I recently finished another book by T.C. Boyle. The novel is called Drop City and it is a continuation of some of the same themes (community, nature, relationships, violence, freedom, survival, activism) from an earlier novel, A Friend of the Earth. While A Friend of the Earth is set mostly in the future to examine the direction we may be moving toward as a society, Drop City takes place in 1970 and looks at the turmoil and optimism of two different communities—the polyamorous, communal lifestyle of a back-to-the-earth group of dropouts and the hardened lifestyles of solitary, traditional people who survive in the Alaskan frontier by carving out their own space—as a method of understanding the legacy of 60s rebellion and the continuing problems of today. While both groups have widely differing politics/perspectives, they both share a disdain for the consumer society of mainstream America and they both have a vision of an unmediated life lived directly off the land. For me, this book, like Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, is a powerful exploration of two different groups seeking authentic meaning in their lives. Of course, both the hedonistic and traditional groups include members who take the ideas to the extreme and while friendships are formed and enemies are made, I found myself pondering my own thoughts on community, authenticity, and relationships. I highly recommend this book—Boyle is one of my favorite contemporary novelists.
So my second summer session just ended and I’m looking forward to the six weeks I will have off before fall semester to heal my body. I have another nagging pain, a much more longstanding affliction, this is a dis-ease I have long felt. I’ve been discontented for awhile and I finally have decided that it must be addressed head on. My mental/spiritual state has been in turmoil and I have mapped out some behavioral patterns that I must work on if I am to find some peace. So, since I have health insurance for the first time since I was a teen, I have signed up for counseling—conveniently located down the street from my new place. I don’t know if it will be effective, but I’m willing to give it a try…
I went hiking at Raven Run Sanctuary yesterday with a friend. We are both dealing with a lot these days and the 4 ½ mile hike along the cliffs of the Kentucky River was very therapeutic. It was a great day, the temperature was mild, there was not many people visiting, and the animals were active. We observed a beautiful snake, probably about 4-5 feet long making its way along a branch. A turkey trotted up the hill and we laughed watching his bobbing head as he skirted away from us in a new direction. We also came upon a doe and her two fawns—very small and curious—as they picked their way amongst the berries of the hillside. We crept along following them for about 20 minutes, trying our best to signal that we meant no harm. The natural fauna of the sanctuary is amazing and I took some pictures that, as soon as I get my hook-up for my digital camera unpacked, I will put up online. Also, there is this amazing viewpoint called The Overlook and this alone is worth the trip. Raven Run is only about 25 minutes from my house, so I am going to start regularly visiting as a sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of my small urban area.
Thoughts on Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other and George E. Marcus’ “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” :
Is Ernst Bloch correct when he states “At any rate, the primacy of space over time is an infallible sign of reactionary language” (38).
Fabian uses Gellner as an example of how “The denial of coevalness becomes intensified as time-distancing turns from an explicit concern into an implicit theoretical assumption” (39). It is quite clear that even though Gellner claims that anthropology is “timeless” that he still views “’primitive’ tribes” as throwbacks to another time. How is this still carried out today? In academia? In advertisement? In popular culture? In politics? Through NGOs? Through racist rhetoric (think of media depictions of inner-urban or Appalachian mountain cultures)?
Fabian makes a critical distinction between the supposedly progressive move towards treating other societies “in their own terms” instead of “on their own terms” (39). Is he nitpicking, or, based upon this simple distinction, can we begin to understand the invisible power of defining sociocultural orders or systems, especially when one groups has the power to define another’s “own terms” (40).
Fabian explains how Talcott Parson’s in “The Social System” comes to the conclusion that “time” is an essential condition for “goal attainment” and, thus, those that waste or misuse time are deviant. Ideally, then, “Time is a means to keep out conflict and interference” in a “complex industrial society” (40). Parson’s views societies that are not centered around management of time as primitive. For a minute, slip on your Marxist lenses (or any other critical theory) and critique Parson’s position—a hint, how does his position on time support capitalist management/control of time? If you’re feeling really energetic perhaps you could show how this would relate to Foucault’s, in Discipline and Punish (1977), critique of a “carceral” system that requires “docile bodies”. Could you provide an alternative vision of contemporary society that is not centered around “management of time”? Here are some counter-arguments from Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue's The Right To Be Lazy (1912), Situationists, such as, Raol Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life (1972), or neo-anarchists, such as, Bob Black (“The Abolition of Work”—1985) or Hakim Bey or CrimethInc: The Ex-Workers Collective.
Fabian mentions “Victor Turner’s analyses of ritual process” in works, such as, Forest of Symbols (1967), if you have read Turner, think about his concept of the “liminal” state in rituals. Is this work participating in the “denial of coevalness”?
Maurice Bloch provides us with a critique of Structuralist-Functionalist arguments for “temporal relativity”, on the top of page 43, Bloch’s argument would also deny Althusserian Marxist belief in an all-encompassing societal system that structures our awareness from birth.
Ernst Bloch writes that “historical relativism” creates cultural monads “without windows, with no link among each other, yet full of mirrors facing inside” (44-45). Fabian continues the metaphor by musing on whether “such mirrors, if placed at propitious angles, also have the miraculous power to make real objects disappear” (45). Are anthropologists (or anyone who theorizes/observes/relates cultural practices/myths) cultural magicians who through ‘smoke and mirrors’ create their own ethnographic stories?
Fabian discusses how the American anthropologists were heavily influenced by WWII and Cold War debates over “national character” and “values” (46). He then goes on to say that these concerns usually take at least a generation to “percolate to the level of popular consciousness.” For those who have managed to stay involved in the recent, acrimonious political campaigns, on the national, regional and local levels—can you explain any current manifestations of “wartime cultural relativism”?
Fabian discusses (47) the “alliance between theoretical relativism and [the] fight for a cause perceived as just and necessary” and how this leads to our perception of the cultural “Other” as “fenced off … [in] culture gardens.” Since the fall of the USSR whom have Americans viewed as “fenced off … culture gardens” that are the antagonistic, alien Other who threatens the American ‘way of life’?
George Marcus provides a brief schematic for laying “out a set of requirements for shifting the space-time framework of ethnography” that would entail “both changing certain parameters in the way that ethnographic subjects are analytically constructed as subjects as well as altering the nature of the theoretical intervention of the ethnographer in the text that he or she creates” (43).
Marcus states that one of the problems is anthropology’s borrowing of techniques from realist fiction to construct its ethnographic narratives (the false “realism” of realistic narratives for instance). Marcus believes that anthropology should learn, from experimental modernist literature and film, the technique of “montage”.
Here is a mapping of possibilities exposed from the “experimentation with creating the effect of real time or simultaneity through montage, cross-cutting, and the like” (50):
1. Let us begin with the proposition that in the late twentieth century world, cultural events/processes anywhere cannot be comprehended as primarily localized phenomena, or are only superficially so. In the full mapping of a cultural identity, its production and variant representations, one must come to terms with multiple agencies in varying locales the connections among which are sometimes apparent, sometimes not, and a matter for ethnographic discovery and argument. In short, culture is increasingly deterritorialized, and is the product of parallel diverse and simultaneous worlds operating consciously and blindly with regard to each other. What “relationship” is in this configuration becomes a matter of focal interest for ethnography, which presents itself initially as a problem of form, or representation. [uses example from David Lodge’s “Small World”] ...
A life goes on in place A and place B, for example. In the more difficult case, there is very little contact between the two in everyday life, yet they are intimately or powerfully related to one another in that they have mutual unintended consequences for each other. How does one explore this kind of complex relationship without dramatic resolutions, how to give a cultural account of this structure, how to represent it ethnographically?
2. The ethnographic grasp of many cultural phenomena and processes can no longer be contained by the conventions that fix place as the most distinctive dimension of culture. Merely historicizing local culture—connecting the village community to a particular historical narration—or describing the depth and richness of tradition fails to capture the side of culture that travels, its production in multiple, parallel, and simultaneous worlds of variant connection.
3. This problem of description and theoretical construction is nothing new in anthropology. In the 1960s anthropologists came to terms with the forms of social/cultural organization of modernity (so called nongroups) through formalist techniques of modeling and the imagery of network and systems analysis from cybernetics. Models of course had their advantages, in dealing abstractly and linearly with relationships, but for the kinds of contemporary questions being asked about distinctly cultural processes within social organizations or as social organizations, they are descriptively impoverished. Models of networks, for example, are linear spatially and temporally: A moves to B, A causes B. There is no sense of the simultaneity of process and action which provides a profoundly different and more ambiguous sort of analytic experience of organization that allows one to understand content as well as form or rather from as content and vice versa.
I see the attempt to achieve the effect of simultaneity as a revision of the spatial-temporal plane on which ethnography has worked. Experiments with it posit three kinds of organizational situations:
a. Simultaneous operations, spatially dispersed within a conventional single institutional frame as a representation of process within it ... .
b. The operation of institutionally diverse agencies to constitute an entity and organization which they all fragmentally share ... .
c. Independent worlds, operating blindly in relationships of unintended consequences in terms of one another. These are most exciting, in terms of the discovery of non-obvious relationships, and controversial objects for this kind of experiment in anthropology. The kind of relationships posited in the 1960s project of cultural ecology in anthropology would offer examples. So would the ethnographic study of markets, especially highly speculative commodity markets (see, for example, Stephen Fay’s account, 1981, of the attempt of the Hunt brothers to corner the world silver market in Beyond Greed).
The capacity, indeed the necessity, to deal ethnographically with the operation of complex systems in a world where cultural process is deterritorialized requires a replacement of the old social structural imageries, through models of network and system, with something equivalent to modernist literary techniques for the representation of simultaneity in social process and action.
4. In my own research projects, I have time and again come upon the multilocale determination of the identity of subjects upon whom I at first focussed as occupying a situated place. This necessitated for me a reconceptualization toward, in each case, a broader and more complex understanding of what the dimensions of the phenomena were that I was addressing. Often this shift has occurred in the middle or at the end of the work that had operated through the conventional ways of representing my subjects whose lives seemed to be encompassed in knowable communities (to use Raymond Williams’ term for the space-time framework of the pre-industrial revolution English novel). My realization of the partiality of this kind of knowledge stimulated me to look for an ethnography of different horizons.
My original work in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga during the 1970s was located in a number of different Tongan villages. This was a time of massive migration internally and overseas. Virtually nothing that happened in a village from kava ceremonies to church collections could be understood only in the terms of the life of the village. What was happening in the village was always being experienced vicariously elsewhere—for example, in San Francisco, Sydney, Auckland, Honolulu—and vice versa. I tried to follow and map migration networks as an understanding of this internationalized dimension of Tongan culture, in which the home islands were becoming just one site, among others, in which contemporary Tongan identity was being constructed. From a cultural perspective, network/systems modeling takes one only so far; rather, one needs a sense of parallel existences through juxtapositions of everyday life in different locales. Models, perhaps too literally and linearly, imaging the connecting lines between such locales without fully describing life in the latter. Cultural description demands an account of ongoing, simultaneous activity in locales for which connections are posited (that is, the linkages are secondary to a description of life in the locales linked). This line of thinking in my Tongan work stopped here in the early 1980s without a clear sense at the time that the problem was one of technique of representation rather than being purely theoretical and methodological (now I understand problems of representation as the distinctive medium of theoretical and methodological discourse in contemporary anthropology) (50-52)
There is more but I am getting very tired—Marcus points out Michael Taussig’s “Colonialism, Shamanism, and the Wild Man” (1978) as an early example of anthropology’s usage of the modernistic “montage” technique. I, myself, would recommend most of Taussig’s work as superb reading and research—the later works also border on the transgressive, in a disciplinary, genre, and thematic sense.
Lastly, Marcus insists that when engaging in critical (my term) ethnography that we must remember that when constructing subject/cultural identity we must engage in “problematizing the construction of the spatial, of the temporal, and of perspective of voice in realist ethnography.” Furthermore, “three requirements” also “concern” the “analytic presence of the ethnographer in his or her text: the dialogic appropriation of analytic concepts, bifocality, and the critical juxtaposition of possibilities” (43).
Marcus, George E. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” Visualizing Theory. ed. Lucien Taylor. NY: Routledge, 1994: 37-53.
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