supporters drew upon the material-​discursive (Barad 2003) legacy of the This term builds upon Brubaker and Coopers’s (2000: 14) definition of ‘groupness’ as a sense of belonging to a ‘distinctive, bounded, solidary group’. 3 The term ‘crisis Syria’ is an analytical term employed to distinguish between the relatively ‘more peaceful’ first year of the Syrian conflict (loosely defined as the spring of 2011 until the spring 2012) and the later, increasingly violent military conflict which followed. 2

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twelfth-​century Ayyubid leader, Salah al-​Din (Saladin), in order to foster national unity and solidarity in the capital city of Damascus. The second interrogates a similar invocation of heritage by opposition activists in Palmyra,4 an oasis town located in the heart of the Syrian desert, as they sought to muster support for their own, disparate cause. The chapter concludes by ‘thinking through’ material failure in light of the ethnographic examples presented.5

Heritage, performativity and Syrianness As noted by Judith Butler (1993: xxi), within speech act theory, a performative act is ‘that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names’ or, at least for purposes here, attempts to produce that which it names.6 Significantly, as Butler (following Derrida) goes on to note, the power of the performative is not simply the function of the originating will of the subject (i.e. the speaker, performer, etc.), but rather is always derivative and citational (xxi). In a similar fashion with regard to heritage, the power and efficacy of heritage objects, sites and idioms to produce the desired result is derived precisely from their ability to cite and draw upon commonly understood narratives of an ‘authentic past’ for which objects designated as ‘heritage’ then serve to materialize (Rowlands 2002). In other words, heritage, as a performative act, legitimizes and grounds the narrative. However, as we shall see, in ‘crisis Syria’, things do not always mean what they are supposed to mean and the performativity of a performance does not always coincide with the performer’s intentions. To Edward Schieffelin (1996:  59–​60), ‘performances  –​whether ritual or dramatic –​create and make present realities vivid enough to beguile, amuse or terrify. They alter moods, attitudes, social states and states of mind’.7 4 While the vast majority of news and scholarly accounts often draw a discursive distinction between the ‘modern’ town and the ‘ancient’ site by referring to the former by the pre-​Semitic name Tadmor, and the latter by the Latin name Palmyra, this distinction is dubious at best. Not only does the ancient site extend physically beneath portions of the contemporary town, but, in addition, both aspects of the city were intimately intertwined in the lived reality of my informants. For the most part, when speaking in English, both the ancient and modern cities were referred to by informants as Palmyra, and when speaking in Arabic as Tadmor. In this spirit, as this chapter is written in English, I follow their lead by using the term Palmyra here. 5 The research for this chapter is based on PhD field research conducted in Palmyra and Damascus from August 2010 to January 2012, just prior to and during the first year of the Syrian conflict. 6 The most classic example of a performative act is the statement ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ spoken by a licensed officiant during a marriage ceremony which both communicates an idea and, by its own act of enunciation, also brings it into being. 7 To Schieffelin (1996: 60), there are two main modes of usage for the term ‘performance’: (1) the domain of particular ‘symbolic’ or ‘aesthetic’ modes of action (e.g. ritualistic, theatrical or folk activities) enacted as ‘intentional expressive productions in an established local genre’, and (2) ‘the fundamental practices and embodied performativity of everyday life’ (60). This second view of performance, or performativity, builds off the work of earlier scholars of performance theory, such as Bauman (1986), Turner (1988), Goffman (1967) and Bourdieu (1977), and differs

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Unlike texts, performances ‘create their effects and then are gone, leaving their reverberations (fresh insights, reconstituted selves, new statuses, altered realities) behind them’. However, while a performance may be more or less ephemeral in nature, its authority is not necessarily so. As one of the fundamental emergent properties of a performance, to Schieffelin (80–​1), performative authority has the capacity not merely to captivate an audience (and participants) while the performance is going on but, if powerful enough, to extend its influence beyond the boundaries of the enactment into the realm of everyday life. It is in this way that a performance has the potential to become politically potent or socially creative. In his view, ‘It is precisely the emergence of realities in performance and their movement into the domain of social historical events which constitutes the movement of ritual or symbolic efficacy into the human world. This is true even when what emerges in a given performance is not necessarily predictable or is even the opposite of the performer’s intentions’ (81). However, what happens when performative attempts fail to produce this type of authoritative ‘presence’? What happens when what emerges from a performance is actually the opposite of what one intends? While this might be disastrous for the performer, from an anthropological standpoint, this is not necessarily a bad thing. To Schieffelin, ‘Studying … performative failure is interesting since it stands to reveal (through the imperfections that bring them down) the inner construction of the particular “ritual” or “theatrical” experience involved and thus, on a broader level, to provide insight into the particular ways (at least performatively) a people construct their own social reality’ (62). While numerous studies in anthropology and related disciplines have explored the performative use of heritage objects, sites and idioms to engender a sense of identity and social solidarity in the present that is linked to the past,8 this chapter follows the lead of Schieffelin to argue that in order to fully understand the social role of heritage in practice, it becomes necessary to examine the loci where such narratives break down. By examining gaps, fissures and moments of dissonance, it thus becomes possible to catch a glimpse of what heritage is actually doing. from the work on performativity that developed from speech act theory by scholars such as Austin (1962), Derrida (1988) and Judith Butler (1993). Thus, although the terms ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ are often used interchangeably, they have quite different theoretical antecedents. Despite this, they are not mutually exclusive and, indeed, as noted by Brickell (2003), should not be. In his view, combining the two perspectives allows theorists to ‘reclaim the social action and interaction central to the term performance, without slipping back into essentialist assumptions about the performers’ (175). Much as with regard to gender (which is Brickell’s concern), with regard to heritage, this synthesis allows us to investigate how heritage is ‘done’, how such doings reproduce conceptions of selfhood, belonging and Syrianness within the conflict and how they bestow an illusion of ‘of-​courseness’ upon its particular manifestations. 8 See B. Butler (2006) for a good review.

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Prior to the crisis, a general modern humanist conception of preservation and conservation of the material landscape prevailed in Syria (Sottimano 2009; Zisser 2006). Numerous ‘official’ heritage projects were initiated, heritage tourism was constantly on the rise and the number of heritage-​themed restaurants increased significantly (Salamandra 2004; Totah 2014). Docudramas and other television programing regarding the nation’s cultural heritage was a daily occurrence, and heritage sites were frequently used as set locations for commercial advertising, music videos and popular television dramas (Salamandra 2004; Boëx 2011). Thus, through the production, maintenance and care of heritage objects and sites extant in the Syrian landscape, coupled with the increased attention, celebration and popular consumption of heritage in everyday life, objects, sites and idioms identified as heritage continuously, and often banally (Billig 1995), materialized a particular narrative of ‘glorious past’ intimately connected to a nationalist discourse of unity, solidarity and Syrianness. This aspect of heritage is a curious one, for, as Michael Rowlands (2002:  108)  notes:  ‘Heritage as discourse implies on the one hand closure around a single legitimate narrative and on the other acceptance that more than one story can be told.’ In other words, ‘Whatever is described or identified as heritage is only valuable as long as an authentic sense of past exists to identify it as such’ (108). To Rowlands, in order to create this ‘authentic sense of past’, a narrative is needed for which ‘heritage’ then serves to materialize: ‘There must … already be an accompanying story, of the nation or a community for example, whose terms we already know and for which “heritage” provides a material objectification or a collective representation of a particular version of tradition’ (108; see also Hall 2000). In this way, heritage, as a ‘performative act’, cites and draws from the narrative while simultaneously legitimizing and grounding it to appear ‘natural’ and ‘self-​evident’. In ‘ “Taking on a Tradition”: African Heritage and the Testimony of Memory’, Beverley Butler (2007: 31) deploys Derrida’s strategy of ‘taking on a tradition’ (i.e. deconstruction) in order to interrogate the conceptual, intellectual and moral-​ethical issues at stake in selected performative moments of ‘memory-​ work’ and the ‘attendant construction of heritage imaginaries’ in Alexandria. Drawing out the tensions between memory-​work and material heritage, her analysis illuminates heritage as a ‘performative moment’, ‘a space of uncanny encounter with ancestors’ and ‘a destabiliser of temporalities’ (32). Likewise, to philosopher Michael Naas (2003), who uses this strategy to ‘take on the tradition’ of Derrida’s own work, helping us to rethink and rework themes such as tradition, legacy and inheritance in the Western philosophical tradition, to take on a tradition […] and what is most powerful and gripping within it, one must affirm and contest not only the arguments and claims of

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tradition but traditional ways of making arguments and claims, of claiming authority, producing evidence, and gaining conviction, traditional modes of receiving and reading the tradition. Hence it is necessary not only to take a critical stance toward the tradition but to adopt a performative strategy with regard to it. Whereas Derrida’s texts thus analyse traditional philosophical issues and concepts in order to reveal something untraditional within them, they also perform traditional critical gestures in order to invent other, unprecedented gestures from within. (xix–​xx; emphasis added) While in Butler’s analysis, ‘taking on a tradition’ in Alexandria finds the legacy of Alexander ‘the Great’s’ appropriation into an epic search for origins, ancient homeland and metaphysical roots (34), in Syria, it is the legacy of historical leaders such as Salah al-​Din and Zenobia that come to the fore. While in Alexandria, a Western ‘myth-​historical birth’ and a desire to stage the conquering march of modernity in the footsteps of Alexander saw the ‘Westernization’ of the city’s ‘potent lexicon of signs and images’ and ‘ready canon of myths and icons’ (34), in Syria, similar processes have also seen the Syrianization of potent ‘signs and images’. As in Alexandria, this Syrianization of historical myths and legends, in turn, helped to establish a number of historical figures, archetypes, ancient identities and templates that were revived and emulated within the contemporary Syrian national imaginary both prior to and during the conflict. As such, heritage, as a ‘thing of value’, became crucial to the production and grounding of a ‘dominant tradition of Syrianness’9 as a mode of nationalist belonging and as a geopolitical construct. In this way, heritage objects, sites and idioms provided a cornerstone upon which conceptions of Syrianness could be managed, mediated, manipulated and claimed as ‘self-​objects’ (34).

The notion of a ‘dominant tradition of Syrianness’ here draws upon the conception of ‘the dominant’ by Russian-​American literary theorist Roman Jakobson (1971 [1935]), who coined the term to refer to ‘the focusing component of a work of art’ which ‘rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components’ and ‘guarantees the integrity of the structure’ (105). Rather than seeing the dominant as some reified, overarching or fixed entity, however, to Jakobson, the dominant is a ‘floating’ concept with the possibility for a ‘multiplicity of dominants’ to exist simultaneously (McHale 1986: 56). Thus, in his view, ‘it is not so much a question of the disappearance of certain elements and the emergence of others as it is the question of shifts in the mutual relationship among the diverse components of the system, in other words, a question of the shifting dominant’ (Jakobson 1971 [1935]: 108). Similar to Roy Wagner’s (1975) discussion of ‘convention’ and ‘conventional contexts’, then, within a given society the dominant can thus be understood as the prevailing value-​system of a given period upon which a particular society is based and through which the contradictions of other value-​systems become elided and masked. 9

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‘Suriyyah bakheer’ (Syria is fine) On 20 June 2011, the Syrian president gave his third speech to the nation since the start of the unrest. Lasting nearly an hour, and drawing upon a number of familiar metaphors, tropes and idioms of belonging, he reiterated the influence of foreign conspirators on recent events, pledged his determination to bring about national reform and urged the Syrian people not to dwell on the past but, rather, to look to the future and to control events rather than succumb to pressure. In his closing remarks he stated: Syria’s destiny is to face crises; but it is also its destiny to be proud, strong, resistant and victorious. Its destiny is to come out of crises stronger thanks to the solidarity and cohesion of its society, its deeply rooted values and the determination of its people who are endowed with intelligence, civilization and openness. It is you who prevented the confusion between the greed and designs of superpowers, on the one hand, and people’s desire for reform and change on the other. It is you who protected the flower of youth from being sacrificed to the greed of international powers. It is you who prevented all attempts of sectarian sedition scrambling at the gates of the homeland and cut off the head of the snake before it could bite the Syrian body and kill it. I say that as long as you enjoy this great spirit and this deep sense of identity, Syria is fine and safe.10 By the end of that week, the president’s final words, ‘Syria is fine’ (Suriyyah bakheer) had become a catch phrase of pro-​regime support, and before long the slogan was ubiquitous. Countless billboards and other signage emblazoned with this message could be found throughout the capital, appearing on the largest and most strategically placed billboards in the city, as well as the curb sides and median strips of nearly all the main boulevards and streets in the city. While the ‘Syria is fine’ campaign was by no means the first nationalist-​ oriented ad campaign to appear throughout the course of the unrest, earlier campaigns had been promoted as independent, ‘privately-​funded’ initiatives (Shackelford 2015). The ‘Syria is fine’ campaign, on the other hand, was blatantly state-​sponsored. While most of the images of the campaign depicted ‘modern’ symbols of the Syrian state and often adhered to a kitsch aesthetic, one image, noteworthy for purposes here, displayed a photograph of a widely recognized statue of the twelfth-​century Ayyubid leader Salah al-​Din (Saladin), and marked

www.presidentassad.net; translation SANA. 10

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FIGURE  8.1   Nationalist-​oriented advert featuring the statue of Salah al-​Din and slogan, Suriyyah bakheer, from the ‘Syria is fine’ campaign, Damascus, July 2011. Photo by author. the first explicit mobilization of a nationally and internationally recognized figure from the Syrian heritage-​scape for the express purpose of bolstering regime support (Figure 8.1). While in his previous speeches, the president had repeatedly drawn upon a rhetoric of shared heritage, such as Syria’s ‘legacy of overcoming crises’ or an Arab legacy of ‘resistance in the face of oppression’, in each speech he had stopped short of invoking any specific historical narrative directly. Likewise, while some of the other ‘privately funded’ campaigns, that also blanketed the city and pages of print media, had invoked the rhetoric of ‘a shared history’, the history that was invoked was vague and nondescript –​an oblique reference to a commonly understood ‘glorious past’ so entrenched in the consciousness of ordinary people that it need not be stated (Shackelford 2015). Thus, the use of Salah al-​Din in the ‘Syria is fine’ campaign indexes the general mobilization of heritage for political purposes during this period. Although the image of Salah al-​Din may at first appear to innocuously invoke nothing more than the memory of a celebrated historical figure who defeated the franj (Crusaders) at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 and liberated

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FIGURE  8.2   Obverse side of the 1997–​98 issue of the Syrian 200 lira banknote featuring the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Damascus and the statue of Salah al-​Din. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Jerusalem from franj rule, however, to the average Syrian above the age of ten, this image simultaneously signified another referent filled with a spectrum of sentiment in the Syria of 2011: the president’s father and former president, Hafez al-​Assad (r.1971–​2000). Indeed, throughout the elder Assad’s thirty-​year rule, comparisons between him and the twelfth-​century Ayyubid leader had been ubiquitous (Wedeen 1999; Kedar 2005; Heidemann 2013). Salah al-​Din’s victory over the Crusaders was likened to the coup that brought Assad to power and, later, to the Tishreen War of 1973,11 each of which enabled the former president to be portrayed as the liberator of occupied Arab lands and a successor to Salah al-​Din. Min Hattin ila Tishreen (From Hattin to Tishreen) became a popular slogan of the period and everywhere analogies between the two leaders  –​their personalities, their biographies, their deeds –​abounded. Thus, by linking events that occurred during his own lifetime to those of Salah al-​Din, the elder Assad sought to engender national unity while at the same time gaining legitimacy and support for his leadership, particularly from the Sunni Muslim majority (to which he, as an Alawite, did not belong). In this way, presidential performances became bolstered by the manufacture of ‘sure signs’ (Derrida in Naas 2003; see also Butler 2007) in which ‘the atemporal quality of such mythologisation’ (Woods in Butler 2007) became a strategic means through which military projects and ‘events’ could be ‘templated’ (Butler 2007) within a broader ‘tradition of Syrianness’ as a bastion of resistance against foreign oppression.

The October War, also known as the Yom Kippur War. 11

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FIGURE  8.3   ‘Imprint of loyalty on the wall of history’ rally at the Damascus Citadel, 5 July 2011. Credit: SANA. In 2011, despite the fact that over a decade had passed since the death of Hafez al-​Assad and that the political invocation of Salah al-​Din had been more or less absent from the official regime rhetoric of his son, Bashar (who came to power in 2000), the memory of the former president nevertheless persisted in both the minds and the material culture of the Syrian nation and its people: in the landscape affixed to countless posters and statues bearing his likeness, in the faded lines of praise painted on walls and buildings throughout the country and even circulating banally on Syrian banknotes –​with Hafez on the 1,000 and Salah al-​Din on the 200 (Figure 8.2). Thus, with the redeployment of Salah al-​Din in the ‘Syria is fine’ campaign, the ambiguity and polyvalency associated with the Ayyubid leader was not lost on those who encountered his newly repackaged image. Indeed, for many, it was unclear precisely which ‘historic leader’ the image was supposed to index. On 5 July 2011, not long after the launch of the ‘Syria is fine’ campaign, a rally was organized in front of the Damascus Citadel located in the northwest corner of the Old City of Damascus and part of the UNESCO World Heritage complex (Figure 8.3).12 During the rally, the street in front of the citadel was 12 In contemporary Syrian imaginary, the Damascus Citadel is widely associated with the legacy of Salah al-​Din, who captured it in 1174. In 1992, a statue of the Ayyubid leader was erected in the plaza in front of the citadel. Significantly, as no icon bearing a physical resemblance to the Ayyubid leader actually exists, it is a photograph of this statue that was used for the ‘Syria is fine’ campaign.

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cordoned off, as participants carried flags, banners and photographs of the president and chanted songs and slogans, while pro-​regime music blared from loudspeakers in the street. An enormous piece of white fabric was draped over the exterior wall of the citadel upon which an outline of the modern state had been drawn and shaded in with the colours of the Syrian flag. In the centre of the flag, the word bakheer could be discerned, immediately drawing to mind the phrase Suriyyah bakheer (Syria is fine), the, by then, ubiquitous phrase. While, from a distance, the colours of the flag appeared solid in form, upon closer inspection the imprints of thousands of fingerprints could be discerned. According to the official Syrian news agency, SANA (5 July 2011), the rally was part of a campaign entitled ‘Imprint of loyalty on the wall of history’ (basmah wafa` ´ala jidar al-​tarekh) in which a 320 m2 ‘map’ (at the time, Syria’s largest) was painted out of fingerprints in order to demonstrate ‘support to the comprehensive reform program led by President al-​Assad and commitment to Syria’s pan-​ Arab and national stances in the face of the attempts aimed at destabilizing the homeland’. After hanging for at least a month from the southern tower of the Damascus Citadel, the article stated, the map would be put on display at other historical citadels in the Syrian provinces as ‘a demonstration of love and support’. As an intentional performance produced by pro-​ regime supporters in Damascus, the rally at the citadel employed a number of material-​discursive practices prevalent at other such rallies held throughout that first year. Participants employed a number of familiar idioms, symbols and practices that would have been easily recognizable to the vast majority of Syrians who witnessed them, such as: chanting well-​known nationalist slogans and waving flags and holding up images of the president to express their loyalty and support. As such, the rally fell within the bounds of a well-​established ‘tradition’ of mass demonstration in Syria. Under the former president Hafez al-​ Assad, Soviet-​ style ‘rituals of obeisance’ had been a common affair (Wedeen 1999). While such overt practices of governmentality (Foucault 1991) may have been toned down with the coming to power of Bashar al-​Assad in 2000, party rallies and cult-​like practices did nevertheless continue, at least to some degree. Although the rally at the citadel may have extended (Wagner 1975) this Syrian ‘tradition’ of mass demonstration in some ways, its enactment was nevertheless produced within the conventions of a well-​established performative genre of Syrian nationalism (cf. Wedeen 1999). In this sense, in both form and content, the rally was derivative, citational and templated on the countless other rallies that had come before. The fact that the Damascus Citadel  –​with its associated myths and legends –​was chosen as the venue for the rally, rather than a central square

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or, indeed, any of the city’s numerous other historic buildings and sites, also underscores the site’s symbolic potency within the Syrian national imaginary at that time. In this way, participants actively drew upon the symbolic value associated with the citadel and the legend of Salah al-​Din to strengthen their performance, grounding it in the material landscape and bestowing upon it an air of authority and authenticity. Performatively following ‘in the footsteps of Salah al-​Din’, participants thus attempted to declare authority over the site, the city and, by extension, Syria, on behalf of the Assad regime (in whose honour the rally was orchestrated). In other words, by declaring their loyalty and physically pressing their fingerprints ‘on the wall of history’, participants reasserted and grounded Assad’s rightful place in it. When looked at diachronically within the context of the crisis, the rally also emphasizes the intertextual relationship (Kristeva 1980 between demonstrations held at heritage sites and other material-​ discursive strategies employed by the regime and its supporters at this time. While heritage may have been invoked obliquely in presidential speeches and circulated banally in the form of ad campaigns, it was through the rally at the site that the mobilization of heritage as a materialization of Syrianness became most powerful and most explicit. Moreover, when taken together with presidential speeches and ad campaigns, such material-​ discursive mobilizations of heritage had the potential to create a powerful message beyond the capacity of any one medium to independently produce. At least in theory. Despite all this, however, the reality is that, for many with whom I spoke, the rally at the Damascus Citadel did not ‘work’. Indeed, as with the countless other pro-​regime rallies held at heritage sites throughout the country, for many, such events were felt to be utterly contrived. As one informant dryly remarked:  ‘Well, you know … those aren’t really normal people that are demonstrating … they’re mukhabarat [secret police].’ For many, despite the apparent ‘enthusiasm’ of the participants and ‘spontaneity’ of such events, these could not hide their spurious nature. Thus, what is perhaps most significant about such events is that while their intention may have been to engender national unity and solidarity and underscore the authority of the president as the rightful ruler of Syria, as a ‘performative act’, what they actually did was the opposite. By their very act of enunciation, what pro-​regime rallies, such as that at the Damascus Citadel, actually did was confirm that everything was not fine  –​not in Damascus, not anywhere. In other words, rather than reiterating the regime’s power and authority in Syria and engendering unity under his leadership, what such rallies actually did was further underscore the regime’s artifice, engender greater dissatisfaction with the president’s leadership and fuel additional discontent among the populace.

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‘Ahrar Tadmor’ (free Palmyra) Throughout the summer and autumn months of 2011, the calls for support and solidarity by both pro-​and anti-​regime activists intensified, and it is in this period that we see a distinct increase in the mobilization of heritage by both sides. Like the regime, opposition activists also appropriated heritage objects, sites and idioms to propagate their cause. Indeed, regardless of which side one supported, the narrative of Syria’s ‘glorious past’ was invoked by nearly everyone with whom I spoke. In this way, each side was able to appropriate heritage to suit widely divergent purposes, which in many ways exemplifies the entirely ambiguous nature of the discourse itself. For example, prior to unrest, the legend of Zenobia, the legendary queen of Palmyra who defied Rome in the late third century, had often been employed by the regime for nationalist purposes. Throughout the period of modern statehood, her legend, like that of Salah al-​Din, had been increasingly incorporated into a larger material-​discursive ‘tradition of Syrianness’ which sought to foster national unity and pride in al-​watan (the homeland) as a means of resistance against ‘the greed and designs of superpowers’. Unlike Salah al-​ Din, who had proved somewhat problematic for the avowedly secular state of Syria,13 in Zenobia the state had found a heroine who was distinctly Syrian. As a heroic and ultimately tragic queen, throughout the Arab world, Zenobia is celebrated for her ability to defy oppression and to stand up for her principles and her people. While, in reality, little is known about her origins or the details of her exploits, such gaps have proven productive, making her legend amenable to a whole host of divergent causes. Seen as a ‘symbol of freedom’, a ‘champion of the oppressed’ and/​or a ‘national icon’ (Southern 2008), to the vast majority of people with whom I spoke throughout my field research, Zenobia was cited as the most important historical figure in Syria (followed closely by Salah al-​Din). Some noted her leadership abilities and how she had ‘changed Syria for the better’, while others saw her as ‘a symbol of Syrian strength when standing in the face of the Roman Empire’. In a similar fashion, when discussing the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra  –​the key materialization of Zenobia’s legend in the landscape  –​ informants frequently mentioned the site as the most important place in Syria. Promoted as the ‘Bride of the Desert’ and Syria’s number one tourist attraction, prior to the uprising, the ruins of the ancient city had assumed a prominent position on all tourist promotional materials, with each materialization quickly followed by a recounting of its heroic queen. While located physically in the landscape of the Syrian Desert, banal images of the site, as well as its 13 Salah al-​Din was both a Kurd and devout Sunni Muslim, who also happened to have been born in Tikrit (in modern-​day Iraq).

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FIGURE 8.4   Obverse side of the 1998–​2014 issue of the Syrian 500 lira banknote featuring the monumental archway and tetrapylon of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra and a profile bust of Zenobia, the ancient city’s celebrated queen. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. legendary queen, circulated endlessly on stamps and banknotes (Figure 8.4); in advertising campaigns; on souvenir memorabilia; on television programs, commercials and news broadcasts; and in print and digital media. Thus, when taken together, both these tangible and intangible forms of inheritance worked dialectically to help the other to endure. As William Wright (1895: 109), an English missionary who lived and travelled extensively in Syria in the nineteenth century, noted, ‘The history of Zenobia is linked inseparably, by fact and fiction, with Palmyra’. Likewise, echoing comments made about Zenobia, herself, to informants, the ruins of the ancient city symbolized ‘the advancement of Syrian civilization and steadfastness in the face of the Roman conquest’, and, in many ways, the appellation ‘Bride of the Desert’ connoted both the site and its queen at once. As a potent manifestation of Syrianness, the symbolic capital of Palmyra was significant, and over the course of the conflict a material-​ discursive contestation arose between the regime and the opposition for authority over the site. According to local residents, during the holy month of Ramadan in August 2011, a peaceful protest was held in one of the main squares of the city to express local frustration with the regime and its policies. This was the first anti-​regime protest to occur in Palmyra, and it was met with the firing of live ammunition by regime forces into the crowds. Seven people were killed in the assault and many more were wounded. According to residents who participated in the protest and witnessed the government’s disproportionate use of violence, Ramadan 2011 marked a turning point for Palmyra. An agreement was reached between tribal elders and the government that the people of the town would not hold large protests against the regime and,

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FIGURE 8.5   Still shot of video uploaded to YouTube depicting the anti-​regime protest in the ruins of Palmyra, 28 October 2011. While most participants donned the green, white, black of the Syrian Independence Flag, one man (far right) wore the red, white, black of the Syrian national flag, demonstrating the sartorial ambiguity at this time. Credit: Palmyrian2011 (https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=qnmX2LYmA5k). in return, the police and security forces would leave the town to tribal rule. Indeed, when I  visited the city in November of that year, this agreement appeared to be in full swing, as not one police officer or security agent was observed. Residents referred to their town as ‘Free Palmyra’ (ahrar Tadmor), and their attention was focused on ‘liberating other cities’, such as Homs, which was under severe attack at that time. Two months after the ‘Ramadan massacre’ (as it came to be called), on 28 October 2011, another protest occurred, this time within the ruins of the ancient city (Figure 8.5). Dubbed the ‘Friday of the No-​Fly Zone’ by protestors, the main intention with the protest was to call upon the international community to impose a no-​fly zone in Syria much like that used against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, whose capture and death the week before had, in many ways, inspired that Friday’s theme. Despite the numerous differences between the Libyan and Syrian uprisings, in the minds of many protestors, strong parallels persisted between the two. Thus, by calling for a no-​fly zone

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in Syria, protestors hoped to bring about a similar revolutionary ‘success’ to that which they felt had occurred in Libya.14 Foreign intervention in Syria was unlikely, however, for only a few weeks earlier, Russia and China, both permanent members of the UN Security Council, had vetoed a proposed resolution that they feared could have led to military action against the Assad regime. Thus, from the outset, the ability of demonstrators to achieve a no-​fly zone was dubious at best. Beginning after midday prayers, the protest commenced with a handful of young men riding motorbikes from the tomb of Nizar Abu Bahaaeddine,15 situated in the oasis about 500 metres from ancient ruins, to gather under the site’s monumental archway  –​by far the most iconic feature of the site. The unchoreographed nature of the event and the haste with which it was conducted are evident in a video of the event that was recorded and uploaded to YouTube.16 Quickly alighting their motorbikes, the men raise placards and flags and break into a medley of anti-​regime chanting and song. The cameraman follows behind the group as they make their way to the arch, where they pause and chant some more  –​faces covered, flags and banners unfurled. For a brief moment, the cameraman pans out from the protest to focus, instead, on the seventeenth-​century citadel overlooking the ruins located on a hill behind the protestors. Although lasting only a few seconds, for that brief moment, the historic setting suddenly eclipses the contemporary action. When panning back to the protestors, the auratic qualities (Benjamin 2007 [1955]) of the citadel are carried along with it, bestowing upon their actions an added air of ‘fatefulness’ (Goffman 1967: 161) drawn directly from the landscape itself. While the flags and majority of hats and scarves worn by participants are emblazoned in the green, white and black horizontal stripes of the Syrian Independence Flag, one man wears a hat adorned with the red, white and black pattern of the Syrian national flag  –​a sartorial ambiguity that underscores the evolving nature of the opposition during this period as well as the material resignification of the conflict, more generally. After a few moments, the men turn and shuffle back towards the camera, pausing for a few last-​minute chants before hurriedly returning to their motorbikes to disperse. In total, participants demonstrated for no more than five minutes. The notion of ‘Free Palmyra’ was stressed by a number of informants with whom I spoke during my visit to the city a few weeks later, and many talked openly about their activities: the late-​night destruction of the president’s image While the ‘success’ of the Libyan uprising can be debated, what is significant for purposes here, is that it was perceived as such by opposition activists at that time. 15 Nizar Abu Bahaaeddine was a Sufi scholar who lived in Palmyra in the sixteenth century. His tomb was destroyed by Islamic State militants sometime between 13 May and 23 June 2016. 16 https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=qnmX2LYmA5k. A still shot of the event was also released by Reuters. 14

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in the citadel, spray-​painting the walls of the modern town with anti-​regime slogans and even the October protest in the ruins. During an interview with a man who had participated in this last event, he recounted how they had planned the protest, gathered quickly in front of the ruins, filmed the video and then quickly dispersed. Many acknowledged that the protest had been a ‘publicity stunt’ meant to draw attention to the town and its frustrations. Indeed, of the five handmade signs used in the event, four were in Arabic and one in English, a fact which demonstrates both a regional and an international target audience. The content of the signs is also revealing. Both the banner17 and the placard written in English focused specifically on that Friday’s theme, while the other three placards, written in Arabic, addressed a variety of other concerns. The first explained why they were protesting,18 while the second gave thanks to ‘honest and independent media outlets’ (‘alamat al-​harr al-​sadiq) (while also bearing the logo of Saudi-​owned pan-​Arab news channel, Al-​Arabiyya). The third –​most significant for purposes here –​stated simply: ‘Here the liberated city of Palmyra (ahrar Tadmor) rewrites history again’ (Figure 8.6).19

Thinking through failure As with the pro-​regime rally at the Damascus Citadel, it is not by happenstance that the monumental archway was chosen as the venue for the protest in Palmyra that day. As mediums for social action, such sites worked dialectically with participants, their cause and the images, slogans and symbols employed to index it, imbuing each with new significance. Literally made of stone, such sites were solid, heavy and durable –​all traits that are significant when discursive claims of greatness appear rather flimsy and ephemeral. Despite the fact that it is not actually known why the archway was originally erected (Ball 1994: 187), staging the protest beneath it nevertheless bestowed an air of legitimacy upon the actions of the protestors. Indeed, much as the final placard (above) indicates, the protest possessed a mimetic and almost mythic quality, with protestors marching ‘in the footsteps of Zenobia’ who, one imagines, might have triumphantly led her own troops under the same

The banner, which was physically the largest of the signs to be displayed, was also emblazoned with the greatest, overarching ‘supra-​agenda’ of the protestors, the departure (arhal) of Bashar al-​Assad, thus spatializing the hierarchy of the protestors’ demands. 18 ‘Min ‘ajl al-​shahada’. Min ‘ajl al-​mutaqaleen. Min ‘ajl al-​mafqudeen. Sanamdi lanil al-​hurriyah. Hatta al-​nihayya. Tadmor. 28/​10/​11’ (For the sake of the martyrs. For the sake of the detained. For the sake of the missing. We will achieve freedom. Until the end. Palmyra. 28/​10/​11) (emphasis in original; translation by author). 19 ‘Huna Ahrar Tadmor ya’eidoon kitabat al-​tarekh min jadid’ (emphasis in original; translation by author). 17

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FIGURE 8.6   Still shot of video uploaded to YouTube depicting the anti-​regime protest in the ruins of Palmyra, 28 October 2011. The placard shown here reads: ‘Here the liberated city of Palmyra rewrites history again’ (Huna Ahrar Tadmor ya’eidoon kitabat al-​tarekh min jadid) (translation by author). Credit: Palmyrian2011 (https://​ www.youtube.com/​watch?v=qnmX2LYmA5k).

ornately carved archway after a victorious battle against Rome. Thus, like the pro-​regime rally at the Damascus Citadel, while the protest in Palmyra may have been templated on a well-​established contemporary tradition of mass demonstration in Syria, it, too, was templated upon more temporally distant, even mythical, triumphal demonstrations of leaders past. As an intentional performance, the main objective of the protest that day was to call upon the international community to impose a no-​fly zone over Syria –​an aim that protestors hoped would lead to their overarching goal: the downfall of the Assad regime. However, rather than imposing a no-​fly zone and, thus, protection for the city, its people and the archaeological site, its use in the protest counter-​invented (Wagner 1975) the opposite. Over the months that followed, two additional protests were held in the ruins of Palmyra. While the state media remained silent over all three of these events, in January 2012, a story broke in the Syrian daily newspaper Tishreen (26 January 2012) that clandestine digging activities were taking place within the archaeological area of Palmyra.

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By February, the arrangement between the residents of Palmyra and the Syrian government ended when regime forces, claiming to be protecting the site, returned to the town and occupied the ancient ruins. According to residents, the army had taken up position in the citadel and were ‘shooting at anything that move[d]‌ ’ (AFP, 19 February 2012). Tanks were reportedly deployed near the entrance to the archaeological area, with heavy weapons positioned and barracks built. Several olive, palm and date groves were also destroyed and set ablaze by regime forces using tank and machinegun fire (Cunliffe 2012). Thus, rather than fostering protection for the people, the city and the site, in Palmyra, protests in the ruins led, instead, to their destruction. As a ‘performative act’, the protest in Palmyra drew upon a particular area of the Syrian landscape replete with symbolic potency, with both the historical legacy and the materiality of the ancient city reverberating acutely with the regime’s oft-​repeated national platform of ‘resistance in the face of oppression’. Indeed, while the content and intention of the protest may have been diametrically opposed to that expressed at the rally at the Damascus Citadel a few months earlier, the form and materiality of each were remarkably similar. In this way, the opposition’s adoption of the site of Palmyra as a symbol of the protest movement ‘took on’ the conventional tradition of Syrianness and its attendant associations by affirming and extending them in new and novel ways, thereby inventing an unprecedented gesture from within the tradition itself (cf. Naas 2003). However, in the new context of the crisis, this traditional affirmation suddenly shifted to signify something other than its dominant signification. In this way, it severed the indexical chains linking both the site and its attendant myths and legends from their conventional associations. In other words, rather than materializing and grounding a ‘national tradition of resistance’ against ‘foreign conspirators’, Israel, or Western imperialism, as it conventionally had in the past, the site of Palmyra was resignified to reveal something untraditional within the tradition itself: as resistant to the Assad regime. This, in turn, exposed the superfluity and ‘free-​floating’ nature within the dominant tradition of Syrianness, thereby sundering the supposedly stable connections linking signified to referent and further ‘opening it up’ to appropriation and radical subversion. In this way, the protest in the ruins of Palmyra highlights the failed alignments between heritage and a particular conception of Syrianness which was in the process of breaking down at that time –​even to the point of nonsense (as exemplified by the sartorial ambiguity of the protestors) –​so that it could be built up again and realigned anew. As such, it demonstrates the ways in which the indexical chains and modes of signification and association broke down and were subsequently reworked throughout that first year. Thus, while the protest in Palmyra may have failed in the ‘traditional’ sense, it ‘worked’ in another sense where  –​at least in the eyes of the protestors  –​it counter-​invented

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(i.e. became the motivation for) a new, ‘truer’ tradition of Syrianness that was then displayed at such sites. This, in turn, positioned failure as a moral accusation each side attempted to impose upon the other in order to ratify its own success. However, as the case of Palmyra demonstrates, while heritage sites may have been embraced and played an active role in both pro-​regime rallies and anti-​regime demonstrations, sadly, when the latter occurred, they were often followed by the damage and destruction of sites.

Conclusion Since the start of the uprising in Syria, many significant archaeological sites have been damaged and/​ or destroyed due to:  ongoing fighting between regime and rebel forces, being turned into a military base, graffiti, vandalism and looting (cf. Cunliffe 2012). While the regime has been quick to blame oppositional forces and ‘armed gunmen’ for the damage, in many instances, regime forces have hit historic sites directly and either participated in or turned a blind eye to looting and other acts of vandalism. Despite the fact that both loyalist and rebel forces have appropriated heritage sites to suit their own political purposes, this has not stopped the physical destruction of the sites on the ground. Indeed, in many ways, the heightened value given to the sites in discursive spheres has actually increased the likelihood of their destruction, as various groups have sought to physically and discursively control such sites. In this context, attempts to freeze the semiosis of who is Syrian, what it means to be Syrian or what objects, sites and idioms should index that can easily slip away and spiral turbulently out of control. Nowhere has this been more tragically clear than with the official declaration of the so-​called Islamic State (IS) in June 2014 and its policy of intentional destruction.20 Indeed, during their ten-​month occupation of Palmyra (from May 2015 until March 2016), which post-​dates the research period here but is nevertheless significant, IS militants intentionally damaged and/​or destroyed many of the ancient city’s most celebrated structures, including: pre-​Roman tower tombs, the inner cella of the Temple of Bel, the Temple of Baalshamin and the iconic monumental archway under which  –​four years prior  –​the chants of ‘Free Palmyra’ once echoed.21 For extensive collated reports on the looting, damage and destruction of heritage sites throughout the conflict in Syria and Iraq, see The American School of Oriental Research, Cultural Heritage Initiatives (www.asor-​syrianheritage.org/​weekly-​reports/​). 21 While outside the scope of this chapter, from a Wagnerian perspective, this more recent intentional destruction of cultural heritage by the Islamic State in Palmyra and elsewhere throughout the region can be seen as a tragic inversion (Wagner 1975) of Syrianness that ultimately lays waste to the dialectic itself. 20

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At the time of writing, the conflict has entered its fifth year and the national unity sought after by both sides at the start of the conflict is still nowhere in sight. If anything, it has become even more fractured. Thus, by focusing on the minute, material dynamics of failure during the early days of the uprising, this chapter has attempted to draw out its ‘larger’ social and cosmological significance by situating material failure within the context of a large-​scale crisis and offering a glimpse of a ‘failure writ large’ that, for many, would be difficult to apprehend otherwise: the ‘failed state’ of Syria. This chapter has addressed what failure is in terms of the collapse of particular meanings and values attributed to particular material objects in the Syrian landscape and illuminated what failure actually does to the de-​ and reconstruction of such meanings and values as well as to the objects themselves. Analytically rejecting the popular moral assumptions embedded within the concept of failure and releasing the temptation to bypass it as a mere ‘stepping stone’ on the road to the ‘success’ of something other, this chapter has allowed failure to take centre stage. Ultimately, through a minute, material analysis of two ethnographic case studies, we found that at the heart of our failure was a semiotic breakdown in the dialectical relationship between a particular ‘dominant tradition of Syrianness’ and the objects that once materialized it. This, in turn, positioned failure as a moral accusation that each side attempted to impose upon the other to ratify its own ‘success’. Within the context of the crisis, such objectifications have ultimately collapsed and failed to adhere, with seemingly stable connections linking signified to referent severed and material-​discursive contestations for control and domination ultimately laying waste to lives and landscapes alike.

Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was conducted as part of my doctoral thesis at University College London under the joint supervision of Paul Basu and Danny Miller and with generous support from the American Philosophical Society, the University College London Graduate School Research Projects Fund and the University of London Scholarship Fund. In addition, I would also like to thank the UCL Material Failure Research & Reading Group as well as those who participated in the 2013 AAA panel ‘When Things Do Wrong: The Material Culture of Failure’ for their insightful comments and critiques of earlier versions of this chapter, particularly Sasha Antohin, Timothy Carroll, David Jeevendrampillai and Aaron Parkhurst. The chapter is dedicated to the people of Palmyra.

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References Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Austin, J. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ball, W. (1994) Syria: A Historical and Architectural Guide. Essex: Scorpion. Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society Vol. 28, No. 3, 801–​31. Bauman, R. (1986) Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, W. ([1955] 2007) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Illuminations, edited by H. Arendt, 217–​52. New York: Schocken Books. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage Publications. Boëx, C. (2011) ‘The End of the State Monopoly over Culture: Toward the Commodification of Cultural and Artistic Production’. Middle East Critique Vol. 20, No. 2, 139–​55. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Brickell, C. (2003) ‘Performativity or Performance? Clarifications in the Sociology of Gender’. New Zealand Sociology Vol. 18, 158–​78. Brubaker, R., and F. Cooper (2000) ‘Beyond “Identity” ’. Theory and Society, February, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1–​47. Butler, B. (2006) ‘Heritage and the Present Past’. In Handbook of Material Culture, 463–​79. London: Sage Publications. Butler, B. (2007) ‘ “Taking on a Tradition”: African Heritage and the Testimony of Memory’. In Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa, edited by F. de Jong and M. Rowlands, 31–​69. London: UCL Institute of Archaeology Publications. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Oxon: Routledge. Cunliffe, E. (2012) Damage to the Soul: Syria’s Cultural Heritage in Conflict. Durham: Global Heritage Fund. Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Governmentality’. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller, 87–​104. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Goffman, E. (1967) Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-​to-​Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Hall, S. (2000) ‘Whose heritage?’ Third Text Vol. 49, 3–​13. Hegel, G. W. F. (2003 [1807]) Phenomenology of the Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Heidemann, S. (2013) ‘Memory and Ideology: Images of Saladin in Syria and Iraq’. In Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image, edited by C. Gruber and S. Haugbolle, 57–​81. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

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Jakobson, R. ([1935] 1971) ‘The Dominant’. In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalism and Structuralist Views, edited by L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, 105–​10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kedar, M. (2005) Asad in Search of Legitimacy: Message and Rhetoric in the Syrian Press under Hafiz and Bashar. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Kristeva, J. (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. McHale, B. (1986) ‘Change of Dominant from Modernist to Postmodernist Writing’. In Approaching Postmodernism: Papers Presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism, 21–​23 September 1984, University of Utrecht, 53–​79. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Miller, D. (2008) The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity Press. Naas, M. (2003) Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rowlands, M. (2002) ‘Heritage and Cultural Property’. In The Material Culture Reader, edited by V. Buchli, 105–​114. Oxford: Berg. Salamandra, C. (2004) A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schieffelin, E. (1996) ‘On Failure and Performance: Throwing the Medium Out of the Seance’. In The Performance of Healing, 59–​89. London: Routledge. Shackelford, J. (2015) Heritage Matters: Understanding Value in Crisis Syria. PhD Dissertation, London, University College London. Sottimano, A. (2009) ‘Ideology and Discourse in the Era of Ba’thist Reforms: Towards an Analysis of Authoritarian Governmentality’. In Changing Regime Discourse and Reform in Syria, 3–​40. Fife: University of St. Andrews Centre for Syrian Studies. Southern, P. (2008) Empress Zenobia: Palmyra’s Rebel Queen. London and New York: Continuum Books. Totah, F. M. (2014) Preserving the Old City of Damascus. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Turner, V. (1988) The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Wagner, R. (1975) The Invention of Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wedeen, L. (1999) Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wright, W. (1895) An Account of Palmyra and Zenobia with Travels and Adventures in Bashan and the Desert. London: T.Nelson. Zisser, E. (2006) ‘Who’s Afraid of Syrian Nationalism? National and State Identity in Syria’. Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 42, No. 2, 179–​98.

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9 Axis of incoherence: Engagement and failure between two material regimes of Christianity Timothy Carroll

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n the opening chapter, the editors outlined a general theory of failure such that ‘material failure’ can be understood to occur when ‘objectification ceases to adhere’. The language used in this definition assumes a processual decomposition: a shoe falling apart, moving from a state wherein the subject can be seen to successfully concretize themselves into an object to one wherein the agentive work of the subject may no longer be the master over the material indexicalities of the thing. In this chapter, I  work with a more processual phenomenon of ‘failure’. Rather than the material conforming and then not, the materials discussed in this c­ hapter –​a parish church building, to be exact  –​never fully matches the aspirations of the community. Each week, the Orthodox Christian parish of St Æthelwald’s enters the space of a homonymous1 Church of England building in order to set up the space for their weekly liturgy. And while the transformation of the space is successful, such that each week the liturgy is carried out, I argue that the sensual quality of

1 The Orthodox parish and the Anglican parish, both of which have the same patronage and name, are given the same pseudonym here.

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the space is not able to cohere to the Anglican material ecology2 of the place. Both the Anglican and Orthodox spaces are coterminous with the physical place of the parish church in East London, but I argue that they are not the same space. Rather, what emerges are (at least) two ‘axes of coherence’ (Gell 1998), such that the Orthodox Christian objectification fails to fully cohere to the otherwise Anglican material. As a result, these two incommensurable attitudes towards and reception of space produce a tension  –​an ‘axis of incoherence’ –​in the material register. The Orthodox parish of St Æthelwald’s rents the nave and adjacent parish hall from St Æthelwald’s Church of England from 9.00 am in the morning till 3.00 pm in the afternoon each Sunday. As is laid out in this chapter, furniture and various items of soft furnishings must be arranged in order to reorganize the space. The chapter follows this phenomenon, then turns to unpack some of the disjunctures between Orthodox and Anglican space. The material ecology in which the Orthodox Christians place themselves produces an affective space of worship that is different from –​both less than and greater than  –​that of the Anglican space. The chapter then turns to address these contiguous, yet non-​overlapping spaces in terms of the Orthodox Christian use and assessment of the space. Drawing on Gregg and Seigworth’s (2010) idea of ‘bloom-​spaces’, taken here as any potent affective space in which people and things may transform, I highlight the transformations which produce the space as a coherent Orthodox temple within otherwise Anglican space.

The Orthodox temple The Orthodox temple is understood to be an ikon of the universe. Eliade’s (1954, 1987) and Köllner’s (2013) respective works on the Orthodox temple, gives the impression that the temple serves as a religious, civic and social anchor for the community. Köllner’s work in post-​socialist Russia stresses the corner stone and the consecration of the temple as key points in its establishment as a sacred space. However, when the building and the Holy Table are not consecrated it becomes more obvious what material element is required in order for a temple to function. As Antohin’s (2014) recent work on Ethiopian Orthodoxy has observed, when, in that context, the tabot –​ or tablet of the Ark  –​is taken out of the parish veiled in ornate wrapping, as is done each Timkat (Epiphany, lit. ‘baptism’), the church leaves the building and the edifice is no longer sacred. It is the tabot  –​not the building  –​that makes the church a church. Boylston (2012: 171), also working in an Ethiopian 2 I use ‘material ecology’ to denote the set of all relata (person and thing, object and substance, tangible and intangible) with which the subject relates in a given space.

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Orthodox context, has similarly noted the perseverance of a church despite its destruction by fire. As the fire did not destroy the tabot, the tabot (and hence the church) was simply moved into a tent down the hill while reconstruction work was carried out. While in Eastern Orthodoxy, the building and Holy Table are both consecrated and thus perpetually sacred spaces, the Holy Table cannot be served upon by a priest without canonical permission to do so. This canonical permission is given in the form of an antimension.3 Its literal meaning, ‘instead of table’, speaks for the fact that this object, not a consecrated Holy Table, is the thing that lets a church be used for Orthodox worship.4 This next subsection follows the churchwarden, Chris, as he and a few others arrange the temple one Sunday morning during the forty days of Pascha, which follow the Feast of the Resurrection. Along with the movement and arrangement of furniture and ikons, the Anglican building is transformed into space suitable for Orthodox worship through the emplacement of the antimension, which transforms the ontology of space.

Vesting the temple In late Pascha 2011, I arrive to the parish early, as the Orthodox churchwarden, Chris, had agreed to meet me and walk me through the process by which he sets up the temple. I arrive at 8.50 am as the caretaker, Harvey, who is hired by the Anglican parish from which the Orthodox congregation of St Æthelwald’s rents its space, opens the great doors. St Æthelwald’s Church of England parish church is a twentieth-​century restoration of an eighteenth-​ century reconstruction of a parish church dating to the Roman period. Inside, the wood-​panelled central nave and balcony are inscribed with the names of clergy serving back into the thirteenth century. The outer brick walls are, on the inside, plastered over with a number of war memorials inset into the walls and window recesses. An eastern-​facing high altar5 is flanked with mosaics of St. John the Apostle and Moses, and a large stained-​glass window shows an assemblage of the crucifixion, not so much as an historical scene, but as it is venerated by an Anglican bishop, a young girl and St Longinus. A small Lady Chapel hosts an ikon of the Russian Mother of God, Our Lady of the Don, and at the back of the parish, facing this ikon, is another of the

3 Several terms, such as antimension, ikonostasis and terms for parts of the temple, are borrowed from the Greek. They are presented in this chapter, however, not in italics, in recognition that they are used as English terms by the Orthodox Christians at St Æthelwald’s. 4 For historical links between the tabot and the antimension, see Januarius Izzo (1981: 4). 5 Eastern facing altars are arranged such that the priest faces away from the people. An altar table may be called ‘eastern facing’ even if the direction on the compass rose is in fact not East.

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Virgin Mary, but of rather more modern rendering. Beyond these three representational pieces of art, the next most noticeable features are the organ pipes, the chandeliers and the small copula –​described by one informant as the ‘church cupcake’. As is typical of many Anglican buildings, St Æthelwald’s nave is long and slender. While the area in which there are pews is not particularly long, it is the same distance from the back of the nave up to the first pew as it is from there up to the Anglican high altar. A stark black and white stone floor in the main nave gives way to grey and white, and eventually white and yellow marble as one walks from the back of the building towards the front. The patterning on the floor, the narrow construction of the walls and the slight elevation increase towards the front of the St Æthelwald’s parish building together give the sense of looking up and at a distance towards a source of light and divine inspiration. Chris arrives at just after 9.00 am, makes his greetings and gets right to work. Gathering the keys, he opens the various closets and storage spaces that the Anglican parish has let the Orthodox parish use. Chris rearranges a large oak table in the centre of the raised Anglican quire and then brings the ikons, processional crucifix and fans, tabernacle and candle stands out from where they are stored behind the Anglican high altar. He arranges these about the quire, the space that will be transformed into the Holy Altar.6 He then takes one of the large high-​back chairs and places it front-​and-​centre, with its back against the Anglican high altar. On either side of this, he sets two low-​backed chairs, forming the three seats of the bema (Seat of Judgement), reserved for the bishop. He then goes and collects the items and boxes from a broom closet below the bell tower. With a few trips he has carried the censor; the candles which will be set before Christ and the Theotokos on the ikonostasis; the folding table used for the prothesis; the two blue Tupperware® boxes containing the utensils of Proskomedia7 and those of the Holy Table, respectively; and the wooden ‘fire box’ with the incense and utensils for the lighting and care of the censor. From the closet under the stairs he pulls the music-​stand used by the reader; the two large wooden stands used for the right and left portion of the ikonostasis; and the folding frame upon which is set the sand box for votive candles. Each of these items of furniture he carries to their place within the slowly assembled space of the temple. Seraphim, a young man who came to N.b. Following the two different sets of Christian terminology, ‘high altar’ is here an Anglican term for the table upon which the priest performs the mass; ‘Holy Altar’ is an Orthodox term for the area behind the ikonostasis. In the Orthodox St Æthelwald community ‘altar’ was used with reference to this space and, in some cases, loosely referring to the table in front of which the priest performed the Liturgy. To keep confusion to a minimum, in this chapter I use the other term more commonly used to speak of this table, the ‘Holy Table’. 7 The service of preparation for the wine, bread and water that will be used in the Eucharist. 6

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help Chris, arrives during this stage and helps arrange the ikonostasis with the four ikons, showing: Christ, the Theotokos, John the Forerunner and the patron of the parish. It is only with the placement of the ikons of the ikonostasis that the building begins to look discernibly Orthodox, and, even so, the large stained-​glass window still dominates the visual field of the building. Standing back from the small ikonostasis, Seraphim turns to me and says: ‘If I had my way, if we owned the building, the first thing I’d do is build a right-​ proper ikonostasis.’ He then proceeds to explain the architectural renovation that would be needed –​which walls to move, where to add this, where to get rid of that. His primary critique of the building is twofold. First, it is too long, and, as such, there was wasted space up front. The Lady Chapel should be changed into the vestry; the most easterly portion of the nave, with the stained-​glass window and the Anglican high altar, should be gutted and made an office for the priest. His second critique is that the building is visually sparse. ‘We need to get an ikonographer in here’, he tells me, ‘the walls should be covered in ikons. The ikonostasis’, and here he lifts his hands taking into account the great expanse of imagined architectural emendations, ‘the ikonostasis first and foremost’. Even in the up-​distant motion of the imagined ikonostasis, Seraphim did not imagine it going up particularly far. Up to the level of the banister of the loft, yes, but an ikonostasis should never, I was told, be so tall that one cannot see who it is in the ikons along the top. Seraphim’s desire to see the whole parish covered in ikons was not uniquely his own, and for the forty days of Pascha, the extra effort was made to make visible the saints. During this period, ikons were placed on the ledges, lining the walls, around each pillar and any other flat surface large enough to host a Blu-​Tack® mounting. For most of the year, however, the parish made do with the small ikonostasis, an ikon placed at each of the four main pillars of the church and three analogia8 arranged at the entrance to the nave. By 9.20 am, Reader Romanos arrived, ready to arrange his texts for the day on the stand recently pulled from storage. Meanwhile, Chris, having finished moving the furniture stored downstairs, heads up the narrow wooden stairs to the loft. He grabs an analogion, wrapped in rich brocade –​the same fabric used to dress the three tables in the Altar. He lifts it carefully, not wanting to topple the ikon that rests atop the inclined surface. Feeling his way with the heel of his shoe, he walks blind down the staircase and carries the ikon stand to the back of the nave. He straightens the cloth cover and heads back upstairs for the next. One by one he carries them down the stairs, setting them in place: one at the main entrance with the festal ikon; one to the south at the back of the centre isle with Christ and St John the Forerunner; one These are slanted plinths upon which ikons are set; sing. analogion. 8

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to the north, across from the latter, with the Theotokos and St Æthelwald. He sets these in place and immediately turns to fetch the next. Later in the morning, after everything is in place, I see him go back to venerate each with a low bow, the sign of the cross and a kiss. I ask him why he does not do this before, combining his two tasks and venerating each as he arranges them; he pauses. Upon reflection he ascribes a didactic meaning to my question I did not intend and says, ‘You know you’re right, I probably should kiss them before I  move them, and after I  have set them in place  –​Father’s always talking about the importance of that sort of thing. But, you know, it doesn’t feel like the temple till they’re in place and the Holy Table is arranged, and I find it nice to wait till it’s the temple to say my prayers. When I’m setting things up I wanna get it done.’ By this time, at about 9.25 am, other members of the choir begin to arrive, greeting both each other and the ikons as they do so. As it is the Paschal season, there are a number of additional items to arrange, including the epitaphios. Chris pulls this large embroidered cloth ikon out from its protective plastic cover from atop the shelf where it is kept. This he rests over the ledge of the choir stalls, ready to be placed on the Holy Table once the altar vestments have been laid out. After fetching these down from upstairs, he begins to lay them out over the various furnishings. Over the lectern he drapes a long analogion cover. Over the large table he carefully unfolds the custom-​ made white satin vestment which Anna, the sub-​ deacon’s wife, made when they first started renting the building in the late 1990s. He carefully situates it to be smooth and aligned such that the cross, embroidered on the front flap, falls even and centred. Once these white garments are in place, Chris positions an embroidered ikon (the epitaphios) showing Christ being taken down from the cross, into place on the soon-​to-​ be Holy Table. He then moves the candles up onto the table, along with the small brass tabernacle. At this point (roughly 9.50 am), Sub-​deacon Nicholas arrives and begins to arrange items on the Holy Table and on two small tables, which Chris had set up off to the side of the Holy Table. Sdn Nicholas pulls items out of two blue Tupperware® boxes and places them on the tables. Most items he places on the midsized table of prothesis (a setting forth). Having set up the tables and prepared the vestments, Chris leaves this stage of the preparation to the sub-​deacon. Some of the artefacts he cannot touch, but he tells me that he is allowed to be in there, as an Orthodox man with a priest’s blessing to do so, but, and he wriggles his shoulders, ‘I just don’t like being in there once it’s …’ and he trails off, with a long gaze towards the space in which he had not ten minutes prior bustled about, taking full command of the space. He snaps back from the gaze. ‘Well’, he says, ‘follow me, there’s more work to be done.’

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Again dashing up the stairs and back down again, Chris unrolls a Persian rug, situating it in the centre of the solea.9 This item is only brought out for feasts, to create a space for the veneration of a festal ikon or for the positioning of a small table for a special service. Still in the season of Pascha, the rug is now used to create the space for the ikon of the resurrection. As far as I was able to discern, no one knows where the rug came from, one person suggested it was gifted to the parish early in its history; another suggested Fr Gabriel gave it to the parish from one of his travels; Fr Gabriel’s wife thought it belonged to the Anglicans and suspected it was not theirs at all. Ultimately, the provenance did not appear to be important in the slightest. In contrast to the Anglican environment around them which claimed heritage with the war memorials and the line of clergy traced back seven centuries, what was important to the Orthodox congregation was that the festal ikon of the resurrection needed something special to be placed under it in order for its placement to be accorded a dignity worthy of its own holy status. To accomplish this, Chris uses a litany desk from the Anglican sanctuary as an analogion to position the ikon at a low, slanted position allowing for its veneration during a low bow. This stand, made of a simple wooden design, is further augmented with a white altar vestment. The vestment used was made for a small table and does not fit the litany desk perfectly. However, whoever is dressing the table, Chris in this case, folds the vestment to fit the purpose as an analogion cover. Thus, while the fabric is not ideal for the situation, the congregation makes do with what they have, adjusting for what is most appropriate as they decorate their temple for the feast. Chris finishes arranging the festal ikon atop the analogia cover, vested over the litany desk, upon the rug on the solea about 9.55 am. This coincides with Fr Theophan arriving and Sdn Nicholas completing the arrangement of the Holy Table, the table of Prothesis and the server’s table. Now, towards the front-​centre of the Altar stands the Holy Table. Atop the white vestments used in Pascha rests the epitaphios. On this the clergy place the antimension, then the Gospel book above that. The Gospel book is covered with another cloth ikon, that of Mary and John the Apostle beneath the crucifixion. Here, inside the Altar, one is surrounded with sacred things; holy things are layered one atop the other, and the space is transformed –​my informants tell me –​into heaven on earth. And while twenty minutes before Chris was bustling about like he owned the place, at this point he does not enter. The change of space happens specifically with the placement of the antimension. It is a simple item of fabric, a cloth ikon, roughly 25×30 inches, signed by the local bishop granting to the parish community the authority to conduct itself as a canonical Orthodox parish. When not in use, the antimension sits on the Holy Table, underneath the Gospel book. During the course of The open space in front of the ikonostasis, towards the people. 9

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FIGURE  9.1   Fr Theophan standing before the Holy Table. The antimension lies open atop the epitaphios. Photo by author. the Liturgy, the Gospel is opened, read and moved off to the side. Then the antimension, which is kept folded within a satin coverlet (the eileton), is unfolded, showing the ikon of Christ being taken down from the Cross (Figure 9.1). It is over this item of fabric that the consecration of the Holy Gifts is performed, and, as such, there are strong correlations understood between this textile artefact and the body of Christ; it is both an image of and a component in the making of its prototype. In most parishes this is a rather understated piece of fabric, because it rests atop the consecrated Holy Table, which, with its holy relic, is a very stable, governing anchor within the cosmological groundings of the temple as heaven, the created cosmos and throne of God.

Sensible coherence In the slow assemblage of the Orthodox temple within the space of the Anglican building, it is the placement of the antimension that transforms the space from the mundane to the sacred. In a normal Orthodox temple there would be a consecrated Holy Table. The elaborate rite of consecration conducted by a bishop sets a permanent anchor within the built environment. Such Holy Tables contain within them a holy relic and are a fixed feature in the

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sacred landscape. Even without vestments, such a table is always sacred. The Orthodox temple holds a very important role within the religious life of a community, and, as Mircea Eliade (1987) emphasizes, the temple is an ikon of the universe. Eliade (1954: 20) argues that through ritual ‘every consecrated space coincides with the center of the world’, however I  argue that the Orthodox temple is not the ‘centre’; it is the ‘totality’. The circular pattern that can be seen in the arrangement of ikons –​and in the circular motion carried out in ritual procession –​encompasses the entire universe. What arises out of the Orthodox use of the space is an ‘axis of coherence’ that values an intersubjective ocular proximity (being face to face with each other and with ikons) and processual circularity. While Orthodox temple buildings are considered holy objects in their own right, Orthodox congregants of St Æthelwald’s understand the Anglican edifice to be in no way sacred. It is, according to church canon law, a ‘synagogue10 of the heretic’. What changed the space into sacred space was the placement of the antimension. In this way, St Æthelwald’s stands in contrast to the temple as ideal-​type as seen in the writings of Eliade and Köllner. Eliade and Köllner each demonstrate the importance of the material ecology in which Orthodox worship and the particular importance of a consecrated Holy Table that acts as an important anchor in community life; but St Æthelwald’s has no such anchor. The magnitude of affective change the antimension creates within the building cannot be stressed enough:  it flips a quaint old building into the Temple of God, Heaven on Earth. The manner in which Chris and then other members of St Æthelwald’s arrive and begin the transformation of St Æthelwald’s Church of England parish into St Æthelwald’s Antiochian Orthodox parish has been outlined above. During the process of preparation anyone can move through this space. Often Anna arrives early with her husband in order to arrange the altar vestments; likewise, catechumen may come to help Chris set up and could do so with no problems. But once the antimension is placed on the table, it becomes the Holy Table, and the area behind (to the east of) the little ikon screen becomes the Altar, and Heaven is made on Earth. This shift affects the space, access and body practice. This is key. It is the position of the fabric that renders the space an affective space of sacred action.11 The formal orientation of the ikonostasis and other moveable furniture, however, work to produce the temple as a visible and

‘Synagogue’ (συναγωγή) simply means ‘assembly’, implying ‘meetinghouse’. In many older sources (the Apostolic Canons date from at least the mid-​fourth century [Erickson 1997]), ‘synagogue’ is used in a broad sense, with no necessary implication towards Judaism. 11 For an extended argument on the qualities that allow fabric to help make sacred space, see Carroll (2017). 10

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tangible ikon of the universe. As an aggregation around the otherwise hidden artefact of the antimension, the moveable furnishings and ikons placed about the space of the temple augment the visible field of the building in order to facilitate the interocularity and intersubjectivity of Orthodox worship. After the Liturgy, the priest, or other member of clergy  –​because only members of clergy may touch this item  –​remove the sacred fabric, place it in a blue Tupperware® box and it is carted off to be stored in the broom closet from which Chris took it earlier in the morning. Often catechumens12 help with putting away the church furnishings. As neophytes, they are not permitted access to the Altar and, as such, must wait until the clergy remove the antimension from the Holy Table. Once this occurs, the nature of place as sacred domain switches off, and it is, once again, simply a building that needs to be cleaned up before the clock shows their use-​rights have expired for that week. Once the clergy place the antimension and Gospel in the Tupperware® box, it may be carried by anyone. Tucked away in closets and cupboards and hidden behind Anglican fixtures, the material components of the Liturgy are stored from week to week. As the congregation begins to assemble each Sunday, they pull forth the boxes, candles, processional cross and fans, ikons, vestments, water, bread and wine necessary to produce the Liturgy. The resulting bloom-​space of people and things rests on many nodes to be present: there must be a priest, there must be people; ikons and candle stands constitute sites of prayer; tables and chairs must be arranged. Each of these items help form a coherent sense of Orthodox sacred space. The analogia covers and rug create spaces for the holy things to be placed and venerated. Like the analogia covers, the altar vestments create a space for holy things to be prepared. As vestments, they dress the church as a bride in matrimony, showing her relation to Christ  –​ embodied in the ikon of the priest (cf. Woodfin 2012; West 2013). In this argument arises the sense of relational affect. As writers in affect theory quickly point out, the body itself is in a state of ‘perpetual becoming’, characterized by a constant ‘in-​betweenity’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010:  3; emphasis original) in relation to things, people, emotions and so forth. The continual ‘in-​betweenity’ of the body, as it is affected in dynamic ‘bloom-​ spaces’, is a quality, however, of not only the body, but the other materials within the space as well. The argument here is that the aggregation of the Orthodox paraphernalia within the Anglican space pushes the affective bloom-​ space into alignment with a radically different axis of coherence. As the aggregation of soft furnishings, assembled around the antimension, push the flow of the space it affords spiritual transcendence (or spiritual immanence) by bringing together issues of the material ecology and sensible 12 That is, those studying to become Orthodox Christians.

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space in a potent, sensible way. The idea that space fosters transformation is not a novel one. Either as bloom-​spaces (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), or affectual geographies (Navaro-​Yashin 2012; Tolia-​Kelly 2006), or fused with the person in ‘the meld’ (Garrett 2013), space is an indisputable part of the experience of the self. In terms of the built environment, Verkaaik (2013) has observed that for all the effort many religious informants exert to impress upon researchers that buildings are not important to their religious pursuit, they are nonetheless potent components within religious devotion and often demand a significant portion of time and money within belief-​practice, across traditions. Orthodox Christians, on the other hand, often are very upfront concerning the importance of religious buildings and express the role that the built environment plays within the experience of the holy. Van de Port (2013), in his work on baroque churches in Brazil, speaks of the ways religious architecture can produce ecstatic experiences. He takes ecstasy, ek-​stasis ‘outside the self’, as a type of jouissance (as apposed13 to plaisir; Barthes 1975) –​an ego-​disrupting pleasure ‘in conflict with canons of culture’ (Gallop 1984: 111, in van de Port 2013: 77), and argues that ‘religious buildings have a power of their own that is not illustrative of religious knowledge already in place, but that one might call “ecstatic” … The vacillation between plaisir and jouissance, consciousness and flesh, a body of religious knowledge and the-​rest-​of-​what-​is is characteristic of many mystical traditions and techniques’ (van de Port 2013: 78). However, whereas van de Port identifies the ecstatic to be the end of many mystical traditions, this is not the case with Orthodox Christianity. As the theologian Vladimir Lossky (1976: 208) explains, ecstatic states ‘are particularly typical of the early stages of the mystical life’. Instead, the Orthodox mystic ‘has the constant experience of the divine reality in which [the mystic] lives’ (209). Thus, leaving ecstasy aside, the Orthodox Christian is understood to seek something beyond the ‘outside the self’: a state of constant living-​with-​ God, which is understood to be done in and with the body (224). Taking this intersubjective idea of living-​with-​God, not ek-​stasis, as the purpose of the material culture of Orthodox worship. As such, while I agree with the points made by van de Port and Verkaaik concerning the central role of ecclesiastical architecture, I emphasize the role of the built environment in making spaces which cohere to the motive and sense of the religious intention to achieve, in the Orthodox case, a different subjectivity than that pursued by the Anglicans. This next section looks at parishioners’ perception of their temple. While body practice is changed in response to the nature of the building as an Orthodox, rather than Anglican, space of worship, the Anglican material 13 That is, ‘next to’ not opposition  –​Barthes does not see jouissance and plaisir to be in a relationship of opposition.

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culture is still present within the texture of the building. The remainder of this chapter examines this failure in objectification and seeks to understand it in light of Gell’s (1998) work on axis of coherence. In so doing, the chapter unpacks the Orthodox understanding of what St Æthelwald’s temple is and its position within, and in tension against, its physical location.

Axis of incoherence While three religious groups and three commercial groups used the facilities at different points in the week, there was little contact between the various parties. Apart from fulfilling fiscal duties, there is no regular correspondence made between the Orthodox parish and their Anglican counterpart. But within the material ecology of the space there are certain qualities evoked that cohere with certain ideals celebrated by the Anglican community. As material anchors of their own affective coherence, the war memorials and evidence of the edifice as a City Church speaks of a long line of national and civic heritage; its broad central isle, well lit, leading up to a welcoming gesture in the stained-​glass window provides a movement forward to light a votive candle or partake of the Anglican Eucharist. In each aspect, there are certain kinds of relations between material objects which suggest what Alfred Gell (1998: 215 ff) in his work on Marquesan art called an ‘axis of coherence’. Gell’s use of the term spoke of relations between relations specific to the motivic qualities of a society’s artistic production. The argument here shifts the focus slightly to speak of the sensibility that arises out of a physical environment in terms of the driving motivation or epiphenomenal quality of the space as a social environment. As a sense-​ability, the ‘axis of coherence’ is what intuitive understanding apprehends as the cohering logic of a social space. In taking this interpretation, I make explicit what appears to be a tacit play on words within Gell’s theoretical framework. The etymological kinship between motif and motive, cohere and coherence, sensible and sensibility links the material aspects (pattern, media, etc.) and relations of thought and intentions (cf. Jones 1856), possibly even virtue and value (Lambek 2008; Miller 2008). This claim, that architectural space may have an ‘axis of coherence’, should not be read in all too essentializing a manner. Many spaces may have more than one cohering factor. In the context of St Æthelwald’s, not only did there exist multiple factors, but even contradictory ones. Take, for example, the contrast between the civic and liturgical aspects of the Anglican architecture and the weekly Orthodox reorganization of it. For the current Anglican parish of St Æthelwald’s, the relationship with the holy codified in the building is not felt to be ideal. While the quire is oftentimes employed as such, and the high altar is used on special occasions,

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most masses are ‘low’, said masses (as opposed to ‘sung masses’) with a west-​facing altar,14 using the large oak table near the congregation. Around the edifice other moveable furnishings also speak of the adaption of space needed by its present occupants. Moveable bulletin boards show adverts for Weight Watchers’ meetings, Anglican goodwill and development missions in Africa, and ask for donations from tourists, reminding them of the cost to keep such houses of prayer open in Central London. The guildsmen keep a large wine cask by the modern Madonna, something used as the lectern in their annual meetings. By the main door, a wide selection of brochures advertise the building for event hire; ask for funds for various ministries of help among disabled persons; and advertise festival and arts events. On the back wall a marble clamshell holds (Anglican) holy water and a wrought iron frame, with accompanying votive candles, sits awkwardly off to the side –​unused by the Orthodox parish, but both marked evidence that the building is still also an Anglican house of prayer open to tourists. These are just some examples of the material ecology of the parish church. These diverse objects relate together producing a particular sensibility to the space. It is a beautiful building, standing in stark contrast to the surrounding office buildings and, as such, attracts tourists year round. Most tourists who enter the building go in and notice one or two paintings and stop to look at the war memorials; some glance at the notice boards; a few dip their hands in the marble clamshell and cross themselves with a little curtsey towards the altar before heading out. But, as more time is spent in the building, and particularly as people are tasked with making the space suitable for communal rituals, certain epistemological assertions which are made in the inter-​ artefactual domain become increasingly recognizable and, in some cases, problematic. It is this problematic aspect that is now addressed. This description of the parish building is given at length in order to draw out a specific kind of ocular phenomenon and its relation to the ritual processions made in the space as a metaphor of the spiritual pursuit central to those who make use of such spaces. Richard Kieckhefer (2004), in his work on the theology of Christian architectural forms, speaks of the correlation between the length of the building and spiritual pursuit in Western Christianity. This length and spiritual insight observed by Kieckhefer is colluded in the ethnography of Anna Strhan (2013), who points out that in many forms of Western Christianity, height and clarity of sight go hand in hand. Traditional spatial metaphors of longitudinal spiritual pursuit, such as the ‘mystical ascent’,15 are recurrent

That is, an altar wherefrom the priest faces the people. 15 This language can be seen in both Greek and Latin Christianity, following from Origin’s neo-​ platonic language. In the West it can be seen to follow from Bonaventure’s mystical theology, exemplified in his Journey of the Mind into God. 14

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within the Evangelical Anglican parish of St John’s, who use skyscrapers as a motif with which to speak of a distanced (and divine) appraisal of the city below. In my reading of Strhan’s work, one can make an analogy between the up-​ness of the skyscraper from whence her informants can gain the clear sight to ‘read’ the city (340) and the idea of the transcendent God of Protestant Christianity. Strhan reads this ‘view from above’ ‘as constructing a position that allows [those at St John’s] to read the city as peopled by the “lost” ’ (340). This upward-​ distant perspective is, within the parish of St John’s, also a material inscribed motif. Like the skyscraper, the pulpit is placed high above the congregation, requiring an upward gaze to receive the words of the Gospel message (337; pers comm). St John’s parish is, in its Evangelical character, logocentric. But while there is a switch from the Eucharist (in High-​ Church Anglicanism) to the Word (in Evangelical Anglicanism) as the central cohering thing of the congregation’s Christian worship, the material form of the worship is still similar. In both St John’s and St Æthelwald’s Anglican parishes, the material ecology posit a longitudinal progression for the pious Western Christian in her pursuit of God, salvation and Heaven as a transcendent other. The altar, as the focal anchor of sacramental Christianity, invites the pious worshipper to approach the place of God with holy fear. While the altar itself is not accessible, that which it offers is given to whoever will make the long journey up. This is the ek-​stasis spoken of by van de Port (2013). Following in this tradition, the parish building of St Æthelwald’s was constructed in such a manner so as to make an ocular and processional movement up and back, so the pious Anglican might receive the sacred elements, mediated for them by the priest, and return to their space among the people. The longitudinal and processional quality of the building is at harmony with the Anglican use. For the Orthodox parish, however, the material environment of the Anglican church is inadequate for the ocular and ritual use of the space. The ikonostasis is placed close to the unused pews to foster a visual proximity to the saints. Other ikons are arranged throughout the building, by the door, by the candle stand and on the four main pillars of the church in order to foster a more enclosed, circular quality of veneration. As mentioned earlier, during Pascha an extra effort is taken to increase the circular quality of inter-​ocular veneration, placing ikons on any ledge available around the skirting and pillars. Consequently, as is common in most purpose-​built temples, looking in any direction the eye is met with the eye of an ikon. Similarly, a circular movement is made in processions, which take place each liturgy, as the clergy circle around the pews. It is not uncommon for Orthodox parishes in the United Kingdom to take over Anglican spaces of worship. In most cases, however, some adjustment is made to the building, such as the installation of a ‘right-​proper ikonostasis’

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and the painting of or hanging of ikons around the building. Many also remove some or all pews, as Orthodox Christians tend to stand for almost the entirety of their services. In these situations, the material ecology is renovated and made compliant with the sensibility of Orthodox liturgy and theology. This, however, is not an option for the St Æthelwald’s parish. As I spoke to various members about their relationship to the edifice, the large stained-​ glass window was a recurrent problem. As a commissioned piece to repair damage done after political violence, the piece evokes, I  was told, an odd mix of traditional iconographic technique and modernizing influences. ‘It’s just awful’, one woman tells me, ‘I can’t bear to look at it.’ Another tells me he stands in the front and a bit off to the side, specifically so that as he looks towards the priest he cuts the window out of his line of sight. What is so wrong with it? Christabel, an ikonographer in the parish, explains it to me most succinctly. Within Orthodox Christianity, images are extremely important; ikons are visual theology. As an ikonographer, she must follow careful guidelines and live a life of prayer, in observation of the fasts of the Church, in order to make ikons suitable for use in worship (Carroll 2015). Images are theological statements; but the image in question, she asserts, is heretical. Rather than positioning the saint in a frontal position, such that the viewing person may enter into an inter-​ocular mode of veneration, the window is populated with a number of faces which engage different directional gazes:  St Longinus and a bishop look up towards a down-​cast Christ, both their faces obscured; the gospel writer St Matthew is shown in profile, looking up to the left; only an unidentified (so far as anyone could tell) little girl returned the gaze of the onlooker. Whereas Orthodox images are designed to create a space between the viewer and the image, the window draws the attention up, into the light beyond. Such a visual practice runs counter to the formal sensibility of Orthodox visual culture. While many Western forms of Christianity, as exemplified in van de Port’s description of Christian architecture, are designed to facilitate an out-​of-​self experience, such mysticism is not the idea in Orthodox spirituality. In this sense, the longitudinal perspective, towards an image which further encourages meditative movements further afield, run at counter purpose to the Orthodox ideal of ‘living with’. While there are exceptions to this rule, most Orthodox ikons present the subject in a quite frontal perspective, often allowing the eyes of the viewer to lock gaze with the eye of the saint. Such an orientation, fitting within the wider practice of circular ocularity, fosters an intersubjective relationship of being with the saints and God. While, as Seraphim expressed, the blank walls without ikons are an absence in need of filling, the stained-​glass window is worse than nothing. In this context, it can be seen that what the image wants is sensibly distinct from what the Orthodox parish wants from an image. This ‘heretical’ image invites

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the viewer to gaze up, away from the ocular circularity of the ikonostasis. The image incites the viewer to the contemplation of a sociality and spirituality foreign to the Orthodox temple. There is a preference for bare walls over an image that asks the viewer to contemplate an overly emotional rendering of the crucifixion at a height and distance. There is nothing beneficial from an image of Christ that seeks to engage the viewer in something other than the face-​to-​face intersubjective gaze traditional of ikons. A blank wall is preferable to an alternative spirituality. This wilful blanking is also seen in the man’s practice, mentioned above, who stands in a way as to occlude the stained-​ glass window from his gaze. Both outside (e.g. the skyscrapers) and inside (e.g. the stained-​ glass window and the modern Madonna) there are aspects of the material ecology of the Orthodox Parish of St Æthelwald’s that are simply ignored. Do people notice them? Yes, of course. As the newest skyscraper was being built in 2011 and 2012, an off-​hand comment about the construction could be heard. If asked about the modern Madonna at the back of the parish, everyone would know which image was being spoken about (‘Oh that awful thing?’), but while tourists gave these aspects attention these elements did not gain notice or enter into the worshipful imagination of the Orthodox parishioners. The coherence of the Anglican edifice, as a City Church, set among towers and transport lines, welcoming tourists, Guildsmen and Weight Watchers was not the same sensual space as the Orthodox Temple into which parishioners, like Chris and Seraphim, entered. Each week the parish successfully completed their communal worship, yet there was a recurrent attitude expressed which indicated the sensibility (and sensible aspects) of the building failed to match the sensibility of the congregation. And, not only was it a matter of insufficiency in terms, for example, of not enough open space, but also one of unacceptability such that parishioners and clergy alike spoke of consciously ignoring parts of the material ecology in which they found themselves. Returning to Gell’s argument concerning relations between relations, then, it is argued here that an axis of incoherence arises between how the space is constituted in the material ecology of the Anglican edifice and how that material ecology is reconstituted, sublimated and altered in the religious praxis of the Orthodox congregation. This is not to say that the Orthodox or the Anglican praxis is ‘incoherent’, but rather that  –​in the material failure of the edifice  –​objectification does not adhere; the space of St Æthelwald’s Anglican Church and the sensible space of St Æthelwald’s Orthodox Church do not map one to one. What can now be seen is that St Æthelwald’s –​as a place –​is very different from St Æthelwald’s as a space. It is, in fact, more than one bloom-​space; if offers apposite affective qualities leading to distinct modes of subjective becoming. The Orthodox parishioners and the trickle of tourists, though in the edifice simultaneously, interact and come to engage in the material ecology to

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very different results. It is the same physical environment, but the affect of the materiality within the sensible ecology of St Æthelwald’s produces different successions of embodied engagement. This should be of no surprise. As Ahmed (2010:  32)  has observed, ‘to be affected “in a good way” involves an orientation toward something as being good’ –​to be affected at all, it might be added, requires an orientation of some kind. As Bourdieu (1984) convincingly shows, bodily orientation and response to an artefact of phenomenon is largely contingent on before-​the-​fact orientation and judgement. What is seen in this case study is that differing affective responses are not only a result of sensing different qualities of the phenomena, but also negotiate the material phenomena occurring. For the Orthodox parishioner, knowing of the antimension, it serves as an anchor, and the cohering material ecology of Orthodox worship helps orient the space towards the totalizing effect of producing the temple. With this vision comes the blindness to artefactual aspects of this temple space. By contrast, the tourist, many of whom recognize the space as sacred and –​whether by practice or courtesy –​bow and cross themselves while visiting, engage the space in a very different manner. Their focus, on the memorials, or the advertisements, or the ikons, engage the space but without knowledge or acknowledgement of the antimension. But as Chris’s withdrawal from the Altar demonstrates, affective response to space is switched in reference to the position (orientation) of a piece of fabric within the material ecology. As a hidden artefact, tourists and the casual observer would not even know that there is such a textile to have an orientation towards. Thus while moving within the same physical space the two groups inhabit different material spaces. As the Orthodox rearrange the St Æthelwald environment to become the temple, they concretize the sensibility and redirect the coherence of the space along a distinct axis to that which is experienced by the non-​Orthodox in the space. The affective space of the Orthodox temple is not only different from its Anglican environment, but it also occludes some present aspects and highlights other, non-​present aspects. Items like the iron votive candle stand and the marble seashell (which some informants had simply not noticed) are not present within the temple. Examining informants’ engagement with the space, it becomes evident that these are ‘consensual bloom spaces’.16 Even glaring items, like the stained-​glass window, are actively ignored, such that they do not feature within the visual field of parishioners’ worshipful stance. While these items within the material ecology of St Æthelwald’s parish church are ignored or go unnoticed, other materialities with which parishioners engage do not appear in the church building. Some items (ikons, furniture, etc.) are brought in for ritual use. However, in these materials, with their un-​purified, I am grateful to David Jeevendrampillai, who offered this phrase to help explain the dynamic role of affective spaces. 16

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figural excess (Pinney 2005), it can be seen that other spaces are opened up to the Orthodox Christian. In making the temple, those at St Æthelwald’s understand themselves to be making an ikon of the universe. Each ikon is not only a representation of the saint, but also a means of communing with that saint. Entering the temple and greeting the saints is a practice of entering into an embodied intersubjective relationship with fellow Orthodox Christians: both living and dead. It is a form of engagement that, as seen in the example of Chris, is best done fully only once the building is also the temple.

Conclusion In the context of this chapter, the transformation of space is explored following the movements of Chris, the churchwarden, as he arranges the temple one Sunday morning. Through his weekly routine and devotional practice, the radical transformation of space is seen to impact how people orientate themselves towards their built environment. The chapter then explores the nature of this transformation, looking at the gaps around the edges of the sensible space of the temple. Drawing on Gell’s work concerning sensible and motivic coherence, the chapter argues for the presence of an axis of incoherence. In this way, the failure of the Orthodox temple to map into the Anglican edifice can be seen to be at once overlapping and utterly distinct. It is argued that the axis of Orthodox coherence within St Æthelwald’s produces a space not entirely map-​able into/​ onto the material space it inhabits. As such, it is argued that the material ecology of the temple extends past the Anglican environment, occluding parts, but also including aspects within the wider circle of material flows.

Acknowledgements This chapter draws on research made possible by funding from the Paleologos Graduate Scholarship. My heartfelt appreciation goes to those at St Æthelwald’s, especially Chris and Seraphim, who helped me with this research. Thanks also to Aaron Parkhurst and Rebecca Williams for helpful comments on this chapter; any errors are my own.

References Ahmed, S. (2010) ‘Happy Objects’. In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, 29–​51. Duke University Press.

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Antohin, A. (2014) Expressions of Sacred Promise: Ritual and Devotion in Ethiopian Orthodox Praxis. Doctoral Thesis, UCL. Barthes, R. (1975) The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press. Boylston, T. (2012) The Shade of the Divine: Approaching the Sacred in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community. Doctoral Thesis, London School of Economics. Carroll, T. (2015) ‘An Ancient Modernity: Ikons and the Reemergence of Orthodox Britain’. In Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things, edited by Lucinda Matthews-​Jones and Timothy Jones, 185–​207. Palgrave Macmillan,. Carroll, T. (2017) Textiles and the Making of Sacred Space. Textile History, Vol 48. Eliade, M. (1954) Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Eliade, M. (1987) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Books. Erickson, J. (1997) ‘The Reception of Non-​Orthodox into the Orthodox Church: Contemporary Practice’. St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly Vol. 41, 1–​17. Garrett, B. (2013). Explore Everything: Place-​Hacking the City. London: Verso. Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gregg, M., and G. Seigworth (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Izzo, J. (1981) Byzantine-​Ruthenian Antimensia in the Episcopal and Heritage Institute Libraries of the Byzantine Catholic Diocese of Passaic. An Episcopal and Heritage Institute (EHI) Library Publication. Jones, O. (1856) The Grammar of Ornament: Illustrated by Examples from Various Styles of Ornament. London: Published by Day and Son. Kieckhefer, R. (2004) Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley. Oxford University Press. Köllner, T. (2013) ‘New Churches in Post-​Soviet Russia’. In Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Oskar Verkaaik, 83–​98. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lambek, M. (2008) ‘Value and Virtue’. Anthropological Theory Vol. 8, No. 2, 133–​57. Lossky, V. (1976) The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Miller, D. (2008) ‘The Uses of Value’. Geoforum Vol. 39, No. 3, 1122–​32. Navaro-​Yashin, Y. (2012) The Make-​Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Pinney, C. (2005) ‘Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does That Object Come’. In Materiality, edited by D Miller, 256–​72. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Strhan, A. (2013) ‘The Metropolis and Evangelical Life: Coherence and Fragmentation in the “Lost City of London” ’. Religion Vol. 43, No. 3, 331–​52. Tolia-​Kelly, D. P. (2006) ‘Affect –​an Ethnocentric Encounter? Exploring the “Universalist” Imperative of Emotional/​Affectual Geographies’. Area Vol. 38, No. 2, 213–​17.

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Van de Port, M. (2013) ‘The Ecstasy of the Igreja de São Franscisco, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil’. In Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by O. Verkaaik, 63–​82. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Verkaaik, O. (ed.) (2013) Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. West, K. (2013) The Garments of Salvation: Orthodox Christian Liturgical Vesture. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Woodfin, W. (2012) The Embodied Icon: Liturgical Vestments and Sacramental Power in Byzantium. Oxford University Press.

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10 The materiality of silence: Assembling the absence of sound and the memory of 9/​11 Pwyll ap Stifin

Absent silence After the announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan by US Special Forces at the beginning of May 2011, televised images of crowds celebrating in New  York were beamed around the world. Close to the cameras –​which all seemed to be shooting from thigh level, looking up at the crowd, forcing them to look downwards –​were young men clustered together, jumping up and down, drinking beer and chanting ‘U-​S-​A! U-​S-​A! U-​S-​A!’ (4/​4, crotchet rest after the ‘A’). The same camera trick has produced visible evidence of a mob in any number of other contexts in the post-​9/​11 world. The space now known as ‘Ground Zero’ was still, almost ten years after the attacks, composed of a number of narrow roads surrounding a boarded-​ up construction site. The material traces of destruction that had, for almost a decade, been subject to a process of domestication and transformation were still hidden from view. The crowd had to squeeze into the few open public spaces available. The cameras were drawn to a handwritten sign on a piece of cardboard held up by an anonymous reveller: Obama 1 Osama 0

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Such visualizations are the kind of thing needed to provide palpable evidence of a national or cultural ‘attitude’ for the rolling television news coverage through which such events become knowable; but they can be misleading. There seemed, to me, to be almost as many television crews, lone photographers and others ‘capturing’ the scene as there were members of the crowd, who seemed primarily to have spilled out from fraternity drinking sessions at nearby colleges. Visuality produces a snapshot. This was around two o’clock in the morning, early on a Monday morning. W. J.  T. Mitchell (2011:  244)  has published an email from a friend of a remarkable instance that he witnessed that night: At one point among the nationalist chants last night, a guy got up on his friends’ shoulders and started asking the crowd for a moment of silence for those killed on 9/​11. The people around him started shushing, and turning to those around them, trying to spread the word of silence. ‘A moment of silence –​pass it on’, people said to one another beneath the patriotic din, and for a few minutes it seemed possible that all of the shouting, cheering, singing, and flag waving might briefly stop. But soon it became clear that people couldn’t hear the quiet spreading. Gradually, and perfectly, the voices demanding silence got louder and louder, until they drowned themselves out and got lost amidst the returning howls of U-​S-​A, U-​S-​A, U-​S-​A. Standing among the crowd, I did not hear this silence.

Aural materiality The idea that sound constitutes a particular form of materiality is becoming a common claim in much recent critical literature (Born 2011; Duncan 2004; Goodman 2010; Guimond 2007; Gunaratnam 2009; Wallach 2003). While an earlier focus on the senses in anthropology was defined by a concern with the means according to which the experience of an outer world became known to a sensing human subject (Feld 1990; Howes 1991, 2003; Stoller 1984, 1989), the developing field of sound studies seems based on the premise that sounds are, rather than simply immaterial sense-​data, things in and of themselves. Taking a lead from the physical sciences which have, since the early modern period, understood sounds to be material forces as tangible and physical as any of those things conventionally called ‘material’ by anthropologists, archaeologists and others, this strain of recent work treats sounds themselves as objects of study in ways conventionally restricted to discrete objects of ‘material culture’. Rather than stepping-​stones on the way to a linguistic, musical, phenomenological or symbolic analysis, the recent

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concern with the materiality of sound refuses a representational logic and analyses particular sounds’ paths, affects and entanglements. For example, Steve Goodman (2010) describes the physical effects of sound waves on the human body when deployed as weapons:  a vibrational force acting directly on the nervous system from a distance. Julian Henriques (2010) provides an ethnographic rendering of the work of vibrations, or ‘vibes’, as they move through the Kingston Dancehall scene, tying together human bodies at a scale of sensation irreducible to emotion or culture. Stefan Helmreich (2007) describes the different entanglements of body and sound in deep underwater environments, drawing attention to the necessity of considering the substances and environments within which both are ‘immersed’, in an imaginative redeployment of a classically ethnographic trope. This expansion of academic discussions to include what Ben Highmore (2010) has recently referred to as ‘awkward materialities’ is an important addition to the social sciences generally and to discussions of materiality specifically. The interest in sound’s materiality is part of a wider trend in this regard. The materiality of social life is coming to be understood as more than the mere supplementary inclusion of solid, stable, discrete objects onto a particular cultural ‘stage’; a vast range of fluid, dynamic forces are progressively being included in accounts of the social. Along with the materiality of sound, recent work has addressed the substance of air (Connor 2010), the materiality of light (Bille and Sørensen 2007) and the material affordances of electricity (Bennett 2010). Empirical description of what Ollie Harris (2014) has referred to as ‘communities of humans and nonhumans’ are certainly enriched by the inclusion of a vast range of ephemeral material forces and substances at the heart of all social interaction. While these ephemeral forces were a central aspect of early ethnographic description (e.g. Malinowski 1965), the advent of British Social Anthropology proper, with its generally dematerializing tendencies, banished such awkward materialities to the realm of symbolism. The study of magic, for example, came to be less a question of mechanism and technique and more a study of indigenous psychologies (e.g. Evans-​ Pritchard 1976). This re-​engagement, then, is a welcome trend. An attention to awkward materialities allows a more complex, nuanced picture of social relationships –​relationships between a vast range of different entities, rather than simply between subjects and objects –​to be drawn. There is a danger, however, that in the process of drawing previously ignored material forces into our accounts, we repeat the mistakes of a previous iteration of material culture studies, where materiality came to be equated with essence. The characteristic means according to which ‘material culture’ has been classically understood within anthropology is as a realm of dead, fossilized objects; a counterpart to the lively, dynamic human subject (Buchli 2002, 2004). These objects may reflect, absorb or symbolize socially significant

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traits, but only as a mirror of the human mind or human action, which remains the fount of everything observed by the ethnographer. Material objects do not, in and of themselves, actually do anything; they merely sit awaiting whatever significance is to be bestowed upon them by human subjects. The division of the world into lively, dynamic, embodied, rich, agentive subjects on the one hand and dead, unfeeling, hollow objects on the other–​what Alfred North Whitehead (1978: 289–​90) calls the ‘bifurcation of nature’ –​is a foundational structuring trope in anthropological research, with roots delving deep into the Western philosophical tradition (Pels 2008). The material  –​‘as intrinsically empty of metaphysical purposes or ends as it is devoid of animistic or human spirit’ (Coole 2010:  95), as mortified, as concrete –​is the necessary counterpart to the dynamism of the thinking subject. This understanding was foundational to the work of Isaac Newton; the emergence of the field of modern physics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries worked from a basic distinction drawn between the inertia of matter and the energy acting to move or modify it (Coole and Frost 2010: 10–​11). As Peter Pels (2008) points out, this is a distinction with a strong root in Protestant theology. The most fundamental aspects of modern, Western ontology rely on this distinction: the division of the world into two dichotomous realms defined by the presence or absence of movement, dynamism and fluidity. This historical tangent is relevant to the contemporary anthropological project due to the foundational influence contemporary scientific understandings of the world had on the nineteenth-​and early-​twentieth-​century materialist thinkers  –​particularly Hegel, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche  –​whose influence still underpins the most basic assumptions of the contemporary ethnographic project (Coole and Frost 2010:  5). That the basic ontologies underlying late-​ twentieth-​century social theory understood agency, for example, as the action of a human mind on the material world via the vessel of the body (Bourdieu 1977) attests to the enduring power of these early modern characterizations of dead matter. The social and humanistic sciences have moved little from such a view over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries. ‘It is still common to consider thought as an abstraction, and we tend to assume that, in the form of concepts, thought hovers over a material substrate, one that is itself formed from thought without being inhabited by it’ (Küchler 2011: 60). The world thus comes to be divided, not merely into mental and material stuff, but into separate spheres based around the presence or absence of agency, dynamism and vitality. To cast a particular thing as material is conventionally to render it inactive, stable and dead. Much recent theoretical work has been dominated by the attempt to break away from this classically Cartesian and Newtonian picture of solidity and inertia. Building on a century of developments in the natural sciences, particularly particle physics, as well as the philosophical work of William James

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(1976, 1979), Alfred North Whitehead (1920, 1978) and Gilles Deleuze (1988) and the more recent work of figures like Jane Bennett (2010), Karen Barad (2007) and Bruno Latour (2004, 2005, 2010), matter is coming to be seen less as the dichotomous counterpart to the active, sentient, spiritual human subject, and instead as complex, contingent and fluid. Here, ‘materiality is always something more than “mere” matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-​creative, productive, unpredictable’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 9). If the classical understanding of material culture is as a series of solid objects discretely distributed through space, this view is coming to be progressively displaced by a concern with complex, modulating fields of relationality. Rather than considering materiality to be a characteristic of mortified, stable objects, here materiality comes instead to describe fluid aggregations forming and reforming in a constantly shifting material world. ‘Materiality is a quality of the relationship rather than a thing in itself’ (Pels 2008: 265). In much contemporary scholarship, this fluid, shifting characteristic of materiality is associated with the figure of the assemblage (Bennett 2010; Delanda 2006; Harris 2014; Koerner 2005; Rabinow 2011). Though the provenance of the assemblage as a theory of materiality is heterogeneous, Bruno Latour (2005) draws attention to a particular instance in the later work of Martin Heidegger. In his essay ‘The Thing’, Heidegger (1971) rejects an understanding of the material entity as a reduction to ‘a set of outer properties measured in either physical or phenomenal form’ (Harman 2009:  293). By restricting an artefact of material culture to its boundaries, phenomenology repeats the mistake of the physical sciences: it cuts the thing itself away from the world, mortifying it, removing it from the contextuality and dynamic nature of its entanglements and relationships. This is, in essence, a rejection of the mortified ‘object’ of material culture (Buchli 2004). Returning to the etymological root of the thing in the Old High German ding as a form of assembly or gathering, Heidegger discusses a thing –​or ding –​not as an isolated, static, bounded object, but instead as an active gathering. Richard Rorty (2005:  274), taking up this thread, argues that ‘things are what they are by virtue of their relation to everything else. This means that they have different features depending on the context in which they are put’, leading to a position from which we must see ‘each thing as a way of gathering many other things together’ (274). Rather than bounded, static objects, the ding –​ as ‘thing’ or ‘assemblage’ –​describes a process whereby assemblages coalesce into particular forms, always retaining the possibility of breaking apart. In this sense, one could argue that materiality is, in and of itself, inherently ‘awkward’ (Highmore 2010). Apparently ephemeral materialities, such as sound, are not to be classed as material by displaying any characteristics conventionally associated with ‘objects’ –​stability, discreteness, endurance –​ but rather, due to their nature as dings; as complex, distributed gatherings

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of different elements, constantly changing in relation to the things around them. Discrete subjects and objects are replaced by ‘sticky entanglements of substances and feelings, of matter and affect’ (199). Sounds exist only in relationships with other entities: the architectural spaces through which they flow, the listening bodies they penetrate and affect and the technological infrastructures of recording and amplification which modulate and change their characteristics (Born 2011). Like all other material configurations encountered during empirical research, they are modulating, complex, multifaceted assemblages. What emerges time and again from ethnographic studies concerned with sounds is their connective nature; the awkward materiality of sound –​short-​lived, ephemeral, invisible –​works to tie together apparently discrete entities. ‘Sound has this potential as medium and material to rearticulate and build social tissue … It involves and penetrates the body … It diffuses, propagates, disseminates, and infiltrates space’ (Martinho 2010: xii). This awkward, dynamic, assembling materiality is intensely social: particular sounds exist only in relation to other material things and actively draw connections between them. If we consider the materiality of the human voice:  should this be classed as human or non-​human? Where would one locate it? Inside the speaking body, reverberating around a room or inside the auditory canal of the listener? It is the very fluidity of sound, the impossibility of pinning it down that makes it analytically illuminating. As Malden Dolar (2006:  14)  evocatively puts it:  the human voice is ‘the very texture of the social’. In the vignette that opens this chapter, I described a battle between sound and silence, fought among a gathering of bodies. Here were a given number of stomachs, lungs, larynxes and mouths producing a series of sound waves –​ waves that melded together and resonated around the deeply affective space of Ground Zero. ‘U-​S-​A!’ manifested as vibrating patterns moving through the air, penetrating ears, deflecting from surfaces, tying bodies together. If we leave aside the symbolic, representational qualities of this scene, we are left with a deeply material playing out of post-​9/​11 politics. The appropriate means of memorializing 9/​11, of experiencing the death of its architect, are played out at the scale of the senses, within and between bodies. While the materiality at the heart of this scene may seem ephemeral, it is undeniably affective. The effervescence of the crowd operates at a scale irreducible to the individual body; difficult to put into words, the ability of such gatherings to provide a basis for deeply corporeal social ties has long been recognized (Durkheim 1915). An attention to the materiality of the chants themselves draws attention to the uncanny processes taking place. As the sound of the voice moves from the interior of one body to another, there is a literal intermingling taking place; for a short instance, separate bodies come to be tied together by the sounds flowing through them.

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It seems, then, that the attempted moment of silence was destined to fail. If sounds gather an agglomeration of bodies, spaces and technologies together –​relying on each element of the assemblage in order to give them their specific characteristics in any given situation  –​then silence would appear to be the empty void filled by this process. The characteristic means of conceiving of silence is as the absence of sound; if sound constitutes an aural materiality, then silence, it seems, must be an aural immateriality. This chapter presents an alternative view. It is not inevitable that the moment of silence attempted in the vignette failed to materialize; it is not the case that it was simply ‘drowned out’ (Mitchell 2011: 244). Absence is not simply the lack of a presence; each absence forms its own specific material conditions (Fowles 2010). Rather, the particular silence that some members of the crowd attempted, but were unable to configure, failed to go through the same process of assembly as the chanting, it failed to gather together enough elements to bring it into meaningful existence; the assemblage of materiality that cohered failed to gain the material conditions of silence. Below, I offer two accounts to explore these issues. The first focuses on an instance when sonic materiality did, indeed, cohere as silence via a process of assembly while the second, an instance when it did so only partially, under rather more fraught conditions.

First moment of silence At around 8.30 am on the morning of 11 September 2011, exactly ten years, to the day after the 9/​11 attacks, I arrive as part of a huge crowd at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. Walking from Park Place subway station to the edge of the area cordoned off for the ceremony I pass a number of booths. A ‘Prayer Station’ stands next to a man distributing free copies of the Qur’an. A man is collecting money for a charity to aid ‘September’s Children’: those with a parent killed on 9/​11, while a group of around twenty ‘truthers’ –​so-​called conspiracy theorists  –​hold banners and distribute leaflets outside St. Paul’s Chapel. Some of the crowd reacts angrily; one man grabs handfuls of their leaflets and throws them on the ground. I talk briefly to a woman distributing leaflets about ‘The Ground Zero Cross’, replete with scriptural quotation regarding the death of Christ, equating it to the sacrality of the sacrifice performed by the victims on 9/​11. Tens of thousands of human bodies are crammed into the streets surrounding the fenced-​off plaza within which the ceremony is taking place. At 8.46 am –​now ten years exactly since American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center  –​the ringing of a small, high-​pitched bell invokes a deafening silence, the first of many ‘moments of silence’ held that day.

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The silence spreads through the crowd quickly and precisely. One second there is noise, the next a concentrated silence. People close their eyes, feet stand extremely still, shoulders rise slightly, muscles around necks stiffen perceptibly, lungs quietly fill and are emptied. All actions occur s-​l-​o-​w-​l-​y. Some people place both hands behind their backs, with one hand grabbing hold of the opposite wrist. Many bow their heads, but their backs remain stiff. Others gaze up at the sky. The group of friends with whom I have come have talked throughout the week of a building of tension towards the anniversary ceremony, not just over the last week or month, but over the previous decade. It is fitting that the anticipation of another 11 September –​literally –​produces this menacing dread; from the beginning the fear was of an uncanny return of the past event as new attack: another 9/​11. In another sense, it is a reminder that this past event is still present in the city, and the attendant inability to escape from the clutches of this tacky, sticky memory configures history as a trap from which many are attempting to escape. Time and again I have heard the wish, explicit or implicit, that the tenth anniversary will close off the ‘post-​ 9/​11 period’, so that a new period in the city’s history can begin (see also Mitchell 2011). It is these tensions that I see in the shoulders of the crowd around me, in the sinews of their necks:  a deeply embodied, troublesome memorialization. From my vantage point, those ‘leading’ the ceremony are invisible. The crowd does not seem to know the order of the service, so when the silence is broken by a series of speeches given by various dignitaries, the atmosphere is one of confusion, the words of Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama seem to simply wash over the crowd. However, when the next voice simply states a name, there is a sudden re-​intensification and contraction of muscles, a sinking sensation, a palpable, visceral shock that leaves a pained expression on the faces of many in the crowd. Two women alternate: ‘Gordon M. Aamoth Jr’ ‘Edelmiro Abad’ ‘Maria Rose Abad’ ‘Andrew Anthony Abate’

The delivery is a deliberate monotone, each syllable evenly spaced, clear and careful: ‘An-​drew-​Anth-​ony-​Ab-​a-​te’. Over the next four hours this will take on a grinding effect. The rhythm of the voices mirroring the relentless cascading of names. Each name followed by another, and another and another. Whole city blocks are drawn together by a vast arrangement of speakers and public address systems. The names leave the mouths of bereaved relatives –​ those who have chosen to recite the list  –​as waves of resonating matter. Matter that moves through the microphones as electrical currents flowing

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towards the speakers, where they will cause the soft fabric held in the plastic cases to vibrate and set in motion a new series of waves. These waves travel out over the crowd, speeding up and slowing down as they strike pockets of warmer or colder air. Moving in a spherical pattern, they strike buildings, bodies and road surfaces and are deflected back into the vast open space. Each of these deflections leaves something of the wave in that which it hits. Absorbed as heat, the resonance dissipates materially into the space through which it moves. While the waves travel, through ears, into human bodies, leaving direct material imprints, they disappear from their point of origin; as the wave front moves forward, its centre fades into nothingness, producing a sphere with no interior (Kuttruff 2000; Schaudinischky 1976). The cascade of names continues until 9.03 am with a piper playing softly in the background; then, the same bell is struck to mark the beginning of another moment of silence, now ten years to the moment when United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower. The affect of the silence is extraordinary. An apparently impossible translation:  a deafening, inconceivable explosion  –​an aircraft exploding on impact with a building of unimaginable, monstrous scale  –​is translated into silence. This time, as it breaks through the cascading list of names, its emotional impact is greater, and it draws tears from many of those surrounding me: suppressed, silent sobs. But, again, the silence stops. The timing is sharp and precise; one minute the disorientating drone of the list, the next a silence cutting through it, then back to noise.

Assembling silence The notion that silence is a tangible thing, as much a material artefact as any building or monument is perhaps a less contentious claim at a point in the history of Western art and music where the work of John Cage now sits comfortably as part of the cannon. While Cage’s oeuvre is wide-​ranging and diverse, it is through his concern with silence, via the piece  –​4’33”  –​for which he is most well known. This classic, initially controversial, composition consists of a musician, usually a pianist, sitting silently before an instrument for four minutes and thirty-​three seconds. Kyle Gann (2010: 2–​3) describes the premiere: Pianist David Tudor sat down at the piano on the small raised wooden stage, closed the keyboard lid over the keys, and looked at the stopwatch. Twice in the next four minutes he raised the lid and lowered it again, careful to make no audible sound, although at the same time he was turning the pages of the music, which were devoid of notes. After four

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minutes and thirty-​ three seconds had passed, Tudor rose to receive applause. The description is extraordinary for conveying some of the effort, and some of the details of practice, that are required to configure silence; something we are accustomed to thinking of as pure lack or negativity, the mere absence of any positive sound. On the contrary, what Cage’s piece and Tudor’s performance highlight is that silence does not ‘just happen’; it requires work, it needs to be produced. Specific, demarcated periods of time are bracketed by intervals –​two during the performance –​that, as anyone who has witnessed a performance of 4’33” will know, is inevitably filled with coughing, shuffling, the rustling of paper programmes and the other noises that fill any sonic void when groups of human bodies are gathered together. This noise is vital for producing what the stopwatch delineates:  a block of time characterized by a deliberate attempt to refrain from any action that leaves an audible and ‘positive’ sonic mark. ‘The primordial fact is not Silence … but Noise … it is not that silence is broken but silence itself breaks, interrupts’ (Zizek 2006: 224). If conceived of as an assemblage, this silence is a particular, contingent meeting of elements: the temporal regulation of the stopwatch, the bodies of the audience, the work of the composer, the performance of the pianist, the architectonic context, the history of Western music; all these elements must hold together for a specific period of time in order to generate the desired silence –​a silence which will then inevitably break apart. This specific, unique silence is an assemblage of all those things out of which it is constituted. In a rather obvious and tangible way then, each silence is utterly different from every other. Silences, like all other material artefacts, are constituted from a unique set of elements, gathered together in a unique way. And through this process, one repeated time and again in varied contexts over the past sixty years across the globe, a tangible thing (ding) called 4’33” has come to exist; a thing with a consistent identity, but different and unique in each specific instance in which it is encountered. Each time it is composed of different atoms: different bodies, a different performer, a different architectural context, a different stopwatch, a different historical moment. Discussing the importance of periods of silence in the religious practices of Quakers, Blasser and Salter (2007:  33)  argue that ‘group silence is the ultimate manifestation of social cohesiveness because silence can exist only if all members cease from speaking  –​total deference to the group’s values’. The ritual moment of silence is increasingly common in the secular mythology of the nation state, though its roots delve down historically into the devotional practices of Euro-​ American tradition (Connerton 2011:  59–​ 64). As Paul Connerton argues, such nationalistic silences are themselves predicated on the noisiness of the Modern nation state, they become the

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Derridean supplement to a noise that they then proceed to attack. The two minutes of silence marking the end of the First World War was shocking, in the way Zizek suggests above, precisely due to what it cut through. ‘It meant engines stopped wherever they happened to be; that the engine crews stood bare-​headed at their footplates; that the passengers sat silent in their compartments; that all over the industrial north the machinery of the textile mills stopped for two minutes; that throughout the Midlands engineering firms interrupted their work; that telephone exchanges ceased putting through calls’ (Connerton 2011:  53). As with all rituals, it produces community, but Connerton shows how it does so particularly strongly due to the extraordinary uniformity of purpose it demands of the participants. Only one element need fail for the moment of silence to fall apart. Silence is not simply a matter of a restraint from speaking, but from any physical or technological motion or event that leaves a sonic mark. This requires considerable effort, an effort at an impossible control of the soundscape (Schafer 1994). During performances of 4’33” the failure to produce silence is, in practice, both inevitable, and, paradoxically, desired. Cage (2009) would stubbornly insist that ‘there’s no such thing as silence’ and that all the apparent silence of 4’33” does is open the ears of the audience to the sounds that cannot be disciplined: the hum of the air conditioning unit, the traffic passing outside, the water flowing through the central heating system, the quiet breathing of the listener’s fellow audience members. Much like the Quaker’s silence, which opens up a space within which God can work (Bauman 1983), 4’33” is meant to ‘sober and quiet the mind and thus make it susceptible to divine influences’ (Sarabhai quoted in Cage 2009:  158). The failure does not seem to matter, rather, it is the exclusion of particular sounds: the sound of a hammer striking a string in the body of a piano, the sound of a human voice, the sound of a screwdriver being dragged across the strings of a harp that lead us to consider 4’33” as Cage’s ‘silent piece’. As Jackson (1968: 294), following Levi-​Strauss, observes: ‘the type of noise against which silence is being contrasted may be significant’. This is not really ‘silence’ in the colloquial sense of ‘lack of noise’ at all, but rather, like any moment of silence, a particular attempt to regulate sound, to produce a very specific sonic assemblage. An absence must itself be configured (Fowles 2010). In order for silence to become a material artefact, it relies on selective hearing –​an operation that dematerializes all kinds of sound waves in order to produce something that we might call harmony, that is of the same order as that produced by a choir or an orchestra. It is a harmony built from a plethora of elements:  human bodies, technological apparatus, time, history, ‘background’ sounds, all, for a brief moment, working together to produce a novel artefact. Silence’s materiality derives from its assembled nature. If anthropological work has conventionally considered silence as a problem to be overcome, as

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denoting a lack of meaningful social life (Gal 1991; Hedge 1996; Sheriff 2000), then what Cage’s work and the tenth anniversary ceremony commemorating 9/​11 show is its intensely social nature. A whole community –​humans and non-​humans –​must be drawn together in order to provide it with a material tangibility. As with any other material thing, it emerges from the particular processes that configure it, providing it with the particular qualities and morphology apprehended by the researcher during the ethnographic encounter. The moment of silence observed at Ground Zero on the tenth anniversary of 9/​ 11 possessed an affective, moving nature unavailable to any performance of 4’33” as it was an entirely different thing, composed of different elements and possessing entirely different properties. The moment of silence that attempted, but failed, to cohere as a tangible, material thing after the killing of Osama Bin Laden failed precisely for this reason:  the process of assemblage could not maintain the material conditions of silence. Too many other materials –​such as the chanting –​impeded the objectification of silence. In this way, materiality comes to be understood less as a problem of solidity, stability or unproblematic apprehension and more as an emergent quality of the assemblage. There is no materiality prior to the process of its assembly; it is inherently ‘awkward’ (Highmore 2010). This is the principle of the ding (Latour 2005).

Second moment of silence Shortly before the previous anniversary, for the first time, many influential voices had suggested that the time would soon come when the annual recitation of names would no longer be appropriate. The mayor announced on the radio that the city would consult with bereaved family members regarding a timescale for when this profound shift should start coming into effect. Initially, the sentiment was condemned by many family members as heartless; however, over the course of the following year, its controversial edge became blunted, and more and more spoke of the need to move on. In a sense this had always been anticipated, and part of the tenth anniversary’s power lay in an unarticulated understanding that this was the last ‘big one’. As one friend told me: ‘Hopefully everything will calm down after this. These kids now, they’ve grown up with nothing else.’ Time for history to start up again, for linear time to regain functionality, to establish a relationship to 9/​11 that does not cast it as the beginning of history, nor the reference point for all other historical events. The list of the victim’s names is monumental; it takes many hours to read, it assembles a huge number of human and non-​human bodies, its effect is disorientating and imposing in keeping with the more general effects

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of monumentality:  far, far too many names to make sense of, let  alone remember; it makes the listener’s head spin. In 2012, it would still be intact, the names would still be read but everyone understood that it would not last forever. I  am not aware of any public discussion suggesting that the moments of silence will ever stop being observed1; being in the public perception immaterial, a pure lack or negativity, perhaps it occurs to no one that the silence could stop. Exactly one year after the first example (above), on 11 September 2012, the atmosphere at Ground Zero is very different. On the eleventh anniversary the structural interventions in the landscape of the city are considerably reduced. Though police and security forces are scattered about, the number of streets that have been closed are noticeably fewer than the year before. Some temporary steel barriers funnel the comparatively sparse crowds through the narrow alleys of the financial district, but the police officers do not defend their integrity with any particular zeal. With some friends, I walk up to a barrier, smile, talk: ‘Can we just get through? We want to get to that Starbucks.’ We walk all the way to the entrance at Greenwich and Albany streets of the official memorial at Ground Zero, opened to the bereaved families for the first time exactly one year previous. Whereas in 2011 a huge area stretching over many blocks was drawn together by the speaker system, now the sound from the ceremony has trouble crossing from one side of the street to the other. Gatherings of people, a few dozen at a time, are straining to hear the names read aloud. While I  am aware that it is a list of names, less than half the sounds are actually intelligible as articulated words; rather, it is a quiet drone that periodically breaks into proper audibility. The contrast with the reading of the list of names that was performed at the tenth anniversary is striking. What had seemed so monumental, so material last year now seemed so fragile. I left to take some photographs of the surrounding streets. As I crossed over to Broadway, only two blocks from Ground Zero, and turned south towards Zuccotti Park, I  saw twenty-​ six firefighters, arranged into four columns, standing still, silently, in front of a fire truck parked at the side of the road (Figure 10.1). Rush hour traffic was driving past them, people were crossing the street in front of them, walking past them on the sidewalk. Almost everybody seemed to glance at these men, but few broke stride; certainly no one stopped. Looking at my watch, I saw that I was walking through the moment of silence marking the collapse of the second tower; I had missed the first without realizing. A crackle of static suddenly emanated from their radios and they broke from their columns, hugged and talked quietly to each other; the moment of silence was over. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum also now, via their website, offers guidance on how and when to observe the moment(s) of silence. 1

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FIGURE  10.1   The firefighters’ moment of silence, 11 September 2012. Photo by author.

Conclusion During the tenth anniversary ceremony of the 11 September attacks, two distinct aural materialities  –​the monumental list of names and the dense, affective silence  –​worked together in a distinct, defining interplay. The massive sonic infrastructure of the list provided the assembly from which the silence could emerge and drive it into a position of contrast. The uniformity of purpose played out by the agglomeration of human bodies, technologies and memories in this particular lieux de memoire (Nora 1989) configured two distinct artefacts of aural materiality that took deeply affective forms. To describe these as things –​as tangible, as taking a particular kind of shape, as displaying particular qualities or properties –​is perhaps a convincing notion, even if only as an attempt at ethnographic evocation. During the ceremony marking the following year’s anniversary, however, things were rather less clear. Unlike the failed silence that opened the chapter, the firefighters’ moment of silence did not fail utterly; a particular assemblage was configured. However, this assemblage was restricted in its reach, its materiality rather fuzzier, its boundaries porous, lacking the sharp divide of the all-​encompassing cascading of names. The materialities of both the list of names and the moment of silence –​each configured as its own particular assemblage –​had become rather frail and indistinct. In each of the moments of silence discussed in this chapter, a particular instantiation of the memory of 9/​11 is played out. Academic discussions of the materiality of memory almost exclusively foreground conventionally material ‘objects’:  buildings, monuments, photographs, bodies (Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett

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2003; Sather-​Wagstaff 2011; Sturken 2004). Here, it is all too easy to slip back into habits of thought that take the material to represent unchanging, stable essences while memory –​shifting, fluid, meaningful, affective –​becomes the sole property of a human mind. Memory and materiality remain dichotomous opposites. However, when considering aural assemblages of the kind described in this chapter, their mutual modulations and complexities become clear. With no a priori distinction between thoughts and things (James 1976), but an acceptance, rather, that human thoughts are simply one aspect of the assemblages from which materialities emerge, the materiality of memory is seen to be fluid and processual; as open to the vagaries of modulation and process as the immaterial, subjective memory reified by modern thought (Derrida 1995). In the examples given here, the shifting constitution and qualities of different moments of silence betray the shifting patterns of memory and the shifting relationships to 9/​11 in tangible, empirical ways: the apparent impossibility of configuring a liberal memory of 9/​11 after the death of Bin Laden; the regimented, disciplined memory of the tenth anniversary; and the gradual erosion of this discipline as observed a year later. Aural materialities in memorial contexts such as this one would seem to inhere to an intimate configuration of ethics and politics (Hirschkind 2006). Never fully disentangled from human bodies, each becomes a literal embodiment of an assembled relationship to a past event. Through a consideration of the configurations and failures of silence within 9/​ 11 memorialization practices, this chapter has attempted to reposition the materiality of silence from the background of sound studies, where it is often seen as little more than a universal void waiting to be filled by the particularities of cultured sound, to instead foreground its assembled nature. As the examples given here demonstrate, an intermingling of elements  –​bodies, spaces and technologies  –​gives silence form and defines its qualities. While vibrating patterns of resonance –​as sound exists in the contemporary, ‘scientific’ West  –​are taken to provide a basis for sound’s materiality (Erlmann 2010), silence is rather more difficult to think in the abstract. Its materiality pertains to no essence, no universal existence but, rather, must be composed uniquely in each situation as it arises. Each particular moment of silence is thus configured from a particular agglomeration of elements, a unique artefact distributed across a unique, unrepeatable assemblage.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Ollie Harris and Victor Buchli for their comments on this chapter.

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Funding This research was supported by an AHRC Block Grant for Doctoral Study.

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he contributions to this volume provocatively open up a poorly understood area of study within the social sciences. With this, the contributors propose a radically new terrain for investigation, particularly within anthropology and material culture studies. The editors and contributors investigate neither the normative objectifications of culture –​both discursive and material –​nor their failed expressions: such as indicated in recent work on failure by those like Jack/​ Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Povinelli and Judith Butler. Rather they propose a terrain of research that examines the gaps between the two. This is a programmatic investigation of the hitherto poorly understood terrain of interstitiality, or gaps, that observers such as Marilyn Strathern, Jacque Derrida and others have long drawn our attention towards but which up to now have not constituted an area of sustained empirical research. Having an ‘awkward materiality’ (Highmore in ap Stifin, this volume), this terrain has gone largely uninvestigated. The contributions to this volume call for a new programme of research that addresses this ‘gap’ both in the theoretical literature and as it is experienced sensuously and socially in our daily lives where the question of ‘failure’ resides. At the heart of this investigation is, of course, the inherent relationality  –​social, discursive and material  –​within such a gap produced between two contexts. This relationality, however distinctly social, has hitherto eluded material culture research, and social scientific empirical investigation in general, as well as the wider conditions by which such social relations are forged. The contributions to this volume address this relational terrain as produced within these gaps. This shift in perspective profoundly challenges how we understand the nature of material culture and its materiality, claims towards normativity, the nature of discursive realms and objecthood –​in short

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the contributions of this volume show how our conventional understandings of material and social life can be seen in a radically new light, the complexity of which is, frankly, enthralling to this reader. All the contributions presented here speak to the inherently productive nature of ‘failure’. But more importantly they also speak to the empirical, material and sensuous conditions under which such ‘failures’ arise and the social and cultural work that ‘failure’ in turn accomplishes. By examining the wider terrain that frames the ‘gaps’ within which ‘failure’ emerges, the authors point out new and innovative contexts that bring together hitherto empirically distinct configurations into a novel comparative frame that suggest a new programme of ethnographic material culture research. A framework of critical binaries emerges –​and within that a new and challenging complexity –​as in the relation of black and white in terms of cloth and skin in Dubai (Parkhurst), HIV treatment and holy water in Ethiopia (Antohin), Anglican/​Orthodox Christian spaces (Carroll), governmentality/​local culture in London (Jeevendrampillai), local and global manifestations of Krishna (Mohan), archaeological heritage and the two sides of the civil war in Syria (Shackelford), silence and voice in Manhattan 9/​11 remembrances (ap Stifin), two competing notions of time, the body and care in the British national health service and Haredi notions of care and eternity (Kasstan). Within these critical binaries, the gaps that constitute ‘failure’ emerge and, with the empirical detail presented in these case studies, a new understanding of the various material registers from the discursive, to the visual, to the aural arise that profoundly challenge our conventional understanding of these received analytical categories. The gaps this work addresses also speaks to the critical work done in an earlier tradition within linguistics and linguistic anthropology but which can be extrapolated and expanded here to novel effect. Derrida (1976), in his Of Grammatology, spoke of the semiosis inherent in the gaps that produce différance while Strathern (2004 [1991]) drew our attention to the productive nature of discursive gaps for the reproduction of social relations in Partial Connections. Within linguistic anthropology, Michael Silverstein (2003) has what has been called by Caldenby as the ‘translatory motion’ (Caldenby et al. 2014: 23) within the linguistic study of translation from one language and one language community to another as inherently relational and productive of new forms of sociality and authority. Silverstein discusses the modality of ‘transduction’ as understood within the material metaphor of thermodynamics whereby every conversion (translation) generates a loss (cf. Rosman and Rubel 2003). However, this loss produces new forms of power and community; it is a loss that produces a ‘debt’, a ‘debt’ that is at the heart of a renewed politics of redemption and ‘mercy’, as Derrida (2001) so poignantly demonstrated in his discussion of translation, debt and mercy with reference to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Within material culture studies the notion of transduction

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has begun to take on a programmatic role, such as in the work of Murphy (2012), in ethnographic design studies. In many ways this complements the material here, most notably Sundwall’s on the ethnography of design and ‘failure’. But heretofore the terrain within such empirically recognized transductions has not been programmatically focused upon; the contributions to this volume do exactly this. The linguist Roman Jakobson’s original definition of transduction, as identified by Silverstein, is instructive here in terms of how it might explain the terrain proposed by the contributors. Transduction is useful in thinking through the interstitial terrains investigated in this volume, particularly as the implications of these gaps are expanded outwards in their ethnographic interventions within this novel and inherently social and productive terrain. Jakobson (1966) identifies three kinds of translation: intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic. ‘Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ (114). ‘The translator is a betrayer’ (118), failing one context in relation to another, but, as he goes on to ask, the translator is the ‘betrayer of what values?’ (118). This opens up the critical arena at the heart of the ethnographic investigations discussed by the contributions here, when, in a more general sense, a given objectification tout court fails. It is in this ‘translatory motion’ (Caldenby et al. 2014) between differing sign systems and objectifications that the losses of transduction occur and wherein, as Silverstein (2003: 91–​5) notes, a loss that produces ownership and a new set of relations predicated on that loss. Such ‘failures’ produced within transduction are inherently relational, productive and reconfigure given relations of power –​a fact to which all the contributions of this volume attest. These earlier discussions, however, only hint at the critical nature of these gaps; and within these early forays a novel understanding of the material is mooted. In contrast, the discussions here methodologically and theoretically place themselves directly within these gaps in order to explore this poorly understood, yet crucial area for the creation of social and material life. The investigations here engage this new radical analytic binary and the gaps they engender and explore how radically new comparative axes describing social and material life emerge within the discipline, thereby charting a path for further exploration. Sundwall discusses how failures in the design process and the inability to translate a given design into a given material and mode of production produces radically new understandings of materiality and the ontologies they sustain. Such material failures enable new forms of social life between the different actors present in the design and manufacturing process, along with new alliances and new forms of expertise. The material itself, in fact, becomes a new form of social relation and means of communication. Rather than being

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understood as inanimate matter, its instability and multiple failures at various junctures literally produce new relations and expertise, and Sundwall goes on to describe how different social and material worlds can be brought into a new configuration in relation to one another. Materials are hardly ‘raw’ and anterior to social life, but literally the stuff of which social relations, expertise and knowledge are possible and co-​constitutive of one another. An important aspect of this observation is that not only are the supposedly ‘raw’ natures of materials and their respective ‘failures’ productive, within these disjunctive gaps, but they indicate radically new scales of action and time in relation to Sundwall’s observation apropos Thomas Edison and his notion of futurity and time: ‘I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work’ (Edison in Sundwall). Such failures imply a radical and novel futurity towards which human actions and relations are redirected, temporal scales are reworked and new forms of social and material cohesion emerge. Mohan attends to Bourdieu’s ‘transposable dispositions’ in relation to his notion of habitus, considering how this transposal within one religious context and sensorial regime, based on darshan, comes undone in relation to the digital imagery of clothes adorning the deity. Such digital media expands its purview and runs aground in relation to the constitution of local and dispersed communities of the same faith within these media, and, thereby, refiguring territoriality within this global digitally mediated context and therewith the locus of religious authority. Mohan examines the controversies that arise within semiotic transduction when one ‘embodied value is replaced by a representational one’ (Mohan, this volume, p. 53). This is to say that from the sensuous embodied context of the temple, to the digital image circulating across various platforms and media –​with all the visual and physical intimacy such a sensorial regime produces within the context of darshan and haptic vision –​become incompatible with given institutions of a globalizing religious authority. As Mohan notes: ‘objects “failed” because they drew attention to their status as materials rather than as seamless conduits of divine presence’ but this also produced a new form of religious visuality as related to the digital image and the assertion of global institutional control. Suddenly digitization inhibits the exercise of darshan and the proper presencing of the divine and requires the rearticulation of the relationship between the institutional centre of Iskcon adherents and their global co-​religionists. Parkhurst’s discussion of skin whitening products –​what is conventionally thought of as ‘racism in a bottle’ –​complicates this understanding by considering the productive work of body modification within marriage practices and genetic inheritance and speaks to the constant failing of these semiotic modes in differing historical contexts within Gulf society that must be constantly worked on because of their inevitable failure. Inherent ineffectiveness in the face of historical changes is seen here to be a key dynamic, constitutive of traditional

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notions of selfhood and emic understandings of asymmetric heteronormative sexual dimorphism in ever changing demographic and modernizing contexts. Here the whiteness of cloth and the whiteness of skin are brought into relation to one another as constantly shifting and ‘failing’ processes of differentiation, but which, through its failures, assures its continued labour and reproduction and with it continuity and adaptability in new historical and social contexts. Here in Parkhurst’s discussion, as in others, the forms of work and social engagement that ‘failure’ produces are at the heart of a traditional logic that is constantly being reinvented –​failure here does not produce rupture or radical ontologies but serves as a mechanism where an embodied form of labour and gendered sociality is reproduced and in fact stabilized within a dynamic modern environment. Similarly, the seeming failure of the disjuncture’s between conventional biomedicine and healthcare in relation to traditional Haredi communities in Kasstan’s piece speaks to how the disjuncture and the failure between two regimes of care with two distinct notions of the body and futurity work in tandem to  –​in the case of the Haredi community  –​constitute a novel and enduring from of traditional life, body and futurity in relation to Haredi spirituality and understandings of the body. Two temporal scales and two forms of the body are at play here. On one hand there is the biomedical body of the contemporary Euro-​American nation state and its rationalist temporalities, on the other is the body that belongs to God and eternity in Haredi cosmology. The disjuncture between the two, in terms of the prosaic provision of efficient ambulance services and post-​mortems, creates a space where the failure of one (the British National Health Service) to meet the needs of the community creates the conditions whereby the community reproduces itself and then positions itself to meet the ‘failures’ of the state and the broader secular community at large –​and in turn –​in unexpected and novel fashion ‘bolstering the autonomy of the social body as a whole’ (Kasstan, this volume, p. 109). Similarly, this response to disjuncture and ‘failure’ spurs the uptake of new technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in post-​mortems that accommodate both Haredi notions of ‘eternity’ and the sacred qualities of the human body with the secular rationalist exigencies of the state. Two notions of community and temporality are hereby creatively accommodated through what might appear as a ‘failure’ as in the other examples presented in this volume. Failure here produces the conditions whereby innovative but traditional forms of sensuous labour must take place and with that the conditions whereby both the requirements of God and eternity and the secular nation-​state are recreated and enhanced. Carroll’s discussion of an Orthodox Christian use of an Anglican church speaks to how the apparent disjunctive failure of the Anglican space produces the conditions whereby an Orthodox cosmology can prevail. This does not

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happen through the material integrity of any one body of material culture, architecture, cloth, furniture and so on, but through the distinctive means by which a traditional ontology and futurity is literally produced, not despite disjunctures, but precisely because of these disjunctures, enabling the continuity and stability of such a spiritual community to prevail. It is precisely the disjunctures that engender the reproduction of the conditions of Orthodox cosmology, community and time and the specific sensorial regime in relation to face-​to-​face encounters within the economy of the Orthodox icon as opposed to the immaterial Anglican visualist one based on ascendance:  Orthodox circularity versus Anglican longitudinality. As the Orthodox Church is itself an icon of the universe, the making of that icon presences that icon through sensuous labour and what might be dismissed as the grumpy complaints of parishioners (‘Oh that awful thing?’, Carroll, this volume, p. 172) underpinning that labour. The disjuncture produces an askesis that engenders orthodox spirituality. The result is that even though the spaces of the Orthodox Church and the Anglican one seem to overlap, our conventional understanding of material culture is utterly reconfigured in relation to the specific sensorial and theological modes in which the space is occupied simultaneously in one conventional empirical register and then not at all –​utterly and entirely. Shackelford speaks to such disjunctures and gaps and their competing temporalities in relation to the way in which heritage monuments are reconfigured in the Syrian civil war. Here too the question of visuality, heritage and political action are radically reworked in relation to the new visual registers of digital technologies, as in Mohan’s discussion of the Iskcon context. Seemingly incompatible material registers are here reworked in radical new ways to assert different visions of the nation and the development of the future amid the bloody Syrian conflict. Heritage and its produced monumentality and endurance worked effectively in stabilizing competing notions of the nation, but even then these seemingly stable forms fell apart with their competing reconfigurations as the conflict ensued and assumed even deadlier and more tragic proportions –​as these monuments were increasingly contested so too they became more increasingly vulnerable. Traditional means by which heritage monuments could be stabilized by the state in terms of a given historical narrative, physical maintenance, preservation and access can be overturned with a video of a protest posted on social media that took less than five minutes to pose (Shackelford, this volume, p. 148). Thus dispersed, the novel configuration of image, body, text and monuments would then endure in social media, refiguring the traditional monumentality of heritage sites to the extent that –​unlike Carroll’s e ­ xample –​the two visions, rather than accommodate one another, served the opposite function of rendering the entire material edifice asunder. The continual realignment of the contested landscape, accelerated in digital media, worked eventually to undo the apparent material solidity of these

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monuments, just as the sensorial regimes at play in Carroll’s piece worked to undo one another. One semiotic register transduces into another, but in a violent and volatile political context, thereby upending the apparent solidity of heritage monuments. But it is precisely the suddenly volatile nature of these seemingly stable forms that here serves to reproduce the cycles of violence ripping the country apart. The stability of heritage enshrined in stone –​and their indexical relationships –​change continuously, and the consequences of these ‘failures’ are devastating (Shackelford, this volume). Jeevendrampillai speaks about the disjuncture and the apparent failure of an urban planning research initiative aimed at enhancing the vitality of suburban life being unable to accommodate the actual conditions of suburban vitality. In fact, the two forms of vitality and their respective temporality are radically at odds with each other, as in the examples of others here. But it is precisely this disjuncture that allows these competing temporalities and forms of vitality not only to coexist but to actually co-​produce one another at the level of planning. The transformation of existing on-​the-​ground structures, orchestrated by those in the wider urban sphere in order to encourage the vitality of suburban regions, is resisted on the ground through tactics of the ‘stupid’ used to produce alternative forms of life and temporality that are coterminous and co-​ constitutive. Here the slippages within failures occurring at the empirical level of data input on a community map, indicate again the means by which digital engagements in new media such as citizen mapping actually help to produce co-​terminal, but not coextensive, forms of community and vitality. The technology, both digitally and bureaucratically, ‘fails’ but as a result this ‘failure’ is able to produce authentic conditions of vitality and futurity coextensively. The map produced will ‘fail’ in order that it might succeed in the future and thereby secure the promise of an evolving form of urban democratic governance. All this is possible due to the implicit grammatical ‘tensing’, as Jeevendrampillai argues, of the technologies at play both at the level of directed urban development and at the ground level of community activism. A novel nexus of co-​constitutive ‘failures’ thereby assure the continuity of two differing scales and temporalities engendering ‘vitality’. Two incommensurable transductive motions work to produce one another in what is a ‘felicitous’ failure, as Jeevendrampillai calls it, and two distinctively coextensive but mutually exclusive understandings of community development and authenticity. Here one can compare Jeevendrampillai’s understanding of heritage (where ‘myth’ and ‘fact’ compete) in relation to Shackelford’s analysis of two coextensive but incommensurable understandings of heritage and its attendant temporalities. Both knowledge communities in Jeevendrampillai’s analysis are sustained through this transductive failure and the literal and material inability to ‘map’ one onto the other. Both the community of Seethingers with their ‘stupid’ actions and the rational bureaucratic practices

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of the Adaptable Suburbs Project creatively transduce in various registers across widely different scales to produce, through ‘felicitous failure’, the conditions of their sustained success. Ap Stifin’s analysis of the failures of silences commemorating the dead of 9/​11 discusses the extraordinary material assemblages needed to produce silence and their memorializing function. Here a lack of even what might be considered conventional material culture is painstakingly evoked in the ethnographic detail of how silence produces an extraordinary material assemblage when there is apparently no matter or even sound –​as the most ephemeral of material registers –​to be invoked. As such the apparent failure of even silence to cohere between the two memorial instances of silence under discussion attest to the particular socialities and the extraordinary material assemblages they are required to marshal. Unlike traditional memorial practices, which are distinctly material, and unlike the heritage practices invoked by Shackelford, the silences described by ap Stifin attest to the evident failure of a given material register to create memory. Even the apparent negativity and seeming immateriality of the two different moments of silence attest to the extraordinary configuration of distinctly material elements to produce what seems like a negativity. Silence can fail so easily, one misplaced cough or incidence of uncontrollable ambient sound will cause the silence to fail and the whole memorial practice to come undone. But it is this struggle to stave off the undoing at the most intimate bodily level of suppressed coughs, regulated breathing and bodily comportment that produces this extraordinary memorial practice, the doing of which is itself to avert the breakdown of that silence which produces this extraordinarily materialized monumentality. The studied aversion of this ‘failure’ produces an intense sense of community, action and purpose. As with the other contributions in this volume, the production of various concatenating transductive material registers –​from bodily cavity, air wave, building echo and wider open urban space  –​cut through all the conventional material and immaterial registers with which we are familiar to produce this series of transductions that in their totality produce this totalizing yet ephemeral monument. The different instances of failing silence attest to the different nexus of people, spaces and things that produce one extraordinarily coherent collectivity at different levels of intensity and with it different socialities. As ap Stifin notes, silence is inherently relational in the transductive material means by which it is produced and, as ap Stifin’s discussion points out, these materially produced silences and variable degrees of success and failure form the novel terms by which these socialities can be conceived. As ap Stifin notes, this is an example of the ‘awkward materialities’ observed by Highmore and their productive effects that are at the heart of all the discussions in this volume.

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Antohin discusses how the question of ‘failure’ is really a question of temporality and the scales at which success and vibrant life might be achieved. As Antohin (this volume, p. 90) notes, ‘The temporality of living in failure is often a continued condition, that is, it is not directed by a sense that success is around the corner’. Similarly, it is through the issues of ‘blame’ and responsibility that, when things fail, one regime is able to accommodate the other. In relation to HIV treatment, biomedical contexts limit blame within a narrow field of action and resources, whereas the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian contexts expand the field of action and blame into the wider sphere of God’s will, where failure becomes a ‘test’, a ‘lesson’ from which a more integrated and sustained Christian subject might emerge. As Antohin notes, ‘One cannot be saved from HIV/​AIDS by ART, but one can by God’s redemption via the material intervention of holy water’ (Antohin, this volume, pp. 84–85). The biomedical body might be redeemed up to a point and at the temporal scales of biomedicine and public health initiatives, but God’s redemption and Orthodox eternity is facilitated by the spiritual processes and dispositions of care and being that holy water facilitates. Here the requirements of biomedicine with Christian spirituality are combined with the church’s advocacy that ART be administered with holy water. This is not unlike what public health advocates in Western metropolitan centres promote at a different scale of the body –​not the immediate and greater one of the social body of biomedical public health concerns, but in terms of individual life expectations and goals that must be linked with those of biomedical practices to sustain a lifelong and communally sustained response to the pandemic linking individual aspirations with public health goals. As Antohin notes, by caring for the soul through holy water, one creates the conditions whereby the body might be saved through biomedical practices. Citing Vitebsky (1993: 108), this is a transduction of practices whereby the ‘essence of “Development” is to declare an essence in someone else, in order to end their previous state of knowledge by transmuting it into ignorance’. Thus one semiotic regime is transduced into another. As Antohin notes (this volume, p. 79): ‘These procedures, whereby man-​made objects are brought under divine sanction and protection, is made possible by Orthodox teachings that consider “salvation made by Christ [as] enabl[ing] material things to act as sacraments of communion with God” ’ (Ware in Gebru 2012:  160). One transduces into the other into a radical and new alignment that merges two cosmologies, two understandings of the body and two temporalities, into a novel configuration where the inadequacies or ‘failings’ of both are transduced into a hybrid whole where ART in combination with Holy Water accommodates and expands both understandings of time, the body and spirit into a novel alignment and regime of expanded care. As Antohin further notes, citing the innovative transduction performed by the Ethiopian patriarch of the Orthodox Church:  ‘The Patriarch’s appeal was phrased in this way:  “I told them [HIV

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patients] the holy water and the medicine are the same, and they were never opposed to each other. The scientists who made the medicine, who created them? God. As far as I am concerned, they both came from the same God” ’ (cited by Antohin, this volume, pp. 75–76). Derrida (2001) has observed that in relation to the problem of translation and objectification in general, the losses incurred therein produce a debt between the two elements brought into relation with one another through the ‘translatory motion’ (Caldenby et al. 2014). He meditates on the dilemma at the heart of Shakespeare’s play the Merchant of Venice, where it is impossible to realize the translation successfully of a pound of flesh to repay the debt without causing the death of an innocent debtor. The challenge is to avoid inevitable death that would result if objectifying translation/​transduction were performed without failing: ‘the challenge to cut flesh without shedding one drop of blood’ (Derrida 2001: 189). This is an irreparable debt, a loss that can never be recovered; however, as Derrida proposes, this is also the condition whereby that loss might be redeemed through care and mercy, hence the injunction made by Shakespeare’s cross-​dressing and eminently translatory body, Portia, to be merciful:  a mercy that produces a novel relationality and condition for social life and moral responsibility for one another. It is precisely this irreparable and irreconcilable loss and ‘failure’ that produces the novel conditions and promises of redemption and new forms of moral and material life that the various contributions of this volume make evident. The ‘failures’ that emerge within these gaps engender novel forms of care, mercy and mutuality. They give testimony to Derrida’s observation regarding the binaries invoked  –​that ‘Forgiveness is prayer; it belongs to the order of benediction and prayer on two sides: that of the person who requests it and that of the person who grants it. The essence of prayer has to do with forgiveness, not with power and law’ (188) –​and with this the radical new moral and material conditions that exceed given relations of custom and law as the contributions here show and therewith engender novel forms of mutuality and material and social life.

References Caldenby, C. et al. (eds) (2014), Architecture, Photography and the Contemporary Past. Gothenburg: Art and Theory Publishing. Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Derrida, J. (2001) ‘What Is a “Relevant” Translation?’, Critical Inquiry Vol. 27, No. 2, 174–​200. Gebru, M. (2012) Liturgical Cosmology: The Sacramental and Theological Dimensions of Creation as Expressed in the Ethiopian Liturgy. PhD Thesis, Toronto, University of Toronto.

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Jakobson, R. (1966) ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’. In On Translation, edited by R. Brower. New York: Oxford University Press. Murphy, K. (2012) ‘Transmodality and Temporality in Design Interactions’. Journal of Pragmatics Vol. 44, 1966–​81. Rosman, A. and P. Rubel (2003), ‘Introduction’. In Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, edited by A. Rosman and P. Rubel. Oxford: Berg. Silverstein, M. (2003) ‘Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating Glossaando on Thin Semiotic Ice’. In Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, edited by P. Rubel and A. Rosman, 75–​105. Oxford: Berg. Strathern, M. (2004) Partial Connections. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Vitebsky, P. (1993) ‘Is Death the Same Everywhere? Contexts of Knowing and Doubting’. In An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance, edited by Mark Hobart. London: Routledge.

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Index Abrahams, Peter 64 Adaptable Suburbs Project (ASP) 113, 115, 125, 127, 204 aims of 115 design of 117, 122 field sites 118 use of Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) 116 Ahmed, Sara 173 alchemy 25–6 Alexander the Great 138 alterity concept of 9–10 Amharic (language) colloquialisms 81 anthropology 22, 36, 97, 129, 136, 178–80 failure in 90 linguistic 198 material culture/​materials/​ materiality debates 24, 33 study of human body 58–9 Appadurai, Arjun 129 analysis of globalization 41 concept of ‘production of locality’ 133 criticisms of habitus 40–1 Arabic (language) 70, 149 al-​Assad, Bashar 143 regime of 148, 151 ‘Syria is Fine’ campaign 139 al-​Assad, Hafez 141, 143 death of (2000) 142 Austin, John Langshaw concept of speech acts 118 performative utterance 120 How to Do Things with Words (1962) 12–13 Australia Aboriginal population of 8

bahelawi hakimoch (traditional doctors) injectionists 82 wagesha (bone-​setters) 82 Bakhtin, Mikhail 11–13 Barad, Karen 181 Barber Osgerby Olympic Torch Project 27–8 Battle of Hattin (1187) 140–1 Bedouin territory inhabited by, see UAE wearing of burga 65 Bennett, Jane 181 Bensaude-​Vincent, B. problematization of artificial v. natural 24–5 biomedicine 108–9 Blasser, Barry study of use of silence by Quakers 186 Boddy, Janice ethnography of Muslim women in Northern Sudan 66 bodily alteration 58 academic conceptions of body 58–9 beauty product sales 69 breast enlargement 61 nose alterations 61–2 skin bleaching/​whitening 57–8, 61, 63–5, 71, 200 culture surrounding 60, 65, 67–9 pathological discourse 69–70 Bollywood 70 du Boulay, Juliet anthropological analysis of Orthodox Cosmology in Greek village life 78 Bourdieu, Pierre study of habitus 40, 200 theory of cultural capital 63 Boylston, Tom study of Ethiopian Orthodoxy 158–9

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Brazil 61, 167 plastic surgery industry in 57 British Society of Antiquarians and Archaeologists (BSAA) 123 Buck, Trudi 102 Butler, Beverley ‘“Taking on a Tradition”: African Heritage and the Testimony of Memory’ (2007) 137 Butler, Judith 12, 197 observation of context in performative failure 121, 135 Cable News Network (CNN) 26 Cage, John 4’33” 185–8 Calvinism 63 capitalism 21, 34 Carroll, John 16 concept of optimism 3–4 Chaitanya Gaudiya Vaishnavism 47, 50 Chambers, Robert Whose Reality Counts? (1997) 116 Chevra Kadisha 103–5, 109 death attendants 104 China, People’s Republic of 148 Hong Kong 63 Christianity 63, 80, 205 Anglicanism 18, 157–9, 164, 169, 201–2 architecture 168, 170–1 High-​Church 170 material culture of 157, 167–8 Bible Book of Genesis 78 Orthodox 18, 85, 157–8, 166–7, 169–​72, 201–2, 205–6 Altar 164, 166 Eastern 159 ecstatic states in 167 Ethiopia, see Ethiopia, Orthodox Church Holy Table 158, 162–6 ikonostasis/​ikons 160–1, 163, 165, 170–1 Liturgy 165–6 temple 158–66, 168, 173 Protestantism 170, 180 Quakerism ritual use of silence 186

colonization British 64 French 64 impact on beauty culture 64 internal 97 Portuguese 64 commensurate /​incommensurate 7–10, 125–8, 158, 203 Conneller, Chantal 24 Connerton, Paul observation of ritual use of silence 186–7 Culler, J. 120 Darwin, Charles On the Origin of Species (1859) 2 Deleuze, Gilles 181 democracy 9 deliberative 125 late-​liberal 114 Derrida, Jacques 12, 128, 135, 197, 206 Of Grammatology (1976) 198 use of deconstruction 137 design industry colour, materials, and finish (CMF) 22–3, 34 Dewey, John 3 diabetes 82 dialectic 18 Bakhtinian 11–13 Hegelian 11, 13 subject-​object 12 Wagnerian 11–12 cultural 11 Douglas, Mary 17, 87 Dwyer, Rachel 41 study of religioscape 41 Edison, Thomas 21, 200 concept of optimism 3–4 design of modern light bulb 21 Edmonds, A. analysis of bodily feature change discourse 57 efficacy concept of 40 Egypt 80 Eliade, Mircea observation of Orthodox temple 158, 165

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Index epilepsy 82 Espeland, Wendy Nelson concept of commensuration 7–8, 126 ethics 126, 137 Ethiopia 91, 198 Addis Ababa Entoto Mariam church 75 Jan Meda 77 Dessie 83 HIV/​AIDS crisis in 75–7, 88 destigimatization 84 Orthodox Church 75, 77, 79–80, 82, 89, 91, 158–9 Book of Baptism 78 Gishen Mariam 78 Timqet 77, 79, 158 use of holy water 78–81 European Commission product innovation based on new/​developed materials estimation 27 evolution biological 2 cultural 2 Darwinian model of 62 Mendelian model of 62 experimentation 28–9 use in materials selection see industrial design failed state 153 failure 3–4, 10, 13–14, 81, 113–14, 129, 149–50, 157, 197–8, 202–3 accusation of 16–17 conceptions of 3, 11, 14 emotional 21 ethnographic 4, 14–16 cultural contexts of 81 material see material failure material cultures of 6–7 materiality of 6 moral accusation 14–15 objectification in 10 performative 114, 135–6, 151 context 120–1 intentional 150 social 9, 14 temporal aspect of 15–16

211

Felman, Shoshana 12–13, 122 feminism 59 First World War (1914–​18) two minutes silence 187 Fischer, David 64 Foucault, Michel 59, 109 concept of governmentality 97 Free University of Seething, The 116 Freud, Sigmund 180 Gaddafi, Muammar 147 Ganderson, Lefi 118–19 Gann, Kyle 185–6 garments deity 52–3 failure of 45–6 peacock feather 51–2 gopa 46–7, 52 kimono 46, 48–9, 52–4 Gebru, Mebratu Kiros 78 Geertz, Clifford 87 Gell, Alfred concept of ‘axis of coherence’ 168 German Clinic for Neurology and Psychiatry 61 Gilsenan, Michael 88 globalization 41 Goodman, Steve observation of impact of sound waves on human bodies 179 Google, Inc. APIs 116 Goswami, Rupa 47–8 founder of Chaitanya Gaudiya Vaishnavism 47 governmentality concept of 97 Halberstam, Judith/​Jack 197 concept of queer art of failure 9, 15 Queer Art of Failure, The (2011) 129 Harris, Ollie 179 Harrison, Simon 68, 71 Hatzolah 99–100, 108–9 cultural view of 100–1 expansion of 100–2 volunteers 101 Hebrew (language) 100 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 11, 180

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hegemony 9–10 Heidegger, Martin ‘Thing, The’ (1971) 181 Henkel, H. 117 Henriques, Julian study of work of vibes 179 heritage 137 deconstruction of 137–8 historical myth 138 Hermann-​Masefen, J. investigation of holy water sites 82 Highmore, Ben concept of ‘awkward materialities’ 179 Hinduism 46 caste system of Brahmin 39–40 deities of 43–5, 49 alankaara (ornamenting process) 40, 53 Brahma 39 Krishna 39, 42–50, 53, 198 Radha 46, 48 Shiva 39 Vishnu 39 Gaur Purnima 46, 48–50, 54 Gopashtami 46 mythology of Mahabharata 42 sects of Gauidya Vaishnavism 39–40, 42, 44, 47, 52 temples of 39, 53 darshan 42–5, 49, 53, 200 worship of murtis 40, 42 Vedics 39–40, 50 HIV/​AIDS 75, 88 destigimatization of 84 treatment of 17, 89 antiretroviral treatment (ART) 75–6, 84–5, 205 rejection of 75 spiritual healing 75–6, 82, 84–5, 89 holy water 86–7, 91 as ts’ebel 78–9, 85 use in blessings 79–81 sites 83–4 use in spiritual healing 76–7, 82–3, 85–6, 89

failure of 83, 87–90 publicizing of 83 sanctification 79 homunculus 62–3 Horton, Robin ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’ (1967) 80–1 humanism 137 Hungary 50 Husken, Ute When Rituals Go Wrong (2007) 2 incommensurability 9 concept of 7–8 stasis of 10 India 63 Orissa 51 West Bengal 40, 48 Kolkata 40 Mayapur 40, 42–3, 45–6, 48, 51, 53 industrial design 21, 23, 32 manufacturing process 35 material failure in, see material failure materials selection experimentation 28–30 supplier involvement 31–2 Industrial Revolution 26 imperialism 151 Ingold, Tim 14 Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) 34–5 innovation material 34–6 International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Iskcon) 39–41, 200 Arcana 51–2 founding of (1966) 39 Governing Body Committee (GBC) 50–2 Krishna Consciousness 39–40, 45, 48 materiality in 41–2 religioscape of 53 temples 50 altars of 43–4 darshan pictures 44

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Index invention 10–11 Ireland, Republic of 49 Islam 66 biological preformation 63 fashion 65–7 notions of purity 70 Sunni 141 Islamic State (IS) Occupation of Palmyra (2015–​16) 152 Israel 103, 151 Haredi population of 96, 102 Italy migrant population of 65 Jakobson, Roman definition of transduction 199 Jamaica 65 James, William 3, 180–1 Japan 63, 70 Jesus Christ 79, 164 baptism of 78 Jiménez, Corsín 85 John the Apostle 163 Jordan, River 78 Judaism 98–9, 103 cosmology of 98 Haredim 16–17, 95, 97–9, 103–​6, 109 cosmology of 106 healthcare access issues 96–7, 99–101 ideology of 95–6, 99 social organization of 100–1 state view of 108 territory inhabited by, see Israel, UK kosher 99 post-​mortem examination practices 106–7 Purim 101 Kieckhefer, Richard study of spiritual pursuit-​Christian architectural form relationship 169 Klein, Ursula 25 knowledge-​production 76 Köllner, Tobias

observation of Orthodox temple 158, 165 bin Laden, Osama assassination of (2011) 177, 188 Leeuwenhoek, Antoni 63 Levi-​Strauss, Claude 187 Lewis, Sarah 3 Libya Civil War (2011) 147 Littlewood, Roland 69 Lossky, Vladimir view of ecstatic states 167 Mapping for Change 117, 122, 124–5 Marx, Karl 2, 180 Mary 80, 159–60, 163 intercession of 85 material culture studies/​theory 5, 24, 33, 181, 197–9 anthropological conception of 179–80 material engagements 23 knowledge development/​ dissemination 26 material failure 12, 14, 16–17, 91, 134 body as 59–60 concept of 5, 157 in industrial design 21–2, 36 subject-​object dialectic of 12 materiality 7, 197 awkward 179, 182 concept of 5, 178–9, 181 ephemeral 181–2 in anthropology, see anthropology of silence, see silence, materiality of study of 41–2 materials 7, 21, 24–5, 28–30, 32–4, 180, 200, 203 definitions of 23–4 social sciences 25 innovation, see innovation made-​to-​measure 33 ‘miracle’ 36 nano 33 new 27 raw 24 smart 33

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materials consultancy 27 Mauss, Marcel 59 medico-​materialities 98 Merli, Claudia 102 Meshartim 103–5, 108–9 death attendants 104, 106–7 volunteers 103, 105 Miodownik, Prof Mark 24 Mitchell, W.J.T. 178 Miyazaki, Hirokazu ‘Failure as an Endpoint’ (2005), 90 morals, failure as category of accusation of failure 8–10, 14–16, 114, 126–127, 152–153 context 84–89, 96–98 responsibility 108, 206 Moran, Bruce T. Distilling Knowledge (2005) 25–6, 36 Morgan, Lewis Henry schema of unilinear cultural evolution 2 Moses 159 Mouffe, Chantel 126–7 concept of post-​political democratic state 125–6 Naas, Michael 137 New Scientist (magazine) ‘Wonder Stuff: Seven New Materials to Change the World’ (2014) 27 New York Times ‘Brief History of Failure’ 15 Newman, W. R. problematization of artificial v. natural 24–5 Newton, Isaac 180 Nietzsche, Friedrich 180 Nizar Abu Bahaaeddine tomb of 148 objectification 10, 13, 157 in failure 10 one.org ‘Living Proof: Holy Water Healing’ 75 Pakistan Abbottaabad 177 Palestine 103 Jerusalem 141

Paulos, Patriarch Abune 75 Peirce, Charles Sanders 3 Pels, Peter 59 van de Port, Mattijs study of Brazilian baroque churches 167, 170 poverty 75 Povinelli, Elizabeth 197 concept of social project 114 conception of incommensurability 8 Prabhupada, Bhaktivedanta Swami 51 founder of Iskcon 39 Pratt, Mary Louise concept of ‘contact zone’ 116, 129–30 public health authorities access to 96–9, 108–9 Haredi, see Judaism queer theory failure in 9 Raguel, Archangel feast day of 78 religioscape 41, 53–4 Iskcon, see Iskcon Riles, Annelise ‘Failure as an Endpoint’ (2005), 90 Roman Empire 145, 150 Rorty, Richard 181 Rowlands, Michael view of heritage 137 Rubio, Fernando Dominguez 5 Russian Federation 148 Orthodox Church 79 Salah al-​Din (Saladin) 134, 138–40, 142, 144 Salter, L. R. study of use of silence by Quakers 186 San Francisco Chronicle 3 Sanskrit (language) 40, 43, 48 Schieffelin, Edward 135–6 schizophrenia 82 Schmemann, Alexander 78 Scott, James concept of zone of cultural refusal 99 Second World War (1939–​45) Holocaust (Shoah) 100

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Index Seethingers 113–14, 116, 119, 122–4, 127 use of failure 114–15 sexual dimorphism 65 colouration of 65 Shakespeare, William Merchant of Venice, The 198, 206 Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding 65 silence 178, 183–5 assembling 185–7 material conditions of 183 materiality of 178, 187–8, 191 nationalistic 186–7 of map 113–15, 127–8 relationship with failure 113–15, 183 ritual uses of 186–90, 198 vibes 179 Silverstein, Michael 12–13, 198–9 South Korea 63 South Norwood Tourist Board (SNTB) 118 Soviet Union (USSR) 39 Spary, E. C. 25 speech act theory 135 spidersilk potential uses of 26–7 spiritual pursuit longitudinal 169–70 St John the Apostle 159 St John the Forerunner 160–2 St Longinus 171 Stevens, M. L. concept of commensuration 7–8, 126 Stirrat, R. 117 Strathern, Marilyn 129, 197 Partial Connections (1991) 198 Strhan, Anna 169 success in built environment 53, 58, 64, 83, 90, 115 in innovation 15, 21, 32, 34 in relation to failure 3, 7–9, 129, 204–206 in revolution 148 ritual 40, 42–43, 153, 157, 172 Sudan 66 Swami, Gaur Govinda followers of 51

215

Syria 143, 153 Civil War (2011–​) 13–14, 18, 133–4, 139, 145, 148, 151–​2, 198, 202 Free Palmyra 148, 152 Ramadan Massacre 147 cultural heritage of 137–40, 142–3 Syrianness 134–5, 137–8, 141, 144–6, 152 Damascus 134, 142–3 Damascus Citadel 143–4, 149, 151 Homs 147 Independence of (1946) 133 Palmyra 135, 145, 148–9, 151–2 as heritage site 145–6 IS Occupation of, see Islamic State (IS) SANA 143 Sunni population of 141 Thailand Tsunami (2004) 102 Thompson, Michael concept of ‘impossible’ failure 6 Tilley, Christopher conception of materiality 5 transformation of space 157, 163, 165, 167, 174 Anglican-​Orthodox 159 Altar 160 antimension 164 sensual qualities 157–8 tuberculosis (TB) 83 United Arab Emirates (UAE) beauty product sales in 69 Bedouin population of 65 Dubai 57–8, 63, 70–1, 198 Filipino population of 63–4 Oud Metha 61 Health Care City (HCC) 60–1, 68 migrant/​expatriate labour in 70 plastic surgery practices in 61–2 skin colour culture in 60, 65, 69–​70 skin whitening 60, 63–4, 67–8, 71, 200 traditional fashion in abaya 66 dishdash 66–7

216

216

Index

United Kingdom (UK) 17–18, 28, 106, 119, 170–1 government of 34 Haredi population of 95–6 Hatzolah 100–1 healthcare access issues 96–7, 99–101 Liverpool 119 London 22, 100, 113, 118, 158 Olympic Games (2012) 27 South Norwood 118 161–2, 165, 168, 170–4 Surbiton 118–19, 123–4 Manchester 100 National Health Service (NHS) 100–1, 201 Public Health England 109 Scottish Independence Referendum (2014) 118 United Nations (UN) Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 142 World Heritage Sites 142, 145 Security Council 148 United States of America (USA) 49 9/​11 Attacks 18, 182–5, 188–91, 198, 204 New York 39, 177, 188–9 Special Forces 177 University College London (UCL) 117 Bartlett School of Graduate Studies 115 Department of Anthropology Ethnographic Collection 6 faculty of 24

Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum Global Design Forum London Design Festival (2015) 28 Vitebsky, P. concept of ‘essence of “development”’ 83, 205 Wagner, Roy 15 concept of cultural dialectic 11 cultural ‘invention’ 1, 10 Invention of Culture, The (1975) 10–11, 59–60 Wall Street Journal ‘Ethiopians Trade Holy Water for AIDS Drugs’ 76 Whitehead, Alfred North 181 concept of ‘bifurcation of nature’ 180 Wilde, Oscar 3 Wired (magazine) 27 Wong, D. 90 Wright, William 146 Yiddish (language) 100 YouTube ‘Miracle at Entoto, The’ (2008) 85 use in Arab Spring 148–9 ZAKA 102, 105, 109 volunteers 102–3 Zenobia 138, 145–6, 149 Zigon, J. 89 Zizek, Slavoj 186–7