Ways of Knowing : New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning [1 ed.] 9781789204155, 9781845453640

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Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ways of Knowing

Ways of Knowing : New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

Methodology and History in Anthropology General Editor: David Parkin, Director of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford Volume 1

Volume 10

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

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

Volume 2

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

Volume 11

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

Volume 3

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

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

The Problem of Context Edited by Roy Dilley

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

Volume 5

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Religion in English Everyday Life By Timothy Jenkins

The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice Edited by Jacqueline Solway

Volume 4

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Volume 6

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

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

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

Volume 15

A History of Oxford Anthropology Edited by Peter Rivière Volume 16

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

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

Volume 9

Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition By Robert Parkin

Ways of Knowing: Anthropological Approaches to Crafting Experience and Knowledge Edited by Mark Harris

Ways of Knowing : New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

WAYS OF KNOWING ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO CRAFTING EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE

Edited by

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mark Harris

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Ways of Knowing : New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

First published in 2007 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2007 Mark Harris All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

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Printed in United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-364-0 (hardback)

Ways of Knowing : New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

Harris_SB3.indd iv

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In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance … … And what you do not know is the only thing you know T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Four Quartets (1944)

As a scholar you have the exceptional opportunity of designing a way of living which will encourage the habits of good workmanship. Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career.

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C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959)

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CONTENTS

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction: ‘Ways of Knowing’ Mark Harris

1

Part I: Paradigms and Polemics 1. Of Dialectical Germans and Dialectical Ethnographers: Notes from an Engagement with Philosophy Dominic Boyer

27

2. Practising an Anthropology of Philosophy: General Reflections and the Swahili Context Kai Kresse

42

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3. Is Religion a Way of Knowing? Otávio Velho 4. Deskilling, ‘Dumbing Down’ and the Auditing of Knowledge in the Practical Mastery of Artisans and Academics: An Ethnographer’s Response to a Global Problem Michael Herzfeld

64

91

Part II: Time and the Disruption of Knowing 5. Knowing Silence and Merging Horizons: The Case of the Great Potosí Cover-Up Tristan Platt with Pablo Quisbert

113

6. The Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge in a Colonial Context: The Case of Henri Gaden (1867–1939) Roy Dilley

139

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Contents

7. Embodying Knowledge: Finding a Path in the Village of the Sick Paul Stoller

158

Part III: Rethinking Embodiment 8. Crafting Knowledge: The Role of ‘Parsing and Production’ in the Communication of Skill-Based Knowledge among Masons Trevor Marchand

181

9. Communities of Practice and Forms of Life: Towards a Rehabilitation of Vision? Cristina Grasseni

203

10. Seeing with a ‘Sideways Glance’: Visuomotor ‘Knowing’ and the Plasticity of Perception Greg Downey

222

Part IV: Learning and Repositionings 11. Figures Twice Seen: Riles, the Modern Knower and Forms of Knowledge Tony Crook 12. ‘A Weight of Meaninglessness about which there Is Nothing Insignificant’: Abjection and Knowing in an Art School and on a Housing Estate Amanda Ravetz

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13. The 4 A’s (Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture): Reflections on a Teaching and Learning Experience Tim Ingold with Ray Lucas

245

266

287

14. A Discussion Concerning Ways of Knowing Nigel Rapport and Mark Harris

306

Notes on Contributors

331

Index

336

Ways of Knowing : New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

LIST OF FIGURES

5.1a and 5.1b Indians using wind-furnaces (16th–17th century); Indians amalgamating silver with quicksilver (16th–17th century). (Hispanic Society, New York)

121

5.2 From Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615–1616) ‘The silver mines of Potosí as the Inka’s gift to Charles V, the King of Spain’.

131

8.1 DS models for parsing and generating ‘John likes Mary’.

188

9.1 Children engaged in ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ at the Valtaleggio Cattle Fair of October 2004.

210

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9.2 Examples of commodities that represent and disseminate the aesthetics of selective breeding. 212

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume is an outcome of a conference entitled ‘Ways of Knowing’ held in January 2005 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The Department was founded in 1979 by Ladislav Holy, who came from Queen’s University, Belfast and he was shortly followed over from there by David Riches. From two permanent members the Department has grown to twelve; from sharing departmental status with Geography, Social Anthropology acceded to its own department in a School with Philosophy and Film Studies. The reputation of the humanities at the University of St Andrews has proved fertile ground to an anthropology concerned with an interpretation of human experience, which is philosophically sophisticated at the same time as it is empirically rigorous. The volume is also part of a series, which arises from conferences held at the St Andrews Department of Social Anthropology. The first such event took place in December 1982 under the auspices of Richard Fardon and was published as Power and Knowledge: Anthropological and Sociological Approaches (in 1985 by Scottish Academic, Edinburgh). Since then there have been a number of others dealing with the nature of anthropological enquiry. A conference on ‘Ways of Knowing’ suggested itself as a development of this theme. That there are multiple ways of knowing the world, albeit differently valued, contested, coexistent or mutually exclusive, has become an anthropological truism. What meaning is left in the sheer familiarity of the phrase ‘ways of knowing’? The funding for the conference was obtained from the Ladislav Holy Memorial Fund, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the School of Philosophical and Anthropological Studies. I am very grateful to these sources and institutions for the generous financial support of the conference, especially to Kate Holy and Andreas WaldburgWolfegg. Some participants at the conference have not been able to contribute to this book: Peter Gow, James Leach, David Riches and

Ways of Knowing : New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2007.

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Preface

Huon Wardle. I thank them for their thoughtful efforts. I would also like to thank Stephanie Bunn, Richard Fardon, Emilia Ferraro, Stan Frankland, Kay Milton, David Parkin, Joanna Overing and Jonathan Skinner for their interventions and summaries during the conference. I hope they find some of their oral contributions at various points in the book. Roy Dilley gave much needed advice and moral counsel in the organizing of the conference and the preparation of this volume. Thanks to Lisa Smith who kindly prepared the manuscript for sending away. The editing of the manuscript was undertaken when I had grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust and I acknowledge their support with appreciation.

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Mark Harris July 2007 St Andrews

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Introduction

‘WAYS OF KNOWING’

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Mark Harris

This book examines knowing as a practical and continuous activity and the implications of this understanding for anthropology. It is commonplace to talk about different kinds of knowledge: knowledge from intuition or experience, from a skill or the senses, from being acquainted with a place or person, from inference and so on. What often gets left out of these discussions is that knowing is always bound up in one way or another with the world: a person does not leave their environment to know, even when she is dealing with the most abstract of propositions. Nor does she stop in order to know: she continues. Anthropologists are well placed to examine these contexts, for their fieldwork makes them familiar with the practical lives of the people they come to know. The argument here is that these observations make a difference to how anthropologists may proceed in their study of other people’s knowledge. Some of the essays consider the political aspects of this understanding of knowledge, a few evaluate the philosophical dimensions of it, a couple analyse the biological bases of learning new skills, and others detail what happens when knowing is somehow blocked or radically transformed by an event. The variety of topics is unified by the idea that a ‘way of knowing’ is the movement of a person from one context to another, rather than the different kinds of knowledge mentioned above. A way of knowing is more a path to knowledge in terms of an apprenticeship (not in the mystical sense). Knowing, as developed here, is an achievement of work, experience and time. What is the nature of this accomplishment though – is it cumulative or, thinking of T.S. Eliot, a stripping away? In what way

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is knowing measurable against not knowing? Is ignorance a lack of awareness, knowledge or linguistic dexterity? A worker may express in his posture and gestures his sense of exploitation by an employer but not do so in words. The overall argument is about ‘intellectual workmanship’ in C. Wright Mills terms (1970: 214–5), and it is always connected to ethnographic problems. If knowing is ongoing and practical, a form and method – a crafting – has to be initiated which captures the process adequately. This approach is an attempt to achieve a consistency across the stages of the knowing of others. It is no good being interested in experience as an analytical concept, for example, and only writing about verbal reports on the topic. Experience should be integrated in theoretical perspective (e.g. phenomenology), a fieldwork method (e.g. participatory learning, see Dilley 1999, or participant perception rather than observation) and a form (e.g. writing which evokes the texture of experience).1 However, biological processes also mediate experience. What place should they have? Recently, a number of influential anthropologists who have written on knowledge have shown that an outdated theory of cognition lies implicit in many anthropological texts which sees the brain as a computer running programmes and processing information (Sperber 1985; Bloch 1998; Toren 1999; Whitehouse 1999; Ingold 2000). This view of the brain is indefensible since it implies a series of assumptions about biology and culture, the individual and society, sensation and perception, which are not always consistent with each other or supported by analyses from beyond anthropology. The argument of this book is theoretical as well as methodological, for it offers a range of anthropological ventures into philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and history in its attempts to mark out a terrain of enquiry. The contention here is that this project should take place collectively and address an arc of human experience, such as the historical and the contemporary, the diseased and the strong, the ideational and the physical. Given this focus and scope it will not be surprising that many contributors engage with and extend a phenomenologically-based anthropology. Phenomenology’s concern is with the world as it is lived and experienced (Csordas 1994; Jackson 1996; Toren 1999). Thus the methodological connections between it and knowing in practice are well fused here. Part of the appeal of phenomenology is its insistence that any attempt at objectivity is always mediated by the context and personalities within which it is framed (Moran 2000). But can the objective and the subjective be reduced to each other? Some contributors have examined this mediation – that subjective experience can never bring anything like certainty that phenomena are real (see below). For example, Dominic Boyer (this volume)

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Introduction

3

demonstrates that Hegel’s conceptualization of the dialectic was embedded in the bourgeoisie’s nation-building projects of the time. That is, Hegel codified the aspirations of a particular class at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and made a universal concept out of them. For the present purposes, phenomenology serves to reclaim the phrase ‘ways of knowing’ and distinguish the approach here from others which have also used the phrase. But the theory does not limit the various investigations, rather it enables new departures. So a clarification is in order regarding the phrase ‘ways of knowing’, for it is a familiar and informal phrase heard in classrooms and encountered in titles and texts and has been interpreted differently. One often cited source is Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ (1949). The former is the knowledge of a skill, how to put something into action; it is tacit and situationdependent, performative and non-propositional. ‘Knowing that’ is propositional knowledge (theoretical or factual), since it conveys meaning, is based on rules or laws, and is not dependent on context. The distinction between the two kinds has either been developed or challenged from a number of quarters in philosophy and anthropology (see the chapters by Marchand, Downey and Grasseni). One argument against this division is that in the enactment of what we know, the two kinds are merged and are both activities and convey meaning. For example, knowing how to transform the use of a machete from an axe to a paint-can opener or a screwdriver requires a flexible mental representation and previous experience of how to employ the tool. Even so, the distinction has been influential, particularly in Maurice Bloch’s work (see below, p. 13) and is important in Trevor Marchand’s contribution in bringing together cognition and embodiment. There are alternative usages of ‘ways of knowing’. Robert Borofsky’s (1987) ethnographic study of Pukapukans, who live on an atoll in the Cook Islands, makes a central virtue of the difference between native and anthropological ways of knowing, which he understands as separate patterns of cultural learning, each organized and valued differently. Other anthropologists who have used the phrase talk about how the diverse ways of knowing overlap (e.g. Parkin 1995 on Western and Islamic medical knowledges); some, on the other hand, argue for a strong functional separation (e.g. Bloch 1985 on cultural knowledge as being composed of two kinds: everyday [nonpropositional] and ideological [propositional] knowledge), and a few call for their integration (i.e. difference is created by the point of view, e.g. Leach 2005 on scientific and artistic working practices; Crook this volume). These are just some recent published examples. The general attraction of the phrase is its appeal to multiplicity and an inclusive sense of what is considered to be knowledge.

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Mark Harris

The phrase ‘ways of knowing’ is used to remind us that any knowledge is inevitably situated in a particular place and moment; that it is inhabited by individual knowers and that it is always changing and emergent. As such, this book builds on discussions of the ‘anthropology of knowledge’ (Crick 1982; Barth 2002; Boyer 2005), which have focused on the ethnographic and disciplinary meanings and status of knowledge. It extends Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of practice and habitus by making them the objects of investigation, rather than, as Greg Downey writes here, ‘merely the explanatory bridge to resolve theoretical problems, such as the relationship between structure and agency, or the endurance of class differences’ (p. 237). This Introduction prepares for the following chapters by first defining some of the principal issues, with a short illustration, and then identifying the main directions of enquiry in the ‘ways of knowing’ approach. These are: (1) an examination of how anthropologists work, which can be called a crafting of their knowledge; (2) an understanding of the relationship between language, senses and skills, or knowledge that is not articulated verbally; and (3) knowing the past and how time is ‘brewed’ and ‘percolated’, to use Michel Serres’s terms (Serres with Latour 1995: 58). What counts as knowledge and knowing? This is obviously a huge philosophical question – there is nothing new in the current anthropological attention to knowledge – and for the present purposes I shall follow Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s understanding that knowledge is ‘the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess certain characteristics’ (1971: 13). My purpose is not to prioritize or privilege philosophical knowledge over utilitarian knowledge, rather to locate them both in the contexts in which people live. Not all experience becomes knowledge, and not all knowledge becomes articulated into theories of that certainty or language. However, the English language does not make a distinction between knowing as an ongoing process (what we may know by experience, such as the heat in the tropics) and knowledge as a certainty (the actual temperature in Celsius, see Collingwood 1938: 160). This linguistic confusion rather suits our purposes for both are activities involving the whole person. However, it also illustrates the conceptual difficulties being confronted in the following pages and reveals the tension we are grappling with. These definitions roughly demarcate our enquiry, so what if we bring this to an ethnographic level: can the fieldworker presume other people hold to the same certainties, doubts, and truth-values? Is the practical basis of knowledge – its usefulness – similar across places, times and people? A fieldworker may find herself answering these questions in a contradictory manner. She may attribute common

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Introduction

5

capacities to others, such as conscious thought, and also ask questions which assume humans do not share basic understandings about the world – otherwise why do anthropology? (Toren 1999). The point here is to ask about the limits of a notion of humanity in common when we locate knowledge in practice and time, and brings us to appropriately uncertain ground. In this respect, Michael Herzfeld has argued that the discipline should pay more attention to the ways in which people claim to know each other, ‘[i]n that way we may be able to grasp more convincingly how they come to know the world’ (1995: 140). He wonderfully captures not only a sense of shared humanity but also its failings in the title to his article from which I have just quoted: ‘It takes one to know one.’ Indeed, it is precisely in an individual’s ambivalent identification either with a ‘pan-human we’ or with an exclusive collectivity that she chooses, or is forced to choose, that Herzfeld is interested. What this means can be briefly illustrated with two queries which challenge a glib pan-human framework. In English, do we immediately muddy the waters by lumping together what other European languages separate, savoir (e.g. saber, wissen, to know a fact or skill) and connaître (e.g. conhecer, kennen, to know a place or a person)? Does this mean English-speakers understand all knowledge to have the same social character? Clearly, knowing occurs in relation to the meanings of a particular language but it may not be determined by it. As anthropologists often work in their non-native tongues, the semantic differences between languages are an important part of the analysis (see the chapters by Boyer, Dilley and Platt). Humans may share a common grammar of inter-subjective experience, but the languages they use direct their expressions and ideas in definite ways. The second point of interrogation is best raised by the poet Ted Hughes and is of a general literary nature. Hughes asks, ‘What about the experience itself, the stuff we are trying to put into words – is it so easy to grasp? It may seem a strange thing to say, but do we ever know what we really do know?’ (Hughes 1967: 120). Hughes goes on to discuss the uncanny ability of some observers of human life to see a whole biography in a walk or gesture, or to recognize somebody out of the corner of the eye (see Downey’s chapter). It is strange because often we may not be conscious of this knowledge, hence Hughes’s question. This offers a short illustration of one kind of information ethnographers might pick up in the field, but might not be aware of (see Dilley 1999). Some aspects of what we know may remain ‘inarticulable’, but it is the task of ethnographers to try to bring them into a framework of common appreciation. The papers by Marchand and Downey discuss the process of moving from experience to language or understanding, arguing that while action is deliberate

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much happens beyond awareness. Moreover, Hughes suggests that profound knowledge is reached only by intellectual minimalism, a stripping away of previous knowledge, reminding us of the epigraph to this book by Hughes’ fellow poet, T.S. Eliot. These questions express a general problem of translation, between languages, and also between experience and a linguistic form. Commonly, a reader is presented with only the final result of the process of translation, rather than a reconstitution of the manner in which it was made. The contributors here, instead, attempt to capture the unfolding of the moments from fieldwork to writing-up, for research has its own temporal sequence. Of course, this re-enactment is made up after the event and is one possible narrative, but it is the result of critical reflection on what can be known and a bridging of the stages in the process. In this sense, we can think of a way of knowing not as productive of knowledge, but as the continuous line of its reworking by human practice from one context to another.

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* Let me now give an example of the kind of unfolding of anthropological knowledge being proposed. In particular I am interested to reveal the peculiar quality of fieldwork in the way it mixes up the skills and ideas in a nexus of reciprocal relations. My interest in ‘ways of knowing’, and the spur to gather together others interested in the topic, can be pinpointed to a moment at the end of a relatively long period of fieldwork in a peasant village on the banks of the Amazon River in Brazil. I had felt myself reasonably competent in some of the physically demanding skills needed to live on the flood plain, such as paddling a canoe, fetching water, using a machete and so on. Managing daily life turned around a person’s ability to do such actions reasonably well. However, by the end of my time in the field my companions (ribeirinhos) thought I still was not performing these skills in the way they did: my paddling was not quite right and my machete strokes were not flowing enough. I lacked their knack for effortless accomplishment; nor had I learnt these skills in the domestic contexts they had. Their comments forced me to reflect on what I had learnt and how I had learnt it. They were not artisans, so I had paid scant attention to the practical aspects of their life. Moreover, they seemed uninterested in the formal aspects of culture – in the articulation of a history and an identity in selfconscious terms. I felt this apparent lack of formalized knowledge was directing me to what they knew in the form of their skills. My notebooks had little information to help but I had at least participated in many activities and so I started to try to understand these people’s

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Introduction

7

history and identity as silently embedded in their practical knowledge. I am not saying you need to be good at these skills to know them, but you do need to have experienced them to know what it feels like to live as the flood plain villagers do. According to these Amazonian riverdwellers the fact they perceived I was not carrying out the skills in an effective way was evidence that I did not share their identity. I could come to know them through their skills and our shared humanity but I could not be one of them. These skills are a way of knowing since they offer a form of ‘certainty’ within the world. Ribeirinho survival depends on the successful implementation and adaptation of certain skills to changing market demands (Harris 2005). Thus a skill is a good example of Berger and Luckmann’s definition above since the fact that fish can be caught, for example, is proof that ribeirinho perception of the environment is real and their intervention in the world has material consequences. This is an anecdote to show something of the stages at which I came to realize the importance of practical knowledge. But at first I did not see it in terms of a process that needed unravelling and historicizing. I only gradually realized that their knowledge was constituted in different forms to my own once I started reflecting on my fieldwork. Skills were not part of a toolbox of technical proficiency, but coordinated movements which expressed a certain style and aesthetic. Given the implicit nature of this kind of knowledge it was difficult to translate it into analytic prose without distorting the subject matter. So in writing I searched for a form in which to convey it properly and settled on a ‘word painting’, focusing in each passage on a single event or action. This went some way towards writing an ethnography that took as its beginning experience and practice (Harris 2000). I have tried here to establish the common ground between the ribeirinhos’ knowing of the world, how they understand it and my knowing of their lives, for I do not wish to make a categorical distinction between these ways of knowing. Of course, they are organized differently and are commanded by different regimes of control and value. But they are also grounded in the practical uses of knowledge and are temporal. A number of contributors in this book draw attention to this commonality by discussing the crafting of knowledge in both anthropology and human life (e.g. Marchand, Herzfeld, Ingold and Ravetz). Tim Ingold (this volume) discusses his experience of teaching a university undergraduate course that was based in his conviction that ‘learning is understanding in practice’. His objective was to unite his theoretical pronouncements in anthropology about how humans learn with how students could learn that anthropology. This seems a good example of the search for consistency I mentioned earlier. If we have a theory of learning that

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says people learn best by doing, how can we, as teachers, then require students to understand anthropology by talking at them? Students and teachers just like anybody else craft their own understandings. What exactly is this notion of crafting? Herzfeld (this volume) suggests that anthropologists have a number of points in common with the Cretan artisans he has studied, as well as craft workers more generally. This companionship is founded of the primary significance of ‘practical epistemologies’ but their togetherness is now facing fission. Industrialization and globalization have resulted in artisans becoming ‘deskilled’ (which means that a person is no longer recognized as having a particular skill). Similarly, as academics are subjected to auditing, the implicit, the non-measurable, features of intellectual labour are marginalized, and diversity becomes standardized. However, anthropology remains stubbornly an awkward discipline, faithful to telling the stories of its interlocutors. ‘Writing anthropology,’ declares Herzfeld comparing the process to sculpture, ‘is a shaping of ideas grounded in direct personal experience and made accessible through a shared language we know as theory’ (p. 98). This echoes Wright Mills’s (1970) argument that the scholar’s life and work should not be dissociated. The tasks are how to keep hold of this texture-like quality in the making of anthropology and to be rigorous concerning the terms involved. With this aim stated, let me move to detail the three main themes to emerge from the ways of knowing perspective outlined above.

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Methodology and the Practical By placing the emphasis on knowledge in practice and experience, methodology comes to the forefront of an anthropological analysis. This is because the ethnographer is forced to confront two aspects: first, how to develop fieldwork techniques which enable such knowledge to be elicited; and second, how to give adequate expression to the tacit in a recognizable form of anthropological theory (also see the following section on ‘kinds of knowing’). The term methodology is used here to include both these parts, since they concern a way of working and its procedures. However, the term is not satisfactory; workmanship or craft is preferable. In the interests of the wider argument I will maintain the usage of methodology. Traditionally, anthropologists have paid little attention to their methods, but now they are dogged by calls to make them teachable and transferable. Methodology has become a key area for anthropological debate since the 1980s and has intensified with the growth of subdisciplines. This attention arises from a need to rethink the way anthropologists work

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Introduction

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as the people they engage with, and the world about them, change. Moreover, the politics of doing anthropology has been transformed radically in the period since the Second World War. Anthropologists now often find themselves caught between the local political realities of their interlocutors’ lives and the academic demands of their jobs. Nevertheless, the contributors to this volume have all carried out fieldwork, many of them have returned to their fieldsite a number of times, and some have carried out long-term fieldwork in more than one place. We are fully committed to the value of the knowledge derived from fieldwork. The methodological issue here is about what is done with this knowledge as it moves out of the field location to the academy or to national debates involving one’s informants (Herzfeld, Platt this volume). The point here is to understand the connection between various aspects of the research process and how they relate to each other. In particular, the focus is on how anthropologists transform the information they gather in the field of participation and observation (the field site) and analyse it in the field of the reflection (the academy). Stoller’s chapter is a good example in this respect. He juxtaposes his experience of a serious illness and its treatment in the United States and his long-term ethnographic work with Songhay sorcerers of West Africa. As Stoller undergoes a profound personal transformation, he re-evaluates the knowledge he acquired with his Songhay subjects. He attempts to put into practice their cures and rituals in the biomedical setting of the cancer clinic in the U.S. Not only does he describe what he learnt at each stage, and how he wrote about it at the time, he demonstrates how his experiences were being altered by illness. Stoller’s piece is a narrative of thirty years of ethnographic work in West Africa as seen from the present. Another principal source (aside from Ryle) for the phrase ‘ways of knowing’ is found in John Berger’s influential book Ways of Seeing (1974). Berger emphasized the active and reciprocal nature of seeing in relation to what a person believes or knows, arguing that what a person knows is influenced by what she or he sees, and vice versa, although there is never a direct relationship between them (1974: 7–9). The medieval notion of Hell, for example, owed much to daily encounters with fire and burns. Anna Grimshaw (2001) borrows Berger’s phrase to understand vision as a critical tool with which anthropologists can address issues of knowledge and method. A way of seeing generates a particular mode of knowing, which influences how the world is understood. The way of seeing of Bronislaw Malinowski, the pioneer of modern anthropology, according to Grimshaw, can be characterised as ‘romanticist’ because his method was about the novelty of knowing the Trobrianders and exposing himself to

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them; Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, the other ground-breaking figure in anthropology, has a vision which is more akin to a rationalist approach since he was interested in structures and underlying patterns. Ways of knowing is likewise intended to foreground the situated and relational character of knowledge. According to Ladislav Holy, before an ethnographer reaches the field site she is directed to understand in particular the way: ‘[a] specific theory about the constitution of the investigated object does not only shape the method of investigation; it also defines research problems and directs the researcher’s observations of the specific aspects of the object deemed theoretically significant’ (Holy 1984: 18). Each theoretical approach generates ‘an overall methodological stance’ and turns the investigator to particular kinds of questions. For example, functionalism, which dominated British social anthropology for much of the twentieth century, was notable for the kind of consistency this volume seeks. There was, according to Keith Hart, a ‘unity of its object, theory and method. The object was “primitive societies” … [t]he theory was functionalism, the idea that customary practices however bizarre, make sense and fit together, since daily life would be impossible otherwise. And the method … was “fieldwork-based ethnography”, joining people where they live to find out what they do and think, and then writing it up at universities back home’ (Hart 2004: 3). As the world changed and anthropological theories advanced, the method, the representation and the object did not transform at the same pace. The contributors here attempt to achieve an innovative kind of unity, though each piece differs in how it can be done. In her exploration of how art and anthropology may combine at the level of practice and theory, Amanda Ravetz uses her observations of fine art students in Manchester and her fieldwork experiences of a poor housing estate in the North of England. She sets up the methodological framework in which a combination could take place, which centres on linking the students’ proposition that art is a verb and the anthropological one that knowing is an activity. The selfconsciousness of art in form and expression can provide lessons for ethnographic studies in how to re-engage with its subject matter, in this case women on the housing estate. Here Ravetz offers the technique of ‘tracking’, which describes this re-engagement and attempt to bring together visual culture and ethnographic representation. Tracking involves following the movement of people in their activities. Moreover, the term alludes to the hard-to-pin-down nature of social experience, as well as to the positional nature of knowing; women who are pursued by police and live on poor housing estates know the world from a very different place when compared to fine art students

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checking out each other’s work. This last theme of the positionality of knowing is also important in Otávio Velho’s piece (see below). The concern with methodology has also been critical to those who have used indigenous conceptions of knowledge to interrogate ‘Western’ and anthropological ones (e.g. Overing and Passes 2000; Hirsch and Strathern 2004). Marilyn Strathern has pioneered this approach (1988), in particular using Melanesian ethnography to scrutinize what are called Euro-American concepts, reversing the normal flow of analysis from centre to periphery. This procedure has been productive in throwing up new ideas about anthropological topics such as kinship, gender and exchange – that is, various aspects of social relations. Strathern also talks about the ‘scaling of knowledge’; the work of an anthropologist is to move knowledge from one scale to another (1995). There is a conversion from one form of understanding, scale or idiom, to another order, along a pathway of knowing. Tony Crook’s chapter develops a Melanesian reading of contemporary anthropological work by focusing on a ‘style of thinking’ about knowledge in terms of the social relations in which it is embedded. Scales of knowing which seem different on the surface actually bear important similarities. Continuing the attention to the practical basis of symbolic systems, Otávio Velho and Kai Kresse investigate the philosophical dimensions of ideas in the ‘South’. For Velho, the starting point is to recognize, in a political way, the position from which a person knows. Thus, he asks how can an alternative account of modernity can be made from the tropics, one which valorizes hybrid forms and has never had much time for essences. Velho, who develops his argument alongside Bruno Latour’s body of work in network theory, is interested in the religious conversion, and emphasizes the need to move beyond categorical divisions (i.e. between indigenous and other knowledges) and the presumption of rupture and change, especially that associated with modernity. Then the continuous nature of the social world can be regained, as symbols and ideas move from one context to another. Kai Kresse’s protagonists are a poet writing in Swahili and an Islamic scholar who both live in Mombasa and are intellectuals concerned with the production of their knowledge. Like Boyer, Stoller and Dilley, Kresse focuses on the life and thoughts of certain individuals in social worlds. But unlike these other contributors, Kresse concentrates on the words and texts produced by the two men and analyses their socially and historically constructed meanings drawing on Islam and African philosophy. The result is ‘a thinking about thinking’ and provides a framework for the study of philosophy contextualized in social practice.

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The attention to methodology is not an end in itself, rather it is a means to an end. That end is the re-engagement with ethnography, a better understanding of how anthropologists come to know the people they work with and the uses to which that knowledge can be put. In turn this demystifies the conditions in which ethnographers come to understand their subjects and de-exoticizes the lives of others. This unfolding is tantamount to making anthropology more ‘scientific’, because the connections between method, theory and object are made an explicit part of the analysis. Dominic Boyer states that ‘the work of turning anthropology to look at others’ knowledge has invariably meant symmetrically turning anthropology inward on its own epistemic practices, forms and relations’ (2005: 147). In terms of the present objective, the focus has allowed a move away from methods understood as formal procedures or tools. The shift is towards developing an artisanal approach to anthropology. This methodological responsiveness is epitomized in the titles to two important books. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Lucien Levy-Bruhl wrote a book called How Natives Think (first published in 1910) and at the end of the same century, Maurice Bloch entitled his collection of essays How We Think They Think (1998). It can be concluded that in the intervening period between the publication of the two books, anthropologists developed a critical awareness of the nature of their accounts. We can see this book as a reclaiming of a particular understanding of knowledge, which is different to Bloch’s (see the conclusion to this Introduction), and how our accounts of it are made. As framed for this book, this involves, in addition, consideration of the various modes of apprehension of the world and the time of knowing, either conceived in terms of an individual or across generations.

Kinds of Knowing Anthropological interest in the different modes of cognitive or perceptual apprehension of the world is a relatively recent one – although as pointed out earlier, the concern with the inexpressible and experience has a more general character, as much literary as philosophical. Ethnographers have always dealt with the explicit part of the information they gather in the field, such as what is told them, what they observe and can measure. The tacit aspects such as body techniques, skills, the senses (Howes 2003), practical know-how have been less considered. Certainly since Pierre Bourdieu’s promotion of habitus as a set of embodied dispositions to behave in a certain way (1977) more analytical consideration has been given over to the various kinds of non-propositional knowledge.

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Having recognized the significance of the tacit as an important part of the ethnographic encounter and allocated due methodological place to it, the anthropological problem becomes what theoretical concepts can be used to understand it. Two chapters here by Downey and Marchand seek the answer outside anthropology in the incorporation of theories from neuroscience and linguistics. Others (e.g. Dilley, Stoller, Grasseni, Herzfeld) have taken a more strict anthropological line and sought to apply existing disciplinary concepts to develop a more finely tuned sensitivity to the unsaid. The aim is to avoid reducing what people know to what they say. Nevertheless, even if we avoid this reduction, we can ask whether the different modes of apprehension are fundamentally of the same kind, part of the same subjective experience? On the other hand, whether the tacit is really a ragbag term which is not analytically strong enough to contain all that it is supposed to? Downey (this volume) argues for the ‘diversity of embodied knowledge [which] includes perceptual, physiological, and behavioural change, important in their own right, not because of what they might represent in a propositional or symbolic sense’. They are individually significant because they open up the ‘black box’ (in the sense of being unclear about what happens) of ‘knowing how’: people do not just learn a skill and somehow perform it, as is implied in Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. The changes which occur can be documented and given a precise location and time. Recognizing the body’s malleability then is an important part of rethinking embodiment. However, the answers to the questions above are not uniform and in some cases they are mediated by the local ideas on the topic. That is, the kind of knowing is given ethnographic saliency by considering simplicity (Herzfeld) or the opposites of knowing – ignorance, incompetence, silence and deception (Platt and Dilley). Before outlining these chapters’ contributions I need to make clear the kinds of knowing under consideration. Fully aware of the limitations of equating language and knowledge, Maurice Bloch has explored the ‘relation between what is, on the one hand, explicit and conscious – that is to say, the type of informants’ knowledge that anthropologists can hope to access easily – and, on the other hand, what is inexplicit or unconscious but perhaps more fundamental’ (1998: vii). Elsewhere, he attempts ‘to go some way towards writing ethnography in such a way that actors’ concepts of society are represented not as strings of terms and propositions but as governed by lived-in models, that is models based as much in experience, practice, sight, and sensation as in language’ (1993: 130). Bloch proceeds to write about ‘five linked mental models’ for the Zafiminary of Madagascar (1993: 132). It should be made clear that

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the form of these models is structured by cognitive operations given in the brain; which are called schemata (1998: 6; see Toren 1999 for a phenomenological reading of schemata). Their content is, of course, socially given. Such models exist independently of language, since the way in which children put them together is never voiced. So verbal communication neither plays an important part in the learning of schemata, nor is it particularly useful as a method of accessing them. Human awareness of them is necessarily limited, but, according to Bloch, ethnographers cannot ignore their importance. In this book, Downey and Marchand provide a response to the challenge work like Bloch’s presents, which is that it is not credible to limit an analysis to semantics and ignore the biological or psychological aspects. Downey argues that anthropologists need, when necessary, to have models of knowledge which are in keeping with research elsewhere. His chapter examines the bodily transformations that take place in learning capoeira, a Brazilian martial art, which involves two people ‘fighting’ in a circle to music. Like Marchand, he draws on neuroscience in order to shift the terms of knowing and understand what bodily knowledge might mean in biological terms. Can a person see without being aware what they are seeing? Downey argues that the reactions to an opponent’s movements have to be so quick that it is impossible to process consciously the information. Developing the themes of vision and learning (see Grasseni this volume), Downey shows that vision in capoeira is a form of seeing that involves a tangible grasp of one’s opponent. Learning how to see in combination with one’s bodily movements is the technique to master in capoeira. More generally, this process of learning can be linked to anthropological studies of magic: possessing a representation of an object is to have a substantial connection to it (Taussig 1993). For Downey, there are different forms of knowing, each one with its own domain of enquiry, which extends our understanding to include how biological processes clarify the separation. Marchand, on the other hand, agrees there is a degree of specialization in cognitive and perceptual abilities, but at the level of practice says these cannot be distinguished. Marchand’s chapter picks up many topics from other papers, such as vision (Downey, Grasseni) and craft (Herzfeld, Ingold). A central concept for Marchand is an ‘environment of situated learning’, which he takes from Jean Lave’s studies to indicate the definite social contexts and relations of learning. Marchand’s environment is a building site of temple construction in Mali and his objective is to understand the kind of communication passing between masons. As they work on-site, they take part in numerous half-finished conversations and yet manage to coordinate successfully between themselves and the completion of tasks. Drawing on two recent linguistic theories (mirror

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neuron and dynamic syntax), he deepens an understanding of nonpropositional forms of knowledge by showing how the gestural and the linguistic are fused. The theories Marchand uses show that the craftsmen’s ways of knowing are not the implementation of a schema or rule, rather it is emergent in the fluid connections between the environment, the individual’s processing of language, his skill in masonry and attending to others in the effort of a collective goal. Pursuing ethnographic aspects of different kinds of knowing, Roy Dilley asks about ‘not knowing’? Building on Mark Hobart’s writings, he examines the social construction of ignorance (e.g. Hobart 1993). The context is colonial Senegal in the early twentieth century where efficacious knowledge of language, settlements, ethnic identities and the physical environment is at a premium. Perhaps for this reason, the training of French colonial officers was largely implicit, derived from ‘being there’ and learning on the job. Of course, the price of colonial ignorance was high. Dilley focuses on one man, Henri Gaden, who became extraordinarily knowledgeable about colonial Senegal. Gaden married a Senegalese woman and took seriously the task of his ethnographical and geographical missions, but he was a member of a dying breed. The next generation of officers, from the 1920s, were trained in France at the Ecole Coloniale, and posted for relatively short periods to a number of different countries. These new officers looked down on those like Gaden for whom knowledge was practically generated. For Gaden, the new recruits were not competent to conduct their work and relied more on the government in Paris for advice and direction. This shift in colonial context and policy parallels the one Herzfeld draws between audited and artisanal knowledge. The contributions here also address the question of form, as raised in the previous section. For how can the unsaid be given adequate representation without fundamentally distorting its character? However problematic the task of giving expression to experience, we should distinguish between our accounts and what they refer to. Marchand opens with an evocative description of how one apprentice mason was considered to have shed his status as a novice. And Downey describes the skills of capoeiristas in detail. Nigel Rapport narrates a scene from his fieldwork in a Scottish hospital with a view to showing how the routine of the place belies the creative nature of individual conversations. He argues that people zigzag between different kinds of knowing, imaginative and perceptual for example, in an eclectic engagement with the world. In other words, the drive to analyse the various kinds of knowing is mirrored by the attempts to find a form in which to evoke them. For writing, according to Rapport (1997), is an act of perception. This diversity of form is an appropriate way to keep open the significance of different forms of knowing.

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Knowing the Past Many chapters deal with how knowing as an activity is caught up in time. Some of this interest is linked to transformations of individual lives as a consequence of illness, apprenticeship or events in the environment. Others are taken up with longer time-scales, such as Velho’s interest in modernity, and how the past can be known. Platt reminds us that the past is not a preparation for the present and that the present consists of multiple times, in the sense that each action, for example, has its own rhythm. In Latour’s terms this is the ‘assembly of the contemporary’ (1993), recalling Serres’s image of the car as composed of different parts, each of which has its own design history, some new, others old (1995). In this respect, we can say that some aspects of social life may change without disturbing anything else, while others may be so central to a particular group that when they are modified they cause a collapse of all the parts around them. Similarly, certain concepts and practices form conceptual bridges to related external ones much more easily than others, which remain stubbornly in place. If we see knowing as inherently temporal, then we need to recognize, first, the different durations of kinds of knowing, second, the ways these times are constituted by our informants, and third, the continuities, or not, between knowing the past and the present. Traditionally, phenomenology has had little to say about knowing the past. The experience of time has, on the other hand, received much attention, but not beyond the immediate world of the subjective. A phenomenologist might say that this is a basic method of the theory, namely the ‘bracketing off ’ of subjective experience. Be this as it may, an anthropologist would find it difficult to employ this method and be taken seriously. The problem is that in many phenomenologically inspired anthropological analyses there is a view that the past cannot be known because it can only be known through the present. The present here means ongoing life, and the way it reconstitutes what is known in the whirling force of the here and now. In one sense this is undeniable, but it neglects the significance of a non-modern view of time, the way it folds and pleats, so that what seems far away actually comes nearer, and vice versa. There is as Wendy James and David Mills write, a ‘profound tendency to presentism’ (2005: 5) in anthropology which has the effect of not just ignoring past labours but divorcing the present from what has preceded it, and eschewing the practical side of human life (what is done), and favouring what people say, their representations and discourses. A sophisticated argument concerning the way the past informs the present is made by Christina Toren (1999: 2). Writing about human development (ontogeny), she maintains that adults can never return to the child they once were because there is an opaqueness and a

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density to their personal pasts which cannot be appreciated through their current selves. She concludes that we cannot ‘have access to how we came to know what we know’ (1999: 13). By the same token it could be said that retracing (or re-enacting) the progress of anthropological research, for the purposes of being methodologically candid, is similarly unfeasible. A person cannot again be a part of and experience the same environment of the past but does that mean she cannot in good faith try to recreate the conditions of learning? Taken to its logical conclusion, this developmentalist understanding seems to deny the possibility of engaging with the past (personal or otherwise), let alone one imbued with the hopes and fears of those who want to know it. Of course, we should not mistake collective and individual memory forms of memory. Even though it is impossible to go back to the past as it was once precisely experienced, can we, as scholars, not try to know the past as if it were another present? The possibility is common currency in ethnography, for it is neither desirable nor possible for an anthropologist to have experienced all the subjects she writes about. Yet the initial training, if it is of sufficient length and intensity, is constitutive of a ‘new organ of understanding’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 120). This organ is one of perception and can then be used in the classroom and at the computer to perceive other societies at other times encountered in texts and images – one’s own experience becomes a guide to cross-check other analyses. Can we not settle then for something in between presentism and historicism, ask present-minded questions but not give present-minded answers? The version of historical knowledge most closely associated with this method is re-enactment theory, as conceptualized by R.G. Collingwood (1994). Tristan Platt examines this method and how it may be of use to anthropologists, arguing that ‘knowing the past involves a specific kind of activity which should not be strange at all to ethnographers, namely the imaginative re-enactment of other people’s thoughts, purposes, intentions’ (p. 119). This knowing could involve recreating the technologies and materials used in silver mining in the Andes in the sixteenth century in order to get a feel for what it was really like. Platt’s case study is a reconstruction of the early days of the conquest of South America and the Spanish interest in silver. Through piecing together various testimonies, he argues that the Inka remained silent to the Spanish about the existence of large silver mines, only revealing the whereabouts of a smaller one. There was a deliberate deception taking place, a ‘concealment about the concealment’. Platt’s point is as much methodological as historical, since the silence does not appear in the evidence itself, it has to be inferred and constructed. In Collingwood’s method, such evidence is considered to be a trace, and has no independent meaning; it has significance only when it is

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constituted by an argument. Traces of the past are then incomplete and are waiting for the right question to be put to them. Platt ends his chapter by turning to the way political demands of a subordinate people often appeal to the past, for example, the collective land demands by indigenous groups are based on their historical residence of an area. Using colonial land titles (among other documents), long-term occupation can be demonstrated, which might lead to national recognition of their rights to the land. In other words, a present struggle is leading the desire for land, and the evidence comes from the past, giving legitimacy to a claim of continuity. This process complicates the way the past is at the service of the present, since new forms of agency are made possible by documenting continuous occupation, which may derive from what Platt calls ‘falsification, mythologization and essentialist self-reinvention’ (p. 135). The task for the analyst is to protect historiographical methodology in order to know the past as it was experienced, however imperfectly, but not as it is invented in the present. In my dialogue with Nigel Rapport, I have tried to move beyond a presentist understanding of the fisherpeople of Brazilian Amazonia. The fisherpeople manifest what is commonly seen as a hybrid of cultural traditions from the Amazon, Portugal and Africa. I argue that these traditions come together in different mixtures depending on the activity and the historical value they were given by people or institutions in the past. Thus a contemporary shamanic curing complex combines Iberian practices around spirit possession, Catholic priestly functions and Amerindian abilities converge to see the invisible world with the use of tobacco. I show that these combinations derive from the imaginative bridges people made in the past between what they knew and what they encountered for the first time, which then became part of accepted practice. Some practices, such as whipping a possessed person with a special plant stalk, are continuous with medieval European ones, but others have changed, such as the role of the shaman-like priest. In other words, I have avoided lumping all actions together but have treated each one separately in terms of its own time and place. Some practices have continuity or resilience over long periods, distances and ideologies, and others change remarkably quickly. Knowing what to do when a person falls ill, then, is an activity which has multiple strands, following Serres and Latour. This understanding is a temporalization of the ‘kinds of knowing’ outlined in the previous section. Dominic Boyer’s chapter usefully brings together many themes discussed across these three sections. He starts off by showing how the social context in which Hegel devised his theory of the dialectic determined the very idea itself. However, Boyer’s interest in the dialectic

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derived initially from his fieldwork with East German intellectuals after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He thus reveals something of the manner in which he came to understand the dialectic. For Boyer, the notion of dialectic powerfully expresses a central tension in experience, that between being and becoming. He uses this tension to study Hegel’s philosophy and how the dialectic continues to influence the worldview of intellectuals in Berlin: ‘[it] hovered as a constant resource for social knowledge’ (p. 36). This brief review can only touch on some of the salient issues. The aim is to move towards an expanded notion of presentism in order to incorporate other presents, which existed in the past, and to understand the past as differentially composed and embedded in practice. Not all pasts inform the present in the same way: some have more pertinence than others.

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Plan of the Volume The first section opens with the volume’s critical priorities: the examination of the social and practical life of philosophical ideas, the significance of where a person knows from, and the global ordering of different kinds of knowing. Part II examines the pathways of learning from one place or person to another, and how they are broken up by disease or ignorance or blocked by deception. The third part is also concerned with learning, but incorporating biological and psychological understandings of vision and language in order to conceive of more ‘plausible’ models for anthropology. Part IV builds on the revisionist arguments of the previous section, and seeks new vehicles for conveying their content. This includes teaching at a university, learning about form from art students as they attend their Masters’ course, a comparison based on a close reading of styles of analysis, and a conversation. These final topics serve to remind readers of activities in which most anthropologists occupy much of the daily lives and craft their work accordingly: teaching, reading and talking.

Other Approaches To end I want to situate the ways of knowing domain of enquiry in relation to other approaches with an interest in human knowledge. This will highlight the objective of the current volume in relation to developments in anthropology. Broadly speaking, since the

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Enlightenment there have been two opposing answers to these questions, the first deriving from René Descartes and the second from Giambattista Vico. We are not dealing with recent developments but long-standing divisions in how philosophers have argued over the nature of knowledge. As I said earlier, this topic is too large to summarize adequately here, but a brief genealogy will show how the present volume fits into this larger scheme. This will help clarify why the situated, practical nature of knowing adumbrated here contrasts with other approaches. At the core is an argument over whether human society can be understood in the same way as the world of nature. Is information, empirically verifiable raw data perceived by the human brain, different from knowledge, the interpretation of that data by the mind? This philosophical question has its modern origin in the first part of the seventeenth century with Descartes’s establishment of the rational subject whose search for knowledge and truth would consist of discovering laws governing nature. This view came to be challenged by Vico when he developed a theory of human history, which ran in opposition to Descartes’s (and Spinoza’s) emphasis on rationalism (Israel 2001). This caused a split in the Enlightenment early in the eighteenth century, for Vico insisted that the study of humanity required different methods to those used in the natural sciences (1999). Humans, according to Vico, can have true knowledge only of themselves and there is a progressive order in the way this development occurs; other kinds of knowledge, such as ‘nature’, are of a different kind (Vico 1999; see also Herzfeld and Platt this volume). Thus forms of life or the environment could not be studied using the same framework. Reason, for Vico, was only one way to comprehend the human condition and discover truth (Herzfeld 1995: 126): there were others such as imagination and empathy (called ‘kinds of knowing’ earlier). This division has been transformed and reworked by many others, but its specific influence continues in the understanding of knowledge as shaped by the human mind whose nature is still much contested (Whitehouse 1999). Moreover, these contrasting Enlightenment and counterEnlightenment positions have been thrown into contemporary relief by the quickening of what can be seen as related positions in anthropology (Whitehouse 1999). On one side lie the phenomenologists who argue that cognition and perception are social activities situated in the nexus of ongoing relations between the person and the world (these scholars may or may not acknowledge Vico as an intellectual predecessor). Skills and techniques of the body are neither simply innate nor simply acquired, but mature both biologically and socially in the whole person. Thus great attention is given in this perspective to the dynamics of

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Introduction

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everyday life and individual development, inducing an ecological type of approach, bringing together brain, body and environment. On the other side, there are the cognitivists (the rationalists, we might say, e.g. Sperber 1996) who seek to understand what an individual needs to know to be culturally competent. Their focus is more on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’ of social life, recalling Ryle’s distinction. Cultural competencies derive from cognitive structures in the brain, which are universal; they therefore reject the ecological understanding. Thus attention is given to the concepts and categories (e.g. living kinds, colours) that humans recognize and whether they are shared widely or not. Essentially this kind of study treats knowledge as an objective or naturalized domain separate from subjective experience. While these rival positions may conceal other more nuanced arguments, the gulf between them is not only historic but continuing. As Harvey Whitehouse (1999) shows, the debate is at the forefront of contemporary anthropology and in one way or another it is difficult to ignore. This book is a continuation of the Vichian side of the debate in an attempt to develop an anthropology of knowledge as skill, and take it forward into new dialogues. Kresse (this volume) argues forcefully that the significance of such a project is both reflective and cumulative. Intellectual exploration should be about the critical improvement of one’s ideas; without reflection on intellectual practice, there can be no understanding of understanding. The essays here can also be characterized by a scholarly concern with the effects of anthropological knowledge (such as Platt’s comments on the use to which Bolivian Indians put the reconstruction of their history). This book is about the different textures of knowing as they pass through their and our hands, and about ‘getting things right’. This anthropological anxiety may not be new, but its current expression in a period of capitalism which puts a premium on transferable skills, flexibility of employment and exclusive notions of academic expertise gives a new pressure to the labour of writing about the knowledge of others.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dominic Boyer, Jim Hunter, Kai Kresse, David Mills, Nigel Rapport, Amanda Ravetz and David Riches for their comments on drafts of this Introduction. A version was presented to the Anthropology seminar at the Institute of Social Sciences, Lisbon. I am grateful to the audience for their suggestions. In this regard, I am especially indebted to João de Pina Cabral for the invitation and various discussions.

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Notes 1. Anthropologists have only recently come to be interested in experience (e.g. Turner and Bruner 1986; Jackson 1989), with a few exceptions such as Rodney Needham (1972) and Godfrey Lienhardt (1961).

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References Barth, F. 2002. ‘An Anthropology of Knowledge’, Current Anthropology 43(1) 1–18. Berger, J. 1974. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Berger, P. and T. Luckmann. 1971. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bloch, M. 1985. ‘From Cognition to Ideology’, in R. Fardon, (ed.) 1985. Power and Knowledge: Anthropological and Sociological Approaches. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, pp. 21–48. ———. 1993. ‘What Goes without Saying’, in A. Kuper, (ed.) Conceptualising Society. London: Routledge, pp. 127–46. ———. 1998. How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, Literacy. Boulder: Westview. Borofsky, R. 1987. Making History: Pukapukan and Anthropological Constructions of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, D. (ed.). 2005. ‘Theme Issue: Revisiting Knowledge in Anthropology’, Ethnos, 70(2). Collingwood, R.G. 1938. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1994. The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crick, M. 1982. ‘Anthropology of Knowledge’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 11: 287–313. Csordas, T. (ed.). 1994. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dilley, R. 1999. ‘Ways of Knowing, Forms of Power’. Cultural Dynamics, 11(1): 33–55. Herzfeld, M. 1995. ‘It Takes One to Know One: Collective Resentment and Mutual Recognition Among Greeks in Local and Global Contexts’, in R. Fardon, (ed.) Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 124–42. Grimshaw, A. 2001. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, M. 2000. Life on the Amazon: The Anthropology of a Brazilian Peasant Village. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. ‘Riding a Wave: Embodied Skills and Colonial History on the Amazon Floodplain’, Ethnos, vol. 70(2): 197–219.

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Introduction

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Hart, K. 2004. ‘What Anthropologists Really Do’, Anthropology Today, 20(1): 3–5. Hirsch, E. and M. Strathern (eds). 2004. Transactions and Creations: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Hobart, M. (ed.). 1993. An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance. London: Routledge. Holy, L. 1984. ‘Theory, Method and the Research Process’, in R. Ellen, (ed.) Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct. London: Academic Press, pp. 13–34. Howes, D. 2003. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hughes, T. 1967. Poetry in the Making. London: Faber. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Israel, J. 2001. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, M. 1989. Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jackson, M. (ed.). 1996. Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, W. and D. Mills. (eds). 2005. The Qualities of Time: Anthropological Approaches. Oxford: Berg. Lambek, M. 2003. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lave, J. 1988. Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leach, J. 2005. ‘Being in between: Sci-art Collaborations in a Technological Culture’, Social Analysis 49: 1. Levy-Bruhl, L. 1926 [1910]. How Natives Think, trans. L.A. Clare. London: Allen & Unwin. Lienhardt, G. 1961. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. Signs, trans. with an introduction by R. Murphy. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Mills, C. W. 1970. The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Moran, D. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Needham, R. 1972. Belief, Language and Experience. Blackwell: Oxford. Overing, J. and A. Passes. (eds). 2000. The Anthropology of Love and Anger. London: Routledge. Parkin, D. 1995. ‘Latticed Knowledge: Eradication and Dispersal of the Unpalatable in Islam, Medicine, and Anthropological Theory’, in R. Fardon, (ed.) Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 143–163. Rapport, N. 1997. Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology. London: Routledge.

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Ryle, G. 1984 [1949]. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Serres, M. with B. Latour. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. R. Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Sperber, D. 1985. On Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1995. The Relation. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press. Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Toren, C. 1999. Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London: Routledge. Turner, V. and E.M. Bruner (eds). 1986. The Anthropology of Experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Vico, G. 1999 [1725]. New Science, trans. D. Marsh, with an Introduction by A. Grafton. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Whitehouse, H. (ed.) 1999. The Debated Mind: Ethnography versus Evolutionary Psychology. Oxford: Berg.

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PART I

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PARADIGMS AND POLEMICS

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Chapter 1

OF DIALECTICAL GERMANS AND DIALECTICAL ETHNOGRAPHERS: NOTES FROM AN ENGAGEMENT WITH PHILOSOPHY

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Dominic Boyer

This much is clear: the anthropology of knowledge is finding renewed interest on both sides of the Atlantic. Some have even embraced it as a methodological intervention with the potential to provide striking epistemological reframings for anthropological theory and ethnography (Holmes and Marcus 2005; Maurer 2002; Miyazaki 2004). Although I am very happy to see more discussion of knowledge within anthropology, I am not entirely convinced that there is anything so radical about the anthropology of knowledge. One could just as well argue for its banality since it would be difficult to locate anthropological research that did not, in some fashion, speak to and about human knowledge. From early studies of mythology, magic, science and religion to more recent interest in the invention of traditions, social imaginaries, and the ethnography of ‘cultures of expertise’ like scientists and professionals, the semiotic and epistemic interface between human communities and their social and natural environments, has long been a central, perhaps the central, focus of anthropological knowledge-making. As Malcolm Crick put it in his 1982 review article: the anthropology of knowledge ‘is not a subfield but merely a reminder of what anthropology is centrally concerned with’ (Crick 1982: 287).

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If epistemological intervention perhaps overstates our case, in an essay no less excessive in its claim to an ‘anthropology of philosophy’ it is worth lingering on the desire for epistemological intervention for a moment, since it highlights key differences between the epistemic attentions and intentions of anthropology and philosophy and also, perhaps, the reason why philosophical knowledge is an object of interest, even fascination, for anthropologists in the first place. The beauty of philosophical knowledge is its evidently transcendental engagement of the transcendental – its capacity, even in its most evidently anti-rationalist (like Nietzsche [1997]) and processualist (like Wittgenstein [1968]) and deconstructive (like Derrida [1998]) incarnations, to sustain discourse and faith in a recognizable and retrievable parallelism between human reason and the logic of the world. This is the particular expertise of philosophy – transposing the practical experience of reason into epistemological, phenomenological, ontological schemas – at least in its most familiar, modern and Western instances, and there is something very attractive (if also unsettling) about its capacity to produce knowledge of the reason of the world with so little evidence of self-doubt. The project of interrogating this philosophical capacity for transcendental knowing has likewise been with us for some time. As the recently departed Pierre Bourdieu tirelessly reminded us, it is in the social character and political mission of philosophical activity to distill Knowledge from its social, corporeal and historical embeddings and to cultivate instead its seemingly universal and transhistorical features (1988: xxiii–xxiv, 2000). But Bourdieu’s insight actually belonged first to Marx and Engels in their critique of Hegelianism as precisely the philosophy of history one would expect from people who enjoyed the relative luxury of specialized mental activity in a capitalist society (1978: 148–160). Anthropology, I think I can safely claim, specializes elsewhere. At least since the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropology has always been rather stubbornly concerned with the existential, social and historical intricacies of human knowledge. Even the most formalistically – or universally – inclined among us are acutely aware of the importance of the settings, moments and relations within which humans know. Cultivating this awareness is, if you will, our expertise as anthropologists, an expertise that both creates a space for the destruction of, and the desire for, philosophical knowledge (no less than our own intellectual attentions might provoke moments of desire and disdain from the pure epistemologist). The destructive impulse is, as noted above, well-documented. The sociology of knowledge from Marx to Gramsci to Lukács to Mannheim to Bourdieu, for example, has argued its case in terms of a rejection of the possibility of pure, contextfree ideation of the kind prized in philosophy and elsewhere. For Marx,

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as for Bourdieu, epistemology, and ontology for that matter, are aspects of ideology. By ideology, Marx meant not only the dominant ideas of a dominant class but also the orientation to knowledge cultivated by a particular social position in the division of labor (see Boyer 2005). Indeed, Hegelian idealism or Smithian political economy, for Marx, reflect not just the ideational armature of bourgeois hegemony but also the social subjectivity of specialized mental labour in their symptomatic fantasies of intellectual transcendence such as, for example, their faith in the existence of pure ideation and its capacity to discern the natural logics of human social experience (see Boyer 2005a). But a desire for intellectual transcendence suffuses the work of critics of ideology as well even though its impulse has been much more rarely acknowledged, even by the greatest of the sociologists of knowledge. Think, for example, of a work like Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations (2000) that concerns itself primarily with an exposé and exorcism of the transcendentalism inherent in the practice of philosophy. Like all of Bourdieu’s work, the Pascalian Meditations gets certain aspects of professional intellectual life just right (e.g. its micropolitical, agonistic aspect), but suffers serious blind spots elsewhere as a result of centring the professional agon in its analysis. None is more telling than the fact that Bourdieu, despite claiming reflexivity as his method, does not discuss his own implication as a specialized mental actor in Marx’s sense. Instead he confronts philosophical transcendentalism with his own brand of sociological transcendentalism, asserting the possibility of higher modes of objectivity that can emancipate sociology from ideology (also Bourdieu 1988: 26–35). He also tells us quite earnestly that we must understand how he does not like the intellectual in himself (2000: 7) – a confession I do not believe for a moment. Instead, I think that he, perhaps like you and me as well, cannot help but desire (in a jouissance sort of way to be sure) pure intellectualism of the philosophical variety at the same time that our vocations as social theorists and ethnographers demand from us something other than it. Bourdieu aptly characterizes his sociology of philosophy as containing a therapeutic potential but I am not sure how effective the therapy will be until one admits that it is not just the symbolic or academic prestige of philosophical knowledge that makes it seductive to social science but also its realization of the desire, also our desire, for a kind of transhistorical, transcontextual extension of intellectual power and being. It is the fantasized immortality of philosophical knowledge (an effect created precisely, in good Durkheimian fashion, through its consistent epistemic and practical rejection of the profanity of sociality and history) that makes it so attractive (see also Falcone n.d.). Bourdieu’s highly abstract and technical prose, just

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like my abstract and theory-laden introductory remarks in this essay are performances of this same desire, no matter what we say we are criticizing. Our orientations to knowledge as professional scholars tend to exemplify what I have termed the social ‘phenomenology of expertise’ (2005, 2005a; Boyer and Lomnitz 2005) that encourages intellectuals to valorize abstract and formal dimensions of knowledge in accordance with the specialized practical attention to knowledge that anchors our place in the social division of labor. That the valorization of abstract knowledge and the desire for pure ideation are symptomatic of anthropologists as well is an irony that has not been lost on Michael Herzfeld, who has written with concern of how theoretical abstraction often eclipses other modes of human knowledge in professional academic writing (2001). So, if an anthropological engagement with philosophical knowledge should resist the latter’s epistemological overtures but if the horizon of a pure critique of pure ideation is not a very fruitful direction either, what then? I remain unapologetic in considering the Marxian critique of ideology to be a helpful point of departure for thinking about how anthropology might engage philosophy since it urges us to confront philosophy as social, historical and human practice (see Kresse this volume and Kresse 2002). Otherwise, since anthropology so often mines philosophy for sources of theoretical inspiration, it is relatively easy, when we come to take philosophical knowledge as an object of anthropological inquiry, to pursue philosophy on its own epistemic terms – that is, as a strictly ideational enterprise. But I would also emphasize that the recognition of ideology in philosophy is only a beginning, not an end in itself, as in some critical sociologies of philosophy. I would like to devote the rest of this essay to outlining two case studies, one historical and one ethnographic, that are drawn from my own encounters with philosophy in a recently completed book, Spirit and System (2005). Spirit and System outlines an alternative method of anthropological engagement with philosophy that explores the social, phenomenological and historical dimensions of philosophical knowledge but that also emphasizes the links between philosophical knowledge of history and society and other modes of social knowledge and ways of knowing within culture ranging from the everyday hermeneutics of social experience to processes of identity formation, to political ideologies and programs of social reform. As an ‘anthropology of the dialectic’ of sorts, Spirit and System seeks to trace what I term ‘dialectical knowledge’ throughout German intellectual culture, across its more and less formal circuits of knowledge-making. This project bears a kind of Wittgensteinian family resemblance to the critical comparativist anthropology of knowledge developed by Marilyn Strathern and others in the context of Melanesian

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anthropology (for example, Miyazaki 2004; Strathern 1991; Wagner 1981). But I would emphasize the difference that my work has sought a critical unravelling of Western philosophical knowledge from within, a demonstration of the predication of its expertise upon the social and phenomenological experience of its knowers, rather than on a confrontation of Western and non-Western knowledges per se. It is hardly a question of one method being superior to the other. Rather, the key methodological difference, it seems to me, is where one wishes to begin one’s critical engagement with ‘knowledge’ in the first place: with a comparison of epistemic forms themselves or with an analysis of conditions of possibility of knowing. The questions that have come to absorb me are ones such as: ‘How is it possible for Hegel to have conceptualized his dialectical philosophy of history in the manner and terms that he did?’ ‘Why did Marx seek to save the dialectic from his devastation of Hegel?’ In turn, the answers to such questions point toward dialectical knowledge as something very specific to its historical and social conditions of origin in modern German intellectual culture. Yet, at the same time, they suggest that the particular apprehensions of temporality, spatiality and action that the dialectic formalizes and concretizes are also available to human knowledges other than those that have been subsequently canonized as ‘German philosophy’, a fact that makes the dialectic abundantly more interesting than were it solely the epistemic artifact of one culture. To explain, let me say a few words about what I mean by ‘the dialectic’. When I describe dialectical social knowledge in modern German intellectual culture, I mean social knowledge that foregrounds and, on occasion, ontologises two tensions in human experience. The first is a temporal tension between becoming and being; and the second is a spatial tension between interiority and exteriority (or simply, inwardness and outwardness). I write further of ‘positive dialectical knowledge’ that emphasizes the unmediated extension of inner potentiality into external actuality and of ‘negative dialectical knowledge’ that emphasizes, by contrast, the power of external actuality to constrain, compromise and imprint inner potentiality. In both cases, dialectical knowledge is epitomized in indexical and referential distinctions between master tropes like spirit and form or spirit and system, tropes that invite frequent projects of ontological finishing work. The term ‘dialectic’ did not always signify these tensions and I would wager that it does not signify these tensions to most of the educated persons who use the term today. In Greek and medieval philosophy, ‘dialectic’ denoted a method of reaching the truth through dialogue and eventually became associated, even synonymous, with logic and logical disputation. The term ‘dialectical’ in contemporary social

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science is often used less in its technical Hegelian-Marxian sense and more often to signal a broader sense of ‘co-determination’ so that any two things or forces that are seen to influence one another to co-create a new thing or state are said to exist in ‘dialectical relationship’ to one another. My use of the term is borrowed more faithfully from Hegel who managed a rather remarkable redefinition and valorization of the dialectic in his political philosophy. In the Philosophy of Right (1991 [1821]), for example, Hegel argued that the dialectic was something more than what Greek and medieval philosophers had made of it: ‘The moving principle of the concept, which not only dissolves the particularizations of the universal but also produces them, is what I call dialectic.’ And, ‘This dialectic, then, is not an external activity of subjective thought, but the very soul of the content which puts forth its branches and fruit organically’ (Hegel 1991: 59–60). Hegel emphasized that the dialectic was not simply a conceptual device or method; rather, it represented the ‘very soul’ of the historical process, a divine ontologic of extension and formation (Gestaltung) that unfolded, in part, through conceptual devices and methods. My first case study is a historical examination of why Hegel ontologised the dialectic in his place and time in the particular language that he did. My argument, in brief, is that Hegel’s genius lay in his codification of the social phenomenology of integration, extension and cultural agency shared by his social caste (the Prussian Bildungsbürgertum or cultural bourgeoisie) into the transcendental register of philosophical discourse. Hegel’s dialectical philosophy formalized an already dialectical social imagination of the ‘becoming’ of the German nation among the intelligentsia of Central Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a social imagination that they vigorously translated into nation-building projects and ethnological knowledge of Germanness – so much so that dialectical ethnotypes (the best known of them is German ‘inwardness’) are still resonant and widely-acknowledged today. The crux of this story is the relatively unique social situation of intellectuals in Hegel’s place and time. Historian James Sheehan has written that there is little that one could call nationally ‘German’ in German-speaking Central Europe of the eighteenth century (1981: 8). The aristocracy still oriented themselves to a courtly and European stage while the lower and middle classes tended to be highly localized in both their spheres of activity and their outlooks on the world. Modes of sovereignty and vernacular language were legion, regional economies were unevenly integrated, the transportation infrastructure was poorly developed, and so on. Within an abundantly heterogeneous and localized social environment, German intellectuals or Gebildeten (literally, the educated or enlightened) as they termed themselves were

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distinguished by their relatively high degree of translocal mobility and awareness. German students typically travelled far abroad to complete their education and then were often barred from returning to their home towns by tight labour markets in the professions, administration and universities. As they circulated throughout Central Europe, taking short-term positions here and there, they maintained relatively intimate networks of correspondence with one another, and began, in the process of intellectual dialogue and exchange, to fantasize the social landscape of Central Europe as a canvas for a national-cultural realization of the German Volk. State bureaucracies expanded across the second half of the eighteenth century and Gebildeten were recruited in higher numbers into the lower ranks of government, becoming increasingly entitled and even ennobled relative to other middle-class strata. Among civil servants and literati especially, a sense of translocal intimacy and proximity to political power merged into a self-understanding of a vanguard role in the process of national formation. Gebildeten identified in their relative communicative unity and in their ethic of a pure orientation to knowledge (Wissenschaft) a model for the German nation and for Deutschland (Germany) more broadly, one that sought to transcend vernacularity and to reconcile social particularities to cultural universals. Indeed, their imagination and articulation of national Germanness was modelled upon the values they prized in themselves: linguistic unity and virtuosity, intellectual seriousness, pious discipline, all signalled by the core caste values of Geist (inner genius), Kultur (culture) and Bildung (moral formation). In settings like the University of Jena in the 1790s, one encounters the normative ideals of the Gebildeten being converted into dialectical knowledge of Germanness as a whole (for example, the positive virtues of German inwardness and intellectuality were emphasized especially in opposition to the French). By the first decades of the nineteenth century many in the mainstream intelligentsia were actively engaged in producing positive dialectical narratives of national ontology and teleology, foretelling an inevitable actualization of the German national spirit and its culture. Gebildeten fantasized the collapse of the estates system that prevented them from gaining greater power over national-formation, and with the wave of Prussian state reform during the Napoleonic period, they eagerly expected that the guidance of modernizing and actualizing the German nation would fall to them. At the high watermark of intellectual optimism, in the excitement surrounding the founding of the University of Berlin in 1811, philosophers like Fichte dreamt of a modern rational state, a Kulturstaat as he termed it, with a university as its central institution.

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This was precisely the historical and social context within which Hegel began to articulate the dialectical imperative in history – for Hegel, the divine Idea of freedom works through its World-Spirit, extending itself, cancelling itself, sublating itself through the materials of the world (including, of course, humanity and its cultures) until it realizes its highest reconciliation of universality and particularity in the political and cultural formation of a rational liberal state administered by Gebildeten. Rather than an epistemological/ontological innovation, Hegel’s redefinition of the dialectic reads to me as an artful codification of the dialectial social imagination of Gebildeten that had developed across the previous century. There was no European intelligentsia more concerned with reconciling universality and particularity, nor more fascinated with the emancipatory power of a rational state than the Prussian intelligentsia during this period. And, in turn, Hegel and his philosophy had a kind of Latourian spokesperson effect as they circulated in Prussian intellectual culture in the 1820s and 1830s, further elaborating a certain social fantasy into expert knowledges of law, politics, society and theology. In retrospect, the progress of becoming did not turn out quite as expected. Indeed, the story becomes rather tragic for German intellectuals after their Hegelian epitome. The end of the reform era was followed by the increased repression of intellectuals and the failure of the revolution of 1848 to challenge seriously aristocratic hegemony within German political culture. In the second half of the nineteenth century, shifting relations within the societal elite of the German states dealt the final blow to the social imagination of the Kulturstaat as Gebildeten were relegated to the position of stewards of national culture (in the sense of education and the arts) but marginalized from political influence by wealthy bourgeois and aristocratic industrialists. By the time that the German nation-state was eventually unified under Prussian hegemony, the virtuous national organism the Gebildeten had once imagined now seemed strangely spiritless and alien to them. By the end of the nineteenth century, even the most statusful and conservative segments of intellectual culture (like the civil service) had come to decry, in negative dialectical fashion, the excess of form, history and system in modern social life and its degrading influence upon the national spirit and culture. This intuition of a negative dialectic of modernity has resonated in the interpretive practices and theoretical settlements of German social theorists ever since, from the Marxian critique of alienation through the Frankfurt School’s critique of cultural disenchantment by rationalization through, most recently, Niklas Luhmann’s autopoetic social systems. But, and this is a story for another essay, I would argue that each of these negative dialectical visions still reflects the social experience and imagination

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of intellectuals themselves (that is, each theory is ‘ideological’, in the original Marxian sense of universalizing relational social experience). Thinking about the Hegelian dialectic in the context of the changing fortunes of the German intelligentsia restores some of the historical and social contours to philosophical knowledge that, as Bourdieu argues, philosophy itself flatly denies. But one must also note how philosophical knowledge is likewise anchored in concrete practices and settings and permeated by phenomenological and dialogical processes of knowing. One of the arguments I advance in Spirit and System, for example, is that the various ontological aspirations of dialectical knowledge in intellectual culture all ultimately index a certain tension in the phenomenology of knowledge, a sense of incommensurability between the extensional powers of the self and the efficacy of external forms and relations. This tension is by no means limited to intellectuals, of course, but it provides the experiential anchorage for their ontologising labours upon dualisms like self/world, spirit/form and agency/structure (see Bourdieu 1977). Rather than simply a philosophical phenomenon therefore, an ethnography of intellectual culture finds dialectical figurations and judgements saturating more formal and public knowledges as well as more informal and private ways of knowing. Dialectical figurations can be discerned, for example, in the ideologies of states and political movements, especially those that speak, as most do, of realizing a popular spirit ‘within’ into a more perfect social order ‘without’. Dialectical knowledge saturates as well the fantasies and terrors of popular culture. So many Hollywood narratives revolve on the tension between a heroic actor and the forces of the outside that seek to mediate or defeat his or her (but usually his) self-realization. This is the case whether the film is as humorous and absurd as Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle or as self-important and terrifying as The Matrix with its total extractive apparatus ‘without’ containing an inassimilable human spirit ‘within’. But the significance of dialectical knowledge in everyday processes of communication and social-knowledge formation is perhaps most striking from an anthropological point of view. My original interest in studying the dialectic came not from reading Hegel and Marx but emerged rather in the course of my ethnographic work with eastern German journalists as I listened to, and participated in, their intellectual labours of social differentiation and identification, their ruminations upon the burdens of German history and of Germanness, and their reflections upon professional intellectual life. The professional lives of eastern German journalists had transformed radically in the several years prior to my research in 1996 and 1997 and I found them keen to talk about these changes.

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Although trained in a Leninist model of journalism as propaganda and organizational work for the party of the working class with an expectation of a lifelong commitment to the East German party-state, my interlocutors had found themselves in the autumn of 1989 drawn along with everyone else into the historical whirlwind of the collapse of the Iron Curtain, then the collapse of the party-state and, finally, the unification of the two Germanys in 1990. If the fall of the Berlin Wall had brought with it an unprecedented, fleeting period of professional autonomy – as the party-state continued to fund its media system but no longer exercised effective political control over it – the return of order in the form of West German social and political hegemony seemed expected if not entirely welcome. ‘This [1989–90] was a fool’s paradise,’ one man said, ‘we knew it couldn’t last.’ Journalism was gradually routinized again by the emergence of a new management of eastern German media organizations and the period from 1990 to 1994 was recalled as an intense and unpleasant phase of reprofessionalization or ‘re-education’ (Umerziehung) to the standards of West German media professionalism. Throughout all of our conversations about professional vocations, realities and changes in the eastern German media, the dialectic hovered as a constant resource for social knowledge; it was drawn upon frequently to represent the tension my interlocutors sensed between extensional creative powers and constraining, restraining, (and sometimes enabling) exterior forms and forces in their professional lives. System (System), for example, was an omnipresent trope in our dialogues, one that served as an anti-totem of creative selfhood and that condensed a labyrinthine exteriority of forces like the party and its diverse practices and institutions of media control under a single lexical heading. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) itself had been a System, everyone agreed. It was a society founded upon good principles and a positive historical mission to transcend exploitation, injustice and militarism whose leadership had gradually allowed those principles and that mission to drift into routines and thence to harden into dogma and institutions, none of which any longer contained the ‘spirit’ or ‘ideals’ of socialism that had first motivated them. Instead, the GDR became a lifeworld choked with artificial forms and external structures that constrained and alienated its citizens and that made the life of creative individuals like journalists a constant struggle. In virtually all of our conversations they recalled their daily effort to find ways to test the parameters, to find creative openings, or simply, ‘to sprinkle chocolate on the shit’ of the work the party demanded of them. But, interestingly, everyone also agreed, West German society was equivalently a kind of System, perhaps a better and less disingenuous one, but ultimately no less external, structural and inhibiting of the

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creative powers of self than the GDR had been. Several of my friends told me that the main difference they could see between the GDR and the FRG was that whereas the bureaucratic party apparatus dominated the one System, the empty formalities of the market dominated the other. In both cases external form dominated inner spirit and resisted the latter’s inner agency. When I asked him what the opposite of System was, my friend Albert quipped that it would be easier ‘to explain the opposite of silicon’ to me. The metaphor was apt since the trope of System sought to convey a sense of social order both organic and functional, but also foundational and elemental. In the historical memory of my interlocutors, revolution of 1989 was said to be systemlos (system-less). The year 1989 was reported to be both brief and timeless; it was a quality of time, not a quantity of time to be measured and rationalized. It was instead ‘a gigantic time’ and ‘an extraordinary time’ according to my interviewees; it was spirit without system, for once in their lives. It was only later, in my search for a theoretical framework for my dissertation that I very slowly began to discover to what extent the Hegelian and Marxian philosophies of history mirrored many of the same dialectical figurations as those of the East German journalists with whom I was working. This was perhaps unsurprising given how their own educations had steeped them in dialectical philosophy. My friend Karl, for example, was a high-ranking journalist in the GDR, a member of general secretary Erich Honecker’s media entourage for many years. But, unlike many former GDR journalists, Karl had also been able to secure himself a tenured position after 1989 working for a West German boulevard magazine. Several of his former colleagues described him to me as a kind of turncoat and opportunist who must never have had a genuine intellectual Geist to have done so well for himself in both systems. Karl shrugged off this kind of criticism as the sour grapes of people who had been unable to ‘arrive in the West’. He almost never spoke with me about his work in the GDR, but when he finally did, at the end of a long night and many beers, it came in a dialectical torrent, focusing on the gradual perversion of his socialist ideals and good intentions by the exigencies of party journalism: I always wanted to help people. From the very beginning when I was at a factory newspaper, I wanted to do something for the workers, that was my passion. If you came up through the ranks in journalism, if you were from a working-class family and didn’t have any background, like me, then when you were working for a factory newspaper you really were doing it for the workers, to try to help them in some way. To do something for the workers, you know? That was what I always tried to do back then, that’s why I would try new things out for them. That’s why I would have people come on my local TV show and do these talk shows with them. Even before talk

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shows were invented yet! I invented them! I invented them because I thought this was a way to bring the issues alive for people and I would record the conversations and transcribe the tapes myself. I was always trying to think of ways to do something for the workers. You know to help the lads [Kumpel] out, yes, to do something for the lads. But then, however, as you went up in the hierarchy, you began to say, hey, what’s all this? You saw that no one had any idea what was going on outside. As you got higher you realized that the people weren’t the same anymore. That you were surrounded by the rulers instead of the workers and that the rulers were completely cut off from what was going on below them. Then you were corrupt. You were up there with the leaders and you were corrupt. That’s how it always happened. But that’s something you learned slowly and after a point you realized it was hopeless and you withdrew into your own work. But that’s not how it was at the beginning at all. When you started out in a factory newspaper, your attitude was, hey, let’s do something for the lads, let’s help the workers out. Only later, when you were already deep into the System did you become corrupt. That’s how the System was designed. It was very clever.

Even in its very personal and emotional qualities, Karl’s narrative is identical in its plot to Hegel’s portrait of the dialectical process of Gestaltung (the extension of Geist into the world, the moment of severance from the sanctifying agency ‘within’, and the consignment to the world of formal duration and formal mechanisms ‘without’). Dialectical narratives of this kind proved a routine feature of my fieldwork. Eastern and western Germans routinely utilized dialectical stereotypes (the famous Ossi and Wessi) to describe one another, predicating their identification as complete social beings upon counterdistinction to empty beings of form and habit. In such moments, the Ossi was portrayed as the generic human ‘readymade’ of a totalitarian society, while the Wessi came across as an anthropomorphism of the classical marginal-utilitarian market, with its competitive individuality, zero sums and lack of imagination of social relations beyond those of competition, supply and demand. Each being was a token of a particular social system whose caricature was isolated from the rich humanity and spirit of the speaking subject. In the settings of newsrooms, meanwhile, I found that journalists (not unlike academics) would more or less overtly differentiate between subjects of spirit and their ‘dead wood’ colleagues who were said to have lost their creative powers and to have lapsed into a life of habit. Dialectical knowledge clustered, although not exclusively, around issues of identity and alterity, around the essentialization of social types, around analyses of the relationship between self and society and between self and history. All of my interlocutors, whether journalists or not, had something to say about the ‘weight’ of Germanness and German history stemming from the Holocaust, about their sense of an

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excess of history that challenged, however subtly, their self-knowledge and projects of self-realization and which threatened to seal them into an essentialised cultural being. These few examples only begin to scratch the surface of dialectical knowledge across contemporary German intellectual culture, from barroom argument to the pages of German systems theory (see Boyer 2005 for more extensive discussions). My point here is just to emphasize to what extent philosophical and theoretical knowledges correlate with more informal and less transcendental modes of knowing the social. This is not, I would argue, simply a problem of or in German culture. On the contrary, one of the most important things I learned in the course of writing Spirit and System was to recognize my own intimate relationship to dialectical knowledge, both informally in my intuitive judgements of spirits and systems but also in terms of the dilemmas of studying German philosophy with analytical strategies and frameworks that were themselves borrowed from German philosophy, inconveniently blurring the emic/etic, frame/content distinctions upon which we, as anthropologists, tend to rely. I cannot imagine that any anthropological engagement with philosophy would not have to face this dilemma in some form. An immediate, also dialectical, response to this dilemma is to demand a greater, more encompassing theory, a higher level of objectivity in Bourdieu’s terms. But this feels to me a bit like a panic reaction driven by a need to reassert one’s epistemic domination over the complexity and complications of the world. The irony is that such a response amplifies the phenomenology of expertise, forefronting a concern with the abstract and formal dimensions of knowledge, and suppressing the potential of anthropology to call attention to the historical contingencies as well as to the social and experiential embeddedness of intellectual life. The conclusion that I arrive at in Spirit and System is that the anthropology of philosophy, and the anthropology of knowledge more generally, needs to be reflexive but in a somewhat different sense than Bourdieu’s method. What I mean by reflexivity is simply a therapeutic project of identifying and resisting the suppression of critical self-awareness of our own knowledge practices that is encouraged by intellectual professionalism. For the anthropology of philosophy, this would mean an anthropology that does not rush past (en route to ‘meta-theory’) unsettling problems, such as how the social relationality of our intellectual lives affects the knowledge we produce or how one creates authoritative knowledge of one ‘culture of expertise’ as the practitioner of another. Rather, it would invite an anthropology that lingers on the awkwardness and complexity of such situations, allowing them to motivate the work of theory, of ethnographic representation and of self-reflection. Reflexivity might

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also point toward a more robust anthropology of the psychoanalytic and phenomenological dimensions of academic professionalism. An anthropology that asked why we are so subjectively invested in knowledge in the first place and how our own ideologies of knowledge prefigure to a greater or lesser extent what we find in the world. And it would point toward better institutional ethnography of universities that would explore the immediate contexts of the social production of professional academics as knowers and knowledge-makers. Simply put, a reflexive anthropology of knowledge invites more attention to ways of knowing and to the production of knowledge in anthropology. If the anthropology of knowledge is only a reminder of that with which we have always been concerned as anthropologists, then it is still a very good idea to remind ourselves and our colleagues of the concerns that we call the anthropology of knowledge.

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References Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1988. Homo Academicus, trans. P. Collier. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Pascalian Meditations, trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boyer, D. 2005. Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005a. ‘The Corporeality of Expertise’, Ethnos 70(2): 243–66. Boyer, D. and C. Lomnitz. 2005. ‘Intellectuals and Nationalism: Anthropological Engagements’, Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 105–20. Crick, M. 1982. ‘Anthropology of Knowledge’, Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 287–313. Derrida, J. 1998. Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Falcone, J. n.d. ‘The Hau of Theory’, unpublished ms. Hegel, G.W.F. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzfeld, M. 2001. ‘Irony and Power: Toward a Politics of Mockery in Greece’, in J.W. Fernandez, (ed.) Irony in Action: Anthropology, Practice, and the Moral Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holmes, D.R. and G.E. Marcus. 2004. ‘Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-functioning of Ethnography’, in A. Ong and S. J. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. London: Blackwell.

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Kresse, K. 2002. ‘Towards an Anthropology of Philosophies: Four Turns, with Reference to the African Context’, in G.M. Presbey, et al. (eds), Thought and Practice in African Philosophy. Nairobi: Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R.C. Tucker. New York: Norton. Maurer, B. 2002. ‘Anthropological and Accounting Knowledge in Islamic Banking and Finance: Rethinking Critical Accounts’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(4): 645–67. Miyazaki, H. 2004. The Method of Hope. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, F. 1997. Untimely Meditations, ed. D. Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sheehan, J. 1981. ‘What is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography’, Journal of Modern History 53: 1–23. Strathern, M. 1991. Partial Connections. Sabage: Rowman & Littlefield. Wagner, R. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1968. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Chapter 2

PRACTISING AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHY: GENERAL REFLECTIONS AND THE SWAHILI CONTEXT

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Kai Kresse

Over the last decades, anthropology has opened up research in interdisciplinary subfields in ever more subdifferentiated areas, leading to a new variety of ‘anthropologies of …’ these fields. To develop them further, the involvement of specialist knowledge from other disciplines has become more important for anthropology than ever before (Moore 1999: 4). This re-emphasizes anthropology’s inherently interdisciplinary character. Here, I seek to present the case for an anthropology of philosophy.1 As with more established fields, the use of the label ‘anthropology of ’ may appear to suggest a more clearly identifiable field of investigation than the blurred and intermingled webs of human experience actually allow for – yet it serves to indicate the direction of a basic research interest. Also, while to some the expression ‘of ’ may imply a hierarchical rather than a cooperative view of the relationship between the researchers and the people they, after all, work with, I do not think this is a necessary connotation. I use the label ‘of philosophy’ (distinguishing it from others, e.g. ‘of religion’) as a generic descriptive shorthand, to mark the dominant focus of interest. This terminology also has the benefit of continued compatibility with other established subfields and disciplines, such as ‘anthropology of art’ or ‘philosophy of religion’.

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If ‘studies of knowledge and meaning, and their mediation by power and ideology, have always been at the heart of anthropology’, as Mark Harris put it in the invitation to the conference on which this volume is based, studies of individuals as thinkers reflecting upon the fundamentals of their social and political contexts have not (though in any case, they would need to be crucially related to the former). Here, I am trying to present a general argument for the case that they, too, could be.2 Looking back, an early example of anthropological research in this direction, flawed in some ways yet stimulating in others, was provided by Radin (1957), on native North-American thinkers. But in general, anthropology largely neglected the perspective on social actors elsewhere as individual agents and thinkers. This may have been particularly common for the study of Africa – despite some prominent counter-examples such as Griaule’s Ogotemmêli and Turner’s Muchona (Griaule 1948; Turner 1967). Here, a longstanding focus on common and communal worldviews for some time obstructed, and distracted from, research in such direction. Recently, research on philosophy in Africa has started taking seriously the specific and complex cultural and linguistic frameworks in which individual thinkers operate, as starting-points for the study of philosophical discourse in Africa. This has led to the production of several empirically informed studies in philosophy (e.g. Wiredu 1996; Hallen and Sodipo 1986; Hallen 2001; Karp and Masolo 2000).3 Yet the social relationships underlying schools of thought and the regional intellectual histories underpinning, ultimately, the performance of intellectual practice in Africa (including the practice of philosophy in the sense that I will elaborate below) have hardly been explored from this angle. Our understanding and analysis of them can only be enhanced by consulting the wealth and depth of anthropological studies on related fields such as, for instance, cosmologies, knowledge, divination, prophecy and healing (e.g. James 1989; Johnson 1994; Janzen 1992; Lambek 1993; MacGaffey 2000).4 Here, I will not investigate these specific overlaps and inter-connections further (I have done so elsewhere, Kresse 2002, 2005), but rather present the case for the anthropological study of philosophy and intellectual practice as a subfield of investigation in its own right. For ethnographic illustration, I draw from my own research on Mombasa in Kenya (for a detailed presentation and discussion, see Kresse 2007). ‘Practising’ an anthropology of philosophy is here meant in two ways: firstly, I sketch out the perspective for my own practice of such research, as conducted in Mombasa, Kenya; secondly, the connotation of ‘training’ or ‘revising’ is involved as well. ‘Practising’ something differs significantly from simply ‘doing’ it, even though the two

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may not be distinguishable from the outside – as Gilbert Ryle made clear when developing his concept of a ‘thick description’ (which, as we know, Clifford Geertz picked up and made popular far beyond anthropology, Geertz 1973). Practising something means to involve a conscious effort of acting in relation to one’s internal perspectives about goals and hopes on what this action should bring about (Ryle 1971). It involves a self-conscious process of reflection on what one has done and how one can do it better, while it also includes testing out a range of possible ways of performing this action (in theory or in practice) in order to assess how an improvement can be achieved. To some extent, this dimension of practising, of going through options, is meant to be included in this essay. After introducing the project of an anthropology of philosophy – the investigation of ‘philosophy’ in terms of social discourse and practice and thus as a matter of anthropological concern – I will present two ethnographic illustrations from my own research practice, based on fieldwork. Also, as the performer of this practice (concerned with practising and improving it further), I will provide some reflections on these accounts from an internal (practitioner’s) perspective, in relation to the context, possibilities, and the range of the overall project. In this sense, the double-connotation of ‘practising’ that Ryle pointed at is present throughout this essay. In the end, the outcome of these reflections, just like the outcome of any practice session, will remain provisional. Anthropology of philosophy, if we start to think about some of the contours of this sub-field, is overall necessarily connected to the wider field of the anthropology of knowledge, which is by no means a unified field but marks a shared interest in human ways of knowing and the ways that these are socially expressed and refined (both verbally and bodily). Fundamentally, philosophy is linked to knowledge, the quest for knowledge, the critique of knowledge, and to the various perspectives from which different forms of knowledge can be described and conceptualized. This is why an anthropology of philosophy has to be developed and to proceed in relation to an anthropology of knowledge, where various local forms of knowledge are identified, observed, described and discussed, in relation to social practice. In this sense, I find Lambek’s hermeneutically developed perspective on internal conceptions of knowledge particularly helpful (Lambek 1993). In terms of generating ‘knowledge of the world’, philosophical reflection is not a first-hand provider. Rather, as a critical instance, it scrutinizes and investigates the veracity and adequacy of all kinds of claims to knowledge. The critique of knowledge, just as knowledge itself, is generated in human societies around the world, though in very different and culturally specific ways – yet it may be suppressed as undermining and threatening to existing power relationships. As

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social practice, it is woven into the webs of meaning that constitute ‘culture’ (according to Cassirer, 1992, or Geertz, 1973, who himself is drawing from Weber), by individual thinkers who are specifically inclined and qualified to do so, and independent enough to interrogate knowledge claims. The aim of such critique is to confirm existing principles of orientation, to improve them, or provide new ones, both in theoretical and practical respects. I build my case on the assumption that the quest for basic intellectual orientation in life, covering fundamental questions about ‘knowledge’ and ‘goodness’, is likely to be characteristic of human beings wherever they live. It does not belong exclusively to any particular society or cultural history. Conscious discursive attempts to formulate principles of such orientation characterize ‘philosophy’, a term that has been applied mainly to the documented textual corpus of reflexive discourses produced by thinkers in Western history, and has often come to refer merely to the academic tradition of institutionalized schools of thought which themselves evolved over long periods of time. Yet philosophy’s origins lie in social practice, with the common human drive for orientation – the questioning Socrates at the marketplace as the founding example of ‘Western philosophy’ illustrates that well. As such, it also merits anthropological attention. This has not been entirely forgotten within the complex history of Western philosophy. At times, even Kant qualified philosophy as an activity (the practice of wisdom), which can only be learned through practice in intellectual self-reliance (Kant 1974: 26–30). More recently, Jaspers re-emphazised these features, putting the focus on the existential aspects of intellectual orientation for individuals within their specific experiences of life (Jaspers 1951). And for theorists of the Frankfurt school (such as Horkheimer, Adorno, or Habermas), the view that philosophy, as theory and practice, is inextricably embedded in social dynamics has been a central driving force for their development of critical theory.5 Society, there, is seen as the generating environment for critique, and at the same time its topic, audience and venue. Philosophers, as members of society, raise concerns and provide critical reflection upon them, ultimately seeking to improve social life. Nevertheless, philosophy has rarely been investigated as a contextualized social practice, not only for intellectual traditions outside of Western history but within it as well.6 Here, anthropological investigation can provide concrete details, accounts and assessments of philosophical practice in various parts of the world, beyond those that sociological or historical approaches can offer. Not only can the project contribute to the integration of theories and philosophical traditions of non-Western cultures into mainstream anthropology (see Moore 1996)

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and academic philosophy; but also, as reflection on the ethnography of intellectual practices elsewhere in the world, and their specific ways of being embedded in social life, it may stimulate fruitful questions on the ways that knowledge, intellectual practice and critique are socially embedded and institutionalized in Western contexts.7

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Practising: A Sketch All of us, as individuals, will at some point or other have spent a good amount of time thinking and reflecting upon the big questions of human life, trying to find orientation for ourselves about principles that could and should guide our thinking and doing. It seems this kind of conscious reflection, or at least the attempt to it (as some of us are better at it, or more prone to it, than others) is part of what it means to be a human being. So with ‘all of us’ here, I mean the community of human beings who are intellectually engaged in this manner. Indeed, anthropological research, during its hundred years or so of practice, has shown again and again that all over the world, within the most diverse cultures and societies, we can find some kind of norms or moral standards and values set in place, and discursive justifications for them. Some are argued for explicitly, some implied, some invoking metaphors, narratives, and images. The fact that these reference points are there, that they have been established through human efforts of meaningful construction, indicates that reflection upon human experience in the world has taken place, has been used to order, to understand and render meaningful the diffuse and often confusing flow of human experience. The narratives, images, metaphors and systems of reasonable justifications of values established (and re-confirmed) within cultures, as part of historical processes, are expressions of the reflective processes, or of the outcomes of the reflective processes. As anthropologists (and in the first instance, ethnographers), we commonly follow a reflective process in the opposite direction, concerning ourselves with these expressions, working ourselves into the complex systems of meanings (and cross references between internal subsystems of meaning) to arrive at a sense of the general principles invoked as driving forces or conceptual centres holding systems of value or the framework of a particular worldview together. Now imagine yourself, as anthropologist, reflecting upon yourself, as an individual person, reflecting upon yourself and your experiences in the world, vis-à-vis and within an existent system of norms and values and a particular set of social relations, seeking to find orientation about what to think, what to do, how to understand yourself as this

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particular person with these specific experiences shaping you in the world you live in. You will find, perhaps, that as this reflective being you have sought solitude and quietness, to think ‘in peace’; you have placed yourself in a bodily position that makes you feel ‘at rest’ or ‘at ease’, making it possible for you to forget about it, and disengage from the social environment around you and concentrate on your thoughts, following them, letting them lead you to explore whatever it is that has aroused your intellectual interest, or that has created the existential experience that you need to address intellectually. This is, in a way of course, getting to know yourself better, and developing a conscious sense of your relationship to the world around you. You will notice, perhaps, that your thoughts will pick up from and develop further specific existing thoughts other than your own, part of the corpus perhaps of the cultural traditions that you have grown up in, providing reference points and orientation for your thinking, wide avenues, narrow pathways, or just simple crutches that make it possible for you to make some headway. You are drawing from the arsenal of intellectual history that you are part of because it is part of what you have been born into, grown up in, or worked yourself into. Which religion, which thinker (poet, novelist, philosopher), which principle you use, follow, think with and possibly develop further, or adapt to your needs, depends on this. You will notice, finally, that by reflecting upon yourself in the world, you are engaged in a timeconsuming activity that costs a lot of effort and does not always lead to a solution or clear answer to the question that set you off thinking. On the other hand, you may have sometimes experienced flashes of insight that appear to give you a clear vision of life, an answer to the questions about what is right and wrong, and what is good and bad for you; and if lucky, you may have found the words or some other kind of expression to hold onto those insights, formulating them as verbal statements or saving them as mental images or pictures in your memory (so that you will have recourse to them in the future). These insights, we may agree, are the outcome of your own intellectual effort and creativity which would have been inconceivable without the whole framework and context of the specific social and cultural history that you are embedded in (or have embedded yourself in). Here, the religious and cosmological context matters as much as the language (and key concepts) you use to think with. And, if you go a step further, making your thoughts explicitly part of a social discourse – perhaps even making it your concern to contribute regularly to social discourse with your ideas, and thus potentially becoming an acknowledged ‘intellectual’ – the social and cultural context provides you with a very specific choice of established idioms, tones and genres of expression that you can use, draw from or transform.

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All of this leads us to the idea of what an anthropology of philosophy, as I see it, is about. If you can think of yourself as a thinker, observe what you are ‘doing’ then, as well as reflect upon the contexts in which you are doing it, namely performing this intellectual practice, then you can also conceive of others doing the same thing. More so, you, as anthropologist, will also be able to see how it can make sense to include this kind of human activity (occurring around the world) as part of the explicit interests of anthropological research. You may even, like me, see some reward in this, in terms of a contribution to the discipline, with an ethnographic, theoretical and comparative edge that can be pushed and developed further, within the wider field of existent anthropological interests and established subdisciplines (which have similarly grown out of initial research interests and their subsequent, more and more systematic, pursuit). If to know oneself is one of the goals that we pursue when engaging in reflection, whether secluded on our own or engaged in direct social exchanges of discussion and debate,8 this links us explicitly to the history and practice of philosophy. Within the history of Western philosophy, the command ‘know thyself ’ has been an established and continuous leitmotif of philosophical enquiry since Socrates and Plato (Cassirer 1992: Chapter 1). When engaged in reflection upon ourselves and the world around us, as we have seen, we are still active as bodily persons, and even our intellectual attempts to find (better) orientation for ourselves, about the fundamental principles of our thinking, knowing and doing, correlate with bodily actions that we perform because we feel they assist us in pursuing this quest (apart from the obvious, and conscious, matters such as reading a particular writer or asking a particular knowledgeable person in our surrounding for advice). These are sitting comfortably, contemplating the outside world from our favourite spot at the window or walking our favourite route, or other things that make us feel ‘at ease’ in the sense that we are able to concentrate on the thoughts we are pursuing. Seeking knowledge and certitude about oneself and the world, and being engaged in improving one’s basic orientation about (and within) one’s own thinking, knowing and doing, vis-à-vis the world we live in, indeed has been characterized as constituting philosophy.9 This marks it as a socially contextualized intellectual practice, an activity that we perform. Once we express the results or processes of our attempts at this to others – in conventional or unconventional forms, in established scholarly or informal ‘worldly’ genres of speech – we identify ourselves as philosophical thinkers taking part in a social discourse that is commonly called ‘philosophy’. It is important, I think, when following our overall line of thought here, to remind ourselves of what we know from our own experience

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but (for whatever reason) we may be reluctant to accept as researchers. We have to concede that by following this inner command to know oneself, we are also ‘doing something’, we continue to perform some kind of socialized practice. The common opposition between ‘thought’ and ‘practice’ does not make much sense to us as anthropologists here, when we are looking at people and what they do. Human beings do not cease to ‘do’ anything once they ‘think’, once they put explicit conscious effort into reflecting upon the world (again, see Ryle 1971). As ‘thinkers’, we remain part of the whole context of social action, agents within what is going on in society – even if, as thinkers, we may reject much of what is going on in society. What is happening, then, is that we are engaged in a particular kind of communication, an intellectual performance which is often an exchange: us picking ideas from others and elsewhere, and offering them on to others for their consideration, even if only to receive some kind of feedback on whether our ideas ‘work’, more generally. We are engaged in the creative reconstruction, further development and potential transformation of ideas that ‘are around’, and correspondingly, of the genres of expression of such ideas. It seems to me that all the statements made thus far, could be similarly applicable to human beings and their social contexts all around the world. And since anthropology is the discipline covering the whole range of human experiences, practices and performances, it seems we have good justification to pursue the project of an anthropology of philosophy and develop it as a relevant field of research.

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Ethnographic Framework, Swahili Context I now proceed to present and discuss further my approach to an anthropology of philosophy, with reference to two ethnographic examples from my fieldwork in the Old Town of Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, a Muslim and Swahili-speaking context.10 At the core of my research was the task to investigate reflective discourses in society that address fundamental questions of orientation in life, and concurrently, to document the activities of individuals generating these discourses, in relation to the cultural determinants and social dynamics within which all of this happens. ‘Philosophy’ is thus approached as social discourse and practice – as a critical discourse in society seeking to provide fundamental intellectual orientation, and as intellectual practice performed by individuals within historically established frameworks and traditions. In terms of a framework for research, an overall focus on two conceptual pairs and their respective overlapping interrelationships are crucial: knowledge and practice (leading to a focus on ‘intellectual

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practice’), and the relationship between individual and social aspects within the field of knowledge and practice. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘practice’ as an axis within everyday life help determine some basic parameters of the field of investigation: from the simple (yet no less fundamental) questions, as to what counts as knowledge, who is knowledgeable, and why; what kind of knowledge is relevant or important for which kind of practice; which knowledgeable person is seen to be able to provide guidance or orientation to others, and for which aspects of life. These questions help to map out, with reference to internal social discourses and standards, the specific local dynamics of knowledge and practice, as they were characteristic for (or seen to be valid within) the Swahili context. In this respect, I basically follow Lambek’s approach of a hermeneutically oriented anthropology of knowledge, using ‘knowledge’ as a conceptual tool for ethnography that secures access to, and reconstruction of, an internal perspective (Lambek 1993: see especially 8–14). Other aspects of the relationship between knowledge and practice are relevant as well, with regard to the framework of investigation: what practices are linked to the diverse existent forms of knowledge; how is knowledge practised, by which practices is it transmitted, disseminated, increased or contested? These questions lead us to identify local schools of knowledge and intellectual practice, as well as genres of presentation and negotiation of knowledge. The link to an ethnography of philosophical discourse and practice lies in the fact that critical and fundamental questioning of knowledge, as well as conceptual, reasoned, affirmation of knowledge (both inevitably socially contextualized practices) are themselves intellectual practices which are commonly qualified as ‘philosophical’. In terms of ethnography, the task for an anthropology of philosophy consists in identifying, documenting and analyzing such processes and practices within the wider social field of investigation. To carve out the features and procedural steps of investigation more clearly, the second conceptual pair, ‘individual’ and ‘social’, needs to be reflected upon as well. The relationship between individual and social knowledge within the daily practice of everyday life is of crucial relevance for an understanding of philosophical discourse. The creation (or existence) of frameworks, schools, genres or traditions of knowledge is inconceivable without social context. Yet the formulation of specific philosophical insights is always reliant on an individual thinker who conceives of them and puts them into language, making them (yet again) socially accessible. Intellectual creativity and originality is (as the terms indicate) linked to unique processes of construction by specific individuals – who, without the specific kind of social contexts that they found themselves in, would not have been able

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to think or express these kinds of thoughts and insights (see Collins 1998). Thus at the core of the constitution of philosophical discourse there is a dialectic interrelationship, a tense interdependence, between social and individual knowledge (and their correlative practices). It is a task for ethnography to capture and document the dynamics of these tensions, and uncover the contributions of both individual and social knowledge in this constitutive process of philosophy. To exemplify this within the Swahili context – i.e. the (historically Muslim) settlements along the East African coast – we should have a brief look at how a framework of social knowledge, or common local worldview, constitutes the basic operating field for the reflective efforts by individuals to create philosophical discourse, that is, meaningful statements seeking to provide orientation in response to fundamental questions about human existence. The three main components constituting such a framework of Swahili worldview, an all-encompassing and meaningful perspective on life for insiders, are history (including regional intellectual history as part of social history), language (including key concepts), and religion (in this case Islam, and its respective regionally influential schools and factions). In combination, these determine a common framework of reference for social actors, within which the discursive confirmation, contestation, and (re-)negotiation of knowledge, beliefs, norms, and values takes place, as part of social practice. Within this field, customs and proverbs are two ways of habituating (and thus confirming and transmitting further) existing norms and values, performatively in the first case and discursively in the latter. All of this characterizes the lifeworld, and provides a given set of references which any kind of critique or fundamental questioning needs to take into account. In short, this is the contextual setting within which philosophical discourse can develop. In relation to this, there are specific genres or mediatory channels of knowledge and practice that have developed historically, in correspondence with the particular history of the region, and through the efforts of individuals who have coined or shaped them. For example, the Swahili context, being part of the Bantu–African cultural and linguistic region and the Muslim world for well over a millennium (Nurse and Spear 1985; Horton and Middleton 2000), has developed specific genres of poetry and wordplay, forms of Islamic discourse and practice, and ways of healing that are unique to the region while sharing features and elements with other Bantu and Muslim societies. Related to these, are, of course, local specialists who are experts in the knowledge as well as the practice of these genres. Cutting short a more elaborate introduction to the setting, we will now look at two local intellectuals and their discourses as ethnographic examples, the poet Ahmad Nassir (born 1936), and

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his older brother, the Islamic scholar Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir (born 1932). In the first case, we will see how an interpretation of a Swahili key concept, namely utu (goodness, or humanity) is discussed and explained within the classic utenzi genre of didactic poetry. In the second case, we will see how a form of Islamic lectures is used for a social critique of current Muslim society in postcolonial Kenya; this includes self-critique and encourages a self-critical attitude among the audience. In both cases, given forms of Swahili discourse are used in a creative way by these two thinkers to bring their points across. And both times, the topics (and the ways they are rhetorically dealt with) can be linked to everyday discussions that take place among friends and neighbours outside their houses on the verandah-like baraza benches,11 or elsewhere.

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The Poet Ahmad Nassir, Reflecting on Utu (Goodness, Humanity) Many of the intellectually engaged people I came across in Mombasa and elsewhere, made a point of emphasizing how much they appreciated the poetry of Ahmad Nassir. His dazzling verbal constructions, the wide scope of his language, and the depth of meaning, are among the most lauded elements of his poetry. But his compositions are cherished not only for artistic and reflective features, which need to be appreciated intellectually. Many of his shorter poems are also performed as songs by his cousin Juma Bhalo, himself a veritable star within the regional network of Swahili popular music, t’arab. They have struck a chord with the audiences and thus become an enduring part of local popular culture. Here, I will focus on a long didactic poem by Ahmad Nassir which provides philosophical reflection on what it means to be ‘human’ and ‘good’, from within a conceptual and aesthetic framework which is determined by historical conventions of knowledge, religion and linguistic form, situated within the Old Town of Mombasa.12 The poem, called Utenzi wa Mtu ni Utu (The utenzi about ‘a human being is utu’) was composed in 1960, during Ramadhan,13 when Ahmad Nassir was only twenty-four years old (Nassir 1979: 3). Mtu ni utu, literally: ‘A human being is utu [goodness, humanity]’, is itself a proverb, representing or encapsulating folk knowledge. Thus the title already indicates the complex interrelationship between individual and social knowledge that is negotiated here: individual reflection on a common key concept is presented through reference to social conceptions of knowledge, in a form of historically established verbal art. As Ahmad Nassir says in his preface, ‘the intention for composing

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it is to explain in a pleasing and decorative way those things that will be of profit to the reader and listener’ (1979: 1, my translation). Here the poet puts himself at the service of society as a conscientious teacher of social values who uses his personal talents for the common good. The poem itself has 457 stanzas, organized in ten subsections that either highlight topical foci (love, friendship and the relation between spouses) or genre-specific conventional sections formally introducing and concluding the poem. The general patterns of the utenzi genre are followed: a classical rhyme scheme is kept up throughout the poem, and so is the conventional order of composition, starting with an invocation of God and ending with a short self-description of the poet and the date of the composition. The section Upendano, mutual love (or ‘loving another’), is fundamentally relevant for the theory of moral goodness developed in the poem. In this part, basic conceptions of human equality, moral knowledge, freedom of action and moral responsibility are established as parts of utu. Nassir sketches out an ideal kind of love (pendo bora, 1979: stanza 62) that all human beings should have for one another. Marked by true mutual concern for each other, this is the precondition for human beings to live as one (kitu kimoja, 1979: 61). But the author admits not being able to give any existing example of such love (1979: 63). Love is thus used as a regulative principle. Rather than an empirical fact of human life it is a moral demand on individual human beings. As such, love characterizes a task that is inherent in the hypothetical statement that has just been related: if you want to live in peace with others, you have to give such love. The bottom line is: if you want the ideal world to have a chance to come about, you have to act as if you were already part of it. This conveys what could be called a circle of the moral sphere: what is aspired to in the end already has to be presupposed in the beginning; to become part of the morally good world one has to act as if one was already living in it. In such a way, through our moral imagination, we can be aware of an ideal love, and use it for our orientation when seeking to behave as moral beings. Such love presupposes the equality of all human beings, as it is pendo la sawa, an egalitarian love (1979: 84). Love that is selective, we are told, ‘has no meaning’ (halina maana) but causes bad things (kuzusha ubaya, 1979: 85). This shows a fundamental conception of human equality that Nassir’s elaboration of utu works with. This does not mean that all people are the same, or that there are no differences between them. Nassir regards the differences in appearance of human beings as a tough test of God, which is good for them because it poses a challenge (1979: 117–23). The moral equality of all entails egalitarian love as a precondition, if discord, hatred, discrimination, jealousy and quarrel are to be surmounted (1979: 70–78). Again

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and again, as part of utu, Nassir emphasizes the necessity to imagine and create an all-embracing, truly global human unity, without any ukabila (ethnocentrism, tribalism). He has reconfirmed this point to me emphatically in several interviews, pointing at the fact that ethnicity (one’s tribe) is only like an identity card (kabila ni kitambulisho tu). Accordingly, utu is not a concept exclusively for and by Swahili people or Swahili speakers, but for all human beings who show their utu as part of such a moral unity. However, he says, it is up to us as human beings to realize our potential membership in the moral community, to decorate ourselves with utu (1979: 123). This underlines the moral responsibility of us individually as moral agents. We are responsible for good and bad actions (1979: 95), because as human beings ‘we should know good and bad’ (tujuwe jema na baya, my emphasis, 1979: 211). Moral knowledge is the basis of responsibility. We human beings have this knowledge because God taught it to us (explicitly in the Qur’an), together with his recommendations to follow the good way. We are, however, says Nassir, not determined by God to perform in the morally good way (if we were, we would not need any moral advice at all), but free to decide for ourselves. This seems why, both in folk theories and in Nassir’s poem itself, the emphasis on the actual performance of good deeds that correspond to utu is crucial. Performing good actions is the only way of becoming part of the moral community which we are assumed to be part of from the beginning: utu ni kitendo (literally: goodness is action). A web of interrelated concepts constitutes utu as the exclusively human moral sphere. These concepts signify basic anthropological assumptions, qualities that are seen to be part of the human character. Utu, then, can be understood as a universal moral concept, brought forward and formulated from within the Swahili framework. Displaying the basic characteristics of fundamental equality, of moral knowledge, freedom and responsibility, the poem Utenzi wa Mtu ni Utu shows features we link to classical moral theory. Indeed, there are striking similarities with deontological moral theories in the history of Western philosophy. Such moral universalism from an African context refutes simple dismissals of all universalist positions as unjustifiable grand narratives of Eurocentric origin. With Utenzi wa Mtu ni Utu, we are not dealing with a mere ‘Swahili’ version of this, but rather with an individual thinker’s attempt to describe the general moral character of human nature from within the context of Swahili culture and language. While for Nassir, as he confirmed to me in interviews, utu is not a religious or Islamic concept, Nassir’s conceptual framework is nevertheless reliant on a conception of God for the full explication of utu, and in this respect he concurs with common social knowledge on utu. Such reliance is obvious in the fundamental conception of

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moral knowledge, the possibility of distinction between good and bad. According to Nassir, this knowledge originates in God and has been given to human beings (via prophets, in revelations). This is taken for granted, without any further attempts of explication, as they would be expected and performed in secular moral philosophy. Here, on the whole, human beings are understood as creatures of an almighty and benevolent God. What distinguishes them from animals, namely moral knowledge and freedom of action, is linked back to their creator. This points to a local philosophical anthropology or general doctrine of human nature, which inherently includes the religious sphere. As also evident from the poem, Nassir insists on the principle that knowledge should be sought after and given, and must prove to be of practical value. The poet gives us a vivid illustration of this: Ilimu isiyotenda ni kama mtu kupanda mti usio matunda wala majani kumeya (Nassir 1979: 130)

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Knowledge that is not enacted is like a person planting a tree without any fruit nor any leaves growing from it

To be sustained and effective in social life however, this principle demands intellectual agility of people and the readiness to step in when, for matters of convenience, knowledge is not ascertained, or when it is used as a superficial label of status that tries to impress without really teaching. Nassir told me about a number of related episodes in which he had been involved, each time pointing to the need for debate and communication so that knowledge can proceed to be practically meaningful; but also, to the responsibility of the knowledgeable (each according to the extent of their knowledge) to ascertain knowledge through critical questioning and to apply it in practice, for the good of the community. This is a moral obligation linked to utu, and practising it often means to take the initiative and go against or beyond customs and practices that were established without conscious reasoning.

Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir and His Ramadhan Lectures14 Before discussing his Ramadhan lectures as another example of philosophical discourse, Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir should briefly be introduced biographically. Born and bred in Mombasa, as part of an intellectually active family with healers and Islamic scholars among

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them, he went to Zanzibar to gain teaching qualifications and also obtained further Islamic education there. In the late colonial era, he was a teacher at two reputable educational institutions for Muslims in Mombasa, the Arab Boys School and the Muslim Institute of Modern Education (MIOME). He became a popular local politician and was even elected as Member of the colonially administered Parliament before he was thirty years old. He also led the coastal independence movement Mwambao (see Salim 1970). After independence (1963), he was active as an editor and manager for Oxford University Press East Africa, and later founded and ran a small but significant publishing house for Swahili publications. He remained active as an Islamic scholar, mostly in terms of giving regular public speeches (often in relation to Kenyan politics). From being engaged in the Sunni community, he turned publicly to Shia Islam in the 1980s, which led to resentment and attempts to ostracize him among the Swahili Sunni community. Nevertheless, Sheikh Abdilahi has remained an important, yet somewhat sidelined local intellectual in the Muslim community of Mombasa, where he is also a leading figure for a growing group of Swahili Shias. Over the last forty years or so, he has been a prolific public speaker in changing arenas. He has published a variety of Islamic pamphlets since then, and audio- and video-recordings of his speeches are circulating widely in East Africa and beyond, through personal and virtual networks, including the Internet. Sheikh Abdilahi has been commented upon in academic literature highlighting his concern for social problems and the general wellbeing of Muslims, together with his much admired abilities of rhetoric and reasoning (Topan 1991: 50). As a kind of priest-politician, he is said to have been mediating well between the traditional and modern ulama (Islamic scholars); being ‘equally at home in the secular world’ and the religious sphere, he ‘had a special appeal to the Muslim masses’ (Bakari 1995: 188–90). He has also been called ‘a Muslim activist committed to socio-economic and political reform of society’ (Chande 2000: 351). These comments underline his practical orientation in regard to the application of his religious knowledge and his critical and eloquent talents. It seems that to him, Islam is an internalized moral guideline that merges politics and religion, and is the only reliable measure to improve social life in the appropriate way and to a sufficient degree. The peculiar path of Sheikh Abdilahi’s biography is certainly worthwhile to be explored further in numerous ways. Here, however, the task is to present a brief ethnographic illustration of his reflections and critical arguments. My observations are based on my attendance at his daily Ramadhan lectures in the year 1419 of the Islamic Calendar (between December 1998 and January 1999). What follows seeks to convey an impression of how Sheikh Abdilahi reflects

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critically on social reality (using the Qur’an), develops an argument and presents it to his audience. Overall, as I have stated elsewhere, his agenda as a critical Islamic scholar and a kind of public intellectual may be described as wanting to ‘make people think’ (Kresse 2004). Sheikh Abdilahi’s Ramadhan lectures constituted a remarkable social critique of the Kenyan Muslim community and their contemporary political experience. This critical review was based on the Sheikh’s understanding of Islam and transmitted by means of Islamic lectures, on weekdays as rather more formalized sessions of interpretation of specific sections of the Qur’an (tafsir), and on weekends as free lectures on social issues. These lectures were notable for their self-critical attitude, in which he also included the audience, and as such they stood out against the common local Islamic lectures or speeches, which tend to be dogmatic and ideologically loaded. For Sheikh Abdilahi, these were not empty rhetorical gestures. He dealt with fundamental questions of self-assertion for Kenyan Muslims, in individual and social respect, such as how to live as a member of a religious and cultural minority in the postcolonial state dominated by upcountry Christians, how to relate to the state, whether and how to engage in processes of public decision-making. Furthermore, he was well-known for his stance as a free thinker who reasoned his own way. This was displayed in the Ramadhan lectures, where his exceptionally diverse audience consisted of Muslims with different ethnic, linguistic and sectional backgrounds (Sunni and Shia) that admired him for these qualities and enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of his talks. His weekend lectures provided the audience with the rare opportunity to interact with the speaker. Members of the audience could, in advance, request topics that he would discuss and also raise questions after his speeches. Questions and topics requested were concerned with socio-political issues current in 1999, on a regional, national and global scale, on which Sheikh Abdilahi would give his personal evaluation, drawing from Islamic as well as secular readings: on the processes and discussions around the constitutional reform in Kenya, American interests in the Middle East vis-à-vis the role of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or on disunity and infighting among local Muslims about the beginning of Ramadhan. Thus, issues of fundamental socio-political concern were at the centre, which Sheikh Abdilahi would think through critically with his audience in response to the questions put to him. Now, if philosophizing is essentially the conscious effort to orient oneself intellectually, by means of reflecting on the basics of one’s thinking, knowing and doing – as I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter – these lectures can certainly be qualified as such. As texts and contributions to ongoing debates, they belong to philosophical discourse, and as socially performed attempts

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to reflect on life, they belong to local philosophical practice. Yet even though I stress their philosophical character here, they are also, of course, contributions to local discourses of Islam, politics and society. Sheikh Abdilahi’s lectures and writings should, among other things, also be considered as part of the philosophical discourse of the region. In them, processes of fundamental questioning, orienting oneself intellectually, reasoning through one’s position, involving others in one’s process of rethinking, occur as continuous and significant features. They are exercised constantly in close relation with politics and the practical historical circumstances that affect his community, which extends from a neighbourhood quarter of the Old Town, via the city of Mombasa, beyond national politics towards specific ideals of global Muslim unity. Sheikh Abdilahi’s reflective practice is influenced both by the scholarly traditions, which he continues to study, and, his social world.

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Conclusion I have outlined two examples of Swahili philosophical discourse from an anthropological perspective that is interested in philosophy as part of a wider social context of human life. I would like to suggest that, beyond the documentation of local discourses of knowledge and critique that seek to provide fundamental orientation in life, an anthropology of philosophy ultimately also offers us a critical perspective on philosophy itself – especially our institutionalized Western tradition – and may be able to indicate ways in which its selfunderstanding may need expansion. The point here is about philosophy as social practice. If philosophy, as a common human discourse about the basic principles of fundamental orientation in life, is to achieve also a fuller understanding of the internal dynamics of philosophical reflection on the whole, it should expand its interest not just beyond a particular cultural region and its intellectual achievements, but also beyond texts – and thus concern itself with the social debates that individual thinkers are embedded in, how and from where they get their stimulation, why certain styles of speech are used when giving a talk or lecture, and how biographies link in with texts and discourses. For this, anthropology can be crucial. Regarding philosophy (to a significant extent) as social practice performed by individuals leads us to focus more consciously on social contexts, on the particular ways in which these thinkers present their arguments, and on the respective contextual perception and appreciation of their arguments and ways of thinking.

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In my examples, I have indicated how individuals who engage in reflective discursive activity that we may call ‘philosophical’ are involved in social debates. It is from here, I suggest, that philosophical discourse and intellectual practice in the region can begin to be understood. As a rule, the more insight we gain into regional intellectual history, discourses of knowledge, social debates and the established practices of theory, the richer the portrayals of philosophical discourses can be. The better these are documented, the more relevant they can become for other people, both within and outside the society discussed. They can also be seriously taken into consideration as alternatives to theoretical frameworks and ways of thinking that we have been using so far. From such an angle, anthropology can also contribute to a timely critique of academic philosophy, and indeed, to an ongoing self-critique within it. It can contribute to the transmission and exchange of philosophical insights across cultures, and thus open up the perspective of integrating other ways of understanding the world into one’s own. This always happens through individuals and their intellectual efforts within their respective social and cultural settings. Let me try to put it this way: to understand the understanding of understanding better, and make understood in our own contexts the processes, contents and conditions of understanding elsewhere, is a goal for this hermeneutical project in which I see anthropology and philosophy involved, a project which relies on mutual support and exchange. Anthropology has the benefit of being able to bring in specific and empirically grounded understandings of ways of knowing, and can transmit these insights within and beyond academic institutions. This points to the translocal dynamics of philosophical discourse, which provide the basis for the anthropology of philosophy advocated here. If philosophy is a knowledge-oriented human activity, which can be performed in many styles and idioms around the world, it has to be investigated within the social field where it is practised and acknowledged (for further elaborations, see Kresse 2007: Epilogue). Let me conclude with the following claim: ethnographic research on, and analytical attention to, intellectual practices and discourses of fundamental reflection upon human life in cultures and societies all around the world, can gradually help to liberate us from a derogatory perspective on other societies which, unfortunately, is still common in Western academia and public opinion. As long as such research is conducted within the same general framework of inquiry (thus avoiding double-standards), it can bring home the point that human reflection may yield rich and inspiring thoughts all around the world. Its value can be experienced on two levels: internally, by the people of the community within which the thoughts were initially hatched and communicated (contextualized by language, genre and intellectual

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history); and, potentially, outside of them as well, by people from other parts of the world, who are situated in different – and sometimes quite similar – circumstances of living and are used to different – yet sometimes quite similar – ways of thinking. I think it could be part of the anthropologist’s job to convey a sense of the kinds of intellectual engagement and critical discourse going on in societies elsewhere, performed by particular individuals in communicative interaction. Crucially, these are connected to the various ways of knowing in different social settings. This can enable us to appreciate the internal value and complexity of such discourses and practices, and to explore their intercultural significance further, meaning the potential value of their thoughts for us.

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Notes 1. I thank Mark Harris for the invitation to present an earlier version of this paper, and for stimulating feedback. Thanks for helpful questions and comments also go to the other participants, as well as to the audience at a departmental seminar at the University of Aberdeen (I thank Alex King for the invitation). Fieldwork on which the ethnographic part of this paper is based was largely carried out over thirteen months in 1998 and 1999; funding by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and by SOAS travel funds is gratefully acknowledged. I also thank Louis Brenner and J.D.Y Peel for their longer-term guidance and advice on the initial project. Most of all, I am grateful to Ustadh Ahmad Nassir Juma Bhalo and Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir for their gracious, generous and open-minded readiness to respond to my questions. 2. Anthropological research has an inherent and underlying personal dimension to it: the topics we chose, the regions, groups, societies we work on, may reflect various dimensions of the experiences, qualifications and moral perspectives that shape us. Being engaged in anthropological research, as much as it means to get to know oneself better as one studies the worlds of others, also and inevitably means to supply others – one’s academic audience – with knowledge about oneself. This can be seen, sometimes in humorous or even tragic instances, throughout the history of anthropology. Our life histories are not disjointed from our research histories, and vice versa. This is to point at the personal background of issues negotiated here and to provide a way into the circle of understanding that characterizes this essay: in my case, travelling extensively in East Africa and studying Philosophy, African Studies and the Swahili language brought me to the study of Anthropology in the first place and then to this particular kind of anthropological research. 3. Developments in this direction have been pushed forward by Hountondji (1996), Appiah (1992), Oruka (1990, see also Graness and Kresse 1997), Wiredu (1980) and Masolo (1994). 4. Highly valuable studies of this kind are, for instance, James (1989), Johnson (1994), Janzen (1992), MacGaffey (2000). The wealth of historical studies on related materials should also be noticed. 5. This similarly applies to Gramsci (1971: especially 321–77), whose work inspired Feierman’s study of ‘peasant intellectuals’ in Tanzania (1990).

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6. An exception to this is sociologist Randall Collins who produced a masterful study on the ‘sociology of philosophies’, grounded in communication theory, network theory, and the sociology of knowledge; this study provides a conceptual framework, as well as detailed case studies from Western and Chinese intellectual history (Collins 1998). 7. The anthropological perspective envisaged here can also be applied ‘at home’, feeding into a meaningful ‘cultural critique’. This conception, in different ways, has been evoked in the self-understanding of both philosophy, by people like Horkheimer and Cassirer, and anthropology, in the works of Benedict, Mead, and more recently, Fisher and Marcus (1986), for instance. 8. The two are not mutually exclusive, as we can see when looking at the fact that people (especially academics) often write their contributions and responses to intellectual debates and discussions in seclusion, in order to concentrate, to focus; yet through such secluded concentration they engage intensely with the ideas of others. People in such a situation (or such a state of being) are not ‘cut off ’ from communication; rather, they ‘relive’ a specific kind of communication so as to understand better and contribute better to what has been said. Thus people secluding themselves for these purposes are not hermits – hermits have cut themselves off from such kind of social concern and communication with others. On this general point of communication, see Collins (1998, especially Chapter 1). 9. I am drawing here from a characterization coined by the German philosopher Herbert Schnädelbach, emphasizing it as an activity, namely ‘the attempt at thoughtful orientation within the realm of the principles of our thinking, knowing and doing’ (1988: 215); my translation. 10. Elsewhere, I have provided an in-depth ethnography and various topical discussions on this (Kresse 2007, see also 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005). 11. I have dealt with baraza discourses and their relevance elsewhere (Kresse 2005). 12. For an in-depth discussion of this poem and Ahmad Nassir’s explication of utu, see Kresse (2007: Chapter 5); I am using a few sections of that discussion here. 13. It is common for Muslim poets or scholars in the region to accomplish a specific piece of work, of particular moral or religious value, during the month of Ramadhan. 14. I have dealt with Sheikh Abdilahi, his biography, his writings and his Ramadhan lectures in more depth elsewhere (Kresse 2004, 2007: Chapter 6).

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References Appiah, K.A. 1992. In my Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford University Press. Bakari, M. 1995. ‘The New ‘ulama in Kenya’, in M. Bakari and S.S. Yahya (eds), Islam in Kenya. Nairobi: MEWA, pp. 168–93. Cassirer, E. 1992 (1944). An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chande, A. 2000. ‘Radicalism and Reform in East Africa’, in N. Levtzion and R.L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa. Oxford: James Currey, pp. 348–69. Collins, R. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Feierman, S. 1990. Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Geertz, C. 1993 (1973). ‘Thick description’, in idem, The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Fontana Press, pp. 3–30. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selection from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Graness, A. and K. Kresse (eds). 1997. Sagacious Reasoning. H. Odera Oruka in memoriam. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Griaule, M. 1975 (1948). Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. Hallen, B. 2001. The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Discourses about Values in Yoruba Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ——— and J.O. Sodipo. 1997 (1986). Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy. Standford: Stanford University Press. Harris, M. n.d. ‘Invitation to Participate in Ways of Knowing Conference’, University of St Andrews. Horton, M. and J. Middleton. 2000. The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Hountondji, P.J. 1996 [1976]. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, W. 1989. The Listening Ebony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janzen, J. 1992. Ngoma. Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jaspers, K. 2003 [1951]. Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Johnson, D.H. 1994. Nuer Prophets. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, I. 1974. Logic, trans. R.S. Hartman and W. Schwarz. New York: Dover Publications. Karp, I. and D.A. Masolo (eds). 2000. African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kresse, K. 2002. ‘Towards an Anthropology of Philosophies, in the African Context’, in G. Presbey, et al. (eds), Thought and Practice in African Philosophy. Nairobi: Konrad Adenauer Foundation, pp. 29–46. ———. 2003. ‘“Swahili Enlightenment?” East African Reformist Discourse at the Turning Point: The Example of Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui’, Journal of Religion in Africa 33(3), pp. 279–309. ———. 2004. ‘Making People Think: The Ramadhan Lectures of Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir in Mombasa, 1419 A.H.’, in S. Reese (ed.), The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa. Leiden: E.J. Brill, pp. 212–43. ———. 2005. ‘At the Baraza: Socializing and Intellectual Practice at the Swahili Coast’, in T. Falola (ed.), Christianity and Social Change in Africa: Essays in Honor of J.D.Y. Peel. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, pp. 613–32. ———. 2007. Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam, and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili coast. Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute. Lambek, M. 1993. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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MacGaffey, W. 2000. Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marcus, G.E. and M.M.J. Fisher 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Masolo, D.A. 1994. African Philosophy in Search of Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moore, H. 1996. ‘The Changing Nature of Anthropological Knowledge’, in H.L. Moore (ed.), The Future of Anthropological Knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 1–16. ———. 1999. ‘Anthropological Theory at the Turn of the Century’, in H.L. Moore (ed.), Anthropological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–23. Nassir, A.J.B. 1979. Utenzi wa Mtu ni Utu, ed. and introd. by M.K. Khan. Nairobi: MacMillan. Nurse, D. and T. Spear. 1985. The Swahili. Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Oruka, H.O. (ed.) 1990. Sage philosophy. Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African philosophy. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Radin, P. 1957. Primitive Man as Philosopher. New York: Dover Publications. Ryle, G. 1971. ‘Thinking and Reflecting’, and ‘The Thinking of Thoughts’, in idem, Collected Papers, vol. II. London: Hutchinson. Salim, A.I. 1970. ‘The movement for “Mwambao” or coast autonomy in Kenya. 1956–63’, in B.A. Ogot (ed.), Hadith 2. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, pp. 212–28. Schnädelbach, H. 1988. ‘Philosophie als Wissenschaft und als Aufklärung’, in W. Oelmueller (ed.), Philosophie und Wissenschaft. Munich: Shoeningh, pp. 206–20. Topan, F. 1991. ‘Reseaux Religieux chez les Swahili’, in F. Le GuennecCoppens and P. Caplan (eds), Les Swahili entre Afrique et Arabie. Paris: Editions Kathala, pp. 39–57. Turner, V. 1967. ‘Muchona the Hornet, Interpreter of Religion’, in The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wiredu, K. 1980. Philosophy and an African Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiredu, K. 1996. Cultural Universals and Particulars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Chapter 3

IS RELIGION A WAY OF KNOWING? Otávio Velho1

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I This volume sets out to discuss different ways of knowing and forms of engagement with the world. It also recognizes the centrality acquired by ‘knowledge’ over the last twenty years or so. In this context, which is also intended to stimulate a special attention to indigenous discourses and a critical look at Western conceptions, religion is certainly a candidate for the enactment of a way of knowing. At issue here is the establishment of a general (and generous) notion of communication and information capable of encompassing exchanges occurring under this and other labels, such as art. Gregory Bateson was certainly a pioneer in this approach, especially in his later writings, although the roots of his interest in communication and information go back to his early encounter with cybernetics in the 1940s. Tantamount to the recognition of different ways of knowing, this information paradigm has promised the possibility of a productive dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences and between Western and indigenous discourses. Curiously, however, it is precisely against this apparently benign dominance of an information paradigm that the French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour has positioned himself, especially in his more recent writings. I shall thus use his intervention in this debate as a point of entry in order to cover some aspects of the issues at hand. One of the main thrusts of Latour’s argument is exactly against a ‘Gnostic’ conception of religion: he would undoubtedly answer that religion is not a way of knowing. Latour has repeatedly illustrated his

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point with the argument that when a lover asks his (her) partner if she (he) still loves him (her) what is sought is not information, but a statement that performatizes transformation; a transformation which in the case of our religious tradition can be taken to be equivalent to a conversion. Latour contends that positing information as a general reference gives science – or at least a certain understanding of it – an undue dominance that fails to do justice to the plurality of different ‘regimes of enunciation’ and is unduly impoverishing, even in terms of actual scientific practice. He takes particular issue over the placing of religion in a subordinate position in consequence of an information paradigm, which identifies it with what is construed as ‘belief ’, taken to be a second-rate kind of knowledge. Just as he condemns not only a negatively biased view of religion, but also of politics that would (and does) follow from the same kind of reference. This disagreement regarding the roles of information and religion seems to be caught up in quite distinct views of social life in general and of science, modernity, nature and even democracy. It even seems part of different strategies. I shall therefore begin by trying to provide a preliminary assessment of these differences and of precisely how much they really do differ. In a series of published interviews conceded by Michel Serres to Bruno Latour (Serres 1992b), Serres defends philosophy as a solitary pursuit. Taking an opposite stance, Latour questions Serres over his refusal to see himself as part of ongoing discussions and his tendency to seldom – if ever – cite his colleagues. In reply, Serres manifests his disdain for the contemporary world of theses, journals and academic stammering: ‘Honesty, by contrast, implies writing only what one thinks and believes oneself to have invented.’ Strangely enough, some years later in Jubiler ou les tourments de la parole religieuse (Latour 2002a), Latour gives every impression (not entirely borne out in reality, as we shall see) of following his master – outpacing him, even, by producing a synthetic work that requires discarding everything one knows in order to invent: something Serres floated in the interviews as an ideal still waiting to be realized in the future. The (dis)organization of Jubiler is symptomatic. No citations, no notes, no chapters even. Instead, we encounter a carefully honed style supporting the author’s line of reasoning. Honed to the point, in fact, of making highly complex topics often appear simple – topics, which are in truth extremely challenging, forcing us to doubt whether our reading is capable of capturing the many nuances involved. The work reveals a series of insights that were in fact picked from Serres and show how Latour was inspired to engage in an implicit dialogue with him and in the process develop his own thinking. However, despite this dialogue and the fact that Serres and Latour both continue to imagine a re-encounter (or a new contract)

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between humans and non-humans and what Latour dubs naturecultures, Jubiler develops a number of key differences in relation to Serres. These differences extend beyond Latour’s already evident disbelief in ruptures, in contrast to the positions adopted by Serres in Hominescence (Serres 2001), a paean to a new humanity published almost simultaneously with Jubiler. Latour insists on the limits of communication – communication being a theme central to Serres, epitomized by the figure of Hermes. Based on these communicational limits, Latour also insists on a distinction between different regimes of enunciation that contrasts with the emphasis on the interplay between philosophy, literature and science found at the core of Serres’ work. Indeed Latour’s insistence on different regimes of enunciation holds despite the fact that in Jubiler he seems to be in search of a fusion between literature and social sciences (provided these are not ‘critical’ in intent) – not to mention theology. This insistence seems to be part of a defensive strategy against scienticism. In other words, it functions as a defence against the penetration and paralysis of politics (and not just politics, as we shall see) by Science (in the singular) and the clandestine politicization of the sciences by epistemology, Science corresponding in turn to a Nature, equally in the singular (Latour 2004 [1999]). While Serres deplores the banishment of nature, Latour deplores its invention, arguing for the end of nature as the ‘other’ of politics through the development of a political ecology. Nature must be opposed by cosmopolitics. Critique should be abandoned due to its association with modernity, rupture and above all Kant and the idea of a ‘Copernican revolution’ separating us from the past. For Latour, the task is to become ever less critical, accepting life as it is in a way reminiscent of the Nietzschean amor fati. However, this is not to say Jubiler acts as an isolated peak to Latour’s work, even though the title apparently refers to Jesus’ proclamation of the coming of the Kingdom of God (Luke 4: 15–22). Perhaps because this expression itself takes its inspiration from the jubilee year announced in Leviticus (25: 8–17), in theory at least periodical. Instead, we find ourselves immersed in an intertextuality, which, among other things, prevents us from isolating any single component of the chain. The arguments deployed can be found in earlier and later texts and in other forms, making Jubiler a particularly salient crest on a wave that nonetheless continues onward, like one jubilee in a sequence of others – part of a production, which astounds us through both its quality and its quantity. As an example, Latour published another important book, La Fabrique du Droit: une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat (2002b), the same year as Jubiler. Hence the latter’s salience should be recognized, but also its insertion within a set of works. This set interconnects with – while also diverging from – his previous writings on scientific practice

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and now takes religion as its supreme challenge. In between these two sets of work we find (among other texts) his best-known book, We Have Never Been Modern (1993 [1991]), which links the two sets through the pervasive issue of (non-)modernity and politics. Although this second group clearly comprises a distinct set of works, science is not altogether absent. In fact the opposite is the case. It remains present, albeit often in ghostly fashion, above all due to religious discourse’s potential to bypass the pretensions of scientific discourse and its claims to monopolize reason or act as an exclusive paradigm. This helps explain Latour’s insistence on rejecting any view of religion as a second-order reason (belief) in comparison with science, while also refuting the idea that religion is about the transmission of information. Instead, the author stresses the need to map the felicity conditions of the different regimes of enunciation – in other words, the numerous activities in our culture capable of evoking truth. This applies to religion and politics alike, both of which, Latour argues, need to be distinguished and rescued from the scientific paradigm currently paralyzing them. Philosophical pragmatism appears to be much more active in the author’s work as a whole than suggested by the (fairly infrequent) references to William James and John Dewey. Active even as he turns away from the dominance of discourse analyses over analyses of practice, a factor that frequently distinguishes him from language-oriented neopragmatism. Serres also complains about information. But he means information that substitutes for knowledge. For him, the ‘messenger always brings strange news, or is no more than a parrot’ (Serres 1992b) and only creation distinguishes good from evil. In Latour, the problem is somewhat different. He riles against the omnipresence of knowledge itself. Religion – he insists – is not a gnosis, but nor is it a respectable (but unreasonable) belief concerning distant subjects to be hypocritically tolerated. Although, this said, the author seems somewhat ambivalent on this point, an ambiguity revealed when he complains about information in general, or qualifies it as double-click information – information that supposedly transmits its content without distortion. This is a supposition which elsewhere Latour considers inadequate for describing the real practice of the sciences, limiting it to Scientific discourse only. The same occurs in the case of the external referent, used to mark through absence regimes of enunciation such as that of religion; in the end, even in terms of the sciences, Latour substitutes it with the circulating reference, the potentially infinite sequence of mediators which effectively replaces the opposition between the external and the internal. It is impossible to expect direct information when immersed in the world of laboratories, instruments, equipment, data manipulation, writing, congresses, budgets, disputes and so on.

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The emphasis is on mediations and mediators (though distinguishing between their modes of arrangement and layout), while information is never simply transferred, since it pays for its transportation with a heavy duty in transformations, even where maintaining a constant in the case of sciences in action. And yet the distinction between the regimes of enunciation remains essential to Latour’s line of argument – above all the distinction between science’s emphasis on the transference of information and, by contrast (especially where religion is concerned), the emphasis on presentification, the production of the person and re-presentation – themes which can clearly be traced back to the Greek notion of parousia, transliterated by Christianity primarily to describe the second coming of Christ. As Latour suggests in an interview (Crawford 1993), we need to protect ourselves from the possibility of a general equivalence by seeking out instead a ‘generalized non-equivalence’. His overriding concern seems to be that any concession to scienticism could prove fatal. Rather than being connected to the information paradigm, politics involves the formation of groups. Religion, for its part, involves transformation (subsequently illustrated, as we saw at the outset, by love talk). Or to use the language of a tradition Latour readily assumes, religion involves conversion. Religion refers not to a beyond but to a ‘here’ and ‘now’. Curiously, these radical transformations and conversions, sudden and absolute as the Pauline model dictates, are the very same phenomena whose universality is put in doubt by studies in the anthropology of religion. This particularly applies to non-Western parts of the world (albeit still having to do with global Christianity) where employing the Pauline model simply produces ‘incomplete’ or even ‘false’ forms of conversion – ironically, an outcome analogous to the effect of collapsing other regimes of enunciation with science. Here Latour makes no room for the hybridisms he promotes elsewhere. But while in the recent past this could be questioned for being Christianocentric, today this questioning is found in the field of Christianity itself, expressed above all in the silent dispute between the Vatican and the numerous manifestations of Christianity in the Third World – a topic to which we shall return later. In Latour, scienticism is associated with modernity, which he rejects. Albeit here also with a certain ambiguity, since either modernity looms as a present and even threatening reality, or ‘we have never been modern’. But if we were never modern, why all the worry? Perhaps here, too, we can make use of the idea of the double-bind, more positive than the idea of ambiguity: it is as if Gregory Bateson’s dog growled and wagged its tail at modernity simultaneously. After all, although Latour’s definition of modernity serves his purposes well, it is operational, basing itself on Science’s relationship with society and

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the problematic of purity versus mixture, along with other dichotomies (such as fact and value, world and representation, etc.). What would happen were we to introduce a broader definition of modernity, too? Would Latour still reject it?

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II So where does this leave ‘us’, down below, in relation to modernity? Perhaps in the tropics, where we have always cultivated mixtures more keenly than purifications, we can imagine a modernity, which paradoxically does not entail a rupture with the past? An imagination of modernity closer to its real world practices: instead of reducing the officious to the official in the name of transparency, this would demand the opposite – namely, making the official more like the officious. Up until now, we have perceived this absence of rupture with the past as a failure in terms of our revolutionary dreams and the discourses bought from the First World. Yet in this era of second thoughts concerning modernity, perhaps underdevelopment will indeed have its advantages: the exploration of alternative modernities (Velho 1973 and 1995) in relation to discourses. An undertaking very different from – but perhaps more difficult than – the opposite (and ever-present) temptation to be more royalist than the royals, ‘freezing’ modernity through an Occidentalism, just when it is entering an era of disenchantment. Perhaps, indeed, these possibilities were already present at the dawn of modernity – in Machiavelli and Spinoza, for example – following a conception of folded time (as in Serres) that allows us to see present and past much closer than normal – especially if we avoid taking the discourse of triumphant modernity too seriously. Diverging from Latour, this would therefore involve unpacking (in Portuguese: desfazer) modernity rather than throwing away (in Portuguese: se desfazer) the entire package. Another ambiguity in Latour’s work emerges precisely in the field of religion. Opposing the ruptures evoked by modernism, his aim is to find a religious language adequate to today’s needs although necessarily distinct from those of the past – all now obsolete as far as he is concerned. However, as our own experience shows, this obsolescence is not so clear-cut. Not to mention that we should also (in contrast to what usually occurs among analysts) separate discourse from practice. Religious languages (in practice) show themselves to be very much alive, albeit at the cost of a certain impression of fundamentalism due to various dualisms, which in turn dissolve others (Velho 1999). But as Latour himself (1996) has already shown us in elaborating the concept of the faitiche (a neologism invented

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by the author from the combination of fact and fetish in French), fundamentalism lies more in the eyes of the modern beholder. Among ourselves down below, these languages appear alive and in the service of a religiosity of presentification and experience, just as Latour (and William James) would wish – or in the service of the ‘living God’, as the Pentecostalists like to say. Traditional language, in this case, is not properly speaking in the service of tradition, in the sense of a simple relayed transmission, as far too many anthropologists and theologians treat it. What is missing here, perhaps, is a greater attention to reception; precisely the same problem, in fact, as reducing communication to the transmission of messages. To add a local touch: when peasants in Brazil speak of the ‘cativeiro’, the wealth of meanings this term evokes and sets into action should not be underestimated since they are referring at the same time to Biblical bondage, to the historical slavery officially abolished in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and to present situations (Velho 1991). A kind of post-figuration that is reminiscent of – but also contrasts with – the pre-figuration examined by Eric Auerbach (1984): continuous world, continuous time. Or folded time, crumpled time, as Serres would say. Who knows, perhaps every religious language could be treated, as Latour suggests for the case of faitiches, as simultaneously real and constructed, a religion of which Feuerbach could be the apostle? The result would be a kind of generalized factishism. Worshippers can often be heard to say: ‘I wouldn’t be able to pray if I didn’t picture God as a person.’ The person, in this case, is a faitiche! Likewise the text. So why should this language need to be ‘updated’ more than it already is by itself? Unless it is merely as a concession to the modern lack of imagination, the misunderstanding of the iconoclast, so well described by Latour (1996). Why, after all is said and done, surrender to this modernity? And to a linear conception of time? The ‘updating’ of this kind of religious language need be no more than the actual transformative dynamic of the system of relations, the constant flow of mediations (as Latour likes to imagine it), but not being then properly speaking our task. Perhaps it is better to allow ourselves to be swept up by this flow than assume the role of religion-makers. Or, better still, to accept this is another situation where the opposition between subject and object needs to be collapsed (a topic to which I return later). True enough, the situation in Europe appears very close to (if not the grounding conditions for) Latour’s formulation. But perhaps we need to be outside Europe to see its situation as an exception rather than the ruling vanguard, as it sometimes appears to be in Serres’ own work – outside Europe to appreciate fully the exoticism expressed in the radical ideology of French laicism, for example. But even so,

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Europe remains an exception to be qualified, as we find in the work of Grace Davie (2000), who shows religion to be much more alive than typically reported, including in Latour’s own accounts. After all, like the churches Latour describes in Jubiler, football stadiums are also emptying, yet this doesn’t mean we are witnessing the end of football, only a change in the ways in which the game’s fans express themselves. And this is not to mention Islam, which – again in folded time – has once more become part of Europe, is no longer able to be treated as an externality. It is difficult not to distrust solutions which in their finer details (such as the attribution of a key role to economists converted to new rules as though in Pauline fashion) minimize the (present) risks of a generalized auditing (Latour 2004 [1999]) – something Marilyn Strathern has already forewarned us about with her notion of ‘audit culture’ (2000). And for an author who professes himself to be noncritical and pragmatic, is there not here a certain excess of separations (between the new and the old), suspensions and rules, as well as a somewhat blind faith in Constitutions as untouchable totalities? Does this not tend to exaggerate both what cannot be done now and what can be done in the future, minimizing the mixtures and changes taking place gradually and imperceptibly, and subordinating (in a way contradicting Latour’s own line of argument) politics to a dynamic other than its own?

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III But qualms aside, Bruno Latour’s work in progress remains a breath of fresh air. Many of the apparent problems in his thought can perhaps be put down to a failure on our part to obey the commandment not to ‘freeze images’ in terms of the flow of his thinking; a warning which anthropologists would indeed do well to observe in relation to themselves (and their epigones). As the author has already stated (Latour 2004 [1999]), the issue is one of valuing experimentation and the trajectories of apprenticeship. These problems may also be attributed to a failure to perceive the strategic nature of his formulations. A strategy closely linked to a kind of long and dispersed cautionary note concerning scienticism (where by generalizing a principle of precaution, Latour identifies himself with the practical spirit of the best anthropology) and to his belief in collectives not composed exclusively of humans. But a strategy also closely linked to the recognition of God, or at least his place (a trend influencing many figures from the contemporary world of philosophy besides Ricoeur and Levinas, ranging from Derrida to Charles Taylor and Gianni Vattimo, not to mention Serres himself).

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This recognition is associated with the obsolescence of what Latour considers the false realism–constructivism dilemma, together with a certain astonishment regarding the nihilism produced over the last few centuries and its effects. Along with the subliminal fascination of certain presences and affectations (such as Islam) in the world surrounding us. At a certain point in We Have Never Been Modern, Latour writes:

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Our past begins to change. Finally, if we have never been modern – at least in the way criticism tells the story – the tortuous relations that we have maintained with the other nature-cultures would also be transformed. Relativism, domination, imperialism, false consciousness, syncretism – all the problems that anthropologists summarise under the loose expression of ‘Great Divide’ – would be explained differently, thereby modifying comparative anthropology. (Latour 1993: 11–2)

Although Latour later swapped the principle of symmetry inspiring these ideas for one of egalitarian respect (Latour 2004 [1999]), an interesting key undoubtedly remains here – especially for those down below, such as ourselves. A key, moreover, for the theme of the regimes of enunciation. Thus, we were never modern only in the form narrated by criticism. Indeed, were the opposite the case, how would we begin to explain the dialogue between Latour and Serres, who proclaims that thanks to science we are now living through the birth of a new world ‘with no relation to any other world since the beginning of humans and societies’ (Serres 2001)? Or even speak of a new Constitution and the production of the best of all possible worlds (Latour 2004 [1999]), even if in Latour’s work these new forms also contain the sense of a reconciliation with the past and other naturecultures? The importance of constraining modernity lies not in the field of science, but in our approximation to other nature-cultures in relation to which we – including anthropology – have always assumed our superiority. Latour knows power depends on an attribution: at root, it is not that the king of double-click modernity does not exist, but that the declaration of his nudity is the touchstone needed to achieve the desired unfreezing of images. Another problem remains, though. This unfreezing must also include the unfreezing of the images of these supposedly other naturecultures. Latour aims to achieve this by establishing a common ground of non-modernity (or ecologism), very different from cultural relativism’s tolerance of differences, which renounces the search for any common ground. But if we are really interested in indigenous peoples and their replies without pre-packaging the latter within our schemas, we need to question, firstly, to what extent their

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distinct non-modernities correspond to Latour’s non-modernity (a pragmatic inquiry which in no sense inevitably implies culturalism). And secondly – since none of this has been agreed with them and once stung (as they already have been in many cases) by the insect vectors of globalized modernity (globalization not being taken here as necessarily reductionist and premature, but as that which Latour prefers to call mondialization) – we also need to ascertain whether these indigenous peoples recognize themselves in this terrain. Including for the reason that modernity, which like the world-objects of Serres (and myths) only ever appears through its versions (these indeed potentially constrainable), cannot perhaps ever be possessed and therefore can never be decreed inexistent. Down below (in Brazil and elsewhere) – and this difference may well be responsible for some of the doubts raised above concerning the postponement of issues pertaining to the common world – the (relative) debility of Science tends to provoke a tension between the fundamentalists of Science (more royal than the royals) and the (relative) strength of hybrid forums – a difference symptomatic, perhaps, of what I mentioned earlier under the rubric of alternative modernities. This calls our attention to the fact that Latour’s work allows no consistent place for Spinoza’s third genre of knowledge, which concerns the relations of singular things with the totality. Networks and even their developments, like rhizomes (Crawford 1993) and attachements, good and bad (Latour 2000), are more clearly associated with the second genre of common notions, necessary relations and affectations (in this case, in continuity with the first genre of the imagination). Despite his opposition to Nature, a concept at the core of the philosopher’s work, Spinoza remains a strong presence in Latour, notable even in the act of labelling his book on microbes (2001b [1984]) a ‘scientific-political treatise’, inspired, like its predecessor, by the question of democracy, but now in an era of ‘science wars’. However, albeit without naming them as such, Latour seems to favour the second genre over the third, which for Spinoza would comprise a culmination closely echoing Serres’s ridding-oneself-of-all-one-knows. This is part of a militant opposition to the discourse of holism (including in the field of religion, where, as we saw, presentification should prevail). This is manifest in Latour’s critique of the Naturpolitik of ecologists, which is invariably distant – and once more we are faced with this type of contrast – from the practice of these same ecologists, which depends on particular places, situations and events (Latour 2004[1999]). It is as if this third genre were too mystical and spiritual – incompatible with a pragmatist posture and antithetical to concrete articulations. But supposing this to be the case (a topic that really merits further discussion), what would happen if its material justification had

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in fact already emerged, not as a starting point but as an end point (totalization)? Are we not faced once more by contemporary realities that Latour, although pursuing the same line of reasoning (in this case, that of totalization), locates in the future? Does his caution not then become debilitating? In Hominescence, Serres declares the end of networks and the instauration of a new, topological, space, without measurable distance and allowing a generalized ubiquity which discards the Heideggarian being-there and the (Latourian?) here and now in favour of a being-all (être-partout) which invades ontology (Serres 1992a [1987]). For the author, these events are provoked by the new world-objects: the laptop computer and mobile phone. World-objects to which, at least halfway, some of our Amerindians could add the tape recorder and video camera. The same Indians who – in contrast to what Latour supposes for non-humans and suggests for humans themselves (2004 [1999]) – were they consulted (as his non-modern Constitution anticipates) would perhaps prove entirely uninterested in having scientists (or philosophers) as their spokespeople, a role which at the end of the day still appears to clash with his own democratic proposal or at least reveal its latent contradictions. Unilateralities aside (after all, in principle there seems to be no incompatibility between networks and topological space), it remains essential to ascertain the implications of all this – without neglecting, furthermore, the second genre here and now, but recreated out of the global. This dialogue must continue, therefore. But for this to happen, it may well need to be amplified, breaking a number of barriers which still, at least partially, separate different intellectual traditions. By avoiding the freezing of images (Latour’s expression), we could then establish more productive dialogues, where the questions posed above and many others could enjoy a much ampler space in which to propagate. I shall spend the remainder of this paper attempting precisely this kind of exercise – one also equivalent to a ‘postcolonial’ approach in which a mediating role is potentially occupied by those situated beyond the metropolitan poles of knowledge. In the process, I shall use the issue of Christianity’s persistence at a global level to pose a number of methodological questions and as an expedient for limiting the scope of the discussion on religion as a way of knowing.

IV Marilyn Strathern began an article published in the Brazilian journal Mana in 1998 and later republished in Property, Substance and Effect (1999) by stating that:

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Both those who think they exemplify the new and those who think they exemplify the old may, in pursuing that very division, be radical agents of change. If there is a kind of congruence or interdependence here in their efforts, perhaps it is part of what Otávio Velho has described as the fait accompli of globalisation. He puts a concrete image before our eyes: for the anthropologist the experience might be akin to seeing people going Pentecostal all over the world. The battle between God and the Devil that Neo-Pentecostalism enjoins is a dualism to undo other dualisms. Moreover, while it was a nominally Lutheran pastor from Hagen who took me aside in 1995 with a message he wanted to relay to England, Velho’s remark about Pentecostalism in Brazil spreading across the entire religious field was also echoed in the Hagen area. Public meetings of the long-established Lutheran church, as well as Roman Catholic, can now resemble those of the much more recent Assembly of God, with its promise of charisma and fellowship, and work in the name of similarities. Observing that Papua New Guinea is now one of the most Christian countries of the world, the pastor said I must return to England where he knew there were few believers and bring people back to God. (Strathern 1999: 89)

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Strathern refers to an article of mine she was able to read in English (Velho 1999–2000), but which had also been published in Mana (Velho 1997). There I wrote that anthropology should perhaps pay more attention to a discourse of similarities and contingent approximations, which would not annul difference, only its exotics. The article also stated that: Such phenomena as the growth of Pentecostalism in various regions of the world (including Brazil, not long ago seen as the example par excellence of a Catholic culture of a holistic nature) cannot be explained away by simply assuming an absolute ability to absorb and domesticate locally all that comes from ‘outside,’ leaving no residues. Even when there is dissatisfaction with the ‘global’ alternatives offered … the rhetoric that points to such full absorption and domestication sounds less and less convincing. This is true particularly in the case of religion, where the call to transcendence legitimates the overstepping of boundaries … (Velho 1999–2000: 329)

Truth be told, not just anthropologists were surprised by these events. Birgit Meyer (1994 and 1996), writing from the context of Africa, has pointed out the global effectiveness of diabolizing the so-called ‘traditional’ religions – a diabolization in which the Pentecostalists are masters – in contrast to more theologically and politically ‘correct’ strategies such as ‘inculturation’. Despite the opinion of critics, among whom enlightened clergy are certainly included, she argues that we must recognize the role of agents, and not mere defenceless victims, assumed by converts in this process. A recognition which has indeed been made by ethnologists, albeit very often – at least until recently

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– only in the equally unilateral direction of affirming the unlimited capacity for ‘cannibalization’ of what comes ‘from the outside’. Pentecostalization is a powerful instrument in Christianity’s persistence. This includes the fact that it tends to be generalized far beyond Pentecostalist churches properly speaking – as Strathern notes – and even within Catholicism. It also interests our discussion insofar as it exposes the limitations of certain mechanisms of anthropological common sense. Equally, we should note that the discomfort experienced by anthropologists in general in the face of Pentecostalism’s power of conversion is duplicated among ourselves vis-à-vis Christianity as such in the field of ethnology (where the phenomenon of Pentecostalization is also far from absent). This, in fact, provides proof that the discipline’s Great Divide does not always operate, even in reaffirming preconceptions. But with or without Pentecostalization, Christianity’s persistence is a fact that assaults anthropologists in a wide variety of ways. To Marilyn Strathern’s report we can add that of Niko Besnier (1995), who records how the natives of Polynesia, since the nineteenth century, have been able to convert without ever seeing a European thanks to the action of Samoan missionaries, experts in the art of conversion. Other, nonanthropological accounts tell of Polynesian missionaries in a more general fashion, but also note the special devotion of Samoans. I have already described elsewhere my conversation with the then President of the American Anthropological Association (Annette Weiner), in which she expressed her indignation over the fact that ‘her’ natives had become ‘believers’; and this precisely ‘there’, on the Trobriand Islands, where, so to speak, ‘everything began’ in mythical terms for our (modernist) discipline. The fact is that especially from the nineteenth century onwards the conversion of the peoples who have been the object of anthropology is an incontestable fact. Margaret Jolly even records, among the inhabitants of Vanuatu (the old New Hebrides) and other areas of the Pacific, the desire to reverse the missionary flow, imagining a future scenario in which the peoples of the Pacific promote a Christian revival in Australia, Europe and even America (Jolly 1996). And if this appears pure fantasy, perhaps even more surreal is the statistical data apparently confirming this fantasy, since in numerical terms Christianity is increasingly a ‘Third World’ religion, while Islam is making rapid advances in the ‘First World’ (as well as in the Third, naturally). Furthermore, Christianity is advancing in the Third World (which in turn advances through the First) not just numerically, but also theologically, despite resistance from the Vatican and beyond. This reminds me of a meeting of the World Council of Churches where I acted as a consultant: an Indian Jesuit had suggested that for the Christians of India, the Old Testament,

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derived from the Judaic tradition, would need to be replaced by another, deriving from the Indian traditions. Along the same lines, I could cite the comments of a Palestinian Lutheran whom I met in Nazareth, in the interval between two intifadas, stating how difficult it was for her under those circumstances to empathize with those who had circled the walls of Jericho in the episode from the Bible. In fact, we can perceive that this kind of data – complemented by the records of anthropologists, even when they exaggerate the ‘resistance’ of native cultures – lends a very special twist to the apparent persistence of Christianity. In the article of mine cited by Strathern, I called attention, inspired by the observations of Niklas Luhmann, Peter Beyer and others, to the risks of a very common illusion, which by underestimating contingencies also ends up underestimating the changes hidden by a certain historical, albeit productive, misunderstanding of nominal persistencies. The price paid by Christianity’s persistence is that it has ceased to be ‘occidental’, although at times it may be occidentalist. A paradoxical persistence, may be crying out for a new terminological framework to formulate these questions. But perhaps, then, we should return to the anthropologists. What lies at the root of their persistence? I recall Christina Toren (personal communication), recounting the ironic observation made by her husband on visiting the anthropologist at her field site in Fiji: ‘But you never told me about these Coca-Cola adverts on the roadside!’ And this in a place not so far from the region of the world where anthropologists were obliged to recognize cargo cults. Are Christians just so many more Coca-Cola adverts for anthropologists? Even if they have to retreat to a second line of defence, minimizing strategically what can no longer be hidden empirically?

V Not being an ethnologist (a term that in Brazil is reserved for anthropologists who study Amerindians and their indigenous counterparts in other continents), I feel uncomfortable making any substantial claims in their field. Furthermore, I should note the growing effort in Brazil over recent years to try to respond to these questions. Suffice it to say, though, that perhaps we are confronted here with important conceptual and methodological obstacles, during what Joanna Overing has already described as a ‘period of confusion’ in our discipline. And I suspect that while these remain unconfronted, empirical advances will fail to realize their full potential. The situation demands something along the lines of Henrietta Moore’s remark,

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made in an extreme case, that it is not enough to ‘add-woman-andstir’, applying the existing theory to resolve the problem of integrating the feminine perspective within anthropology (Moore 1988) – though this also calls attention to its strategic importance. Hence I shall simply try to identify some of the possible sources for the confusion to which Overing refers and some potential avenues to be explored, looking to supplement the efforts already being made in this direction. These avenues are undoubtedly already familiar to us and I shall merely recall them. Since up until now they do not appear to have realized in a more generalized way their full potential in the field of research, even when they are present in our debates. Any exaggeration I make may be put down both to my ignorance and to the fact that I shall use what Marilyn Strathern has dubbed an ‘analytic fiction’ as a way of calling attention to particular problems. Problems, despite being tackled by more innovative works, remain deeply rooted in the canon of our discipline. My aim is precisely to highlight the existing potential for renewal. The first point of the diagnosis can be drawn from another text by Marilyn Strathern: the already classic ‘Out of context: the persuasive fictions of anthropology’ (Strathern 1990), where she once again demonstrates her unequalled ability to poise herself on a tightrope between mainstream anthropology and the winds of change. In this work, Strathern accepts Edwin Ardener’s argument (1985) that anthropology’s modernist period is coming to a close. This period was characterized by an accentuated emphasis on viewing individual societies as totalities to be interpreted in their own terms, in a readertext relationship based on the construction of a strangeness in relation to these societies, to which, however, we are perfectly capable of attributing meaning if we respect the dichotomy between subject and object and an implicit epistemology that domesticates behaviour. This is not the place to examine the productivity of such a posture. Neither is it the place to examine the theoretical, political and rhetorical reasons alleged not only by Strathern and Ardener, but by innumerable other authors, for supposing that today it is no longer possible to operate with these premises – nowadays discredited as far as Strathern is concerned. A still polemical topic, in fact, although many of us have already been persuaded to take it seriously, in principle at least, even if only in response to the intellectual environment it symptomizes. What I am suggesting here, however, is that this recognition has yet to be followed by a new operational posture, even an experimental one, which allows us not only to believe the facts, but also to deal with them in a way that does not resort compulsively to modernist solutions, still deeply incorporated by us. Nor, on the other hand, to fall into the post-modern temptation to condemn ourselves to examining

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only representations of representations of ourselves, indefinitely. The fact is that operationally we appear to have made little headway from this theoretically (and politically) contested ‘past position’. Indeed, the non-academic outcome of this impasse seems to be that we continue to transmit a modernist anthropology transformed into common sense. As a result, in the case of religion, however much they identify with us, even the more enlightened and politically correct sectors of the clergy, for example (such as those advocating ‘inculturation’), paradoxically reveal themselves to be less instrumentalized than those who by adopting a practical, ‘wild’ anthropology help to reveal, retroactively, the limits of established anthropological knowledge. In Lisbon I had the chance to attend a service at the temple of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in which the Brazilian pastor claimed that the Exus and other malevolent divinities active in Brazil were also busy at work in Portugal. And the audience seemed to be in enthusiastic agreement. What would anthropology have to say about this which would mean more than just ‘add Pentecostals and stir’? Something to say that would go beyond an easy (but misleading) diffusionist interpretation which would skip over the actual meaning of these practices? A viewpoint that would not in a self-satisfied way oppose ethnography to theory, creating a false opposition between those who favour ethnography and those who supposedly do not? Indeed, an opposition that may actually cover up a de-skilling of ethnography itself (to use the term put forward by Michael Herzfeld in his contribution to this volume). But that may also cover up the less frequently observed responsibility of anthropologists themselves in the process, for instance by means of a (rapid) conventionalization of knowledge that in fact impedes serendipity (see Herzfeld’s contribution) and lines (Ingold 2004) from producing their full effects. Instead of opposing ethnography and theory, anthropologists might do well to recognize the difference between Scientific discourse and actual scientific practice, something scientists in general (they too, non-propositionally!) seem to do quite well. This in fact suggests it may be a corporatist illusion to suppose only anthropology has an artisanal and embodied way of knowing. It may be our particular (and embarrassing) difficulty in recognizing the difference between discourse and practice that explains (at least partially) the strong impression produced among us by the positivistic vision of knowledge.

VI One of the paths to be explored seems to be the introduction of the question of the person. But here, too, this is not enough. This

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introduction has to be done in such a way that, instead of reinforcing established dichotomies, like individual and society, structure and agency, subjectivity-objectivity and so on, it helps to break with them. Strathern has tackled the question herself in relation to Melanesia, in part inspired by Roy Wagner, but also by the regional ethnography as a whole – for example, in her text ‘Parts and Wholes: Refiguring Relationships’ (Strathern 1992b). Here she argues that the dichotomy between parts and wholes dissolves when one considers the modelling of relations contained by the actual person, instead of looking to discover to what group he or she belongs in contrast to the person treated as an individual. Here fractals serve as a metaphor illustrating this perspective. Although her argument relates to Melanesia, as so often occurs in anthropology, the text also amounts to a critique of the way in which we see ourselves and our relations, in a line which seems akin with the notion of Mind, as previously developed by Gregory Bateson. In turn, by suggesting that this way of seeing ourselves is not the only possibility, even for ourselves, this critique reveals a typical disjunction between the ethnographic record and generalizations, as Nicholas Thomas has already pointed out (Thomas 1991). Perhaps one way of advancing these discussions with the potential for applying them to our case and enabling a transposition of these ideas as a whole, without ethnographic arbitrariness, can be found in Tim Ingold’s text, ‘The Art of Translation in a Continuous world’ (Ingold 1993). And here I would underline the idea of ‘continuous world’. Ingold suggests that the anthropological fabrication of cultural systems is a product of representing and codifying difference within the discourse of homogeneity. In this sense, the accusation of ethnocentrism is itself a way of asserting superiority in relation to everyday humans or ‘informants.’ The person is seen as the carrier of a set of cognitive rules based on a Cartesian dualism between mind and body. Taking an opposite stance, Ingold argues that we must replace perception as an activity of the mind with perception as a permanent activity of the whole person, moving about within and exploring an environment, the person being apprehended as a node within a nexus of relations. Difference should not be understood as a function of discontinuity and contrast, but of involvement with others in a continuous social process, where the movement within a same world which we inhabit (rather than simply decode) is fundamental – as Merleau-Ponty and Bateson both pointed out. It is essential to avoid expelling all difference to a frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in order to create an artificial ‘internal’ uniformity. The division into blocks of distinct cultures needs to be replaced by the representation of people’s variable sense of belonging to a continuous world. Here there is no longer any place for an over-

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emphasis on individual societies as totalities to be treated exclusively in their own terms. In actual fact, there is also considerable space here for questioning the concepts of society and culture. It is supposed, therefore, that speaking of subcultures only recognizes the difficulty without altering the terms of the question. It is this division into blocks which entails the artificial reconstitution of the continuity of the world only through the act of translation. As Latour says, incommensurability is produced rather than given. Instead of resolving the problem of translation, anthropology creates it in order to feed off it. We need to recover a sense of continuity prior to the act of translation – a sense which should not presume uniformity – with an emphasis on relational identities. This does not mean social life does not imply acts of construction and separation, translation itself undoubtedly being one way of rendering the other understandable (Rafael 1988) – only that rather than being the initial moment, this is living in the continuous world. In fact, this sense of continuity echoes Marilyn Strathern’s reading of the work of Frazer (in contrast to that of Malinowski) in ‘Out of Context’ (Strathern 1990). It also recalls her search for a solution to the critique of binarism capable of dealing with similarity and difference without relying on the ontology of an economy of opposition (Strathern 1992a) – a search that undoubtedly coincides with the overall sense of what we are looking for here and that was already present in my Mana article (Velho 1997). This, without mentioning the critiques made of notions such as ‘tribe’ – as well as, more generally, the colonial imposition of ethnic and religious identities where previously much more fluidity had existed. An imposition invariably followed (when not led) by anthropology itself. And again without mentioning the modern division of disciplines such as anthropology and psychology into blocks, which Ingold and others also consider outmoded. Combining Ingold and Latour, I suggest we are so used to the fundamental operation of rupture that it is difficult for us to absorb this alternative idea of translation and difference in a continuous world: of small differences rather than big oppositions, of sequences of similarities rather than equalities or binary oppositions. An operation of rupture of an epistemological kind, epistemology here being taken in Bateson’s sense of modes of thought (in contrast to the epistemology of philosophers that Latour repudiates), that appears to legitimate parallels between apparently distinct areas of social life. This is perhaps a question of Gestalt, as Bateson mentioned when he suggested replacing the definition of the hand by its five fingers with the possible relations between the fingers: always the primacy of the relation substituting the primacy of things. The idea of translation and difference in a continuous world seems to be demanded from

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many sides. But it is important to stress that at the end of the day even continuity should not to be taken literally; rather, we should see it as Gestalt and also as the capacity to treat small differences as such. For me personally, it was useful while absorbing this idea to compare a text by Bruno Latour (2001a) in which he explores the difference – for many, incommensurable – between things and words and between referent and observer. Observing a group of scientists in the field in the Amazon, he shows how, despite what philosophers of language might say, the practice of research does not produce an impassable gap between subject and object demanding, once more, artificial solutions. Instead, we encounter a series of mediations that traverse the difference between things and words. There is no external referent: it is always internal to the forces that use it (Latour 2001b [1984]). In actuality, reference is circulating and designates a chain of transformations in their entirety, each transformation implying (only) small (mediated) hiatuses between form and matter. And with this – just as in the case considered here – many modern and postmodern mysteries evaporate. It seems to me basically the same mechanisms are at work. Just as they are at work in Nicholas Thomas’s critique of what he terms the ‘fabrication of alterity’ (Thomas 1991). In practical terms, Thomas suggests the importance of a regional perspective. This perspective enables the multiplication of ‘others’, meaning that difference emerges between one context and another without taking the radical form of alterity in an abysm separating observers from those observed. This also provides us with a solution to the previously mentioned disjunction between generic questions and ethnographic work. In the author’s view, we cannot understand cultural borrowings and additions, or locally distinct variants of cosmopolitan movements, while we remain focused on the richness of local conversations and the stable ethnography that captures them. Although the nuances of village dialogues are indeed interminable, and the interplay of time and person highly seductive, we need to surrender in some degree to the corruptions of pidgin and creole languages if we are to recover an intelligible debate beyond the multiplicity of isolated languages.

VII Talal Asad (1996) reminds us that, as the medievalist Karl Morrison has pointed out, the concept of conversion is actually a Christian– Western notion: it therefore amounts to a category confusion to deploy it as an instrument of critical analysis. This line of reasoning has been pursued by various anthropologists and without doubt the book

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Conversion to Christianity, edited by Robert W. Hefner (1993), comprises an extremely diversified panel of what may be conceived as conversion along the lines of the critique of nominalism referred to earlier – a critique implying that the classical Pauline model of sudden and radical rupture should be duly situated rather than used as a parameter to disregard transformations that in comparison appear incomplete, slow and/or ambiguous: another example of anthropology (re)constructing a concept only to become scandalized by its own ideas. As we saw earlier, reference to this narrow model of conversion has been used to disqualify indigenous conversions. But, here too, is it not more useful to think of a ‘continuous world’, a topology, rather than absolute discontinuities and ruptures? Even if this implies questioning notions such as syncretism, which function as the flipside of this idealized conversion, as well as avoiding underestimating the transformations already taken place – transformations that sometimes appear closer to a model of ‘awakening’ possibilities contained in networks and (network-)persons rather than the strong model of conversion. This model of awakening is implicit but not yet fully theorized in anthropological narratives, perhaps because of the constraints imposed by the disjuncture between ethnography and generalizations observed by Nicholas Thomas, as well as the incorporation – still – of modernist premises that fail to recognize these transversalities. Although this awakening does not seem so far from what Roy Wagner labels ‘obviation’. This is an idea which surfaces, for example, in Maurice Leenhardt’s account of the (re)discovery of the meaning of ‘redemption’ achieved in the very act of translation undertaken collectively with the natives by this hybrid of missionary and anthropologist – a figure which challenges our modern separations and purifications (Clifford 1982) and recalls the practice of less enlightened missionaries even today. Except here Morrison and Asad’s critiques need to be slightly modified: in a continuous world, the fact that a notion possesses an original context need not stop us from finding its equivalent elsewhere. Equally, it does not allow us to presume that the concept, by definition, actually functions in the way that the model dictates in its original context. In every case, a continuous world. And in all cases, nothing substitutes for empirical verification. In operational terms, perhaps we must add a recuperated notion of ‘networks’ to this overall idea. A notion capable of assuming a central role in this kind of approach, including as a way of correcting any trace of apriorism or ahistoricity contained in Ingold (and MerleauPonty) in the image of the continuous world. Continuous world being an engaging image which, however, in its singular form should probably be considered a recent historical event, as Latour indicates apropos the notion of environment – perhaps even a political task,

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associated with the concrete links generated in the process (Latour 2000). Moreover, in every case we must verify not only the content of the network, but also what escapes its meshes or comprises part of other networks, even when these seem proximate, besides leaving open the possibility of vaster totalizations. This verification forces us to remain alert to the concrete interplay of socialities – indigenous and/or non-indigenous alike. An interplay where not only mediators but above all chains of mediators (to avoid any second-level reification of the supposed mediators themselves, such as missionaries) comprise strategic nodes. Mapping these nodes should be a priority, including the recognition of small mediators, like the native sacristans and leaders of confraternities during the colonial period among the Tagalog in the Philippines, highlighted by Vicente L. Rafael, whose functions found similarities in Latin America in their ‘capacity to move between … social and political hierarchies’, (Rafael 1988: 194). In reconstituting these kinds of chains in detail, this mapping should also enable us to recognize the minimal order of magnitude of the differences between their links. And all this our referential frameworks seem to me to have hindered until now, except perhaps on a very general or – conversely – on a highly empirical level. Precisely the opposite to Freud’s fears, epistemological neurosis perhaps resides not in the small differences but precisely in the inability to recognize and deal with them, reducing everything either to identifications or opposed fields. The potential centrality of the notion of networks (irrespective of whether the name itself is retained) depends, though, on not restricting ourselves to the individualist and homogenizing conception that characterized its British version in the mid twentieth century – a conception which still lingers today. This depends on incorporating Serres’s topology. But also Ingold’s emphasis on movement, process and the life and crossing of lines (Ingold 2004). Or Bateson’s rhizome (Bateson 1958 [1936]) that Latour (taking the term from Gilles Deleuze) suggests may be introduced in the place of network (Crawford 1993: 263). And even depends on eventually drawing different conclusions from those drawn by some of its new proponents, such as Latour himself to the extent that as suggested earlier he finally seems to stop short of recognizing Spinoza’s third (totalizing) genre of knowledge. Anyway, as Latour suggests, the notion should be widened and heterogenized in a rhizomatic proliferation that includes not only indigenous and non-indigenous humans, but also artefacts (such as the State, its agents and religious faitiches) and even nonhumans, ways of knowing and other enunciations. The mapping of chains of mediators should not only be as detailed as possible, but as wide as possible, pursued without barriers or preconceptions within

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an agnostic methodology. Just as the sixteenth-century debates on the nature of Indians seem to exemplify, the division we usually establish between humans and non-humans, for example, is to a certain extent the same division made between ‘ourselves’ and all other human beings. This suggests an important asymmetry in the ways in which we see each other, insofar as indigenous peoples do not act in the same way: what comprises the ‘other’ for us may not be so for them – a fact which appears to denounce the paradoxical ethnocentrism of modern alterities themselves, above all when presented in the form of objective (when not universal) conceptual schemas that attempt to impermeablize themselves from affections. Joanna Overing has already drawn our attention to this procedure (Overing 1996). By declining to make this division, we can avoid identifying ourselves with modern nihilism, bypassing the opposition between Nature (given) and Culture (constructed). We can thereby (re)approach indigenous peoples themselves, who – although it is difficult to generalize – usually seem to operate within their cosmologies without this division: differentiating, for sure, but within continuous worlds. It must be stressed that the latter is a complementary argument, since we are in search of a holistic research posture, without reductionisms of a cosmological, cognitive or any other kind. A posture that accepts neither irremovable incommensurabilities, nor absolute compartments (of codes, for example), which fail to include a process of translation-with-[little]-treacheries. In isolation, the cosmological argument, like any other, is far from decisive. Shifting beyond an economy of either/or, enables us to absorb everything and everyone, including – who knows? – even ethnologists and nonethnologist anthropologists, within a collaborative regime. And all this does not mean we unduly surpass the limits of the social, since what is at stake is precisely the recognition of a social world amplified through the agnostic and pragmatic criterion of its actual presence, abounding in faitiches and beings, which, as Latour would say, if they don’t make, at least ‘make happen’. Conceived in this way, the notion of networks allows us not only to abandon the rigid distinction between sciences and ethnosciences, as Latour (1989) advocates, but also to cease making any distinction between religion and ‘ethnoreligions’. The figure of the Samoan missionary converting people throughout Polynesia and – who knows – in Europe, becomes less strange insofar as we recognize this involves times and spaces that are not independent but produced inside networks. Today the distinction between World Religions (such as Christianity) and those labelled traditional or local becomes ever more impossible to sustain; just like the distinction between those religions that seek to make converts and those that do not. In this

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context, missions would comprise the general mode of operating and dislocating elements in religions in the shape of networks – a form which tends to be the general tendency in this era of globalization, in large part following the pioneering Christian model, too. This applies even though it does not involve the same type of network in all cases: the typical modern network is characterized by a concerted action, though each agent remains separate in his or her (or its) apparent purity – the anthropologist, for example, clearly separated from the missionary or the administrator. But in no sense is this the only possibility (Latour 2001c [1984]). Indeed, the fact this is not the only possibility is not only shown to us by the Maurice Leenhardt case: it is confirmed by many field experiences and even by some of our ‘hybrid’ students. It is essential we avoid being more fundamentalist than the fundamentalists, presupposing that the origin of a category makes it irremediably an ‘ethnocategory’. Finally, in more general terms, we must understand networks within a conceptual framework that abandons the subject–object opposition, besides not opposing totalizing possibilities. Earlier I mentioned the eclipsing of Coca-Cola advertizing (and implicitly, consumption) in Fiji. By chance, again at a meeting of the World Council of Churches, I once met an elderly lady who was a missionary in Fiji. She recounted how Fiji had been in a deplorable economic situation until someone dreamt up the idea of exploiting a source of mineral water that had been long overlooked from over-familiarity. Given the contemporary vogue for mineral waters, this water became an instant success in Europe. Hence, it is well to remember that while the natives drink cheap Coca-Cola, by using exoticism in their favour, Europeans can be persuaded to drink water from Fiji at the price of gold. The networks themselves should escape the choice between objectivity and subjectivity, the important factor being to bypass this false dilemma in pragmatic fashion, their recognition (or not) – as we have already observed in terms of mediators – depending exclusively on their efficacy. In this context, the most probable response to our opening question, namely whether religion comprises a way of knowing, is perhaps simply: ‘that depends’, the reply being constituted by a set of dimensions which, with all due respect to the solutions already proffered, seems to be incapable of dispensing with an irreducible discursive form coherent with the primacy of the question of practices (discursive and otherwise), relations and networks, and with the nonrecognition of the separation between subject and object of knowledge itself (at the end of the day: who knows?). It also involves being clear about the fact that knowledge production is not a natural faculty. Asad suggests (Asad 1993: 46) that in the West before modernity reduced it to belief (up to this point he coincides with Latour), religion

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was in fact a site for producing (disciplined) knowledge (here he parts company with Latour). And one could also suggest that this production of knowledge may have survived in Christianity itself (Meyendorff 1982), as its Eastern (Orthodox) variant’s notion of theosis (deification) seems to indicate. It may have survived particularly in cases where monasticism and other practices helped keep alive charismatic leadership, not always incompatible with institutional leadership or demanding the affirmation of the latter’s primacy, as moderns would insist. Latour notwithstanding, it may be exactly when this incompatibility does establish itself and the institutional mediation is reified (more commonly in Western Christendom) that religion is definitely not a way of knowing. We could also therefore ask to what extent imbuing the notions of skill, learning, embodiment and the formation of habits with a new and positive emphasis should not alter the way we have tended to view disciplinary practices themselves at least since Foucault (more specifically, the Foucault of the genealogy of power, if not the Foucault of the technologies of the self). In an era in which reified institutions are less and less a legitimate source of affectations (and thus cannot rely on discipline), it may well be that the repudiation of discipline paradoxically represents a senile repudiation of its still active (albeit in a loose form as in the ‘sects’, and particularly among the young) charismatic counterpart, still capable of mobilizing discipline. At the same time it may also herald new, noninstitutional and individualized forms of control (by means of modern consumerism, for instance) ideologically associated by liberal thought with creativity and the imagination.

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Notes 1. This chapter was translated by David Rodgers.

References Ardener, E. 1985. ‘Social Anthropology and the Decline of Modernism’, in J. Overing (ed.), Reason and Morality. London: Tavistock, pp. 47–70. Asad, T. 1993. ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category’, in T. Asad (ed.), Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 27–54. ———. 1996. ‘Comments on Conversion’, in P. Van der Veer (ed.), Conversion to Modernities: the Globalization of Christianity. London: Routledge, pp. 263–273.

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Auerbach, E. 1984. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bateson, G. 1958[1936]. Naven: The Culture of the Iatmul People of New Guinea as Revealed through a Study of the ‘Naven’ Ceremonial. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Besnier, N. 1995. Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clifford, J. 1982. Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crawford, H.T. 1993. ‘An Interview with Bruno Latour’. Configurations 1(2): 247–68. Davie, G. 2000. Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates. New York: Oxford. Hefner, R.W. (ed.). 1993. Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ingold, T. 1993. ‘The Art of Translation in a Continuous World’, in G. Pálson (ed.), Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse. Oxford and Providence: Berg, pp. 210–30. ———. 2004. Up, Across and Along. Unpublished ms. Jolly, M. 1996. ‘Devils, Holy Spirits and the Swollen God: Translation, Conversion and Colonial Power in the Marist Mission’, in P. Van der Veer (ed.), Conversion to Modernities: the Globalization of Christianity. London: Routledge, pp. 231–62. Latour, B. 1989. La Science en Action. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. New York and London: Harvester and Wheatsheaf. ———. 1996. Petite Réflexion sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser em Rond. ———. 2000. ‘Fractures/fractures: de la notion de réseau à celle d’attachement’, in A. Micoud and M. Peroni (eds), Ce Qui Nous Relie. La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de L’Aube, pp. 189–207. ———. 2001a. L’Espoir de Pandore: Pour une Révision Realiste de l’Activité Scientifique. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2001b [1984]. Pasteur: Guerre et Paix des Microbes. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2001c [1984]. ‘Irréductions’, in Bruno Latour, Pasteur: Guerre et Paix des Microbes. Paris: La Découverte, pp. 237–49. ———. 2002a. Jubiler ou Les Tourments de la Parole Religieuse. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser em rond. ———. 2002b. La Fabrique du Droit: Une Ethnographie du Conseil d’État. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2004 [1999]. Politiques de la Nature: Comment Faire Entrer Les Sciences en Démocratie. Paris: La Découverte. ———. n.d. Si l’on Parlait un Peu Politique. (version finale pour publication dans Politix). Meyendorff, J. 1982. The Byzantine Legacy in the Orthodox Church. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

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Meyer, B. 1994. ‘Beyond Syncretism: Translation and Diabolization in the Appropriation of Protestantism in Africa’, in C. Stewart and R. Shaw (eds), Syncretism and Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. London: Routledge, pp. 45–68. Meyer, B. 1996. ‘Modernity and Enchantment: The Image of the Devil in Popular African Christianity’, in P. Van der Veer (ed.), Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. London: Routledge, pp. 199– 230. Moore, H.L. 1988. ‘Feminism and Anthropology: The Story of a Relationship’, in H.L. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–11. Overing, J. 1996. ‘Who is the Mightiest of them All? Jaguar and Conquistador in Piaroa Images of Alterity’, in J. Arnold (ed.), Monsters, Tricksters and Sacred Cows. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Rafael, V.L. 1988. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Serres, M. 1992a [1987]. Le Contrat Naturel. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 1992b. Eclaircissements: Entretiens avec Bruno Latour. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 2001. Hominescence. Paris: Le Pommier. Strathern, M. 1990. ‘Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology’, in M. Manganaro (ed.), Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 80–122. ———. 1992a. ‘Between a Melanesianist and a Feminist’ in M. Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Technologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 64–89. ———. 1992b. ‘Parts and Wholes: Refiguring Relationships’, in M. Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Technologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 90–116. ———. 1998. ‘Novas formas econômicas: um relato das terras altas da Papua-Nova Guiné’. Mana 4(1): 109–39. ———. 1999. ‘New Economic Forms: A Report’, in M. Strathern, Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological essays on persons and things. London: Athlone Press, pp. 89–116. ———. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. Thomas, N. 1991. ‘Against Ethnography’. Cultural Anthropology 6(3): 306– 322. Velho, O. 1973. ‘Modes of Capitalist Development, Peasantry and the Moving Frontier’, Ph.D. thesis. Manchester: University of Manchester. ———. 1991. ‘The Peasant and the Beast’. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 51: 7–25. ———. 1995. ‘Preventing or Criticising the Process of Modernization? The Case of Brazil’, in L. Van Vucht Tijssen, et al. (eds.), The Search for Fundamentals. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1997. ‘Globalização: Antropologia e Religião’. Mana 3(1): 133–54.

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———. 1999. ‘Globalization: Object – Perspective – Horizon’. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 4(2): 320–339 [also in R. Robertson and K.E. White (eds), 2003, Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology, Vol. I: Analytical Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 233–50.]

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Chapter 4

DESKILLING, ‘DUMBING DOWN’ AND THE AUDITING OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE PRACTICAL MASTERY OF ARTISANS AND ACADEMICS: AN ETHNOGRAPHER’S RESPONSE TO A GLOBAL PROBLEM

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Michael Herzfeld

This paper is the first salvo in a concerted attempt I am making to address the problem of ‘simplicity’ as a specifically political issue in the presentation of knowledge. In a word, I want to suggest that ‘simplicity’ is – simply – a proxy term for ‘standardization’. The standardization in question is that of knowledge, routinized as ‘data’, and it corresponds to the industrial practice of marginalizing individualistic modes of production in the name of efficiency. Once we dissolve the old distinction between artisanal and intellectual knowledge, such parallels take on more persuasive meaning. They also pose a threat to academic and intellectual autonomy, analogous to the deskilling of the artisan. Thus, the populist call to simplicity is more than the sum of its parts. It is, in fact, complex – a rhetorical and political call to arms that strikes at the very heart of inventiveness. This perhaps explains why it so often seems that ‘complexity’, rather than simplicity, is the issue seeming to require resolution. There is one variety of complexity that we nevertheless take for granted and even

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embrace, as the ‘unmarked’ term. This is the complexity we attribute to ourselves. There is a host of literature on ‘complex societies’, ‘complex social formations’, and ‘complexity’ tout court. In a world that proudly considers itself complex, however, the allure of simplicity also seems to grow apace, much as urbanism fostered the worship of an idealized nature (Williams 1973). Simplicity apparently appeals to an aesthetic as much social and political as it is epistemological; it speaks both to working-class anti-intellectualism and to bourgeois pretensions of rejecting elaborate or sumptuous lifestyles. It is an ideology readymade for the anti-intellectual populism that seems to soar on the wings of today’s global neoliberalism. The time has come to question this dangerously unmarked, and unnoticed, status of simplicity. To do that, however, requires appealing to one of its most frequent victims: ethnography. It is no coincidence that populism often adopts a ‘know-nothing’ position. It appeals to an ideology in which artisanal, embodied knowledge is seen as a surer basis for assessing intelligence and social worth than is bookish knowledge. Politicians have clearly exploited a substrate of accumulated resentment against intellectualism, their position not unsupported from within. While those of us who have done research on physical labor have tended to write sympathetically (and against the grain of elitist intellectualism) about the value of embodied forms of knowledge (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; Jackson 1983; Herzfeld 2004; Jenkins 1994), populist politicians ranging from George W. Bush in the United States to Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Thaksin Shinawatr in Thailand have – without any evident respect for embodied knowledge itself – whipped up this resentment against a perceived tyranny of ‘cleverness’. Thaksin provides some especially revealing correspondences. For him, ‘academics and NGOs’ merge, perhaps not coincidentally, in the person of a self-styled anthropologist who has frequently criticized his policies (Thirayuth Boonmee), and who is also a well-known critic of ‘the West’ (e.g. Thirayuth 2003). Mocking Thirayuth’s determinedly unfashionable dress mode, and (in true neoliberal language) dismissing the entire range of his critics as his ‘usual customers’, Thaksin deploys to his advantage an aspect of Thai manners (marayaat) that allows the powerful to deride those they wish to regard as weak: by belittling the power of ‘professors’ (ajaan, a term of religious implication [cf. Sanskrit-derived acharya]), people who once held a respected position in Thai society, he rhetorically replaces them by a horde of number-crunching managers and an underclass recast as about to receive unimaginable wealth as a reward for its new-found obedience. The fact that Thirayuth himself is a great simplifier, as his treatment of ‘the West’ clearly shows (e.g., Thirayuth 2003), gives him some purchase on popular imagination, and

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his frequent press conferences and their coverage attest to the reasons for which he was apparently one of the few academics Thaksin genuinely feared. But it is Thaksin who ultimately held the upper hand in these debates; on the one occasion when he chose a lofty disdain over his more usual preference for petulant attack, he garnered a surprising amount of praise even from journalists who were accustomed to deriding his hypersensitivity. Those familiar with American and Italian society will be able to draw the obvious parallels with ease. Thaksin’s imposition of a taxonomic grid – ranging from a ‘one district, one product’ approach to productivity that claims ‘traditional’ Thai roots but in fact appears to be a refraction of the general proclivity to produce limited-term plans with finite but grandiose objectives to his implementation of a ‘registration of the poor’ (apparently so that they would be entitled to particular kinds of funding) – found a strikingly receptive audience in Thailand. A population used to being statistically analysed, and for whom ‘data’ are the very nuts and bolts of popular struggle and its repression, understands the governmentality entailed in statistics (cf. Urla 1993), but does not find anything strange in it. There is a battle over facts, but not over the criteria of factuality. ‘Audit culture’ (Strathern 2000) is the very context in which political debates are played, from the loftiest halls of government to the village meeting. Thaksin is a populist, and, despite remarkable resemblances to the Italian ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, not a particularly right-wing one, at least in rhetorical terms. His embrace of market economics as the engine of social change may shed some light on what is otherwise a deeply puzzling phenomenon here in Britain. I allude to the Thatcherite language and ideology of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, a Labour Party leader whose endorsement of neoliberal principles of management has dismayed many of his erstwhile supporters. During his tenure of office, the allegedly Americaninspired audit culture has spread and infected the vast majority of public life. As in the United States (Blum 2000), the rise of a positivistic vision of knowledge, itself both accountable and (above all) countable, accompanies a brutal elision of embodied forms of knowledge. This connection – between positivistic styles of management and the deskilling and marginalization of artisanal labor – is one I want to explore further in the present paper. I particularly intend to sketch an argument to the effect that the process of colonial control in which scientistic sociologies supported urban planning and design (Rabinow 1989) has had equally pernicious effects in the Western world itself. More specifically, I contend that the move toward prefabricated knowledge design (Thaksin again comes to mind, with his promotion of ‘knowledge centers’) marginalizes opposition on several simultaneous fronts: artisanal, academic and journalistic.

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In this context, the meaning of deskilling – a word that misleadingly suggests ‘stripping away skills from a person’ – actually lies in the rejection of their importance in the larger economic context. Since artisanal skills are very often resolutely opposed to book-learning, the coincidence of this phenomenon with the marginalization of academia may seem paradoxical. But we should remember that artisans also, as part of their opposition to scholastic knowledge, practice aggressively performative and embodied forms of calculation that render precise enumeration superfluous and even inimical to their crafts. They also often reject precise calculation of social obligation, particularly in matters of hospitality (see Herzfeld 1991). With the dismissal of artisanal skills as irrelevant to the modern world, then, a dismissal that often accompanies an ideology of individualistic desire and a refusal of picturesequeness (Collier 1997), comes a pattern of ridiculing intellectual positions that refuse positivistic measures of precision. But the respective positions of workers and intellectuals in this situation are in fact different, because, while many of the intellectuals can and do protest (although with little effect most of the time), workers are more easily drafted into the service of the very ideology that has suppressed their interests in this cavalier fashion. As they are deskilled, many of them turn politically rightwards and also accept as somehow familiar and anti-elitist the siren call of opposition to the power of intellectuals. When Thaksin ridiculed Thirayuth’s ragged jumpers, he was in fact astutely suggesting that real wealth, now potentially in the grasp of the working poor, was incompatible with anything unfashionable or imprecise (this being a further, insidious conflation). Follow me, he said, and you will gain what you want – and I know what this is, because it is the ‘natural’ desire that drives us all. It would be tempting to view this intended bifurcation of the interests of workers and intellectuals, respectively, in classically Gramscian terms, by arguing that the workers had been made more or less unwittingly complicit in this process, and had been set up in opposition to their ‘natural’ allies, the intellectuals. In the name of simplification and efficiency, this would suggest, workers come to endorse a conceptual opposition between their practical mastery and the academicism of scholars and administrators, and so, as their skills are devalued, they become especially vulnerable to deskilling because they are assumed to be incapable of moving into administrative or ‘knowledge-based’ positions – the latter a particularly ironic exclusion. Yet we should beware of so glibly naturalizing workers’ apparent complicity. It is not clear that they are unaware of the processes in which they are caught up, and to argue that they do not perceive the situation with any clarity presupposes a lack of agency or volition

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on the part of the workers. It is thus a position that endorses their domination far more insidiously than any stance of theirs. More generally, as I have recently argued in respect of Cretan artisans (Herzfeld 2004), the notion of ‘misrecognition’, of which Bourdieu (1977) has been an especially articulate proponent, entails complicity in the relegation of unstated knowledge to the depths of self-ignorance. By energetically recovering ‘embodied knowledge’, in other words, and especially by endorsing its ideational opposition to intellectually self-aware knowledge acquisition, we risk dismissing as irrelevant the apparently inarticulate (or at least unarticulated) awareness of the conditions of its production that workers arguably do in fact possess. In the study of Cretan artisans, there were two particular areas in which such knowledge about the conditions of production was not articulated: the preference for avoiding specifically patrilateral kin as apprentices; and the goal of creating hardened young men by encouraging their unruly actions while seeming to disapprove of these and mercilessly punishing their perpetrators. In both cases, master artisans denied any such intention on their part. The difference was that in the matter of avoiding the hiring of agnatic kin, master artisans might concede the point after I had asked them to list examples of agnatically related master-apprentice dyads; they usually failed in their quest to prove me wrong, and were wryly amused that I had discovered the principle for myself. But in the matter of training their apprentices in the arts of subversion, they were as adamant in their denials as they were proud of the very insubordination that we were discussing in their apprentices. Unless one were to insist that they were being duplicitous or just plain stupid, neither of which seems an adequate or even remotely convincing explanation, clearly something very different was at stake. The most that artisans would normally concede was the importance of a tough, disciplined control, not only over their apprentices, but also over their own offspring: ‘At this moment I have a staffing problem [literally, ‘a problem with hands’]. I need two people, two assistants, and I don’t have them. For this every parent is to blame, who looks to send his child to do lighter work, to go to ‘letters’, to earn his bread with ease. And perhaps that’s the fault of parents, let’s say. I bring my own children up very strictly. I tell my wife that the harder I bring them up, the easier their life will be thereafter.’ Interestingly, the speaker was initially reluctant to have me note this last statement, as though he was aware that it was somehow unfashionable, a recognition of less-than-ideal conditions of life for which he nevertheless felt the moral obligation to prepare both his children and his apprentices. It is not in fact an unknown aspect of schooling in the great urban – and especially colonial – centres; ‘as the twig is bent, the tree will grow’,

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as the muscular educational Christianity of Matthew Arnold and his followers proclaimed. Nor is it incompatible with earlier traditions of monastic bodily discipline. But the most curious aspect of it is the reluctance to make explicit the fact that very often the goal of apprenticeship is social rather than purely aesthetic or technical. At this point we encounter the fundamental premise that instruction in craft is not the primary goal of apprenticeship. In point of fact, separating the social from the technical is in some sense a Cartesian convenience, and we should try to bypass it here. The parallel between the production of objects and the production of persons is an interesting topic in its own right (see also Kondo 1990); the irregular relationship among picturesquely artisanal objects and the resistance to any sort of standardization appeared to reproduce the narrowly conceived nonconformism that marked the mien of the self-styled traditional artisan. While this is, I think, an important connection in its own right, it also has consequences for the production of intellectual knowledge, whether of the positivistic or of a more critical variety. Anthropology in particular, as a discipline associated in the popular imagination with the exotic and marginal, is usually not averse to playing up that image; the fashioning of ethnographers as professional persons says a great deal about the fashioning of the knowledge that they present in their teaching and publications. Here I turn to the important anecdotal insights in Paul Rabinow’s much-maligned but also immensely popular classic, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), and especially to that segment dealing with the attitudes of his professors at the University of Chicago whose massive disapproval showed that at the very least he had hit a nerve. In comparing his insights with my ethnographic account (and others, e.g. Marchand 2001) of artisanal apprenticeship, I want to try to dissolve the conceptual opposition between intellectual and physical labour, arguing, as Boyer (2005a: 137–41, 2005b) also does, that the distinction between theory and practice (or, as he calls it, system and spirit) is a hegemonic one, and that within this framework it is important to view even seemingly menial or distasteful tasks – such as censorship, for example – as genuinely artisanal rather than as existing on some plane altogether different to labor. Charles Stewart (1989) has similarly argued – in the Greek context, as it happens – that the distinction between ecclesiastical and folk religion is itself hierarchical and therefore hegemonic.1 The fact that artisans themselves invoke this distinction is not so much a matter of false consciousness or its relatively recent avatar, ‘misrecognition’ (Bourdieu 1977), as it is the consequence of strategic decisions they must make to valorize their despised status as best they can. They are caught in a hegemonic bind, and they often know it.

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Such predicaments offer salutary lessons for our discipline; considerable areas of anthropological knowledge are both gained and understood in terms that are closer to the experience of artisans than of scientists (or at least of scientists as they like to imagine themselves; see Grasseni 2004). This propinquity is itself part of the problem; it exposes anthropologists to dangerous power plays by the self-appointed guardians of scientific standards and by other representatives of the hegemonic traditionalism that continually threatens to confine anthropological knowledge to the margins of public awareness in the new century. The all too familiar accusations of anecdotalism, of overemphasis of the local (and especially of gossip), and of a lack of experimental replicability are not so much about theory and method as they are themselves power ploys. In my Cretan study, I emphasized that artisans were expected to absorb a sense of embodied technical knowledge (2004: 154–55). This not only allows but actually forces them to bypass the explicitness of verbal instruction. There are two further points to be made here. First, that avoidance of explicitness is by its very nature social, being cut from the same cloth as the refusal to acknowledge the rules of reciprocity to which Mauss drew our attention so long ago, and that in Greece is maintained in the double standard of hospitality (failure to reciprocate is both proverbially acknowledged as only allowing up to three chances, but no one will ever reproach an offender directly). On Crete this refusal to calculate is also inherent in the rules of animal-theft (incremental increases in the numbers stolen are both expected and incalculable), and in Rethemnos specifically in the socially calculating avoidance of careful monetary calculation in economic transactions among close neighbours (Herzfeld 1985, 1991: 169–71). The second point, one that I briefly mentioned in the original study, is that such inexplicitness is recognized at the very heart of our own profession. That most intellectualist of social anthropologists, Rodney Needham (1972: 237–38), himself emphasized the apparent autonomy of the writing hand. If one follows the trajectory of his own career, from some of the most formalist structuralism to come from the hands (so to speak!) of British social anthropologists to works that can only be described as deconstructive (e.g. Needham 1983), and only relatively late in his professional career to the publication of his early ethnographic work (Needham 1987), one can see the ineluctable effects of the lacerating self-honesty that has always been Needham’s trademark on what many initially regarded as a classically structuralist position. But that honesty in turn reveals something else, something that would have been hard to intuit from his earlier work. Needham’s writing displays powerfully artisanal qualities, especially in the

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attention he pays to the etymological sources of a vocabulary that might otherwise seem merely eccentric and the playful craftiness with which he then deploys that knowledge; moreover, while he is profoundly and insistently aware of those sources (Needham 1972: 41–44), he does not explicitly link that awareness to his own writing style – it is, quite simply, left obvious for others to experience, a poetic and artisanal quality rather than the ratiocinative quest for total clarity that his earlier works seemed to portend. My own preferred analogy for explaining the craft of anthropological writing is with sculpture. Writing anthropology is a shaping of ideas grounded in direct personal experience and made accessible through a shared language we know as theory. There are areas that should be left rough, either because the data are somehow incomplete or because the relative emphasis on another area of the ethnography is too fragile to withstand a dramatic vignette somewhere else. There is a logic here, but it is not the logic of the scientific laboratory, and this is why the use of the first person singular has become the preferred expository mode of most ethnographers (much, it may be added, to the annoyance of a wide range of others, from historians to engineers). Writing now in this way about how I write more generally is almost painful. Above all, I am anxious (although unsure as to why I am so anxious – perhaps the reasons are social and cultural as much as personal?) to avoid a confessional mode. Because so much of our evidence is necessarily anecdotal, it involves choices that are as much aesthetic as they are scholarly (assuming, for the moment, that the distinction itself has some value). Which anecdote ‘best’ illustrates the point we wish to make? When do we feel that we have piled up enough evidence to persuade a reader that Cretans have patrilineal systems (a point that colleagues have gently questioned, merely, if in part perhaps with some degree of justification, because ‘their’ villages are different; see, notably, Just 2000: 121–28)? What level of statistical sufficiency must we reach in order to convince a skeptical reader that artisans do indeed avoid patrikin as apprentices despite their own disavowals of any such bias? How many local terms must we adduce in order to establish our credentials as competent cultural sleuths? When, in short, is enough enough? I take the question seriously in large measure because I have placed myself in the firing line with my assertions (Herzfeld 1997/2005) that anthropologists’ best answer to statistical measures of adequacy lies in the cumulative – and therefore in some sense statistical – intensity and intimacy of their field encounters. But even these are not all the same. (Artisans make similar claims about drawing their knowledge from life’s accumulated and embodied experiences.) Leaving aside questions of internal variation (we do not know all our informants equally well, even in relatively homogeneous village situations),

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my encounters with Greek, Italian and Thai informants were made substantially variable by differences in cultural attitudes to sociability. The Cretan villagers and townsfolk with whom I associated drew me into their midst with aggressive (even ferocious) hospitality, yet they also regarded my interest in their less law-abiding practices with a deep suspicion compounded by the fact that this non-Greek spoke their language fluently and with a sense of already-acquired intimacy. Here presumptions of intimacy could be as much a threat as an amiable stance, given the dynamics of political tension between Greece and ‘the West’. In Rome, no such tensions marred my interactions; they were almost too easy, prompting acquiescence in Roman assertions that the local community was ‘just a village’. And in Bangkok, where my more obviously physical difference as well as my initially inappropriate gestures and halting Thai made for awkward interactions, an initial sense of frustration was enhanced by cultural attitudes of outward respect and deference (kreng jai), and eventually only broken by a more or less Geertzian moment of solidarity in the face of the authorities (when my wife and I found ourselves, before dawn, on the inside of a community bracing itself for a siege that was expected to end in the violent eviction of the community – an event that fortunately did not materialize, perhaps in part thanks to the presence of these two foreign observers). At the end of the day, however, what all these encounters share is an appreciation of what it takes, in each society, to achieve an intimacy that goes beyond mere politeness and tact – indeed, opposes it, much as the ‘diamond in the rough’ stance of the ‘traditional artisan’ both represents such cultural intimacy to insiders and risks justifying the contempt of those who are, quite literally, not ‘in the know’. Inevitably, then, style becomes a matter of content. Some writers speak of creating an atmosphere, a sense of place or an engaged empathy; none of them can be sure how these messages are interpreted by their readers, but the self-announcing techniques at least offer some guidance about how these writers would like to be read. A reader’s understanding of the key events in each situation will in any case necessarily flow in part from stylistic devices used by a writer to convey a sense of affect. While this may be closer to scientific and bureaucratic practice than exponents of these latter positions would care to say (but see Gusterson 1996; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Traweek 1988; Zabusky 1995), it has not resulted in a great deal of introspection – or extroverted analysis, for that matter – about the relationship between ethnographic writing and craft. The one exception, a collection of essays edited by Michael Coy (1989), focuses less on the production of ethnographic texts than it does on the learning of cultural practices in the field. This is a useful

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beginning, but it should be linked to the kind of insight that Rabinow’s (1977: 1–4) all-too-brief discussion of his Chicago experience should have launched but was prevented from doing so, I suspect, by a social aesthetic of tact to which he himself apparently did not subscribe. While some departments are more determined than others to produce courses on methodology, the fact that so many students setting out for the field express frustration that no one has ever really told them what to do suggests a proximity to artisanal experience that is not necessarily negative or intellectually unsound but that certainly reproduces the risk of political marginality – the charge that the discipline lacks clearly defined methods occasions enormous anxiety in some quarters – that is also, to a large extent, the lot of artisans in self-consciously modernizing or industrial societies. That risk becomes especially clear when we consider the common artisanal conceit that knowledge acquired through experience is more valuable than that acquired through formal schooling. Where would this leave the anthropologist, for whom the field largely replaces the library or requires that the libraries and even individual documents be read as social places – this, in itself, a major and revelatory step for ethnographic practice (see especially, Messick 1993; Papailias 2005)? Anthropologists’ conventional insistence that direct field experience cannot be replaced by library research as such thus comes strikingly close to the artisan’s insistence on the superiority of embodied knowledge, and is in no way undermined by the expansion of field research to urban settings, bureaucracies or even the Internet and the library proper. (The untrammeled intimacy that the Internet sometimes permits actually enhances its value as a site of ethnographic encounter.) And intimacy is hard to achieve through team research. Thus, the ‘heroic’ anthropologist (Sontag 1994) is much closer here to the aggressively masculine artisan, with his grumpy independence and alleged inability to work with others, than to the detached laboratory scholar with an array of multiply-authored publications. (It is particularly ironic that Lévi-Strauss, the subject of Sontag’s famous essay, saw the world as a ‘laboratory’ in which his poetically described labours took on epic qualities.) But that image of the heroic but socially inept artisan – one need only ask how many anthropologists have cultivated a reputation for being antisocial and grumpy! – has catastrophic consequences today. The subordination of research to ‘audit culture’ (Shore and Wright 2000; Strathern 2000) bears a disturbingly close resemblance to the ‘deskilling’ of artisans (on which, see Blum 2000). Moreover, media complicity in the process of ‘dumbing down’ marginalizes both academic and workers’ knowledge as irrelevant to the projects of efficient modernity, feeding into a politics of knowledge as a quantifiable good made instantly comprehensible to

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a populace disinclined to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Such, for example, is the force of populist calls for ‘knowledge centres’ in Thailand and elsewhere. The parallels I have adumbrated here are not imaginary. Just as the concept of self-regard that is so widespread in rural Greece allows some to claim that society as already prepared for capitalism because of its exaltation of competition, for example, neoliberal capitalism derides academicism as the enemy of ‘practical knowledge’ while seizing on workers’ anti-academicism as evidence of their unpreparedness for modernity (but also exploiting it to get them fully entangled in the neoliberal agenda). At the same time, both the self-regard of the masculine artisan and the self-referentiality of the academic sound and look pitifully picturesque: they stand outside the well-organized and clearly delineated world of ideal modernity. Claims to reflexivity, for example, especially when couched in abstruse language (a common problem!), usually gets the same condescending reaction as that evinced by a picturesquely gruff artisan. The self-lacerating critique of the scholar figures as an eccentric act of self-indulgence, and, as such, incompatible with the dispassionate precision of modern science – a position that conveniently ignores the fact that ethnographers are inevitably the principal instruments of their own observations, analyses, and comparisons and that, by the same token, the scientistic relegation of reflexivity to the conceptual margins is itself embedded in an ideological and social perspective. Rethemniot artisans, too, are very aware that they are viewed as a dying breed; it is both their weakness (numerically and politically) and their strength (scarcity value – which is a value determined only in relation to the demand it creates among the relatively wealthy and educated elite). As with academics, who have rather meekly (on the whole) submitted to the framing of their problems in terms of the false accountability of audit culture, and whose complaints have thus come to serve rather than to counteract their marginalization, artisans’ self-pitying talk about the death of their trade contributes to their progressive marginalization. Deskilling – whether of artisans brought into an increasingly mechanized labor force or of professors held to the standardization of production (numbers of students taught and of publications) – more or less automatically discourages and punishes originality. Standardization replaces standards; audits replace a socially grounded ethics of responsibility. The Cretan artisans’ discourse illustrates this predicament with chilling clarity. Its effect is to marginalize the artisans both through its implications of self-exclusion from modernity and in its concomitant appeal to a powerful form of localism – and localism is itself a rejection of the authority of that ultimate incarnation of modernity, the

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nation-state. In the Cretan case, localism ironically also exhibits the dilemmas of being Cretan as a metonym of being Greek, underscoring a persistent strain of opposition between nation and state in popular Greek thought (see Campbell 1964: 258): ‘There are some [traditional cobblers]’, remarked one Rethemniot shoemaker, ‘but they are limited in number, because unfortunately the right preconditions [for their work] don’t exist. And they give themselves over completely to the production of boots – those Cretan shoes, as they’re known. These have become limited.’ This shoemaker, moreover, a ‘traditional’ artisan in the eyes of the authorities charged with encouraging such things, was invited to open a school for cobblers. What he found in practice, however, was that those who applied to learn were not really prepared to do so under the unpleasant conditions that were all the state was willing to provide, and that were certainly no worse than the old workshops in which he and his peers had learned their trade; he understood that he was meant to teach them verbally as well. In the end, the whole venture collapsed because those who were interested in enrolling were dilettanti with no real sense of commitment – or no pressing need to commit themselves – to a way of life that would have guaranteed their continuing marginality to the modernity in which their attitudes were already a badge of membership. Yet only a generation earlier, as this man pointed out, it was the artisans who ‘married the best brides’ – an attitude, bespeaking the gender hierarchy generally associated with artisanal masculinism, that itself works against any claim to a place in modernity. (Again, recall academics’ increasingly strident lament for a time when they enjoyed respect and inhabited less dilapidated working quarters.) He described both the desirability of artisans as husbands and the amount they earned in those days as ‘risible’ (yelio) by modern standards, thereby telescoping past achievements down to their reduced modern equivalents; what is more, in those days many apprentices paid (often in kind) for the privilege. In his sense of social change lies an entire history of political reversal. As one man recalled: ‘It was the other way around then – the apprentices themselves paid [for the privilege of work]. That happened to my master, but not to me. My master paid his boss five drachmas a day, to learn the craft. Er, five drachmas a week, I’m not … I don’t want to give you wrong information. Now we’re talking about the 1940s.’ One part of the complex message this memory conveys is that learning a craft, even under difficult and discouraging instruction, was a privilege, but that this was particularly clear when the value of money itself was high and nothing could be taken for granted. Today, the context itself has dramatically changed. The most radical part of this change lies in the larger national context, which is one in which self-conscious traditionalism has

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become both state policy and the basis of the artisans’ increasingly precarious survival as a professional category. Artisans who have resisted deskilling, like academics who refuse the allure of industry or who resist the demands of neoliberal efficiency in their universities, must embrace a high degree of risk, and that decision itself increases their marginalization from the modern mainstream. These artisans, moreover, share with academics, and with anthropologists in particular, a sense that they are engaged in the resuscitation (anaviosi) of a lifestyle now effectively removed from the world stage (or at least from the industrial world); whereas anthropologists protest that they ‘also’ study ‘modern’ societies, however, artisans cannot afford to make too many or too obvious concessions to modernity even though they crave admission to it. Cultural revivalism provides a resolution of sorts. The shoemaker I have just quoted saw his role in precisely these terms, which is why he initially agreed to the very un-artisanal idea of a school; it ran aground on its incompatibility with both the state’s restrictive view of what artisans’ political clout should be and with the tradition of artisanal learning that it idealized and so, ironically, subverted before the project ever got off the ground. The problem of traditionalism lies in its two-edged power to elevate and to marginalize. If artisans suffer the consequences of this by virtue of their own lifestyle, anthropologists suffer by popular association – an association, moreover, that their tendency to engage in ‘salvage’ work has sometimes seemed to reinforce considerably. The more they protest the ethical rightness of their pleas for a relativistic stance and for taking marginalized populations and their knowledge seriously, the more they put their own standing at risk in a world dominated by neoliberal values and positivistic logic. Moreover, like the artisans, they risk becoming complicit in their own marginalization as well as in that of their specific competence. While the move to recognize indigenous knowledge is a powerful one – the status of phumipanyaa in Thailand, for example, is not unlike that of Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectuals’ in Italy, and anthropologists (including this author) have been praised in the media for recognizing the intellectual worth of local people – its very separation of folk from institutional knowledge participates in these hegemonic processes. In other words, the power may actually not end up in the hands of those whose standing its use is intended to promote. Anthropologists are not only actively engaged in the attempt to get respect for indigenous forms of knowledge but, in any setting where (to use Boyer’s terms) Geist must surrender to System, they may be thought to look too much like those they study; they end up being marginalized together, and the association in many people’s imagination of anthropology with ‘traditional’ ways of living cements that disadvantage into place.

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To be sure, Boyer has also argued (2000) that an excess of System can sometimes bring about the collapse of the system itself, through the suppression of any space to enjoy the intimate knowledge that anthropologists try to share with locals. But that is precisely what the systematizers most fear, which is why they seem to invest an inordinate amount of effort in deriding ‘anecdotalism’ as the grievous epistemological sin of anthropologists. Although we might attempt a Vichian critique of the etymological connection between ‘history’ and ‘story’, suggesting that neither the distinction between fabulation and factual narration nor that between narration and event should be taken in too absolute a sense, the marginalization of Vico’s own ideas might suggest that this, too, is a losing battle – and all the more so, one might add, in an age when classical learning has been devalued, so that the detailed analysis of neoclassicism itself is protected by a wall of ignorant appeasement. The relationship between book learning and craft apprenticeship was not always invisible. An older craftsman might to this day emphasize the analogy – never in terms of precision, but always in the language of affect: ‘No matter whether it’s letters, as I found out as I became an old man, or a craft, if you don’t love it, you don’t learn. Letters, too – if you don’t love them, you just don’t. … If you don’t fall in love with your craft, as a master artisan would say, you don’t learn it! I had come to the point where when I had finished off a shoe and the owner took it and handled it badly, I would get really beside myself with rage. As though they were dragging my guts out – that’s how self-centred I had become; and when a self-centred, love-besotted person comes along [you’d better watch out]!’ At one level, this is simply a way of saying that people will show aptitude in a calling they enjoy. But it also recognizes the affective dimension of learning in the scholarly as much as in the artisanal sphere. Parents who hope their children will take to ‘letters’ as a first step toward a relatively lucrative and high-status bureaucratic career are also prepared, if this effort fails, to submerge their disappointment in the rhetoric of yielding to their children’s inclinations (and also of claiming that book-learning is an inferior mode anyway!). There is a strong understanding that craft is subject neither to monetary nor to intellectual calculation: ‘Craft doesn’t enter the pocket. Nor is it an object! But your brain has to be sharp, you should have enthusiasm (meraki) to learn it. Letters and everything are like that too.’ But still there persists the desire for the lifestyle that a bureaucratic job, however despised, would bring: ‘Everyone, so to speak, wants a “chair”, to sit and lounge around, that kinda thing. They are not interested in being productive. The only thing they’re interested in is to sit and pass their time, get their wages, and that’s the

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end of it. They have no desire to learn!’ In other words, the desired end of learning is the disappearance of any desire, or need, to learn. There is a sharp lesson here for us all. Yet this is the fate of the Greek working class. ‘How long would a “European” last in such a job?’ In short, we should read such apparently conflicting preferences for the moral superiority of the artisan and the bureaucrat’s life of ease, not as literal statements about the relative value of two distinct modes of learning, but as a flexible rhetorical strategy that both proactively recognizes the possibility and consequences of failure and prepares the ground for either eventuality. In this regard, statements about the relative merits of mental and physical labour are like sorcery accusations (see Argyrou 1993): they are a way of turning a materially ‘have-not’ status into a morally ‘have’ one. Like the Thai slum dweller who puts up a sign saying, ‘This is a good house, so it’s already wealthy’, Greek parents pre-emptively exploit the moral ambiguities associated with economic and political power. Such attitudes have less to do with sour grapes than making the best of a bad (and probably irredeemable) situation. They are about strategy (or tactics, in de Certeau’s 1984 sense) rather than about ‘what actually happened’. They do have a relationship with dominant cultural ideologies, in that the alleged individualism of the artisan allows the political leadership to use him as an example of Western aesthetic innovation and independence but to oppress him as a quarrelsome and industrially useless relict of an oriental past. Reflecting then on our own situation, are our defensive attacks on positivism simply another such pre-emptive strike? In arguing that they can indeed take on such a character, I am not suggesting that they are necessarily wrong. Rather, I want to point to the strategic and political danger they represent. Some forms of anthropology do get used; Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind (1973) is apparently a mustread in the Bush White House, for example, while older evolutionist paradigms often underwrite global interventions in the name of ‘development’ – a weak disguise for ‘evolution’ (see Ferguson 1990). For the most part, however, the alleged mental paralysis threatened by a relativistic stance is used to keep anthropologists out of decisionmaking – a move that is reinforced by the anthropologists’ own reluctance to lend their imprimatur to hurriedly conceived quick fixes and top-down management. Reification is without question a key part of social life. While we may decry its conceptual authority, every social act constitutes the creation of an essence, or, in other words, reifies a social identity of some sort. That this is so should not occasion any great lamenting. But far more disturbing is the way in which such reifications then take on the authority of eternal verities at the level of political morality,

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and this is where social anthropologists insist on critically dissecting the process – a move that, in terms of theory, has led to a recognition (‘practice theory’) that formal structure and ephemeral contingency are necessarily two sides of the same coin. Much as an artisan’s work is characterized by the ability to ‘capture’ contingency – this is what makes it appear in picturesque fashion to refuse standardization – ethnographic fieldwork does not sacrifice the importance of theoretical arguments to the necessarily ephemeral character of most of its data. At various times in the history of our discipline, systematicity has seemed to win out; at others, resignation to the ineluctable uncontrollability of social life has tended to reduce the discipline’s public image to little more than the gossip that the etymology of its name conveys (see Gluckman 1963). But if practice theory (and Boyer’s book) can teach us one thing, it is that the opposition between these two dimensions is itself an artifice. The way in which our students acquire their fieldwork skills will be reproduced in our own efforts if we return to the field, especially if we do so in new linguistic and cultural settings (as I have been doing for the past decade and more, in Italy and Thailand, after a quarter of a century working on Greece). We remain dependent on the serendipitous, the unexpected and the unpredictable; we are no less modern for gambling on outcomes (Malaby 2002), although our rhetoric may make us seem less so. So where does this leave us? I do not think that anthropologists will have much difficulty with the idea that knowledge takes the form of elaborations on received cultural forms, and that improvisation plays an important part in determining both the originality and the marginality of their specific incarnations. Not only does this help to explain the ambivalent social status of artists in modern society (and the tendency of the public to reify artists as producers of ‘high’ or ‘good’ culture and therefore as a model that many artisans try to emulate in, ironically, standardizing their wares). It also satisfies the criteria of a social poetics, in which aesthetic as well as technical mastery is demonstrated in the realm of social interaction, as in any craftwork, through the selective deformation of existing norms (Herzfeld 1997/2005). The forms are, to use the terminology of performance theory (e.g. Bauman 1977; Fernandez 1986), emergent in social action; they have no existence outside that arena. It is for this reason, I suggest, that the critical role of anthropologists and especially their capacity for interventions based on a trenchantly comparative perspective on the world’s social and cultural arrangements cannot afford to succumb to the lure of the audit culture and of conceptual routinization. Anthropologists are trained like artisans; they may not be as brutalized as some of the artisans I

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have studied – indeed, I would very much hope not! – but they cannot be given methodological tool kits without an accompanying loss of critical edge. They shift angles of vision while adhering to a familiar set of precepts and concerns; they see the gossip and fudging that underlie their collection of data as irreducible to the logic of the formal interview and questionnaire. But this does not mean that their knowledge should be ignored. Rather, it should raise some very awkward questions about what I have elsewhere (Herzfeld 1997a) called ‘the politics of significance’. I started this paper with a salvo about the way in which academics are contrasted with artisans, and end it by arguing for their mutual similarity. The idea that academic knowledge is not crafted through bodily means is an old and pernicious one. By looking comparatively at the way our students and artisanal apprentices go about acquiring their knowledge, we both resist the temptation to fall into such easy binarisms and make good (or at least better) on the comparativist goals of our discipline, in the process subverting the many attempts that have been made to expropriate comparison for aridly numerical and structural ends. If we want to enter the political lists, we must reply to the ‘know-nothing’ advocates that we very well recognize their stance for what it is: an attempt to reject the relevance of our work on the grounds that it fails to satisfy criteria that it was never intended to meet. Our students’ serendipitous training is a constant subversion of taxonomic closure, and our ability to recognize it as such and to proclaim its significance and usefulness as an act of resistance to the uncritical uses of epistemic authority may yet rescue our perspective from the marginality to which already-deskilled artisans have largely been relegated. Anthropologists write, tell stories, craft images. But there is a sense of producing recognizable objects that is also very much the hallmark of artisanal production. The variability of these objects – styles of ethnography and theory, writing modes and even the choice of field site – does not obscure that continuity; to the contrary, like artisanal unpredictability, it resists standardization in order to demonstrate mastery that is also a critique of formal knowledge alone. Like artisanal work, too, it places ‘experience’ above ‘replicability’. But it also possesses one tactical advantage that, arguably, most artisanal production does not have. Because it is a verbal and critical discourse, its practitioners can, at least in principle, actively question the claims of scientific and political models to have achieved permanence and closure. In this sense, social anthropology is a continuation in practical terms of Giambattista Vico’s original understanding of the meaning of scientia, knowledge – a crafting of stories that craftily challenges the well-crafted histories no less craftily masking the contingent operations of power.

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Notes 1. The extent to which it is hegemonic in the classic Gramscian sense is indicated by the ease and frequency with which rural Greeks dismiss their local religious practices as indicative of cultural backwardness. The relationship of such attitudes to anthropological evolutionism, which has left a powerful mark on Greek ethnology and thus also (through the agency of schooling) on the popular imagination (see especially Herzfeld 1987), deserves considerable attention. In Greece, it seems, anthropologists and informants are locked in a painful pas de deux from which neither side can ever quite manage to escape.

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References Argyrou, V. 1993. ‘Under a Spell: The Strategic Use of Magic in Greek Cypriot Society’. American Ethnologist 20: 256–71. Bauman, R. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Rowley: Newbury House. Blum, J.A. 2000. ‘Degradation without Deskilling: Twenty Five Years in the San Francisco Shipyards’, In M. Burawoy (ed.), Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 106–36. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, D. 2000. ‘On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledge of Difference: Mass Media, Journalism, and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany’. Cultural Anthropology 15: 459–91. ———. Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. ‘The Corporeality of Expertise’. Ethnos 70 (2): 243–66. Campbell, J.K. 1964. Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Collier, J.F. 1997. From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coy, M.W. (ed.). 1989. Apprenticeship: From Theory to Method and Back Again. Albany: State University of New York Press. De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fernandez, J.W. 1986. Persuasions and Performances. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ferguson, J. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gluckman, M. 1963. ‘Gossip and Scandal’. Current Anthropology 4: 307–16. Grasseni, C. 2004. ‘Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics’. Social Anthropology 12: 41–55. Gusterson, H. 1996. Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Herzfeld, M. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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———. 1987. Anthropology Through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1997a. ‘Anthropology and the Politics of Significance’. Social Analysis 4 (3): 107–38. ———. 1997/2005. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, M. 1983. ‘Knowledge of the Body’. Man (n.s.) 18: 327–45. Jenkins, T. 1994. ‘Fieldwork and the Perception of Everyday Life’. Man (n.s.) 29: 433–455. Just, R. 2000. A Greek Island Cosmos: Kinship and Community on Meganisi. Oxford: James Currey. Kondo, D. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B., and S. Woolgar. 1986 [1979]. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Malaby, T.M. 2003. Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Marchand, T. 2001. Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen. Richmond: Curzon. Messick, B. 1993. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Needham, R. 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1983. Against the Tranquility of Axioms. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1987. Mamboru: History and Structure in a Domain in Northwestern Sumba. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Papailias, P. 2005. Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Patai, R. 1973. The Arab Mind. New York: Scribner. Rabinow, P. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sontag, S. 1994 [1963]. ‘The Anthropologist as Hero’, in idem, Against Interpretation. London: Vintage, pp. 69–81. Shore, C. and S. Wright. 2000. ‘Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education’, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge, pp. 57–89. Stewart, C. 1989. ‘Hegemony or Rationality? The Position of the Supernatural in Modern Greece’. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7: 77–104. Strathern, M. (ed.). 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy. London: Routledge.

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Thirayuth, B. 2003. Prathaet Thai moea lok yukh khom hua hai tawantok. Bangkok: Matichon. Traweek, S. 1988. Dreamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Urla, J. 1993. ‘Cultural Politics in an Age of Statistics: Numbers, Nations, and the Making of Basque Identity’. American Ethnologist, 20: 818–43. Williams, R. 1973. The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus. Zabusky, S.E. 1995. Launching Europe: An Ethnography of European Cooperation in Space Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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PART II

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TIME AND THE DISRUPTION OF KNOWING

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Chapter 5

KNOWING SILENCE AND MERGING HORIZONS: THE CASE OF THE GREAT POTOSÍ COVER-UP Tristan Platt with Pablo Quisbert1

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Hansel comforted his little sister and said: ‘Just wait, Gretel, until the moon rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I have strewn about, they will show us our way home again.’ When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousands of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up. Hansel said to Gretel: ‘we shall soon find the way,’ but they did not find it. (Grimm’s Fairy Tales).

One of the fundamental contributions of postmodernism … is the questioning of the teleology of the modern, … so that it becomes possible once again to conceive the past not merely as a route to the present, but as a source of alternative historical trajectories that had to be suppressed so that the present could become a possibility. (Arif Dirlik 1997)

A Vignette Framed by the steep, maize-stubbled terraces of the warm eastern valleys of the Andes, Kuysara, captain general of the ‘seven nations of Charcas’, was seated on his ceremonial stool in the ‘Town of the Nobles’ (Awkimarka).

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It was late in the year of 1538, the beginning of the southern spring, and he was about to receive the ‘ambassadors’ of the King of Spain. He had withdrawn to his own valley lands after observing, during the campaign against the Europeans in the Valley of Cochabamba, the havoc wrought against his soldiers by the Spanish cavalry. Avoiding defeat, yet aware of the irresistable power of the horses, he waited for the Pizarro brothers, Hernando and Gonzalo, to visit him, exchange gifts and negotiate terms of peace.2 Kuysara will have received Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro and their horsemen with all the ceremony of Andean customary hospitality. And with the Pizarro brothers came the Spaniards’ ally Inka Pawllu and his 5000 ‘friendly Indians’, whose own diplomatic initiatives, coming after the battle, had helped convince the ‘seven nations of Charcas’ that resistance was useless. The negotiations led to an offer: Kuysara would tell the Pizarros what they wanted to know, namely, the location of the Inka’s mines – gold, silver, copper and tin. Above all, they would show them the Inka’s legendary silver mines of Porco. They would reveal these treasures to the representatives of the Spanish King, in exchange for royal recognition of their status and privileges. Then Kuysara mounted his litter, covered with sheets of precious metal, shaded by a rich featherwork canopy and carried by up to 100 Indians. He accompanied the Pizarros and their band as they rode along the stony riverbeds to the frontier with the neighbouring ‘nation’ of the Qaraqara, where lord Muruq’u (the ‘Hammer’) was waiting to receive him. As the Inka’s silver mines were in Qaraqara territory, Muruq’u’s approval was needed to confirm Kuysara’s earlier offer. The ‘seven nations’ were grouped into three big sub-federations: the Urqu (mountainous, high, male) was made up of the Qaraqara, the Karanqa and the Killaka, and their chief was Muruq’u of Qaraqara. The Uma (water, soft, female) included both Charka and Sura, and their high lord was Kuysara of Charka. But there were three other groups of ‘Indians of bow and arrows’ who are also named as part of the ‘seven nations’: the Chicha, the Yampara and the Chuy. These had still to give their agreement to the proposal, through their high lord, Aymoro of Yampara. So the lords of the Qaraqara and Charka nations escorted the ambassadors of His Majesty to the warm lands of the Yampara. Here Aymuru received them beneath the twin hills of Chuquisaca, probably also seated on a ceremonial stool. His gift to the Spanish were the lands where in 1540 would be founded the city of La Plata (today Sucre), in exchange for help in guarding his south-eastern frontiers against lowland Chiriwana raids. And in La Plata the agreement to discover the Porco silver mines to Hernando Pizarro was formally sealed between the Spanish and the three high-lords of the three sub-federational groupings of the province of Charcas. As a sign of their agreement, the Spanish gave Kuysara, as representative of the whole province of the seven nations of Charcas: a silk tunic, a green velvet shirt with a cloak of green damask adorned with

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flecks of gold and green silk, a red hat with flecks of red silk, a big box of knives with their sheathes, and some hunting dogs. Then the Spaniards were taken on the last leg of their expedition. Accompanied by their guides, they crossed the river Pilcomayo and climbed up the zigzag path which led to the high pastures and silver-mining lands of the Qaraqara. They passed the thermal baths at Chaqui, capital of the southern Qaraqara, where the old Inka Wayna Qhapaq (d. 1525) had liked to bathe, and finally reached the silver mountain of Porco. Porco was the seat of a mountain divinity, or huaca, an advocation of the Andean triple deity of Lightning worshipped by the ‘seven nations’ under the guise of three stones, and a lump of pure native silver – no doubt the mama (concentrated fertility) of the mine. This yielded knowledge of the celestial sling-shot: the flash, the crack of thunder and the bolt which sowed the land with silver.3 Here you had only to pull up plants to find ‘potatoes’ of native silver sticking to the roots. The sacred ‘door’ to the mine was guarded by the ‘porter’, the shaman who administered the sacraments to entrants. Sacrifices and hallucinogenics brought mining-pilgrims to experience hierophanies that put them in communication with the patron of silver, lightning, warfare and prosperity, telling them where to find the ‘white metal’, congealed light, the glittering semen-sign of the divine warrior in the stars. The ‘world-reforming’ Inka Pachakuti had brought hammered sheets of refined or native silver from Porco in the mid fifteenth century, in order to swathe his war-litter and wrap the great stones of the sun-temple in Cusco. Now, the mine assigned to Inka Wayna Qhapaq was ceremonially transferred to Emperor Charles V, in a symbolic shift of allegiance. Hernando left his steward, Pedro de Soria, and some Spanish soldiers to begin exploiting the mines, with Indian labour provided by the Charcas lords. He himself returned to Cusco to prepare for his long journey back to Spain. For the next seven years masses of silver were extracted and refined in Porco, and the royal fifth was sent back to Spain to help finance the wars of the Emperor in Europe and the Mediterranean. The silver was incredibly pure, and the Spaniards installed Castillian smelters to supplement the Andean wind-furnaces (wayras). However, the nations of Charcas had shown wealth and favour to the Spanish; but they had not shown all their hand. No one had said anything to the Pizarros about a far greater treasure, only a few leagues distant from Porco: the silver-mountain of Potosí … Yet if their offer of vassaldom was sincere, why didn’t they mention Potosí? Why did they persist in their silence about the ‘greatest treasure in all the world’? What were they waiting for?

Silences of the Past Let us begin by recognizing that the common idea of the past as preparation for, or antecedent to, the present is clearly insufficient, as it can never be sufficiently repeated that people in the past had

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no notion of what the future would be (though they often guessed, and their guesses had historical consequences). Historicist attempts to explain the present by the past ignore the complexity of past presents. Echoing Walter Benjamin,4 Arif Dirlik has argued (1997) that some past conjunctures have contained a range of different futures in embryo, and that we can usefully go back to them in order to relive old battles, thereby bringing back into consideration alternative paths that may ‘still open up the future in new ways’. The identification of which ‘past presents’ contained this fruitful potentiality, and which did not, is a task for anthropologists and historians alike. Equally inadequate are insistences that the past ‘only exists in the present’, because we can only imagine it in the here and now. There is a discipline which purports to construct historical knowledge, and anthropologists have too often ignored the theoretical debates and methodological procedures which may be said to underpin historical narratives. In this sense, historical knowledge may be defined as the ‘truths’ about peoples and societies that exist and change in time, as these ‘truths’ may be constructed according to such debates and techniques. Knowledge of societies past and present, together with knowledge of their members as historical and cultural actors, must depart from recognition of their situations amidst the overlapping temporalities, and hierarchies of continuity and discontinuity, which characterize historical time, both as these are experienced by contemporaries and as they are observed today with the advantages of hindsight. Among the different sorts of evidence that can be constructed in support of a historical or anthropological theory, silence has had an abiding fascination. John Murra observed that, rather than referring to documents or references that have been lost, it would be better to say ‘not yet found’ (epigraph to Salomon 2004); and Georges Duby said that the most interesting kind of information is that which is ‘not said’ (cited in Laurencich-Minelli & Numhauser Bar-Magen 2003). Silences may occur because of an apparent gap in the evidence; they may be symptomatic of unconscious repressions by contemporaries; or they may occur intentionally, where actors have preferred to conceal their actions. In the latter case, if the action was itself an act of silence (an act of concealment, for example), we may find that they are obliged to conceal their own act of concealment, and hence to be silent about their own silence. And it is not always self-evident which kind of silence is in question. Intentional silences in history have been classified into those which aim to hide signs of the illegitimate exercise of power; those which aim to avoid the production of histories disfavourable to a whole society; and those which try to conceal collective defeat and shame (Marc

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Ferro, A historia vigiada, cited in Laurencich-Minelli and Numhauser Bar-Magen 2003). While this classification could profitably be refined, the idea of distinguishing kinds of deliberate silence is a necessary step towards knowing them. What, for example, was the nature of the silence which concealed the existence of Potosí from the Spanish between 1535, when the first European expedition left from Cusco to explore south of lake Titicaca, and 1545, when the Rich Mountain of Potosí was ‘dis-covered’ to the Spanish by a little-known Indian miner called Diego Wallpa? Was this silence the same throughout those years of conquest, settlement and war? If not, how and why did it change? Returning from a fruitless expedition to Chile, Diego de Almagro, rival of the ineffable Pizarros, found one of Wayna Qhapaq’s sons, Inka Manco, besieging the Spanish in Cusco. Manco had been named ‘Inka’ by Francisco Pizarro in 1533, but had grown increasingly indignant at the humiliating treatment received. He tried to get his brother, Inka Paullu, and the Governor and Sun priest of the Qullasuyu,5 Challku Yupanki, to assassinate Almagro while accompanying him south to Chile. Instead, both became Almagro’s allies. With Paullu’s help, Almagro returned to Cusco and raised Manco’s siege, occupying the city but provoking the resentment of the Pizarros. Hernando Pizarro approached Cusco, and defeated Almagro in April 1538, re-taking the city. He mounted a mocktrial and murdered his rival, while astutely naming Paullu ‘Inka’ in place of Manco. And Paullu became as faithful to Hernando as he had previously been to Almagro … Manco withdrew to continue resistance from the tropical refuge of Vilcabamba, surrounded by a court with many lowland warriors from the Upper Amazon. Now, with Cusco recaptured, Hernando needed to assuage the inevitable anger of the Emperor at the murder of Almagro. Charles V was already disturbed by the Pizarro’s murder in 1532 of Inka Atawallpa at Cajamarca; then, only the famous ransom of gold and silver had offered some relief to the King’s troubled conscience. Might the Inka’s legendary silver mines now have the same effect? Accompanied by Inka Paullu and 5000 ‘friendly Indians’, Hernando and his brother Gonzalo decided to invade the Qullasuyu with a picked band of 70 Spaniards. They knew that south of lake Titicaca, beyond the pontoon bridge of totora canoes over the river Desaguadero maintained by the aquatic Uru fisherfolk, there lay the vast spaces of the Altiplano and the lure of the silver mines, hidden object of Hernando’s desire. The Pizarro clan was in a tight corner. From Vilcabamba, Manco had raised against them the northern and western quadrants of the Tawantinsuyu; he now sent messengers to the Qullasuyu, and its provinces of Collao and Charcas, to prepare native resistance against the Spanish invasion, and shield the great mines from the invaders. The first signs of resistance came from the Aymara lakeside federations: the Lupaqa and the Pakasa, who had an agenda of freedom from both Inkas and Spanish. Feigning flight they drew the Spanish towards the balsa bridge; capturing

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one, they took him across the bridge to Tiwanaku, the pre-Inka ruins on the other side of the river, and sacrificed him to the Sun. They knew he was human and mortal. Hernando rode furiously towards the bridge, to find it cut loose by the Urus and lined up against the further bank. Horsemen who rushed into the river to try and swim across were carried downstream by the current into the totora reeds, where horses and riders drowned. The Aymara warriors jeered and, according to one eye-witness, shouted to Hernando, ‘Why don’t you come across?’ Without crossing the Desaguadero, Hernando could not expand his knowledge of the land and discover the road to the Inka’s silver mines. So he rifled Inka Wayna Qhapaq’s stores of balsa wood, kept for building the rafts with which the Inka used to make ceremonial and leisure trips on lake Titicaca. Now Hernando had a raft built for himself, twisting the Inka’s resources and skills to his own ends. Then, with a few soldiers and horses, he boarded the raft and came across, jumping into the water amidst the totora reeds, eager to get at his enemies and avenge the sacrificed soldier. Things might have gone badly for Hernando, who was alone, and at a disadvantage. But help came from an unexpected quarter: the 5000 ‘friendly Indians’, old enemies of the Aymara federations, quickly ran up lots of tiny raftlets of totora reeds, and crossed the river further downstream behind the Aymara lines. This relieved the pressure on Hernando, and as more men and horses were ferried across, the Spanish were able to establish a bridgehead, before routing the Aymaras with the sixteenthcentury equivalent of a tank battle: a cavalry charge. The first stage in the discovery of the Inka’s silver-mines had been achieved. Ahead lay the road to Cochabamba, and the campaign against Kuysara and the seven nations of Charcas.

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Knowing the Past Ways of knowing should be considered, first, in relation to the linguistic and semantic practices of one or more specific speech-communities. Know, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘now covers the ground formerly occupied by several verbs’, in particular that of wit (cf. German wissen) and can (cf. können and kennen, hence ‘knowing how’). Today, ‘know’ has come to embrace both ‘knowing by the senses’ (cf. can and ken) and ‘knowing by the mind’ (the archaic verb wit). It covers a semantic field which in other languages may be divided between different word-stems. One cannot expect to find the same history in the case of verbs used to translate ‘know’ in other languages. In Quechua, a non-Indo-European language, the word yachay is customarily translated as ‘knowledge’, ‘knowing’ and ‘to know’ (yachaj, lit. ‘knower’, means ‘shaman’). But it also means ‘be accustomed to’, ‘be able’ (e.g. mana uchu mikhuyta yachanichu, ‘I don’t know eating red

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pepper’ = ‘I don’t know/am not accustomed to red-pepper-eating’). A different nuance is given to ‘knowing how’ or ‘can/be able’ by use of the stem ati-, which also means ‘conquer’ or ‘dominate’. On the other hand, we would have to exclude from both these semantic fields the idea of ‘knowing a person’, which is expressed by a separate lexeme (rijsiy, ‘be acquainted with’; cf. Sp. conocer) that cannot be extended to the Biblical meaning of ‘know’. And ‘knowing a place’ is expressed with the word for ‘seeing’ (rikuy), an essential stage in the Andean process of learning and acquiring knowledge (‘Do you know Potosí?’ = ‘Have you seen Potosí?’, putsitachu rikunki?).6 I want here to ask what is involved in that particular kind of knowing which is ‘knowing the past’. This seems to bring up problems of its own, though certain historiographical procedures may not be dissimilar to those involved in an ethnographer’s knowing of a place, a person or a people. Indeed, in at least one theory of historical enquiry, that of R.G. Collingwood (1994[1946]), knowing the past involves a specific kind of activity which should not be strange to ethnographers, namely the imaginative re-enactment of other people’s thoughts, purposes, experiences and intentions, considered as the conscious ‘inside’ of human actions and activities, or what Kenneth Pike called the emic part of them, the part that endows actions with meaning; as opposed to the external description of them as observable etic phenomena. Re-enacting the way people experienced different times and temporalities in radically different ways is, in this approach, an essential precondition for knowing the past; and this is only possible because, as Vico said, we are able, as humans, to understand – with difficulty – everything we have made, that is, human history and society in all its diversity; whereas only God can understand the inner meaning of the natural world, since he alone has created it.7 If we now adopt a phenomenological perspective, the distinction between external and internal vanishes into direct, sensory perception, whether used actively as when exercising a skill, or passively as when surprised by joy, pain or a hierophany. For Husserl, it includes the initial perception of the self-evidence of logical or mathematical relations, before these are ‘sedimented’ into formulaic skills, or knowledge (Husserl 1970). In sixteenth-century Charcas we meet indeed with revelations and divine voices; and we also find specific skills, such as those required for the extraction and refining of precious metals. Andean and Old World alchemical ways of knowing minerals and metals manifest some surprising similarities: similarities which, rather than merging ‘syncretically’ (as too often assumed), may sometimes have consolidated each in the validity of their own different ways of knowing (Bouysse-Cassagne 2004). Each had developed different kinds of sensibility and sequences of skilled bodily movement; and the

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relations between the two traditions naturally became highly charged politically. Early colonial mining, before the shift in the balance of power brought about by Viceroy Toledo’s introduction of amalgamation to Potosí in 1573 (Assadourian 1989), was mainly in the hands of Andean smelters (see Figure 5.1a). But it would be wrong to suppose the two bodies of knowledge remained discrete and differentiated. Before 1573, a Spaniard claimed to have introduced improvements into the smelting methods of the Andean wind-furnace; and after 1573 Indians were quick to learn and adapt to small-scale operations the new protoindustrial method of amalgamation with quicksilver (see Figure 5.1b). Clearly, to re-enact these different silver-refining pasts, it is necessary to situate two sets of skills and experiences, together with others that may arise following colonization, in relation to more general expressions and constellations of power within a wide temporal field of events. So while it is useful, even crucial for re-enactment theory, actually to carry out the material processes of refining, using the same technologies and, as far as possible, the same materials, ideas, reimagined symbolic imagery and/or concepts, as were used in the past in question (thus getting to know them subjectively through direct sensory practice, as well as through external description, a process wellknown to archaeologists), it would clearly be impossible to interpret these activities adequately except as part of the web of political and historical experiences in which they were immersed and within which they acquired an important part of their meaning. Indeed, through re-enactment theory, the gap between artisanal activity – reenacting metallurgical techniques associated with different times and populations – and the practice of history – re-enacting other people’s thoughts and intentions in the context of certain historical processes – begins, surprisingly, to shrink. As Diego de Almagro travelled south in 1535, guided towards Chile by his Inka and Aymara companions, he passed close by the great silver-mines of the Qaraqara. But not a word was breathed to him about the world-shaking wealth lying a few leagues to the east of the road: Manco had ordered concealment of all mines. Manco’s aim was clearly to get Almagro away from the area of hidden wealth, split the Spanish forces, and send Almagro to his death, either at the hands of Paullu and Challku Yupanki, or in battle against the Araucanians of southern Chile. He himself would then take care of the Pizarros. The policy of concealment was clearly operative, as it would be when Luis de Valdivia again invaded Chile in 1540. Only the declaration of Porco in 1538 seemed to spell a brief reversal of policy, under the diplomatic influence of Inka Paullu. But as soon as Hernando Pizarro left for Spain in 1539, the seven Charcas nations – some of whom had been on the point of telling him of Potosí – reverted again to Manco’s policy of concealment. Why did they

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Figure 5.1a Indians using wind-furnaces (16th–17th century); Figure 5.1b Indians amalgamating silver with quicksilver (16th–17th century). (Hispanic Society, New York) do this? With Hernando gone, and Gonzalo absent from Charcas in Cusco and Quito, it must still have seemed possible that Manco might expel the Spaniards. After Francisco’s assassination in 1541, many Spaniards even left Porco for a time, probably encouraged to do so by rebellious Indians. Meanwhile, Manco and the lords of Qaraqara continued to brood on Potosí. This great solar huaca, with its enormous silver deposits, would endow

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whoever possessed it with a source of religious, political and economic power difficult to resist. What should be done with the Rich Mountain? With the promulgation in 1542 of the New Laws, which aimed to reduce the power of the encomenderos and reflected the influence of Bartolomé de las Casas on Charles V, it appeared that the interests of Manco and the King of Spain were finally converging: how could they control the last remaining member of the Pizarro clan, Gonzalo, representative of the encomenderos’ interests in Perú? So let us try to re-enact hypothetically Manco’s state of mind: let us imagine that he asked himself whether Potosí should not be declared to the King, as Porco had been revealed in 1538, as a sign of obedience and a powerful means of eliminating the last of the Pizarro brothers. The hypothesis is supported by signs of his tentative approaches to the first Viceroy Blasco Nuñez, who arrived in Lima in 1544 charged with implementing the New Laws. On the other hand, it would seem that Manco must have been concerned to ensure that Potosí did not fall into the hands of Gonzalo himself, who, from his refineries in Chaqui and his mines in Porco, was prospecting close to the very base of the Rich Mountain. If he had not been called away to Cusco in April 1544 to lead the encomenderos in their desperate bid against the New Laws and the King, there can be little doubt that Pizarro would have discovered the mountain for himself: later, he even declared himself the ‘first discoverer’. And La Plata was still in the hands of a Pizarro nominee, Francisco de Almendras, when Potosí was finally revealed to the Spanish in April 1545. Was this deliberate? Or was it a sign of the confusion of the times, when cities were regularly changing hands between the two sides, and it must have been difficult to get the moment right?

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Re-enactment Theory Re-enactment, in Collingwood’s philosophy of history, is part of a theoretical construction which purports to show how knowing the past is possible. It departs from the assumption that there exist traces of past actions, which can be compared with the traces examined by detectives who are trying to unravel a murder case; a legal comparison taken up again more recently by Carlo Ginzburg in his salutary comparison of anthropological questioning with that of the Spanish inquisition.8 These traces may consist of bones, monuments, footsteps, a landscape, pictures, ethnographies, letters, lawsuits or other written documents, a jewel and so on: we should remember that, as well as being a historian, Collingwood was a leading archaeologist of Roman Britain and a Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy. The proposal is interdisciplinary; but history is seen as the unifying concept in a project in which Collingwood, a reader of Vico, Dilthey and Croce, extended the method and aim of history to knowing oneself as a result of being able to entertain the thoughts of so many different people.

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It should be remembered that, for Collingwood, traces are not to be considered evidence for anything in themselves; they cannot be evidence for something (e.g. a hypothesis), until one is able to put appropriate questions to them. It is through questions that traces may be constituted as evidence: evidence for a particular hypothesis, interpretation or theory. Without a question to put to them, they are meaningless. A chant by an Amerindian – say, the voice of a spirit conjured up through shamanic trance –, is not, for Collingwood, an ‘oral source’ pregnant with ‘authentic meaning’; it has to be constituted as evidence for an interpretative hypothesis just as much as any other trace. Equally, Collingwood denies that documents are ‘sources’ containing some kind of ‘authentic truth’: such a view could only lead to what he calls ‘scissors-and-paste’ history, the fabrication of a narrative through a collage of so-called ‘authentic contemporary voices’. Rather, both speaking and writing are equally capable of lying and misleading, and therefore are in as much need of questioning and interpretation as the message of a clock that has stopped at a certain time in an Agatha Christie who-dunnit. To reconstruct the human intentions, thoughts and actions which underlie, give rise to, and to some degree account for traces is, therefore, the aim of history (and, we may add, of anthropology, too). The idea that documents and archives are not ‘sources’ of truth, but traces waiting for the right question to be put to them, provides a corrective to overly romantic views of ethnographic practice, such as those which fetishize the oral directness of the ‘native voice’. Faithful oral transcription and text-critical techniques are ways of polishing up and perceiving clearly such traces; but the work of re-enacting the hidden intentions of the speakers, situating them within the relevant contexts, has still to be done. Neither speaking nor writing are necessarily purveyors of ‘truth’. So it becomes necessary to question the opposition sometimes adduced, for example, between ‘Indian history’ (written from an Indian point of view) and ‘history of Indians’ (written from an external, or ‘European’ point of view). As Isaiah Berlin remarked, we know today that too rigid a distinction between ‘history from within’ and ‘history from without’ may inhibit the combination of techniques which are necessary to understand the present and past of people, groups and societies. We cannot refuse any tool that may help us answer our questions (Berlin 1967). Observable behaviour can also be a key to the interpretation of intentions, purposes, agency, if interrogated as evidence for a theory. Our task is to look first at the conditions of production of the sources; and to build hypotheses which our past interlocutors might have disagreed with, if indeed they even shared the same questions.

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Arnoldo Momigliano pointed out that historians have always to some extent to overcome and surpass their predecessors by moving beyond them;9 and in one person of their professionally split personalities, the same is true of anthropologists in relation to the people they study. No degree of reflexivity will reduce inequalities of power in the field of literary expression and projection. No amount of deconstruction of Western ideas by exposing them to the perspective of a cultural other will do more than invert the relationship of alterity. We, and those we are trying to understand (who are also trying to understand us), are constantly moving on, caught up in new situations, entangled in new webs of meaning and intention; and this returns anthropology once again to the question of history as the inescapable context in which all anthropological reflection takes place. The wealth of Potosí was revealed to the Spanish, according to traditional versions, by two ‘servants’ (yanaconas) whose masters were from the middle and upper Spanish elite. Strangers from near Cusco, these yanacona had, it is alleged, no interest in following Manco’s policy of concealment. Diego Wallpa found the Rich Lode (the Veta Rica) by accident around August 1544, and exploited it for a few months by himself, until a yanacona comrade, traditionally named Diego Wanka, interrogated him about the sources of his wealth. In the end, Wallpa ceded a second Lode, ‘Centeno’s Lode’, to his comrade, and they exploited them for a time together. Then they quarrelled, and as a result, in April 1545, Diego Wanka turned over the Centeno Lode to his master, Diego de Villarroel. Almost like a mediaeval morality tale about treasure and avarice, leading to a fight and betrayal between friends, this colonial version also tells us that divine providence had hidden Potosí from the Inka, or at least had forbidden them to exploit the mountain before the arrival of the Spaniards. For God knew that only the reward of precious metals would induce the Spanish to settle in such a barren, freezing place, thereby bringing the Word of Truth to many thousands of Andeans. This version also makes use of the legend (whose date is uncertain) of the mountain rebuking Inka Wayna Qhapaq for trying to exploit its silver, saying that it was being kept for better people than he. By a piece of good fortune, we have a deathbed declaration from Diego Wallpa, ‘first discoverer’ of the Rich Mountain, which was taken down by a Spanish friar under orders from Viceroy Francisco de Toledo on the last day of 1572, only ten days before Wallpa’s death. The text is complex and multi-.levelled. Its purpose is clearly to ensure that Wallpa’s children and descendants might benefit from any privileges granted to him as a reward for being the ‘first discoverer’. Yet it remained unpublished till the late nineteenth century, and as usual it conceals as much as it reveals; but it is clear that Diego Wallpa was not alone when he first discovered the Rich Lode. For around his deathbed were a group of Inkas and their supporters, as well as an old, experienced Spanish miner called Antonio Quijada. All were said to have known Wallpa since before the discovery of the Rich Mountain of

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Potosí, i.e. prior to 1545. Moreover, in this version Diego Wallpa’s comrade is not called Diego Wanka, but ‘Challco, an Inka from Cusco’. What are these Inkas doing mixed up with the discovery of Potosí? It has become possible to interrogate these silences due to interdisciplinary advances made by archaeologists, geologists and historians. Far from being deserted and ignored, it is now believed that the Rich Mountain was an important huaca, perhaps the most important of the whole region, and probably dedicated to the Sun. Archaeological remains oriented towards the mountain have been found in the surrounding hills and valleys. Diego Wallpa and the extirpating priest Arriaga tell of a cult centre which existed on its peak. Some have argued that quantities of silver had been extracted from Potosí at least since 1100 A.D., reversing the traditional assumption that it was left untouched until the Spanish got there, though it is difficult to be precise about either the population or the amounts of silver involved. Wallpa was (so he tells us) an Andean noble from Chumbivilcas, near Cusco, and he had been Guardian of the Inka’s Feathers, an important part of the imperial regalia. This was an eminent position, which brought Wallpa into close intimacy with the Inka. But he and his companions in Porco were miners, skilled at refining silver in Andean wind-furnaces. Moreover, they were traders who travelled from Porco with llamas to the maize-growing valley of Cochabamba, bringing back maize – the raw material for corn beer – as well as coca from the semi-tropical yungas, and also, no doubt, news filtering through the frontier from the eastern lowlands of Antisuyu dominated by Manco. Manco’s instructions had got through to spur Charcas resistance in 1538; there is little reason to doubt that any changes in policy would also reach Potosí, right up to his death at the end of 1544 or beginning of 1545. For Manco’s policy was in constant evolution. He knew too well the horrors of which Pizarro and the encomenderos were capable to be willing to re-open negotiations with them. In 1540, Francisco Pizarro had ordered the burning by fire of his queen, his high priest and his chief general. So we can with reason intuit that he was now prepared to seek an alliance with the Spanish King as the only way of stopping Gonzalo’s march to absolute power in the Andes. The news of Manco’s evolving strategy was apparent to Andeans; and once Potosí was discovered to the Spanish in April 1545, only a few months after Manco had himself been assassinated, most of the Altiplano erupted against Gonzalo and his captains, and continued to support the royal forces until Gonzalo’s final defeat, capture and execution after the battle of Xaquijaguana in 1548. It is almost as though the discovery of Potosí had been a pre-arranged signal for the Indians to rise up in support of the royal forces against the encomenderos … . Suddenly the significance of the Inka presence around Wallpa’s deathbed begins to appear, like an image emerging on photographic paper. It offers support for our hypothesis about the changes in Inka Manco’s political strategy. If we can find evidence for the idea that Potosí was an Inka gift to the King, we can infer that Manco was no longer ordering the concealment of all mines from the Spanish. Rather, he was looking for

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the right moment at which to instruct the Inkas in La Plata and Porco to manifest Potosí to the enemies of Pizarro. But amidst such chaos, could there be a ‘right moment’? The strategy survived Manco’s assassination at a moment when Gonzalo’s supporters were still in control of La Plata and Porco … And (with only a brief interruption) they continued to dominate the situation until 1546, when Gonzalo confronted and defeated the royal forces, killing the Viceroy Blasco Nuñez. With this Gonzalo had crossed his Rubicon. In Charcas, meanwhile, only Diego de Centeno managed to unite the royalist opponents of Gonzalo (among them the Spanish miner Antonio Quijada), taking control of La Plata briefly between August 1545 and January 1546, but enjoying Andean support from Cusco to La Plata until the war was over.

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Imagination To re-enact the thoughts and actions of people in the past, a deal of imagination is required, though channelled by knowledge of the sources and by an interpretive theory of the period. Here Collingwood proposes a neo-Kantian view of what he calls the imaginative a priori. For, as in all who-dunnits, the traces left are always incomplete. If a person was seen passing Point A at 12.00 and then reaching Point B, twelve miles distant, at 4.00, we have to assume, and we can reasonably imagine, that they traversed the distance between the two points during the intervening four hours, and even ask ourselves what they did during that time. If Caesar appears to be in Rome one month and then in Gaul three months later, we can assume that he must have crossed the Alps, and we can reasonably imagine him doing so. So what is imagined is not necessarily fiction, as opposed to ‘what actually happened’: we need to be able to imagine what could have happened – even must have happened – though there is no direct evidence for it. This allows Collingwood to introduce the relation between Silence and Imagination as a fundamental dynamic in the re-construction and re-enactment of the past. Without imagination, we would not even be left with a bundle of disconnected clips, for we would have no theory with which to make them meaningful, and therefore no evidence for knowing anything at all. Re-enactment theory has inspired considerable debate: it seems to imply an empathetic identification with other people’s – sometimes quite alien – emotions, thoughts, purposes, that some have found distasteful. We could never, some pure spirits allege, empathetically identify with a murderer, a torturer or a cannibal. Such spirits then invoke some sort of projection theory that safeguards their moral non-commitment, to make such cases fit to be re-enacted while leaving them untainted by the experience. Others invoke Gadamer’s

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interpretation of re-enactment as a ‘merging of horizons’, that brings two minds into close convergence, at least for a short period of time, but without the need to posit absolute moral and emotional agreement (see Stueber 2002). This is an important advance since a historian’s (or anthropologist’s) capacity for moral judgement cannot be omitted from our account. In fact, there are probably very few human feelings and actions which we are completely unable to imagine. We may remember Jorge Luis Borges’s literary re-enactment of a Nazi’s thoughts before execution in his tale Deutsches Requiem: possible criticisms of Borges disappear if we accept that the imaginative merging of horizons does not necessarily involve moral agreement. Moreover, one thing life and anthropology teaches us is to expand our awareness of what, for good or ill, we may be capable of. Here, however, our interest is in recovering the importance of Silence, not just as a gap in the evidence constituted in favour of a particular theory, to be compensated for with the help of the a priori imagination, but also as itself a trace; a silence, therefore, whose profound intentionality has to be recognized if it is to be seen as both historical event and purposive action, and therefore part of an account of past experience. But keeping quiet can lay one open to reprisals; and therefore, in the case we describe, the silence was itself concealed, thereby appearing, not as a clever cover-up, but rather as not a silence at all, as though there were nothing to be silent about. Thus, one might say that history is silent about Henry VIII’s trip to Japan, because in fact Henry VIII never made a trip to Japan; but suppose history was silent about it for another reason altogether, namely, that Henry VIII did in fact visit Japan, but destroyed all traces of it so effectively that only now are we able to say, with surprising new evidence at our disposal, not only why he made the trip, but why he was so anxious to cover it up, and what that cover-up has done to past and present ideas of historical temporality. This is the sort of silence we are concerned with: the concealment of concealment, or silence as historical duplicity. It may be difficult to discern unless, like Umberto Eco on the tracks of the Templars, there is a theory powerful enough to make its intentionality seem plausible. We have to know better the mechanisms by which our knowledge of the past (and that of other people) has, in the case under consideration, been deliberately blocked, and the need to resort to interdisciplinary approaches if the road to knowing is to be cleared. In particular, we can draw on geological and archaeological studies, and on colonial theories of stereotyping and recognition, to uncover a strategy in which are interwoven political guile, a powerful religious imagination and the threat of colonial violence, giving rise to new accounts of the Andean past.

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As Diego Wallpa lay dying during the last days of 1572, he knew himself to be in a quandary. Mindful of the Inka part in ensuring the revelation of Potosí to the Spanish in 1545, he nevertheless did not wish to speak of the concealment of Potosí that Manco, Paullu and the lords of the seven nations of Charcas had practised in 1538, at a time when all except Manco had decided to reveal the location of Porco. To recognise the concealment would simply confirm Viceroy Toledo’s worst suspicions of the Inkas as inherently untrustworthy. In 1545, then, not only had the Inkas and Aymara lords previously concealed Potosí, but after its discovery they needed to ‘conceal the concealment’ they had practised. At the same time, their manifestation of Potosí could be seen as a way of setting the record straight, by delivering the greatest huaca of all, not to the Pizarros (as had been necessary with Porco in 1538), but to the forces of the King. There is one trace which is difficult to interpret, although it may be taken as a powerful piece of evidence in support of our theory: At the end of his declaration, Diego Wallpa tells us that he had sent a great piece of silver from Potosí as a gift to the ‘Hatun Apu’ (Great Lord) of Castille, i.e. to the Spanish King. It is tempting to see this piece of silver as, precisely, the Andean mama of the Rich Mountain, that is, a precious piece of native metal normally extracted from Andean gold or silver-mines which then became an object of cult to the miners. Pure projectile of congealed light driven to earth from the sling of the warrior in the stars, the mama represents the potentiality and fertility of the mines. And Wallpa chose to send this gift to His Majesty with his friend, the Spanish miner Antonio Quijada, who, as we know, was among those closest to Wallpa and the Inkas in 1544–45, who was present at Wallpa’s deathbed. Moreover, Wallpa tells us the year when he sent the gift: it was in 1549, when Polo Ondegardo was Corregidor of Potosí, just after Pizarro’s death. What was the meaning of this gift? And why was it not sent until 1549? The defeat of Gonzalo Pizarro in 1548 was followed by a period of Andean disillusion. Inkas and Andeans soon experienced the effects of a new distribution of encomiendas by ‘the pacifier’ La Gasca to the loyal followers of the King (some had changed sides only at the last moment). The new encomenderos were perhaps even more rapacious than their predecessors. 1549, in many ways, saw the betrayal of Andean hopes. How did they react to this situation? How did they attempt to re-establish the relationship with the King, whose victory had been the aim of their support for the royalist forces and of their opposition to Pizarro and his band? We suspect that the gift of the huaca of Potosí to the Hatun Apu of Castille in 1549 was designed quietly to remind the Crown of the favoured relationship sought with the gift of Porco, and reiterated with the intended gift of Potosí: the transfer of allegiance to His Majesty, in exchange for recognition of the ‘natural lords’ of the land, under the local sovereignty of an Inka … Just as Porco had been the gift to the Crown of the local lords of Charcas, with the encouragement of Inka Paullu but with the opposition of Manco, so Potosí had been another, greater gift to the Crown from the Inkas and local lords, led this time by Manco.

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So what was the political settlement envisaged by the Inkas? Why were they present at Diego Wallpa’s deathbed? If the gift of Porco signified an alliance between Andean vassals and the Crown, was the gift of Potosí – originally withheld in case of an unexpected Andean victory – meant to signify a consolidation of the same political pact?

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Translating Re-enactment To return to the need to compare the semantics of knowing in different linguistic communities: we might at this stage want to ask whether there exists a Quechua semantic equivalent of ‘re-enactment’. While it would obviously be unprofitable to ask for an Amerindian theoretical elaboration identical to that provided by Collingwood, there are some related lexemes which offer clues for semantic comparison. In the preamble to the early colonial Quechua corpus of tales known as the Huarochiri Manuscript (eds. Salomon & Urioste 1991 [1608]), the anonymous writer laments the lack of alphabetic writing in pre– Hispanic times, which made it difficult (he alleges) to ‘make things lost [human deeds and past events] appear again’ – and here he uses the lexemes chinkasqa (lost) and rixuriy, ‘appear’. Now ‘recovering things lost’, making them reappear, is a classic shamanic skill; and it has been plausibly suggested that the sixteenthcentury habit of reading aloud led some native Andean observers to consider inscribed paper as a ‘sacred object’, a sort of European huaca, that spoke to Spanish readers with voices equivalent to those that Andeans were accustomed to hear during shamanic seances (Ziólkowski 2002). Asking an inscribed paper sheet to tell past events was therefore comparable to Amerindian shamanic techniques for making other ‘things lost’ to reappear (see Salomon and Urioste 1991; and Platt 1992).10 Moreover, we encounter direct hallucinogenic perceptions of creation time and mythic heroes in both Amazonian societies (such as the Tukanao), and in the Andes through the shamanic use of San Pedro peyote-cactus (achuma), and other psychotropic substances. It is evident that the idea of a vivid ‘imaginative re-enactment’ of past actions and intentions, with an immediacy and faithfulness that can bring them directly into present minds, would not appear alien or incomprehensible to Amerindian intellectuals and shamans, whether in the sixteenth century or today. Re-enactment is in fact a major feature of Amerindian attitudes to the past. The silences in this story come at us from many directions: the original concealment of the mines in 1535, the discovery of Porco accompanied by the silence about Potosí in 1538, the concealment of this concealment following the discovery of Potosí in 1545, the difficulties of claiming to

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have ‘given’ Potosí once La Gasca had launched the new distribution of encomiendas in 1548, apart from Diego Wallpa’s gift of the great mineralized stone of 1549. With the continued resistance of the descendants of Manco in Vilcabamba until their destruction by Viceroy Toledo in 1572, it became almost impossible to make such a claim. Wallpa’s declaration was itself suppressed by the Viceroy, anxious to impose his own silence and deny the Inkas any role in the new colonial order apart from that of tyrants who had been justly deposed by the King. Many kinds of silences succeeded each other and combined to form new conjunctures of concealment, a network of disorientations so complex as to be almost impossible for those coming after to render into transparent simplicity. Toledo himself favoured the providential account, which represented Potosí as a miraculous gift of God. He had no time for versions which represented the Inkas as anything other than tyrants and traitors. Nevertheless, at least one person in the second half of the sixteenth century seems to have heard of the Inkas’ claim to have known Potosí since before the European invasion, and their intention to deliver it as a gift of power into the hands of the King. According to the Andean writer Waman Puma, author of a 1,000–page illustrated letter to the King in protest against colonial corruption and abuse, Potosí had been an Inka settlement founded by Inka Tupaq Yupanki, the son of Pachakuti Inka and father of Wayna Qhapaq. Waman Puma represents the silver-mountain of Potosí as the basis of the power of Pope and King. And his drawing of Potosí (Figure 5. 2) is a representation of the political ideology which, behind the early silences, seems to have been intended by the Inkas’ gift (Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980: f.1057). The Inka stands on the crown of the mountain, where the huaca to the Sun was situated. Above him is the coat of arms of Castille and the motto of Charles V, PLUS ULTRA. He is flanked on each side by four Apus, one for each of the four quadrants of the Tawantinsuyu. At his feet are the ‘silver mines of Potosí’, shown as a black object within a white frame, with a zigzag path of access. Thus the Inka, the son of the Sun, and the Council of the Andean kingdom of Peru, stand upright beneath the sovereignty of the Spanish King, on the mountain top where the cult to the huaca of the Sun had been located. They dominate the mines to which residents in the Spanish town below have access by mounting the winding path. The Inka remains as lord of the land, with the King’s permission; and people from the Spanish town below exploit the mines, with the Inka’s permission. In his drawing, Waman Puma has represented the relationships that constitute the basis of the Inka’s political proposal.

Failure to Know Let us now return to the image of the artificial mountain, as a symbol of obstacles on the path to knowledge. There were many ways by which Andeans could conceal the wealth of the land: cutting rope

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Figure 5.2 From Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615–1616) ‘The silver mines of Potosí as the Inka’s gift to Charles V, the King of Spain’.

bridges, covering telltale paths, submerging high-grade ore and refined silver in mountain lakes, withdrawing the priests, removing huacas to distant refuges, and constructing artificial mountains (cerros postizos) on top of adits. In these circumstances, ways of knowing become ways to knowing: a question not only of perceptions, but also of the management of rafts and bridges, of horsemanship, of conquering enemies, opening

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pathways, finding routes, negotiating disclosures, identifying mine mouths or ‘doorways’, entering adits, tunnels, galleries, face-workings, commandeering Indian labour, bidding them descend through subterranean chambers where images of the Andean ancestors – now transformed into ‘devils’ – proffer knowledge of the mine in exchange for cult and devotion: coca leaf, alcohol and tobacco, still today the psychotropic trinity of modern Andean shamanism. All the basics of a computer game of virtual quest, it might seem; but it is in the real world that the miners, both Spanish and Indian, finally approach the sources of subterranean knowledge and power. Crossing the threshold of the mine-mouth – the door to knowledge which was guarded, as we have seen, by the shaman, or ‘door-keeper’ (punku kamayuq), in pre-Hispanic times – the miner enters another domain. In her recent ethnography of modern Potosí miners, Pascale Absi finds them to be ‘ministers of the devil’ from the moment they leave the Christian light of day and step inside the mouth of the mine (Absi 2003). They enter a different régime of devotion and religious knowledge, which alone will take them closer to the metallic treasure they must seek. In these circumstances, Christian truth becomes inoperative; other paths to knowledge must be explored, paths which are ‘secret’, or ‘clandestine’ from a Christian standpoint; in the same way that ‘secret names’ (sajra suti) are pronounced when pouring libations to a sacred place, ‘memory path’ or deity (Abercrombie 1998). There are moments in Andean rural shamanism when the shaman instructs his congregation ‘not to feel themselves Christian’, proposing the availability of alternative, concealed structures of knowledge and feeling (Izko 1992). These alterities are part of the miners’ almost schizoid existence which is re-embodied with every entry to, and exit from, the subterranean world of the mine. In modern Bolivia, miners have sometimes been assimilated to the figure of Christ, regarded as symbols of the power of suffering; an image which easily makes them representative of the mestizo nation, crucified by foreign capitalists. But here, too, beneath the Christian imagery and discontinuous with it, lies a different world of meanings. The instruction issued by the deity of the mines in the seventeenth century to worship him ‘behind’ the appearance of Christ, or ‘within’ the mountain whose external form was assimilated to that of the Virgin of the Conception, is reminiscent of the doctrine of taqiyya, which allowed clandestine Muslims in sixteenth-century Spain to adopt the outward forms of Christian worship while continuing faithful to Allah in their hearts (Cardaillac 1979). It was followed, in the Andes as in the Peninsula, by those whose religions had been driven underground through forced conversion.

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With Manco’s order of concealment, many hands were put to the task of reshaping the landscape so as to hide its wealth, remoulding the profile of hills and mountains with invisible additions that covered the entrances to the Inka’s mines, putting them beyond Spanish reach. The Europeans occupied a land where local knowledge had become, by definition, something hidden, difficult for them to accede to, even pagan, whose discovery meant immersion in an immense work of prospection, inevitably in the end with the help of an Indian informant/informer. The fantasy of the miners – always dreaming of the fabulous ore-shoot which will make their fortune – was one of the motors which kept the search going; fantasy and imagination lay at the roots of their paths to knowing. The avarice of the Spaniards could not be satisfied with two silvermountains. No more could the imagination of the Andeans, who multiplied trinities throughout their social organization and cosmology, as though to triangulate and at the same time embody different aspects of a composite reality. The trinity of Lightning was itself the third of a supreme trinity of huacas: Viracocha, the Sun and the Lightning. The Sun formed a trinity of its own, in which the flash of the lightning appears as a concentrated emanation of solar light; while the Lightning is also triple, being made up of flash, crack and bolt. All these trinities were regarded by some priests as examples of ‘providential preparation’, proof of a prior process of evangelization by St Bartholomew or St Thomas. Yet they concealed trinities which were different from the Christian mystery of the three Persons in One which they superficially resembled. For the Spanish, it was perfectly possible, and greatly to be desired, that there should exist a third mountain that would leave the other two in the shade. For a time in the early seventeenth century they looked to the powerful mines of Oruro; then it was rumoured to exist near Chaquí, the old capital of the southern Qaraqara. With nearby Porco and Potosí, Chaquí forms a triangle. And the entrance to the silver–mountain of Chaqui was in turn triangulated by a trinity of three stones. One of these was a big, blunt stone resting on the mine-mouth and ‘facing the sunrise’, while a second was a big rock which had been split by lightning, close by a small lake; these two rocks made a triangle with a third stone which lacks explicit associations … In any case, the entrance to the mine had been covered with an ‘artificial mountain’ (cerro postizo). The mines of Chaquí have never been found. They were alleged to have been ‘very well covered up’ by the Indians, although two Spanish miners had paid Indian labourers to excavate the ‘artificial mountain’ down to the level of the mine-mouth, extracting more than 50,000 cwts of slag and rubble to a depth of ‘more than five stades’, and ‘the more we extract the more it fills up again’, an immense labour which nevertheless left the mine mouth finally visible. The miners listened intently as the Indians valued one of the two oreshoots at 500 pesos per cwt extracted, and the other at 100 pesos, together with an ‘altar where they worshipped idols from Porco and elsewhere …’

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It is possible that the mining temple of Chaqui was real, and Spanish disappointment stems from their confusion of a sacred place with a vast silver deposit. The triangle with Porco and Potosí appears convincing; but no rich mountain in purely quantitative terms was ever found there, although its fame circulated in contemporary books on metallurgy (Alonso Barba 1967). Though silver was extracted, refined and circulated in the pre-Hispanic period, it was never the object of mercantile accumulation, but rather a substance of intense political, symbolic and esoteric value. It was valued for its glitter, the capacity of gold and silver to overawe a subject with its refractions, or dazzle an opposing army. Formed from the slingshot of the celestial warrior, it generated fertility, multiplying the oreshoots that grew inside the earth and inspiring the trinitarian religious complexes that arose around it. The association of the celestial projectile with the evening star, or with shooting-stars, has persisted through the centuries (Urton 1981). In the sixteenth century, the slings of the Indians cracked as they drove flaming projectiles into the thatched houses of Cusco where their Spanish enemies were hiding. No doubt they were imitating the evening star slung down the sky by the warrior in the stars. A distant echo of these cosmological associations was heard in the k’ah! made by the slings of free Indian miners, or k’ahchas (lit. ‘k’ah-makers’), when they fought against eighteenth century royal authorities; or, more distantly still, when twentienth century miners slung dynamite with their slings during their battles with the Bolivian army.

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Politics and History It has been argued that political issues are better served by attention to the present than to the past, and that anthropology should stay in the present where political issues can be confronted (Sanjek 1991). This of course conflicts with the practice of actual politicians for whom history is a constant (if sometimes narcissistic) point of reference. It also shows little understanding of how traces from the past affect living populations in many parts of the world. In 1971 Tristan Platt was living with the Indian leader of one of Macha’s two moieties (the Macha, split since before the European invasion into ‘Upper Moiety’ and ‘Lower Moiety’, are the modern descendants of the leading Qaraqara ethnic group), don Santiago Carvajal. Don Santiago, chief of the Upper Moiety, wanted me to help him and his people by publishing a colonial document from 1648 confirming Macha rights to land, which they held in their moiety archive. The Crown inspector who drew up the document in the seventeenth century is remembered today as the person who established modern communities’ ‘originary’ rights to land. So, in 1982 I finally published the document.11

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I did not know at the time that I had landed in the middle of a centuries-old argument (Andean Oral History 1992; and Rappaport 1990). Throughout the Republic, Indian communities have continued to brandish their colonial titles, provoking court debates, confirmations or refutations. They continue to engage in mobilizations and confrontations with government, contributing to a generalization of popular protest against a state that aspires to exercise the ‘principle of authority’ and a ‘monopoly of the means of violence’, combined with the very liberal–democratic idea that only people ‘sufficiently mature’ can be expected to exercise civic freedom, and act as responsible, peaceful citizens. Yet for some Indians, the state was always ‘theirs’ (‘Nuestro Inka’; ‘Nuestro Estado’) and they expect it to behave in a way that will guarantee their rights to land, in exchange for services rendered (Platt 1984; also 1982: Epílogo). If it doesn’t, insurrection may become a legitimate path to justice. Was the publication of the 1648 document ‘hazarded directionality’? I didn’t think so then: it appeared rather to be a relatively straightforward case of the ethics of reciprocity. They had received me and told me things, my task was to publish what they wanted to make known … Later, I realized what my hosts were hoping for: that, by publishing documents about the past, new tools could be afforded for a renewed and expanded Indian agency in the future, taking in its stride the risk of mythologization and essentialist self-reinvention. The purpose is intelligible; yet it sheds light at the same time on the importance of deploying independently procedures of historiographical methodology and knowledge-construction. Apart from the fact that the ‘indigenous’ is also a historical construction, it is important for us to write, not only about the resistance, negotiations and agency of the oppressed, but also about the costs of agency within postcolonial situations. The recovery and imaginative re-enactment of the past as experienced by contemporaries is fundamental at both individual and social levels. During the work of memory in psychotherapy, remembering can sometimes produce slight ‘shifts’ in emotional structures by letting in, with therapeutic help and perhaps only for a visceral moment, a message from the past which disturbs rationalization and compels recognition. These personal shifts can be compared with the desired effects of Arif Dirlik’s view of the past as a store of past struggles, which reappear and are experienced anew in the present, with the aim of ‘shifting’ or undermining, however slightly, the sedimented effects of history. Convergences and similarities may, we have seen, confirm the independence of different visions; but they may also make it possible, when desired, to communicate and share imaginings. Here it has been possible to take a problem in sixteenth-century Andean history

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as an allegory of a more general way to knowing: one that emerges from the recovery of each specific occupation and practice, whether as conqueror or peasant, as shaman or midwife, as metallurgist or historian, as Mallku, Inka or King. It is true that joining imaginatively the silent gaps between traces is only possible in relation to a theory of their production: actions (including silences) must be situated in a semantic context before they can be interpreted from within. But we can then move from the outside inwards, and by re-enacting diverse practices find ourselves discovering our own imaginative capacities while apprenticing ourselves to the most varied range of others. This is the kind of freedom that Collingwood discovered and recommended as the aim of doing history. And it is obvious that the historian or anthropologist has no need to merge horizons to the point of sharing incompatible moral qualities with the people whose ideas they are trying to re-enact, except in a transitory, experimental, almost ludic way. The actor who impersonates Iago or Hagen does not have to be the epitome of evil. Indeed, it is perhaps by imitating the character impersonation of the actor, as our nearest cultural equivalent to the shaman, that we can most fully approach the work of re-enactment.

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Notes 1. Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, La Paz, Bolivia. 2. The historical vignettes in this chapter draw on research published in Tristan Platt, Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne, Olivia Harris (2006); for a more fully-sourced account of the concealment of Potosí, and the interpretation of its silences, see Platt and Quisbert (2006). We would like to thank Mark Harris for his patience during the production of this text 3. ‘They imagined him as a man formed of stars in the sky, with a club in his left hand and a sling in his right, dressed in glittering clothes which flashed like lightning when he swung round to loose his sling, and the crack of the sling was the cause of thunder, and he released them when he wanted it to rain,’ Bernabé Cobo (1660), quoted by Ziólkowski (1997), who suggests that the projectile of the celestial slinger was the evening star that descends to the horizon just after the setting of the Sun. 4. For an excellent recent commentary on Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, see M. Löwy (2003). 5. Qullasuyu was the southern quadrant of the Inka’s fourfold domain, or Tawantinsuyu. 6. As explained by a Quechua-speaking woman interested in becoming a midwife: she began by seeing, watching those attending her own labour; this led to doing, i.e. attending other women during labour; and thence to knowing how to do it as a skilled practitioner, i.e. becoming a midwife, see Platt (2001). 7. For the verum factum principle see Vico (1999), whose critique of anachronism provides the point of departure for the positions advanced in this chapter. 8. Ginzburg points out that there is only one situation in which we can be sure that the person questioned may be saying something not already prefigured in the

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questioner’s mind, which is when the inquisitor (or, perhaps, the anthropologist) has not understood the answer (1989). 9. Harris makes a related point about Fernand Braudel, who, she argues, emphasized the novelty of his own thought as discontinuity with what proceeded it, although a main theme of that thought – produced amidst the violent ruptures of the mid twentieth century – was the recovery of the grand continuities, or ‘long durations’ of history (2004). 10. For the Andean perception of ‘white sheets’ of inscribed paper as though they were Spanish huacas, see Ziólkowski (2002). 11. See Platt (1982), Apéndice 1. Also documents published in Platt, Bouysse-Cassagne and Harris (2006), especially Document 15.

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References Abercrombie, T. 1998. Pathways of Memory and Power. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Absi, P. 2003. Les Ministres du Diable. Paris: L’Harmattan. Alonso Barba, A. 1967 [1640]. Arte de los Metales. Potosí: Casa de la Moneda. Assadourian, C.S. 1989. ‘Acerca del cambio en la naturaleza del dominio sobre las Indias: la mit’a minera del virrey Toledo, documentos de 1568– 1571’, Seville: Anuario de Estudios Americanos XLVI. Berlin, I. 1967. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the Philosophy of History. Oxford: Blackwell. Bouysse-Cassagne, T. 2004. ‘El Sol de Adentro: Wakas y Santos en las Minas de Charcas y en el lago Titicaca (siglos XV–XVII)’, Boletín de Arqueología PUCP 8: 59–97. Cardaillac, L. 1979. Moriscos y cristianos: un enfrentamiento polemico (1492– 1640). Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Collingwood, R.G. 1994 [1946]. The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dirlik, A. 1997. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder: Westview Press. Ginzburg, C. 1989. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Guaman Poma de Ayala, F. 1980 [1613]. Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno, transcript. and ed. J.V. Murra, R. Adorno & G. Urioste. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Harris, O. 2004. ‘Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity’. History Workshop Journal, 57: 161–74. Husserl, E. 1970. ‘The Origin of Geometry’, Appendix VI of The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Izko, X. 1992. La doble frontera. Ecología Política y Ritual en el Altiplano Central. La Paz: HISBOL/CERES. Laurencich-Minelli, L. and P. Numhauser Bar-Magen. 2003. El Silencio Protagonista: El primer siglo jesuita en el Virreinato del Perú, 1567–1667. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala.

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Tristan Platt with Pablo Quisbert

Löwy, M. 2003. Walter Benjamín: Avisos de incendio. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Platt, T. 1982. Estado boliviano y ayllu andino. Tierra y tributo en el Norte de Potosí. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. ———. 1984. ‘Liberalism and Ethnocide in the Bolivian Andes’, History Workshop Journal, 17: 3–18. ———. 1992. ‘Writing, Shamanism and Identity, or, Voices from Abya– Yala’, History Workshop Journal 34: 148–158. ———. 2001. ‘El feto agresivo: Parto, formación de la persona y mitohistoria en los Andes’, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, LVIII–2. Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano–Americanos. ———. 2002. ‘”Without Deceit or Lies”: Variable Chinu Readings during a Sixteenth-century Tribute–restitution Trial’, in J. Quilter and G. Urton (eds.), Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin: Texas University Press. ———, T. Bouysse-Cassagne and O. Harris. 2006. Qaraqara-Charka. Mallku, Inka y Rey en la Provincia de Charcas. Historia antropológica de una confederación aymara, Siglos XV-XVII. La Paz: Institut Français d’Études Andines/Plural editores/University of St Andrews/University of London/ Inter-American Foundation/Fundación Cultural del Banco Central de Bolivia. ——— and Pablo Quisbert. ‘Tras las huellas del silencio: Potosí, los Incas y el Virrey Toledo’. Paper presented at the International Colloquium on Mining and Metallurgy in the Andes, Sucre, 2006. Rappaport, J. 1990. The Politics of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salomon, F. 2004. The Cordkeepers. Khipus and Cultural Life in an Andean Village. Durham: Duke University Press. ——— and G. Urioste (eds). 1991. The Huarochiri Manuscript. A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion. Austin: Texas University Press. Sanjek, R. 1991. ‘The ethnographic present’, Man (n.s.) 26 (4): 609–28. Stueber, K.R. 2002. ‘The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation: Reenactment, Simulation, and the Fusion of Horizons’, History and Theory 41 (1). Taller de Historia Oral Aymara (THOA). 1992. ‘The Indian Santos Marka T’ula, Chief of the Ayllus of Qallapa and General Representative of the Indian Communities of Bolivia’, History Workshop Journal 34: 101–18. Urton, G. 1981. At the Crossroads of Earth and Sky. Austin: University of Texas Press. Vico, G. 1999 [1725]. New Science, trans. D. Marsh, with an Introduction by A. Grafton. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ziólkowski, M. 1997. Los objetivos y los mecanismos de la rivalidad dentro de la élite inka, Siglos XV–XVI. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala. ———. 2002. ‘El Breviaro y el Inca, o, Del arte de conversar con las huacas’. Paper read in the Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos (CSIC), Seville, November 2002.

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Chapter 6

THE CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE IN A COLONIAL CONTEXT: THE CASE OF HENRI GADEN (1867–1939)

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Roy Dilley

This chapter focuses on the issue of knowledge practices among French colonial officers and administrators in West Africa, and in particular on how one specific officer and administrator, Henri Gaden (1867– 1939), developed an understanding of a region previously unknown to him. Before I tell the story of his engagement with the peoples and landscapes of West Africa, it is perhaps pertinent to address in brief a number of theoretical issues surrounding the problem of knowledge in an anthropological perspective. Much anthropological literature on knowledge regards the issue of knowing as a relatively unproblematic accumulation of what it is that people claim to know about the world, about their social relations, about their cosmology and so forth. A topic that is rarely considered, however, is the flip side to knowledge, namely ignorance. To talk of knowledge without recognition of the potential of ignorance is like speaking of velocity without a conception of distance. My thoughts on this matter are guided by the work of James Frederick Ferrier, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews from 1845 to 1864.1 He raised the problem of ignorance in relation to his discussion of epistemology in Institutes of Metaphysic (1854). Father of the term of ‘epistemology’, Ferrier also gave birth

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to the idea of ‘agnoiology’, the theory of ignorance. Epistemology, the science of knowing and what is known, was contrasted with ‘agnoiology’, the doctrine of those things of which we are necessarily ignorant; that department of philosophy which inquires into the character and conditions of ignorance, according to the OED, or in Ferrier’s words ‘the theory of true ignorance’. Ignorance was one element of his rationalist philosophical system that comprised of epistemology, agnoiology and ontology – theories of knowledge, ignorance and being, respectively. Why the term epistemology gained respectability and passed into broad usage, yet the label agnoiology did not, is a question which philosophers are no doubt best equipped to answer. Perhaps from their point of view, such a theory of ignorance, were it to be true, would undermine at the outset the claim of the truth of ignorance. These philosophical conundrums are perhaps best left to the philosopher. What I take from Ferrier is the insight that the character and condition of ignorance are linked intimately to claims to knowledge: ‘ignorance guarantees potential knowledge’.2 Knowledge and ignorance, it would seem, are mutually constituted. This may seem to be an obvious point, but I hope to indicate some of its implications for an anthropological perspective. The kinds of questions that appear to me to be perfectly well within our anthropological domain of competence, rather than a philosophical one, relate to the place of ignorance in specific social and cultural situations. For example: what are the social consequences of ignorance? What do social practices of knowledge and ways of knowing tell us about conceptions of ignorance in any particular social milieu? Do all claims to knowledge cast a shadow that is to be demarcated as a domain of ignorance? Are ‘accounts of knowledge and their shadow accounts of ignorance’ always mutually defining, to paraphrase Fardon? (Fardon 1990). What, however, is ignorance? The OED tells us that ignorance is ‘the fact or condition of being ignorant; a want of knowledge (general or specific)’. But there are other senses too. The verb ‘to ignore’ used to mean ‘not to know’, but this meaning became obsolete in English by the 1700s. (This sense still exists in French, as in ‘je l’ignore’ – ‘I don’t know.’) The verb in English carries also the meaning of ‘to refuse to take notice of; not to recognize, to disregard intentionally, to leave out of account, to shut one’s eyes to’ (OED). One cluster of meanings, therefore, describes a sense of the limits to knowledge, the lack of knowing in some general or specific way. The second meaning involves intentionality, the direction of attention, a sense of agency and of an agent’s consciousness. We could easily be drawn here into a discussion of memory and forgetfulness, ideology, repression, masking

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and so forth. I will follow Fardon (1990), however, in limiting myself to ‘not knowing’ and ‘not paying attention to’ as two crucial aspects of accounts of ignorance. Richard Fardon developed in his ethnographic work on the Chamba of the Nigeria–Cameroon border (Fardon 1990) a direct approach to the problem of ignorance. By illuminating the limits of knowledge (both ours and theirs) and of the forms of interpretation placed upon persons, events and relationships in different locations in Chambaland, he revealed a theoretical and methodological relationship between anthropological treatments of knowledge and the hitherto littlediscussed domain of ignorance. The question of ignorance appears to be, therefore, of theoretical and ethnographic importance in any discussion of knowledge, knowledge practices and ways of knowing. Another anthropologist who has contributed to the subject is Mark Hobart. In a discussion of development, he raises questions about representations of ignorance. If the growth of knowledge entails the growth of ignorance, as he argues, is ignorance always to be construed in the same way (Hobart 1993: 20)? Ignorance, he continues, ‘differs in degree and kind according to the presuppositions of different knowledges’ (ibid.: 21). If we are concerned with varieties of ways of knowing, should we also be attentive to differences in the ways of ignorance? Hobart adds another dimension to this discussion of ignorance and knowledge. ‘Ignorance, however, is not a simple antithesis of knowledge’, he tells us. ‘It is a state which people attribute to others and is laden with moral judgement’ (ibid.: 1). He expands on this idea: Both knowledge and ignorance … are peculiarly ideal and timeless notions, which, rather than describing unambiguous states, are attributed to some people by others under particular circumstances, often with moral connotations. The relationship between different knowledges, as propounded and used by their adherents, is then often less dialectical than confrontational. The proponents of one ‘system’ attempt to eliminate other knowledges, to portray them and those who use them as not just wrong, but as benighted and bad. (Ibid.: 21)

It has become an anthropological commonplace to regard knowledge not as a ‘system’ with specious concreteness, nor as a kind of reified or essentialized entity. Instead, attention is now paid to situated knowledge practices, processes of learning and ways of knowing. Knowledge has shifted from a substantive thing to something we do; it is constructed by means of the social and cultural relationships we create around us. So, too, no doubt, must ignorance, the counterpart of knowledge, be

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viewed as processual, dialectical and confrontational.3 Paradoxically, while the human subjects of our anthropological studies might hold to different conceptions of knowledge and its lack, our accounts of their knowledge play on the ‘ignorance’ of this view by resort to sociological explanations that refer to power and ideology and so forth. The specific question I am raising, therefore, is this: What is the place of ignorance with respect to constructions of knowledge, both within the discipline of social anthropology and in relation to French colonial knowledge practices in West Africa?

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* These reflections on knowledge and ignorance lead me in a very roundabout way to French colonial West Africa and a specific colonial officer, one Henri Gaden (1867–1939). I seek in what follows to focus on the social and political significance of knowledge and ignorance within the colonial administration of French West Africa. What ways of knowing were employed by military officers and colonialists in their attempts to come to understand, administer, order and control territories and peoples? What were the consequences of their political and economic goals for those knowledge practices? This present research should be set against my earlier work on apprenticeship and situated knowledge practices among Haalpulaaren of Senegal. This body of work focuses on the transmission of knowledge, ways of knowing and forms of power that are characteristic of relations of learning among Sufi Muslim clerics, on the one hand, and marginalized craftsmen, musicians and diverse specialists on the other (See Dilley 1989, 1999, 2004). The shift in focus towards colonial knowledge practices and relations of power is the counterpart to this earlier work. My aim is to consider here how diverse forms of knowledge practice, modes of knowing the world and acting upon it, and the constructions of power within the colonial encounter become articulated and engaged one with another within a space increasingly dominated by French colonial interests.

Gaden and the Colonial Context The last few decades of the nineteenth century saw the end of French military expansion in West Africa, and the beginnings of the establishment and consolidation of a colonial apparatus aimed at the control of territory and the ordering and surveillance of local populations. It also involved an individual, Henri Gaden, who grappled with the problem of making sense of his immediate West

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African experiences. His career included the posts of military officer of various ranks, and then his appointment as a colonial administrator. I take this individual life as a prism through which may be viewed in detail the complexities of, and tensions among, diverse colonial knowledge practices. These complexities are apprehended through Gaden’s engagement with local populations, with the landscapes they inhabited, and with the languages they spoke. Gaden’s increasing participation in civil administration from 1910 onwards is another dimension of this engagement.

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Gaden – A Personal Transformation Henri Gaden signed up for the French colonial army in 1894, having attended the military academy of Saint Cyr, one of the two most prestigious academies in France. During his second tour of duty in 1896, Gaden was engaged in operations against some of the last leaders of resistance to French annexation. Military conquest reached a symbolic conclusion in French Soudan with the capture of Samory Toure in 1898, during a campaign in which Gaden himself played a significant part.4 Gaden later became a key figure in colonial government on his appointment in 1920 to the Governorship of Mauritania, then one of the last territories to be pacified and controlled by the French. After his retirement in 1927, he remained in St Louis, Senegal, the seat of the Governor, to live out his twilight years conducting ethnographic and linguistic research, surrounded by his Senegalese family and his West African wife by a country marriage – mariage à la mode de pays. This brief outline of a career contains a story of personal transformation. The figure of a young military officer, replete with nineteenth-century bourgeois prejudices of Africa and Africans, is recast in new form by the end of his life. In his latter days, he was regarded as a respected figure of authority, of learning and stature in the eyes of his adopted community. He lived with his West African partner, Coumba Cisse in St Louis until his death. With her, he adopted in around 1920 a young métis boy, Amadou Aïdara otherwise known under his baptismal name as Henri Michel Gaden, who was probably the son of one of Coumba’s female relatives and a Moor of the Aïdara clan. The couple also fostered a number of local children from St Louis, one of whom, now in his eighties and known to his friends as Doudou Gaden, is still alive in Dakar today. Gaden’s initial encounter with Africa on 30th October 1894 did not augur well. He describes in a letter to his father the following scene on arriving at the port of Dakar: 5

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Finally, we dropped anchor [in Dakar] at 6.30, on a dark night. The odour of the negro can be smelt from the port itself, and when a horde of canoes invaded us, a bunch of grubby blacks climbed aboard. The smell became awful. I have however almost become used to it already. … Horrible hot night, no air and a stifling temperature. The old Sudanese who were with us could not recall similar temperatures. You can see I have started off well. Today the heat is again stifling … The blacks are decidedly a dirty race; above all those here, terribly lazy and indolent that one must berate them firmly in order to get something done. This colourful and dirty crowd is rather remarkable. All of them well clothed, however, in unbelievable boubous, in obnoxious rags. The women with their babies on their backs, straddled around their waists, their bare heads nodding around, are quite remarkable.

On 14th December 1894 he writes again to his father:

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The blacks are completely insensible to good deeds, which they take as a sign of weakness. A case of mores. The respected chief is one who administers blows and chops off heads, advisedly, of course. My groom is never as careful, never cleans the bridle or saddle as well as when I administer to him a kick somewhere or other.

He was not, however, insensitive to what he saw around him, nor uncritical of the so-called civilizing mission of colonialism. A few months later in January 1895 he recounts, again in a letter to his father, a snippet of ethnographic insight and critical commentary: ‘Anyway, the society is sharply divided into castes; warriors, cultivators, smiths, weavers, leatherworkers, praise-singers, and there is no need of rules to guarantee their privileges. A black believes himself to be dishonoured if he takes on a trade other than that of his father … And here are the people whom we have the pretence to civilize!’ Or again, when describing a meeting with the illustrious Fama Madamba,6 with whom he dined well, – a meal apparently washed down with champagne and a ‘rather good Bordeaux’ – Gaden comments that despite the chief ’s enormous palace, surrounded by high walls and flanked by large towers, there was absolutely nothing inside it. ‘No more cleanliness or order than among the last of his captives.’ He adds, nonetheless, that ‘Madamba is mightily interesting on the country, which he knows profoundly, its history, its uses, its languages. Eight mightily interesting days were passed with this man.’ Gaden chose not to shut his eyes to this encounter with Madamba, nor did he when making his ethnographic observations on caste separation. Indeed, by overcoming the temptation to ignore, he

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allowed himself the opportunity to apprehend the ignorance inherent in the French civilizing mission. His initial dismissive attitudes towards those around him were also gradually weathered away by successive encounters with the people of the region. By the end of his life, Gaden had mellowed into a man of stature in the eyes of his adopted countrymen. By 1926, a French journalist described in the column ‘Silhouettes coloniales’, published in Le Midi Colonial et Maritime, remarkable scenes he witnessed at the Governor’s residence in St Louis: From all points in Mauritania, from the near Trârza to the distant Adrar, they come on camels to submit their grievances or proclaim their vows to the great chief of St Louis, whom they all venerate for his uprightness and equity … The prestige of M. le Gouverneur Gaden over the Maures and Toucouleurs is considerable.

In what ways had Gaden come to know West Africa and its populations? In what ways had he engaged with those around him and with the cultures he encountered? A one-time racist colonial novice with an unshrinking severity and judgemental eye had undergone a remarkable personal transformation. It was, as it were, Andre Gide’s Amyntas in reverse – a transformation from distance and disdain to intimacy and engagement. The story of transformation in the life of an individual person is only one small part of a broader canvas of colonial endeavour and engagement with the other.7

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Empire of the Unknown Ignorance was an uneasy bedfellow of the colonial enterprise. The military and colonial mission was predicated on a claim to superior knowledge of various sorts: scientific rationalism, technological mastery of arms and machines, economic know-how about the exploitation of resources for industrial production, and so on. It was also fuelled by a sense of intellectual and moral progress, by developments in education and religious understanding, and by the civilizing mission of an enlightened European power. Yet lurking behind this pretence of mastery was a sense of ignorance, of not knowing. Ignorance was a function of ‘not knowing’ as well as ‘shutting one’s eyes to’ aspects of local culture that challenged preconceived ideas and deep-seated prejudices.8 These ways of notknowing related to specific and important domains. The first of these was the environment and landscape, the geography and topography of

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regions yet to be annexed. The second was the people who populated these landscapes; it included, too, the languages they spoke. The physical landscapes colonialists encountered were apprehended as imaginative spaces, into which at times figures and motifs from familiar European surroundings were used to make sense of an alien environment. These were landscapes of beauty and nostalgia. For example, Gaden writes to his father in November 1894:

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We left Kayes the day before yesterday. The train journey is certainly interesting. We travelled through superb places. The country is very mountainous, table-like mountains the sides of which are precipitous, resembling those of the valleys in Spain.

At other times, they were also inchoate landscapes of fear. Gaden writes in January 1895 of the Niger bend that this is a ‘country of incoherence’ where ‘the morrow is never certain’. These intimidating spaces were inscribed by lieux de mémoire, sites of memory evoking conflicts and armed engagements, disasters or triumphs over adversaries. These lieux de mémoire are constantly evoked in officers’ discourse. For instance, Gaden reports in December 1894 that: ‘We camped near to Dio, which pillaged Gallieni’s mission in 1881’. The landscape was thus an object of knowledge, around which the shadow of ignorance with all its ghastly and grizzly consequences hovered with menace. These landscapes were endowed with moral qualities, too, for the sites of memory were inscribed with characters that spoke of wrongs to be righted and hurt pride to be restored; they spoke as well of personal and collective emotional turmoil, of anger and resentment, and of the necessity of revenge for fallen comradesin-arms. In his letters home to his father, Gaden frequently complains about the lack of information available at colonial residences, forts and outposts. Colonial reports on neighbouring territories were not available, few maps were produced and even fewer were to hand. His father in Bordeaux, Gaden pointed out, would probably be more informed than he about the local situation in West Africa. When not engaged in military operations, Gaden was charged with a responsibility for ethnographical and geographical missions. His beautifully hand-drawn maps, the detailed itineraries, compass readings and spatial coordinates noted in his diaries, all attest to a dedication on Gaden’s part to the crucial task of plotting virgin territory. Devising supply routes and carving out lines of communication were indispensable aspects of colonial penetration. Mapping, surveying and the physical description of localities were the tools by which the military confronted ‘not knowing’ the geography of the region.

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The price of this sort of ignorance was high. It was a topic of conversation among officers, who counted the immediate costs of ignorance, saw at first-hand its consequences, and discussed the resulting loss of prestige in defeat for the French nation. Military patrols died in unmapped corners of territory, men got lost and were never seen again. For example, the shadow of the massacre of Captain Bonnier’s mission some years earlier was cast darkly across the landscape. Gaden refers to this incident in his letters home, saying that ‘vengeance for the affair has never been taken’, that ‘our [French] prestige suffers terribly because of it’. ‘Not-knowing’ the landscape could have disastrous consequences for the physical and mental well-being of French troops. To stray off the map was to enter tortuous territories where officers might lose their lives or go out of their minds.9 A notorious affair was etched deeply into the consciousness of colonial officers and administrators. Chaumette and Volet’s 1890s mission from the Soudan to meet up with two other exploratory French forces at Lake Chad had profoundly troubled all who came to know of it. These two officers, in command of a unit of Senegalese troops, became deranged en route through the Soudan. Suffering from delusions of grandeur, they had proclaimed themselves kings of the Soudan, committing atrocities against local populations in their march towards Lake Chad. They were cut short only once their Senegalese troops mutinied, leaving the two officers dead. This was too late, however, to stop them from killing Captain Klobb at the head of a small contingent of troops, sent to relieve them of their duties by the Governor General on hearing of the mission’s atrocities. The ethnographic project was equally crucial to the success of the colonial mission. Knowledge of local society was as significant as knowledge of the landscape. As General Gallieni had advised: ‘the realising of a good ethnographic map is at least half the work of pacification’. Gaden was charged with this role immediately on his arrival. Indeed, the mapping of the region’s peoples and the writing of ethnographic accounts eventually became his lifelong obsession once he had moved into civil administration and then retirement. Language, the command of vernacular tongues, was another problematic area of ignorance. Colonial officers were suspicious of an over-reliance on native interpreters and translators, for they were anxious to have an immediate ear on local discourse and exchange. The Ecole Coloniale in Paris only started teaching African languages some decades later in the early twentieth century. Officers such as Gaden, after a military training at Saint Cyr, had little or no language instruction in African tongues. The Bureau Arabe, established in Algeria for the training of officers and officials in Arabic and North

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African culture had an impact only later in the Soudan, to where its methods were imported many years after Gaden’s introduction to West Africa. Officers such as Gaden learnt in situ the languages necessary for colonial government and administration. Always keen to get hold of any published works on local vernaculars, Gaden nonetheless honed his own linguistic skills through local studies of language in Bandiagara, Zinder, Chad and St Louis. He emerged over the course of his life as an important linguist of Pulaar or Fulfulde, among other languages. The image that captures the experiential form of learning on the spot is the ‘broussard’, the practical man of action living in the bush. Until the next generation of college-educated men arrived in West Africa, the broussard was a kind of ideal type of colonial officer – he was an unencumbered bachelor willing to spend time alone in remote up-country stations; a person whose knowledge was acquired by means of immediate, sensory experiences. The broussard absorbed by a process of osmosis practical adaptations to the climate and territory, he picked up a savoir faire to deal with local conditions that could not be matched, it was argued, by other ways of learning. There was no explicit methodology taught to officers to explain how this process of osmosis was to occur in the bush, that is how officers were to absorb the lessons that their postings to remote locations might teach them.10 Someone like Gaden, however, developed his own idiosyncratic method by which the lessons of the bush could be integrated with his own carefully crafted methodical techniques for topographical and ethnographical mapping, linguistic research and so on. His intellectual curiosity, whetted by his early encounters with individuals and local groups, was in addition a continual spur to his endeavours. In parallel with the concept of the broussard was the ideological notion of the ‘mystique of action’, a romantic ideal developed by military men such General Lyautey, who proclaimed the glory, virtue and sense of self-fulfilment to be gained from active military service. Together these two ideas – the broussard and the mystique of action – were the wellsprings of Gaden’s motivation for his early West African encounters. The practical expression of these ideals, along with his own methods of putting them into practice, led to him gaining an immediate experiential, bodily and sensory knowledge of place and population. By the 1920s a new generation of trained, professional colonial administrators were graduating from the Ecole Coloniale. Graduates of the Paris-based Ecole were trained in African languages, ethnology and culture before being posted overseas (Cohen 1971). Gaden’s contempt for this new breed of official, expressed in his later years,

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is all too evident: they had no bush experience, no knowledge or understanding of local cultural complexities, no feel for the place or its people. Furthermore, these new recruits were reluctant, it was claimed, to take on long and arduous postings to distant stations. Many of them were now also accompanied by their French metropolitan wives on their tours of duty to West Africa. This concession was regarded in some quarters with ambivalence. The accusation was made that officers were unwilling to be parted from their families – who lived in the relatively cosseted surroundings of Senegal’s coastal towns – and serve the colony in the manner their elders expected. Their ignorance was apparent to Gaden and others like him. He complained specifically about the series of functionaries sent out to replace him after his retirement; and claimed that, for example, seditious Islamicist literature, circulating in Dakar in the 1920s, had to be sent to Paris for translation and interpretation. Such were the levels of ignorance and subsequent incompetence in Gaden’s view. These claims of ignorance by him must be set within a context of political, ethical and personal transformations, since they can be read, too, as strategic and individually motivated accusations that carry a moral burden.

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Changes in Colonial Context A different set of knowledge practices had been developed for this new generation of colonial administrators; by means of different ways of knowing, the new recruits threatened the older methods of experiential learning. Moreover, new knowledge practices were developed in relation to the problem of political control in Mauritania. Until the early 1920s, France had been anxious to secure a narrow belt in the southern part of Mauritania, in order to protect its economic and strategic interests in St Louis and the Senegal River basin. Towards the end of the decade, the new Governor General of Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) insisted on pacifying the rest of the territory in order to link up with French interests in Morocco, Algeria and the rest of the Maghreb. Lines of communication needed to be secured, and the pillaging and raiding by Moorish groups had to be stopped. The vision of uniting the French territories in West Africa and in the Maghreb generated all kinds of madcap schemes, such as the unsuccessful attempt to build a trans-Saharan railway – a project that was eventually buried in the shifting sands of the desert. This vision of unity was part of a colonial programme seeking mastery and control, not only over local populations but also over the natural elements of an extreme environment. Its practical advantages were defined in terms of uninhibited communication of man-power,

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goods and services between discontinuous spheres of influence, the pacification of pockets of local resistance to achieve stable colonial law and order – a practical consolidation and a symbolic manifestation of French imperial might. One of the new techniques of knowledge was to rely increasingly on surveys, listings and estimations of wealth in livestock and menat-arms of groups of Berbers and Moors who had not submitted themselves to French dominion. Knowledge thus became formalized and was represented on standardized forms to be filled in and lodged in individual files held in colonial offices. Individuals or collectivities of local populations were assigned to one of two conceptual categories of person, namely, those of ‘dissident’ and ‘notable’. ‘Notables’ were those willing to submit to French rule, and ‘dissidents’ were those who opposed it, for whatever reason. Under the new colonial regime, these categories became rigid, crystallized, and essentialized with respect to the individuals and groups they purported to describe. Gaden’s use of these categories in his reports differs significantly. In his hands, they appear to be much more fluid, relative and contingent classes, whose membership depends upon circumstance, not on something approaching innate and fixed human qualities attributed to enemies or friends. Gaden’s discursive, descriptive and ethnographic style of reporting political affairs is progressively replaced by the formulaic and ordered style of the new arrivals. To his superiors, Gaden was guilty of excessive tolerance and indulgence, verging on a derogation of duty of a high-placed colonial officer. He was eased into early retirement by the Governor General, but did not go quietly. His critical voice continued to be heard until his demise in 1939. Gaden’s policy of ‘domestication’ or ‘taming’ (apprivoisement) in Mauritania was discredited by the late 1920s, and the politics of the ‘sugar-loaf ’ that he espoused were abandoned.11 France succeeded in connecting its West African territories to those in the Maghreb. But at what cost? This was Gaden’s constant refrain. One major plank of Gaden’s construction of knowledge in this colonial setting was derived, it could be argued, from his bourgeois Bordelais upbringing. Gaden’s family roots lay in Bordeaux, in particular among immigrant German families who had established themselves as wine merchants in the late eighteenth century. By the mid nineteenth century, the Gadens, together with other German families, had founded important trading houses, whose members had become influential in the city’s commercial, political and cultural life (Espagne 1997). A recurring feature of his early letters to his father are Gaden’s observations on the West African environment as a treasure house of commercial possibility. He describes levels of commerce in specific

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towns, the types of commodities on offer, what agricultural produce was abundant in the areas he travelled through, and so forth. These details were to be passed to other members of his family who had mercantile interests in France and West Africa. Furthermore, the Gadens were linked through affinal ties to the Devès family, originally Bordeaux merchants, who had later set up business in St Louis dealing in gum Arabic. The St Louis Devèses had established a strong commercial base in the town and emerged over succeeding generations as an influential métis family in the local community. Gaden’s mercantile background was central in forming a strategy he pursued in his dealings with West Africans. What became known as the ‘politics of the sugar loaf ’ emerged from reciprocal exchange relations Gaden developed with key local informants and notables. For him, knowledge was akin to a commodity, an article of commercial traffic, to be exchanged with those he considered worthy: namely local scholars, Muslim clerics, oral historians, praise-singers and the like. That is, those who offered insights into the country, its history, its literature, languages and cultures. These commodities were exchanged to promote and cement relationships. They were articles of trade for this son of a Bordelais mercantile enterprise, but they were also tokens of an emerging set of personal and professional relations whose social and symbolic density increased over time. For example, he was drawn into an intimate relationship with Cheikh Siddiyya, known by some as the co-founder of modern Mauritania (Robinson 2000). In exchange for ethnographic data on religion and customary practice, or for information on kinship relations among specific clans, as well as for political intelligence, Gaden arranged for books in Arabic – religious texts, dictionaries etc. – to be imported from Paris or the Lebanon. These books, together with other gifts, were presented to the Cheikh as part of a system of personal reciprocal exchange. In other cases, Gaden organized the official papers and permissions for, as well as helped finance the expenses of, the pilgrimages of local Muslim leaders to Mecca. Reciprocity formed a central plank of Gaden’s policy of domestication in Mauritania; a policy driven by an intellectual and personal engagement with the Other that was predicated on the idea of mutual benefit and advantage. Domestication was, moreover, a specific strategy within a much broader framing of French colonial policy at the end of the nineteenth century. This involved a shift from an earlier phase of assimilation to one of association, which resembled something akin to the British policy of indirect rule (Conklin 1997). This policy was championed with much enthusiasm by Gaden, among others.

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Political changes in France after the First World War, together with the appointment of a new Governor General to the AOF, led to the abandoning of the experiment with the policy of association and to a reassertion of a militaristic strategy in Mauritania. Gaden’s politics of the sugar loaf was attacked by the new administration. Furthermore, his kinship ties to the Devès family became a liability, for specific family members took a prominent stance against French colonial policy in St Louis. The final straw for Gaden’s career was the accusation that French weapons, whose serial numbers could be traced to St Louis, were found in the hands of dissident groups of Moors. The suspicion was that Gaden was implicated in the affair in some way, perhaps through some of the Devèses who were known to be trading with these groups. The nadir of French prestige and confidence in relation to its Mauritanian policy came with the Reine and Serre episode in 1927. These were two French aviators whose plane, plying the route between St Louis and Casablanca, came down in the Spanish-controlled West African territory of Rio de Oro. The protracted negotiations for the release of the two men from groups of dissident Moors, and the humbling realization that a ransom would have to be paid for them, was the final nail in the coffin of the pacific and mediated policy of domestication. The powerlessness of the French position in this affair was seen by the Governor General as a direct consequence of the overtolerant and indulgent attitude Gaden had adopted during the seven years of his Governorship of Mauritania.

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Reflections This is a brief and truncated version of a period of about fifty years of French colonial history in West Africa. This chapter attempts to capture, too, one man’s experience during that period: the transformations he underwent as a military officer, colonial administrator and ethnographer, and as a human being entangled in intimate personal relations with a variety of local characters. A number of conclusions can be drawn from this. First and most generally, attributions of ignorance by French colonialists towards local practice and custom were often condemnatory and brutal; they were frequently cast in racist and evolutionary terms. In addition, attributions of ignorance by local interpreters towards French policy and conduct are also apparent in correspondence and official documents. This is hardly surprising. The situation calls to mind Hobart’s observation that attributions of ignorance entail moral judgements – in this case, judgements issued

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by both parties to the encounter. Moreover, claims to ignorance are to be seen as being as much confrontational as they are dialectical. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the major military campaigns in the Soudan were over, and the last significant figures of colonial resistance were either captured or dead. The subsequent development of a broad, functional system of administration shifted attention away from military conquest and towards a civil structure whose aim was to achieve order through other means. Strategies of arms were no longer the primary recourse for colonial intervention, for now greater emphasis was placed on ethnographic documentation, linguistic research and an engagement with the practitioners of ‘local knowledge’. The first and most urgent knowledge practices of colonialists during the military phase had been intimately related to the necessities of gaining the upper hand over local adversaries. They comprised mapping and topography, establishing lines of communication to outposts of French annexation, basic information on local populations, their resources and military capabilities. Colonial concerns about ignorance lay squarely in the domain of securing domination through might: a military might founded upon a limited scope of knowledge governed by the dictates of an expansionist colonial enterprise.12 The establishment of a civil colonial administration that lay beyond the control of purely military men became the priority in the early decades of the twentieth century. Henri Gaden fitted neatly with the new requirements of civilian government: he had military credentials but was sensitive to and well versed in the complexities of local social organization. His ways of knowing had been formed by numerous means: disciplined by the formal techniques of military necessity, moulded by the practical experience of living in the bush, informed by his initial ethnographic and linguistic enquiries, and motivated by personal and family imperatives. Gaden’s Governorship of Mauritania from 1920 coincided with a shift in colonial policy from assimilation to association, specifically in relation to the territories north of the Senegal River. This allowed him to develop as part of his official strategy a range of knowledge practices aimed towards a new set of objects of enquiry: local understandings of social and cultural relationships; the connection between modes of livelihood on the margins of the desert and in the Sahara proper, on the one hand, and local ecological constraints and practical adaptations to the environment, on the other. Moreover, the social relations he created with religious and political leaders, with local intellectuals and cultural interpreters, expanded the compass of colonial networks in ways not imagined a generation earlier. A shift had occurred, too, in the burden of ‘interpretative labour’, in Graeber’s terms (2006), from the subordinate local to the

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dominant colonialist, whose aim was now to administer through a more informed sense of what indigenous custom and practice was all about. The structures of inequality shifted from a military to an administrative mode, and with it the ‘lop-sided structures of the imagination’ balanced themselves more evenly. Gaden’s burden of interpretative labour was made possible by his intimate engagement with local knowledge practices. This moment of mutual engagement was not to last long, however. Both confrontation and dialectic are apparent, therefore, in this examination over time of shifting colonial knowledge practices. Each claim to knowledge cast a shadow of ignorance not only over the lands of West Africa, but also across the tiled floors of the Governance itself. Different ways of knowing engendered different modes of ignorance, and these were set in opposition one with another once colonial policy was put into practice. The extent to which at specific moments colonial policy was informed by an understanding of local knowledge and its practitioners is another dimension in the dialectic of the colonial encounter. The colonial project was not a monolithic exercise of power and knowledge, but was a highly nuanced affair in which attributions of ignorance, claims to knowledge and the pursuit of power were ever-present.

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Notes 1. My thanks go to Mark Harris for alerting me to the work of J.F. Ferrier. 2. See J.H. Haldane’s ‘Introduction’ (2001). I much appreciate John Haldane’s advice on references to work on and by Ferrier. 3. By confrontation and dialectic, I refer to two different but related processes. Under the term ‘confrontation’, I wish to include the way in which bodies of knowledge (as they may be emically conceived) can be placed in opposition one with another by their respective adherents. This encounter may lead to mutual accusations of ignorance by either party, and to pejorative moral evaluations of opposing possessors of knowledge, as suggested above by Hobart. By ‘dialectic’ I refer to a ‘conversation’ or ‘debate’ between a number of different agents, each of whom approaches an issue from a different intellectual position. One consequence of such a conversation is the production of new or hybrid forms of knowledge, as may be seen below in the case of Gaden’s encounter with his West African interlocutors. On a more general point, Hegel’s conception of dialectic – the overcoming of the contradiction between thesis and antithesis by means of a new synthesis – suggests an insight into the relationship between knowledge and ignorance (see Boyer, this volume). That is, the synthesis that emerges in turn becomes contradicted (and eventually overturned) by a new antithesis, and so on as the process repeats itself until final perfection is reached, for Hegel. In other words, each step in the Hegelian dialectic involves a recognition of a type of ignorance of previous stages of knowledge.

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4. Henri Gaden wrote extensively about his early encounters with West Africa in a series of letters to his father, a body of correspondence that starts in 1894 and continues for the next fifteen or so years. These letters are held at Centre d’Archives Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, in ‘carton 15 APC 2’. His letters home in September 1898 describe in detail how a company of colonial troops, of which Gaden was a part, tracked Samory’s forces through the bush, eventually capturing the resistance leader in a surprise raid on his camp. Popular illustrated news publications of the colonial period carried first-hand accounts by officers engaged in the operation. See Gaden (1899) for his account of the much-lauded defeat of Samory; Gaden was also the first to take photographs of him immediately after his capture in the bush camp. These were widely used in later colonial publications. 5. The following quotations are taken from letters written by Henri Gaden to his father, and all the translations from French are mine. 6. Madamba, a Wolof, was a retired employee of the Post and Telegraph service, to whom Archinard had given a small state, populated by captives taken from Ahmadou Tal of Nioro. 7. Whether this change in Gaden’s outlook came by way of a moment of epiphany or was the result of a more gradual and incremental process is the subject of further research. The kinds of factor that may have brought about this transformation include: his ‘country marriage’ to a local woman, the birth of his children by this woman, his increasing engagement with local intellectuals, and the developing strains with his colonial peers and contemporaries. 8. Conrad described how the ideological distinction between civilized European society and the ‘heart of darkness’ became meaningless once men were confronted by unknown territories that threatened and overpowered their sense of self and disoriented their moral compass. As Said (2001) has noted: ‘the heights of European civilisation could instantaneously fall into the most barbarian practices’. The extension of empire into previously uncharted regions of West Africa brought French colonialists and military officers to confront the extent of their own ignorance, the limits of knowledge, and the make-up of their own moral universes. They had to confront, too, the potential of their own power that could be unleashed in remote regions beyond the ken of the imperial centre; they had to grapple with motivations and urges normally submerged by the weight of civilized pretence. The dialectic between ignorance and knowledge does not register, therefore, on one dimension alone: an encounter with the unknown stirs human passions and desires, whose consequences reach beyond the intellectual search for knowledge or the imposition of political order. 9. See Fabian (2000) for a study of the effects of the European experience of the encounter of Central Africa on the mental equilibrium of explorers and travellers. 10. Dr Barot’s Guide pratique (1902) was perhaps the nearest Gaden’s generation of officers would have come to receiving an explicit set of practical tips and advice on conduct in the colonies, but this publication appeared a little late for them and some years after their introduction to West Africa. It contains, for example, guidance for officers and others on which kinds of women (by ethnicity, race, etc.) should be chosen to ensure loyal companions and faithful concubines in the bush. 11. The politics of the ‘sugar loaf ’ involved the provisioning of local leaders and groups to keep them sweet and loyal to the French cause. 12. Graeber in his 2006 Malinowski Lecture sets questions of knowledge and ignorance in the context of power relations and structural inequalities, and argues for a consideration of the role of might in relation to the redundancy of cultural understanding in situations of dominance. In the present case, one could note that the burden of ‘interpretative labour’ was laid upon the shoulders of local people

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Roy Dilley during the military phase of colonial expansion, for they found themselves in a subordinate position in the face of increasing military domination. The ‘structural inequalities’ of the colonial order created ‘lop-sided structures of the imagination’ (Graeber 2006), by means of which claims of ignorance and moral discourses of outrage were constructed by those subject to French rule. This was to change in the period that followed.

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References Barot, Dr. 1902. Guide pratique de l’Européen dans l’Afrique Occidentale à l’usage des militaires, fonctionnaires, commerçants, colons et toursites. Paris: Flammarion. Cohen, W. 1971. Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Conklin, A.L. 1997. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Europe in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Dilley, R.M. 1989. ‘Secrets and Skills: Apprenticeship among Tukolor Weavers’, in M.W. Coy (ed.), Apprenticeship: From Theory to Method. New York: State University of NewYork Press, pp. 181–98. ———. 1999. ‘Ways of Knowing, Forms of Power: Aspects of Apprenticeship among Tukulor Mabube Weavers’, Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 11 (1): 33–55. ———. 2004. Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices among Haalpulaaren, Senegal: Between Mosque and Termite Mound. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (for the International African Institute). Espagne, M. 1997. ‘Les Allemands de Bordeaux au début du XIXe siècle: l’exemple des familles Gaden, Meyer, Klipsch’, in G. Merlio and N. Pelletier (eds), Bordeaux au temps de Hölderlin. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 53–77. Fabian, J. 2000. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Fardon, R. 1990. Between God, the Dead and the Wild: Chamba Interpretations of Ritual and Religion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (for the International African Institute). Ferrier, J.F. 1854. Institutes of Metaphysic: The Theory of Knowing and Being. Edinburgh: Blackwell. Gaden, N.J.H. Letters to his Father, carton 15 APC 2, Centre d’Archives Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence. ———. 1899. ‘Le capture de Samory’, A Travers le Monde 8(25): 57–60. Gide, A. 1988 [1906]. Amyntas. New York: Ecco Press. Graeber, D. 2006. ‘Beyond Power/Knowledge: An Exploration of the Relation of Power, Ignorance and Stupidity’, The Malinowski Lecture, 25 May 2006, London School of Economics. Website: www.lse.ac.uk/collections/ LSEPublicLecturesAnd Events/pdf/20060525–Graeber.pdf.

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Haldane, J.L. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in Philosophical Works of James Frederick Ferrier, edited by A. Grant and E.L. Lushington. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. pp. v–xxi. Hobart, M. 1993. ‘Introduction: The Growth of Ignorance?’, in M. Hobart (ed.), An Anthropological Critique of Development. London: Routledge. Robinson, D. 2000. Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920. Oxford: James Currey. Said, E. 2001. ‘The Clash of Ignorance’, The Nation, 22 October 2001. ‘Silhouettes coloniales’, in Le Midi Colonial et Maritime, 16 December 1926.

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Chapter 7

EMBODYING KNOWLEDGE: FINDING A PATH IN THE VILLAGE OF THE SICK

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Paul Stoller

In many societies specialists acquire knowledge through embodied ordeals. These may include the ingestion of hallucinogenic substances, ritualized beatings and scarifications, and incidences of spirit possession, all of which come to pass through structured apprenticeships. Among the sorcerers of the Songhay people of Niger and Mali in West Africa, illness is the embodied mode through which specialized knowledge is acquired. Songhay sorcerers consider illness not only as a test of one’s physical and psychological resilience, but also an opportunity for the development of one’s sorcerous capacities and awareness. Put another way, it is through the portal of illness that apprentice sorcerers increase their knowledge and power. Although Songhay sorcerers attempted to explain this epistemology to me in great detail, I failed to comprehend it completely until my own serious illness, Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, compelled me to revisit the Songhay world of sorcery. In this essay, I describe how I used West African rituals to confront the existential and physical difficulties of cancer treatment in what I call the village of the sick, a space where millions of people with incurable diseases – illnesses in remission – reside.1 In the village of the sick, as I suggest, illness is no longer a nuisance that is brought to a quick end through pharmacological or medical intervention. Illness, rather, consumes one’s physical and emotional life with pain, uncertainty and chaos.

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Learning that I had an incurable disease came both as a surprise and a shock. How could I have cancer? How much would I have to suffer? How long would I live? These questions sank me into despondency. The menacing presence of malignant cells in my body ignited fires of fear. In a flash, cancer had abruptly taken control of my life and forced me onto a dreadful new path that promised unspeakable pain and endless suffering. The terrifying prospect of a slow and unbearable death made me tremble. These frightening thoughts quickly transformed me into a powerless person. I wanted my old life back, but in my dazed and confused state, I felt incapable of recapturing it. Life-threatening circumstances, however, can sometimes steer your life in unanticipated directions. In my case, confronting cancer unexpectedly transported me back in time to the compound of Adamu Jenitongo, a West African sorcerer to whom I had apprenticed myself as a young anthropologist. Lessons that I had learned twenty-five years earlier among the Songhay people of the Republic of Niger now took on startling new meaning. Somehow, cancer enhanced my perception and deepened my sensibilities. This disruptive new presence in my life made it possible for me to understand more fully that sorcery is first and foremost a set of prescriptions about how to cope with the vicissitudes of life. I gradually realized that this knowledge, which years ago had drifted into the background of my awareness, could make me strong. It could help me to confront the physical burdens of chemotherapy treatments and the emotional quandaries of remission with respectful humility and steadfast dignity. As odd as it may seem, the unanticipated and devastating presence of cancer in my body opened a new pathway to personal growth and development. It deepened my spiritual beliefs, refocused my professional vision, and forced me to understand more realistically the symbiotic relationship between illness and health. In time, my experience of cancer toughened my body and strengthened my resolve; it also deepened my appreciation of the power and efficacy of ritual, broadened my conception of sorcery, and reoriented my sense of how we come to know the world.

Harmonizing the Bush at The Cancer Center When I learned definitively that I had cancer, Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, nothing could keep me from thinking about what was happening to me. I worried constantly about my future. I spent hours reading about the side effects of chemotherapy, information that filled me with fear and anxiety. I geared myself for body-wrenching nausea, bone-weary fatigue, and hair loss. I bought an electric razor to avoid excessive

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bleeding – chemotherapy can reduce blood-clotting platelet levels – from a shaving cut and a soft toothbrush to guard against painful mouth sores. I also read the literature about Rituxan, an antibody, cloned from mice, which could be dripped into my bloodstream to kill lymphoma cells. Although this drug had fewer side effects than the chemotherapy medicines, it, too, could cause serious problems – fever, chills and heart irregularities – especially the first time it was administered. I also didn’t know if my medical insurance would cover its cost – more than $5,000 per dose. I had suffered through hardships in the past. Professional struggles, family concerns, but most of all the ordeals I had faced as a young apprentice sorcerer had toughened me. But I wondered if I was tough enough for cancer. As much as possible, I made practical as well as emotional preparations for chemotherapy. But was I ready to face this physical and emotional trauma? The atmosphere at any cancer treatment centre is difficult to bear. No degree of architectural planning or interior decoration can alter the heavy reality of a room filled with cancer patients. On the day of my first treatment, conversation was muted in the waiting room. There was no laughter. A mother and her teenaged daughter, the colour drained from their expressionless faces, sat stiffly and silently in their seats. A skeletal man, sporting perhaps a three-day growth of beard stubble, fidgeted in his chair. Parked next to him was a portable oxygen-machine, marking him a lung-cancer patient. A slender woman wearing a headscarf stared at the ceiling. One of her arms had swollen to the size one would expect in a woman three times her weight. Removal of her lymph nodes had caused the backup of lymph fluid that made her arm swell to elephantine proportions. As a veteran of many diagnostic trials as well as a previous visit to The Cancer Center, I felt some distant kinship with these people. I still had my hair and felt myself to be physically fit, and yet, we all shared the burden of cancer. Cancer always makes you confront death. This unwelcome and unexpected confrontation quickly erodes the gender, ethnic and class differences that divide American society. At The Cancer Center social differences among university professors, construction workers and secretaries quickly fade away. Cancer makes us involuntary kin in the village of the sick. This realization sank me further into silence. Shortly thereafter in a sterile examination room, I sat down and shivered. Attempting to add a touch of ‘warmth’ to the setting, someone had hung a painting – a house at the beach backgrounded by blue sky, puffy cumulus clouds, and soft surf. Soon thereafter, Joel Rubin, my oncologist, walked into this surreal setting. ‘Hello,’ he said brightly.

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Joel, who preferred first-name exchanges, sat down on the swivel stool and looked at my chart and swivelled towards me. ‘Your blood work is perfect,’ he said, looking at the numbers. ‘I’ll monitor your weight and pressure over the course of the treatments.’ I sat silently in my chair. ‘How long will the treatments last?’ Joel shrugged. ‘That depends on how you respond. It could be as short as six months or as long as one year.’ He rolled the swivel chair closer to me and cleared his throat. ‘Have you thought about treatment options?’ he asked. On the previous visit to The Cancer Center, Joel had suggested three possible treatment alternatives for my NHL. The first was watch and wait. NHL is a disease that can develop slowly. One may have lymphoma cells swelling lymph nodes or building bulky tumours, but not present any symptoms – weight loss, low-grade fevers and night sweats. One treatment alternative, as Joel explained, was to delay treatment until the onset of symptoms. Standard chemotherapy would be the second treatment alternative. I would receive three drugs, Cytoxan, Vincristine and Prednisone. Nurses would administer the Cytoxan and Vincristine through an intravenous drip. I would take 180 milligrammes of Prednisone a day, a massive amount, for seven days. At the end of three weeks, I’d come back for another treatment, and so on. Joel had said that this treatment was usually effective for NHL patients like me. The third treatment alternative would combine chemotherapy with Rituxan, the immunological medicine that contains antibodies that attach to specific antigens, molecules found on most lymphoma cells. The intercourse of antibody to antigen brings on the death of the malignant cell, presumably without killing healthy cells – an advance over standard chemotherapy agents that destroy healthy as well as cancerous cells. Although it had been approved by the U.S. Drug Administration for several years, Rituxan had been used only to treat lymphoma patients for whom chemotherapy had not worked or for previously treated patients whose cancer had returned. Very few people had received Rituxan as initial therapy. Fewer still had received it in tandem with chemotherapy. ‘I’ve read the clinical studies,’ I began, struggling to sound professional, ‘and I’m impressed with Rituxan. The side effects are few and seem limited to the first infusion. It also seems very effective against the kind of NHL that I have.’ I paused. ‘What kind of impact do you think Rituxan will have on patients like me?’ I asked Joel. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. There are a few clinical trials that suggest that Rituxan make chemotherapy drugs more effective. But we really don’t know.’ Another of those troubling answers that quickly increased my anxiety – a typical response to many of the treatment options offered to cancer

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patients. There have been so many new clinical developments – with only preliminary clinical results – in the treatment of lymphoma that physicians like Joel Rubin simply don’t know the medical repercussions of every new therapy. In clinical trials, researchers use cancer patients – as volunteers – to test the effectiveness of new cancer drugs, but it takes years for specialists to obtain conclusive results. Despite the inconclusiveness of Joel’s response, I appreciated his expression of uncertainty. ‘I’m also concerned about the cost.’ I added. ‘It’s very expensive,’ he said. ‘I’ve got several patients like you and their insurance has covered it. If yours doesn’t, I can offer it to you at cost.’ ‘I’d like to try Rituxan.’ ‘If one of my family members had NHL,’ Joel added, ‘I’d recommend this combination therapy.’ He wrote down some notations on his chart and stood up. ‘Excuse me a moment, I need to do some calculations.’ He left. Faced with an incurable disease, I decided I’d take risks that I might otherwise forego. But I was still uncertain about my decision. A few moments later Joel came back. ‘We are just about ready. This is how your treatment will work. First, you’ll get some steroids to prevent nausea. Then you’ll get a small dose of Vincristine followed by Cytoxan. That will take about ninety minutes. We’ll follow the Cytoxan with some Benadryl and Tagament, which prepares you for Rituxan, which has to be given very slowly. The whole treatment process will take about five hours.’ At that moment the disruptive seriousness of my state hit me like a Nigerien dust storm. Even if the chemotherapy treatments were successful, they would still change my life dramatically. Faced with these overwhelming circumstances, I struggled for strength. Slowly, I sensed a familiar tingling in my stomach – a sorcerous tingling. Blood surged through my veins. My senses finally began to wake up to the world in which I now found myself. I heard the soft voice of Adamu Jenitongo, my teacher and mentor: ‘You’ve found your way back to the path,’ he said. ‘Step on to it and walk forward.’ Adamu Jenitongo had helped me once again. Because this moment was a crucial one in my life I now knew what to do – reconnect with what had given me strength in the past. I turned to Joel Rubin. ‘Could I hold your hand?’ He looked at me with some skepticism. ‘There are different paths to well-being,’ I said softly to Joel. ‘You have your way of treating illness. I learned another perspective from my African teacher. I would like to rely on both now.’ I paused. ‘This treatment will bring physical and emotional disorder, pain and suffering to my life. Disorder deepens illness. If I am going to get well I also need to follow the old ways of the sorcerers. I will try to harmonize the world in the way my teacher taught me. This will help me cope.’

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I held his hand. He patiently looked at me as I began to recite an old incantation I had learnt many years before.

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In the name of the High God. In the name of the High God. I speak to east. I speak to the west. I speak to the north. I speak to the south. I speak to the seven heavens. I speak to the seven hells. I am speaking to N’debbi and my words must travel until, until, until they are known …

I finally loosened my grip and released his hand. Falling back in my chair, I took a deep breath. The words had comforted me. They made me feel more able to face what was ahead. ‘What was that?’ Joel asked. ‘That is the genji how. It’s an incantation that harmonizes the forces of the bush. The bush, here,’ I added, ‘is disharmonious. The words are in Songhay,’ I said. ‘It’s the language of three million people in West Africa. I learned it when I lived there as a young man.’ Joel had known that I was an anthropologist. ‘I studied with a sorcerer for seventeen years. Like you,’ I told him, ‘I learned to be a healer – a different kind of healer. My teacher always said that there are many paths to wellbeing. I now understand more fully what he meant.’ ‘I’d like to learn more about this,’ Joel stated. I wondered what he thought about what had just happened. I truly appreciated his willingness to participate in a healing ritual that was so alien to his own training and background. Shifting from the spiritual back to the practical, Joel stood up and gave me my file. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Follow me.’ We came to the end of the corridor and walked toward the front of the building to a nurse’s station set off from the ‘infusion room’ by a wood counter. Joel approached one the oncology nurses, a tall and very attractive blond woman named Jennifer. If anyone were to drip poison into my body, I thought, let it be Jennifer. Joel introduced us and handed Jennifer my file. ‘It’s good to meet you, Paul,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’ll take very good care of you.’ The genji how, I thought, must have already begun to work its magic! She took me to the ‘infusion room’, a square space separated into four alcoves by dividers. Each treatment alcove held several E-Z chairs, flanked by upholstered chairs and swivel stools. Gold-plated Art Deco light fixtures attached to the cream-coloured walls softened the effects of the fluorescent lighting. The linoleum tile looked cold and uninviting. ‘Find yourself a seat,’ Jennifer said. ‘I’ll go and mix your medicines.’

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She disappeared behind the nurse’s station. I picked a chair closest to the nurses and the bathroom. Several patients, surrounded by family members or friends, were undergoing treatment. As chemotherapy medicines slowly dripped through plastic tubes and entered their bloodstream, they slept, talked quietly, read, or, simply stared at the ceiling. My anxiety returned. I felt butterflies in my stomach. Perhaps I had been too quick to acknowledge the power of the genji how. Confronted by sobering circumstance, I again whispered the genji how, and followed that with an incantation for protection, which, like the genji how, I had learnt many years before. The incantation is recited to Harakoy Dikko, goddess of the Niger River and mother-protector of human beings. She gave birth to Suntunga. She gave birth to Muntanga. The Sah Tree. The Dugu Tree. The Wali Belingnan Tree. The Kasa Tobe Tree [sacred trees of Harakoy Dikko’s domain under the Niger River]. The master of the small festival, Dikko; the master of the big festival, Dikko …

The words again brought me a degree of comfort. To complete the ritual, I spat very slightly on the linoleum floor. I hoped no one had noticed. Songhay sorcerers spit after reciting an incantation so that their words carry to the east, the west, the north and the south. Several minutes later, Jennifer returned. I had had my first real exposure to living ritual, my first real lesson in embodying knowledge

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Embodying Knowledge Even though I had been a student of sorcery for many years, it was not until I became a cancer patient that the rituals of Songhay sorcery took on deeper meanings. As a young apprentice sorcerer I had considered these rituals a weapon in my sorcerous arsenal.2 I believed then that sorcery was much like gunfighting in Hollywood Westerns. Gunfighters practiced and duelled to become ‘the fastest gun in the West’, which meant that their very presence injected fear – and respect – into any atmosphere. Gunfighters, like sorcerers, felt no sense of morality. They felt little or no remorse about the people they wounded or killed on their way to the top. Being top gun, though, seemed a mixed blessing. Out of fear, people paid them considerable deference. By the same token a skillful challenger could at any moment propose a gunfight, which could result in the top gun’s death. In worlds of sorcery, there are ‘top guns’ who are being continuously challenged – often with mortal consequences. Despite the power of my weapons (potions, power objects and the genji how), I didn’t possess the proper

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belief and stamina to pursue sorcerous power. For me, the genji how was a sequence of poetic words. And yet, when I sat in Joel Rubin’s examination room the words of the genji how surged like a current into my consciousness. They had become central weapons in my ‘fight’ against lymphoma. I finally realized that I had misunderstood the deep meaning of the incantation. It was a sorcerous weapon that could divert death. It was a sequence of words that could re-establish harmony in chaotic circumstances. What I hadn’t realized was that the power of the incantation comes from the combination of two components: disharmony and peace. By creating harmonious peace in the ‘infusion room’, the genji how primed me to confront the devastation of cancer.

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* Twenty-five years after Adamu Jenitongo first introduced me to the world of sorcery, I revisited that strange universe. My knowledge of sorcery provided me with comfort. My own religious background, Judaism, gave me a set of abstract principles about the world in which I lived, but provided no concrete formulas for dealing with an unexpected and incurable disease. From my new vantage as a person living in the village of the sick, sorcery, by contrast, provided a reassuring set of principles about how to live in the world. And yet, how many cancer patients, as one of my friends put it, have ‘sorcery in their pocket?’ Before I became a cancer patient, I would have said that very few people have ‘sorcery in their pocket’. I would have also said that to have ‘sorcery in your pocket’ is a mixed blessing. Although it can make you strong, it also makes you vulnerable. Time and experience have taught me that everyone, especially cancer patients, can have ‘sorcery in their pocket’. As I now understand it, sorcery is a set of embodied principles. It is more than a set of esoteric practices; it is a way of carrying yourself in the world. The genji how, for example, is an intrinsic part of sorcerous ritual. Its powerful words prepare a setting for sorcerous actions. Sorcerers, as already mentioned, always begin their work with ritual texts like the genji how. Sometimes, they use it to divert death or sickness. Above and beyond its specific uses, the genji how is a ritual incantation, something that is said the same way and in the same context day in and day out, year in and year out. Through the recitation of the genji how the sorcerer attempts to maintain a semblance of order in the world. Like the genji how, rituals set the world straight. Anthropologists usually associate rituals with religious life and suggest that they constitute that which is considered sacred. Religious services, for example, are a collection of ritual incantations (prayers, hymns and

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invocations) that bring to worshippers a sense of calm and peace. In search of calm and peace, people seek solace in churches, synagogues and mosques – especially when they must confront trying personal experiences or troubling public events. Rituals, however, also work their magic in the routine world of everyday life. Each of us has her or his personal rituals. Doing certain things when we wake up or go to sleep may help to ‘set the world straight’ and bring us a sense of calm. Some people may run or stretch every morning before going to work; other people may take a soothing bath at night before going to bed. I like to wake early, brew coffee and write. When we are able to perform these personal rituals, they give us a good feeling. They make us feel, if only for a little while, that we can generate and maintain a measure of control over our lives. When you learn that you have cancer, the world spins out of control. You are thrown into a world of medical procedures and inconclusive diagnoses. What’s more, you have to interact with technicians and medical professionals, many of whom can be insensitive. What’s more, the texture of your social relationships shifts. Your friends and family may shower you with too much attention and concern; they may talk too much about your disease. Some of your friends and family may seek comfort in denial; they avoid the subjects of illness and death. Meanwhile, you find yourself in the vortex of a whirlwind. No matter what kind of support you have from friends, family and professionals – and the importance of this support cannot be overestimated – the cancer cells have appeared in your body, which means that ultimately you, like the African sorcerer, must face your fate alone. Confronting cancer is a frighteningly lonely proposition. How do you confront your isolation? How do you face your fate? Songhay sorcerers have one suggestion: they say that you should diligently perform personal rituals. Throughout my treatments for lymphoma, I tried to follow this principle. Seated in the E-Z chair in the ‘infusion room’ of The Cancer Center, I’d recite the genji how and follow it with an incantation for protection. Once I had spat lightly into the air so that my words would infuse the ‘infusion room’ with old and powerful sounds, I’d spread a piece of Malian bokolanfani fabric – black geometric patterns on brown homespun cloth – over the drab brown table next to my chair. I would take my jazz tapes – Coltrane, Gillespie, Mingus and Hamilton and put them on the cloth next to my Walkman and several Ironman Energy Bars. When my oncology nurse came in to connect me to the intravenous line, I would put on my earphones and fly away to some distant spot in John Coltrane’s musical universe. Throughout my treatments, I never varied my ritualistic routine: genji how, incantation for protection, cloth, jazz and Ironman energy bars. The routine helped me to endure five- to six-hour treatment sessions.

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In my social and physical isolation, they helped me to confront the physical and emotional pain that I was experiencing. They gave me a degree of control over an uncontrollable situation. I am also convinced that they primed the immune system to purge my body of lymphoma cells. After three treatments, the combination of chemotherapy and Rituxan had shrunk my abdominal tumor by 50 per cent. What’s more, I hadn’t lost my hair, and had retained enough energy to teach, write, and even travel a bit. Engaging in personal rituals, of course, cannot guarantee a successful course of chemotherapy, but it can assure, I think, a certain sense of personal control, which goes a long way toward maintaining the quality of life. Any cancer patient can engage in this kind of ritual. Before treatment, you might recite a certain prayer or poem, like the genji how, that gives you comfort. You might wear clothing that makes you feel confident. You might bring food that fuels your energy. You might bring music that sends you on a soothing dreamlike journey. These personal rituals transform a clinical encounter into a meaningful personal odyssey. They bring you peace, following the wisdom of the genji how, so that you can be ready for what life has presented on your path.

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* When I lived in Niger I learned that rituals can also prepare a person to see things more clearly – an important lesson for the apprentice sorcerer or a person who has to confront a serious illness like cancer. Early on in my apprenticeship Djibo Mounmouni, my first teacher, asked me to assist him in a sorcerous rite. We went to the compound of a merchant was very sick. After we recited the proper incantations and washed the patient with a fragrant ablution, we left the compound. I asked Djibo if we were, indeed, finished and if the man was cured. Djibo laughed. ‘Of course not. A witch has stolen the man’s soul. We have to find it and free it. Then the strong fragrance of the ablution will attract the man’s soul back to his body and he will be healed.’ I remained sceptical, wondering how a witch could eat a soul. Djibo harbored no such doubts. ‘Follow me,’ he ordered. ‘We’re going to find the shopkeeper’s soul.’ We trudged up the sandy road until we reached the outskirts of town. The mudbrick compounds of long-term residents gradually gave way to the grass huts and milletstalk fences of new arrivals. Beyond the newest neighbourhoods we noticed several piles of millet husks that formed mounds on the sand. Saying nothing, Djibo walked towards the mounds and got down on his hands and knees. He sifted through the husks. ‘Praise be to God,’ he proclaimed. ‘Praise be to God.’

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I watched him as he worked. Djibo finally stood up and shook his head. ‘I liberated the soul of the shopkeeper.’ Noticing the puzzled expression on my face, he pointed his finger at me. ‘You look, but you don’t see. You listen, but you don’t hear. You touch, but you don’t feel.’ He shook his head. ‘You have much to learn.’ He paused a moment. ‘It will take years for you to “see”, “hear” and “feel” the world.’

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Living in the World Djibo’s comments bothered me. He had talked about images, sounds and textures that did not exist in the ‘real’ world – at least the world as I knew it. How could I see something that was invisible? How could I hear something that made no sound? How could I feel something that had no tangible surface? It did indeed take me many years to understand that Djibo’s comments encapsulated the central tenants of Songhay sorcery. It takes a lifetime to learn how to ‘see’, ‘hear’ and ‘feel’ the world. Among the first steps of my education in sorcery was learning how to ‘see.’ For sorcerers, to ‘see’ is to look deeply into the past, present and future – the art of divination. Songhay sorcerers use one of two methods to ‘see’ – geomancy and divining shells. The geomancer traces lines in the sand and uses a complex numerology to read the past, present and future. Although this technique is rarely used in Niger, variations of the practice are widely employed throughout West and Central Africa. Divining shells are more commonly used in Niger. Before Adamu Jenitongo taught me how to ‘see’, I observed scores of divining sessions. The sorcerer typically throws small white shells – the cowry shells that had once been used as currency in pre-colonial Niger – to assess a person’s situation or to discover the source of his or her misfortune or illness. After the sorcerer has read the shell configurations, he or she prescribes a course of action – a series of animal sacrifices, an offering to the blind, or a course of herbal medicines. Anthropologists have written extensively about divination. For the most part they see it as a complex mathematical system that uses sophisticated scales of probability to deliver results.3 I relied on this anthropological literature to try to make sense of the divination sessions I had witnessed. Despite the insights that this anthropological knowledge provided, I still failed to grasp the relationship between the shell patterns and the sorcerer’s observations. I did learn that if the small opening of the shell faces up, it is ‘female’. Conversely, if the large opening faces up, the shell is ‘male’. Beyond this primary

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distinction, I made little sense of how the infinite combinations of ‘male’ and ‘female’ indicated betrayal, jealousy, illness or death. After a session with Adamu Jenitongo, I asked my mentor about how he read shells. ‘That,’ he said, ‘I cannot tell you. You must learn for yourself. You must receive “sight” from Wambata.’ Wambata was the headstrong Songhay spirit that lived near cemeteries. ‘What does Wambata have do with “seeing”?’ I asked. ‘I will try to give you sight,’ Adamu Jenitongo said, ‘and then you can better understand Wambata.’ He invited me into the conical spirit hut and asked me to sit down on a palm-frond mat. He took out three large, red kola nuts that had been stored in water in a small clay pot for three days. ‘Put these over your eyes,’ he ordered. He then began to recite a series of incantations. Sitting there with the cool kola nuts pressed against my closed eyes, I wondered how this ritual might give me ‘sight’. Listening to these incantations impelled me to think about what Adamu Jenitongo had already taught me about the Songhay view of divination. The world, according to Songhay belief, is a dangerous place filled with potential misfortune. You expect to confront all sorts of trouble – betrayal, loss and illness – along your path. Although you cannot expect to evade misfortune, which is the norm rather than the exception in life, you can try to be prepared for it. One way to do so is divination. A diviner can throw shells to pinpoint where and what type of misfortune you will confront on life’s path. Forewarned in this manner, you might be able to take pre-emptive measures – offerings, a course of fortifying medicines – to better confront the trouble that fate invariably brings your way. This viewpoint did not seem terribly exotic to me. It made me think of my grandmother’s considerable fear of the evil eye. Like many Songhay people, she saw misfortune in every nook and cranny of the world. Thinking that the evil eye would punish self-assurance, ostentation and beauty, she, like many other Eastern European Jews, Greeks and Italians, stressed modest self-presentation and avoided making positive statements. Hearing the praise-names of Wambata, spirit of death and goddess of divination, jolted me from my reveries. Adamu Jenitongo recited her praise-poem with emphasis and deliberation. It is a poem that describes the clairvoyant powers of a willful female spirit, the mother of death. From listening I understood clearly Wambata’s capacity to see clarity – the past, present and future – in ‘the brightness of the sun,’ in ‘the glow of the moon’, in ‘a bowl of milk’ or in ‘a pool of blood’. I wondered, though, how Wambata’s capacities might be extended to me.

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‘You now have vision,’ Adamu Jenitongo stated when he had finished. ‘You mean that if I throw shells I’ll see the past, present and future?’ The old man chuckled. ‘I have given you the potential for vision. You must find your own way to sight. Be patient, your path will open in front of you.’ He put some grated kola under his lip. ‘When it opens depends upon you and Wambata.’ He pulled a leather pouch from one of the pockets in his tunic. He counted thirteen cowry shells and put them into a cloth satchel, which he tied shut. ‘Take these. They will help you to see.’ I thanked him and took the shells and put them into the pocket of my tunic. ‘These are Wambata’s shells. She will not speak through other shells.’ Late that afternoon, I returned to a friend’s house and eagerly attempted to throw the shells to divine his future. The configurations did not reveal anything about my friend’s past, present or future. I did not hear Wambata’s voice One year later, I returned to Niger to continue my studies with Adamu Jenitongo in Tillaberi. He taught me sorcerous incantations and allowed me to observe sorcerous rites, but had nothing to say about divination. After several weeks at his compound, I asked him to teach me again about the cowry shells. ‘Maybe it’s time for you to visit your friends in Mehanna.’ I followed his advice, not knowing how my friends in Mehanna, the town where I conducted my early field research, could help me to learn how to ‘see’. As it turned out, my trip to Mehanna enabled me to learn more about divination than I had anticipated. At the market I saw a friend, Fatouma Seyni, who asked me to visit her house late one afternoon. After we drank tea and chatted, Fatouma told me that she was a diviner. ‘The shells say that I should teach you about divination,’ she informed me. The path of divination had opened for me – at least partially. I took lessons from her. She taught me configurations that indicated sickness, death. She showed me how to detect the presence of a witch, the loss of money, and the arrival of good fortune – either money or good health after a bout of sickness. She taught me how to see a ‘path that was blocked’ and to divine what might be blocking the path. She pointed out how to ‘see’ trouble on a person’s path. After helping me to learn a little bit about reading shells, she abruptly dismissed me. ‘You’ve learned enough for now. You’ll be back. I’ve seen it in the shells. When you return, we’ll continue.’

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Reluctantly, I did as she asked and returned to Tillaberi to say my farewells to Adamu Jenitongo. Before leaving Niger that year, I threw shells for several associates in Niamey, Niger’s capital city. I now could see sickness and good fortune but didn’t know how to attribute them to a particular person. I had yet to hear Wambata’s voice.

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* The development of ‘my vision’ has been a slow process. As the years have progressed I have learnt more about a seemingly infinite array of shell configurations. Ten years after first studying with Adamu Jenitongo, I began to sense Wambata’s voice during divination sessions for friends and family. That gentle breeze of a voice would give me a point of reference in shell configurations, which enabled me to make better sense of the patterns. I gained some ability to see/hear the past, present and future. My path, as Adamu Jenitongo would have said, had opened. This development encouraged me to throw shells more regularly. My enthusiasm, though, exacted a price, for, like my teacher Fatouma Seyni, this turn of events also gave me severe headaches. When I became more circumspect about throwing shells, the headaches disappeared. The experience reminded me once again that one should learn about sorcery in a deliberate and respectful way. The shells have taught me a number of important lessons about living life in the contemporary world. Sorcerers cannot master shells, as the Songhay would phrase it, unless they have mastered themselves. Such mastery means that sorcerers need to know themselves, to evoke the ideas of Antonin Artaud, with a ‘cruel’ honesty. As this emotionally painful self-vision ripens with age, so does the capacity to read the past, present and future. Following this path, the sorcerer learns to see as well as to look, to hear as well as to listen. Twenty-five years ago, Djibo Mounmouni said to me: ‘You look but you don’t see. You listen but you don’t hear. You touch but you don’t feel.’ Although my abilities cannot be compared to Adamu Jenitongo or Fatouma Seyni, I have slowly and deliberately tried to develop my capacity to see and hear. When my path unexpectedly led me into the village of the sick, these sensibilities deepened. When I stepped into the world of cancer and experienced blood tests, CAT scans, PET scans, bone-marrow biopsies and the cool surge of chemotherapy drugs in my blood, I understood more fully what it meant to feel.

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Embodying Humility Among many African peoples knowledge, like wealth in people, is a precious commodity. It is not something that an individual owns; rather, it is something that one masters, refines and passes along. Sorcerers fit into this category. They heal the sick, but their approach to knowledge reflects a more collectivist orientation that usually leads to a humble and respectful approach to illness and healing. Sorcerers are the embodiment of power. They are the masters of incantations, plants and magic. And yet, sorcerers do not ‘own’ this power; the power ‘owns’ them. It is said that in the process of eating power, in the form of the aforementioned kusu, sorcerers are consumed by power. Particular sorcerers may become accomplished practitioners who attract clients from far and wide, but no matter their renown, the collective power of ‘those who came before’ restrains their sense of self. In this way the sorcerer is part of a larger tradition of sorcery. Traditions of the past constrain an individual’s will in the present. The precedents of the past set the parameters within which sorcerers learn, practice and refine power. By the same token, these precedents underscore the limits of the individual sorcerer’s power as well as his obligation to pass power on to the next generation. Sorcery, then, is far more powerful than any sorcerer is. This set of time-honoured principles chart a sorcerous course that slowly leads from youthful arrogance to seasoned humility. Like sorcery, cancer charts a course toward humility. Cancer propels you down a difficult path on which it was important to be humble. If you are arrogant about life and believe that you can master illness, a disease, like cancer, can force you into a needlessly desperate corner. The onset of many cancers is sometimes sudden and often without symptoms. A healthy, active person, who exhibits few, if any symptoms, is suddenly told that she or he has cancer, a pronouncement that, in the minds of many people, is usually the equivalent of a death sentence. Optimism fades and feelings of control over one’s life dissipate. Fear appears and helplessness fills the void created by a confrontation with death. Fear and helplessness can trigger depression, which often develops after a cancer diagnosis.4 Life spins even more out of control as we worry about a painful and premature death. No formula can wash away the pain and suffering that comes with the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. For many people, denial can have short-term effectiveness. For others, faith, spirituality and/or religious ritual can provide a degree of solace. Support groups can decrease the cancer patient’s isolation. In a support group you are more likely to say what you feel and take comfort through commiseration with others who more or less share your fate. Even so, can participation

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in support groups deflect powerful themes that culturally disadvantage cancer patients? Perhaps they can to some extent. But can they alter the general perception that cancer is evil, that cancer changes social relationships, which cancer makes life spin out of control? As I indicated earlier, no matter the degree of support you have, cancer patients, like the African sorcerer, must confront their illness alone. Such a lonely assessment is by no means a prescription for hopeless pain and suffering. On the contrary, a sense of humility can put pain and suffering into a context larger than the personal. This view is the one that most Songhay people hold. Illness is always lurking. Like the High God and the spirits, the force of illness is greater than any individual is. Illness is part of life; it lies within us and waits for the right moment to appear. The ideal for Songhay, especially Songhay sorcerers, is to learn to respect the unalterable presence of illness and live with it. Songhay sorcerers believe that if you learn to live with illness, your being becomes stronger and stronger. The idea of living with an illness runs counter to major themes in American culture. No one wants to live with an illness. If we contract an illness, we want to conquer it. Illnesses are metaphorically framed, as is medical discourse, in terms of war. We are at war with disease. We fight infection. Bacteria invade our bodies and colonize our cells. Our immune systems produce natural killer-cells that ambush the invaders so that we can win our battle with illness. The world of cancer is particularly fraught with war metaphors that underscore an orientation to military culture. We are fighting the war on cancer. Cancer cells attack and overwhelm healthy cells. In military culture, one is taught to follow orders. Lack of obedience and a state of disorder create inefficiency and weakness. Illness also creates ‘disorders’. There are neurological disorders, gastrointestinal disorders and, of course, psychological disorders. As in military culture, disorders are culturally unacceptable in mainstream American culture. We therefore engage in monumental efforts to order our disorders through frontal attack. We are encouraged to change our diets and moderate our drinking. We pay billions of dollars annually to ingest millions of over-the-counter and prescription drugs. We sometimes agree to cosmetic, minor or major surgery. But can we bring order to the chaos of life? I once thought so, but living in the village of the sick has made me more respectful of the disorder of social life. It has also shown me that if you respect illness you can use it to develop your being. * In Niger sorcerers are usually solitary figures. They usually live at the edge of town and serve as physical intermediaries between the

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calm tranquility of the village and the chaotic danger of the bush. Situated at the edge of reality, the sorcerer is utterly alone. Although sorcerers are, like anyone else, members of families and networks of friends, these associates cannot help them to confront the underside of the world. Sorcerers are the solitary spiritual guardians of their communities. Through ritual incantations and offerings, they attempt to balance the disruptive forces of the bush, which, in turn, creates harmony in the world. In a harmonious context, sorcerers attempt to develop their vision. They throw cowry shells to ‘see’ bits of the past, present and future. The shells chart a course on which sorcerers are eventually able to cut through life’s haze and see things clearly. After years of concentrated effort the capacity to see things more clearly than others develops into a seasoned humility. Seasoned sorcerers come to understand how they are a relatively small part of a great tradition – a trickle in the flow of history. Accordingly, they realize that the knowledge they have acquired is borrowed and that their responsibility is to refine what they have learnt and pass it on to the next generation. Ideally, this humility enables them to be more comfortable in their skins and gives them the courage to confront the world with a degree of strength and dignity; it can enable them to live well in the world. Like Songhay sorcerers, cancer patients are also solitary figures. The disease makes you the intermediary between the relative tranquility of family life and the absolute disruption of illness. You live at the edge of the village of the sick. You can see your friends and family in the village of the healthy. Although you can visit them frequently, your place is elsewhere. Your life on the edge makes you a lonely figure in the world. Like the Songhay sorcerer, you, too, can use ritual, both spiritual and pragmatic, to establish harmony in your world. Like the Songhay sorcerer, you, too, can try to see things clearly and develop a strong-willed humility. Like the sorcerer, you can realize that time on earth is borrowed and must be eventually paid back. This realization can make you more comfortable with yourself and give you the courage to confront the existential imponderables of being diagnosed with and treated for cancer.

Experience, Knowing and Being in Anthropology My experiences in the worlds of sorcery and cancer underscore powerfully the dynamic relationship among experience, knowing and being. How do our experiences impact what we know and who we are? For Songhay people, especially sorcerers, a person cannot learn something important in isolation of experience. Put another

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way, you learn cumulatively by being in your body in the world. This epistemology, then, is one that does not separate mind from body or experience from learning. For Songhay people, the mind develops through the body’s experience-in-the-world. In the Songhay view, the young mind is as undeveloped as the young body. Both need to be exercised to grow. Young apprentice sorcerers, bards or weavers are not expected to master the nuanced intricacies of sorcery, poetry or cloth design; rather, they are told to listen to their masters. By ‘sitting’ with their masters, they slowly follow their paths to knowledge. They mix potions, recite poetry or weave strips of cloth. Through time apprentices expand their practices-in-the-world. By way of these embodied practices, apprentices deepen their experience-in-the-world. As their bodies and minds develop, Songhay apprentices start families and travel to other villages, towns or countries. This social experience, in turn, further deepens their experience-in-the-world. In the end, cumulative experience-in-the-world slowly ripens the apprentice’s mind, preparing it to receive powerful knowledge – what it means to weave the world, what it means to be the guardian of ‘old words’, or what it means to understand death. These truths are taught only to those apprentices who, through persistence and patience, have demonstrated the capacity of an elder to receive and understand that which is important – the knowledge that enables people to better their lives. These are philosophic lessons, then, that mark the final transition from being an apprentice to being a master. Masters use total being to perform two primary tasks: (a) to practice judiciously what they have learned; and (b) most importantly, to impart that knowledge-practice to the next generation of apprentices. In this way the dynamic tension among experience, knowing and being generates knowledge that is learned, refined and passed on in the classic and unending pursuit of wisdom. What about experience, knowing and being in anthropology? Because fieldwork is an anthropological rite of passage, we, more than other social scientists, stress the link between doing and knowing. When it comes to being, though, anthropologists, like most other scholars, tend not to write about how doing and knowing have shaped their lives. There is a gap, as Clifford Geertz famously noted between ‘being there’, the field experience, and ‘being here’, the institutional experience of the professional scholar. ‘Being there’ is usually a sensuous, fully human experience filled with personal drama and lifechanging events. ‘Being here’ usually compels us to adhere to a set of institutional rules that tend to separate ‘being there’ from ‘being here’. The result is that, more often than not, we excise much of the passion of ‘being there’ from what we write. This absence, in turn, usually hides how doing and knowing ultimately shape being in anthropology.

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How can we understand the human condition if we place our own being in the margins of our professional discourse? Like most anthropologists I, too, experienced the existential turbulence that you find in the space between ‘being there’ and ‘being here’. As an apprentice anthropologist my admittedly limited experience-in-the-world steered me onto the path of ‘being here’. Despite an early detour through the Songhay world of sorcery, I subsequently avoided the topic of sorcery for almost twenty-five years. It was too painful, too sensuous, and too ‘being there’. As my life course unfolded, including, of course, the experience of being diagnosed with and treated for cancer, doing and knowing has reconnected me to being – integrating more profoundly ‘being there’ and ‘being here’. This integration, as the Songhay would say, has ripened my mind. In the end, this personal evolution has made me realize that my primary obligation in life, like the Songhay weaver, bard or sorcerer, is to pursue the path of wisdom and recount what I have learned in the hope that my stories might enable someone to think a new thought, feel a new feeling, remember the past and imagine the future.

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Notes 1. The notion of the villages of the healthy and the sick are anthropological adaptations of Susan Sontag’s more religious invocations of the ‘Kingdom of the Healthy and the Kingdom of the Sick’, in her book Illness as Metaphor (1978). The idea of a village of the sick is also similar to Arthur W. Frank’s notion of the remission society, which he introduces in his second book, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics (1995). Members of the remission society are people who ‘are effectively, but could never be considered cured … Members of the remission society include those who have had almost any kind of cancer, those living in cardiac recovery programs, diabetics, those whose allergies and environmental sensibilities require dietary and other self-monitoring, those with prostheses and mechanical body regulators, the chronically ill, the disabled, those ‘recovering’ from abuses and addictions, and for those people, the families that share the worries and daily triumph of staying well’ (p. 8). 2. This early stage of my apprenticeship in sorcery is recounted in In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger (Stoller and Olkes, 1987). 3. There has been much discussion of divination in ethnographic reports on societies in West and Central Africa. Among the most celebrated texts are Adler and Zempleni (1972) on the Moundang of Chad; Bascom (1994) on the Yoruba of Nigeria; and Peek’s collection on African divination systems. Shaw (2002) has produced a fine ethnography that describes how divination, among other practices, shapes memory and contours the historical imagination of the Temne of Sierra Leone. Shaw claims, quite rightly, that by linking past and present, most West African divination systems help to forge an atmosphere of completeness, harmony and continuity. Shaw’s broad approach to West African divination has striking parallels to the diagnostic processes central to Western medical practice. In times of physical crises, we seek out physicians, who, in order to make a diagnosis, order diagnostic tests, most of which

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entail some ritual elements as well as some degree of risk. Tests are called ‘procedures’ and are filled with ritualistic preparations – fasts, premedication, qualifying blood work, ingestion of barium. The iodine administered during a contrast CAT scan, after all, can produce a fatal allergic reaction. 4. There are many studies on the relation of cancer to the onset of depression. Some of the more important studies include: McDaniel, et al (1995), Sheard and Maguire (1999), Barraclough (1998), Miller (2002) and Lan Ly (2002).

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References Adler, A. and A. Zempleni. 1972. Le baton de l’aveugle: Divination, maladie, et pourvoir chez les Moundang du Tchad. Paris: Hermann. Barraclough, B. 1998. Cancer and Emotion: A Practical Guide to PsychoOntology. 3rd ed. Chichester: John Wiley. Bascom, W. 1994. Ifa Divination: Communication Between the Gods and Men in West African. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Frank, A. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lan Ly, K. 2002. ‘Depression in Advanced Disease: A Systematic Review: Part I: Prevalence and Case Finding’, Palliative Medicine 16: 81–98. McDaniel, J.S. et al. 1995. ‘Depression in Patients with Cancer: Diagnosis, Biology and Treatment’, Archives of General Psychiatry 52: 89–99. Miller, D.K. 2002. ‘Psychosocial-Spiritual Correlates of Death Distress in Patients with Life-Threatening Medical Conditions’, Palliative Medicine 16(4): 331–38. Shaw, R. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sheard, T. and P. Maguire. 1999. ‘The Effect of Psychological Interventions on Anxiety and Depression in Cancer Patients: Results of Two Metaanalyses’, British Journal of Cancer 80: 1770–80. Sontag, S. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Stoller, P. and C. Olkes. 1987. In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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PART III

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RETHINKING EMBODIMENT

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Chapter 8

CRAFTING KNOWLEDGE: THE ROLE OF ‘PARSING AND PRODUCTION’ IN THE COMMUNICATION OF SKILL-BASED KNOWLEDGE AMONG MASONS

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Trevor Marchand

A horizontal wooden plank was raised on short stacks of mud bricks above the roof level, and next to the parapet wall. The two site masons and their senior apprentice carefully balanced themselves along the plank to construct seven decorative mud mitres (sarafar idye) that would crown the wall over the front entrance of the house. Construction of all seven occurred in tandem. The apprentice worked on the central mitre and the masons each built up three on either side. The square bases were carefully arranged leaving equal spacing between each mitre. A tautly drawn horizontal cord was raised from one course-level to the next to ensure that all three builders were producing the same geometries. The tapering of the inside faces was judged for symmetry by the masons’ eyes and corrections were made regularly to ensure that all matched perfectly. The mitres reached eight bricks high, and the builders tapered the successive courses, achieving a slight convexity on all sides that ultimately terminated in a fine point. When completed, the mitres were covered thickly in mud and their identical finished forms were sculpted and smoothed with French trowels. The apprentice was performing well and his master paused to exclaim loudly to the nearby labourers who were passing bricks and mortar, ‘See! My assistant is a mason today!’ (Djenné, Mali, February 2001)

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The apprentice, like the masters, was a participant in a context qualified by dialogue, social relations, available construction materials, tools-tohand and the physical parameters of the building site. The workplace could be described as an environment of situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991) for both trainees and mentors. In addition to technical skills, other types of specialized knowledge that were acquired, honed and transformed there included basic trade economics, project scheduling and contract negotiations; the production of amulets and the memorization and performance of benedictions; the fluid integration of Islamic values with the masons’ performed identities; and the appropriate enactment of social graces and customs. In my studies of building-craft knowledge and apprenticeship (Marchand 2001, forthcoming), training took place and knowledge was ‘enacted’ via multiple modes of communication that responded dynamically to changing material, sensual and cognitive stimuli in the environment. Dialogue minimally included utterances, propositional statements, movement and actions, gesture, deictic pointing and facial expression. As anthropologists, we are confronted with the task of working out ‘conceptual and methodological forms that will allow us to theorise about cognition in everyday practices’ (Lave 1988: 18) by engaging our own ethnographic expertise with interdisciplinary discussions about communication, learning and knowledge. Key questions begging greater attention are: what are the defining characteristics of different forms of knowledge, including motor, visual and propositional? How are these coordinated within the mind–body complex, and thereby share information in a simultaneous, non-linear fashion that results in a recognizably intelligent performance? And, finally, how is knowledge expressed through various mediums of communication, interpreted and shared by other agents, and stabilized to some extent as ‘memory’ that may be consciously or unconsciously enacted? Plainly, these are large questions demanding long-term agendas, but I will attempt to address them, albeit in some partial manner here. The anthropological quest to explore and explain ‘culture as knowledge’ (Goodenough 1957) is by no means new, as evidenced already a half-century ago by the rise of cognitive anthropology upon earlier foundations laid by linguists such as de Saussure and Jakobson. Over the decades, cognitive approaches to the study of learning and knowledge have converged and evolved upon the historically related themes of taxonomies, prototypes, schemas and connectionist theory. Computationalist approaches have yielded models or adopted and adapted Fodor’s modularity-of-mind thesis (1983) to explore ideas of domain specificity. Such studies have typically yielded cognitive models that provide valuable insight into the possible mechanics and stages of mental operations. Modelling, however, is often abstracted to

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a considerable degree from everyday human exchanges, and the focus on the interiorised individual mind has been criticized for foregoing the complexity and messiness found in the ethnographic setting that necessarily includes other interlocutors. Like Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Chomsky’s computational linguistics, cognitive modelling is inclined toward elegantly presented universal archetypes, turning to explanations of biological evolution rather than a cultural history of human propensities, adaptation and invention.

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The Present Theoretical Aims My research attempts to address the above by proposing a way forward in our anthropological engagement with, and descriptions of, the dynamics of communication, learning and knowledge. In my approach to knowledge, I remain firmly committed to a representational theory of mind (RTM). World and context refer not to an independent reality of ‘things out there’ but rather to the mental representations that our minds entertain of those things processed through sensory perception or conceptual thinking. In place of cognitive modelling that fixes mind, the ideas presented below explore the multiplicity of interacting knowledge domains that give rise to, and are shaped in, embodied experience. Merleau-Ponty suggested that embodied sensual experience constitutes the continuum between an inner and outer reality that places our minds, with our bodies, firmly in the world (1962). In other words, mind and body produce, and are produced in, embodied experience, and, in parallel, embodied experience produces, and is produced in, the world. My aim is to ultimately move towards a conception of knowledge that is somewhat analogous to Butler’s account of performed identity (1990): thereby recognizing knowledge as producing, and being produced in, physical, social and cultural contexts that necessarily include other actors. Knowledge is not fixed, but rather is in an ever-present process of becoming – nie sein, immer werden. Notably, the model of embodied cognition that I am subscribing to and aim to advance within an anthropological framework is devoid of insulated and innate architectural cores or series of hard-wired modules – at least beyond the cognitive level of sense perception (Fodor 1983, 2001). I begin from a familiar premise that knowledge is not monolithic and, as Bloch attests, much of what we learn and know is nonlinguistic in both content and expression (1992). While recognizing the difference in nature between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ (Ryle 1984), however, I wish to move beyond the implied dichotomy and explore the common ground that they share, anchored in the

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body and shared within communicative processes. In order to do so, I will look to a range of somewhat interrelated ideas coming from the behavioural and brain sciences and linguistics that challenge wholly computationalist views of mind and that more carefully consider the complex and situated interactions between interlocutors. Indeed, one of the main arguments I am making is that the differentiation made between embodied knowledge and propositional or conceptual knowledge is not as deeply entrenched as once supposed. The neurological research presented in support of my argument suggests that neural systems involved in cognitive tasks are much more flexible than any modular theory might allow for. Rather than being specified by a predetermined architecture, many systems and networks are shaped by experience, at least to some considerable degree as demonstrated by Downey’s exploration of vision among capoeira practitioners and Grasseni’s account of skilled vision among dairy farmers in northern Italy (both in this volume). This does not imply, however, that all domains, if exposed to the ‘right kind of experience’, can potentially forge neural circuitry for sharing information in a direct manner. Normal neural circuitry, for instance, will never enable a person to ‘taste what they hear’. Species-specific biological constraints exist, and at basic levels of sense perception Fodor’s modularity thesis holds. But recent studies demonstrate that some higher-level cognitive activities associated with parsing and interpreting certain types of visual stimuli and certain types of linguistic information tap directly into the experiences of our bodies. Thus my exploration first introduces an inversion of the traditional approach for investigating cognition. Historically, structuralists (LéviStrauss 1963; Sapir 1963; Whorf 1956) and computationalists (Chomsky 1975; Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch 2002; Jackendoff and Landau 1992) have used language as the prime window on cognition and have purported that language structure is the model par excellence for all forms of thinking. By contrast, the argument I describe proposes that many cognitive processes, including the interaction between visual processing and object-oriented behaviour (Jeannerod 1994), as well as the production and parsing of certain types of language including human action verbs and emotions (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002, 2003), are in fact grounded to some extent in embodied forms of cognition. Such neurological and psychological findings should impel anthropologists to more thoroughly consider what people do and how they come to do what they do, as opposed to the long-standing, overriding emphasis (both during fieldwork and in ethnographic writing) on what people say.

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Neuroscience and Dynamic Syntax Motor Imagery and Mirror Neurons Based on findings that the mental images we entertain in our visual modality (often referred to as the ‘mind’s eye’) rely on the same neural substrate as the perceptual images that we generate in normal visual perception, Jeannerod hypothesized that motor imagery must be likewise embedded in our motor physiology (1994). In order to qualitatively differentiate motor imagery from a visual one, he proposed a distinction between internal and external imagery. External imagery is synonymous with visual imagery whereby one imaginatively ‘pictures’ oneself engaged in a certain action. Internal imagery, on the other hand, pertains to motor imagery, or the kinaesthetic representation of an action, whereby one ‘feels’ oneself to be executing that action. In further defining motor imagery, Jeannerod also made an important distinction between it and motor preparation processes, maintaining, however, that both are instantiated in the same neural substrate. Motor preparation results automatically and simultaneously in the performed action and entails an entirely nonconscious process, whereas motor imagery occurs when the execution of an action is purposively blocked or delayed, enabling conscious reflection by the imaginer. He appropriately illustrated his point with an example of a music teacher and pupil. While remaining immobile and observing the teacher play an instrument, the pupil imagines the actions. Likewise the teacher experiences strong visceral ‘feelings’ of what should be done while monitoring the pupil. ‘The vividness of the imagined action’ suggests Jeannerod, ‘can be such as to induce in the watcher changes in heart and respiration rates related to the degree of mental effort’ (1994: 189). Significantly, the continuum he hypothesizes between motor preparation and imagery ‘contrasts with the classical [linguistic] idea … of a unitary symbolic representation for the different types of mental activities’, and thereby challenges any supposed necessity for symbolic manipulation between representation and action (1994: 190). The principal idea that the observation and execution of motor tasks are directly linked is more robustly articulated by the ‘mirror system hypothesis’ that I turn to next. Based on extensive studies of grasping – first in macaque monkeys, then humans – the mirror system hypothesis claims that a specialized system of neurons is active for both the execution and observation of manual actions (Arbib and Rizzolatti 1997; Arbib, 2005). Importantly, studies demonstrate that these so-called ‘mirror neurons’ are not cognitively predetermined, but rather reflect the impact of experience as individuals engage in, and observe, activities during the course of

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their lifetime. Mirror neurons thus support a capacity for learning that takes the form of pantomime, conventionalized gesture and imitation. Imitation, and especially complex imitation (like that engaged in by the music student or by the mason’s apprentice), involves parsing a complex movement into a composite of (variations on) familiar actions that must be grounded in the prior development of a basic set of composition techniques (Arbib 2005). Practice and repetition gradually yield the graceful execution associated with mastery. At the neural level, fluid and efficient delivery is achieved by stabilizing the networks that bring together, in a coordinated and contiguous manner, the constituent parts that perform the whole. This sort of complex imitation demands something beyond mimicry, namely the multi-modal processes of ‘understanding’. It is therefore recognized that the mirror neuron system must be embedded in a synaptic network of cognitive functions that yield ‘higher’ levels of reasoning and conceptual awareness, and that extend ‘knowing’ from individual action to the public, social context. Action, as an outward expression of embodied cognition, is thus importantly acknowledged as a vehicle of social communication. Interestingly, mirror neurons associated with manual grasping are located in the Broca’s area of the brain – a region associated with language. Arbib’s hypothesis claims that the mirror system in Broca’s area enabled an experiential and culturally-based evolution that proceeded from grasping to imitation to forms of proto-language, and provided homo sapiens with ‘language-ready’ brains requiring few, if any, biological changes (2005). In other words, human cultural evolution has taken us from earlier stages of communication based on manual actions (and presumably facial expression and other forms of body language) to our present one that combines manual gestures with spoken languages (and seemingly sign languages, i.e. American Sign Language). This has been one of the most important and influential hypotheses in the brain sciences in recent years. It counters prevalent Chomskian notions of an innate and hard-wired language faculty, and suggests that the acquisition of (and engagement in) vocal language is rooted in an experiential dimension. And experience, it must be reinforced, is grounded in the body that acts and engages not only with a physical environment of sensual phenomena but also with a (cultural) community of interlocutors. This opens an important space for anthropological investigation. On the basis that vocal communication is built upon the capacity for a manual one, Arbib has significantly postulated that ‘the parity requirement for language in humans – that what counts for the speaker must account approximately the same for the hearer – is met because Broca’s area evolved atop the mirror system for grasping with its capacity to generate and recognise a set of actions’ (2005).

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Dynamic Syntax: The Parsing and Production of Language Dynamic syntax theory (DS) offers a highly innovative model for better understanding how parity between speaker and hearer is cognitively achieved (Kempson, Meyer-Viol and Gabbay 2001). More broadly, the model demonstrates how the mental representations of speakers and hearers are communicated, interpreted, constructed and updated in dialogue. DS is a parsing-directed grammar formalism, whereby a model of the incremental processes of parsing serves to explain both the hearer’s exercise of interpreting and the speaker’s job of producing utterances. Because both hearer and speaker individually construct the same conceptual architecture in dialogue, the common phenomenon of shared utterance between speakers (whereby an utterance initiated by the speaker is completed by the hearer, and so forth) can be explained in a straightforward manner. This is especially relevant to developing a better understanding of skill-based teachinglearning in which physical tasks are taken up in a coordinated, but not predetermined, manner by two or more parties. For the hearer, parsing language entails the construction of a semantic interpretation (and notably not a syntactic structure)1 of a string of words that is built up in a strictly incremental, time-linear sequence. If successful, this yields a mental representation with logically ordered propositional content that closely matches that of the speaker. With reference to the binary branching tree format employed by DS, parsing is defined as ‘a process of building labelled semantic trees in a strictly [time-linear], word-by-word incremental fashion’ (Purver and Kempson 2004a: 86). At any point in the dialogue, the parser state ‘contains all the partial trees produced by the portion of the string [of words] so far consumed which remain candidates for completion’ (ibid.). In the case of generating language, the speaker produces an utterance that maps his/her mental representation by using the same incremental parsing process as the hearer. The speaker’s mental representation to be communicated is referred to in the model as an input semantic tree, or goal tree, representing some propositional formula. In generating dialogue, the speaker ‘incrementally produces a set of corresponding output strings [of words] and their associated partial trees (again on a [time-linear], word-by-word basis) by following standard parsing routines’, with the key difference being that the goal tree is used as a subsumption check against which all selected words are matched (Purver and Kempson 2004a: 87). It can therefore be demonstrated that production and parsing employ the same tree representations and tree-building actions (see Figure 8.1). In the models of parsing and generating, each step is represented as a partial tree, and each one an enrichment of the previous partial tree in the sequence. For the hearer, the parsing process is initiated with an

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Parsing ‘John likes Mary’

Generating ‘John likes Mary’

john

john likes mary

{}

{}

{john’} {t} likes

likes

{} {john’}

{}

mary {like’(mary’)(john’), t} {like’(mary’)} {like’}{mary’}

{john’}

FAIL

mary

{}

{like’} {t}

{john’}

FAIL

{john’} {t}

FAIL

{}

{like’} {t} mary {like’(mary’)(john’), t} {john’}

{like’(mary’)} {like’}{mary’}

Figure 8.1 DS models for parsing and generating ‘John likes Mary’ (from Purver

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and Kempson, 2004a: 87).

empty node. Parsing proceeds in time-linear sequence, starting in the example in Figure 8.1 with the word ‘john’ and yielding a conceptual representation {john’} for some individual John, and a node under development identified by a pointer {쏻}. The hearer will progressively construct his/her interpretation by unfolding the tree structure in anticipation of what is needed to complete a logical form representing the assertion that this particular John likes this particular Mary. For the speaker, generating ‘John likes Mary’ requires a mapping from a logical representation of an interpretation (or goal tree) onto a linear string of words. Notably, from this string of words the hearer can construct the speaker’s goal tree in question by a parsing system that uses the same rules. To reiterate, although the same computational actions are used in generation as in parsing to develop some tree, in generating an utterance ‘each update step has to meet the severe restriction of not merely being an enrichment as in parsing, but of being a precise form of enrichment’ that yields the speaker’s particular goal tree (Kempson, forthcoming). According to the DS model for production, it would seem that the speaker, in selecting the appropriate words that incrementally map the goal tree, must perform a search of his/her full lexicon at each successive step in the process of building a partial tree. This

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is clearly an enormous and cognitively uneconomical task. It is proposed, therefore, that ‘production is context-dependent, much of the time not involving search of the lexicon, but merely, as does parsing, the context’ (Kempson, forthcoming).2 The dialogue context is constituted by any preceding sequence of partial trees produced in the course of producing an utterance, including as a minimum that under construction, and all completed trees that have already been constructed in the immediate dialogue. The use of pronouns provides a fitting example of context search. For example, to follow on from ‘John likes Mary’ with the utterance ‘But she doesn’t like him,’ involves for both speaker and hearer a search of the context defined by the completed tree already constructed. The concepts {mary’} and {john’} contained in the present goal tree (i.e. the speaker’s mental representation with propositional content that ‘a particular Mary doesn’t like a particular John’) are subsequently represented in the speaker’s utterance with the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘him’ representing {mary’} and {john’} from the previous completed tree. Additionally, the verb ‘like’ from the earlier utterance is reused.3 Lexical repetition can be expected when the context provides appropriate words previously used, and thereby avoids full search of the lexicon. To emphasize the role of context in interpreting and generating dialogue, I quote at length from Kempson: Given that in all successful communication acts, in both parsing and production the same tree must be being constructed by both speaker and hearer, the selection of appropriate minimal context will be taken from the sequence of trees both speaker and hearer will have constructed. No calculation of mutual manifestness, or hypothesis about the hearer’s mental lexicon is necessary to ensure this: it is a simple consequence of the fact that production follows the same process as parsing. Both involve the construction of tree representations of content: and presumed values of minimal context are thereby shared. (Forthcoming)

In dialogue, speaker and hearer roles are not static. As evidenced from any conversation, not only do interlocutors switch automatically between speaking and hearing, they also regularly complete each other’s utterances. For example: Trevor: ‘Do you have my …’ John: ‘Pen? I’m using it to sign Christmas cards.’ Trevor: ‘Have you got one for Jennifer and Paul?’ John: ‘Yes, and for Dave as well.’

The DS model provides a direct explanation of how the roles of producer and parser are easily swapped. As explained above, the activities of

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production and parsing employ the same set of strategies in unfolding a tree structure and, if communication is successful, speaker and hearer have individually constructed the same context. Thus the structure under construction and the context are shared by both parties. The hearer is therefore in a position to complete the partial tree that they have constructed up to that point, and finish the speaker’s utterance. The hearer effectively shifts from parser to producer where the task is to complete that tree against their own now already completed goal tree. Since the speaker also has a partial tree constructed up to that point where the hearer took over as producer, the speaker can shift into being a parser. And so forth. Because the computational actions, and the semantic-based representations of content that they yield, are the same for both roles, no major shift is required between one mechanism and the other. Inspiringly, what the DS model captures is not only the dynamic structure of natural language, but also the dynamic and interactive production of knowledge. To date, work in dynamic syntax has focused principally on spoken dialogue. The final section will explore the possible applications of a combined theory of embodied cognition and dynamic syntax to the on-site communication between a mason and his apprentice. I will move away from examples of spoken language to that of a skill-based teaching-learning environment where the vehicle of communication is dominated by manual actions and physical skills. It will be suggested that observers and producers, in their respective activities of interpreting and generating bodily performances, are not merely scanning their ‘repertoire’ of available actions or skills in motor cognition. In order to construct and communicate their mental representations, both parties are also searching the motor context. Following the DS model, this context will be defined as the partial and fully completed trees that unfold the structure of mental representations that map bodily performances, minimally including the tree under construction. Dynamic syntax and mirror neuron theory will be used to describe how the mason and apprentice, or any two (or more) builders engaged in a cooperative task, swap roles between observer and performer. For the purposes of developing and further explicating this theory, I have selected the familiar exercise of teaching and learning to sculpt bricks on the construction site. With reference to the ethnographic excerpt at the beginning of my chapter, the apprentice, in the course of his training, acquired the correct knowledge for chiselling and carving various dimensions and shapes of mud bricks that were laid in successive courses to build up the mitre-like projections that terminated in fine pyramidal points. In the process of learning, the apprentice watched, imitated and practiced, and the mason

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occasionally supplemented his mainly action-oriented mentoring with verbal instructions. In brief, the guiding question for the remaining exploration is: how might a combination of dynamic syntax theory of parsing-directed communication and motor neuron theory better inform anthropological studies of situated learning, skill-based knowledge and mainly non-propositional communication of this sort?

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Towards a Model of Skill-Based Teaching-Learning: Masons and Brick Carving The production of a carved brick – characterized by a particular size, shape and corresponding geometries – may be initiated with visual imagery of what the end result should ideally look like, and possibly with a propositional representation of how the brick will be used in the given building assembly. These mental representations, along with the mason’s intention to satisfy the goal of producing a brick of a particular size, shape and geometry, will instantiate an appropriate physical performance. An appropriate performance in this instance will be a ‘correct carving’, and this will involve the production of a fluid and efficient coordination of numerous tool-wielding actions. These contiguous, though not strictly time-linear, actions are made public by virtue of the mason’s overt display of his physical performance. Additionally, the properties of the brick in its various stages of transformation throughout the carving process – from standard cuboid to trapezoid – will also be visually and tactually available for public scrutiny. Within a framework of embodied cognition, I will next explore in detail how a skill-based performance is produced, and how it is communicated to, and interpreted by, an observing and participating apprentice. It is important to reinforce at the outset that it is not merely the representation of a ‘correctly-carved brick’ that the mason intends to convey in his demonstration for the pupil, but it is also the procedures (i.e. the movements and actions that constitute a correct carving) that must be simultaneously communicated. Thus the mason’s skilled performance, as a means of publicly conveying knowledge, is enacted with the aim of achieving a parity of mental representations between him and his pupil in at least two cognitive domains: the more straightforward one of visual imagery, whereby the pupil will ultimately entertain/acquire a mental representation of the finished brick that is roughly equivalent to that of the mason’s; and the arguably more complex one representing the correct procedures for carving that will be parsed, acquired and ultimately generated by the apprentice in his own motor cognition. In addition and in

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relation to these aims, the mason presumably intends (consciously or unconsciously) to communicate relevant social knowledge about what it is to be a mason in their shared physical, cultural and social West African context of Djenné, thereby modifying his protégé’s representations that inform and constitute his professional, ethnic, religious and gendered identity – in terms of the way that this identity is conceived, lived and performed. As Herzfeld notes, any separation made between the social and the technical in studies of apprenticeship may be construed as a ‘Cartesian convenience’ (this volume). I am in no way suggesting that mental representations are ‘transmitted’ from one actor to the next. As already stated, I hold fast to a representational theory of mind (RTM) and maintain that mental representations, thought processes and intentions are individual. Communication of any sort – whether verbal, visual or bodily – serves as a vehicle for ‘sharing’ representations with others, and is intentionally motivated to make the representations publicly available via culturally produced and recognized systems of expression. Successful communication is aptly described by dynamic syntax theory as being achieved when all interlocutors in dialogue have individually unfolded the same tree structure, constructed the same context and completed the same goal tree (or semantic-based mental representation). I suggest that this model is applicable to embodied communication, whereby the same trees are unfolded and the same motor context constructed, giving rise to a close approximation of the performer’s mental representations in the mind and body of observer. Like dialogue, successful skill-based communication does not necessarily result in the observer entertaining a mental representation identical to that of the performer’s goal mental representation. In fact, there is no guarantee of this in the learning, leaving the door wide open to the possibility of variant interpretations and procedures. In a teaching-learning environment, a pupil therefore does not ‘appropriate’ the propositional or motor content of the mentor’s representations, but rather constructs their own employing the same parse routine as that used to generate the performance. Parsing and Production of a Skill-Based Performance So far I have proposed that a combination of imagistic and propositional representations of the finished brick (i.e. what it should look like; what physical properties it should have; how it will be used, etc.) formulate a goal representation motivated by a so-called ‘prior intention’ to achieve it (Jacob and Jeannerod 2004). This motivated goal instantiates the mason’s motor intention toward physically acting upon the brick with the edge of his sturdy trowel. Following Jeannerod (1994), I described above how motor intentions are formulated and enacted within motor

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cognition, thereby yielding either motor imagery (i.e. embodied motor simulation) or motor preparation processes that automatically yield motor actions. The mason’s motor intention results in a kinaesthetic representation of the carving action. Like the speaker’s goal tree, this motor-based representation acts as a subsumption check against which all selected movements and actions are matched and coordinated. If execution is successful, the mason’s performance will map the kinaesthetic representation and satisfy not only the motor intention, but also the prior intention to produce a brick of a specified shape, size and function. The question that follows is how an intentionally motivated kinaesthetic representation is actualized in a coordinated series of physical movements? Or perhaps more usefully, how does a coordinated series of physical movements map and satisfy the goal representation? A parsing-directed formalism outlined by DS provides an excellent starting point for exploring the parsing and production of embodied actions. It can be recalled that a parse routine, in which binary tree structures are unfolded, is the exercise central to both the hearer’s job of interpreting and the speaker’s task of generating dialogue. Language production involves the incremental mapping from a logical, propositional representation onto a linearized string of words from which the goal tree in question can be constructed by a parsing system using the same rules. The goal tree serves as ‘the filter against which all possible actions by the generation system have to be matched, despite the fact that neither the selection of words nor their order is uniquely correlated with a given content’ (Kempson forthcoming). In spoken dialogue, a goal tree is defined by its logical and propositional content. Unfolding its structure proceeds in a timelinear fashion corresponding to the incremental selection of words and word actions from the lexicon and from context. The timelinear aspect, however, is not entirely applicable to understanding how the kinaesthetic representations that yield motor imagery or that instantiate physical activities are unfolded in the parsing and production processes since actions and movements, unlike words, may overlap with one another in time. I do maintain, however, that the notion of constituent parts that unfold in some sort of logical or coordinated (though not necessarily propositional or time-linear) arrangement remains relevant. The basis of the model is therefore suited to exploring the interpretation and generation activities associated with corporeal performance, whereby the mason’s activities on the building site are recognized to be a form of communication, typically directed at his apprentice. In observing the mason at work, the apprentice’s parse routine involves disarticulating the performance into its constituent actions

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and movements that may, and regularly do, overlap in time, and incrementally mapping those actions and movements onto motor concepts (i.e. motor-based representations). It might be supposed that unlike the linear two-dimensional structure that is incrementally unfolded in the parsing of dialogue, the structure unfolded by the observer in motor cognition is three-dimensional. Thus, rather than a strictly binary tree structure, a kinaesthetic representation may yield a tree structure of two or more branches. Considering the threedimensional nature of action itself, this hypothesis strikes me as potentially promising, but shall remain open to future investigation and development. Relevant to the present argument, the observer’s parsing exercise unfolds an incremental sequence of partial trees of n-branches, each one being a motor-based enrichment of its predecessor. As in dialogue, I am proposing that the parser state at any point will include all partial trees that are candidates for completion. If successful, the parsing routine builds a kinaesthetic representation that closely approximates the performer’s motor-based goal tree. Generating a skilled performance is initiated with a kinaesthetic representation that will serve as the goal tree. At each stage, the performer incrementally produces a set of corresponding movements and actions and their associated partial trees by following the standard parsing routine and employing the goal tree as a subsumption check. The generation of a performance will yield partial trees of n-branches, and each will contain one or more empty nodes in anticipation of subsequent selected movements. Again, I am suggesting that there may be more than one empty node for completion at each stage since several constituent movements are likely to occur simultaneously, thereby necessitating more than one follow-up movement or action. The performance may be considered successful when a completed tree identical to the goal is produced. For the mason carving a mud brick, his generation of the performance proceeds incrementally with search and selection of appropriate movements and actions that successively map his goal tree. His (typically unconscious) kinaesthetic selection of movements and actions will, to some extent, involve search of his available repertoire of motor skills. As pointed out by DS, however, production, like parsing, is context dependent much of the time. In cognitive terms, it is less costly to search and select from what is already available (i.e. the dialogue or motor context that has already been constructed), and we can expect that this will take precedent whenever possible over the harder work of searching the entire lexicon for each word uttered, or searching the whole repertoire of motor skills for every movement and action enacted. In parsing and producing an embodied performance, the shared motor context that is individually constructed

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by the observer and performer will comprise all partial and completed trees, and include as a minimum the one under construction in motor cognition. Motor context will additionally include the movements and actions, and their associated motor procedures (i.e. that orchestrate movements and actions in fluid performance), that have already been used in the parsing process to build the existing trees. Like dialogue, a successful communication of embodied performances should result in construction of the same context for both observer and performer. Parsing an embodied performance is primarily exercized upon the visual information that the performance supplies. This implies a tight coordination between visual and motor domains of cognition as suggested by Goodale and Milner (2004) and Downey’s study (this volume). Next, I will explore the possible role of mirror neurons in parsing embodied performances and the final section will suggest how the roles of producer and parser (i.e. carver and observer) are swapped in a fluid, coordinated manner between interacting agents. The Role of Mirror Neurons in Parsing Action To repeat, parsing a performance roughly involves its disarticulation into constituent actions and movements that are mapped to corresponding motor concepts. I will be concerned here with the mapping process. Mapping movements and actions to motor concepts is achieved neither by propositional thinking, nor by visual-imagistic cognition even though the principal sense for receiving a bodily communication (i.e. grasps, gestures, skill-based performances, etc.) is visual. I suggest instead that mapping in motor cognition is achieved primarily via processes of embodied simulation. Arbib and Rizzolatti’s study (1997) proposes that motor mirror neurons fire when an individual observes or engages in the same manual activities. In other words, the same motor neuron network is active in the apprentice when he is observing the mason’s object-related hand action (i.e. grasping a brick or carving it with his tools) as when the apprentice himself takes up the tool and is involved in its actual execution. Mirror neurons therefore ‘supply motor, not purely perceptual, representations of actions …, [and they] enhance [the] learning [of] technical skills by allowing motor imitation’ (Jacob and Jeannerod 2004). In a simulationist account of embodied cognition, Gallese likewise proposes that motor neurons form the basis for what he terms ‘action understanding’ (2004). The learner or practitioner of skills can consciously reflect upon their ‘action understanding’ if the physical execution of their action is blocked. In this case, the resulting motor imagery simulates an imagined engagement in the activity that is ‘felt’ (not pictured), and possibly objectified in motor memory for further contemplation. Studies in sports performance have demonstrated that practitioners can

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effectively harness embodied simulation for skill improvement (Yue and Cole, 1992). The powerful effects of motor imagery were exemplified in Jeannerod’s case of the music teacher and pupil (1994), and apply equally to the attentive building apprentice who closely observes the mason’s performance and to the mason who monitors and evaluates his student’s practice. In their respective situations as observers, both men unconsciously and automatically invoke an embodied simulation or, more crudely, a ‘feeling’ for what needs to be done in achieving a correct practice of carving. Both parsing an observed performance and generating a ‘mental rehearsal’ proceed internally without any overt physical expression of imitation. In an earlier version of his 2005 publication, Arbib noted that ‘what is tuned is the expectation of the action, so that one comes to better and better “understand” (not necessarily consciously), what variants of one’s actions would match those of the master, and what cues must be taken into account to effect a smooth transition from one sub-action to another’. I suggested earlier that in parsing and producing motor practices, the observer and performer are executing searches of not only their respective repertoires of available movements and actions, but also the motor context. It can be speculated that the search process itself, whether of the repertoire or the context, takes an embodied form that invokes the motor mirror neuron system (as distinct from a lexical search that triggers propositional domains of knowledge). Thus the model of a parsing-directed formalism as applied to parsing and production of embodied activity must necessarily be embedded in motor cognition, and will optimally rely on the motor mirror neuron system in the search, selection and mapping processes. This idea has been presented in elementary fashion and will hopefully instigate closer consideration and elaboration. From ‘Shared Utterance’ to ‘Shared Performance’: A Social Construction of Knowledge In my opening Djenné example, the apprentice was positioned between two masons while all three men built up the pointed mud mitres in tandem. At the outset, the apprentice’s principal mentor described what needed to be done using a combination of words, gestures and demonstrations. The apprentice listened and observed carefully and then, taking up a trowel, he engaged in the activity. As a participant, he simultaneously kept an eye on the masons on either side, checking his own production against theirs. He signalled to a fellow labourer to pass him a rectangular mud brick and scrutinized its quality for the purpose of the task. He held it in the palm of his left hand, and with the trowel in his right he proceeded to chop it down to size and shape, eyeing the final result with pleasure and holding it out prominently

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for public display. The mentor, while continuing with his task, kept watch over his procedures and end product. He endeavoured to adjust his protégé’s skills, drawing the young man’s attention to his own example. Next, the apprentice bent down to a woven basket of fresh, oozing mud mortar at his right side and paddled some out with the flat surface of his trowel. He spread the mud evenly over the foundational course of bricks and diligently set his newly carved brick in position. At this point, the mentoring-mason suspended his own bricklaying to assist and guide his pupil. The apprentice stopped and watched carefully, and when he determined what he was meant to be doing, he interjected and anxiously took charge of his own task once again. Exchanging roles of observer and performer occurs regularly in shared physical activities such as team sports or building construction, and actors coordinate their efforts in performing tasks together. In doing so, team players or craftsmen often cut in and take over from each other in completing a goal. This swapping of activities is generally fluid and efficient between skilled experts who, through experience and sharing a history of working together, begin new tasks already sharing very similar goal representations (visual, propositional or motor) of what must be done, and how this will be articulated in their respective motor performances. If initially players entertain divergent goals, a verbal or more often embodied form of smooth negotiation ensues once the difference has been registered. Swapping between observing and doing is also central to teaching-learning processes in skilled activities, as exemplified in the ethnographic example. In the teachinglearning situation where hierarchies of social status and expertise are conscientiously respected, the division between the roles of observer and performer (and subsequently between parser and producer) are likely to be more starkly delineated. This means that swapping roles may not occur with the same fluidity as displayed between seasoned craftsmen, but there is no reason to expect that shared performance and role swapping between a mason and apprentice won’t proceed in the very same cognitive manner. The phenomenon of shared utterance in spoken dialogue was explained in terms of a parsing-directed formalism as developed in DS theory. It was shown that the parser and producer use the same set of computational strategies to unfold a binary tree structure of semanticbased representations, with the main difference in their respective activities being that, for the speaker, the goal tree acts as a subsumption check for all words selected in her incremental production of the utterance. It was also demonstrated that both parser and producer are constructing the same ‘shared’ context, comprised of all partial and completed trees at any given point, minimally including the partial tree under construction. Because both parties share the same series

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of trees and dialogue context, the hearer can perform an abduction step, and jump to the conclusion of what is going to be said, thereby completing the goal tree and possibly finishing the utterance. In turn, the speaker swaps roles and becomes a parser. It is always likely that the hearer-cum-speaker will take the dialogue in new and variant directions in communicating their own propositional representations (or ‘ideas’) relating to the present discussion. In successful dialogue, the speaker-cum-hearer is able to successfully parse her co-interlocutor’s string because she has constructed the same set of semantic-based trees and possesses the same context up to that point. Role swapping is perpetuated throughout dialogue in this manner. And, because all parties involved employ the same computational actions and, at least ideally, construct the same semantic-based representations of content, there is no need for the speaker to make ‘higher-level hypotheses about the state of the interlocutor’ (Purver and Kempson 2004b). I am proposing that the same general principles hold true for shared performance. Both parser and producer – as observer and performer respectively – are employing the very same motor-based computational strategies to incrementally unfold n-nary tree structures of motorbased representations. As discussed in the previous section, it is entirely plausible that such embodied strategies implicate the use of motor mirror neurons. The shared motor context will contain all partial and completed trees, minimally including the one under construction in motor cognition. As in dialogue, shared tree structures and context in motor cognition means that the observer can make a motor-based abduction by simulating what the next movement or action ought to be and thereby successfully complete the goal tree. This abduction process and completion of the goal tree may remain internalized, resulting in motor imagery. Potentially, however, it may be physically enacted in which case the observer switches to the performer’s role by interrupting and taking over his co-practitioner’s task in the same manner that the apprentice took over bricklaying from the mason. Co-practitioners, like interlocutors, are in some sense sharing the task of constructing the representational structures that they both possess, thereby engaging in what might be deemed a social construction of knowledge. Kempson emphasizes that although it may appear that a shared utterance completes an audible string of words, it is in fact a cognitive structure that is being completed (forthcoming). The string of words in an utterance is what allows the hearer to recover and the speaker to communicate the semantic contents of that cognitive structure that both are constructing simultaneously. Similarly, in the case of cooperating masons who fluidly take over from one another in executing and completing a task, it is more than simply the physical task or the crafted object that is being finished. Evidently

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it is their respective motor-based mental representations (goal trees) that are being completed, and ultimately their skill-based knowledge that is being honed and updated.

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Conclusion Boyer instructively reminds us that all anthropological research is about human knowledge (this volume). This chapter has been directly concerned with the nature of knowledge, and more specifically with the multiplicity of different domains of knowledge that are enacted and communicated in environments of situated learning, like the construction site in Djenné. Imitation plays a crucial role in learning and the reproduction of knowledge, but any credible account of reproduction must afford possibilities for variant interpretations and transformation. In order to move beyond Bourdieu’s practice theory (1977) and better understand how practices are produced, reproduced and changed, I introduced two theories that together promote a more satisfying exploration of embodied learning, practice and communication. Mirror neuron theory offers a novel model of embodied cognition that leads toward an explanation of complex imitation involved in manual activities. Dynamic syntax theory accounts for how parity between interlocutors is cognitively achieved, and more specifically how the mental representations of both parties are constructed in dialogue. This was extended beyond spoken language to the exchange of skill-based practices. The chapter ended with an account of how shared performance is achieved and how roles are swapped between actors and observers in a context of apprenticeship. It was explained that because both parties employ the same motor-based computational strategies to incrementally unfold the same or similar motor-based representations, and thus share context, the observer can make a motor-based abduction, complete the goal and fluidly take over the performance. In the takeover, the observer-cum-practitioner may introduce variant interpretations and novel actions and procedures to the exercise. I argued that this sharing in the construction of the motor representations that they both possess amounts to a social construction of knowledge. In sum, knowledge was shown to be dynamically constructed in the coordinated activities between actors in their capacity as interlocutors and practitioners. Knowledge is not possessed by individuals in finite and static form, but rather it is situational and the product of social, cultural and physical interaction. As anthropologists, we must acknowledge this and pay closer attention to people’s situated practices to consider what they do as much as what they say.

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Acknowledgements The fieldwork component of this study was made possible by grants from the British Academy and the School of Oriental and African Studies. I am indebted to Ruth Kempson for her valuable comments on earlier drafts, and I thank my fellow participants at the University of St Andrews conference for their stimulating feedback.

Notes 1. DS challenges the computationalist claim that grammaticality is determined by an irreducible syntactic core (i.e. Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, 2002), positing instead that semantic interpretation is built up during parsing, ‘mapping strings of language onto representations of their meaning as established in context’. In the DS framework, ‘grammaticality is parsability’ – i.e. the successful incremental construction of a mental representation with propositional content and of logical form, using all the information of the words in sequence (Purver and Kempson, 2004a). 2. Note that context here does not refer to the physical, social or cultural context in which the dialogue takes place. Rather it refers to the dialogue context. Dialogue context is not comprised of objective, external language ‘out there’, but, necessarily, refers to the individual mental representations constructed by speaker and hearer in the course of dialogue. In successful communication, both parties will cognitively ‘have’ the same context. 3. This is referred to as lexical alignment by Pickering and Garrod (2004: 175), and further explained using DS theory by Purver and Kempson (2004a).

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References Arbib, M.A. 2005. ‘From Monkey-like Action Recognition to Human Language: An Evolutionary Framework for Neurologists’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences 28(2): 105–24. (And the earlier, June 2003, version of this paper) ——— and G. Rizzolatti, 1997. ‘Neural Expectation: A Possible Evolutionary Path from Manual Skills to Language’, Communication and Cognition 29: 393–424. Bloch, M. 1992. ‘Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science’, Man 26: 183–98. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Chomsky, N. 1975. Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon. Fodor, J. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2001. The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scopes and Limits of Computational Psychology. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Gallese, V. 2004. ‘Intentional Attunement: The Mirror Neuron System and Its Role in Interpersonal Relations’. http: //www.interdisciplines.org/ mirror/papers/1 Glenberg, A.M. 2002. ‘Grounding Language in Action’, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9: 558–65. ——— and M.P. Kaschak, 2003. ‘The Body’s Contribution to Language’, in B.H. Ross (ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 43. San Diego: Academic Press. Goodale, M.A. and D. Milner. 2004. Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodenough, W.H. 1957. ‘Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics’, in P. Garvin (ed.), Report on the Seventh Annual Roundtable Meetings on Linguistics and Language Study, vol. 9. Washington: Georgetown University, pp. 167–73. Hauser, M., N. Chomsky and W. Fitch. 2002. ‘The Faculty of Language: What is it, Who has it, and How Did it Evolve?’, Science 298: 1569–579. Jackendoff, R. and B. Landau. 1992. ‘Spatial Language and Spatial Cognition’, in R. Jackendoff (ed.), Languages of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jacob, J. and M. Jeannerod. 2004. ‘The Motor Theory of Social Cognition: A Critique’. http: //www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/2 Jeannerod, M. 1994. ‘The Representing Brain: Neural Correlates of Motor Intention and Imagery’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17(2): 187–245. Kempson, R. (forthcoming). ‘The Structural Dynamics of Language’. ———. W. Meyer-Viol and D. Gabbay. 2001. Dynamic Syntax: The Flow of Language Understanding. Oxford: Blackwell. Lave, J. 1988. Cognition in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— and E. Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. Structural Anthropology 1. New York: Penguin. Marchand, T. 2001. Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen. London: Curzon. ——— (forthcoming). The Masons of Djenné. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Pickering, M.J. and S. Garrod. 2004. ‘Toward a Mechanistic Psychology of Dialogue’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27: 169–225. Purver, M. and R. Kempson. 2004a. ‘Incrementality, Alignment and Shared Utterances’, in Proceeding of the 8th Worksop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Catalog), pp. 85–92. ———. 2004b. ‘Context-Based Incremental Generation for Dialogue’, in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG04), Carey’s Manor. Quinlan, P.T. 1991. Connectionism and Psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ryle, G. 1984. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sapir, E. 1963. Language. London: Harvest. Whorf, B.L. 1956. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings. London: Chapman and Hall.

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Yue, G. and K.J. Cole 1992. ‘Strength Increase from the Motor Programme: Comparison of Training with Maximal Voluntary and Imagined Muscle Contractions’, Journal of Neurophysiology 67: 1114–23.

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Chapter 9

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE AND FORMS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A REHABILITATION OF VISION?

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Cristina Grasseni

Anthropology is facing, like many other disciplines, what has by now been named a ‘practice turn in contemporary theory’ (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigny 2001). Practice is working as a theoretical hub for a re-categorization of knowledge and cognition: it is being used to re-conceptualize the Marxist concept of praxis, in ways that owe much to the philosophical currents of American pragmatism, analytical philosophy of language and Continental hermeneutics. It should be very good news for anthropology that even philosophers now consider the field of practice as the starting point for their epistemological reflections. At least within these debates, the paradigm of a rationality based on an explicit, propositional and individually-owned theory of knowledge is now superseded in favour of models of knowledge that take into account the tacit, non-propositional, collective and practical aspects of knowledge and cognition. This chapter aims at situating a reflection about ways of knowing in relation to the anthropology of practice and the anthropology of the senses. I shall do so by illustrating and discussing the affinity and usefulness of the concepts of ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998) and of ‘form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1953). Diverse ways of knowing will be considered as the result of participation in different communities of practice, meaning here, in the broadest sense, social and material contexts for training and learning. In other words, communities of

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practice can cradle and nurture social and cognitive skills, habits and attitudes, value-laden stances, emotional patterns and engrained beliefs, etc., thus defining the boundaries of what we can consider a form of life. This becomes apparent if we look into ways of learning to look at the world, literally, as ways of seeing that define what is ‘good’ looking (in the sense of a good way of looking at something) and what is good to look at. Let me start by briefly mentioning an ethnographic case, a local initiative that I shadowed during my fieldwork in a village in the Italian Alps. Local villagers got together to draw a tourist map of their valley. From their meetings, some interesting connections emerged between practices of locality, ways of seeing and the phenomenology of the landscape. The mayor of the village chaired a group of volunteers to design and publish a map. A tourist guide had just been issued by the regional administration, but he felt that only locals could be the proper sources of knowledge of the territory. The group included, amongst others, expert mountain-goers, a university student, a cheese retailer, a marathon runner, a botanist and a hunter. As alpine guides, amateur photographers and habitual hikers, they all engaged in an exercise of embodied imagination, so to speak, namely reliving the experience of walking along the paths in order to better describe it in the guide. But each saw the landscape differently. Their description of the hiking routes matched their experience of the landscape in ways that were closely related to their visual and bodily experience of the land, and to their social ways of appropriating it. There were in fact different timescapes and different landscapes: those walked by the hiker and those studied by the botanist, those run by the marathon man and those photographed for publicity leaflets, those scanned by the hunter looking for prey and those seen through the eyes of nostalgic memory. The map thus became the sediment of a complex, at times difficult negotiation between different ways of envisioning and perceiving the landscape. From observing this process, I concluded that different ways of seeing exist in direct relation to a phenomenology of skills. In other words, different capacities to relate to the landscape are closely bound up with the skilled practices that unfold in it. On this occasion, I do not wish to dwell on the map-making enterprise (see Grasseni 2004a for ethnographic details), but I think the example is worth mentioning, as a good starting point for a theoretical reflection about the relationship between practice and the nature of anthropological understanding. Another example comes from the anthropologist Michael Jackson, who felt that he only reached an empathic understanding of Kuranko culture when, trying to mimic local women kindling and tending their fires, he became ‘suddenly aware of the intelligence of the technique’. His own exercise in ‘practical mimesis’ afforded him an insight into

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‘the close kinship between economy of effort and grace of movement’ (1983: 340). My point here will be that it is not only in preliterate societies such as this one that ‘indigenous understandings are frequently embedded in practices rather than spelled out in ideas’, and that the cultivation and imitation of practical skills are not the exclusive domain of anthropologists, esoteric practitioners or manual workers. On the contrary, the recent refocusing on practice in Western societies – through the notions of apprenticeship and habitus (see for instance Herzfeld 2004, Wacquant 2000) – make us aware of the ineptitude of an implicit dichotomy between Western rational practice and a non-Western, embodied sensibility. For instance, a similar moment of insight, almost of gestalt switch, is experienced when one becomes able to savour the beauty of mathematical abstraction in appropriate formulae. One feels that the formula is not only appropriate, but one also feels the grace of its synthetic power. The fact that embodied dispositions tend to sink in the somatic and the unconscious does not give us licence to confound them with some innate capacity, nor to label it away generically as the result of mimesis. According to Michael Jackson, ‘Kuranko habitus constrains behaviour, and when the bodily unconscious is addressed openly it answers with forms and features which reflect a closed social universe’ (1983: 336). Now, according to what I would call an ecological approach (see, for instance, Ingold 2000), individual behaviour is in fact made possible, not just constrained, by habitus.1 In other words, habitus is the condition of possibility of meaningful individual behaviour in all its diversity and variety. There is no freedom of practice that is then constrained by a socio-historical impediment, just as it makes no sense to talk about experience if it is not in some way constructed and structured by our activities. Thus, ‘using one’s body in the same way as others in the same environment’ is not a matter of speechless understanding or cognitive communion, but a necessary premise to understanding what is said and thought. Jackson proposes to ‘advance a grounded view which begins with interactions and movements of people in an organised environment, and considers in detail the patterns of body praxis which arise therein’ (1996). In what follows I hope to propose a few examples of such detailed considerations of the ways in which everyday bodily practice, the use of relevant objects and social training, contribute to the configuration of specific ways of knowing. I should caution from the start that the analytical study of the environment as a richly textured, socially and physically organized basis for cognitive and social action, does not eschew sympathetic, empathic and embodied participation. In fact the main tenet of the essay is that wholesome and meaningful participation is achieved through careful adherence to step-by-step training in social and cognitive action.

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Towards an Ecology of Practice What is generally meant by practice is some form of human activity that takes place in a material context, which defines its boundaries, scopes and means, and in a social context, which includes communities of practitioners, networks of peers and competitors. Therefore studying practice is not possible without considering an anthropological observation of apprenticeship and social training, or, in other words, the processes of situated learning that Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger named ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (1991). This is the critical moment of the socialization of new actors, through apprenticeship, in specific ‘communities of practice’. I would take as the broadest possible definition of apprenticeship that of a process of ‘education of attention’ (a phrase used by Ingold 2000 in the stricter ecological sense after James Gibson 1979). By that I mean a relational and contextual process that shapes specific skills of perception, relation and cognition, which are in turn instrumental to justify and reproduce specific contexts of action. Coming from the schools of cultural psychology and organization studies, Lave and Wenger underlined the unity of the cognitive and operative aspects on the one side and, on the other, the socialising and relational dynamics of apprentices and experts. This trend of analysis has produced many ethnographies of professional practices (seaman, doctor, psychotherapist, computer programmer or smithy2) which all stress the social dimension of learning and performing, eschewing a disembodied cognitive modelling. The underlying thesis is that common criteria of action, perception and evaluation (both moral and aesthetic) are socialized in contexts of co-participation. From an anthropological point of view, then, communities of practice, in their broadest sense, offer concrete scopes and targets of observation to highlight the dynamics of cognition, skill and social roles in their making. This radically shifts the problem of ways of knowing from the objects to the subjects and to their forms of knowledge. Knowing, meaning at once a cognitive process and one of understanding (Verstehen) can be illuminated starting from the relational and material constitution of systems of activity. In other words, understanding ways of knowing would be a matter, not of establishing relevant models of cognitive patterns, but of reconstructing histories of learning (Pálsson 1993: 34). Likewise, cultural belonging would be the result of enskilment, not of enculturation (Ingold 1993), of resonance rather than of interpretation (Wikan 1993), and understanding cultures a problem of learning rather than one of translation (Pálsson 1993). To this approach, I would add the importance and attention devoted in different disciplinary realms to artefacts and what we do

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with them. Artefacts (books, pictures, tools, computers, etc.) are being recognized as key elements in relational and mental human life (Hutchins 1995; Norman 1988). The focus is still on the body as the privileged means for experiencing the world, whilst tacit knowledge and practical expertise become crucial parts of our being human. The sociality of body praxis has been recognised as early as Marcel Mauss’s study in the techniques of the body (1979 [1935]), which underlined their learnt and social character, not reducible to the psychology of the individual (Schlanger 1998). Practice theory owes much to this first recognition of the body as the realm of non-discursive, socially acquired, context-bound knowledge. To this, the focus on artefacts adds analytical scope for a detailed investigation of how learning, enskilment and even resonance happen in concrete contexts, which are structured for specific action, perception and social interaction. Furthermore, communities of practice pinpoint a level of anthropological analysis from which to assess the never-solved but almost-forgotten philosophical conundrum of cultural incommensurability, which has bogged both philosophy and anthropology as a dilemma of cultural relativism (Hollis and Lukes 1982). Both Wittgenstein and Habermas have – each in a different way – posed the problem of the pragmatic pre-conditions for common action and understanding: Wittgenstein (1969) proposing ‘certainty’ as our immediate and reflexive sense of being rooted in reality; Habermas considering language as intersubjective action that presupposes a Lebenswelt. This topic has been similarly phrased in terms of the ‘pragmatic turn’ in Dewey’s theory of thought as action, in Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowing how and knowing that, and in the philosophy of everyday language (Austin, Wittgenstein, Rorty). For Wittgenstein certainty is not investigable, but it is the limit, the boundary of what is sayable. We never doubt our ‘common sense’: it is the background against which we distinguish between true and false (1969: section 94). Some have defined the human ‘deep need for agreement’ (Wittgenstein 1956: section 74) as a transcendental structure, shared by the members of a form of life (Borutti 1993). Here, ‘transcendental’ simply means, a la Wittgenstein, ‘what cannot be said’, i.e. the bounds of sense, the contour that shapes sense but cannot be drawn, only lived in. Without delving into the specificities of these philosophical arguments we may distil a common assumption amongst them that is of anthropological interest, that is, that practice is the ultimate dimension of our being in the world. The very fact of participating in a richly textured environment – full of objects, images and body patterns – structures and guides our perception tacitly and implicitly. As a result, practice can engender understanding as a sediment of

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experience and skill. Ultimately, our physical being in the world is not indifferent to the world we can know and to the ways we look at the world (Jackson 1996; Casey 1996; Stoller 1989). The emphasis is hence on practice and tacit knowledge as ways of both constructing and accessing constellations of meaning. As for the notion of ‘community of practice’, we can take it as a useful ethnographic grounding of the epistemological notion of ‘form of life’. Together they can provide the scope for studying anthropologically different ways of knowing on two different levels: firstly, as understanding. This is understood as an emergent property of shared practical contexts (professional, linguistic, cognitive, everyday), through processes that involve identityformation. Secondly, as cognition, namely, in the broadest sense, as the ways in which any information about the world is gained and put to work. In other words, the notions of community of practice and of form of life converge on the issue of practical understanding, which is achieved locally, through learning experiences. By understanding ‘worldviews’3 as anthropologically embodied in a community of practice, the incommensurability between different ‘language games’ would be solved, so to speak, on the ground. By participating in many different constellations of communities of practice, in various capacities and degrees in the course of one’s life, one pragmatically gains the capacity to relate to those ‘forms of life’ that are in some way contiguous to one’s own. Reference to some ethnographic material should help showing, at this point, how considering ways of knowing as anthropologically embedded in communities of practice, as forms of life, is a valid alternative to classical notions of cognition and understanding. This example focuses on the role of artefacts in organized environments, showing how interacting socially with value-laden artefacts influences the formation of significant patterns of meaning and social action.

Toys and Trophies During my fieldwork in Alpine northern Italy, I first lived with a family of dairy farmers in Valtaleggio, in Lombardy, during the summer season of the high-pasture grazing (alpage), over two successive years. Then I started visiting cattle-sheds and agricultural fairs, doing participant observation with breed experts, vets and other professionals in the trade of breed selection (the planned reproduction of cattle through artificial insemination). During this experience, the notion of participant observation took on for me the phenomenological hue of trying to assume the same gaze as the ethnographic subject, and, to an extent, trying to share the same lived experience. As an ethnographer and visual anthropologist, I felt that learning to look at my hosts’ cows

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was a necessary premise to accessing their worldview and sharing their practice. For instance, after I spent two summers with my hosts I was still not aware of how beautiful their cattle looked, in the eyes of their fellow-breeders, i.e. according to the shared judgement of their community of practice. It was after I toured some other fifty stables with a breed expert and I learnt how to look at cattle according to their “professional vision” (Goodwin 1994), that I recognized what I had already heard about them, but had not yet been able to see for myself: that my hosts were outstanding in their profession of dairy breeders. Within that professional community, they shared a firm belief in artificial selection as a way of ‘improving’ the breed. As a result, the ‘beauty’ of their cows was assessed on the basis of purebreeding, aimed at increasing production within a model of intensive agriculture. It should be kept in mind that such criteria are in many ways controversial, both in terms of their sustainability and of animal welfare. In a sense, I had to become a child again – an experience many anthropologists have undergone – and learn to see as I was taught in order to appreciate how they did (Grasseni 2004b). Children of families in the breeding trade are similarly daily exposed to criteria, artefacts and tokens of animal beauty that pertain to the professional practice of the adults. They get progressively involved in the family practice through ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, i.e. through easy tasks that nevertheless complete, and cohere with, the rest of the adult breeding activities. It is not uncommon to find twelve-year-old children employed on the high pastures for a season, in exchange for maintenance, little money and the privilege of learning the job. Though this kind of indenture are now progressively superseded by adult hired workers, especially from Eastern Europe, who already know the job and are much more productive, it is still the norm to involve one’s family’s children in the professions of the adults. Children may help during milking by stimulating the cows’ teats before milking proper, or by fetching the cows from the herd, one at a time, to queue them up for milking. They may keep an eye on the herd and help out fencing to allow grazing only on specific portions of the pastures. During visits from fellow-herders, they are involved and listen to the conversations. They come along to cattle fairs where they also play a legitimate role by parading the youngest exemplars in the ring (especially calves, see figure 9.1). When I was living with a family of dairy farmers, breeders of Alpine Brown cows, I observed the eight-years-old grandson of my hosts, playing ‘herding’ with plastic toy-cows. I video-recorded his game which appeared in a scene in my film, Those Who Don’t Work Don’t Make Love. We see the establishing shot of a mountain pasture where scattered cows are grazing peacefully, along a dirt track winding down

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Figure 9.1 Children engage in ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ at the Valtaleggio Cattle Fair of October 2004. Brushing the exemplars clean before parading young heifers and calves.

towards an invisible village-base. The children voices explain: ‘here we are going to make a proper road, so we can come up with the truck and load goats, pigs, chickens, everything …’. When the camera zooms out one becomes quickly aware that the scene is a miniature reproduction of a real life scene, the cows are plastic toys and the children have carved out a miniature trail with their fingers. At closer inspection, the plastic toy-cows resemble templates of breed selection for the Alpine Brown Breed. Templates are models, exemplary standards for the improvement of the breed. They play an important cognitive role in the dissemination of the ideals of breed selection: as the child’s father once explained to me: ‘in order to understand how to better a cow you have to be able to detect her faults by comparison with an ideal model. The model is that one,’ he said, pointing to the top of his kitchen cupboard. On display were trophies won at cattle fairs, chalk exemplars of ideal Brown cows (see Grasseni 2005c). When asking myself what part the plastic toy cows would play in the child’s social training, I could not escape noticing their resemblance to the trophies and the ubiquity of such templates, which embody an aesthetic ideal that has been shaped and handed down in the history of animal husbandry since the inception of animal portraiture at the end of the eighteenth century (Grasseni 2007a). Especially for

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the novices learning a professional practice, the role of reference benchmarks is paramount. For instance, adult dairy-breeders celebrate and acknowledge appropriate examples of ‘good-looking’ animals at cattle fairs. Criteria for animal beauty are shared and expressed in debates, gossip and in the very exercise of looking at animals together, commenting on their worth. This is an important way of socializing knowledge within a community of practitioners, and is mimicked by children, who often develop a keen memory for genealogies and animals’ names. Criteria of animal perfection are not abstracted from economic, professional and historical contexts: the very idea of a distinctive shape and colour as characteristic of a specific breed, or that of ‘improving’ milk and meat production through selective breeding, was unheard of until the momentous change in the history of animal husbandry that took place with the Agricultural Revolution. Now, as back then, the message of agricultural improvement and the aesthetics of breed selection become hegemonic not only through professional discourse and practice, but through daily exposure to commodities and artefacts that confirm and reproduce such aesthetic criteria and such messages of ‘progress’ (Grasseni 2007a). Iconic artefacts abound in the daily and professional environment of both children and adults involved in the practice of breeding. They include adverts and commodities sold at festivals and cattle fairs: toys, posters and different types of templates of the ‘ideal cows’, reproducing specimens of relevant breeds. Commodities and freebies such as watches, caps, pens, etc. all bear relevant icons of selected breeds. Posters, magazines and videos frame ‘animal beauty’ according to prescribed positions and angles that enhance ‘fine’ limbs and mighty udders, as in the tradition of animal portraiture and of two-dimensional templates of the ‘ideal cow’ (Grasseni 2005a). However periodically revised, models of ‘ideal cows’ are ubiquitous in the breeding practice, for instance they appear on certificates of prizes won at cattle fairs, though nowadays they are computer-generated rather than painted (see Figure 9.2). Whether toys or trophies, exemplary specimens or templates, these artefacts are particularly apt at establishing reciprocal relations between expert vision and professional skill. The paramount skill of a cattle fair’s judge is to rank animals by looking at them in the ring. A breed expert is also called to give numerical scores to each exemplar in a shed by looking at their relevant traits (Grasseni 2005b). Such traits are prominently enhanced in computer-generated graphics, photographed champions and even plastic toys. They become iconic in as much as they are then mass reproduced and sketched on commodities, freebies and trophies. To conclude, an extensive ethnographic study of this case of professional vision has led me to rethink vision in terms of skill.

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Figure 9.2 Examples of commodities that represent and disseminate the aesthetics of selective breeding: a watch being sold at the Swiss Brown stand of Bergamo’s agricultural fair, September 2005, with relevant posters being displayed in the background. Below, a plastic toy-cow and a computergenerated model of an ‘Italian Brown Cow.’ Next, prizes and trophies about to be handed out at Valtaleggio’s Cattle Fair, October 2004.

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Skilled Visions Why consider the issue of vision, or rather, of learning to see, within a reflection about ways of knowing, in, and of, anthropology? My conviction is that vision is one important sensorial and cognitive medium, amongst others, through which ways of knowing are learned and can consequently be investigated. A vast literature, interdisciplinary and anthropological, has focused on vision. On the one hand, it stressed the paramount role played by it towards a technological mediation of knowledge. Imaging technologies and cognitive artefacts were shown to be powerful translators of tacit knowledge into viable go-betweens (protocols, formulae, printed texts, explanatory schemas and cognitive aids such as shopping lists) that guarantee that experts act in a coherent and orderly way (Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Latour 1986, 2005). On the other hand, recent ethnographic literature (Goodwin 1994, 2000; Grasseni 2007b) strives to re-contextualize vision within a phenomenology of everyday practice. Each of these two trends actually points in opposing directions: a critique of vision, meant as synonym for the overview, the gaze, or the panoptic; and a rehabilitation of plural visions, meant as local and shared practices: situated, embodied and connected to the other senses. We can map this debate onto an analytic/synthetic divide: while the critics of vision stress the analytical power of imaging technologies, more ‘sensuous’ ethnographers (Stoller 1997) underline the synthetic experience of perception. When I was trained in visual anthropology at the Granada Centre of the University of Manchester, I took my first steps into ethnographic fieldwork being convinced that an observational documentary could suggest the contours of a form of life, taken as a community of practice, sometimes even better than ethnographic writing. I subsequently questioned this initial impression and used audio-visual media as a tool of analysis as well as a synthetic means for constructing meaning. To combine both such aspects is to recognize that there is no seeing without looking, in so far as seeing implies an active search for information from the environment (Gibson 1979). Such capacity, I argue, is the result of a skilled vision (Grasseni 2004b), which is only obtained through apprenticeship and an education of attention. Charles Goodwin has convincingly demonstrated how ‘coding schemes are a systematic practice used to transform the world into the categories and events that are relevant to the work of a profession’ (Goodwin 1994: 608). In other words, ‘coding’, ‘highlighting’ and ‘producing and demonstrating material representations’ of complex phenomenal events is of paramount importance to the construction of a shared ‘professional vision’. This shapes events and gives them

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meaning from a point of view that is internal to a community of specialized practice. Goodwin (1994) analyses this process in the case of apprentice-archaeologists mapping a dirt patch, but also of police officers justifying recourse to violence as if it was a methodical and controlled practice!… Goodwin’s article, in particular, shows the powerful strategies of ‘professional vision’ at work in literally constructing events, even in a case – such as the infamous Rodney King’s beating – where one would naively assume that video-recorded data would constitute an unquestionable piece of ‘objective’ evidence. One can be taught to look at something in an unsuspected way – and to be convinced of what one sees. Even though participating in a practice takes on the quality of flexibility, attunement and holistic resonance with a given taskscape (Ingold 1993b), the tools which allow us to participate in, and share, ways of knowing, are provided by a perceptual environment, accurately specified and effectively inculcated. Learning some ‘good looking’ is inevitably part, and a necessary precondition, of insight. I borrow this pun on words from Barbara Stafford’s analysis of the history of art, science and collecting since the eighteenth century. Stafford crucially places images on the same side of ‘sensory’ messages, against both the iconoclasm of the Western intellectual tradition from Plato to Foucault, and the semiotic preferences of interpretative anthropology. In an interesting twist of the mainstream argument, Stafford denounces that the labelling of ‘gaze’ as perspectival and voyeuristic is precisely the product of a Cartesian bias against the sensorial and phenomenologically ductile quality of vision. She argues for a good sensuality of the image and for the intelligence of sight. Instead of ‘condemning all forms of persuasion as specious and manipulative’ (1996: 14), she invokes a developmental link between perception and understanding. The role of vision as sensory message means that ‘translation is not the sole, or even the most effective, means for facilitating exchange’ (Stafford 1996: 6; see also Pálsson 1993). This is an important consideration not only for art historians, but also for anthropologists who wish to reconsider the very categories of their ways of knowing. Reconsidering the senses, even the most contaminated by the globalizing design of the West (as is the case with the plastic toy-cows mentioned above), means taking seriously an ecological and developmental account of ways of knowing. For instance, the ethnographic example mentioned at the beginning of the chapter shows that the perception of the landscape is not homogeneous, and it is not monolithic even within the so-called ‘Western world.’ This, despite the domination of tropes inherited by landscape painting, perspective and projection as the correct ways of viewing and knowing the territory.4 As Paola Filippucci notes in

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her study of conservation in northern Italy, ‘often Western spatial conventions are part of how people describe and order the world and so also define place. They become therefore part of the data rather than tools for the analysis’ (1997). We are all picturesque-literate inasmuch as we apply to our perceptual modalities the categories borrowed from exemplary patterns, such as those of TV ads and other visual artefacts that are disseminated in the texture of our everyday environments, our lifeworld. But we are also capable of shifting between different visual codes. One may well manage both the skills of the mountain runner and those of the mushroom picker. The former scans the ground quickly approaching under her feet, avoiding obstacles and choosing safe stepping points, whilst keeping track of the route while crossing woods, tagging along ridges and noticing milestones. The latter notices subtle chances in hue, texture and humidity of the ground, identifying the ideal habitat for the mushroom she is looking (and smelling) for. In fact, the relationship with the landscape is not only restricted to sight (see Gray 1999; Stoller, 1989), but also includes the bodily perception of the weather, or conditions of light and temperature. The power of the overview, which Fabian parallels with disembodied, abstracting and abstracted ‘formalization’, can and in fact does coexist with the enskilled, embodied and emplaced sense of vision that characterizes many professional and developmental contexts. Analogously, one may treat ‘perspective’ not simply as a conventional code of representation, but as one of the possible functional ways of integrating several viewpoints in one, namely not as a ‘copy’ of the landscape but as an embodied way of recording the invariant elements in a visual field, which is constantly in fluctuation as the subject moves about. For instance, John Gray, in his study of practices of walking, and more recently motor biking, of hill sheep-farms in the Scottish Borders, has shown how ‘seeing and gathering’ is strategically associated with the use of vantage points and binoculars (Gray 1999). The use of such artefacts and of associated techniques of viewing is instrumental to place-making, regional identity and ‘lived spatiality’. As another example, the ability to get an overview coexists with skilful vision and with the subtle co-ordination of touch and the movements of arms, fingers and limbs in the performance of laser heart surgery (Collins 1997). The dominant character that certain forms of vision may exercise in various realms of social and cognitive action cannot be disputed and should be brought up in ethnographic observation. I refer to skilled visions (Grasseni 2007b) as capacities and capabilities that only some people own (while other people own others), to highlight the fact that we all use our eyes skilfully, i.e. in an educated way. As skill is personally

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owned and situated in a context, it differs from person to person, and from community of practice to community of practice, according to the history of the apprenticeships and trainings undergone by each. In particular, by using the phrase ‘skilled visions’ one aims not so much at focusing on activities that make one’s expertise visible, but rather to observe and reveal the processes through which one acquires the ability to ‘see through’ grids, ideal types and standard artefacts. To see the world through them means effectively ‘seeing the world as’: the schooling of the eye may allow differently trained people to derive different, or conflicting information, from the same visual artefact. Conversely, the ability to trace, view and make use of different artefacts coherently marks the social and cognitive cohesion of a community of practice. Far from being the exercise of ‘neutral’ or ‘disembodied’ observation, then, skilled visions can be analysed in terms of practical routines, and of social and aesthetic belonging. Different practices of looking yield different ways of knowing. So cattle breeders, archaeologists, laser surgeons, even police consultants (Goodwin 1994) do have different worlds in front of their eyes, because they were all trained to see them, some being more gifted than others. To exercise skilled vision means to belong socially to communities and networks that share aesthetic sensibilities, principles of good practice, rituals of participation, ways of apprenticeship, ideological stances and political interests. Focusing on their making can provide anthropological insight into identity, conflict and ideology, as well as to the variety, resistance and relevance of localized aesthetics. While most of the recent anthropology of the senses has been striving to recreate a balance in the study of non-visual senses, ‘gaze’ has become synonymous for an ethnocentric, hegemonic way of exercising vision, imbued with rationalism. This has not helped to consider and study ethnographically the fact that visual knowledge is also embodied (Stoller 1997). Instead of reifying ‘vision’, ‘touch’, ‘taste’, etc., an ecological investigation of perception shows that sensory experience is multi-sensorially woven into the environment. But such investigation should also take into consideration what skilled practitioners know well, that is, that ‘bodily knowledge’ entails discriminating and disciplining one’s attention and the focus of one’s senses, including that of sight. Hence, understanding practice is not simply the result of holistic adhesion but of attentive and analytical apprenticeship into complex patterns of action. In other words, illumination and insight may well result from an exercise in ‘good looking’. Therefore I would avoid a clear-cut distinction between looking as a spectator and seeing as participant, or between looking as analytical, dismembering and disembodied and seeing as ‘receptive, absorbing and experiential’ (Okely 2001: 103). Seeing is not a matter of passive resonance, it

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is the result of a proactive education of attention, which requires repeated training and discernment. Conversely, looking may well not be the overarching gaze of a detached outsider. While calling for more ‘sensuality’ in anthropological scholarship one should therefore also recommend to maintain a close attention and analysis of the actual practices in relation to which embodied knowledge is construed. The attunement of the senses is always obtained with reference to certain particular skilled practices – something involving education, discernment and sometimes discipline, as well as ‘disponibility’ and ‘whole body perception’.

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Conclusion I have argued for a higher consideration and an analytical investigation of the social, political and technical relevance of visual training, and its importance within embodied practice. I did so in the light of different theoretical sources and considerations, in particular: an appreciation of the current phenomenological, senses-oriented trend in anthropology; the practice-approach in the social sciences (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigny 2001); Wittgenstein’s philosophical notion of form of life, and its relevance to the anthropological problem of translation and cross-cultural understanding; an ‘ecological’ approach to cognition – particularly the realization that knowledge is socially distributed (Hutchins 1995), and that skilled practice is the result of an ‘education of attention’ (Gibson 1979; Ingold 2000). I have mentioned ethnographic materials (which I have analysed in detail elsewhere) on the basis of which one can come to the conclusion that practice shapes different types of visions, which exist in conjunction with specific skills, emotional and cognitive attitudes. Redefining vision in terms of skill can contribute to the agenda of rehabilitating vision in anthropology, by exploring the ways in which vision can be shared across a community of practice as an enskilled sense. In particular, it is impossible to define vision as a skilled capacity without highlighting the processes of apprenticeship, the institutional hierarchies and the contexts of labour that generate skilled visions as specific forms of practice. The aim though, is not only to acknowledge the existence of a social context for a specific practice of seeing (which can be professional, artistic, scientific …), but also to dwell on the actual processes through which people are trained to see. The environment for the education of attention is structured by relevant artefacts, as well as by social (institutional or informal) paths of engagement in practices. By learning to manipulate, relating to, and applying certain frames, tools and categories, a person undergoes

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a very concrete process of ‘enskilment’. Relating such local practices to the global circulation of artefacts, and to the historical processes of commodification, may help in restoring the balance between the need for a detailed ethnography of ways of knowing and their relevance to a ‘global hierarchy of value’ (Herzfeld 2004). For the anthropologist, too, an exercise in acquiring a ‘professional’ vision involves disciplining, selecting, re-interpreting and distancing from the objects of one’s naive and undistinguished vision. In other words, to share a process of enskilment means, for the anthropologist, to acquire a reflexive tool – one that sensitizes a fieldworker to the complexities of aesthetics, in their concrete embodiment in practices. Ultimately, illumination may well result from an exercise in ‘good looking’.

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Notes 1. Bourdieu used habitus to defend an idea of agency, flexibility and ductility of strategies against the structuralist and functionalist notion of social norms. The habitus does not blindly reproduce social structures; nevertheless, Bourdieu’s agent is only socially competent in-so-far as she is formed in a social context. A precise definition of habitus is hard to find: ‘embodied history, internalised as second nature and as such forgotten as history’, ‘the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’ (1990: 283). Michael Jackson argues that Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ is fundamentally similar to the phenomenological notion of ‘lifeworld’, despite Bourdieu’s criticism of Husserlian phenomenology (1996: 20). Perhaps beyond a philologically correct use of the term, here by habitus I simply mean habitual action (social, cognitive and gestural) that is shared with others in a given environment. 2. See, for instance, Chaiklin and Lave (1993), Engestroem and Middleton (1998), Goodwin and Ueno (2000). 3. I understand worldviews as shorthand for the viewpoint that is specific of a certain form of life. I use the term in a different way from Nigel Rapport’s ‘diverse worldviews’: ‘The strings of verbal associations had revealed enclosed loops of thought which located their owner in a complete self-contained world of people and events, of values, norms and constraints’ (1993: 79) … ‘I decided to call these loops of thought world views’ (ibid: 80). For Rapport, these are ‘texts’ or ‘fragments of texts’, inhabiting our individual minds and thus composing a ‘worldview’ or ‘form of life’. Rapport does not explain what makes it possible for people with different worldviews to communicate with each other. In fact, he stresses the failure of communication amongst worldviews. He does not seem to relate lived experience and worldviews, in the sense that these ‘private realities’ are analysable as a form of discourse, by way of linguistic analysis: there are no sensory or visual aspects to them. 4. It has been argued (see Bender 1993) – and counter-argued (Okely 1998, 2001) – that landscape painting and Western perspective intrinsically demonstrate and enforce a visualist bias, drawing from the debate initiated by art historian John Barrell. He influentially demonstrated that the picturesque aesthetic, as it was reinforced especially during the life of John Constable (1776–1837), was ideological: it first pushed the rural poor in the middle ground, aestheticizing their raggedness, and conclusively drowned them in ‘a romantic image of harmony’ (Barrell

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1980: 16), right at the time when the most momentous changes in the history of agriculture were taking place, with the enclosures phenomenon laying the ground for the productivist and intensive exploitation of the countryside (land, animals and labourers).

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References Barrell, J. 1980. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bender, B. 1993. ‘Landscape – Meaning and Action’, in B. Bender (ed.) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence: Berg, pp. 1–18. Borutti, S. 1993. Per un’Etica del Discorso Antropologico. Milano: Guerini. Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Casey, E.S. 1996. ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time’, in S. Feld and K. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Seattle: School of American Research Press, pp. 13–52. Chaiklin, S. and Lave, J. (eds). 1993. Understanding Practice. Perspectives on Activity and Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, H.M. 1997. ‘Ways of Going on: An Analysis of Skill Applied to Medical Practice’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 22: 267–284. Engeström, Y. and D. Middleton (eds). 1998. Cognition and Communication at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Filippucci, P. 1997. ‘The Politics of Territorial Value: The Case of Bassano, Italy’, in N. Winder and S. van der Leeuw (eds), Environmental Perception and Policy Making: Cultural and Natural Heritage and the Preservation of Degradation-Sensitive Environments in Southern Europe. Report to the Commission of the European Community, contract no. EV5V-CT94– 048, Vol. 2. Gibson, J.J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Goodwin, C. 1994. ‘Professional Vision’, American Anthropologist 96(3): 606–33. Goodwin, C. 2000. ‘Practices of Seeing: Visual Analysis: An Ethnomethodological Approach’, in T. van Leeuwen and C. Jewitt (eds), Handbook of Visual Analysis. London, Sage Publications, pp. 157–82. ——— and N. Ueno (eds). 2000. Vision and Inscription in Practice. Special Issue of Mind, Culture and Activity 7(1–2). Grasseni, C. 2004a. ‘Skilled Landscapes: Mapping Practices of Locality’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 699–717. ———. 2004b. ‘Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics’, Social Anthropology 12(1): 1–15. ———. 2005a. ‘Tierdarstellung, agrarischer Fortschritt und die Ökologie des Blicks für die agrarische Landschaft’, in U. Eskildsen, H.-J. Lechtreck (eds), Nützlich, süss und museal – das fotografierte Tier. Museum Folkwang, Steidl, Essen, pp. 96–102.

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———. 2005b. ‘Designer Cows: The Practice of Cattle Breeding between Skill and Standardization’, in Society and Animals 13(1): 33–50. ———. 2005c. ‘Disciplining Vision in Animal Biotechnology’, Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice 12(2): 44–55. ———. 2007a. ‘Good Looking: Learning to Be a Cattle Breeder’, in Grasseni 2007b. ———. (ed.) 2007b. Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Gray, J. 1999. ‘Open Spaces, Dwelling Places: Being at Home on Hill Farms in the Scottish Borders’, American Ethnologist 26(2): 440–60. Herzfeld, M. 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hollis, M. and S. Lukes (eds). 1982. Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ingold, T. 1993a. ‘The Art of Translation in a Continuous World’, in G. Pálsson (ed.), Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse. London: Berg, pp. 210–30. ———. 1993b. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology 25: 152–174. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jackson, M. 1983. ‘Knowledge of the Body’, Man 18: 327–45. Jackson, M. 1996. ‘Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique’, in M. Jackson (ed.), Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Latour, B. 1986. ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands’, Knowledge and Society 6: 1–40. ———. 2005. ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Makings Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Karlsruhe: ZKM Centre for Art and Media, and Cambridge: MIT Press. Lave, J. and E. Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, M. and S. Woolgar (eds). 1990. Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mauss, M. 1979 [1935]. ‘Techniques of the Body’, in idem, Sociology and Psychology. London: Routledge and Kegan, pp. 97–123 Norman, D. 1988. The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Okely, J. 1998. ‘Picturing and Placing Constable Country’, in K. Fog Olwig and K. Hastrup (eds), Siting Culture. London: Routledge. ———. 2001. ‘Visualism and Landscape: Looking and Seeing in Normandy’, Ethnos 66(1): 99–120. Pálsson, G. (ed.). 1993. Beyond Boundaries. Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse. London, Berg. Rapport, N. 1993. Diverse World-views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Schatzki, T. K. Knorr Cetina and E. von Savigny (eds.) 2001. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge. Schlanger, N. 1998. ‘The Study of Techniques as an Ideological Challenge: Technology, Nation and Humanity in the Work of Marcel Mauss’, in W. James, N.J. Allen (eds), Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 192–212. Stafford, B.M. 1996. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press. Stoller, P. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wacquant, L. 2000. Corps et Ame: Carnets ethnographiques d’un apprenti boxeur. Marseilles: Editions Agone. Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wikan, U. 1993. ‘Beyond the Words. The Power of Resonance’, in G. Pálsson (ed.), Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse. London: Berg, pp. 184–209. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp and Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1956. Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik/Notes on the Foundations of Mathematics. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp and Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1969. Über Gewissheit/On Certainty. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp and Oxford: Blackwell.

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Chapter 10

SEEING WITH A ‘SIDEWAYS GLANCE’: VISUOMOTOR ‘KNOWING’ AND THE PLASTICITY OF PERCEPTION

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Greg Downey

Many anthropological models of knowledge assume that the human brain stores information much like a computer or file cabinet: an unchanging system of ‘hardware’ houses shifting informational contents, ‘data’ or ‘software’. Increasingly, this model of knowledge is out of step with the neurosciences and research on the brain, cognition, robotics and child development. For many sociological accounts of knowledge, the older ‘file cabinet’ model may prove wholly sufficient; when dealing with how various socio-economic groups have access to knowledge or how political structures may empower certain forms of ‘knowing’, the neural complexities of what it is to ‘know’ may not be overly important. When anthropologists treat what Gilbert Ryle has (1984 [1949]: 25–61) termed pragmatic ‘knowing how’ (rather than propositional ‘knowing that’), however, the filing-cabinet model can hamstring accounts of skill acquisition, perception and expertise. Anthropologists cannot assume that motor and perceptual skills – ‘embodied knowledge’ – necessarily are tacit or implicit analogues to propositional, explicit or symbolic knowledge, or take for granted that the body is physically unchanged by skill acquisition. As Tim Ingold (1998: 28) warns on the limits of ‘embodiment’ as a theoretical rubric:

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It seems to me that the theoretical gains brought by the paradigm of embodiment will be more apparent than real, so long as we fail to take one final, and crucial step, which is to recognize that the body is the human organism, and that the process of embodiment is one and the same as the development of that organism in its environment. (Ingold 1998: 28)

No matter how often we recombine the terms ‘body’ and ‘knowledge’ in new configurations, we cannot fulfil the promise of studies of embodiment if we assume that ‘bodily knowledge’ is just another form of stored information like explicit knowledge (or, more accurately, as some folk theories assume we store explicit knowledge [see Dennett 1991]). Instead, we must ask, how does the body come to ‘know’, and what kind of biological changes might occur when learning a skill. In my studies of capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art and dance, the practical nature and experiential effects of gaining expertise were put at centre stage for me as the necessities of participant-observation research methods thrust me into apprenticeship. Capoeira is a demanding physical discipline, an acrobatic dance-game in which two players strive to trip or to knock each other down while also performing beautifully and harmonizing their movements with an orchestra that guides the players’ interactions. While I was in Brazil studying capoeira my informants routinely discussed the physical changes that capoeira wrought on novice practitioners: the body had to become more able, stronger and more limber before certain techniques were within reach. The senses had to sharpen, physical inhibitions shrink and even the emotional profile of a player change. The ears, for example, had to attend to music differently if one was to learn to play instruments or move in harmony with the game’s orchestra; the genre’s distinctive music had to affect movement dynamics and emotional-corporeal posture (Downey 2002). Perhaps the visual dimensions of capoeira apprenticeship pose the problem of embodied knowledge most acutely. During my training, practitioners repeatedly demonstrated and discussed visual techniques that a capoeirista (a capoeira practitioner) may develop: how to keep sight of an adversary while twisting, turning and cartwheeling; how to avoid being distracted by feints; how to conceal what one is looking at; and how to read other players’ bodies to anticipate their movements. A close examination of visual techniques in capoeira, which this essay outlines, highlights both the complexity and the distinctiveness of embodied knowledge, especially its difference from propositional knowledge. Visual strategies are themselves a form of bodily knowledge, but a player also comes to know through perceptual skills. Visual techniques in capoeira then, demonstrate how the senses

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themselves are, as Edmund Carpenter put it, ‘partly a skill and any skill can be cultivated’ (1972: 20). The question of embodied knowledge in anthropology is even more pressing because in the interdisciplinary brain sciences over the past three decades, a new model of how the brain works has emerged from connectionist models of neural systems, struggles to programme robots to accomplish basic tasks, research on perception and studies on child development. Neuroscientists demonstrate an increasing awareness that the brain is first and foremost not an abstract problemsolver or disembodied ‘knower’, but rather an embodied manager of movement and physical interaction, embedded and dependent upon a structured environment (Clark 1997). This growing awareness of the brain’s materiality and embeddedness poses a challenge to cultural anthropologists: can we propose biologically plausible accounts of enculturation and neurologically plausible models for culture, especially embodied knowledge? The picture of embodied knowledge that emerges from the interdisciplinary conversation, I believe, is rich and varied, and it little resembles the ‘file cabinet’ model of explicit, propositional knowledge. But for cultural anthropologists to keep pace, we must better understand the malleability of physiology, the biological grounds of cultural diversity in knowing, perceiving and human ‘beings’. .

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The Sideways Glance During a roda, or capoeira ‘ring’, at the Grupo de Capoeira Angola Pelourinho (GCAP) one Sunday afternoon, a group of students I knew from another academy showed up to watch us play. That night, the roda was well attended; forty or more spectators sat on benches and cast-off plastic chairs for the two-hour-long series of games. More than two dozen adult members of GCAP played along with some of the young students in the group’s classes for Projeto Axé, a programme dedicated to helping Salvador’s ‘street children’. Unfortunately for the visiting students, the leader of GCAP, Mestre or ‘Teacher’ Moraes, seldom invited visitors to play, unlike at many academies. The visiting students had simply come to watch, travelling a great distance to do so, as the group’s restrictive policies were well known in the community. During a game between our instructor, Mestre Moraes, and one of his veteran students, a bare-chested spectator wandered into the school, his shirt dangling from the waistband of his pants in violation of an academy rule. He was obviously a local resident stopping in to watch and meant no disrespect on a steamy night. Before anyone else could react, even the assistant instructor stationed at the door, Moraes

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interrupted his game in mid-kick, stepped away from his adversary, and told the visitor that, if he wanted to stay, he would have to put on his shirt. The man apologized as the mestre dived back into action. The moment was over so quickly that I doubt everyone in the room even noticed the interruption. Several weeks later, however, another student from the visiting spectators’ academy asked me if Moraes really noticed people entering the academy without shirts while he was playing. This student hadn’t been there to see it for himself. I realized that the story was circulating as proof of Moraes’s mastery of the game. The visitors must have felt that his impressive proficiency was demonstrated, not merely by his prowess in the roda, but also by his sensitivity to what happened outside it. Indeed, Mestre Moraes possessed an awareness of the restricted space of the roda that bordered on the preternatural. Although he careened around the ring while playing heated games, spinning and bounding over and around an opponent as if totally out of control, he managed constantly to survey the entire academy. His erratic movements left players sitting on the edge of the roda with white knuckles; the same stunningly fast pirouettes and leaps that could paralyze an adversary even made the closest spectators fear a collision. I sometimes marvelled that Moraes was aware of his adversary’s position and movements as well as the players seated inches from where he would alight before counter-attacking, and even visitors that entered the academy. And he could keep track of it all while staring off into space, appearing so distant and unengaged that I feared he might inadvertently crash into me when we played. During a class, Mestre Moraes explained that the staggering, spinning style and wandering gaze allowed him to shift constantly to observe the entire roda. The stumbling, erratic steps appeared careless and without purpose, but he insisted that this movement permitted his distantly focused eyes to scan the space around him. He explained that a capoeirista’s swaggering walk when strolling through city streets – a swaying stride was said to be a hallmark of proficiency – allowed similar head and body movements to expand an adept’s field of vision. Behaviour and training could expand one’s perceptions, Moraes suggested. Other capoeiristas agreed that the art could affect a practitioner’s perceptions. ‘If developed properly,’ Mestre Squisito (Costa 1993: 82) writes, … the capoeirista becomes able to discern more and more along with what is seen directly in front of the eyes, developing the ability to perceive things outside the front angle of vision. In this way, the capoeirista can even become able to see behind himself!

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While they ‘played’, some of the best practitioners of Capoeira Angola appeared to be a lesson in studied disinterest. At times their eyes wandered, or they seemed to stare vacantly past one another. Veterans often looked vaguely distracted during a game; they might even pretend that their attention was caught by something outside the roda or that they suddenly noticed something on the floor. The appearance was false, part of a repertoire of cunning subterfuges they had developed with their eyes. If one were foolish enough to follow a veteran’s gaze, looking at the same place that seemed to have caught his or her attention, the savvy practitioner would instantly seize the advantage and go for a sweep or knock-down. Although they might look oblivious, veteran capoeiristas were acutely aware of where an adversary was at all times, and they used their peripheral vision to track another player’s movements. One reason that a capoeirista learns to avoid fixing his or her sight during play is defensive, because one’s gaze can forewarn a perceptive adversary of upcoming actions. In order to conceal their intentions, Frederico Abreu told me that capoeiristas frequently use peripheral vision or the ‘sideways glance’ (olhar de soslaio). As Jair Moura (1991: 12) explains:

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During a counter-attack, a capoeirista should strive to follow the movements of his opponent’s eyes closely. By watching, he can know what an aggressor is looking at, and in this way, before [the aggressor] is able to make the attack, the capoeirista can see the vulnerable point to be struck. To avoid being discovered in this way, capoeiristas … sought to train and possess the ‘cunning look’ or the sideways glance, avoiding, in this way, that an adversary fix their eyes. [A capoeirista] kept his eyes lowered or looked at different places, watching the other contender out of the ‘corner of the eyes,’ or by means of quick glances.

Offensively, Moura (ibid.) also claims that one can, for tactical rather than perceptual reasons, use the eyes to feint and mislead: ‘The peripheral vision possessed by every capable capoeirista permitted him to control all the movements of his adversary.’ All capoeira novices have to train themselves in various different techniques for looking. The most basic, as Ângelo Decânio (n.d.: 218) writes in his ‘Commandments of the Capoeira,’ is: ‘Always watch everyone … and pay attention to your surroundings. Do not lose sight of the movements of your partner.’ A capoeirista learns that even during spinning movements and acrobatics that upend the body, one should never lose sight of an opponent, not for an instant (see also Lewis 1992: 102). This was hammered home to me in one of my very first classes, when I performed a cartwheel looking at the floor. An instructor politely head-butted me in the chest, sending me

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tumbling onto my back. As I rushed to return to my feet, he paused and, wordlessly, pointed to his eye: ‘Pay attention,’ the gesture communicated. These principles may appear to be in contradiction: on the one hand, players must watch constantly, and, on the other, a cunning player ideally should not focus directly on an adversary. These contradictory demands explain why capoeiristas cultivate an apparent disinterest during games, using peripheral vision to watch an adversary. Anthropologist Lowell Lewis confirms that ‘many master players avoid looking one directly in the eye; in fact, they almost always use peripheral vision so that they can appear not to be watching!’ (1992: 102). According to some expert players and observers, including a folklorist who had spent decades working with legendary practitioners and an amateur capoeira historian who was also a renowned player, the use of peripheral vision was not merely a response to necessity. They insisted that an adept could track an adversary better without looking directly at the target. My own mestre echoed this advice, insisting that focal vision could only see one thing; peripheral vision could track many. Loosely focusing on the many moving body parts of an adversary was preferable to concentrating too much on one and taking in too little information, or tracking only a single limb that might be used to feint. So they advocated staring into space over an adversary’s shoulder or off to the side when playing; one even talked about looking beyond an adversary, as if to intentionally fog one’s vision during a game.

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Behaviour in the Visual Perceptual System Capoeira practitioners’ coaching of visual behaviour only makes sense if we consider sight not to be a function of the eyes in isolation, but rather the product of a perceptual system. Ecological psychologist James Gibson (1979) argued that sight is an active ability to engage with the world that deploys, not the eyes alone, but other parts of the body: orienting muscles that turn and focus the eyes, a rotating head, a guiding ear, a swivelling neck, a trained brain and a mobile body. Seeing is the result of scanning, looking, focusing and visually searching. With Gibson’s broad understanding of vision as an active perceptual system, dependent on behaviour, it becomes much easier to recognize how the sideways glance and swaying stride might shift how one sees. Cristina Grasseni (2004, and this volume) explores various processes through which attention is trained and an aesthetic sense of visual form learned in the training of cattle breeders and others in Italy. Expanding

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on points made by Charles Goodwin (1994), Grasseni shows through close ethnographic study how attention is educated. At cattle fairs, for example, the novice breeder’s senses are progressively attuned ‘with the master’s and peers’ expert gestures and refined sensitivity’ (2004: 9) to know how to look, where to focus the attention and how to make sense of what one sees. As Grasseni writes:

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Skilled practitioners know well that bodily knowledge entails discriminating and disciplining the attention of the senses, including that of sight. Skilled vision implies an active search for information from the environment, and is only obtained through apprenticeship and an education of attention. (Ibid.: 13)

In Grasseni’s account (in this volume) of the phenomenological differences in landscape perception that became apparent in a mapping project, she uses the term ‘skilled visions’ to emphasize, not only the plurality of ways of seeing, but also the fact that they are learnt. Her discussion offers concrete examples of differences in ‘bodily knowledge’, forms of acquired expertise that also influence what a skilled perceiver can ‘know’. In other words, skilled visions are both knowledge and means to know. Training to see takes hold of looking behaviours directly in explicit, practical instruction on where to look, while it also affects experience indirectly, as a student following this guidance, starts to know the world through new behaviours. Learning a perceptual practice means living, perceiving and coming to know through it. That is, if one learns to look in a specific way, the world will appear differently than it might through another style of seeing; a different profile of information will be or can be derived from the environment. The sideways glance shapes knowledge, in part, by filtering out certain types of extraneous information, refusing to focus on misleading movements like the sudden hand feint that conceals another attack. Mestre Moraes’s ability to notice a shirtless visitor while playing, far outside the immediate sphere of interaction, demonstrates an ideal sensory state for the game: the practitioner’s attention disperses and covers the whole space. Anytime a player focuses his or her vision, concentration can become a liability. Capoeiristas thus attempt to trick adversaries into focusing their gaze, suddenly ‘showing’ (mostrando) a hand, for example, to incite an opponent to watch it rather than a simultaneous kick that it conceals. Not fixing one’s gaze safeguards against any control that an object of attention could exert over one’s vision. The use of quick motions to feint or distract exploits the sensitivity of the visual perceptual system to ‘visual transients’, the way that sudden changes, especially motion, in our visual field are attention-grabbing

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(O’Regan and Nöe 2001: 947). Typically, we move our field of vision to intercept a visual transient with the fovea. Capoeiristas must learn to suppress this reflex, one that appears to form very early in human ontogenesis, as infants also track moving objects. Alain Berthoz (2000: 193) suggests that mechanisms inhibiting motor actions – like one that might suppress the reflex to look at a sudden feint – are primary conditioning devices that affect a person’s neurological development. One of the ironies of the skilled vision of capoeiristas, then, is that they must train very carefully not to look at irrelevant information because so much of the game depends upon feints and trickery. ‘Knowing how’ to see with the sideways glance means inhibiting a very basic visual reflex, checking the almost instantaneous saccade that usually intercepts a transient in peripheral vision. Specifically, the ‘sideways glance’ also means distinctive scanning patterns of rapid saccades, or eye movements, and not focusing on another player’s face (especially the eyes), torso or a limb that moves suddenly. Since seeing is a whole perceptual system, as James Gibson describes, learning to move one’s eyes differently or shifting one’s habitual scanning pattern can profoundly affect how one sees.1 One learns specific body parts during particular movements that can give away a player’s intentions: if a player puts weight on a ‘pivot’ foot or not, making it likely a feint, if an adversary’s torso is out of control during a handstand or if one is liable to get kicked when trying to attack the inverted body. A practitioner must pay careful attention to the whole body of his or her adversary all at once because some capoeiristas practice movements that are disjointed. Rather than being grounded in the cooperative action of the entire body, movements involve only a single part in isolation, making it very hard to anticipate what will happen from observing other body parts; that way attacks can also be thrown from unforeseen angles. In addition, to be safe, a practitioner’s field of attention should include the spectators who may ‘buy into’ an ongoing game, especially those who might be approaching the ‘foot of the berimbau’ or centre of the orchestra. Novices hear cautionary stories about capoeiristas who, while playing, perceived an adversary’s allies preparing an ambush outside the ring or getting ready to slip a weapon into it. The fact that capoeirstas demonstrate distinctive scanning behaviour is not itself unusual. Alfred Yarbus (1967) demonstrated that, faced with the same scene, people’s eyes will saccade in different patterns depending on the task with which they are presented. Subsequent research has confirmed that ‘visual routines’ or ‘visual search strategies’ vary depending on the task, expertise and even emotional state, but that they focus on extracting essential information for accomplishing specific actions. Even though saccades

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are very fast (typically three per second), they strategically visit and revisit landmarks in a scene depending on whether, for example, a person has been asked to identify the ages of the people, deduce their prior activities, or remember the position of objects (Clark 1997: 29). In other words, everyone with sight is a skilled viewer, adept at using different visual routines or strategies to extract task-relevant information. Research has shown that in such activities as driving, catching a ball, pouring tea, even making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a person’s eyes seldom fall on task-irrelevant objects, patterns and demonstrate a high degree of specificity to the activity. Studies of athletes, such as Land and McLeod’s (2000) research on batting in cricket, reveal that expert athletes learn visual strategies to more efficiently find crucial information. An expert batsman, for example, fixates on the spot where a ball will bounce approximately 100 milliseconds faster than does an intermediate-level batsman, anticipating so as to extract crucial information about the trajectory of the ball after it bounces. Scholars studying soccer, squash, field hockey, juggling, karate and a range of other activities have found that participants demonstrate distinctive visual routines, becoming more efficient as their proficiency improves. As Williams (2000: 745) writes in a review of the research on soccer: ‘Skilled and less-skilled performers can be differentiated on the basis of their visual search behaviours, their ability to distinguish evolving patterns of play and to discern key postural cues signifying opponents’ future actions.’ Anthropologists who study the senses, Tim Ingold (2000: 253, and 1998: 38–40) writes, have tended to assume that the senses themselves are not subject to cultural modification. That is, a society may be ‘occularcentric’, or instead privilege touch or hearing as the most epistemologically certain senses: ‘But just because here vision, or there touch or hearing, have been singled out as vehicles for symbolic elaboration, this does not mean that people will see, hear or touch any differently in consequence’ (ibid.: 283). In fact, capoeiristas can be ‘occularcentric’ like Westerners, but they train their visual systems in significantly different ways. Similarly, one imagines that professional photographers, trackers, birdwatchers, impressionist painters, physical therapists, pickpockets, fossil hunters, jugglers, race-car drivers, and many other sorts of individuals would develop distinctive skilled visions as part of ‘knowing how’ to do these activities (see also Grasseni, this volume).

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Seeing without Knowing The only way to watch everything at once, capoeiristas told me, was to look at nothing in particular. Jair Moura, in his comments on the sideways glance, suggests that peripheral vision is more sensitive to sudden movements. Other teachers echoed these observations, saying that by not focusing on any one thing, a player kept the whole field of vision as sensitive as possible. When I first heard this advice from an instructor, it seemed hard to believe. I treated their counsel like indigenous phenomenology but did not take its ‘accuracy’ too seriously or believe it might correspond with anatomically demonstrable workings of the visual system. I found myself, however, asking if the advice was actually well founded, consistent with neurological data on visual perception and the observable effects of physical training. To my surprise, research on vision tends to support what capoeirstas said. The visual field is not uniform; as O’Regan and Noë (2001: 951) review, researchers have shown that the fall-off in acuity for object detail is rapid outside its centre. Only the middle three degrees of our vision – the fovea – is acutely sensitive to detail, and even within that zone, resolution decreases at only one degree of eccentricity.2 We do not notice this drop-off because rapid saccades almost instantly present to our attention any object of interest; try reading a text while focusing on a single letter, without moving your eyes, and you will see how rapid resolution plummets in the visual field. In contrast, some researchers believe that peripheral areas of the visual field are more attuned to sudden movements than to detail for object identification or colour discrimination (Hardin 1988: 8–12 and 101). Refusing to focus the eyes directly on an adversary may manipulate the visual field to increase a capoeirista’s responsiveness to sudden surprise attacks, especially if the fovea is liable to distraction or competes with peripheral receptivity in attention. Studies of other athletes, such as soccer goalkeepers facing penalty shots, have found that they, too, often fixate their eyes near, but not on, crucial anatomical landmarks. Theorists of sports perception have suggested that the use in sports of ‘visual pivots’, points between crucial sources of information, may be strategic because information about any single body part is less important than the relative motion between crucial areas, and that relative motion information may be more effectively ascertained from peripheral vision.3 One irony concerning capoeiristas’ practical knowledge of the visual field, however, is that the phenomenological effect that they have noted arises from a perceptual structure that they cannot know on the basis of their experience: vision is not a single sense although our experience may tell us it is. Research over the past two decades on primate visual

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systems, on functional brain images of the visual system, and on perceptual anomalies caused by lesions has gradually revealed that the visual system is not a unified perceptual apparatus. Rather, the eyes are linked to the brain along different channels serving separate functions. Specifically, one neural-optical system, a ventral ‘perceptual’ or geniculostriate neurological stream explicitly identifies objects and colours; another, a dorsal tectopulvinar pathway orients action in space (Goodale and Milner 2004; Goodale and Westwood 2004).4 Whereas the ventral system presents information to consciousness about objects in relation to each other (e.g., relative size, colour adjusted for lighting), the dorsal system presents egocentric information to the motor system, whether or not the person is ever conscious of it. Patients with damage to only a single system can be capable of doing the tasks managed by the other neural pathway. Patients with dorsal stream damage, as Goodale reports (2001: 984), ‘who may have lost a good deal of visuomotor control, are still quite aware of the shape, size, orientation, and location of objects that they see’ (see also Goodale and Milner 1992; Milner and Goodale 1995). In contrast, in the phenomenon of ‘blindsight’, a lesion in the brain’s ventral system leaves a person unaware that he or she can ‘see’ any objects and unable to describe their colour or other qualities. Victims with ‘blindsight’ can still pass tests of visual-motor ability, however, such as picking up objects of which they are not ‘aware’ when explicitly asked. Some even play basketball, although they insist they can’t ‘see’, apparently relying entirely on the ventral (tectopulvinar) system of the brain to orient action (see Berthoz 2000: 51; see also de Gelder, de Haan, and Heywood 2001; Weiskrantz 1986, 1997). By disrupting completely the ability to see objects in a conscious fashion, these cases reveal that sight functions along multiple channels and is itself a complex set of perceptual abilities. As athletes who use peripheral vision suggest, Goodale and Humphrey (2001: 333–34) observe that the dorsal action control system does not have the concentrated focus in the centre of the visual field that the ventral object perception system does. In experiments to test visual-motor control, for example, they found that peripheral vision was as accurate at controlling grasping as vision near the fovea. This allegedly allows us to pick up objects, step over obstacles, grasp doorknobs and duck low-hanging objects in the course of everyday life without focusing our fovea on each. If so, this might help us to understand capoeiristas’ convictions that peripheral vision is sensitive to movement and can be used to direct action, even if we cannot perceive these stimuli ourselves in explicit detail. Because an object can be tracked by the ventral system without the dorsal identifying it, we do not have to ‘know’ an object in a

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thematized, conscious, self-aware sense to interact with it. Goodale and Westwood (2004) find from the results of scores of studies that:

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[There] is a wealth of psychological evidence that is consistent with the general view that in specific situations, particularly where rapid responses to visible targets are required, visuomotor control engages processing mechanisms that are quite different from those that underlie our conscious visual experience of the world. (2004: 207)

In other words, if acting on the basis of information from the sense world is the criteria for ‘knowing’, our neural architecture is structured so that, especially when fast reactions are demanded, we will necessarily act on information about which we are not consciously aware. Knowing in a visuomotor sense is quite distinct from conscious object awareness. As Goodale and Milner (2004: 39) argue, although it may be ‘tempting to think that the delivery of such vivid experiences and the knowledge they impart is the entire raison d’être for vision’, conscious visual awareness is an evolutionary latecomer, added to a system that already helped organisms to navigate and act in a complex environment. An anthropology of knowledge that took seriously motor abilities would have to include a range of non-conscious ways of knowing, including visuomotor ‘knowing.’ The intriguing ethnographic insight is not that neurological research can or cannot prove capoeiristas’ insights, or that capoeiristas have somehow already ascertained neurological facts only recently discovered by scientists. Rather, the sideways glance and capoeiristas’ techniques for looking demonstrate that adepts are exploring the experiential characteristics of the visual field, manipulating their own perceptual systems, perhaps even training themselves to increase their sensitivity to specific sorts of stimuli.5 Moreover, they are using, and perhaps training, a system of motor perception that they cannot be consciously aware of under normal circumstances, which returns us to the question of ‘knowing how’: what is happening physiologically when capoeiristas learn how to use the sideways glance if it is not simply propositional knowledge being stored in a mental filing cabinet?

The Plasticity of Perception as Learning One of the crucial innovations of the ‘connectionist revolution’ in cognitive science was modelling computational engines in ways consistent with neural anatomy; in the brain and nervous system, information is ‘stored’ by shifting the strength of connections between neurons. Those synaptic connections that are activated most often

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become increasingly efficient, and those activated at the same time tend to ‘wire’ together, all being aroused when one is stimulated. As Peter Huttenlocher (2002: 188) discusses at length, even the adult brain retains a great deal of its synaptic malleability; without it, we would not be able to learn anything new. Many biological researchers are currently exploring the degree to which neural systems are malleable and respond to the demands placed upon them through physical change (e.g. Zenger and Sagi 2002; Pigliucci 2001; West-Eberhard 2003). Studies have shown, for example, that portions of the sensorimotor cortex dedicated to controlling the fingers become greater with the practice of the violin or in readers of Braille, and that even short periods of training in monkeys in demanding practices can cause an increase in the areas of the cortex dedicated to the limbs exercised. Huttenlocher (2002: 180– 81) reports research indicating that practicing sequences of finger movements, or learning London’s geography while driving a taxi, can lead to observable differences in brain regions dedicated to particular tasks. Patterns of use and behaviour shape the brain’s architecture; part of learning, then, is a material reallocation of neural resources. Reference to the physiology of perception, in this light, need not be treated as a ‘universalizing’ or anti-cultural argument. Rather, an assessment of the biological mechanisms of perceptual adaptation, the range of neural plasticity, and the behaviours likely to influence sensory development offer ways to discuss the embodiment of culture with a degree of materiality, anatomical specificity and fine detail not often approached in anthropology. The question is not whether or not enculturation affects neural physiology, but which biological systems are susceptible, and how responsive each one is to different kinds of training. Recognizing that physiological systems are not uniformly malleable helps us to better understand why a particular form of enculturation might, or might not, take hold and the way that the body adapts to accomplish particular tasks. Although some debate exists whether the heightened acuity of athletes’ perceptions – their ability to meet a fast pitch with a twoand-a-half-inch diameter bat, maintain balance on a narrow beam, or respond to an opponent’s lightning-fast jab – is the cause or the result of excellence in sport, reviews of research indicate that perceptual differences between athletes and non-athletes are widely observed. In a review of research specifically on peripheral vision, for example, Ferreira (2003: 144) found several doctoral dissertations suggesting that athletes on team sports demonstrated higher acuity of peripheral vision than non-athletes with comparable foveal vision. The point is not the obvious one, that athletes can do things that non-athletes cannot; rather, it is the question of how they are accomplishing these tasks.

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Psychological studies of people trained to perceptual ‘hyperacuity’ suggest that modifications are made at ‘low levels’, that is closer to the neurological point of perception rather than only at later steps when sense experience is interpreted. In other words, to accomplish such difficult perceptual-motor tasks as hitting a spinning cricket ball or tracking a dozen players in one’s peripheral vision while dribbling a soccer ball, one’s neurological system, like the dorsal visual pathway, is itself modified so that the sense organs are better attuned to detecting crucial information. Manfred Fahle (2002), for example, studied hyperacuity in vision experiments in which subjects learned to perceive objects below the physical threshold of foveal photoreceptors (due to their size). By all rights, subjects should not be able to detect such small visual distinctions. Because hyperacuity was so specific, sometimes localized only in a single eye, Fahle argues that learning is happening not ‘deep in the brain’, but close to the retina (ibid.: 217). The neurological system itself ‘learns’ or becomes attuned to extract implicit information from the retinal image. Moreover, Fahle found that the adult primary visual system had a great deal of plasiticity while the learning process demanded certain ‘top-down’ inputs, improving only with careful conscious attention and feedback (ibid: 214–17; see also Herzog and Fahle 2002). Barbara Zenger and Dov Sagi (2002) discuss the effects of training on low-level visual networks, such as the ability to detect the segmentation between visual textures and defined stimuli in the presence of visual distractions. One thing that they notice is that no general principle of skill transfer can be determined: in some cases, visual skill seems to transfer; in others, it does not. They found that ‘high-level information’ – goals, explicit instructions, prior orientation – could have profound effects on very low–level processes (2002: 195). This last point – that perceptual development appears to be strongly affected by ‘top down’ forces – opens the door to considering social and cultural effects on the neurological development of perception. O’Regan and Nöe (2001: 970 and 977) suggest as much and point out that an as-yet inexplicably large number of ‘descending’ nerve endings link the visual processing areas of the brain back to the retinas. Similar structures in the auditory channels are thought to allow other brain functions, including emotions, motivations, attention, interpretation and the like, to pre-filter sensual input at the site of perception: in the sense organs themselves. If so, this would be an obvious channel for feedback into perceptual mechanisms at a very early stage of the perceptual process. These descending nerve endings may be one biological mechanism that helps explain how culture shapes distinctive experiential profiles.

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The Diversity of Embodied Knowledge The picture of embodied knowledge that emerges from this careful attention to visual skill in capoeira, and sports more broadly, is a heterogeneous one. The ‘knowing how’ that we might call capoeiristas’ visual techniques includes behavioural change to find task-relevant information and suppress attention to distractions; manipulation of the non-conscious visual motion control system for heightened responsiveness; and likely even change to the neurological ‘wiring’ of vision. ‘Embodied knowledge’ understood through this lens includes perceptual, physiological and behavioural change, important in their own right, not because of what they might represent in a propositional or symbolic sense. Human physiology and behaviour can be modified, affecting both what is ‘known’ and what is ‘knowable’. Different physical disciplines like capoeira can have profound effects on how our bodies develop behavioural, experientially and physically, effacing the division sometimes drawn between biology and culture. Ironically, cultural anthropologists typically underestimate the malleability of human physicality, how repeated behaviours and intentional physical projects of self-making might shape us physically. This can make us anxious whenever human biology is invoked in discussions of cultural diversity. Athletes, in contrast, know well the degree to which they can reforge their bodies; they demonstrate convincingly that one’s destiny is not writ in the nuclei of one’s cells, just as not all that one knows is immediately available to reflection. The intellectual project with which athletes challenge anthropology offers a common ground for cultural and biological anthropologists. Clearly both are implicated but neither enjoys a monopoly on explanation. Although he may overstate the point, Robert Sands similarly exhorts that ‘the holistic, cross-cultural and ethnographic traditions that define anthropology as an endeavor have never been more pronounced than in the field of sport’ (1999: xiv). Focusing, however, on the effects of skill acquisition – virtuoso athletic performance – can lead us to ‘black box’ what is occurring during apprenticeship. That is, we can focus on the training regimen, the cultural behaviour that ‘goes into’ the novice, and proficiency, what ‘comes out’ of the process, without attending to the changes that are ‘enskilment’, to borrow a term from Tim Ingold (2000). By placing an intellectual ‘black box’ between input and output, overlooking the minute details of training and the physical and behavioural effects that training has, we prematurely foreclose a more careful examination of how the body acquires knowledge and the nature of this bodily knowing. As this essay has shown, inside the ‘black box’ of capoeira enskilment, of bodily knowing, are patterns of behavioural change,

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manipulation of the distinct physiological structure of the visual system, and the neurological effects of repeated behaviour. One dominant theoretical framework for dealing with embodied knowledge in sport, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) influential notion of the habitus, threatens to place just such a ‘black box’ on physical practice, training and the biological effects of behaviour. Although Bourdieu’s diverse accounts of everyday practice generate sociological insights on many levels, ironically, they seldom include detailed analyses of the practical formation of habits, skills and dispositions. With abstraction replacing an investigation of the biological effects of ‘embodied knowledge’, Bourdieu often unnecessarily homogenizes his account of practice (see also Hunter and Saunders 1995; Turner 1994). For example, he repeatedly insists that the dispositions of the habitus are ‘transposable’; in fact, studies of the training of perception and action patterns show a widely varying degree of transitivity to other practices. Depending on where the skill has taken hold of the organism – Has it created a context-dependent behavioural change, affected a localized modification of the nervous system, or strengthened more general, centralized capacities, such as reflexive self-coaching? – a ‘disposition’ may or may not affect other behaviours. How ‘durable’ a disposition is, another point on which Bourdieu’s is adamant, also varies widely depending on how the ‘disposition’ lives in the nervous system. For example, the disposition to follow a visual transient, although difficult to check (as any practitioner will tell you), can be over-ridden, especially when experienced players learn new patterns of visual search. Attention to the physiology of skill acquisition and perceptual plasticity reveals how a disposition might change, but also why such change is so rare or difficult, but it does so by attention to the specific systems in question. But worst of all, replacing a rich, heterogeneous, empirical study of embodied knowledge with the single term ‘habitus’ occludes a universe to investigate, a complex tangle of physiology, culture, behaviour, genes, neurology, perception and forms of enculturation that challenges anthropology to achieve the holism to which it aspires. The approach demonstrated in this essay examines the physiological corollaries of habits, skills and other forms of bodily knowledge produced by training; they are the object of research, not merely the explanatory bridge to resolve theoretical problems, such as the relationship between structure and agency, or the endurance of class differences. Refusing to treat embodied knowledge with greater concern for material reality only further marginalizes anthropologists in broader discussions of knowledge. Without curiosity about biology, neurology or physiology, sadly, the term ‘embodied knowledge’, which might help to bridge the Cartesian divide between body and

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mind, can inadvertently foreclose considering how the body retains experience, refines skills and learns cultural lessons in distinctive physiological ways. ‘Incorporation’ or implicit bodily knowledge may solve theoretical problems without actually attending to biological realities, or even to being biologically plausible.

Notes 1. Gibson (1979: 203) draws a distinction between ‘looking at’ and ‘looking around’, suggesting that, over time, people have come to live ‘boxed-up’ visual lives: Our ancestors were always looking around. They surveyed the environment, for they needed to know where they were and what there was in all directions. Children pay attention to their surroundings when allowed to do so. Animals must do so. But we adults spend most of our time looking at instead of looking around. In order to look around, of course, one must turn one’s head. (Emphasis in original)

2.

3.

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4.

5.

Although overly simple, Gibson draws our attention to looking behaviour and how it shapes what we see. To see an illustration of the three degrees, a person can hold his or her arm out and notice that highly detailed perception is restricted to an area about the width of a thumb. An intriguing dimension of this phenomenal quality of the visual field, one that points up how important it is to take more than introspective accounts of experience into consideration, is that most people do not notice this rather marked distortion in their visual field. In contrast, some capoeiristas appear to have observed this basic but little remarked quality of visual experience. Savelsbergh, et al. 2002: 285; see also Ripoll, et al. 1995; Williams and Davids 1998; Abernethy, et al. 2001; Ward, et al. 2002; and Williams, et al. 1999. See Ratey (2001: 97–108) for recent research on visual perception (see also Jeannerod 1997; O’Regan and Nöe 2001: 969). The pathways are not, in fact, completely separate, according to Goodale and his colleagues (see Goodale and Milner 2004; Goodale and Westwood 2004); how they interact depends on how they are being employed. Other neuroanatomists point out that the visual system is composed of not merely two, but many independent subsystems affecting such bodily processes as equilibrium, the pupillary light reflex, and regulation of circadian cycles (O’Regan and Nöe 2001: 967). Even frogs’ brains have five separate visual systems seeking particular sorts of information and controlling specific behaviours (Goodale and Milner 2004: 42 ff.). For a more extensive discussion of perceptual learning and exploratory behaviour, see the work of E.J. Gibson (1963, 1988; see also Fahle and Poggio 2002). Whether or not athletes can train vision is hotly contested in sports psychology, but the overall drift of the debate seems to be that training seems to affect very specific visual abilities and does not generalize well across the functioning of the sense on all tasks (see Abernethy and Wood 2001).

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References Abernethy, B., and J.M. Wood. 2001. ‘Do Generalized Visual Training Programmes for Sport Really Work? An Experimental Investigation’, Journal of Sports Sciences 19(3): 203–22. ———, D.P. Gill, S.L. Parks, and S.T. Packer. 2001. ‘Expertise and the Perception of Kinematic and Situational Probability Information’, Perception 30: 233–52. Berthoz, A. 2000. The Brain’s Sense of Movement, trans. G. Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990. The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Carpenter, E. 1972. Oh, What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! Toronto: Bantam Books. Clark, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge: MIT Press. Costa, R. da S. (Mestre Squisito). 1993. O Caminho do Berimbau: Arte, Filosofia e Crescimento na Capoeira. Brasília: Thesaurus. Decânio, Â. n.d. ‘A Herança de Mestre Bimba: A Filosofia e a Lógica Africanas da Capoeira’. manuscript. Dennett, D.C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown. Downey, G. 2002. ‘Listening to Capoeira: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and the Materiality of Music’, Ethnomusicology 46(3): 487–509. ———. 2005. Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Fahle, M. 2002. ‘Learning to Perceive Features Below the Foveal Photoreceptor Spacing’, in M. Fahle and T. Poggio (eds), Perceptual Learning. Cambridge and London: Bradford Books/MIT Press, pp. 197– 218. Fahle, M. and T. Poggio (eds). 2002. Perceptual Learning. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ferreira, J. T. 2003. ‘An Overview of Research in Sports Vision: Its History and an Optometric Perspective’, South African Optometrist 62(4): 142– 49. Foucault, M. 1988. ‘Technologies of the Self ’, in L. Martin, H. Gutman and P. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 16–49. Gelder, B. de, E.H.F. de Haan and C.A. Heywood (eds). 2001. Out of Mind: Varieties of Unconscious Processes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gibson, E.J. 1963. ‘Perceptual Learning’, Annual Review of Psychology 14: 29–56. ———. 1988. ‘Exploratory Behavior in the Development of Perceiving, Acting, and the Acquiring of Knowledge’, Annual Review of Psychology 39: 1–41.

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Gibson, J.J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Goodale, M.A. 2001. ‘Real Action in a Virtual World’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(5): 984–85. ——— and A.D. Milner. 1992. ‘Separate Visual Pathways for Perception and Action’, Trends in Neurosciences 15(1): 20–5. ——— and G.K. Humphrey. 2001. ‘Separate Visual Systems for Action and Perception’, in E.B. Goldstein (ed.), Blackwell Handbook of Perception. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 311–43. ——— and A.D. Milner. 2004. Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— and D.A. Westwood. 2004. ‘An Evolving View of Duplex Vision: Separate but Interacting Cortical Pathways for Perception and Action’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14: 203–11. Goodwin, C. 1994. ‘Professional Vision’, American Anthropologist 96(3): 606–33. Grasseni, C. 2004. ‘Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics’, Social Anthropology 12(1): 1–15. Hardin, C.L. 1988. Color for Philosophers: Expanding the Rainbow, expanded ed. Indianopolis: Hackett Publishing. Herzog, M.H. and M. Fahle. 2002. ‘Top-Down Information and Models of Perceptual Learning’, in M. Fahle and T. Poggio (eds), Perceptual Learning. Cambridge and London: Bradford Books/MIT Press, pp. 367–79. Hunter, I. and D. Saunders. 1995. ‘Walks of Life: Mauss on the Human Gymnasium.’ Body and Society 1(2): 65–81. Huttenlocher, P.R. 2002. Neural Plasticity: The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ingold, T. 1998. ‘From Complementarity to Obviation: On Dissolving the Boundaries Between Social and Biological Anthropology, Archaeology and Psychology’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 123(1): 21–52. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London and New York: Routledge. Jacob, P. and M. Jeannerod. 2003. Ways of Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press. Jeannerod, M. 1997. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action. Oxford: Blackwell. Land, M.F. and P. McLeod. 2000. ‘From Eye Movements to Actions: How Batsmen Hit the Ball’, Nature Neuroscience 3: 1340–45. Lewis, J.L. 1992. Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Milner, D.A. and M.A. Goodale. 1995. The Visual Brain in Action. New York: Oxford University Press. Moura, J. 1991. Mestre Bimba: A Crônica da Capoeiragem. Salvador, Brazil: Zumbimba. O’Regan, J.K. and A. Nöe. 2001. ‘A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness.’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(5): 939–1031. Pigliucci, M. 2001. Phenotypic Plasticity: Beyond Nature and Nurture. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Ratey, J.J. 2001. A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception Attention and the Four Theaters of the Brain. New York: Vintage Books. Ripoll, H., Y. Kerlirzin, J.F. Stein and B. Reine. 1995. ‘Analysis of Information Processing, Decision Making, and Visual Strategies in Complex Problem Solving Sport Situations’, Human Movement Science 14: 325–49. Ryle, G. 1984 [1949)]. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sands, R. (ed.) 1999. Anthropology, Sport and Culture. Westport: Bergin and Garvey. Savelsbergh, G.J.P., A.M. Williams, J. van der Kamp and P. Ward. 2002. ‘Visual Search, Anticipation, and Expertise in Soccer Goalkeepers’, Journal of Sports Sciences 20(3): 279–87. Turner, Stephen P. 1994. The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ward, P. and A.M. Williams. 2003. ‘Perceptual and Cognitive Skill Development in Soccer: The Multidimensional Nature of Expert Performance’, Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology 25(1): 93–111. ———, A.M. Williams and S. Bennett. 2002. ‘Visual Search and Biological Motion Perception in Tennis’, Research Quarterly for Sport and Exercise 73: 107–12. Weiskrantz, L. 1986. Blindsight: A Case Study and Its Implications. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Consciousness Lost and Found. Oxford: Oxford University Press. West-Eberhard, M.J. 2003. Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, A.M. 2000. ‘Perceptual Skill in Soccer: Implications for Talent Identification and Development’, Journal of Sports Sciences 18: 737–50. ——— and K. Davids. 1998. ‘Visual Search Strategy, Selective Attention, and Expertise in Soccer’, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 69: 111–28. ——— and D. Elliott. 1999. ‘Anxiety, Expertise, and Visual Search in Karate’, Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology 30: 194–20. ———, K. Davids and J.G. Williams. 1999. Visual Perception and Action in Sport. London: Routledge. Yarbus, A. 1967. Eye Movements and Vision. New York: Plenum. Zenger, B. and D. Sagi. 2002. ‘Plasticity of Low-level Visual Networks’, in M. Fahle and T. Poggio (eds), Perceptual Learning. Cambridge and London: Bradford Books/MIT Press, pp. 177–96.

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PART IV

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LEARNING AND REPOSITIONINGS

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Chapter 11

FIGURES TWICE SEEN: RILES, THE MODERN KNOWER AND FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE Tony Crook

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Possessing Knowledge When Barth (2002: 2) asks: ‘Is knowledge best understood as a thing or a relationship?’ he rehearses a similar question to that posed and taken up by recent debates on property rights (see Hann 1998; Coombe 1998; Hirsch and Strathern 2004). Indeed, the possession of knowledge characterizes Barth’s reflections in his Sidney W. Mintz Lecture of 2000, ‘An Anthropology of Knowledge’ (2002), which draws together materials from his New Guinea Baktaman study (1975), a comparison with Bali (1990) and a long-running analogy fashioned with academic knowledge (1987). Barth is concerned with thinking through the possibilities of knowledge as a property – evident by his note on Brown (1998) asking whether culture can be copyrighted, and in his own subsequent question: ‘Might a global code of intellectual property rights provide a way to secure benefits to indigenous peoples from their heritage?’ The question recalls and reiterates the language of article 8j of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (1992).1 That properties of the world can become properties of a person through knowledge is also clear in Barth’s statement which appears to construe knowledge as a thing: ‘The knowledge component of our being is conceptually separable from our relationships and group memberships, the social dimension of

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our lives’ (2002: 2). This chapter aims to examine this claim through a discussion of Riles’ work on UN knowledge-practices and documents as sites of modern knowledge. An interest in knowledge as property carries with it the notion of an instrument ‘what a person employs to interpret and act on the world’ (Barth 2002: 1, and see Riles 2004), and again raises the questions about quantity, location, scarcity and distribution that drove his depiction of Baktaman ‘secrecy’: ‘our scrutiny is directed to the distributions of knowledge – its presence or absence in particular persons – and the processes affecting these distributions can become the objects of study’ (2002: 1). Barth’s interest in the bounded possession of knowledge drove his interpretation of secrecy and his analysis of cultural variation – ‘the value of information seemed to be regarded as inversely proportional to how many share it’ as Barth puts it [1975: 217]). The power of knowledge in this analysis derives from scarcity: but as I argue elsewhere as soon as revelations outside the rituals and to uninitiated men and women are taken into account, this line of analysis cancels itself out, and a new set of questions appear (Crook 1999, 2007a). One danger that renewed anthropological interest in knowledge must avoid is the privileging of ‘knowledge’ over those doing the knowing – that is, property-thinking applied to knowledge leads to a slippage in terms of treating ‘knowledge’ as a universal category in addition to being some pan-human possession (Crook 2007b). Anthropology has a history of foregrounding the particular over the general by seeing the figures in the scene first. Once our notions of knowledge become detached from such individual based propertythinking, it becomes possible to consider other forms of knowledge, mutually constituted by exchange relations, and other notions of what constitutes a person. As such, in this chapter, I want to ask what kind of person is the knower in modern knowledge practices? Among the material effects of the logics or metaphors that we might, with Miyazaki (2004) take as constituting knowledge-practices, is the person of the knower. The notion of a knower screened off from an object of knowledge was an accompaniment of a worldview that held the mind to be screened off from its surrounding body and world. The individuality of each knowing mind made the relation between it and the surrounding world a key site for scepticism and inspecting the validity of trafficking between them. The contents of each held the promise of knowledge seen twice.

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The Ecology of Network Length In order to find a framework in which to interleave my observations on the effects of property-thinking on notions of knowledge and to promote the consideration of the figure of the knower, I have looked to a context through which contemporary practices might be obviated and made to appear a little other-worldly, and have chosen a moment from recent history, but one that seems an age away – pre9/11, pre-Republican withdraw from the United Nations’-sponsored Kyoto accord on global warming, and pre-Iraq War which called the credibility of the UN into serious question. The discussion begins then, caught up in its own age and consequently caught up in its own problem. Its own age (specifically Seattle in late 1999), is one of increased mobility and ‘globalization’; an age that imagines places and people, commodification and conservation to have moved into unprecedented proximity; an age characterized by transition, paradox and ambivalence, but confidence and consolidation also, making a difficulty of tracing a cause to its source, but characterized also by the efforts being made to do so, nonetheless. International instruments abound (such as the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity), establishing that Nature newly requires the prop of Culture (Latour 1993): life has only recently reappeared as a system to be managed (Haraway 1997; cf. Foucault 1970). More recently, Helmreich suggests that because ‘Culture and nature no longer stand in relation as figure to ground … Life forms cannot unproblematically anchor our forms of life’ (n.d.: 9) – the question of the age for Helmreich then, is one of ‘life forms and forms of life’ (n.d.: 7–8), the social forms of life enabled by, and enabling, newly engineered life forms. This was the time of the Human Genome Project and early debates over genetic engineering, when microbiology stressed that the immediate neighbours of a particular ‘gene’ and the specific location in a length of DNA were crucial factors in the expression of particular characteristics, and yet when legal forms such as patent stressed that independent lengths of property be kept as short as possible. The longer the one, the shorter the other. This paradoxical tension over property was one side of another over responsibility. As with the nuclear industry’s potential for wide-reaching effects following a disaster such as Chernobyl in 1986, the possible coverage afforded by insurance was foreshortened. Beyond the laboratory, what part of an extended network of effects caused by gene transfer would the patent-holder or crop-grower be responsible for? State underwriting of responsibilities enabled such industries to operate. The shorter the one, the longer the other (see Crook 2000).

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It is an age concerned with cultural and biological ‘diversity’, yet marked by ‘ethnic cleansing’, resource exploitation, species extinction, agricultural monoculture (Shiva 1997) and corporate mergers on unprecedented scales. It is an age in which equal energy is put into lifting institutional barriers and boundaries (e.g. tariffs, quotas, bans), as is put into instituting barriers and boundaries (e.g. intellectual property rights [IPR]).2 Although alternate means, these last were objectives of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) 3rd Ministerial Meeting, sharing the intention to mark this out as an age of ‘Free Trade.’ Things are imagined to move freely and appear to go together with newly found freedom. Its own problem is that of knowing how much of a network is required, and motivated by the contemporary difficulty that forces decisions about scaling, about where an analogy starts and ends, and of deciding which side of a metaphor one is on. Henrietta Moore recently characterized anthropology’s manifestation of these anxieties:

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Anthropologists are often very unclear about the distinction between a generalization and a theory, and thus confusions arise about degrees of abstraction or, more precisely, about the relationship between observations, normative assumptions and theoretical propositions. (1999: 1)

Moore goes on to discuss different responses to the predicament whereby anthropologists are divided between pursuing their work in either ‘theoretical’ or ‘ethnographic’ modes. Moore’s strategy to straighten out theoretical confusion serves as a counterpart to recent reflections on actor-network theory wishing to reintroduce uncertainty, to unconsolidate as it were, and newly problematize ‘ANT’ (e.g. Law 1999: 2; Latour 1999). It is a problem then of managing the length and appearance of a network. This was a preoccupation evident in Seattle: whilst the ‘industrialized’ U.S. wanted the WTO to extend its jurisdiction for dispute resolution to include labour standards, and the EU wanted it to include environmental standards, many smaller ‘developing’ countries were insisting that the WTO first make up the shortfall between earlier promises on agriculture and textiles, before lengthening its reach. Wishing to demonstrate inclusive democracy by pre-empting the formal Ministerial meeting with a symposium in conjunction with often critical NGOs (who wanted the WTO to extend itself to their ecological concerns, and who Mike Moore, the WTO Director General called ‘a whole new membership on display’), the WTO wished nonetheless to resist such criticism and raced to take it on-board: ministers queued up to voice support for dialogue to address concerns together. U.S. President Clinton went so far as suggesting that the

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thousands demonstrating outside for the environment and the poor be invited in. His view suggested that there should be nobody outside the WTO, nothing beyond its network. This was to be a sustainable age in which trade and ecology were equal partners, sides of the same coin. Here, one objective was to be achieved and completed through the other. The short phrase ‘globalization with a human face’ showed that at times only the slightest touch was needed to reconcile complex networks, or to paint them in an acceptable light. Things are imagined to move freely, and appear to go together with newly found freedom. But the very same effects of analogy and of scaling which effortlessly produce these conjunctions, can with equal economy of effort produce disjunctions that resist any coming together. The newly found freedom to combine and mix has a counterpart one: to separate and split. An example can be found in the images from Seattle that the media returned to time and again. These were the images of demonstrators using mobile phones, of demonstrators vandalizing a Nike store whilst sporting Nike running shoes. Reporters could not get past them, portraying them as contradictions; the images appeared immediately to cancel and neutralize – such carping could not be taken seriously. Here it took only the slightest touch of one or two examples to invalidate the entire critical project, to discount the demonstrators as ‘mixed up’ and to separate them out from the ‘real business’ of Seattle. The complex enchainment of the resource exploitation and free trade paradox was made obvious in Seattle: whilst the rhetoric of ‘sustainability’ was used by ‘deep ecologists’ inspired by the writings of Arne Naess (1973), ministers and trans-national corporations (TNC) alike, the emphases carried alternate meanings. On the one hand, freer access to raw materials encouraged the volume of trade: ‘protectionism anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere’ (Rt. Hon. Stephen Byers, U.K. Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Plenary Address). Whilst on the other hand, freer access to raw materials encouraged ecological degradation; Aldo Leopold’s ‘land ethic’ (1949) was repeated at the time: ‘[a] thing is right as it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ Repeated reference was made to ‘Gaia’: Greek Earth Goddess after whom James Lovelock (1979) named his hypothesis of the planet Earth as a ‘super-organism’ – that the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen of living organisms cycle through the atmosphere, that the entire planetary biosphere is homeostatically regulated by the biotic community for its own benefit. The rationale of ‘sustainability’ has recently come to operate as an holistic; an organizing rubric: first, for measuring interactions within an ecosystem, second, for measuring interactions within a project; and third,

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for measuring interactions between project implementers and supporters. The assessment of the ‘sustainable’ nutritional flows between species within an ecosystem attracts monetary flows to sustainable projects. On each of these three levels, ‘sustainability’ is a measure of successful participatory interaction between a diversity of entities: the rubric anticipates that ‘sustainability’ will be enhanced by further aligning the dynamics of each level – in other words, that each level should provide a model for the others. Beneficial flows at each level become dependent upon each other: an interdependence itself drawn after an ecological fashion. In these terms, ‘sustainability’ is an equation enabling the measurement of ecological relationships between project-defined biota in monetary terms, and equally enabling the measurement of monetary relationships between projects and funders in ecological terms. Exchanges within each level become a measure for exchanges between the levels, as if their interdependence made exchanges of nutrients and exchanges of money appear as equivalent versions of each other. As alternate networks of complexity, ‘trade’ and ‘ecology’ are, however, both driven by holistic visions of the world as a unified body without any hindrance between parts each made equivalent by the logic, that parts are wholly dependent upon others (the indivisible ‘oneness’ of the ‘pure market’, and of Gaia, respectively): Creating a global trading regime [will assist] the continuation of global prosperity, particularly for countries at the low end of the scale … and serve. … as a foundation for peace and stability in the world (Charlene Barshefsky, U.S. Trade Representative).

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The more species and the more interactions you put into the system the more stable it becomes. (Lovelock, cited in Bunyard and Goldsmith 1989: 46) I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking. (Seed 1988: 36).

But the analogy between ‘trade’ and ‘ecology’ fails at the point when their dispositions are compared: whereas the problem for ‘trade’ is that a ‘pure market’ without compartments can never be fully attained, the problem for Gaia is precisely that it cannot compartmentalize effects there from effects here, effects then from effects now. The rhetoric of the age, however, has them as equivalents, equal parts to an equation upon which everyone can agree, even if the balance between the two is fiercely contested. Whereas ‘pure market’ conditions can be assumed, invoked by the slightest touch of inference and worked with even though it is ultimately unattainable (as an ongoing economic project, absolute failure cannot yet be demonstrated), the

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interconnection of life on Earth cannot be assumed, and is rendered as having to be demonstrated (as an ongoing scientific project, absolute success would be required but will never be complete). Both projects are incomplete, but the logic, which takes one for granted, conspires to question the other. As with the Nike-clad demonstrator, scaling works to alternate effect: an idea has the effect of reality, whereas reality (how could life not be interconnected?) has only the effect of an idea. Whereas each order of complexity requires the other (trade requires resources; ecology’s only argument is the ‘precautionary principle’ that would preserve on the basis that future money might be lost), the complexities are the ‘inside out’ of each other. In the gap between them free marketeers see ‘opportunity’ and ecologists see ‘disaster’. These contemporary and alternate effects of analogy and scaling are the images that keep getting caught up in attempting to manage the length and appearance of the paper’s analytical network as a means to equip a commentary on the implications for understanding the Seattle Ministerial. So this paper, caught up in its age and problem attempts to take one thing in isolation, but pulls ever more topics into its analysis: each time a point was reached when it appeared that a piece of analysis had been demarcated and completed, so another order of complexity announced itself, without which the project seemed incomplete. The problem has been one of aesthetic form: as much managing the length of an analytical network as of managing its appearance. At times nothing seemed to be lost by excluding a particular section, at other times such exclusion rendered the whole piece redundant. For example, in the very same week as the Seattle conference, the Sanger Centre in Cambridge published the genetic structure of Chromosome 22 on the Internet, thereby making the most valuable piece of intellectual property freely available. Dropping any reference to this seemed to leave the impression that only one order of complexity was organizing responses to intellectual property. But like a game of musical chairs, one had to choose to stop somewhere, the stopping point seemed arbitrary and afforded the whole project a specific cast: it seemed to be about very different things, even though at any given point it also seemed to be merely reiterating the same old thing (it has seemed postmodern trek and Zen journey at the same time), perhaps illustrating the challenge set before anthropologists which Geertz describes as having ‘to sound like a pilgrim and a cartographer at the same time’ (1988: 10). As much as I attempted to isolate an analytical figure, however, it would be repeated wherever I looked, as if it were the catalyzing form to some vast network. ‘Repetition is what holds together networks’ according to Brown and Capdevila’s discussion of processes which seem to be the

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cause of themselves (1999: 37). Rehearsing these connected problems for the reader now may appear doubly redundant, for if the piece has achieved the aesthetics of its anthropological genre, then any joins between such alternating possibilities will have become invisible. I have resolved then, to cast the piece about only one thing (that is, from here on to pretend that it is not also about itself), and to borrow this one thing from Annelise Riles: ‘one cannot apprehend and hence take steps except against the background of something else’ (n.d.: 23). Another order of complexity organizes completion. Rather than the slippage of never-ending opportunities to recontextualize an analytical point in new relationships, the problem has instead presented itself as one of form. I return below to Riles’s work that concerns international documents negotiated at conferences similar to the 3rd Ministerial, 3 but for the moment I take a lead by starting with the final document issued by the WTO in Seattle. The document is a press release (WTO Press/160), one that reiterates the very aesthetic form that has caught my attention. In accounting for what protestors, commentators and the press were all too ready to portray as an emphatic failure, the WTO press release casts an entirely different light on the Seattle meetings. Even if the outcome was moot, delegates still took away with them an important effect of the negotiations – having apprehended their own positions in the hierarchy anew. But rather than a distinguished failure, the 3rd Ministerial had been true to form. The WTO found it necessary to refer to a supplementary section added to its press release which divides the document into two components, two orders of complexity if you will: the body of the text and the ‘Notes to Editors’:

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‘Notes to Editors’ 1. Previous examples of ministerial talks which were suspended …

‘Suspended’. Even before we have the previous examples, our understanding of Seattle has been radically altered. The WTO would have us view the meeting in a longer network, would have us focus on the constructive outcomes rather than divisions between ‘industrialized’ and ‘developing’ states, and would have us believe that expectations had been less extensive than the impressions gathered all along. The divisions within the WTO are pasted over with a document which takes the division into itself.

Figures Seen Twice To make his point about direct participation in the Seattle decision making process, the Rt. Hon. Michael Maue MP (leader of the

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Papua New Guinea delegation) drew an analogy with United Nations-sponsored intergovernmental conventions which negotiate legal documents, and which he suggested were ‘open ended’ to all members. Maue’s analogy borrows from the pattern of bureaucratic organization motivating UN conferences, any one of which might provide a precedent or model for another insofar as they share a standardized structure. It is interesting to follow the implications of Maue’s analogy between the WTO and the UN for the insights it affords into the forms of participation and the forms of knowledge produced. Annelise Riles’s original analysis (2000) of the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) in Beijing, suggests that these conventions are best apprehended through the aesthetic form of the negotiated documents themselves. In Riles’ portrayal, the form of UN document-drafting process and the form of knowledge produced are mutually constitutive: they take on the aesthetics and complexity of each other (1998). This view was prompted initially by comparisons with the wovenmats that her Fijian hosts had used on the cover of their own draft document. Trained in the academy of meaning production, Riles was immediately struck by the volume and intensity of effort mobilized in producing a document that ultimately lacked an argument organising a number of differentiated facts into an overall pattern recognizable as an analysis: ‘[t]he objective was not so much to achieve transparent meaning but to satisfy the aesthetics of logic and language’ (1998: 386), ‘[c]ertain words fit with others. Language had a shape, a rhythm, a feel, not simply a meaning’ (1998: 386). For Euro-American and Pacific academics (1998: 387), the final document was unreadable to anyone looking for meaning. Indeed, Riles demonstrates the two document-producing knowledge practices to be the ‘inside out’ (n.d.: 24) of each other, with the UN genre resisting analysis in academic terms (and perhaps suggesting why to some minds, academic analyses get to their point only indirectly). Whereas academic texts strive to reveal patterns (steps between levels of analysis) in the progression towards completion, the patterns (required steps of document composition) overtly premeditate intergovernmental negotiations. Each works with its own aesthetic to organize the steps: the move to higher levels of generality (from facts to analysis), the move to higher levels of conference (local, national, regional and international; words, paragraphs, chapters and documents). For academic knowledge, the revelation of ‘politics’ or ‘meaning’ provide evidence of having taken an analytical step, momentarily stopping the flow of relationality. In the document-drafting process, encountering an aspect of the formal steps of procedure or the constraints of time provides evidence of knowledge being produced (n.d.: 23).

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In practice, the form of the completed UN document was anticipated by differentiating the Conference delegate body into working groups each dealing with a separate chapter of a draft document. Member countries sent a delegate to the negotiating room of each working group dealing with a chapter composed of numbered paragraphs internally differentiated into agreed text and bracketed text. Square brackets are placed around a section of a paragraph or indeed a whole paragraph which requires resolution. Formulations of language suggested as solutions to points of gridlock (attempts to ‘bridge’ between the ‘gaps’ 1998: 391), are each initially placed within square brackets too as so many possible versions of the anticipated outcome. Only having expunged all the brackets from every paragraph, having so rendered the text ‘readable’, is the work of the delegate groups finished: paragraphs are assembled into subheadings, headings and chapters, and chapters are joined together into the completed document in accordance with the protocols placing them after sections of ‘Preamble,’ ‘Mission Statement’ and ‘Global Framework’ (1998: 385). The delegates and completed document are reassembled for the closing ceremony. For the duration of the conference until shortly before the closing ceremony then, the ‘document’ did not exist as an object; its only existence was as the ‘collective patterning of intention’ amongst the delegates (1998: 389). At first blush, Riles’s attention to ‘patterns’ in the UN documentdrafting process exposes an intriguing paradox: the pattern of its negotiations are obvious (they simply follow set precedents and protocols), and yet the negotiation of patterns within bracketed text is anything but obvious (what requires such intensive efforts to enchain words, paragraphs and documents). And yet it is ultimately the simplicity of one (the steps; the aesthetics of repetitional form) that organizes the complexity of the other (guides the right form to language by eliciting and recognizing resonance between differentiated parts). Delegates sought language that resonated with other paragraphs of the negotiations or with paragraphs from previous documents dealing with the topic; even to the extent, for example, that some delegates counted the appearance of some words and noted the absence of others (1998: 387): Yet repetition, too, was a matter of aesthetic judgment: the text should be ‘strong’ and ‘consistent’ but not ‘redundant,’ delegates say. It should borrow language from other documents, but it could not replicate those documents wholesale. It should be ‘brief ’ but also ‘comprehensive.’ One had to acquire an ear and an eye for the patterns here. (1998: 387)

Any text remaining within brackets renders the document ‘unreadable’ to the delegates, for the whole text retains divisions between parts

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of differentiated status. A document becomes ‘more readable’ then, to the extent that differentiation is resolved (between bracketed and nonbracketed, between different negotiating interests, and ‘in the creation of a solid linguistic regime’ 1998: 392). Delegates bridge the gaps: they give up what the aesthetic of repetition makes redundant. Properly resolved, the nonbracketed text of one paragraph exemplifies the form also demonstrated by the enchainment of documents and conferences. Indeed, a problem of ‘unreadable’ bracketed text is ideally resolved through quoting from an earlier and completed document:

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in borrowing from one conference or document to the next without so much as a citation, the quotation collapsed all levels of conferences and documents into a single text. Negotiators apprehended this as a great feat, a sign of progress … (1998: 392)

At second blush then, one perceives only the seamless incorporation of another document, another conference into the longer sequence as the UN progresses its work, as if the entirety of the UN cosmos might yet be condensed into each text. Delegate negotiators work long and hard at resolving what Riles calls the ‘infinity within the brackets’, which once achieved allows the brackets around a particular section to be ‘lifted’, and allows the working group to move on to another section of bracketed text. ‘Infinity within the brackets’ describes the capacity of a bracket to contain any amount of expanded complexity, any number of alternative formulations: ‘one bracket might expand to equal the totality of the nonbracketed text in length’ (1998: 391). The solution to this potential is that limits are encountered in another guise. As the multiplicity of concrete alternative formulations within brackets expands, delegates become mindful of the need to abstract from these the one that will allow the brackets to be lifted, and so begin to search for a bridging pattern amongst them; from another point of view, delegates become mindful that the abstract pattern of brackets is taking them farther from their aim of completing the document as a concrete object. The points at which this mindfulness is prompted can be apprehended in retrospect as having encountered limits constituting a background to the activities: in Wagner’s terms, paradox acts ‘as a means of stopping conventional procedures, jolting them into selfconsciousness’ (1986: xi, original emphasis). Riles identifies this as the ‘work’ of the negotiations then (1998: 388 original emphasis), the tacking back and forth between two conventional modes: whilst both motivate the process, the foregrounding of one displaces or backgrounds the other. One mode, one rationale, one set of limits is apprehended as a consequence of the very moment when the other becomes redundant:

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the document’s principal aesthetic device involves an alternation between concreteness (the document as object) and abstraction (the document as pattern). (1998: 388)

Riles captures this process with the image of a ‘figure seen twice’ (1998). One view ‘substitutes’ for another (Weiner 1988, 1995). The loss of one brings the other into view (Riles 1998: 394); the alternation is between logics which exist ‘entirely independently’ of one another (1998: 392); that is as an example of the knowledge mode Latour (1993) describes as ‘purification’ which scrupulously separates and resists combination (this is me putting words into Riles’s mouth somewhat). In particular moments then, delegates apprehend their work in one mode or the other (as working with ‘object’ or ‘pattern’), and this insight itself can be seen from two perspectives: in a longerterm view, taking in the duration of the conference, ‘pattern’ gives way to ‘object’ (the completed document), whereas in a shorter-term view, these constantly alternate as each plays a part in the resolution of successive brackets, each giving repeatedly to the other. In particular moments then, each might operate now to enabling effect and now to restricting effect:

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each mode enables and anticipates the operation of its alternate. Rather than the durability of one mode being ‘productive’ and the other ‘unproductive’, each appears in particular moments as the solution to problems generated by the other. Each takes on effects previously the outcome of the other. The document drafting-process affords a ‘doubleview’. (1998: 388)

Postmodernism has taught us to be suspicious of any analysis restricting itself to the limited options of the binarism which has come to exemplify structuralist accounts. But the twoness here is of an entirely different order (‘structuralism without structure’ as Wagner 1986: 9 puts it): nodes constantly pick up and shed different complementary ‘halves’ to themselves. Moreover, the positing of two modes, two states or two perspectives, by no means places limits upon the infinity of possible effects, actions or viewpoints which may come to occupy the nodes – it rather enables and anticipates it. Nor are limits determined to the infinity of modes that might operate in particular moments, each sequentially substituting for others in step with the action of social life: the ‘binary’ base here enables glimpses of holography. For example, Riles (n.d.) describes the way in which ‘procedure’ and ‘time’ operate within the drafting-process by placing limits on each other (procedure costs time, but then again the pressure of time forces procedural short-cuts). Two dissimilar things so conjoined by a point of similarity constitute a metaphor or trope

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(Weiner 1988), which can itself ‘operate as an organising principle’ (Wagner 1986: x). Rather than binary restriction, the insight into this aesthetic form enables wider application to the process of analytical description (the tensions through which life appears social), and the description of analytical process: indeed, Riles’s innovation of an analysis based on ‘form’ (the aesthetics of the ‘figure seen twice’) is motivated to reveal the redundancy of analyses based on ‘relationality’ (social relations between actors, analytical relations between data and context which now seem so naturally self-evident). The infinite expansion of ‘relationality’ encounters its limit in the guise of ‘form’. The objective is to restore critical force to anthropological theorizing which has become diluted as the critical distance between those using the language of ‘relationality’ as an analysis, and those using the language of relationality in their discourse, has diminished. For Riles, the effective loss of twoness here (proliferation of ‘relationality’ as explanation), has prompted an apprehension to restore new analytical grounds, a new organizing principle. Consequently, Riles’s figures being seen twice are not only social actors but also figures (persons, documents, Fijian mats, negotiating processes, anthropology) composed of and composing aesthetic forms.

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Figures Twice Seen But how to foreground Riles’s point for general apprehension? how to translate this new vision? how to make it generate a forceful insight into the WTO, how to bridge the gap between the analytic modes of ‘relationality’ and ‘form’? In an earlier version of her analysis, Riles presented the image of the brackets with words inside and the negotiating room with delegates inside as equivalents: not in the sense that delegates stood for the words, but rather in the sense that the differences between each were equivalent and would find resolution through the other. I want to offer a complementary view, another half to Riles’s model (another ‘twice’ so-to-speak); that is an example of the knowledge mode Latour (1993) describes as ‘translation’ which scrupulously combines and resists separation. Of course, my ‘inside out’ suggestion is entirely anticipated by the logic of Riles’ thinking. Whereas Riles has focused our attention on the way in which one view is produced at the expense of another, I want to suggest that the document-drafting process also entails another set of logics that absolutely disallows the appearance of such an outcome. This complementary mode is equally crucial to the process (we might call it a ‘figure twice seen’ to emphasize the combination of two modes

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within the figure rather than the temporal displacement of one mode by another). Personal social relationships play little part in Riles’s analysis precisely because they are allowed little part in the document-drafting process: for the process to be seen as having produced an object as the outcome of personal relationships would be fatal to the enterprise. Upon entering the negotiating room and entering the bracketed text, the very real differences of economic and political influence were exchanged for sententious guises that placed each country delegate on an equal footing, as though they merely replicated and repeated each other’s status. Any pre-existing social relations among them were ostensibly left outside. Delegates bridge the gaps: they give up what the aesthetic of repetition makes redundant. Organized thus, the working groups were bound to pay as much time and attention to interventions from inexperienced nations as they were to more powerful nations. These seemingly endless bureaucratic sessions, called ‘formals’, adopt a scrupulously democratic ethic and proceed at dictation-pace (1998: 389) – if any delegate had text they wished to suggest, it would be aired, noted down, passed to the Chair, placed within brackets and considered by the collective working group. Language was suggested on the basis that the solution to the country delegates’ own differences of interest would resolve the differences between text within the brackets. This form of language reiterates progressive incorporation into a longer UN network (a history of prior conferences and documents) throughout the range of scale. Of course, it continues to matter just which country the undifferentiated delegate represents, but this is supposed not to have an influence. We should see figures here (repetitions of aesthetic form) not social actors (individuated delegates). The following exchanges between delegates and the Chair are illustrative: AUSTRALIA: I do think we [are] far closer together than these ten minutes may have suggested … … NORWAY: Thank you Madam. I’ve a strong feeling that we are now absolutely ready to move to a final decision, after the last statement from Benin there seems to be clear, agreement in the room as to how to proceed. Could we now proceed on that given the sense of agreement on that in this room now, thank you. (n.d.: 12, original emphasis)

Rather than speaking solely out of their own interests, country delegates spoke of these interests through the resolving state of differences they perceived in the room: more than simply representing their own part, delegates progressively combined others into a synthesis of the whole. Collective differences are recognized in the suggested offerings of a

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delegate. Only the whole can appear – either through an intervention of the working group or through the intervention of a delegate. This serves to reiterate the replicated status of delegates such that when suggestions are made they appear in the voice of an undifferentiated delegate body, rather than in the person of a differentiated country. A delegate can only appear in the guise of the collective whole. It is important to note that although networking took place in the informality of ‘the coffee-bar where delegates gathered to talk about their amendments’ (1998: 393), these discussions were not admitted nor recognized as part of the proper procedures. An object produced by social relationships between individuated delegates is useless here. Formal protocols govern the conference’s operation through working groups whose delegates have a developed sense of the formality of the negotiations, even though undeveloped enthusiasm sometimes surfaces as in the following delegate intervention:

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‘Let’s make the language more forceful; let’s shorten it,’ the Chair responded, in an impatient tone, ‘Does the distinguished delegate from Turkey have language he would like to suggest?’ (1998: 386).

This unconventionally direct offering was met by heavy emphasis of the lacking decorum, restraint and specificity formally required of delegates as a matter of etiquette. Maintaining the adopted guise of undifferentiated delegate status requires vigilance – here exercised by the Chair whose own authority carries the heightened ambiguity of hierarchy. Aside from the efforts dedicated to the laborious task of resolving bracketed text, what is so striking about these negotiations are the efforts dedicated nonetheless to managing respectful appearances. As evident above, delegates are encouraged to rein in particular urges to move things along, and restrict themselves to proprieties required by the occasion. ‘Shortening’ the language and making it ‘more forceful’ simply will not do if it is so obviously the consequence of one delegate distinguishing themselves: although these very qualities are the aspirations of working groups, it is essential that they appear as the result of consensual work rather than an engineered outcome of self–interest. These uniformed guises resist impositions of will. Individual interventions, like the example above, may make the text ‘readable’ in the sense that brackets have been lifted, but they also make the text ‘unreadable’ in the sense that its language is not that of collective consensus – others will not have equal interest in the text. Finding a pattern for text within the brackets has to respect the pattern of delegates in the room: differentiation has to be suppressed. And yet,

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proprieties occasionally give either to individual outburst, as we saw above, or to collaborative overture:

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When a decision was finally taken, and the Chair announced, in a bright tone, ‘Alright, I don’t hear any objections. It is so decided!’ the delegates abandoned customary decorum and broke out in applause. The Chair also added to the levity of the moment by pausing for just a second to mock her own authority: I have just been given this very impressive gavel. Okay, so thank you. Now let’s move on to our regular agenda …’ (n.d.: 13, original emphasis)

Just for a moment then, the guises might slip but the effect in these examples is to reinforce their adherence: deviation here only emphasizes the norms. We might say that delegates embody the division of differentiated ‘object’ and collective or undifferentiated ‘pattern’ within themselves – and comprise the two modes of action, two sets of effects. This point was illustrated earlier for the working group as a whole, but it is important to recognize that an analogue of this division combines within individuals, too: a delegate might appear set apart from the whole (like the delegate whose enthusiasm overtook his decorum), or as a part exemplifying the whole (the delegates exhibiting uniform proprieties). As delegates suggest text that synthesizes the resolving differences within the negotiating room, they detach or suppress one aspect of themselves (that is, what differentiates them; ‘language, as the ‘things’ delegates bring in’, as Riles puts it, 1998: 392), and the working group becomes pure ‘pattern’ in the sense of document-drafting. The delegate body relinquishes, offers up and detaches one set of effects to become the other set alone. The differences within working groups become those between delegates and document: when the delegate body has become undifferentiated ‘pattern’ then the document becomes ‘object’. Crucially though, the differentiation must come from the collective not the individual: the differences given up are collective (contentious issues are resolved), rather than individual (one delegate distinguishing themselves from the collective). What is given up is the differences between them collectively, rather than differences within an individual. Delegates bridge the gaps: they give up what the aesthetic of repetition makes redundant. Even though it may be the suggested language of one delegate that bridges the gap, the offering is in the voice of the whole. We could not apprehend these dynamics if we retain the scale of individuated social actors rather than figures composed by different forms of effect. Each delegate’s capacity for effects in the modes of

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differentiated and undifferentiated have to remain combined: the appearance of the ‘object’ from the working groups must come of each delegate retaining the combination of potential effects within themselves. They cannot allow themselves to stand forth as an individuated delegate. Alongside the result itself, perhaps the applause in the example above is for the collective endeavour to scrupulously enact democracy. But scrupulous democracy is time-consuming. Riles emphasizes the tension imposed by time constraints; ‘it was also widely repeated that nothing ever got accomplished in the formal sessions and that progress only occurred in the “informals” ’ (n.d.: 20–1). When the pressure of time constraints and the weight of other business reached a point at which a certain bracket seemed incapable of becoming ‘readable’ then the ‘formals’ adjourned into ‘informals’:

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Whatever differences separated them, participants shared a collective angst at being forced to abandon the steps – the proper procedures – in order simply to muddle through. This is made explicit in the procedural vocabulary of UN conferences: As time runs short, delegates break into so-called ‘informals’ – smaller and less procedurally elaborate committees – and then if necessary yet again into ‘informal informals’ which dispense with even more essential elements of the process such as translation and NGO access. At every turn, there was a collective awareness of the cost of doing so. (n.d.: 18)

‘Informals’ stress that time is being taken out from the ‘formals’: the very extension of time emphasizes that it is in shorter measure, and emphasises that what was before costing time is now costing procedure (n.d: 21). Time prompts the move from ‘formals’ and prompts the return to them also: too much time spent through ‘informals’ risks losing too much ‘procedure’, the document risks the perception that its results were at the expense of the proper steps of drafting protocol or the proper enactment of democracy. The tension of the process registered by the negotiating figure can itself be twice seen: it results from having to combine elements that here work against the other – productivity and democracy – each of which tends to curtail the aspirations of the other (like the ‘brief ’ but ‘comprehensive’ text). Whereas the ‘formals’ are democratic they are not productive, yet whilst the ‘informal informals’ are more productive, they are less democratic. The negotiations are, in this sense, also about the aesthetics of this compromise. Although in one view, bracketed text and negotiating stance each represent differences between countries dependent on each other for resolution, in another view they work against each other in that productivity is removing

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differentiation from the text of a paragraph, whereas democracy is retaining the undifferentiated status of delegates. It is interesting to pause for a moment on the question of how the move to ‘informals’ and ‘informal informals’ encourages the resolution of differences between countries and bracketed text. These efforts to move the process along are pursued not by abandoning formal democratic procedures altogether for some alternate means, not a deal based on the social relationships between negotiators who ‘know’ each other (this is Riles putting words into my mouth), but through institutionalization on a smaller scale. As the network involved in the ‘informal informals’ shortens (NGOs and those requiring translation are excluded; the impingement of other paragraphs is reduced), the demands of retaining undifferentiated status are formally eased (now that the differences discussed are more those outstanding between countries rather than those between words, paragraphs or documents). The form in which the same differences are discussed is substituted. ‘Informals’ retain the delegates included as equivalent status repetitions of each other, but afford new possibilities to language now that the synthesis encompasses on a less extensive scale. The institutionalized formality of the ‘informal informals’ is essential to focus and hold attention on the democracy being performed alongside the productivity, rather than allowing the performance of exclusion to be glimpsed. Coffee-bar negotiations would be no substitute here. Moving to ‘informal informals’ heightens both exclusion and inclusion. The very possibility of the outcome appearing as the result of social relationships between differentiated delegates means that their exclusion has to be carefully managed (the fact of excluding some participants has the potential effect of separating out what must remain combined in each delegate – the capacity to appear in a guise other than a figure of equivalence). The very potential presence of social relationships prompts their absence. It is as crucial that the final text appears the result of negotiations between undifferentiated, equivalent delegates, as it is that the document satisfies the criteria of aesthetics and language fitting to the longer UN sequence of documents and conferences. As with other aspects of these drafting-procedures it is vital to the document’s authority that the aesthetic of repetitional form be achieved. The network producing the object has to appear to have a length longer than the foreshortened measures used to achieve it. Either way, these negotiated compromises have to be managed lest the document’s authority and adherence to proper form appear compromised. Whereas in a shorter-term view, these may constantly alternate as each plays a part in the resolution of successive brackets, each giving repeatedly to the other (alternating ‘formals’ and ‘informals’), in a longer-term view, taking in the duration of the

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conference, the final document has to demonstrate that it combines both productivity and democracy, and that the achievements of one were not at the expense of the other. Two views of form have appeared from Riles’s own work on the document-drafting process of intergovernmental negotiations: the ‘figure seen twice’ – temporal displacement or substitution of one mode by another, and the ‘figure twice seen’ – temporal combination of two modes within a figure. They are, of course, simply two views of the same thing; but crucially, they afford different motivations to the figure of analysis. What they share is a set of logics or aesthetics with which to apprehend both figure and ground, both foreground and background: they provide a means of understanding shorter lengths dint of longer lengths, and longer lengths dint of shorter lengths. Seeing the delegate figure only once, we see only ‘part’ or ‘whole’ rather than both also; seeing the drafting-process only once we see only ‘object’ or ‘pattern’ rather than both also, we see only relations between actors rather than those between words, paragraphs and documents also. Riles’s theoretical innovation of ‘form’ provides an analytical tool for prompting this ‘double-view’. This analytical form teaches that it is an unfair strategy to take an isolated component and imagine it capable of standing alone, independently: whereas this description has justified analyses based on ‘relationality’ (social, contextual), it now affords another reading also. Riles advocates that we give up the view of ‘context’ as a durable beyond a figure or between it and something else, and instead turn our attention to the infinity within the figure. Seen in this way, renewed interest in the anthropology of knowledge might well pause to think twice on the contemporary cultural concern with property-rights. As described here, neither ‘knowledge’ nor ‘knower’ can appear as one thing alone.

Notes 1. Article 8(j) ‘Subject to its national legislation, respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and promote their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge, innovations and practices’, http: //www.biodiv.org/convention 2. This paper was originally written in response to a conversation with my friend, Annelise Riles about the role of ‘social relationships’ in the knowledge practices of UN document drafters, and was inspired in part by contributions and discussions at a conference in Chicago, November 1999, on ‘documents’ (see Riles 2006). My thanks are also for continued intellectual generosity on this and sibling projects. That the concerns here are the implications of these knowledge-practices for intellectual

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property rights is thanks to the Cambridge-Brunel ESRC-funded project ‘Property, Transaction, and Creation: New Economic Forms in the Pacific’ (see Hirsch and Strathern 2004) which ran from 1999 to 2002. My thanks to other project members for sharing the context and providing supportive stimulus, and especially to those members of the Trumpington Reading Group in Cambridge who responded helpfully to the first airing of these ideas in 2000. The British Academy afforded me institutional and scholarly support through the offices of the University of Edinburgh at that time, and since joining the University of St Andrews in 2003, several colleagues have provided much appreciated intellectual support through CASKE (Centre for the Anthropological Study of Knowledge and Ethics). I am grateful to Stefan Helmreich for having sight of, and permission to cite, his forthcoming manuscript. 3. The similarity activated here is a contingent one, fashioned for the analytical work of understanding the aesthetics of WTO knowledge-practices, and thereby eclipses the real differences in membership, charter, rationale and especially participation between the UN and WTO. I take my lead from the Rt. Hon. Michael Maue MP (leader of the Papua New Guinea WTO delegation) who drew an analogy with the United Nations in order to highlight a different basis for relationality in Seattle. See the section below entitled ‘Figures Twice Seen’.

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References Barth, F. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. ———. 1987. Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990. ‘The Guru and the Conjuror: Transactions in Knowledge and the Shaping of Culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia’, Man 25: 640–53. ———. 2002. ‘An Anthropology of Knowledge’, Current Anthropology 43(1): 1–18. Bunyard, P. and E. Goldsmith (eds). 1989. Gaia and Evolution: Proceedings of the Second Annual Camelford Conference on the Implications of the Gaia Thesis. Bodmin: Abbey Press. Brown, M. 1998. ’Can Culture be Copyrighted?’, Current Anthropology 39: 193–222. Brown, S. and R. Capdevila. 1999. ‘Perpetuum Mobile: Substance, Force and the Sociology of Translation’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds.). 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell/Sociological Review. Coombe, R. 1998. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law. Durham: Duke University Press. Crook, T. 1999. ‘Growing Knowledge in Bolivip’, Oceania 65(4): 225–42. ———. 2000 ‘Length Matters: A Note on the GM Debate’, Anthropology Today, 16(1): 8–11. ———. 2007a. Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea: Exchanging Skin. London: British Academy. ———. 2007b ‘Echolocation in Bolivip’, in P. Wade, P. Harvey and J. Edwards (eds), Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice. Oxford: Berg. Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publications.

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Geertz, C. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Oxford: Polity Press. Hann, C. (ed.). 1998. Property Relations: Rethinking the Anthropological Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haraway, D. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_ OncoMouse. New York: Routledge. Helmreich, S. n.d. ‘Alien Ocean: An Anthropology of Marine Biology and the Limits of Life’ (manuscript draft, September 2005). Hirsch, E. and M. Strathern (eds). 2004. Transaction and Creation: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. ‘On Recalling ANT’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell/Sociological Review. Law, J. 1999. ‘After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell/ Sociological Review. Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovelock, J. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miyazaki, H. 2004. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Moore, H. 1999. ‘Anthropological Theory at the Turn of the Century’, in H. Moore (ed.), Anthropological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Naess, A. 1973. ‘The Shallow and the Deep Long-range Ecology Movement: A Summary’, Inquiry 16: 95–100. Riles, A. 1998. ‘Infinity within the Brackets’, American Ethnologist 25: 3 378–98. ———. n.d. ‘Deadlines’, paper presented at Documents as Artifacts conference, Northwestern University Center for Law, Culture and Social Thought, November 16, 1999. ———. 2000. The Network Inside Out, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2004. ‘Property as Legal Knowledge: Means and Ends’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10: (4) 775–95. ———. (ed.). 2006. Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Seed, J. 1988. Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings. Gabriola: New Society Publishers. Shiva, V. 1997. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston: South End Press. Wagner, R. 1986. Symbols that Stand for Themselves, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Weiner, J. 1988. The Heart of the Pearlshell: The Mythological Dimensions of Foi Sociality. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1995. The Lost Drum: The Myth of Sexuality in Papua New Guinea and Beyond. Madison: Wisconsin University Press.

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Chapter 12

‘A WEIGHT OF MEANINGLESSNESS ABOUT WHICH THERE IS NOTHING INSIGNIFICANT’: ABJECTION AND KNOWING IN AN ART SCHOOL AND ON A HOUSING ESTATE

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Amanda Ravetz

This essay is an attempt to argue for the salience of contemporary art to social anthropology on the basis that the field provokes new challenges to anthropological knowledge in relation to contemporary realities. Until very recently, art has been approached as an object of anthropological study, framed through ‘non-Western’ examples and debates about cross-cultural aesthetics; contemporary art and international markets have been left, by and large, to art history and art criticism. But in the wake of anthropology’s reflexive turn and the ensuing challenge to certain categorical divisions in the study of art (Thomas 1997: 265), a new debate has emerged over the practicalities of establishing a ‘methodological dialogue’ between the two fields (Schneider and Wright 2006). Methods are closely linked to ways of knowing and so it follows that a dialogue based on method must also consider the different ways of knowing valued by anthropology and art. With this in mind, I set out in this essay to discuss what it might mean to ‘know’ as an artist, revisiting an aspect of my doctoral fieldwork on a housing estate in a northern English town

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from the perspective of my current research into the convergence of ethnography and contemporary art. The relationship between anthropology and art has been the focus of a number of initiatives in recent years. In Britain, what began as local interventions into the anthropology and art debate have recently achieved a new sense of consolidation through the staging of several international symposia, larger research projects and publications.1 These initiatives, when seen alongside the ‘appropriations’ by contemporary art of anthropology (Schneider and Wright 2006), reveal the extent of the change which the relationship between the two fields has undergone over the last ten years. The realignment of anthropology and art also reflects changes within contemporary art. In ways that deserve fuller attention, the eclipse of Greenbergian formalism by minimalism and pop art and the contemporary ‘return of the real’ identified by Hal Foster, have created new areas of shared interest and subject matter between the two fields (Foster 1996). There are further synergies between these re-articulations and debates that have been taking place in visual anthropology. Ten years ago, Banks and Morphy identified two wings of the subdiscipline, the first the study of visible cultural forms; and the second the use of visual media to describe and analyse culture (1997). They argued that the integration of visual systems and visual cultural forms would require a deflection of the discipline away from ethnographic film and photography, so that these practices could reintegrated into the broader anthropological project (1997: 5). This reassessment of film and photography lent a new impetus to those wanting to develop alternative approaches to ‘visualizing anthropology’ (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005); it also raised important questions about the relationship between these two wings. While Banks and Morphy argued for the pragmatic separation of anthropological approaches into research questions about visual culture, on the one hand, and appropriate visual research methodologies on the other, in the same collection, David MacDougall called for a different constellation. He suggested a productive confrontation between the anthropological questions asked of visual culture and the kinds of knowledge that might be said to inhere in the visual approaches used to address them: the visual in anthropology might enhance, change or challenge the anthropological project (1997: 285). The different positions taken up over the relationship between the two visual wings in anthropology continue to influence the field. Following Banks and Morphy in their call for integration, Pink views visual practices as sets of techniques and media that can be transposed between disciplines. She argues that a wide variety of visual and digital images and technologies are successfully ‘engaged in the processes through which ethnographic knowledge is created and represented’,

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including those used by artists – for example drawing and photography (Pink et al 2004: 1). This approach regards contemporary art, among other fields, as a potential source of media and techniques. Schneider and Wright, on the other hand, echoing MacDougall’s idea of productive confrontation, provide a more nuanced description of the crossovers between anthropology and contemporary art, characterizing the relationship between them as dialogic and involving appropriation – a process which they argue is ‘fundamental to exchanges between cultures and to cultural change’ (Schneider 2006: 48). Meanwhile, at symposiums and seminars where artists and anthropologists come together, a polarization can sometimes be observed between the two ‘camps’, reminding one of Gell’s recommendation that anthropologists should adopt a position of ‘methodological philistinism’ in the face of art (1992) and revealing contemporary arts’ resistance to certain expressions of anthropological knowledge. The caution displayed at such events reflects the loss that can occur on both sides when anthropology and contemporary art enter into dialogue. There is a tendency as an anthropologist to look for methods or forms of representation that might be useful in one’s work as an ethnographer, but with less regard for how choices around techniques and materials come to be made by artists, how work affects audiences and how debates surrounding bodies of work play out.2 On the other hand, artists sometimes appropriate methods, materials and ideas developed in the context of anthropology without valuing the ethical or epistemological subtleties they accrue within the field itself. Hal Foster notes that when artists borrow techniques such as fieldwork, important disciplinary understandings are likely to be misapplied or lost (1996: 170–203). For him, this is as damaging to art as to anthropology. The sophisticated use of anthropology by artists – one that goes beyond anthropology as just another medium and engages with anthropological debate – is one of the ways he believes that a critical space for art and theory might be recaptured. Both art and anthropology are, arguably, ways of approaching what it is to be human. If movement across their borders incurs disciplinary loss, it might also be the case that this loss opens up other possibilities connected with this shared aim. In what follows, I describe how the loss of anthropological knowledge during a period of fieldwork on a housing estate became a significant moment in my later attempts to come close to the lives of the women I knew there. Paradoxically, the expertise that contemporary art displays in ‘not-knowing’ helped me to approach an ethnographic reality that for a long time I was unable to articulate. My way of framing an argument about the challenges posed by contemporary art to anthropology builds on an important distinction

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between an anthropology that uses the visual and a visualizing anthropology (MacDougall 1997: 287; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005: 2). If the first tends to fit means to ends, often playing out a legacy of hierarchical relations between art and science, the second allows a visual medium to alter assumptions about what can be known, giving weight to what the image offers (MacDougall 2005). The term ‘visualizing’ can be taken too literally in the context of contemporary art, however.3 Contemporary artists’ uses of diverse media, concepts and debates constitute complex discursive fields in which materials, media and ideas – including text, performance and sound, the senses and conceptual and cultural action – go well beyond what the term ‘visual arts practice’ implies. There has been a shift in contemporary art from medium-specific to debate-specific practices of a similar magnitude to the movement in anthropology from place-based notions of the field towards a multi-sited research imaginary (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1998). By using the words ‘visualizing anthropology’ I want to suggest both the confrontation between anthropology and visual knowledge that MacDougall argues for, and the extension of this idea to contemporary art practice, which in turn is more than a collection of visual methods and techniques. To explore the challenge contemporary art poses to anthropology and specifically to anthropological ways of knowing, I focus on two case studies, the first involving the northern English former mill town of Todmorden, the second the Faculty of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University in Manchester. My argument for an anthropology that engages with art as ways of knowing rather than as a set of materials and techniques, arises from fundamental problems I encountered whilst pursuing doctoral fieldwork at 1997 in the first of these two locations.

Background My doctoral research in Todmorden set out as an investigation into seeing, knowing and the invention of place. My focus on visual knowledge reflected the fact that my undergraduate degree had been in fine art. For my fieldwork in Todmorden I decided to use a video camera as my main research tool, a decision that resonated with my training in fine art. But this choice also supported the proposition embodied in my research that the use of visual technologies would lead to different insights from those available through linguistic techniques alone; I expected that this emphasis on the visual, both in terms of my subject matter and the techniques I used would raise reflexive questions about the making of anthropological knowledge.

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I began my fieldwork on a council estate where I made friends with a small group of young single mothers. It was quickly apparent that my use of the video camera was contentious. The council estate was tense with police surveillance; and it was also overlaid with mythologies of the British ‘sink’ housing estate. For example, the film Twockers, shot on an estate in Halifax, took as its main ‘non-actor’ protagonists young people from the estate where I worked. After the film was finished, a teenager who had played one of the leading roles complained to me that she had not heard from the directors since filming had finished, nor received a copy of the tape after its screening on TV. She felt used by the situation; in the same way, argues Kathleen Stewart (1996), myths about cultural difference treat that difference as if it were an object. This is the case whether or not objects are shown in a sympathetic light. Confabulated spaces produce their own narrative forms that richly evoke their own double occupations and hallucinatory affects (Stewart 1996); using a video camera on the estate brought up the problem of how to approach these forms visually. How was I to produce something that captured the double occupations that occur when life and myth get caught up together? Although I was aware of work by artists dealing explicitly with fabled spaces, I was unsure how as an anthropologist I could create a dialogue with work of this kind.4 In 2004 I ‘returned’ to art school in order to develop a model of ‘aesthetic ethnography’, a project that borrows from Catherine Russell’s term ‘experimental ethnography’ and that grows out of the synergies she observes between avant-garde and ethnographic film. This ongoing project aims to test new approaches to ethnography by creating dialogues between anthropology and contemporary art. In the course of my research, while taking part in and observing the studies of MA Fine Art students, I was required to study the work of an artist in depth. I chose the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Salcedo’s sculptural pieces emerge from long-term immersive research with survivors and relatives of victims of torture. No text accompanies her work, but the haptic quality of the materials she uses – human hair, slivers of bone, wooden furniture filled with concrete and folds of cloth – communicate the experiences of her interlocutors in ways hard to encompass or articulate in words. Critical writing about her work emphasizes the artist’s ability to bring the viewer into the presence of the abject and to confront the inarticulacy of violence and torture (Princenthal 2000). In trying to answer what it was that drew me to Salcedo’s work, I began to see that a connection existed between the feelings it produced in me and events I had witnessed on the housing estate. This essay is an attempt to unpick those connections and to explore the synergies between aspects of my fieldwork and modes of

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contemporary art where ways of knowing are not about producing certainties. Here, states of ‘not-knowing’ exist as something more than the absence of knowledge. I suggest that there are situations when opening up a space for interrupting the certainty of knowledge is appropriate; and that contemporary art’s expertise in ‘modes of interruption’ provides an important challenge to the search for certainties that underpin much anthropological knowledge.

The Estate It was an unusually hot day. The kind when the tarmac gets sticky in places. When the houses on the other side of the street look rubbery and scanning the avvie [avenue] is like staring into oil. Cheryl’s door was wide open and I was sprawled across the step. From where I lay, the white clouds looked like theatrical props suspended from invisible cords; the yellow houses about to tumble down on top of them. Cath took a long toke of the spliff and for a time everything seemed caught on a pneumatic edge, as if the houses, street, trees and sky were being folded inside that one breath. We all heard the siren wailing a few streets away, clocked it moving off in the direction of town. And then with a small sigh we resumed our desultory pastimes, me sliding my finger along the rough underside of the door.

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That afternoon we descended on Tina’s step-dad’s house in the lower part of the estate. We were sitting in the front room, feeling bored, when Vron’s son Matt pointed out his sister Rhiannon on the road outside. The nine-yearold was thin and wiry. She looked vulnerable tottering along in her big-girl heels. She came down the path and pushed open the front door with the force of someone staking out what they know to be an impossible claim. ‘Fuck you, you little bitch,’ said Tina in between mouthfuls of egg sandwich, ‘You’re not invited.’ ‘Fuck you, you cow,’ said Rhiannon into Tina’s face. Tina made a grab for her but missed. She lunged again and this time got hold of Rhiannon’s leg. But Rhiannon wriggled free and ran into the garden outside. Tina, who was big and strong, was angry now. I glanced at Cheryl. She had a fixed grin on her face. Tina went to the back door and snapped down the lock. ‘She’ll come round the front now,’ said Vron. Her voice was thick in her throat. With fear or maternal pride? ‘What’s she like, little bitch, tight little cunt!’

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The front door rattled as Rhiannon tried to force her way in. A few seconds later, she appeared around the back again. She was laughing and crying, all at once. But she was still defiant. Tina jumped clumsily across the room and swung open the living-room window, just missing the child’s head, pitching the egg sandwich into Rhiannon’s face at point-blank range. The child ran up the garden path, wiping egg from her eyes. Tina took a raw egg from the box in the kitchen and went outside with it hidden behind her back. ‘Rhiannon, come here darling, come here babes.’ We were all standing up by now, laughing hysterically: the small girl determined to hold her own. As Rhiannon’s frustration and humiliation reached a state of frenzy she began to sob uncontrollably. Tina grabbed her and swung her up in her arms, still laughing, while Vron threatened her with a good belting if she didn’t stop mythering [complaining]. Soon after, we left the house and headed for town. ‘Can I stay with you tonight Tina,’ Rhiannon asked, as we dragged ourselves down the long road to town. ‘Yeah babes,’ said Tina, as she picked the child up again, ‘course you can.’ Several days later, Cheryl called me on the phone. ‘Mands, can you run me down to Tina’s? The police have been up looking for her, I’m sure they’ve come to arrest her. There were two cars, I need to go and make sure Rachel’s alright.’

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At Tina’s it was Mark who opened the door. ‘Where’s Tina?’ asked Cheryl. ‘She’s been arrested,’ said Mark, as he turned to Rachel, who was four. ‘Mummy’s gone shopping hasn’t she?’ Cheryl and I went to the police station but we were turned away. Later that day she was released. She’d been charged with £5000 worth of criminal damage. A house had been smashed up the night before, the one that Fat Flora was rumoured to be moving into. Two years beforehand, fat Flora had grassed up Tina to social services, claiming that Tina had physically abused her baby daughter. As a result the baby had been permanently removed from Tina’s care. Housing had decided to relocate Fat Flora back onto the estate. The next day Tina and Cheryl called on me. We sat and had a brew and they talked about that night. The events were related in fragmented, luminous images. Telling me about it, the women made me see the flying tin of paint, the picket fence ripped from the ground like an uprooted tree, the splintering glass as the paint tin collided with the windowpane, the

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nail protruding from the length of fence, the blood on the plimsoll. The plimsoll, singular and grey in the moonlight, left like a sign of everything that had happened, a sign of ‘how things come to this’. The plimsoll as a haunting image of that night.

Todmorden is a Pennine town 20 miles north-east of Manchester which in the 1890s was one of the most prosperous cotton towns in Lancashire but that subsequently suffered economic decline, waves of industrial restructuring and later uneven regeneration and reinvention. My focus on ways of seeing began with an interest in the landscape surrounding Todmorden and in the different relationships people there have to it. I was dissatisfied with accounts of landscape that focus on its emergence as a visualist construct and was concerned with whether phenomenological and ecological approaches used by anthropologists in ‘non-western’ contexts could be relevant to post-industrial locations. My use of visual technologies and in particular my intention to use the camera as a way of coming close rather than as a disembodied tool, was intended to elicit and evoke a sensuous and situated perspective and one tuned to non-verbal as much as to verbal expression. I anticipated that this emphasis on the non-verbal, threedimensional aspects of daily life would raise new questions about the themes that have consistently been central to the anthropological study of Britain – identity, belonging and boundary symbolism. I set out to pursue the three-dimensionality of belonging and identity on a housing estate, a working hill-farm, in a factory and by following the year-long preparations for the annual agricultural show. If these recurring themes were evoked by the location of my study, my focus on the visual, the senses and knowledge was intended to introduce a different set of epistemological questions to the study of Britain. I was trained in ethnographic filmmaking at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, at the University of Manchester, with an emphasis on observational cinema (Grimshaw 2005; Ravetz 2005). Following the ethos of this particular approach, I did not stage events but filmed things as they unfolded (Young 1975). I worked hard to establish trusting relationships with my subjects. I was alert for stories of ‘human interest’ and I attempted to reciprocate acts of hospitality. On the estate I videoed rituals like birthday parties and weddings and nights out. At the time and in later years these recordings of family and social events were appreciated and valued by the women of the estate. But despite this, I found a gap opening up between what was literally visible on the estate and what was visually salient in the women’s lives. What ended up on tape did not capture the ‘hallucinatory’, ‘luminous’, ‘storied’ sense of place I increasingly came across (Stewart 1996). Eventually I abandoned the idea of using the rushes to make

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a film. I found instead that I was using the experience of filming – in the way it had directed my observations and in what had eluded the camera – to help me write.

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Losing Knowledge For the women, living on the estate was something like living in an occupied territory. Not only the police, but social workers, family workers, doctors, housing officers, teachers and advice workers all monitored those who were ‘known’ to be perpetrators of criminality, child abuse and acts of vandalism. Unmarked police cars sat on the main street of the upper part of the estate, supposedly invisible to those under surveillance – but their occupants in fact known to everyone by nicknames and remembered for past confrontations. Under this pressure of occupation and surveillance, there were daily conflicts between appearances and truth, between how things were and how they might have been if life had turned out differently. John Berger refers to this as ‘double vision’ (1980: 81); and Kathleen Stewart calls it a double vision of two lives (1996: 50). For Tina and Cheryl it was expressed in the words ‘shit and home’, ‘want to and can’t’, ‘life and dreams’. Out of this double vision, people seemed compelled to act out strange secrets and nightmares and dreams, so that the estate sometimes spilled over its limits. Stewart refers to this as ‘the power of a doubly occupied place to exceed the space allotted to it by its own history’ (ibid.). When I came to write up the research, available ethnographies of Britain presented a picture of people ‘thinking through categorical distinctions’; although this picture supported much of what I witnessed, it also suggested a logic to behaviour that seemed at odds with the women’s lives. In her ethnography of the northern English town of Bacup, Jeanette Edwards sees ‘born and bred’ kinship thinking as implicated in all the theoretically significant issues to have come out of recent British ethnography (2000). Such thinking, she argues, is mobilized through ideas of birth and breeding and the inclusion and exclusion of persons from social categories. In Bacup, the next valley along from Todmorden, Edwards found that born and bred thinking reckons relatedness not only to persons but to places and pasts, linking some of the assumptions of the school of British anthropology to the ethnography of Bacup. Bacup residents and anthropologists both use stories of arrival and select autobiographical moments to make explicit the authority from which they speak; both interpret social worlds by drawing on ‘an archive of cultural knowledge, not in itself an entity

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but the raw material from which entities are conceived’ (2000: 19); and both categorize localities with reference to different kinds of social relationships, the village characterized as interrelatedness and the city as based on single-stranded and utilitarian forms of relationship. On the estate much of this thinking was also part of daily discourse. But what stood out as different were the ways Tina and Cheryl and the others used the categories upon which both British class thinking and British anthropology are founded. Their local idioms of born and bred thinking, for example ‘home/shit’, were not alternated so much as doubled up, particularly during moments of violence and excess. If the farmers in the area, with whom I also worked, privileged different social relationships in different contexts in order to mobilize their union with the land at one moment and their social mobility at the next, the women, by contrast, pushed this logic to the point of collapse. Children and other adults could be taunted to a point where love and rejection caved in on each other; a home-to-be could be wrecked with the ‘shit’ of the everyday until it was transformed into a haunting luminous sign; a friend of the women who spent the night pacing his front garden with a gun held to his head became a sign of life’s power to betray one’s dreams. To write about the estate or to visually document the women’s lives within an analytical explanatory framework raised the problem of what to do with the luminous, fabled sense of place and the difficult-toarticulate feelings evoked in and by the women’s lives. If ethnography involves modes of description, anthropology analyses the conditions of possibility from which these descriptions arise. An anthropological account of the women’s lives would require distance from the affects of the women’s ways of seeing and from my own descriptive processes. But there was a dilemma involved in taking up such an analytical stance. I felt that subjecting the women’s actions and imaginaries to a rationalizing discourse would be to apply to their lives the same ways of knowing which they challenged, making of them an object of cultural difference. An explanatory framework would also serve to flatten the affects of the world as they saw it. Faced with this dilemma I looked for an approach that would allow me to be complicit with the women’s confabulation, to work with their experience in ways that did not reproduce the categorical distinctions that the events in their lives disrupted, to present, for example, the paradoxically material presence of the talked-about-plimsoll. If the price for this was a loss of anthropological knowledge, perhaps there would be compensations too? Most anthropologists can list texts and films that they find inspirational, either for their conceptual sophistication, their lyricism or their insight. Struggling with the questions above I was pointed to Kathleen Stewart’s book A Space on the Side of the Road, which sets

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out to ‘take a cue from the tactile, imaginary, nervous, and contested modes of critique of the subjects we study not in order to decide what these interpretative modes ‘mean’ in the end, but to begin to deploy them in a cultural politics’ (1996: 26). To do this, Stewart suggests, is to do something like James Agee who adopted ‘a poetics of implication and entanglement’ (ibid: 23), or to answer Walter Benjamin’s call for the fashioning of ‘an image that arrests the progress of ideology with a defamiliarising shock of disjuncture and leaves us in a space of tense confabulation’ (Buck-Morss 1989, quoted in Stewart 1996: 26). Inspired by Stewart, I tried to write about the estate in ways that were visual and affecting, even though the things I described were not straightforwardly available to document by visual means. By following Stewart’s writing style, I was able to approach a dimension of the women’s imaginaries; but I remained unclear as to how anthropology might take the imaginary modes of critique employed by the women and deploy them in a cultural politics through any form other than text. I remained unsure, too, about the women’s ways of knowing. I put these unanswered questions to one side for a long time. Then during the first year of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellowship by Creative Practice at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) they unexpectedly reappeared. Working with emerging artists on the MA Fine Art course, I began to find connections between their ways of working and thinking and those of the women on the estate.

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Art School and The Contaminating Effects of Anthropological Knowledge If as a doctoral student I had set out to understand my subject through the formulation and investigation of anthropological questions in a particular place and time, my objective now was to acquire and use contemporary art approaches and to assess their usefulness to anthropological investigations. I expected that if my re-exposure to fine art were to have a chance of registering in my approach to visual anthropology, I would have to let go of some of my habitual ways of working. But despite having been an art school graduate many years previously, this turned out to be a naïve aspiration. I was told that my instincts as an anthropologist sabotaged my attempts to think as an artist. This was defined in tutorials as the problem of contamination. In April 2005 it was reported in the British press that a man had been found dripping wet on the seashore at Sheppey Island. Wearing a black dress suit and bow tie, he repeatedly played the theme of Swan Lake on

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a hospital piano, despite refusing or being unable to speak. A number of theories were circulating about him. Some conjectured that he was an ‘illegal’, protecting himself by feigning amnesia. Others that he was a concert pianist who had suffered a nervous breakdown. A few months into my time at the MA studios I began to work with the story of Piano Man, reading reports about illegal entry into the EU by sea and finding out about the Isle of Sheppey. I copied the drawing of a grand piano that had first prompted hospital staff to offer the man the use of the instrument and worked onto a black jacket, drawing onto it, projecting images onto it and dipping it in brine.

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After a few days working in this vein, I had critiques with two course tutors. Both had recently returned from the Venice Biennale and independently mentioned a work they had seen there as a way of illustrating the problem they believed I was having. The work was by the Danish artist, Joachim Koester. Message to Andre consisted of cine footage – reshot by Koester – of a hot-air balloon expedition to the North Pole undertaken several decades ago, which had ended in a crash. What was on view was the ‘black snow’ visible on the salvaged and damaged film stock. The tutors found the film interesting; but they were very critical of the inclusion in the exhibit of a long panel of text giving information about the balloon trip itself. They likened this exposition to the way I brought anthropology to bear on my work. I was too interested in trying to understand cultural phenomena. For art to work, they said, it needed to create an opening into which the viewer could bring their own feelings, thoughts and ideas. Instead of the openness which contemporary art set out to afford, I was trying to understand something and to communicate it, as if understanding were a package delivered via the medium of art. The result was something that was all too obviously trying to ‘look’ like art, but that did not ‘work’ as art.

The idea that a work of art should create an opening in the imagination was reflected in the approach students were encouraged to take in the development of their ‘practice’. Students taken on the MA course had to write a learning agreement at the beginning of the course outlining the direction that their study would take. The advice I received on how to approach this agreement involved ‘finding the ground’ of my practice. This meant trying to tease out the interconnecting concerns apparent in individual aspects of my work and divining a sense of what animated the work as a whole. This was a reversal of the way I was used to approaching things. My habit was to fix on phenomena ‘in the world’ and then to identify ways of exploring them. What I understood I was being asked to do now was to move my primary emphasis away from understanding explicit social phenomena towards activities that could encompass these other concerns. ‘Practice’ was strongly differentiated from ‘methodology’, which in one tutor’s opinion was an inappropriate term in the context

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of fine art, tied to the sciences and implying falsely, that artists set out to obtain results.5 I was advised to develop my practice by ‘following the work’ and by giving up a degree of intentionality, although by no means all of my intentionality as an artist. The sense conveyed was that the work had a degree of efficacy in and of itself. Practice was not something that could be worked out in advance of action, but nor could one abandon oneself entirely to process. It involved a continual shuttling between process and reflection, whether conceptual, embodied, material, or all of these. If works of art had to leave space for audiences, then becoming an artist also involved creating ‘room for manoeuvre’ within one’s own ways of working. It was not so much about asking and solving questions, but of tracking the manoeuvres and moves from within practice.

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During a group criticism, a student presented the rest of the group and the course leader with two sculptural works that she had constructed using a pair of chairs. Each chair had slightly battered wooden legs, green faux leather upholstery on the seat and back and non-upholstered, polished wooden arms. One chair had been partially encased in plywood, so that although its structure remained visible, it’s seat, arms and back were enclosed in a four-sided ‘sleeve’ of ply, spanning an area from the upper portion of the legs to a couple of inches above the top of the chair back. The other chair was clad in a four-sided sleeve of sheet metal. A sliver of the chair was visible above the sharp-looking metal edge. The welds on the metal sheet were adequate to keep the cladding intact but quite roughly executed. After a minute or so of silence, the tutor asked the students to comment. Greeted with silence he said, ‘OK, describe what you see.’ ‘The one with wood, because it has edges, little wing bits, looks like it is reaching out. I find it quite touching.’ ‘Did you mean it to have those little arm bits? It looks like it was an accident.’ ‘It reminds me of what I normally take for granted about chairs, by frustrating me, not letting me sit in it.’ ‘I couldn’t turn the chairs inside out like I’ve done with the chest of drawers and other pieces, so I came up with the idea of enclosing it instead.’

A mainstay of the course was looking at art, each other’s and that of other artists’. Looking involved all kinds of conceptual moves and tutors would point out the fallacy of some of these. Although from the perspective of the audience we might talk about work as if it were ‘about’ something, this was seen as an erroneous idea. It was we who brought meaning to the work, rather than the work that communicated something. The idea of an art piece ‘doing’ something, but not being ‘about’ something was difficult to grasp at first. But the word ‘doing’ indicated that the efficacy of the work was not thought to be contained

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in preformed meanings; rather, art was able to do ‘work’ in association with its audience, or as one of the tutors put it ‘art is a verb’. The distinction between art ‘meaning’ something and art ‘doing’ something had a parallel in two contrasting ideas that circulated about looking, where looking was either an act of interpretation or of interruption. When one of the chair pieces mentioned above was installed in an exhibition in a residential flat, a tutor remarked on the way the shabbiness told us that the chair had been around and was, as it were, on its way out, evoking for him not a specifically institutional context as I had commented, but drawing attention to the chair’s generic form. He pointed to the way the chair seemed out of place in this semi-domestic, semi-formal setting. It was not the kind of chair you would find in this kind of flat; and he remarked that this out-ofplaceness lent it an edge and helped its success as an artwork. These comments did not tell us what the work was about so much as suggest ways in which the tutor’s ways of looking acted to avoid the imposition of fixed meaning. The shabbiness of the chair, its sense of being out of place conjured up chair as a generic category. The ‘work’ the art did in this case was to create the conditions for a way of looking that oscillated between an ideal image of a chair and a specific instance of a shabby battered chair. Like the model of practice that seemed to encourage a tracking of moves and manoeuvres rather than problemsolving methodologies, the work of art here could provoke viewings that sidestepped stable interpretations, explanations and meanings.

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Doubling What connection is there to be made between this account of art school life, the fieldwork I carried out on a housing estate and anthropological knowledge? On both the estate and at the art school, doubling provided a strong metaphor for contemplating certain things I observed. In The Return of the Real, Foster traces the concerns of neoavant-garde contemporary art through a genealogy of minimalism that took up a war on representation through abstraction, but was complicated by the realism and illusionist concerns of artists such as Andy Warhol. For Foster, Warhol’s work complicates two standard models of representation. These models either have images attached to referents, whether iconographic themes or real things in the world, or are reduced to their simulacral function and only able to represent other images in auto-referential ways. Foster argues that readings of Warhol’s work as simulacral conflate the artist with the surface of his pictures rather than with the depth

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behind them. In the referential view on the other hand, Warhol’s work is related to things in a ‘real’ world such as fashion and gay culture. Foster argues that for the critic Thomas Crow, an object ‘under the surface’ is discovered in the tragedy of Marilyn Monroe. This allows for a reading of the reality of suffering and death through which is then rendered an exposé of complacent consumption. While simulacral and referential readings are both projections on the part of respective critics, Foster deems them both to have value. For Foster, Warhol’s work, in particular his repetitions, produce and reproduce traumatic affects. This account rests on the work of Lacan, where the traumatic is defined as a missed encounter with the real. Warhol’s repetitions can be understood with reference to Lacan as serving to screen the real. But they point to it, too. The real, as Barthes suggests in his essay on the photograph, can pop through the image surface, so that ‘something rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’. ‘It is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there’ (Barthes, as quoted in Foster 1996: 132, 134). The paradox of Warhol’s work, being both surface, evacuating all meaning while at the same time existing as a screen for a depth of trauma, complicates the either/or dualism of referent versus simulacra: in maintaining the tension between them, something else becomes apparent, the protrusion of the real, and this constellation of referent, simulacra and the real then also seems to elicit a double vision. On the MA course at MMU students brought something to artwork. They recognised that it is nothing more than its appearance; and yet they registered its affects and its agency as it did its work. This created a kind of double vision. This doubling, I began to feel, was also characteristic of Salcedo’s work, which rather than illustrating the visual dimensions of abjection associated with violence and torture as some other artists have done, attempts to place us in proximity to what is abject by both screening and yet somehow figuring the real. On the estate, while women often used categorical distinctions in the way Edwards describes, a kind of double vision could also take hold. This doubling seemed to accompany a disturbance of categories that left me feeling the self-loathing of abjection and the women describing similar states, descriptions resonant with Kristeva’s definition of the abject as ‘a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it’ (Kristeva 1982 : 4). The women’s blurring of boundaries between the insides and outsides of bodies during fights, between home as an ideal and home as shit, produced a sense of a ‘weight of meaninglessness about which there is nothing insignificant’ (1981: 2).6 Reading about Salcedo and seeing her work I was reminded of some of these feelings: laughing abjectly at Rhiannon with the others

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and then witnessing the child turn to Tina and ask to stay the night; listening to Tina talk about social services taking her child away and hearing Cheryl’s account of the night when Fat Flora’s house got wrecked, leaving only the bloody plimsoll as a sign; imagining the abjection of Mitchell pacing the garden with a gun to his head and placing this beside Cheryl’s exalted image of Mitchell as a sign of how low people fall. Reminded of the way Salcedo creates haptic surfaces that veil what Lacan calls ‘the real’, I saw in the women’s talk and visualizing of a luminous and enchanted world, ways in which they held off and yet vividly re-figured the ‘shit’ of the everyday. My contact with art and artists led me to identify a number of analogies between what the women on the estate were doing and what the emerging artists at MMU were encouraged to do: between ‘art as a verb’ and the affecting quality of the luminous images the women conjured up; between the non-methodological framing of art practice and the women’s surrender of intentionality to the things they created through action and talk; between looking as interruption and the women’s imaginary as interrupting the representations they lived with through a kind of double vision. This also calls up Taussig’s ‘mimetic excess’, the fashioning of an imaginary in which subjects are both in a world – subject to it – and yet able to move through it, to perform it and give it form (1993). At MMU students of fine art were encouraged to understand art as a verb. They tried to follow this advice by believing in the efficacy of art and by allowing art to do its work on them. It is common to hear artists describe what they do through an apparent surrender of agency, as if the work happens through them.7 Like the students, the young women whom I got to know in Todmorden also believed in the power of the imaginaries they conjured up. These imaginaries worked on them and their audiences not by communicating something, but, as Gell suggests, through a kind of virtuoso enchantment that has a number of affects, including a confusion of categorical thinking and a blocking of cognition (1998: 71). Anthropological analysis tends to rely on two standard theories of representation. The more commonly applied of these is that which proposes images as attached to referents, whether to iconographic themes or to real things in the world. The second model, in its reduction of images to their simulacral function is more commonly cited in challenges to the use of visual media in anthropology and is used to theorize aspects of visual culture. On the estate and in places like those that Stewart describes, the problem with the use of a video camera or descriptive writing as a means of matching a real world in ways that capture ‘the gist of things’ (Stewart 1996: 3), or that reach narrativedriven conclusions, is in how places can too easily become ‘objects’ with

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lists of things already attached to them: ‘there is the easy assumption that ‘it’ is essentially ‘other,’ ‘outside,’ and “resistant”’ (ibid.: 4). In line with this theory of representation the use of documentary film within anthropology has often set out to humanize places, to try to explain why people behave as they do; visual practices in anthropology have rarely taken the affecting qualities of people’s imaginaries as their main cue. In place of this, Stewart imagines ‘a local cultural real [that] emerges in a precise mimetic tracking of events and grows dense with cultural tensions and desires’ (Stewart 1996: 4). In a way that mirrors some contemporary art practice, this project does not try to solve the problem of representing cultural difference, but itself becomes ‘caught up in the force and tension and the density of cultural imaginations in practice and use’ (ibid.: 6).

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Conclusion – The Salience of Contemporary Art to Anthropology On the estate, faced with the women’s imaginaries, I felt alienated from anthropological knowedge as it appeared from my position there. But this loss also had the effect of making me want to revisit my experience on the estate through the ways of knowing encountered in Salcedo’s work and the work of other emerging artists at MMU. Brought into proximity with abjection through works of art, I was reminded of the women’s actions and stories. Here, too, abjection was reconfigured in a luminous world of signs and affects. Some of the ways of knowing used by artists and by Cheryl and Tina have common strands. Knowing as an activity can be said to involve a kind of ‘tracking’. On the estate, the women might be said to be caught up in a world that oscillates between a desire for order and moments of intense excess; as subjects moving through this world and giving it form, their knowledge is in their experience as subjects of the world and as subjects in it, encountering the ‘process of being caught up in discourses and signs and carried into states of nerves’ (Stewart 1996: 21). Art students at MMU track their own and others’ work. Acts of knowing in art involve the sidestepping and interruption of meaning, the fixing onto something only to have it immediately undermined, so that art is not about something and yet does something, is only what it appears to be but is everything that it elicits from us. This is not so far from what many anthropologists do during fieldwork and after when they track their own moves and those of their subjects and encounter epistemological clashes. Those like Marcus and Fischer who take anthropology to be a form of cultural critique (1986) and Taussig who would use mimesis to stare the mind

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out (1993), and others like Strathern, who track the kind of bodies that embody embodied knowledge (1994), follow their subjects and move their stories on through interruptions, amassed descriptions and attention to the ‘formed particularity of things and the spaces of desire (and dread) they incite in the imagination’ (Stewart 1996: 7). All these ways of knowing are counterpoints to knowledge manifest either in representations that hold tight and strong to referents or that otherwise believe only in the possibility of an unending display of auto-referential representations. The methodologies that direct these interrupted ways of knowing are slippery, liable to dissemble, retrospective, unpredictable and hard to fathom. I have tried to show how my growing familiarity with contemporary art enriched my own ability to come closer to the lives of some of the women I met in Todmorden. This led me to reflect upon the inadequacy, in these circumstances at least, of categorical ways of knowing and of certain representational theories. The methodological dialogue between anthropology and art that Schneider and Wright propose, rests in turn on a deeper appreciation of contemporary art’s ways of knowing. For example, the kind of attention to affect that contemporary art invites may be seen in the context of the inarticulacy and irreducibility of certain phenomenon: the thing lost to anthropological knowledge may sometimes be the most important thing to contemplate. This raises questions about when and how the residues of anthropology and contemporary art usefully overlap. If as an artist I want some experience to occur around myself and others, then as an anthropologist I want to find something out. These two things, intention and affect, take artists and anthropologists on mostly different paths; but the residues of an art that is open to what the world throws back and of an anthropology that wants to find things out by being in the world may sometimes work in similar ways. We might ask what would an anthropology look like that was able to give the talked-about ‘sign’ (for example, the plimsoll) the same weight as analytical research findings? Anthropological value might thereby become something to be measured, not only in terms of the distance it puts between a first level of description and a second level of explication, as Gell argues is necessary for an anthropology of art, but in the connection it creates between the realities of affecting worlds and the creation of worlds of affect.

Acknowledgements Discussions with Pavel Büchler and Ian Rawlinson on and off the studio floor were fundamental to the development of the research on

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which this chapter is based – my warmest thanks to them both. Many thanks to Tina and Cheryl for their affecting friendship in Todmorden and thanks to all the students on the Fine Art MA course at Manchester Institute for Reasearch and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD), Manchester Metropolitan University who sustained me during my ‘return’ to art school. I am grateful to Anna Grimshaw, Penny Harvey and Tim Ingold who all read versions of this paper and made a number of helpful suggestions. Mark Harris organized the Ways of Knowing Conference and later approached the job of editor with great care and enthusiasm. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council for the first period of fieldwork and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the second period of fieldwork and during the writing of this paper.

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Notes 1. A list of interventions of this kind in British Anthropology would have to include: The Art Diviners (Schneider 1993); the practice-based AAA seminar series at the University of Manchester beginning in 1995 initiated by Tim Ingold, Stephanie Bunn, Paul Towell and Antonia Phinnemore and subsequent work by Nuccio Mazzullo’s on carving and tool-making among the Sami and Nikolai Zhoukov’s work on the Finnish kantele. Anna Grimshaw’s Prickly Pear Press commission Jimmie Durham on becoming authentic (Papastergiadis and Turney 1996) and in 1999, her collaboration with artist Inga Burrows on a piece that became the installation Times of Our Lives at Whitworth Art Gallery (see Burrows 2005); Ph.D. work by Stephanie Bunn and Wendy Gunn which combined art and architectural practices with anthropological fieldwork (see Bunn 2000; Gunn 2002); Chris Wright’s work as a curator on The Impossible Science of Being exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery and Presence, Leighton House, 2003. Recent symposiums on the subject of Art and Anthropology include Fieldworks: Dialogues between Art and Anthropology, Tate Modern, September 2003, www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/fieldworks; Anthropologies of Art at the Clark Institute of Fine Arts, Williamstown, Mass. in 2003; and Setting up the Document, the Leventritt Symposium at Harvard University in 2004. Recent publications that deal with the issues of border crossings between the two fields include Gunn 2005; Pink, Kürti and Afonso 2004; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005; Schneider and Wright 2006. Research projects on the topic include: AHRC funded Learning is understanding in practice (2002–05), developed jointly by the School of Fine Art, University of Dundee and the department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen; the AHRC-funded Fellowship by Creative Practice, Contemporary convergence of Aesthetics and Ethnography 2004–07. See also, Creativity and Practice Research Papers: A Series of Publications Exploring the Interfaces between the Knowledge Traditions of Fine Art, Architecture and Anthropology, series editor Wendy Gunn 2005. 2. An accusation made of visual anthropologists during Panel Discussion 8 at Fieldworks: Dialogues between Art and Anthropology, Tate Modern, September 2003, www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/fieldworks. 3. Schneider and Wright write in the introduction to Contemporary Art and Anthropology, ‘Our main argument is that anthropology’s iconophobia and self-imposed restriction

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5.

6.

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of visual expression to text-based models needs to be overcome by critical engagement with a range of material and sensual practices in the contemporary arts’ (2006: 4). For example, the video art of Gillian Wearing deals with similar themes to those I encountered, but in ways opposed to the documentary tradition in which I had been trained. For some artists, the term ‘practice’ is itself too suggestive of methodology. The sculptor Phyllida Barlow made the point at a Cornerhouse Talk (1 November 2005), that the artist is engaged not in a practice but an activity, perhaps looking for method but never finding it. ‘If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (Kristeva 1982: 1–2). For example, after an artist’s talk the MA course leader told me his reaction to the speaker’s claim that she fights against being performed by discourse. ‘I wanted to ask her, does she ever feel she is being performed by the art?’

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References Banks, M. and H. Morphy (eds). 1997. Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven: Yale University Press. Berger, J. 1980. About Looking. New York: Pantheon. Bunn, S. 2000. ‘The House of Meaning: Tents and Tent Dwelling among Nomadic Herders in Kyrgyzstan’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester. Burrows, I. 2005. ‘The Experience and the Object: Making a Documentary Video Installation’, in A. Grimshaw and A. Ravetz (eds), Visualizing Anthropology. Bristol: Intellect Books. Edwards, J. 2000. Born and Bred. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foster, H. 1996. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Boston: MIT Press. Gell, A. 1992. ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in J. Coote and A. Sheldon (eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 40–67. ———. 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grimshaw, A. 2005. ‘Eyeing the Field: New Horizons for Visual Anthropology’, in A. Grimshaw and A. Ravetz (eds), Visualizing Anthropology. Bristol: Intellect Books. ——— and A. Ravetz. 2005. Visualizing Anthropology. Bristol: Intellect Books. Gunn, W. 2005. Creativity and Practice Research Papers. Dundee: University of Dundee. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson (eds).1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kristeva, J. 1982. ‘Approaching Abjection’, in Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. New York: Colombia University Press, pp. 1–32. Marcus, G.E. 1998. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Marcus, G.E. and M.J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacDougall, D. 1997. ‘The Visual in Anthropology’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 276–295. ———. 2005. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Papastergiadis, N. and L. Turney. 1996. Jimmie Durham on Becoming Authentic. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press. Pink, S., L. Kürti and A.I. Afonso. 2004. ‘Introduction: Situating Visual Research’, in S. Pink, L. Kürti and A.I. Afonso, Working Images. London: Routledge. Princenthal, N. 2000. Doris Salcedo. London: Phaidon. Ravetz, A. 2005. ‘News from Home: Reflections on Fine Art and Anthropology’ in A. Grimshaw and A. Ravetz (eds), Visualizing Anthropology. Bristol: Intellect Books. Schneider, A. 1993. ‘The Art Diviners’, Anthropology Today 9(2): 3–9. ———. 2006. ‘Appropriations’, in A. Schneider and C. Wright (eds), Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Schneider, A. and C. Wright (eds). 2006. Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Stewart, K. 1996. A Space on the Side of the Road. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. ‘One-legged Gender’, in L. Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory. New York: Routledge. Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Thomas, N. 1997. ‘Collectivity and Nationality in the Anthropology of Art’, in M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven: Yale University Press. Young, C. 1975. ‘Observational Cinema’, in P. Hockings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 69–79.

Filmography Twockers. 1998. Directors: Pawel Pawlikowski and Ian Duncan, GB.

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Chapter 13

THE 4 A’S (ANTHROPOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, ART AND ARCHITECTURE): REFLECTIONS ON A TEACHING AND LEARNING EXPERIENCE Tim Ingold with Ray Lucas

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Learning Anthropology and the Anthropology of Learning Anthropology, perhaps more than any other discipline, is about learning how to learn. It is not so much the study of people as a way of studying with people – a protracted master-class in which the novice gradually learns to see things and of course to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do. An education in anthropology, therefore, serves not merely to furnish us with knowledge about the world, of human beings and their societies. More than that, it educates our perception of the world and opens our eyes to other possibilities of being. And in bringing these possibilities to bear on our own experience, we can be led to new discoveries. For just this reason, however, anthropology is a subject without any firmly established body of knowledge that the teacher might hope to pass on and students to assimilate. Indeed, since the basic task of anthropology – to understand other people’s understandings – is no different from the task that all humans confront on a daily basis in their attempts to forge a social life, what goes for

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education in anthropology also goes for education in life. One of the things that anthropological research has shown, time and again, is that novices are not passive recipients whose mental capacities are waiting to be ‘filled up’ with content peculiar to their tradition, but are rather active participants in a process in which knowledge is forever being created and discovered anew. If this is the way people learn in any society, then it must also be true of the way students learn in our own. Thus the role of the student is not to take on board a corpus of authorized knowledge issuing from a superior source in the academy, but to collaborate in the shared pursuit of human understanding. For many years I have taught undergraduate courses, at both introductory and more advanced levels, in which I have explained this view of learning.1 I have argued that it is wrong to think of learning as the transmission of a ready-made body of information, prior to its application in particular contexts of practice. On the contrary, we learn by doing, in the course of carrying out the tasks of life. In this the contribution of our teachers is not literally to pass on their knowledge but rather to establish the contexts or situations in which we can discover for ourselves much of what they already know, and also perhaps much that they do not. In short, we grow into knowledge rather than having it handed down to us. This is what Jean Lave (1990) means when she says that learning is a matter of understanding in practice rather than acquiring culture. Yet as Lave herself has pointed out, our institutions of education, at least in the Western world, are largely premised on the theory that the classroom is a dedicated space for learning in which students are supposed to acquire the approved knowledge of society, which they can then take into the world outside and put into practice once their education is complete. Of course things are changing, and school classrooms – especially at the primary level – are no longer the regimented settings they once were, where pupils had to sit quietly in rows and take down what they were told. The university lecture theatre, however, seems to be the last bastion of an obsolescent didactic tradition. As many of the more astute students taking my courses pointed out to me, there was a glaring inconsistency between how they were being taught in formal lectures, and what they were being taught about how learning actually occurs in the social world. In adhering to the traditional lecture format, educators in anthropology such as myself seemed to be the very last to practise what they preach. I am not sure whether this complaint was wholly justified. There is much to be said for the old-fashioned lecture, after all. As a performance, it can awaken curiosity, kindle enthusiasm, guide and inspire. For those who would listen, it can set them on the road to discovery. Yet the lecture succeeds only to the extent that it departs from its ‘official’

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didactic purpose, which is to deliver the content of the curriculum. Indeed, the contemporary demise of the lecture format in higher education owes more to an ever tighter adherence to this purpose, at the institutional level, than to its rejection, as new technological means render techniques of oral delivery increasingly redundant. With the reduction of knowledge to transmissible information, the ‘talk’ has no further need of a speaker. Rather, it comes pre-packaged as a series of slides that calls only for competence in operating the equipment of electronic projection. Paradoxically, then, in calling for ways of teaching and learning in anthropology more consonant with what we know from anthropology about the processes of learning and teaching, we might want to defend the traditional lecture. Yet the lecture has its limitations, as it can only cover ground already trodden. The approach we advocate here goes beyond this. It is founded on the claim that as a mode of exploratory practice, learning is itself a kind of research that generates new knowledge and understanding. If this is so, then research can no more be divorced from teaching than can theory be distilled from practice. We do not claim that knowledge is, or should be, practical rather than theoretical, or that the conduct of research is a substitute for teaching. Our aim is rather to find a way of moving beyond these problematic distinctions, so that to theorize is to wonder, as we do things, how it is possible to do them, and to teach is to take students with us along routes that we have not travelled before (or even if we have, along which we may be led to new discoveries). Of course this is easier said than done, especially when student numbers are large and resources scarce. With the benefit of relatively small numbers, however, and modest additional funding, it proved possible for us – in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen – to experiment with alternative forms of delivery that would embed theory into practice and research into teaching.2 We spread our experiment across two courses. The first, entitled Doing Anthropological Research, was taught at Junior Honours Level (that is, in students’ third year of study); the second, entitled The 4 A’s: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, was taught to Senior Honours students (in their fourth and final year). I was personally involved only in the design and delivery of the second of these courses, and what follows is based entirely on the experience I gained from it.

Anthropology of, and Anthropology with I had long wanted to teach a course along these lines. The idea took root a few years ago while I was still based at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. More by accident than

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by design, there were at that time a number of research students at the Department whose background was either in art or architecture, or both. I thought it would be interesting for us to meet together as a very informal seminar group, to talk about issues on the interface between art, architecture and anthropology. This we did, rather successfully – indeed the seminar ended up running in fits and starts for a full three years, until 1999, when I left Manchester to take up my current post in Aberdeen. It was, at least for me, a very remarkable seminar, and I have never known anything quite like it. We began in the usual way, in a seminar room, listening to each other talk, but after a term of this we felt that we had reached some kind of impasse. This impasse, however, seemed to be blocking not just us but the whole subject of anthropology. In retrospect, I think it lies in what could be called the ‘anthropology of ’ formula. The problem is that whenever anthropology encounters anything outside itself, it wants to turn whatever it is into an object that it can analyse. Thus when it encounters art, it wants to treat art as a collection of things that are in some way caught up in a texture of social and cultural relations that we can study. Alfred Gell’s muchcited work on Art and Agency offers a case in point. ‘The anthropology of art would not be an anthropology of art,’ Gell claims, ‘unless it were confined to a subset of social relations in which some “object” were related to a social agent in a distinctive, “art-like” way’ (1998: 13). It is much the same with architecture, although for reasons that are hard to fathom, the anthropology of architecture is not nearly so well developed as the anthropology of art. The literature on the latter is voluminous; on the former it is almost non-existent. These anthropologies of are, frankly, rather sterile. To be sure, anthropologists have been careful to keep their distance from historians of art and architecture who often seem preoccupied with judging the relative merits of one work or practitioner over another on the basis of supposedly authoritative criteria that, from an anthropological perspective, invariably appear value-laden and ethnocentric. But in treating art and architecture as varieties of material culture, that is as objects to be analysed, anthropology has closed off any direct engagement with the creative processes that bring these objects into being. It is as if these processes had been swallowed up by their products: art by artworks; architecture by buildings. One symptom of this closure lies in the fact that the anthropology of art, at least in its more theoretical guises, has had so little to say about the performative arts such as theatre, music and dance. Again, Gell’s work sums it up, and the acclaim with which the work has been received indicates just how widespread are its prejudices. ‘To simplify the problem,’ Gell writes, ‘I shall … confine my discussion to the instance of visual art, or at least “visible” art, excluding verbal and musical art, though I recognize

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that in practice these are usually inseparable’ (1998: 13). This is not, in reality, a simplification of the problem but an evasion, a refusal to contemplate the implications of understanding art as a creative process rather than an assemblage of created works. This same slippage, from process to product, is evident in the reduction of the visual to the visible, a reduction that is widespread in the fields of visual anthropology and material culture studies, as well as in the anthropology of art. The processes of seeing, involving practised and skilful activities of looking and watching, are swallowed up by the images seen. Gell’s work came out too late to have much of an impact on our Manchester seminar. But my own view of it – that it is an intellectual dead-end so far as the relationship between anthropology and art is concerned – reflects what I took from the seminar: namely, a determination to turn our backs on the sterile objectification of art and architecture. Having already reached this dead-end after a term of discussions, we resolved to think instead of art and architecture as disciplines that, very much like anthropology itself, are concerned with exploring, interpreting and describing the worlds we inhabit, and the ways we perceive them. Thus we set out to investigate the relations between art, architecture and anthropology on the level of practice, or in other words, to do anthropology with, rather than an anthropology of, art and architecture. Could certain practices of fine art, for example, suggest new ways of doing anthropology? If there are significant similarities between the ways in which artists and anthropologists study the world, then could we not regard the artwork as a result of something like an anthropological study, rather than as an object of such study? We are already used to the idea that the results of anthropological research need not be confined to written texts. They may also include photographs and films. But could they also include drawings, paintings, printwork or sculpture? Or works of craft? Or musical compositions? Or buildings? Conversely, could not works of art or architecture be regarded as forms of ethnography, albeit ‘written’ in non-verbal media? These were the kinds of questions we set out to address in our seminar. And it was immediately apparent that they could not be addressed in the abstract. For that would be self-defeating, at once converting anthropology back into a talking shop that turns everything else into grist to its mill. We had to be doing things ourselves. Obviously, without the benefit of prior training (which some of us had) we anthropologists cannot snap our fingers and, as if by magic, turn ourselves instantly into artists or architects. But we could at least try to ground our discussions in something practical, so as to give the ideas we came up with some foundation in experience. And we did all manner of things! We wound string and wove baskets, made pots and

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fired them on a home-made kiln, we practised the Alexander technique and discovered how heavy a head or limb can be when it is completely relaxed. We helped a farmer rebuild a dry-stone wall, held a workshop on polyphonic singing, tried our hand at architectural drawing, visited artists’ studios and exhibitions, and so on. Some of the things we did were a bit mad, and they did not always lead anywhere. We never had a coherent agenda. However, we were all agreed that the quality of the discussions we had while doing things was quite unlike anything experienced in an ordinary seminar, and that they were tremendously productive of new ideas and insights. But while this was undoubtedly the case, it was not so clear why this should be so. The question is: what difference does it make if discussion is grounded in a context of practical activity?

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From Three A’s to Four, and Five Tasks When I moved to the University of Aberdeen in 1999 to revive the Anthropology programme there, one of my ambitions was to carry forward some of the ideas arising from the Manchester art, architecture and anthropology seminar. A key role in this has been played by my colleague Wendy Gunn. As a doctoral student in anthropology at Manchester with a background in both fine art and architecture, Gunn was exploring the impacts of computer modelling techniques on the architectural design process, through an ethnographic study of architectural practices in the Norwegian cities of Oslo and Tromsoe. Subsequently, on moving back to Scotland, she began to develop contacts with the School of Fine Art and the Visual Research Centre at the University of Dundee. Through these links I was brought into a series of very productive discussions with colleagues in Dundee, which eventually led us to put together a proposal for collaborative research under the rather cumbersome title, Learning is Understanding in Practice: Exploring the Interrelations between Perception, Creativity and Skill. To our considerable astonishment, the project was funded for a three-year period (2002–05).3 One component of the project was to look ethnographically at the way in which the skills of fine art are taught and learned in the course of studio-based practice. To this end, Wendy Gunn has been working as a participant observer with fine art students in Dundee, documenting their learning experience. Alongside and complementing this study, however, we have been exploring the potential applicability of practices of teaching and learning, in both fine art and architecture, within the discipline of anthropology. It was in this context that we developed the course on The 4 A’s. In the design and delivery of the course I was assisted by Ray Lucas, who

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has been working with me in Aberdeen, and whose doctoral research forms an integral part of the project. Lucas has a background training in architecture but is especially interested in forms of notation and the ways in which they can translate across disciplines, for example between film, graphic art, dance and architecture. But alongside this research, Lucas undertook to document the 4 A’s course as it proceeded, working with the students throughout, and I have drawn extensively on his notes. The course was introduced and taught for the first time in the spring semester of 2004, and what follows is based on our work during this semester. As the title of the course indicates, in the move from Manchester to Aberdeen the three A’s of art, architecture and anthropology were joined by a fourth, namely archaeology. This is in part a reflection of my own interests, which have long spanned the boundary between archaeology and anthropology. However, I am also convinced that any discussion of the relation between art, architecture and anthropology would be incomplete if archaeology were not included as well. For obvious reasons, archaeology has always been very closely linked to the histories of both art and architecture. I suppose there is a sense in which artists and architects could be regarded as archaeologists of the future rather than the past. On the other hand, anthropology and archaeology have long, and rightly, been regarded as sister disciplines, even though they have not always been on speaking terms. It seems only natural, then, that archaeology should be along as the fourth A. In hindsight, however, one of the more remarkable and slightly unexpected outcomes of presenting the course was that while it had been planned as an explicitly interdisciplinary inquiry, in practice it turned out that the boundaries of the disciplines simply vanished. Students did not have the experience of having to relate four distinct fields, but rather found themselves navigating a single field in which the concerns of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture seemed naturally and effortlessly to coalesce. The ten-week course focused, in brief, on issues of perception, design and construction, on the generation and reproduction of form in natural and ‘built’ environments, on the relation between bodily movements and lived time/space, on the significance of craft and skill, on activities of depiction and description, and on the impacts of old and new technologies. It was delivered through a combination of lectures, practicals, project work and workshops. Normally, Senior Honours courses comprise one lecture and one tutorial per week, each of an hour’s duration. While the lectures for the course followed a fairly traditional format, the tutorials were replaced by weekly practical sessions. In each session students would discuss the issues arising from that week’s lecture, at the same time as carrying

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out specific practical exercises that helped to place these issues in an experiential context. Besides attending lectures and participating in practicals, students were also required to carry out a project. Project work proceeded throughout the course. Each student was asked to select an ‘object’ such as a building, a bridge, an ancient monument, a piece of public sculpture, or a landmark (such as a tower, fountain or prominent tree). The student was advised to spend about thirty minutes to an hour with the chosen object every week, focusing on a specific aspect, and to write about a page describing what had been observed, discovered or achieved. At the end of the course, students were told to assemble these pages, along with drawings, photos, a model and supporting documentation, into a dossier to be submitted for assessment. The final component of the course comprised a series of four half-day workshops, including an outdoor session on weaving with willow, a master-class in flint-knapping, a performative exploration of architectural space, and a walk in the countryside to address issues of landscape perception.4 This is not the place for a review of the substantive content of the lectures. Instead, to give a flavour of the course as an experience of teaching and learning, I shall present a series of brief accounts of five of the tasks we set ourselves. The first is about our investigations into an assortment of small items that students found in the vicinity of their project sites. The second concerns our efforts in knotting and basket-weaving. In the third, I describe a couple of short walks we made, one on Aberdeen beach and the other into the hills behind the Aberdeenshire village of Lumsden. Fourthly, I present a few words about the students’ efforts to notate the movements they observed around their project sites, of people and animals. Then finally, I comment on the models they made.

An Assortment of Objects One of the first lectures of the course considered the issue of what is meant by making things. How can artefacts be distinguished from naturally occurring objects, or built environments from natural ones? In order to help us think about this question, students had been asked to visit their project sites and to look for anything lying around in the vicinity that might be considered either ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’. Each student was told to select two small, portable items in the former category, and two in the latter, and to bring them, in plastic bags or cartons, to the next practical session. They had been advised to make a note of where and when the items were found. The items could be new, used or broken, part or whole. Since the aim of our discussion was

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to question the distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’, students were encouraged to bring along items whose status might be considered ambiguous. This turned out not to be difficult. In fact, it was harder for them to find any item that was not ambiguous in some way or another. One of the first things we did was to empty the entire contents of the students’ bags and cartons onto the floor. We looked at the heap, from which a spider scuttled out across the carpet. It had arrived as a passenger with some item, but no-one knew from which. Or was it actually a part of the item? Students divided into groups, and each group selected a number of items at random from the pile. They then discussed each item, thinking about the circumstances in which it had been formed or made, discarded and collected. One item that generated much debate was a small piece of bark, which, according to the student who collected it, had been gently prized from an old, gnarled pine that formed the focus of his project. Close inspection revealed that the bark was inhabited, even now, by a considerable number of tiny creatures, as well as by a certain amount of algal growth. It brought the spider to mind again. Were the creatures inhabiting the bark, and the algae growing on it, part of the bark itself ? If so, then what of the tree? Is the bird that has made its nest in the branches part of the tree? Perhaps the tree is not a coherent, solid object but a knot of tangled lifelines which, like knotted cords, retain their separate identities while becoming tightly bound together. Another item was a coloured section of a rubber ball, found on the beach. From the traces of glue and of rubber of other colours, as well as from the tooth marks on its surface, it was possible to reconstruct a story of how the ball was made, by joining sections of different colours together, of how it would have been bought by the owner of a dog, and of the games of throw and catch that owner and dog would have played until the ball was lost to the sea, only to be thrown back in pieces by a storm tide. This object had a history of entanglement with other lives, both human and non-human, as well as with the elements. In the subsequent week’s practical we returned to our collection of items to think about the materials they were made of. This followed a lecture in which I had argued that the preoccupation in studies of material culture with the materiality of objects has obstructed rather than facilitated our understanding of materials and their properties.5 Materials of all kinds are forever undergoing change and transformation, through their interaction and admixture with one another, through the impacts of both human and non-human activity and through their exposure to the elements. To understand their properties we have to place them within these fields of transformation. In our discussions of this point, a couple of items

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recovered from around a student’s project site, a large supermarket, attracted considerable attention. One was the broken, red plastic cover of the rear brake-light of a car, the other a slab of mortar that had evidently broken off from some brickwork. Did the synthetic material of the former make it more ‘artificial’ than the latter? In other ways, however, the irregular pattern of clearly unintentional breakage made the plastic light-cover seem more ‘natural’ than another object we looked at, a copper coin. Quite a few students had picked up odd scraps of paper with snippets of writing on them, such as a discarded shopping list and, more mysteriously, some lines from ‘Auld Lang Syne’ collected from a prehistoric stone circle. I asked students to pick out all the objects they could see with writing on them. They identified all the writing on the scraps of paper, and on the surface of a squashed Coca-Cola tin. Interestingly, however, not one of them spotted the lettering on the coin. Why? Because the relation between letters and the surface of the coin is quite different from that between words and the paper on which they are written. Thus did the examination of quite ordinary objects lead directly to quite profound philosophical issues, entirely short-circuiting the impenetrable barrier of an often obfuscating literature.

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Weaving a Basket On a cold and windy day in February, we were out on a sandy peninsula wedged between the beach and the estuary of the River Don. Patches of snow remained on the ground. We were learning to make baskets out of willow. To form a frame, an odd number of lengths of willow were stuck vertically into the ground, to form a rough circle, tied at the top. Horizontal pieces were then woven alternately in and out of the vertical frame so as gradually to build up a surface in the form of an inverted cone. Students worked at this either singly or in pairs. From the start, I think, many students were surprised by the recalcitrant nature of the material. In a finished basket, the willow seems to sit so naturally there, as if it were always meant to fall into that shape and merely fulfilling the role for which it was predestined. But the willow did not want to be bent into shape. Sometimes it put up a fight, springing back and striking the weaver in the face. One had to be careful and coaxing. Then we realized that it was actually this resistance, the friction set up by branches bent forcibly against each other, that held the whole construction together. The form was not imposed on the material from without, but rather it was generated in this force-field, comprised by the relations between the weaver and the willow (Ingold 2000a).

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Indeed, as novices, we had pretty little control over the precise form and proportions of our baskets. Kneeling on the ground, weaving involved quite muscular movements of the entire body, or at least from the knees upwards, so that the dimensions of the basket related directly to such bodily dimensions as arm-reach, shoulder height, and so on. Students discovered they had muscles in places they had never imagined, partly because after a while they began to ache. But other forces, too, entered into the formative process. One of these was the wind. A persistent, strengthening wind was bending all the verticals of the frame in one direction, becoming ever more pronounced with height. No wonder, then, that many baskets, especially ones woven nearest to the shore, tilted over somewhat, in an elegant but wholly unintended curve. Other environmental factors also came into play. The verticals stood more firmly in grassy ground, but then in the initial stages, the grass was inclined to get mixed up in the weave. Those who chose spots of bare sand to set up their frames did not have that problem, but their frames had less support and sometimes worked loose. We laboured for almost three hours, gradually developing a rhythm and a feel for the material. As the work progressed, however, we began to face another problem. How would we know when to stop?6 There is no obvious point when a basket is finished. The end dawned for us, not when the form came to match initial expectations, for we had none. Rather, it came with failing light and the immanent prospect of heavy rain, increasing chill and stiffness in the limbs, and the sense that each additional strand was becoming somehow superfluous. At that point it was time to insert a separately woven base and to cut the verticals at the height we had reached. At last, then, we could lift the woven construction from the ground, and turn it upside down to reveal that what we had made was indeed a basket. Each basket was different, uniquely reflecting the mood and temperament, as well as the physical stature, or its maker. Finally the students straggled off into the gathering dusk, proudly bearing homeward the baskets they had made. Later they would tell me that they had learned more from that one afternoon than from any number of lectures and readings, above all about what it means to make things, about how form arises through movement, and about the dynamic properties of materials. It transformed their understanding by grounding everything they had learned so far through the course in a shared experiential context, which in turn provided a foundation for all that followed. They would often return to it in discussions. It came up, for example, in a subsequent practical session in which we attempted to make a complex knot from string, following the instructions in a manual.7 We had varying success: some students completed the task with ease, some failed miserably. All agreed that the manual was of limited use.

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To succeed, one had to be able to feel the knot as a repeated pattern of gestures. What made it difficult was that unlike the willow branches, the string was floppy. It would not hold to any position, yet so long as it was loose it would keep dragging other sections of the string with it at crossover points.

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A Walk Outside In one of our practical sessions we were exploring the role of the different senses in perception. This followed a lecture in which I had argued that the anthropological critique of visualism is focused on an overly narrow conception of vision as the sight of things (Ingold 2000b: 286). Understood as looking and watching, vision can be just as dynamic as listening and touch, as much an experience of light as hearing is an experience of sound and touch an experience of feeling. Students had been advised in that week, on visiting their project sites, to concentrate on what their ‘objects’ look, sound and feel like, and on what the surroundings look, sound and feel like from there. A number of short visits were recommended, at different times of the day (and after dark), as well as in different weather conditions. Indeed the weather, which had already played such a major part in our efforts in basketry, re-emerged here as a key concern. It is striking how something that has such a huge impact on people’s activities, moods and motivations, indeed on the whole tenor of social life, is so little considered in anthropological literature. Most has been written as though there were no more weather in the world than inside a study or seminar room. I wanted to test for the effects of weather by comparing the kind of discussion we could have in the classroom, in this case about sensory perception, with the kind we could have out of doors. So we started inside, in a rather typical tutorial setting in which I explained my ideas about the differences between the perception of the landscape and the perception of the weather. I put a table on the board like this: 8 Landscape Properties of surface Seeing, hearing and touching things

Weather Properties of medium Experience of light, sound and feeling

After considering this for a while, we set out on the short walk to the seaside. The weather at the time was, as forecasters like to say, ‘purely academic’. A bit grey, just a little rain in the air, not particularly warm or cold, or windy. The tide was fairly high, so that on reaching the beach

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that flanks the city of Aberdeen we had to stand on shingle rather than sand. As we continued the discussion that had begun in the classroom, however, its nature changed entirely. We were flooded with questions. Looking around, what could we see? The stones of the beach, the sea, the waves, seagulls wheeling in the sky, the grey expanse of the sky itself, ships in the distance, each other. But were we seeing these things in the same way? And were they really things at all? We may, for example, perceive the ships on the horizon as distant things, but what of the sea itself? It is a surface of a kind, but its colour is always changing to reflect the colour of the sky, and its texture depends on the wind. But the sky has no surface: perhaps it is luminosity itself. As for the waves, they were seen as movements rather than as things that move, and the same seemed to go for the seagulls: our perception of the bird in flight was quite different from that of one at rest, perching on a wave-breaker. The stones under our feet were interesting. We could of course feel them, and were reminded of the fact that it is through the feet, not the hands, that we are in primary tactile contact with the environment. But we could hear them, too, as they crunched under our feet. But we found that the sound of someone else walking across the shingle was quite different from hearing ourselves walk, perhaps because in the latter case the sound reaches us through the whole of our bodies and not just by way of the ears. Hearing each other talk was, again, quite different out of doors, against the background sounds of wind and waves. Moving around so as to face one person or another was as integral a part of the conversation as the words spoken. Towards the end of the course, we went for a walk in the countryside, starting from the village of Lumsden, home of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. Again I wanted to test the difference between the kind of discussion of landscape one can have indoors, with reference to academic texts, and the kind one can have outdoors, in the landscape itself. The students had read a certain amount on the topic of the Western visualist aesthetic, which is supposed to lead us to view the landscape as a spectacle.9 So how did we actually perceive the countryside around us as we went for our walk? Not one of us perceived it in a way that remotely resembled a spectacle. But many interesting questions arose about the way we did perceive it, questions that you would not normally find addressed in any academic treatise on the subject. It was a spring day of bright sunshine and occasional showers, with a gentle breeze. At one point I stopped to ask: how do we perceive the breeze? We could feel it on our faces (but not with the hands or feet), we could hear it brushing the contours of the land, and see how it caused the vegetation to quiver and sway. But as the nature of the landscape affects the way the wind is seen and heard, so our experience of the wind also affects the way the landscape is perceived.

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Another question concerns the relation between land and sky. Is the sky, or is it not, a part of the landscape? Do we move across the earth’s surface or through an indivisible world of earth and sky in which the landscape is merely an interface between substance and medium? Then there was the question of horizons, which appeared close-up when we were going uphill but far-off when we were going back down, and whose relative occlusion oscillated through the effects of parallax to the rhythm of our footsteps as, with each step, the body moves slightly up and down. Finally, we talked about paths, about the sense of encountering our own footprints made on the way up the hill as we walked back down, and about the recovery of memories, on the return journey, of our outward observations. We found that we had remembered the walk as a narrative, not as a series of snapshots, and since narratives make no sense in reverse, remembering the places we came across on the way back meant having to put ourselves imaginatively on the way out again.

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Notating Everyday Life To describe things, we draw lines of various kinds (Ingold 2007a). Where these lines encode information about the world or instructions for action, they are conventionally said to comprise a notation. Speech is notated in the written word, and music in a specialized notation that conveys instructions to the performer on what and how to play. Architectural notation passes directions to the builder, and archaeological notation records the details of a site. It could be said that the task of ethnography is to notate everyday life. It is no easy matter, however, to determine what is rendered in a notation and what is not. How, for example, is a diagram distinguished from a drawing? Moreover, graphic elements taken from different notational systems are often combined: thus a musical stave score includes numbered fingerings and written directions; and a page of an ethnographic notebook or an architectural sketchbook may include words, letters, numerals and diagrams. How are we to understand the relations between these notational components? More generally, if the purpose of a notation is to describe, how can we decide, in any particular case, what is being described and what is the descriptor? To help think about these questions, one of the exercises we set for the students was to devise a notation with which to describe the habitual or repetitive movements of people or animals in or around their project sites. Each student would then explain their notation to the rest of the class, and use it to demonstrate the movements they had observed. In one respect the results were a little disappointing. The

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majority of students interpreted the task as a straightforward exercise in mapping, and drew the movements as lines on a plan of the site. In other words, they took up an imaginary bird’s eye view, interpreting movement as the displacement of a mobile object across a surface. For example, one project was focused on a large traffic roundabout. In a series of three diagrams, the student indicated the paths of pedestrians, cars and seagulls, each observed over a thirty-minute period. But these diagrams told us nothing about the bodily postures and gestures of the walkers and drivers as they went on their way. The diagram illustrating the paths of the gulls nicely illustrated the limitations of the approach, for every time they flew off they disappeared from the notation! A bird’s eye view is of little avail for describing the movement of avian creatures that are eyeing the world from the same level. However, this student did include a separate diagram to describe the gestural movements of a particular gull, showing how it padded about, wagged its beak and tail, squawked and eventually took wing. The people of Aberdeen share their city with a large population of seagulls, and the birds’ use of urban space – with its complete disregard for human regulations and the freedom afforded by flight – was a common theme of the project presentations. Some students did however adopt a more imaginative approach. A study of a hilltop cairn contrasted two kinds of notation. One, modelled on standard musical notation, aimed to capture the gestural components of bodily movement in walking uphill, downhill, along the path and over the cairn. Using the same principles, the student also notated the jumping of a toad that was found to have taken up residence under one of the rocks in the cairn. The second notation was designed to convey the actual flow of movement, not only of the walker and the toad but also of the winds and the waves of the sea, successfully showing how they are all subject to similar oscillations. Another student produced an ingenious series of alternative notations to describe the repetitive movements of a gardener working with a spade. Longer marks indicating the legato digging movements of the spade alternated with short, staccato or punctual marks indicating the chopping movements that the gardener made in order to separate the dirt from the spade’s surface.

Building a Model The final task we set each student was to build a model of the object at the focus of their project, from wood, cardboard, clay or any other readily available material. They were given a completely free hand in how to do this, and the results were extremely diverse. I should like to

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describe two models that perhaps represent the extremes of the full range of approaches. One student had selected for his project a derelict concrete bunker dating from the Second World War, which now stands half-submerged in sand on a beach near the city. For the model, the student first selected plaster of Paris, as the closest equivalent to cement. However when the wet plaster was poured into its cardboard mould it gave way, so this material was abandoned in favour of modelling clay. The cold, uneven, yet smooth surface of the clay is much like that of cement. What is really striking about this model, which was carefully made to scale, is its weight. It is extremely heavy, and in this regard the model gives us a sense of the enormous mass of the real-life equivalent. The clay itself took months to dry, gradually becoming lighter in colour as it did so. For weeks, the smell of drying clay percolated through my office, where the model was stored. At the other extreme was a model of the massive wooden wave-breakers that divide Aberdeen’s sandy beach into sections along its entire length. The student had noticed how, when people walked their dogs on the beach, the dogs could leap through gaps in the planks whereas people would have to walk all the way around them. She had in fact made this observation in the course of her attempts to notate the movements of people and animals. However, she decided to make her model out of a material that could not have been more different from the solid timber from which the actual wave-breakers are constructed. She used thin wire, coiled so as to resemble the geometrical form of the breakers, but at the same time to produce a virtual negative of the real thing: as light as a feather rather than heavyweight, held together by tensile forces rather than by bolts and gravity, and affording no resistance whatever to movement. Perhaps the model offers a kind of dog’s eye view. At any rate it starkly posed the question, hotly debated in architectural circles, of what kind of insight the building of a model can give when it is made out of different materials than the original, on a much reduced scale. For the students, answers varied from a great deal to none at all. At the negative end was the model made by the student who had studied the giant pine tree from which had been taken the piece of bark that served as a focus for our earlier discussions on objects and materials. The model was made of clay. At the time of making, the flexibility of the material perhaps bore some resemblance to that of living wood, though having none of its springiness. As the clay dried and became brittle, however, the slightest movement of the model tree caused its branches to break off. It is now too fragile to transport.

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Conclusion I began with the claim that anthropology is a study not of people but with them. These may be the people among whom we work in the field; they may be colleagues in our own discipline or in others – such as archaeology, art or architecture. But they may also be students. The exercises I have described above are ones that, with the assistance of Ray Lucas, I and the students carried out together. We made many discoveries – far more than can be conveyed in this brief chapter. Of course I too remain a student of anthropology, largely taught, over the years, by those whom I am supposed to have been teaching (Ingold 2000b: x). Since my studies in The 4 A’s have been carried on with the students taking the course, they should really be acknowledged as collaborators.10 And this is my point. It took the best part of a century for anthropologists to include the people with whom they have worked in the field as collaborators in the research process rather than mere ‘informants’. Yet the majority of educators in anthropology, like myself, have probably spent as much time, if not more, in dialogue with students than with people in the field. The contribution of this dialogue to the development of anthropological knowledge remains shamefully unrecognized. For the most part, at least until they graduate to the status of budding professionals, students are written off with the same collective anonymity that used to be accorded to ‘natives’. Where the former were classed as informants, providing anthropology with its raw materials, the latter are still regarded as recipients, destined to imbibe and digest its products. Students remain excluded, as natives once were, from the powerhouse of anthropological knowledge production. Few today would baulk at the idea of reporting conversations in the field within the context of a research paper, and it has become customary to offer fulsome credit to interlocutors who have contributed their wisdom to the outcome of an anthropological study. Why, then, are we so circumspect about reporting dialogues with our students, or acknowledging the inspiration and ideas that flow from reading their written work? Why should these conversations and readings be relegated to the small and marginalized category of literature devoted to the policy and practice of anthropological education, rather than added to that dedicated to the growth of anthropological knowledge itself? If anthropological research is embedded in teaching – as for most of us, in practice, it is – then the conversations we have with interlocutors in the field, and with professional colleagues in our own and other disciplines, must likewise be entangled, in our thinking and writing, with our conversations with students both inside and outside the classroom. It is from the interweaving of all these conversations, and not from one or another in isolation, that anthropological knowledge grows.

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Notes 1. In my teaching I have referred to the work of scholars such as Jerome Bruner (1986), Barbara Rogoff (1990), Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), and Gisli Pálsson (1994), as well as my own (Ingold 2001). 2. In this, we were assisted by a small grant from C-SAP (the Centre for Learning and Teaching in Sociology, Anthropology and Politics). Our C-SAP project, which ran throughout the academic year 2003–04, was entitled ‘Learning through Doing and Understanding in Practice’. 3. We are very grateful for generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (grant reference B/RG/AN8436/APN14425). I would also like personally to acknowledge the support of Murdo Macdonald, Professor of the History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee, who was the principal applicant for the project and has played a major role throughout. 4. For making these workshops possible, we thank respectively artist, craftsperson and anthropologist Stephanie Bunn, master flint-knapper John Lord, architectural theorist Oren Lieberman, and the staff of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop at Lumsden. 5. See, for example, Toren (1999), Graves-Brown (2000), Tilley (2004), and for a critical review, Ingold (2005a). The lecture has since been revised and published (Ingold 2007b). 6. The judgement of when and how to finish off is a crucial test of skill in the practice of any craft, as Charles Keller (2001: 40) illustrates in the cases of the textile weaver and silversmith. 7. The knot was a variety of the ‘Turk’s Head’. We had originally tried this task in the context of the Manchester art, architecture and anthropology seminar, thanks to the initiative of Stephanie Bunn, who had been a leading participant of the seminar and subsequently came to direct our basket-weaving workshop at Aberdeen. For an account of the wider implications of the knot-making task, based on the Manchester seminar, see Ingold (2000b: 357–8). 8. I have set out the argument that lies behind this table elsewhere (Ingold 2005b). The argument is illustrated by way of another episode of standing on Aberdeen beach, but in much livelier weather conditions than those recounted below. 9. These readings included Pallasmaa (1996), Lemaire (1997) and Okely (2001). I have reflected further on our walk in Ingold (2007c: 528–532). 10. Here they are, with thanks to all: Rebecca Ledwidge, Laura Pirnie, Jane Williams, Karen Fraser, Steven McGhee, Mari Von Osten-Piazzisi, Lucy Arnot, Gareth Spary, Darrin Russell, Stuart Allen, Melanie Marks, Irena Connon, Martha Stewart, Euan Lawrie and George Maltezakis.

References Bruner, J.S. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Graves-Brown, P. (ed.) 2000. Mind, Materiality and Modern Culture. London: Routledge.

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Ingold, T. 2000a. ‘Making Culture and weaving the world’, in P. GravesBrown (ed.), Mind, Materiality and Modern Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 50–71. ———. 2000b. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. ———. 2001. ‘From the Transmission of Representations to the Education of Attention’, in H. Whitehouse (ed.), The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Versus Ethnography. Oxford: Berg, pp. 113–153. ———. 2005a. ‘Landscape Lives, but Archaeology Turns to Stone’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 38(2): 122–126. ———. 2005b. ‘The Eye of the Storm: Visual Perception and the Weather’, Visual Studies 20(2): 97–104. ———. 2007a. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. ———. 2007b. ‘Materials Against Materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 1–16. ———. 2007c. ‘Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.): S19–S38. Keller, C. 2001. ‘Thought and Production: Insights of the Practitioner’, in M.B. Schiffer (ed.), Anthropological Perspectives on Technology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 33–45. Lave, J. 1990. ‘The Culture of Acquisition and the Practice of Understanding’, in J.W. Stigler, R.A. Shweder and G. Herdt (eds), Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 309–27. Lave, J. and E. Wenger 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lemaire, T. 1997. ‘Archaeology Between the Invention and Destruction of the Landscape’, Archaeological Dialogues 4(1): 5–38. Okely, J. 2001. ‘Visualism and Landscape: Looking and Seeing in Normandy’, Ethnos 66(1): 99–120. Pallasmaa, J. 1996. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. London: Academy Editions. Pálsson, G. 1994. ‘Enskilment at sea’, Man 29: 901–27. Rogoff, B. 1990. Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press. Tilley, C. 2004. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. Oxford: Berg. Toren, C. 1999. Mind, Materiality and History. London: Routledge.

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Chapter 14

A DISCUSSION CONCERNING WAYS OF KNOWING Nigel Rapport and Mark Harris

This concluding chapter returns to some of the key concepts examined in this book such as embodiment, the self, imagination, fieldwork and time. Its form, a dialogue, is a recognition of the reciprocal contexts in which we come to know others as anthropologists.

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Knowing Workers at a Scottish Hospital, by Nigel Rapport I watch two nurses, one male and one female escorting an elderly male patient from his bed to the lavatory; he walks with a Zimmer frame and they make slow progress. The nurses chat to one another as they go; the old man is bent over his frame, seeming to concentrate only on the way ahead. Suddenly he farts, and the nurses look at one another: are they too late? One bends down to inspect the back of the patient’s pyjama trousers: ‘No,’ she reports, righting herself, ‘only wind.’ Two domestics are in the Sluice Room when I enter to collect specimens from the hook: samples of blood and other bodily matter to be taken to the hospital laboratories for analysis. ‘It stinks in here,’ one of them complains to the other: ‘How do the nurses stand the stench all the time?’ They shake their heads in mutual distaste, and distance. ‘You should always wear gloves when collecting specimens,’ I am instructed by Dugald, an older, experienced porter and our shop steward: ‘You never

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know what’s in the samples and you can’t rely on the doctors to label them properly. It could be AIDS you’re carrying. If the Health and Safety Officer saw you without gloves she’d give you a right bollicking.’ Luke tells me to bathe my feet in salt water: that’s what he does when they get sore from tramping the corridors of Constance Hospital all day: 30 miles reputedly. He also gets athlete’s foot, he tells me, while a congenital problem means he has spurs growing out of his ankle bones so he can’t play football anymore for the porters; and he needs special shoes from the Orthopaedic Rehabilitation Technology Centre because of his collapsed arches. Roger, meanwhile, tells me of his misdiagnosed hernia: in the end he had a lump the size of a grapefruit between his legs. He was also born premature, which is why his tendons are so very tight behind his legs, and why he walks with a bounce.

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Whenever Roger and I go off for our lunch break together he dances down the corridor a few feet ahead, treating me either to a few screeching riffs on his air guitar – Deep Purple being his favourite band – or else shows me a few karate kicks at imaginary opponents. I can see his excitement at being released for 30 minutes or so from the hospital’s regimen of work. I see the same in the gestures from the football terraces that other porters display, in particular in the private space of our ‘buckie’ (porters’ lodge): punching the air in delight as if a goal had been scored, and waving imaginary scarves over their heads. But even when porters walk around the hospital together, chatting and joking, their body language gives them away from a distance – even before the uniform colour of their polo shirts is discernable. They jostle and slouch and joke and shove; it’s a way of not really being at work at all, or of making the hospital an extension of the soccer pitch or pub: their space. I notice, too, how much some of the porters fidget. In the buckie, awaiting jobs, they cannot keep still. They pace, they swing on the doorjamb, they peer down corridors, they open drawers and files, they make tea and toast. Even when they eat their lunch or supper they stand and gobble it down, pacing between mouthfuls or hopping from foot to foot, almost unable to wait until they can chuck the remains into the bin. It is a kind of excess nervous energy that the institutionalism and regimentation of the hospital cannot be allowed to claim or exhaust. When fetching patients, nonetheless, porters can be positively lethargic. The patient sits in the chair or lies on the trolley or bed while two or more porters stand and chat, blocking the corridor, discussing Saturday night’s drinking session, or today’s lunch menu at the dining room, or who is off sick or works each shift, and who gets overtime. The patient is ignored as the porters take their time, laughing and joshing.

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A moment of excitement is caused by a cardiac arrest. Porters race one another out of the buckie and sprint down the long corridors to be the first to supply the ward with oxygen. There, a crowd of young doctors hovers outside the curtained-off bed – more arriving all the time from adjacent wards – eager to have the chance to enter the enclosure and minister to the supine body. I transport Margaret Munro from Ward 24 to the Physio Department for her exercises. She has had three strokes – I overhear from the therapists, the most recent last Sunday – and each time her left side turns numb and her speech goes. Now, thankfully, her speech has mostly returned. Hopefully she won’t be having another ‘accident’ and making a mess in the wheelchair again, the physiotherapists comment wryly.

* … Ailing and aged bodies; bodies on beds; bodies in uniform; flippant bodies; gendered bodies; masculine bodies; bored bodies; discussed and displayed bodies; immodest bodies; leaking bodies; expectant bodies; repaired bodies. It is the bodiliness of hospital life that most strikes me when I start working as a porter at Constance Hospital, in the Scottish city of Easterneuk (cf. Rapport 2007). Not only the reduced bodily lives of the patients, diminished in my eyes to particular faulty physiques, but also the doctors: technicians intent on treating a physical mechanism, experimenting with interventions (operations and drugs) that intends to return behaviour to an explicit bodily norm. Lines from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Ignorance’ (1990: 107), one of his most unsettling, keep coming to mind:

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Strange to know nothing, never to be sure Of what is true or right or real, But forced to qualify or so I feel, [ … ] Strange to be ignorant of the way things work: Their skill at finding what they need, Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed, [ … ] Even to wear such knowledge – for our flesh Surrounds us with its own decisions – And yet spend all our life on imprecisions, That when we start to die Have no idea why.

The poem speaks to me of inexorable dualisms; not only knowledge and ignorance, what is apparent and what is true, but also flesh

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and consciousness, surface and depth. It is unsettling because it belittles consciousness. Body and mind, Larkin seems to say, however interdependent, are distinct: modes of being ever involved in a contest for predominance. There are possible – but uncertain and imprecise – flights of fancy, sorties of imagination, in and from a body, which is in all senses earthbound and secretive, even mute regarding what it knows and will do. Ultimately, moreover, the body’s workings deliver their own truths. A more palatable version is offered by Percy Shelley (1954: 293) who would claim that poetry – our human capacity for imagination and creativity – can compass all kinds of knowledge. Our human poeticism is at once the centre and the circumference of our human ways of knowing. Just as a single word – however seemingly limited and fixed in its physical form – can spark limitless imaginary wanderings, thoughts and evocations, so the body plays host to consciousness and creativity. Centre : circumference : : body : mind : : verbal form : meaning. This, I think, is what I would take for granted. That knowledge might be lodged in physical forms – lexicons, bodies – but is of a different nature to them and, in its extended form, is not limited by them. Of course, consciousness depends ultimately on body and brain, and poetic evocation calls for a linguistic medium, but the character of the circumference is not determined by the centre. The workings and products of the imagination amount to ‘spontaneous creations ab nihilo’ (Sartre 1972: 273ff.), which surpass the seeming objectivity of physical reality in delivering a ‘self-creating consciousnesses’. The glory of our humanity, indeed, lies in the characteristic way in which our knowledge – our specific poeticism – transcends its physical housing. Being surrounded by the porters, not withstanding, leads me to wonder about knowledge practices, about distinct ways of knowing, even about a characteristic relationship between physical forms and imaginatory meanings that spark from them. Life for the porters, as for the hospital’s patients and medics, seems so much a matter of bodies pure and simple. Fit bodies and sick bodies. Bodies that hurry and strut down corridors, and bodies that lie and are transported. How much is poeticism – the imaginational, the flights of fancy and sorties of feeling, issues of meaning, irony and ambiguity – a predominant feature of being here? Are not many more moments of porters’ knowing given over to accessing and displaying bodies-in-wards and in-corridors? For doctors and nurses, too, do not moments of knowing predominantly concern diagnosis that takes as its cue and its endpoint – centre and circumference – what the body might alone signify? *

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I know that I dwell most intensely in an inner imaginal life: that my most continuous and meaningful conversation is an unvoiced, introspective one. Here is a continuity that overrides modifications in time and place, physical circumstance and bodily extension. Working as a porter at Constance leads me to experience as routine a rampant exteriority: living in terms of a healthy and sick, masculine and regimented and rebellious physicality. Porters posture and doctors decipher in terms of a predominantly physical code. My fieldwork entails socialization into workaday mechanisms, practices and procedures – a bodily way of being and knowing – that I experience as attenuated and superficial, solid but stolid.

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Of Ways and Pathways of Knowing, by Mark Harris Although you recognize different kinds of bodies, I sense in what you say that these differences have no real meaning or status. They are a means to an end – they make possible the proper business of life, which is reflection, imagination, thinking and creating. The differences you perceive in the hospital-institutionalized bodies are really only a sham for the homogeneity of the physical. Difference is in consciousness and the internal life one has and from there all else develops. Does this mean the bodiliness of the hospital is an inferior state? Do institutional cultures not demand convention and conformity in order to reduce the noise of individuality? Pushing this a little further, could we not say there is no individuality without institutions to accentuate personal diversity? Surely the porters, too, feel this individual asphyxiation but lacking your education and articulacy do not express their resentment, if that is how they do feel, in words – or more accurately in a verbal stream of consciousness? So I have three specific questions for you. If it is true that porters also experience routine as a ‘blithe exteriority’ then how can we express the knowledge (theirs and ours) of their feelings? Secondly, you describe at the beginning how the hospital staff cannot fully control patients’ bodies, for they might leak at any moment. Bodies can be also fluid and dynamic, if not always conveniently so. We could see this as a form of your inner life, since these functions are part of the interiority of the body, which we may or may not be aware of or able to control. Would it be possible to explore culturally the interior space of the body as ‘uncharted territory’, as Antony Gormley does with his body casts (Gormley 2000)? You can see that I am trying to address those ‘inexorable dualisms’ that make me feel uncomfortable but which are ever-present.

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The third question relates to your phrase ‘the moment of knowing’. An internal personal dialogue is continuous, as you say, and it overrides modifications in the body. I think that expresses a profoundly humanistic perspective, which I have always admired in your work. My question here is how knowing is affected by the sequence in which it occurs. It is clear from developmental psychologists that this is the case in children’s learning, but is adult knowledge as linearly organized? What is more, do some traces remain hidden from consciousness because of the order of relations in which they are placed (a kind of repression)? Another time and sequence would develop that previously submerged trace? Let me explain what I mean. The Amazon that I have studied is the legacy of the region’s incorporation into the modern world by the geopolitical designs of the Portuguese empire. Very generally these policies were concerned with promoting the region to a central place in the eighteenth century transatlantic world. A variety of reforms were instituted at this time in order to sweep away the old missionary order and establish a modern economic and political system. One of the central reforms was state encouragement of racial miscegenation and toleration of cultural hybridity. Since there was a paucity of colonists and a wealth of Indians the aim was to bring them together to create a new society, and, not unconnected, provide exports and pay taxes. These people came to settle along the main riverways of the region and establish homesteads and villages. Slaves were imported from Western and Southern Africa, though not in the great numbers they were in other parts of Brazil. Two hundred or so years later the descendents of these various people continue to live on the riverbanks and make a living using small-scale technologies, some introduced by the Portuguese, and others which have survived from pre-Conquest times, and still others which have been improvised. There is a series of formative influences whose configuration has changed over time. With fieldwork I sought to understand this history and how the riverbank dwellers understood their past and who they were now. Were they more or less European peasants as the Portuguese had wanted them to be? Or was the European only a veneer covering an Amerindian centre which would be their traditional environmental knowledge and cosmology of transformative beings. These basic questions would only have meaning though if they connected to how my informants responded to them. But here the answers I received were a repetition of primary school history lessons: we are Brazilian and live in a racial democracy. I sensed an unwillingness and inability to challenge such dominant sources. Nevertheless, as I got to know their lives better, I realized that really questions of identity were irrelevant. It was doing that mattered, or to be precise what their doing knows,

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since it was their ability to live on the flood plain and negotiate market demands that struck me as critical. I sensed I needed to understand how it was that people know so much more than what they could tell me, and that I, in turn, knew much more than what I was writing in my notebooks. I could not reduce the density of history incorporated in practice to human conscious intentions. That shift was also a result of my developing interest in habits and skills, which I outlined in the Introduction. Within a gesture I could sense a history of connected practices covering long distances and time spans. The task was to realize that the significance of these traces changed with the uses they could be put to, which in turn depended on the wider political and economic conditions.

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* Let me give a brief example. Ribeirinhos (peasants living near the river) can become possessed by an evil demon; this happens to about one in four people and almost exclusively during the teenage years in both men and women. They thrash around, gain in strength, speak in voices and so on. During these convulsions, the possessed person is shown the pages of the Bible and lightly beaten with a twig of a plant especially grown near houses for the purpose. When I ask why these gestures are performed I am told by onlookers that the spirit is supposed to be scared off by these demonstrations and that is their way of doing things. If these convulsions go on and appear to be severe, the person is taken to a shaman to be cured. Only he has the power to detect the nature of the affliction, using his famous cigar and smoke, and call upon his own spirit helpers to take out the unwanted demon (Harris 2000). This cultural complex of affliction and cure is an amalgamation of European and Amerindian elements. We could say the shaman is like a priest, since he performs the rite of exorcism and blessing. Due to the absence of priests in the past, it is likely the shaman came to take on (‘imitate’) Christian duties in the priest’s place. At the same time, the shaman is not a priest because he uses his personal enchanted beings and a cigar with special properties to enact the cure. As far as I know possession by demons is peculiar to Europe, and not to native Amazonia, as is the use of the plant to beat victims. One need only read Carlo Ginzburg’s The Night Battles (1983) to learn more about the role these plants played in Southern Europe at the time South America was being conquered. I sensed that in the colonial past, Amerindians involved in the Portuguese sphere had deliberately found bridges between their ideas and practices and the ones from elsewhere. These connections then became part of a new complex. Older forms were

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not necessarily lost but became traces, repressed memories. How did new associations catch on and how were the traces passed down? In my search for work expressing similar kinds of problems I found Fenella Cannell’s study of Tagalog-speaking Filipino peasants in the Bicol region (1999). She argues the reason why Bicolanos ‘insist so little on the possession of a culture … is that much of what is continuous in local practice goes unarticulated and unannounced’. She offers an example of a very old gesture – ‘pulling the hair on the crown of the head to prevent soul loss when someone faints’. This practice is an ‘automatic reaction’, she says, and is never consciously claimed, or even admitted, to exist. ‘Living,’ she continues, ‘in a Bicol barangay [village] was like living in a landscape haunted by seemingly ancient gestures, gestures whose significance was clearly in excess of the words by which people ever referred to them, as though bodies and emotions relinquish their habitual practices much more slowly than words or even thoughts’ (1999: 251). Here was a good example of Paul Connerton’s notion of ‘incorporating practice’ (1989: 72), a sedimented memory amassed in the body and only visible at the moment of activity itself. The connection between the gestural and knowledge is well put by Connerton: ‘Habit is a knowledge and a remembering in the hands and the body; and in the cultivation of habit it is our body which “understands” ’ (1989: 95). This kind of habitual link may be difficult to give up, as suggested by Cannell, not just personally but collectively. This possibility raises the question of how habitual actions (like hair pulling or beating with a plant stalk) have continuity across periods of time and different ideological and ritualistic contexts (in this case from pre-Christian to Christian), and why some ritualistic actions have more continuity than others. In the first place, it is important to detach practice and technique from a sign, meaning, or an identity. The fact that Christianity came with the Portuguese in my example, or Spanish in Cannell’s, is less important, in this perspective, than the new institutions and ritual practices that came with it. Terms like European or Portuguese, or Amerindian – large, heterogeneous and differentiated – entities became meaningless as a result. In the second place, we cannot assume ontogenetic conceptions of child development and knowledge (e.g. Toren 1999) are going to help understand the kind of continuity at work here. Gudeman and Rivera’s study (1990) of the domestic economy of Colombian peasants offers a way of thinking about the long term of some ideas and actions. The rural folk of Colombia have a local model of land use, economy and production which exists primarily in practice, and is significantly different from modern agricultural ones. The house model, as the authors characterize the peasant economy,

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derives from an older European type which came to be imbricated with local practices and larger processes (1990: 14). In Colombian peasant economic practices there is a multi-stranded convergence of an eighteenth century Physiocratic model, European peasant techniques and technologies, Christian understandings of the land and traces of Amerindian beliefs. There is an ongoing conversation which draws in both peasants, past economists and anthropologists in a single conceptualization of the ‘field’ and which are contemporary with each other. In terms of the present discussion, there are various traditions of knowing gathering loosely in the everyday lives of Colombiam peasants. A Physiocratic model of the economy is not identified as such by peasant farmers but Gudeman and Rivera’s work reveals aspects of it in their understandings. Peasants, we could also say, decide to give continuity to the Physiocratics in their work and understandings. What Gudeman and Rivera do not discuss are the historical transformations of these strands of knowing in particular contexts. Thus an open question is how this local practical knowledge is reproduced and reformed. In order to answer some of my questions I went to the archive.

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* The Public Archive of Pará is located in a busy commercial area in the city of Belém, Northern Brazil. From early in the morning to late afternoon there is a constant bustle of people and goods along its narrow streets. As the evening approaches it becomes a residential district. There are some fine eighteenth-century churches and nineteenth-century town houses and shops with tiled Portuguesestyle fronts, though the vernacular buildings are in a state of chronic unrepair. The Archive building is an outstanding example of civic architecture dating from the very beginning of the twentieth century. Its imposing neo-classical columns and façade, grand marble entrance and large wooden doors do not give way to a world apart from the street life. Rather the walls offer a membrane through which street and archive communicate with each other. A bus growls past, its horn blaring away; a van with a loudspeaker on the roof announces some special offer in a shop; a street-stall selling pirate CDs advertizes itself at full volume. These noises barge their way into the archive. Staff from nearby shops come for a lunchtime break, to sleep, to chat with a friend or to read. It was precisely establishing a form of communication that I struggled with as I toiled over the documents. Inside, the building was dark; red wood floors, shiny with use and cleaning, high ornate wrought-iron shelves, stacked up with boxes and bound volumes of

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manuscripts. I could listen to the street sounds, observe people, talk with them and so on. The documents required a different form of contact and perception. How was I going to know their authors and the lives they had led in the past? The documents were pieces of paper mostly slightly larger than A4 in size and were yellowy brown with watermarks in their middle. The higher up the bureaucratic chain the better quality the paper and handwriting. The smell of the parchments was something like burnt toast and coffee. The letters, which interested me most, were the ones written from the villages and hamlets away from the metropolis or provincial capital by officials who were at the sharp end of colonial life in Portuguese Amazonia. I sought letters from places which I knew well from fieldwork upriver in the lower and middle course of the Amazon. With these ones I hoped to be able to conjure up a visual sense of the situation being relayed in the text. Some of the letters were in poor condition: the ink had burnt through the lower quality paper, leaving varying fragments of paper scattered amongst the sheets. Others had been eaten by a worm which had left small holes, sometimes covering the entire page and leaving a lace-like folio. The condition was less significant a barrier than the language, the way the document had been written. The lack of standardized spelling and writing made my understanding very slow. There were terms of a bureaucratic, legal or military nature that I had to learn and be aware that their meanings changed over the course of the colonial period and different regions had nuances for each one. But it was understanding the actual forms of expression which was the hardest. At first I tried to translate from eighteenth century Portuguese to English – if only to get a gist of the meaning. I found this simply did not work, they were untranslatable in the way I was trying to convert them. The resulting text was a gobbledegook of English, useless to understand the original, transforming it too much or too little, never possible to find the correct or equivalent meaning. They were written in the language they were, at a definite time and place, and would seem to remain strictly faithful to these originating circumstances. Given the untranslatability across time, place and language, I was forced to give up that particular way of understanding them. The more documents I read, the more despondent I became. I would never be able to write an ethnography, a compassionately written study of daily life and popular culture at the end of the colonial period of the region. The knowledge was stuck stubbornly in the past. I have not changed this perception of the documents. But I did have a realization one afternoon, about halfway through my year working at the archive, as I stared out to the street. If I could not succeed in

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bringing the documents into the present, I had to immerse myself in their view of the world – just as one does in ethnographic fieldwork and set up friendships with them. I would need to revisit some of them and ask new questions as my learning progressed. I would have good informants and bad ones, or those I sensed were trying to lead me off the trail, perhaps even deliberately lying. There would be a village of my own creation. Furthermore, I found myself training my imagination to carry out a lot of the research. The fragments of information in the documents could also be made intelligible partly using my fieldwork experience. I could then go back to the writers and ask them, as it were, what might lie behind a claim about Indian laziness, for example. The words on the page were a kind of trigger to change perception, a vehicle to another reality. I needed to go out to them in order to construct them in another form. This shaping took place in the here and now of reading the document. The tangibility of the text allowed me to give its meaning a shape not from its translation but from my immersion in the world I was fashioning through my investigation. Moving backwards and forwards from the words, I developed a way of knowing them, which was more a function of the work of my imagination. A small example: I found a series of letters and trial transcripts concerning a Brazilian-born and well-educated man called José. He had requested a local judge to clear his name of various accusations, one of which was the slur that he was a werewolf. Naturally, the term leapt out at me, amongst all the excruciatingly boring references to the movement of military personnel, arrests and excuses for the small quantity of village exports. José was said to transform into a werewolf, and other similar figures, and scare whites and Indians. The case came to be examined in March 1793 in the area of Santarém, (about 700 miles upriver from the mouth of the Amazon) and just over a hundred years since the first settlement of Portuguese soldiers, missionaries and colonists in that region. Somehow the story of the werewolf had become a part of a cultural repertoire such that its meaning was understandable to all, including people of mixed descent and Indians. How was this possible? I want to argue the werewolf figure acted as a bridge between Indian and Portuguese folklore, and more particularly, monstrous beings with transformative abilities. Even though the different kinds people may have understood the werewolf in dissimilar ways, there was enough common ground to make the connection. Moreover, all human selves were being changed by the colonial world; such shapeshifting beings came to acquire a special significance because they accompanied other social changes. There was an imaginative frontier as much a part of my own research as the world of those living in a remote part of the Amazon at the end of eighteenth century.

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In sum, this archival research has set off my own conversation which engaged the social and natural environment I knew from fieldwork. As I delved into these imagined worlds I would come back to the text and check my wonderings against the traces on the paper. In other words, I cannot separate the language from the embodied understanding of the history I was creating. Fused were the bodily and the linguistic, the tangible paper and imaginary traces, the street and the archive, in my way of knowing this history.

Knowing the Present beyond God and Grammar, by Nigel Rapport Let me address the case you make so attractively for exploring new modes and pathways to knowledge. Maybe there is a way of knowing the ‘uncharted territory’ of the interior space of the body, as Portuguese colonists sought to make Amazonia known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; so that our experience of the body might become a tool to reformulate ontologies and epistemologies, centricities and hierarchies in our ‘old world’ of anthropology. You would reappraise ‘those “inexorable dualisms” that make [one] feel uncomfortable but which are ever-present’:

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* How to relate assumptions of cognitive endowment to those of ecological emplacement, or theories of rationalist Gestalt to those of empirical discovery, or propositional claims – language-based – to non-propositional, tacit ones of embodiment, or emphases on the intensity of the inner life to those on the mortification of total institutions? Are different ways of knowing irreducible or do they overlap and influence each other? (Is there a natural as against a cultural hierarchy, which might, for instance, prioritize consciousness and language over the inarticulate body?) * Need skills, gestures, the senses, habits, memory, practical knowledge all be lumped together as ‘non-propositional knowledge’? And how to represent felt knowledge of our informants that is not articulated in a verbal stream of consciousness (the leaking body in the hospital which perhaps bespeaks a kind of intentionality and intends resistance to institutionalism)? Practice and technique may be distinct from signs and meanings but how to convey the sense that the moments when they are embodied are still communications, and fraught with dangers of loss and contestation? * If our ‘informants’ are documents from the past, as well as interlocutors in the present, what forms of contact and perception are appropriate for getting to know them – accessing their originating circumstances – sufficiently to write compassionate accounts of past daily lives corresponding to our accounts of contemporary ones?

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Wanting to parenthesize ‘inexorable dualisms’ so far as possible, and refusing the solace of essential ways of knowing, you advise a kind of epistemological zigzagging. To sit in the Public Archive at Belém, for instance, is to imagine the social and natural environment upriver and to transpose this to the fragmentary traces of the past on the paper in front of you and then to arrange an interior conversation between two imagined immersions: that with riverine peasants and that with eighteenth-century scribes. I would applaud the humanism of such an avowedly creative and individual authorial presence (cf. Rapport 1994a). What I should like to interrogate further is the formulation you choose for some of your queries, or the status of the epistemological positions between which you zigzag. You want to know ‘who Amazonian peasants might be’. By which you mean ‘what were their formative influences?’ In particular, how is their identity shaped by what and how they know, by their conditions of knowing? Are we dealing here, essentially, with European peasants whose ‘central’ knowledge entailed/entails vassalage to crown and God, or Amerindians with a European veneer and some African admixture whose knowing centre was/is riverine ecology and shapeshifting spirits? (I am uncertain how to ascribe tense to these queries.) But you also wish to zigzag between the above formulations and another: ‘Who do riverine informants think they are?’ (You insist that they must be able to ‘connect’ with your queries.) But now you have, if you will, a conception of culture on the Amazon as a historical actor (‘European,’ ‘Amerindian,’ ‘African’) which conditions, circumscribes, causes, continuing certain conditions of knowing, and a conception of culture as conscious, as interpretive, a matter of what individual informants might intend … Your compromise between these is to suggest that essentially riverine culture is something done not said. This explains, too, why informants refrain from engaging verbally with your queries. Your informants can thus be described as ‘peasants who know (do) the Amazon flood plain and negotiate (do) market demands’; this knowing and doing is more than they can enunciate and is beyond conscious intention: it is ‘the density of history incorporated in practice’. Actions, bodies and emotions, you conclude, possess a habituality, which continues to evince its historical underpinnings. Your synthesis (at the end of the zigzagging between theses and antitheses) seems to end on the side of a kind of impersonalism and social-organicism: ways of knowing exist across generations while coming themselves under the influence of larger-scale processes; ways of being (bodies and their gestures, for instance) incorporate a history of conventional practices, times, places and distances. Here are cultural complexes, which form in historically specific settings

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– ‘originating circumstances’ – and are passed down in ways that militate for the tacit continuation of a range of unarticulated (but still somehow ‘thought through’) local practices … * There is a dualism that I find myself often returning to: information as against value; codification as against evaluation. According to Gregory Bateson (1972), these ought to be approached as aspects of the same central mental phenomenon: what we know and what we value form a mutually constitutive, dialectical pair. I know that what I value above all is the sovereignty of an individual’s personal preserve: that existential space of ‘uncontradicting solitude’ where ‘unfolds, emerges, what I am’ (Larkin 1990: 57). I know that this is what I want my anthropology above all to inscribe: a manifesto, a testament, of this individual freedom. I want to negate the impersonal, the non-personal, as historical agent, and do justice to the individual capacity for creation – of self, society and circumstance – as a function of will. My truth of human being is that:

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the individual is where life is actually lived, endured, decided, denied, suffered, imagined and reimagined. And it is individuals – not society or history or circumstance – who make and unmake the world. (…) The impersonal is not the real. Only we live our lives. We alone are responsible for our world.’ (Jackson 2003: xii, xiv)

What are the facts concerning our ‘existential power’ to make and unmake worlds? I would give testimony to its capacities, liabilities and varieties, and explore the ways and extents to which the circumstance of surrounding otherness impacts upon its expression (Rapport 2003). This anthropology might be described as an examination of the effects which an assemblage of abutting individualities alive in the world – each an energetic and personal centre of activity, intention and interpretation – variously produces. The impersonal has no place here as actor or sovereign cause. According to Michel Henry (1993), there is a slogan which attaches to the impersonal: ‘Long Live Death.’ Social analysis embraces death when human experience is understood as an impersonal – a historical, a structural, an institutional – effect. Yet it is ubiquitous. From Durkheimian sociology through varieties of structuralism to post-structuralism, one finds the same conception: ‘individual experience is made possible by the symbolic systems of collectivities, whether these systems be social ideologies, languages, or structures of the unconscious’ (Culler 1981: 26). These impersonal systems are

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responsible for, and constitute, the individual self and the conditions of its knowing, depriving it of any status as sovereign ‘source and master of meaning’ (Culler 1981: 33). Social life then comprises the playing out of unconscious systems of signification: ‘anonymous, depersonalized networking of images’, ‘games of transmitted signs’ where one finds individuals ‘being spoken’ by unconscious, preconditioned linguistic codes and knowledge-practices (Kearney 1988: 13–4). When one form of determinism becomes untenable – Marxism, say, or Structuralisme – another takes its place – Foucauldian discourse analysis, Bourdieuian ‘habituation’, the Lacanian unconscious. Above all, what is eschewed is the ‘descent into psychologism’ (Kapferer 1988). Faced with this threat to the personal preserve, one wishes to insist, together with Jacques Monod, that: ‘I am entirely aware of my motives and entirely responsible for my actions. They are all conscious’ (cited in Edelman 1992: 145). Or, less dogmatically: [b]y dismissing the subject, [the likes of] Bourdieu and Foucault would deprive us of the very site where life is lived, meanings are made, will is exercised, reflection takes place, consciousness finds expression, determinations take effect, and habits are formed or broken. (Jackson 1996: 22)

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* What does it mean for ways of knowing that I would have anthropology inscribe the knowing subject, remain true to individual and embodied capacities and intentionings, and so do justice to the personal? You put it very aptly, Mark, when pondering the meaning of documents in archives: their identity, you say, ‘remained strictly faithful to the originating circumstances’ of their inscription. ‘Originating circumstances’ I would understand to refer to individual perspectivism. And (then) I agree: meaning pertains to its contextualization within individually construed worldviews. It is, as you say, fundamentally untranslatable. Or, as George Steiner puts it: ‘all communication is translation’ and all translation ‘indeterminate’ (1975: 238). To know the personal is to hope to do the kind of justice born of an imaginative immersion in a lifeworld, intuiting what another life might be like. I do not see this as closing off areas of exploration and examination – the eschewing of the historical, social, cultural as contextual – so much as opening up the true wealth of the personal preserve to possible appreciation. Take gesture, and the array of non-propositional bodily practices and techniques whose knowing you would venture: how to do justice to what they might portend (even if not ‘mean’)? One thing I have come to appreciate in the imaginative work of

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approaching otherness is the ambiguity of forms – behavioural or verbal. I recall Wittgenstein’s credo: ‘[Do] not let yourself be seduced by the terminology in common currency. Don’t take comparability but rather incomparability as a matter of course’ (1980: 74). I would be wary of assigning substantive significance to the seeming sameness of gesture, practice and technique that echoes as a common currency across time and space. For what appears formally similar is likely to be more significantly different. I would be wary of assigning to a formal similarity something – a history, a meaning, a cause – that might detract from an authentic apprehension of the individual, momentary deployment and interpretation of that form. ‘If two people do the same thing, it is not the same thing,’ was George Devereux’s pithy summation (1978: 125); I would wish to know who a person was not by historicizing their gestures, their bodily techniques, or their propositional competencies – impersonalizing them – but by exploring the intentionalities behind their use of conventional forms as a personal context. To reintroduce a language of value, it seems to me that you would wish to valorize the past as a means to know and define (and so limit) the present; I would valorize the present as an intended effect, and a portend of what might be achieved in the future. Nietzsche strikes the truest note, for me, when he exclaims: ‘I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar’ (Nietzsche 1979: 38). Part of ‘meet[ing] the awful challenge of becoming adult and godless’ is to inscribe gratuitousness in the world: the unpatterned, groundless and unique. The human individual, for instance, is: something quite new which creates new things, something absolute; all his acts are entirely his own. Ultimately, the individual derives the value of his acts from himself; because he has to interpret in a quite individual way even the words he has inherited. His interpretation of a formula at least is personal, even if he does not create a formula: as an interpreter he is still creative. (Nietzsche 1968: no. 767)

That notion of the personal interpretation of a formula carried particular weight for me in an earlier fieldwork, where I explored the interaction between strangers in the bars, clubs, hostels, courts of law, university and hospital of St. John’s, Newfoundland (Rapport 1987, 1994b). What was the role that clichés played in these exchanges? What did it mean that clichéd words, phrases, gestures and techniques peppered public exchanges? On one view, such as Zijderveld’s (1979), clichés could be approached as social facts, each incorporating a cultural history, normative expectations concerning a collective

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present, and a coercive force to reproduce future social structures. Here were ‘Durkheimian micro-institutions,’ serving to crystallize social values and mould individual perceptions into one typical, objective, cohesive structure of summary meanings and behaviours. But it need not be presumed, I argued, that the ubiquity of a cliché – its continuities in local practice – translated into a homogeneous identity among users or somehow evidenced a common or continuing way of knowing or being in the world. For this was merely to confuse the formal surface of exchange with a deeper, more meaningful content. The cliché (word, gesture, technique) was a convenient shorthand; through its ‘friendly ambiguities’ (Sapir 1956: 153), the scales of time and space might be superficially shrunk and individuals and groups come together for the routine alignment or coordination of their activities. But the economy did not necessarily carry any significant weight: by way of clichés people were meeting on the surface of their selves. Nor did such engagement represent interactional routines somehow coming to possess their own agency or autonomy, determining or causing meaning, eliminating the interpretive deployment of the individual participants. To the contrary, it was the latter individual deployment, which animated the clichéd and continued to make it relevant to the present. In sum, there was a world of difference to be claimed between shared grammars and interactional competencies, on the one hand, and individual consciousness, identity or worldview, on the other. Certainly, the tension between the two – the formal and shared as against the significantly particular – provides a key focus of socialscientific accounting. I know, however, where my loyalties lie. It is to be admitted that the conventional forms of social life are important synthesizing devices: evidence of past sociality and economic for present and future efforts. They are also transference devices, convenient guises and disguises, of use in shifting attention and distancing both self and other from the truth. Formal grammars and lexicons are containers and husks. True, they might be scoured for traces of past conditions of their use but they were never themselves animate: responsible for their being carried forward into (unconscious) use in the present. An archaeology of such forms should not be confused with an apprehension of the agency and intentionality with which they were (and are) afforded significance as means, shorthands and media of knowing. The identity and the character of life lived in the present is always, in essence, individual and creative and new, I would conclude. To ascertain who people are, what they know, is always to grasp, imaginatively, at their present gratuitousness. (If they are somehow

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slave to a peasant past then this, too, is evidence of a wholly current and non-contingent creativity.) *

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I have framed our difference in existential terms: does value lie in an impersonal accounting of how the past delivered the present, or in an appreciation of the present’s ‘personality’ and gratuitousness? Maybe, in closing this section of our conversation, Mark, it would be more fruitful if it were reframed ethnographically. John Berger (1979: 203–5) suggested that a ‘peasant’ modus vivendi entailed valorizing a ‘culture of survival’, while ‘modernity’ as modus vivendi valorized a ‘culture of progress’. The first – Amazonia, say – aspired to continuity: to pushing a thread of tradition through the eye of the needle of fate. The second – Scotland, Newfoundland – aspired to progress: a heroic growth of hope such that even Death might be dwarfed. But then it also seems to me that whether an ethnographic milieu is characterized by the clichéd forms of peasantry or modernity, the ethnographer’s treatment is inevitably of the present (even in the archive). This, surely, is where we meet. We would know, you and I, the present in all its bodily modalities (Harris) and its individual embodiments (Rapport), in its necessities (Harris) and its gratuitousness (Rapport), in its tacitness (Harris) and its ambiguity (Rapport), in its inheritances (Harris) and its ambition (Rapport). And then it is the case that a presentist knowing demands a multiple and eclectic engagement. The anthropologist zigzags, as you put it, between ‘the bodily and the linguistic, the tangible and the imaginary’, in the attempted authentic apprehension of otherness. Ultimately it is a work of the imagination: of an embrace by the mind, in the here and now, of the possible past and future, the tacit and the voiced.

Knowing in Time, by Mark Harris We have established that the different forms of knowing the world cannot be conflated to each other and that a zigzagging method was not just an ethnographic strategy but a reflection of the everyday tasks and needs of an individual. ‘A presentist knowing demands a multiple and eclectic engagement.’ My question now is what are the limits of presentism for anthropological thought? Here, I do not mean to ask about the explanatory but the temporal limits, the way one’s knowing is lodged in a historical time.

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The temporal limits of knowing is important because it opens out towards the potencies of each moment, people putting together combinations of new elements in concrete situations (or holding on to ‘traditional’ knowledge). A person is born in a particular location at a certain time. She can move around and never return to her birthplace, learn a new language, but she cannot undo the timing of her birth. If she were born in the Highlands of Scotland in 1400 she would never have heard of the ‘New World,’ been able to migrate there, or have been able to read Montaigne. In turn, a child needs time to come to understand concepts, to speak, to acquire habits and learn how to relate to others in acceptable ways. To make decisions, to play football, or write books are so bound up with a sequence – or a rhythm – it is impossible to separate the way we think about them from a sense of time. Space is also needed to undertake these activities but not in such a conditioning way. Learning is cumulative but can we say the same thing about knowledge? Merleau-Ponty gives an answer when he writes:

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Why assure myself that today’s thought overlaps that of the day before? I know well that it does because today I see farther. It is not because I leap out of time into an intelligible world that I am able to think, or because each time I create significance from nothing, but because the arrow of time draws everything along with it and causes the successive thoughts to be simultaneous in a secondary sense, or at least to encroach legitimately upon one another.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 14–5).

Does this mean nothing is lost in human thought and its possible combinations? Although he is talking about the self ’s temporal sense, the idea can usefully be applied in a micro-historical context across generations. In the complex of practices and beliefs, like the ones surrounding shamanic healing I mentioned earlier, there are some elements which are hidden or dormant and accompany the social manifestation. Here I want to recall Giambattista Vico (see Introduction and chapters by Herzfeld and Platt). There are at least two senses in which Vico’s influence is important to the present discussion. I mentioned one in the Introduction, namely his opposition to Descartes’ rationalism. The second influence from Vico is his vision of the historical progression of human society. There are successive phases in the internal development of social forms and intellectual activity. These stages of growth are not random or mechanical but part of the accumulation of experience and the struggle to realize human potential. Each phase has elements of the past, but is its own present; and with the conscious effort of people in social relations new designs can be achieved, an idea

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which became central to the conceptualization of history for Hegel and Marx. Human knowledge is intrinsically historical, as well as plural. These paths are the temporalization of knowledge, the coming into being of human society at a definite time and place. Knowledge of these other times and places is possible through our capacity for imaginative empathy, fantasia. Through imagination a knowing subject can travel backwards to past lives and build on the evidence available to reconstruct their worlds, even if it is mixed up with the present of the author:

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The useful historians are not those who give general descriptions of facts and explain them by reference to general conditions, but those who go into the greatest detail and reveal the particular cause of each event. (Vico, cited in Berlin 1976 as an epigraph)

Vico did not advocate the abstraction of general rules and patterns but the individual character of each society in its concrete historical moment and, we might add, each person in their own moment of being. Isaiah Berlin believes he was the ‘first modern thinker to grasp the fundamental difference between scientific and historical analysis’, which Berlin likens to the difference between an X-ray and a portrait (1976: 89). Vico and Merleau-Ponty, in their different ways, insist on both the temporal aspects of knowledge (no structures outside of history) and the diversity of forms of knowing. I want now to return to the Amazon and look at knowing the past. Earlier I mentioned the continuity between the use of a plant stalk to beat those possessed by a demon in early modern southern Europe and Portuguese-speaking parts of the contemporary Amazon. This kind of persistence is far from unique. William Balée has recently demonstrated that some aspects of ethnobiological knowledge in South America have remained in tact for possibly thousands of years, suggesting that they are more resistant to change than kinship and politics (2000: 401). His examples concern the widespread Tupi-Guaraní speakers’ use of certain complexes linking ritual associations of tortoises or ants with aspects of women’s reproductive cycle, and with ants’ stings as a cure for inflammation and fever. These complexes are so widespread and found only amongst Tupí-Guaraní speakers that Balée posits that they cannot be the result of borrowings or exchanges. They must instead be ‘very old’ cultural practices which have remained, albeit unequally and degraded into the present. On the basis of linguistic evidence, he shows that the particular link between ‘words and things’ has been retained for thousands of years. According to Balée the most likely reason for this antiquity is that, unlike the social and political context,

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biotic communities, native technologies and Amazonian landscapes, in which the indigenous people have lived, have been ‘less prone to shredding and extinction’ (Balée 2000: 403). Balée does not discuss how such complexes are passed down from generation to generation. He assumes that the language, practice and environment connections produce a kind of automatic continuity, not unlike Cannell’s example of hair pulling. We should be careful not to assume that continuity means ‘staying the same’, rather than ongoing and connective. Furthermore, even though the linguistic and ritual unit of a complex may have remained intact, we do not know whether the same meanings have been ascribed to it over that period. Given the changing wider contexts it would seem unlikely. Nevertheless, the possibility that ethnobotanical knowledge can have such range is most suggestive for the present discussion, for it draws out the way in which different forms of knowing are bound up with various timescales. But the current tendency to focus more on change and rupture has blinded anthropologists to the continuous in cultural life. João de Pina Cabral (1992) has observed that there is a fetishization of ‘caesurism’ and it comes at the expense of being able to attend to how some cultural forms (in his case ‘pagan survivals’ in Europe) have had remarkable consistency over centuries. Now, Balée acknowledges that some of the ritual restrictions concerning consumption of foodstuffs during illness and menstruation present in Tupí-Guaraní people can be found in the ribeirinho societies of the kind I have studied in the Amazon. During menstruation, after birth and some illnesses, peasants will avoid foods considered fatty (remoso, catfish and some game), echoing Tupi-Guaraní practices (Motta Maués and Maués 1980). Even though the language, environment and the context are very different, there are some ‘persistences’ from one group to another in the same region. Just because the language has changed does not mean the trace lives on in some other form and is not connected to a language group. These echoes are like the ‘bridges’ I mentioned earlier with respect to the shapeshifting beings from European and Amerindian folklore. These bridges can be seen as the continuous paths of knowing in history, where individuals encounter each other and try to make themselves mutually intelligible and drawing on resources they find useful. These anecdotes are offered as a way of addressing the limits of presentism in anthropology. The habit of plucking hair in the Philippines, the beating of a possessed person, and contemporary food taboos in the Brazilian Amazon are traces of corrupted cultural complexes of behaviour and understanding. These traces may have lost some of their supporting gestures but they remain the same kind of entity from a different point of view at a different time. David

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Parkin, arguing against the notion of a bounded society that can be compared fruitfully to another, promotes an understanding of this constant shifting of cultural forms (or in my case, traces) to a method for a cubist-like anthropology: Anthropologists need only to realise that what is really at issue is not comparison but how to represent continuity in the diversity we call cultures. We have long learned not to expect to find original causes, permanent structures, and independent natural laws in the discourse we call culture. Next we may learn that our endless perspectives on those of others, which we call their culture, are the creative quest that is both means and end. (1987: 67)

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A ‘Ways of Knowing’ Project, by Nigel Rapport and Mark Harris What has this collaborative exercise enabled that would not have been possible in a more conventional textual form? A pattern has been woven which began from an agreed-upon node – the body as a site of knowing – and proceeded along and among particular authorial tracks to treat creativity and continuity, intention and determination, individuality and temporality, the imaginational and the practised. Where might it rest? ‘Ways of knowing’ includes both ‘modes of knowing’ and ‘pathways to knowing’. The second would seem a way to postpone the daunting distinctions of the first: body as against mind; affect against intellect; Geisteswissenschaft against Naturwissenschaft. One concentrates on the process of knowing. To begin, then: one knows in time. One knows, generally, having known things and known in particular ways beforehand. The effect of one’s past knowing on present knowing is what? Does knowing in time deliver continuity, habituality, the despotism of the customary? There surely occurs, ‘routinely’, both accumulation and a radical overhaul of one’s knowledge. And there is that apparently illogical latticed state where new knowledge sits alongside old, perhaps contradictory to it, and is kept distinct. One houses a contrariety of known ‘facts’, happily or at least viably existing as a paradox to oneself. And then the site of one’s knowing, one’s body, exists in time. One knows different things and in different ways at different times of one’s life. Is the child the parent of the knowing adult? There is surely room enough in the human condition for the sedimentation of facts and knowledge processes in the developing body and for those epiphanic moments of being – metanoia – where one engenders a ‘change of

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mind’ and of bodily habit. Memory develops and is fallible, on occasion purposely so. One knows, too, in context, in place and practice. One’s being and doing of particular things ‘knows’, is where knowledge (and identity) lodges. One knows as a conversationalist, then, but also as a porter and a peasant. One does not always know how best to translate one knowledge into the terms of another. Not all one’s knowledge is there to be expressed, never mind translated: not all knowledge can be turned into symbols or even signs. Two very different notions of the structuring of knowledge have come down to us in anthropology. There is the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Gluckman) version of the knowledge that is invested in explicit social structures, conventions and institutions; and there is the ‘Continental’ (Saussure, LéviStrauss, Foucault, Bourdieu) version of knowledge that is invested in implicit, deep structures, discourses and habituses. While avoiding the seeming self-defeating relativism that suggests we cannot know what we know (because we are the pawns of our very unconscious knowledge practices), there is still the question of one’s knowing in history. One’s knowing – and acting on what one knows – has explicit consequences for those who would know afterwards as well as for one’s contemporaries. What is the relationship between one’s knowing and the implicit conditioning to which one is subjected by those who have known before? We are arguing, now, for a knowledge which is derived from what people decide are the conventions or structures they want to support. Of course, there may be unintended consequences and gratuitousness. There is surely a tension in human practice between an existential power to determine the meaning of one’s circumstances and a structural power that threatens to limit the exercise of one’s will to knowledge. One knows amid historical conditions – possibly of long-standing – which can at least superficially and formally demand one’s attention. The body as a site of knowing remains largely uncharted territory: both the body as possessed of an interior space, a personal preserve, and the body as co-extensive with particular geographical, historical, social and cultural spaces. Its modes of knowing and their interrelations are mysterious. Our scientific journey towards its unravelling – however uncomfortable we might be with the reduction and however unlikely might seem the terminology – begins in the fantasia offered us by an imaginal engagement that aspires to an immersion. Through flights of mental fancy we imagine our way between bodies, contexts and practices, across time and space. We lay claim to lifelike portraits of people’s moments of being.

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The dualisms remain irreducible. They are existential as well as structural, corporeal as well as symbolical: us and them, now and then, here and there; tacit and articulated, practised and expressed, affective and intellectual. Mining the archive of those who documented the history of one’s peasant informants, however, walking and talking with hospital porters, one puts oneself in a position to accede to an imaginative immersion which gives grounds and hope for a kind of transcendence.

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References Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin. Berger, J. 1974. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC Publications. ———. 1979. Pig Earth. London: Writers and Readers. Berlin, I. 1976. Vico and Herder. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2000. Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. H. Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Burke, P. 1985. Vico. London: Fontana. Cannell, F. 1999. Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culler, J. 1981. The Pursuit of Signs, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Devereux, G. 1978. Ethnopsychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edelman, G. 1992. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. On the Matter of the Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ginzburg, C. 1983. The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Routledge. Gormley, A. 2000. Antony Gormley (Contemporary Artists), ed. J. Hutchison. London: Phaidon. Gudeman, S. and A. Rivera. 1990. Conversations in Colombia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, M. 2000. Life on the Amazon: The Anthropology of a Brazilian Peasant Village. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. ‘Riding a Wave: Embodied Skills and Colonial History on the Amazon Flood Plain’, Ethnos 70(2): 197–219. Henry, M. 1993. The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jackson, M. 1996. ‘Introduction’, in M. Jackson (ed.), Things As They Are. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2003. ‘Foreword’, in N. Rapport, I am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge. James, W. and D. Mills (eds). 2005. The Qualities of Time: Anthropological Approaches. Oxford: Berg.

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Kapferer, B. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kearney, R. 1988. The Wake of Imagination. London: Hutchinson. Larkin, P. 1990. Collected Poems. London: Marvell/Faber. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. Signs, trans. R. Murphy. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Motta Maués, A. and H.R. Maués. 1980. O Folklore da Alimentação: Tabus Alimentares da Amazônia. Belém: Falangola. Nietzsche. F. 1968. The Will to Power. New York: Random House. ———. 1979. Twilight of the Idols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Parkin, D. 1987. ‘Comparison as the Search for Continuity’, in L. Holy (ed.), Comparative Anthropology, Blackwell: Oxford. Pina-Cabral, J. 1992. ‘The Problem of Pagan Survivals’, in K. Hastrup (ed.), Other Histories. Routledge, London. Rapport, N.J. 1987. Talking Violence: An Anthropological Interpretation of Conversation in the City, St. John’s NFLD: ISER Press, Memorial University. ———. 1994a. The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E.M. Forster, Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1994b. ‘“Busted for Hash”: Common Catchwords and Individual Identities in a Canadian City’, in V. Amit-Talai and H. Lustiger-Thaler (eds), Urban Lives: Fragmentation and Resistance, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, pp. 129–57. ———. 2003. I am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power, London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. ‘Bob, Hospital Bodybuilder: The Integrity of the Body, the Transitiveness of “Work” and “Leisure” ’, in S. Coleman and T. Kohn (eds), The Discipline of Leisure: Embodying Cultures of ‘Recreation’. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 23–37. Sartre, J-P. 1972. The Psychology of Imagination. New York: Citadel. Sapir, Edward. 1956. Culture, Language and Personality: Selected Essays, ed. D.G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shelley, P.B. 1954. ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in D. Clark (ed.), Shelley’s Prose. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Steiner, G. 1975. After Babel. London: Oxford University Press. Toren, C. 1999. Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London: Routledge. Vico, G. 1999. New Science, trans. D. Marsh. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wittgenstein, L. 1980. Culture and Value. Blackwell: Oxford. Zijderveld, A. 1979. On Clichés. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Dominic Boyer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Past research and writings have focused on the relationship between media and knowledge. He is currently studying the practice of news journalism in an era of shifting technical and economic regimes of mediation. His first book, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005.

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Tony Crook joined the University of St Andrews in 2003 from Edinburgh University where he held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, and was involved in the Cambridge–Brunel ESRC-funded project ‘Property, Transactions and Creations.’ His research is based in the Min region of Papua New Guinea and concerns the holographic relations between knowledge-practices, taro gardening, male initiation ritual and, more recently, mining. His chapter here is a companion piece to ‘Length Matters: A Note on the GM Debate,’ Anthropology Today, 2000. The British Academy is to publish Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea: Exchanging Skin in 2007. Roy Dilley is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He has a range of publications relating to his fieldwork in Senegal, West Africa, the latest of which is a monograph entitled Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices among Haalpulaaren, Senegal: Between Mosque and Termite Mound (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). He has also edited two thematic volumes: Contesting Markets: Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 1992), and The Problem of Context (Berghahn, 1996). His recent research is on the life and work of French colonial officers in Senegal. Greg Downey is Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney. He is author of Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from

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an Afro-Brazilian Art (Oxford University Press, 2005) and co-editor of Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke University Press, 2006). His research interests include studying sports, dance and music in order to understand better the way that cultural variation in training and behaviour affects perceptual, physiological and neurological development, effacing the division between ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ variation in humans. Cristina Grasseni lectures in Anthropology at the University of Bergamo (Italy). Among her publications in English are articles in leading international journals (including Social Anthropology, Cambridge Anthropology, Society and Space), the edited collection Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards (Berghahn, 2006) and the monograph Developing Skill, Developing Vision: Identity and Locality in a Lombard Mountain Community (Berghahn, forthcoming).

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Mark Harris is a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. He has carried out fieldwork with people who live on the banks of the Amazon River in Brazil since 1992. Recently, he started archival research on the history of the region, and is currently writing a book with the title of Rebellion on the Amazon: Race, Popular Culture and the Cabanagem in Northern Brazil, 1798–1840. His publications include Life on the Amazon (Oxford University Press, 2000), Some Other Amazonians (edited with Stephen Nugent, Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2004), The Child in the City (edited with Anna Grimshaw, Prickly Pear Pamphlets, 2000). He was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1996 and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2004. Michael Herzfeld is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and former editor of American Ethnologist (1994–98), and the author of nine books, including Anthropology through the Looking-Glass (Cambridge University Press, 1997; J.I. Staley Prize, 1994); The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (Routledge, 2nd rev. edn, 2005). He conducts research in Greece, Italy and Thailand. Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written extensively on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organization in the circumpolar North, as well as on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history, on the role of animals in human society, on issues in human ecology, language and tool use,

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333

and on environmental perception and skilled practice. His latest book, The Perception of the Environment, was published by Routledge in 2000. He is currently writing and teaching on the comparative anthropology of the line, and on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Kai Kresse is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and Research Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin (2006–2008). His monograph Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam, and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast is published with Edinburgh University Press and the International African Institute (2007). His current research is on translocality, Islamic discourses and everyday life in postcolonial coastal Kenya. He has edited volumes on the African philosophers H. Odera Oruka (Peter Lang, 1997) and V.Y. Mudimbe (special issue of African Cultural Studies, 2005), and on Cultural Philosophy (Wehrhahn, 2001). He was Evans-Pritchard Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford (2005), and is a co-editor of ‘polylog: forum for intercultural philosophy; (www.polylog.org).

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Ray Lucas is an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellow at the University of Strathclyde. His current project is on ‘Multimodal Representations of Urban Space’ and is funded by AHRC/EPSRC Designing for the 21st Century cluster. Lucas has also been involved in research on the extent of the human voice in determining space at the University of Edinburgh. Lucas has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Aberdeen with the thesis ‘Towards a Theory of Notation as a Thinking Tool’. This work examined creative inscriptive practices ranging from architectural drawing through movement notations to diagrams and painting. Trevor Marchand is an ESRC Fellow and Senior Lecturer in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He studied architecture (McGill University) and anthropology (SOAS), and conducts research on building-craft knowledge and apprenticeship. He is the author of Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen (Curzon, 2001) and The Masons of Djenne (forthcoming), and is currently studying the training of fine woodworkers in London. Tristan Platt is Reader in Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Amerindian Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Espejos y Maíz (Annales ESC, 1978), Estado Boliviano y Ayllu Andino (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1982), Los Guerreros de Cristo (Plural Editores, La Paz 1996), numerous journal articles and various chapters in edited collections. His most recent publication

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334

Contributors

is an anthropological history of an Aymara confederation in the South-Central Andes (15th–17th centuries) consisting of analytical commentaries and documents, Qaraqara-Charka: Mallku, Inka y Rey en la Provincia de Charcas, 1450–1650, (Institut Français d’Études Andines/Plural Editores, La Paz 2006; written and edited with T. Bouysse-Cassagne and O. Harris). Pablo Quisbert was trained at the Department of History, University of San Andrés, La Paz, Bolivia, and has published several articles with the Coordinadora de Historia (La Paz), the Institut Français d’Études Andines (Lima-Paris), the Museo de Etnografía y Folclore (La Paz), and the Université Paris X – Nanterre. He is at present working on the preparation of audio-visual materials for the understanding of contemporary political history.

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Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews. He held a Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice from 2005–07, where he was the Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, Concordia University of Montreal. His research interests include: social theory, phenomenology, identity and individuality, community, conversation analysis, and links between anthropology and literature and philosophy. His recent books are: The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity (Pluto, 2002); ‘I am Dynamite’: An Alternative Anthropology of Power (Routledge, 2003); and (as editor) Democracy, Science and The Open Society: A European Legacy? (Transaction, 2006). Amanda Ravetz is currently Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University, researching the contemporary convergence of aesthetics and ethnography. She has lectured in visual anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester, taught video production at Oldham College and used video with young people in a variety of community settings. Her documentary work includes The Bracewells (2001) and Clearings (2004), an installation piece in collaboration with the poet Stephen Watts. Recent publications include an edited volume Visualizing Anthropology (Intellect Books, 2005, with A. Grimshaw), and ‘From Documenting Culture to Experimenting with Cultural Phenomena: Using Fine Art Pedagogies with Visual Anthropology Students’ in E. Hallam and T. Ingold (eds.) Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (Berg, 2007).

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Contributors

335

Paul Stoller teaches anthropology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and at Temple University. From 1976 to 1990 he conducted ethnographic research on the religious traditions of the Songhay people of the Republic of Niger. From 1992 to the present he has conducted research among West African street vendors and art traders in New York City. Stoller is the author of many books and essays on African religions, the anthropology of the senses and recent African immigration to North America. A recent book, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City (University of Chicago Press, 2002), won the American Anthropological Association’s Robert B. Textor Prize for excellence in anticipatory anthropology. His second novel, Gallery Bundu: A Story of an African Past, was published in 2005 by the University of Chicago Press.

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Otávio Velho is Emeritus Professor in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. He studied for his doctorate at the University of Manchester in the 1970s where he was supervised by Peter Worsley, and studied with Max Gluckman and Clyde Mitchell. He has undertaken fieldwork with peasants in Brazilian Amazonia and lately has been dedicated to the study of popular religiosity and epistemological questions of an interdisciplinary nature.

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INDEX

A Aberdeen 289, 292–4, 299, 301, 302 abjection 280, 281 action understanding 195 actor 136 aesthetics 7, 52, 92, 105, 106, 206, 210, 212, 216, 227, 227, 251–63, 299 aesthetic ethnography 270 affect 270, 276, 282, 283, 327, 329 African philosophy 43 agency 4, 18, 35, 37–8, 123, 135, 140, 218n1, 237, 281, 322 costs of 135 alchemy 119 allegory 136 Alpine Italy 209–10 alterities 85, 132 Amazon River 6–7, 311 animals 210–11, 300 anthropology 4 artisanal approach to 12 of architecture 290 of art 283, 290, 291 and biology (see also behavioural and brain sciences) 2, 20, 183, 184, 224, 234, 236–8 and ethnography 12, 27, 50, 79, 83, 107, 275, 291 of knowledge 21, 27, 30, 39, 40, 44, 48, 50, 233, 245, 263 of philosophy 28, 39, 42, 43–4, 50, 58–9 of practice 203 of religion 68 and sculpture 8, 98, 291, 294 of the dialectic 30 of vs. with 42, 289–92 visual 213, 267, 291

apprentice 95, 98, 107, 175 apprenticeship 1, 71, 96, 104, 158, 167, 176n2, 182, 192, 199, 205, 206, 213, 216, 223, 236 Arbib, Michael 186, 195–6 archaeology 289, 293, 303 architecture 289–93 neural 233 archival research 123, 314–16 art (see also anthropology of art) 266–9, 271, 279, 281–2, 289 artifacts 31, 265 artificial mountain 130–33 artisans (see also craftsmen) 94–5, 97, 101, 103, 106 artisans and anthropologists 101–4 attention 140–1, 226, 227–9, 231, 235 education of 206, 213, 217, 228 audit culture 8, 15, 71, 93, 100, 101, 106 B Balée, William 325–6 basketry 294, 298 Bateson, Gregory 64, 68, 80, 81, 84, 319 behavioural and brain sciences 184 being-there 175 belonging 80, 206, 216, 273 Berger, John 9, 274, 323 Berger, Peter and T. Luckmann (definition of knowledge) 4, 7 Bloch, Maurice 3, 12, 13–4, 183 bodily malleability 224, 233–5 Borofsky, Robert 3 Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 12, 13, 28, 29, 35, 95–6, 199, 218n1, 237, 320

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Index

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Brazil 70, 73, 75, 77, 223, 314 Amazon River 6 capoeira in 223 Christianity in 75 modernity of 73 Broca’s area 186 building-craft knowledge 182 C cancer 158, 160, 172, 173 and sorcery, 173–4 capoeira 223–6 categories 213–15, 275, 280 change (vs. continuity) 11, 66, 69, 81, 83, 137, 326 chemotherapy 160, 161 side effects of 161–2 children 209–11, 238n1, 275, 311 Christianity 68, 74–7, 82, 87–8, 132–3, 313 class 29, 237, 275 classroom 288, 298, 299, 303 cognition 2, 3, 20, 182–4, 186, 206, 217 cognitive anthropology 182 Collingwood, R.G. 18, 119, 122–3, 126, 129, 136 colonialism French 142 Portuguese 311 Spanish 115 colonial violence 127 communication 14, 35, 49, 64, 66, 70, 182, 186, 189–90, 192 complexity 39, 91–2, 116, 223, 250–2, 255 computational actions 190, 198 computational linguistics 183 concealment (see also hidden) 116, 120, 124, 125, 127–30, 132 confabulation 275–6 confusion 4, 77–8, 82, 134, 248, 281 connectionist theory 182, 224, 233 contemporary art 266–70 continuity (see also persistence) 18, 81–3, 107, 116, 137n9, 310, 313–14, 325–7 conversion 68, 76, 82 craft 2, 4, 8, 96, 98, 99, 104, 107, 198, 291, 293, 304n6 craftsmanship (see also apprenticeship) 2 craftsmen (see also artisans) 142, 197 creativity 36, 50, 87, 290–1, 309, 323, 327 Crick, Malcolm 4, 27

337 D deskilling 91, 93–4, 100, 103 dialectic 3, 19, 30–5, 141–2, 153, 154n3 dialectical knowledge 30–1, 35 dialogue context 189, 198, 200n2 Dilley, Roy 2, 5 divination 168–71 Djenne 181, 192 domain specificity 182 double vision 274, 280, 281 doubling 279–80 dualisms (dichotomies) 35, 69, 75, 78, 80, 205, 237, 280, 308, 317, 329 dynamic syntax theory (DS) 185–91, 192, 199 E ecology 72–3 of networks 247–52 of practice 206–8 education 33, 36, 56, 168, 217, 287– 9, 303, 310 education (of attention) 206, 213, 217, 228 Eliot, T.S. v, 1, 6 embodied cognition 183, 186, 190, 191, 195, 199 embodied experience 98, 183 embodied simulation 195–6 embodiment 158, 164, 172, 218, 222–3, 234, 317, 323 enculturation (see also enskilment) 206, 224, 234, 237 enlightenment 20 enskilment (see also enculturation) 206, 217, 218, 236 environment 1, 14, 16, 17, 145, 150, 153, 182, 205, 213, 216, 224, 298–300, 326 epistemology 8, 27–8, 30, 34, 81, 84, 92, 104, 208, 273, 317–8 ethnography 50, 270, 291, 300 evidence 18, 98, 116, 119, 123, 126– 8, 214, 233, 253, 322 evil 67, 136, 169, 173, 312 experience 174 individuality of 246, 308–10, 327 F fabled 270, 275 faitiche 69–70 fantasia 325, 328 forms of life 208, 247 freedom 34, 53–4, 117, 135, 136, 319

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338 French colonial West Africa functionalism 10, 218n1

Index 142–3

G Gaden, Henri (French colonial officer) 142–52 Gell, Alfred 268, 281, 283, 290, 291 genji how 163, 165 German identity 32 German intellectuals (gebildeten) 32–4 German journalists 35–8 gesture 5, 182, 186, 196, 307, 312– 13, 317, 320 Gibson, James 206, 217, 227, 229, 238n1 globalization 73, 86, 247, 249 goal representations 197 Gormley, Antony 310 Grimshaw, Anna 9, 267 Gudeman, Stephen 313–14 Gunn, Wendy 292

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H habit

38, 87, 204, 229, 237, 313, 317, 320, 326 habitus 4, 12, 205, 218, 237, 328 hallucinatory 270, 273 Hart, Keith 10 health and illness 173 hearing 169, 189, 230, 281, 298–9 Hegel, G.W.F. 19, 28–9, 31–5, 154n3, 325 hidden 311, 324 history 2, 20, 28, 38, 51, 104, 116, 119, 120, 122–4, 134–6, 312, 325 Holy, Ladislav 10 home 113, 274–5, 280 Hughes, Ted 5–6 humanism 318 humanity, notion of 5, 7, 20, 34, 52, 66, 309 humility 159, 172–4 hybridity 68–9, 73, 83, 86, 154n3, 311 I identity 30, 35, 38, 183, 192, 216, 273, 311, 320, 322 ideology 29 ignorance 13, 95, 139–42, 145, 152, 155n8, 308 imagination 20, 73, 126–9, 133, 204, 277, 309, 316, 325, 327 imitation 136, 186, 195, 199, 205 implicit 78, 97, 222, 235

incorporating practice 313 indigenous people 73, 74, 77 Information (vs. knowledge) 64–5, 222, 288, 300, 319 Ingold, Tim 80–4, 222–3 intentionality 127, 140, 317, 322 interpretation 123, 127, 187–8, 206, 319 interruption 271, 279, 282 Islam 51, 56, 71, 149, 182 J Jackson, Michael 204–5, 218n1, 319–20 Jeannerod, Marc 184–5, 192, 196 journalism 35–7 K Kant, I. 45, 62, 126 Kempson, Ruth 187–9, 198 kinaesthetic representation 185, 193, 194 selection 194 knotting 294 knowing how/knowing that (see also Ryle) 13, 118–9, 183, 207, 222, 229, 233, 236 knowing the past 16–17, 118–22, 325 knowledge (see also information) 164 anthropology of 27, 39–40 artisanal vs. academic knowledge 94, 100, 101, 104 definition of 4 and language 4–5, 13–14 as a network of relations 248 practices 39, 139, 141–3, 153, 146, 253, 263n2, 309 proposition and nonpropositional 3, 12, 223, 224, 233, 317 representational theory of 183, 192 scaling of 11, 248, 249, 251 self 38 L landscape 132, 145–7, 204, 214, 294, 298–300, 326 language 4, 5, 51, 67, 69–70, 82, 118, 147, 184, 186, 207, 253–4, 259, 315, 317, 326 Larkin, Philip 308–9, 319 Latour, Bruno 11, 16, 64–74, 81–9, 248, 256–7 Lave, Jean 14, 203, 206, 288

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Index

339

learning 1–2, 3, 14, 99, 102–5, 119, 141, 159, 182, 191, 223, 287–89 lectures 52, 55–8, 288, 293–4 legitimate peripheral participation 206, 209, 210 linguistics 13, 183–4 looking 204, 211, 213, 216–8, 226–7, 228, 278–9, 281, 291, 298 at vs. around 238n1 loss 169, 256–7, 268, 275, 282, 317 Lucas, Ray 292–4 luminous 272, 273, 275, 281, 282

N Nassir, Ahmad (Swahili poet) 52 Nassir, Sheikh Abdilahi (Islamic scholar) 55 Needham, Rodney 23n1, 97–8 network theory 61n6, 248, 264, 265 neural circuitry 184 neurology 237 neuroscience 2, 185–91, 222 Nietzsche, F. 28, 66, 321 non-Hodgkin Lymphoma 158, 159, 161 notation 293, 300–1

M making 275, 294, 302 Manchester 269, 273, 290 mason 181, 182, 190, 191–3 material culture 290, 291, 295 materials 120, 182, 268–70, 295, 297, 302 medium 268, 277, 298 vs. substance 300 memory 17, 37, 135, 140, 146, 182, 317, 328 sedimented 313 memory path 132 mental representations 183, 187, 191, 192 merging horizons 136 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 17, 80, 183, 324–5 metallurgy 134 methodological dialogue 266 Mills, C.W. 2, 8 mirror neuron system 196 mirror system hypothesis 185–6, 195, 198 modelling (cognitive) 182–3, 233 modernity 16, 34, 65–9, 72, 86, 100–3, 323 modularity theory 182, 184 moment of knowing 311 moral judgement 127, 141, 152 motor cognition 190–1, 194, 195, 198 context 192 imagery 185 intention 192, 193 memory 195 preparation 185, 193 skills 194 movement (bodily) 119, 191, 194, 205, 215, 223–5 Muslims in Mombasa 55

O observational cinema 273 outside/inside 75–6, 119, 136 P parity 187, 191, 199 parity requirement 186 parse 187 parse routine 192–3 parsing 184, 187, 188, 194–6 peasant way of life 323 pentecostalization 76 perception 17, 20, 80, 183, 206, 214, 222, 287 and cultural influences 234–5 plasticity of 233 perceptual skills 222–3 perceptual training 235 performed identity 183 peripheral vision 226, 231, 235 neurological aspects of 232 persistence (see also continuity) 80, 325–6 of Christianity 74, 76, 77 phenomenology 2–3, 16, 35, 204, 231 phenomenology of expertise 30 philosophy, anthropology of 28, 30, 39, 42, 44–6, 48, 50, 58–9 poetry 51–2, 175, 308–9 politics 134, 253 populism 91–3 porters 307–9 Portuguese colonial policy in Amazonia 311 practice (community of) 203, 208–9, 213, 216 practice, theory of 106, 207 presentism 16–7, 323 prospection 133 proto-language 186 providential preparation 133

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R real, the 267, 280–2 re-enactment 6, 17, 119, 122–6, 129–30 reflection 46–7 reflexivity 39 religion 47, 51, 63–87 remission 159 representational theory of mind (RTM) 182, 192 research 288–9 vs. teaching 289, 303 resistance 77, 107, 114, 117, 130, 135, 317 ribeirinhos (Brazilian Amazonian river dwellers) 7, 312 Riles, Annelise 245–63 ritual 165–7, 325 role swapping 197–8 Ryle, Gilbert 3, 44, 183, 207, 222 S Salcedo, Doris 270, 280–1, 282 science 64–8, 72–3, 85, 269 sculpture (anthropology as) 8, 98, 270, 278, 291, 294, 299, 310 sedimentation 119, 135, 204, 207, 313, 328 and memory 313 seeing 9, 119, 169, 204, 213, 216, 222–37, 269, 291, 298 semantic-based representations 190, 198 senses (see also hearing, seeing) 4, 118, 140, 203, 213–6, 217, 224, 228, 230, 298 attunement 217, 228, 231, 235 Serres, Michel 4, 16, 65–74, 84 shaman 18, 115, 118, 123, 129, 132, 136, 312 shared performance 196, 197, 199 shared utterance 187, 196–8 Shelley, Percy 309 signs 114–17 silence 115–18, 125–36 similarity and difference 81 simplicity 91–2, 254 sites of memory 146 situated learning 182, 191, 199, 206 skill-based knowledge (see also knowledge) 199 skilled vision 184, 213–17, 228–30 skills 6–7, 94, 190, 204, 237, 317 sky 299–300

Index Songhay 158 theories of knowledge of 174–5 sorcery 158, 162, 165, 176 and cancer 173–4 Sperber, Dan 2, 21 Spinoza 20, 69, 73, 84 spirit possession 18, 158 Strathern, Marilyn 11, 31, 71, 74–7, 78, 93, 100, 245 structuralism 97, 183, 319 substance vs. medium 300 Swahili speaking coast of East Africa 49–58 T teaching 187, 288–94 vs. research 289, 303 temporality (see also time) 31, 127, 327 Thaksin (ex prime minister of Thailand) 92–4 Thomas, Nicholas 80, 82, 83, 266 time 4, 16, 37, 69–70, 116, 204, 253, 256, 261, 293, 321, 323–5 Toren, Christina 2, 5, 14, 17, 77 tracking, notion of 278, 278–9, 282 translation 81, 206, 257, 316, 320 triangulation 133 U understanding 21, 50 United Nations, the 247 Utu (goodness, humanity)

52–5

V Vico, G. 20, 104, 107, 119, 122, 324–5 Vision (see seeing) visual imagery 185 visual perception 185, 231 visualism 298 W walking 204, 215, 299, 301, 329 Warhol, Andy 279–80 ways of knowing (definition) 3–4 weather 215, 298, 304 weaving 175, 294, 296–8, 303 wind 297, 299, 301 wind-furnaces 115, 120, 121, 125 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 28, 30, 203, 207, 321 Z zigzagging (method)

15, 318, 323

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