Why do so many of us get pleasant, uncanny sensations when we throw a coin in a fountain and see it resting in the water below? What’s the cultural psychology here? What do such coins have to do, for example, with rock concerts and the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”?
It’s best to start by reviewing the shift in perspective that occurs when the coin moves out of our hands and into the fountain (or pond…but fountains make better pictures). When we grip that penny or other coin in our hands, we’re totally in control. The coin is literally “in the palm of our hands.” It’s also intimately connected with us through what anthropologists call “contagious magic,” the principle that physical contact creates a bond between people and objects, a principle that’s affirmed every time someone pays thousands of dollars for a piece of clothing worn by Jackie Robinson or John Lennon, or avoids the chair recently used by someone they don’t like. The same principle applies at the edge of the fountain. We’ve kept our coins close to our bodies in our pockets and purses, and now we’re holding them in our hands. Through physical contact, these coins have become an extension of ourselves—a light-hearted, personal avatar.
Then we throw the coin in the water and the whole picture changes. We lose control. We let go of our avatar, and suddenly it looks tiny in the water, much smaller than it did in our fingers a second ago. Often we can’t even be sure which coin is ours, lying there among all the others. Our individual coin is now just one of many. What do you call this reversal in perspective?
“Sectarianism involves strong feelings, deep resentment, a searing sense of injustice, above all, anger,” explained renowned British social anthropologist Mary Douglas in an important lecture, Seeing Everything in Black and White, delivered shortly before her death in May 2007.
She added: “All of these are intensified when religious loyalty is engaged.”
It’s hard to disagree with Douglas’s analysis of the sectarian vision – in particular, she must be commended for highlighting the importance of how, under certain circumstances, combining religious belief with powerful emotions, can fuel and give impetus to terrorism.
So let’s go back to Douglas and review what she had to say about such militant religious groups.
Probably the most important point that Douglas makes concerns the “wall of virtue” constructed by those in the sect. Behind it members can look outwards at other people and classify them as different sorts of human beings – in short, “people not like us”.
Of course, such a classification system doesn’t necessarily lead to conflict or violence – there are plenty of pacifist religious sects in Western and other societies (Amish, Quakers or Swami Narayan) which classify other people as (more or less) metaphysically inferior and place huge restrictions on the number and type of transactions (sharing or exchanging food, handshakes, or daughters and sons) between members and non-members – but in certain circumstances it does. Continue reading “The ‘wall of virtue’ that surrounds followers of Isis will not be broken down by bombing Syria”→
If Republican senators from tobacco-growing southern states believe in social responsibility, they would fully explore the TransPacific (TPP) trade agreement’s potential impact on countries around the world — including provisions that influence the ability of American tobacco corporations to flood the globe with cheap, cancer-causing cigarettes — suggests the author of a book on the history, social costs and global politics of the tobacco industry.
Benson
“One of the great paradoxes of tobacco,” said Peter Benson, PhD, associate professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, “is that while the U.S. government and public health community became increasingly aware of the harms of tobacco, the trade wing of the American government has been busy fighting for the expansion of new markets in the developing world, where they want people to purchase American-made cigarette products, like Marlboros.”
Remember when your mother or other responsible adult told you as a small child to tie your shoelaces so you would not trip and fall? I do. And I’ve carried out that hard-to-learn-as-a child-shoelace-tying maneuver ever since.
Now, my tying skill is used on a pair of old running shoes, which, with the over-cushioned insoles removed, I find very comfortable for everyday walking. The shoes do though have very long laces. Even when tied with a double knot, the laces create large loops.
Two weeks ago I was walking along a footpath, shod in my favorite running shoes. Heading in the direction of my local bank, I become aware that the tip of my right shoe is caught in one of the loops of my left shoe. It’s happened several times before, and I’ve always managed to quickly disentangle myself without taking a tumble.
This time I’m not so lucky.
My foot is well and truly stuck. Down I go, breaking the fall with the palm of my right hand. The pain is excruciating, especially as I land on a hard surface composed of small stones. I roll over onto my right shoulder. I am aware that the area around my right eye has just skimmed the ground. That part of my head hurts. I swear a lot, both at the injuries and my own stupidity for not being more careful to prevent something like this happening to me.
A few weeks previously on TV I watched Australian Olympic gold medallist, Sally Pearson, fall after hitting a barrier in the women’s 100m hurdles at a Diamond League meeting in Rome. She landed on her hand. I winced while watching the slow-motion replay. Later, an orthopaedic surgeon described Pearson’s injury as a “bone explosion” in her wrist, which highlights the delicacy of the human hand bones even in very fit young people. Those images, of Pearson sitting on the track in agony, and the information about her multiple broken bones flash through my mind as I lie on the ground. Continue reading “Fear of falling”→
Hollywood star Ben Affleck’s attempt to suppress a story about a slave-owning ancestor of his has caused something of a furore, especially in the U.S. The information about Benjamin Cole, a great-great-great grandparent on Affleck’s mother’s side, who was “trustee” of seven slaves in Georgia, came to light after Affleck agreed to participate in the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) genealogy programme Finding Your Roots.
Affleck, a self-defined “moderately liberal guy”, was horrified when the information about Cole was brought to his attention by researchers. So he decided to lean on the show’s producers to omit this detail before transmission last October, as he evidently felt that this information contaminated his public and private self. “The very thought left a bad taste in my mouth,” he revealed on Facebook after he was forced to apologize once his attempted cover-up was revealed by WikiLeaks.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post invoked cultural anthropologist Franz Boas’ demolition of “scientific racism” (in which character and behavior among groups or “races” are supposedly aligned with biologically inherited characteristics such as skin, hair or eye colour) to reassure Affleck that his “embarrassing” ancestor had zero input into his own character or personality. “If your grandfather was a louse that has no more bearing on you than if your neighbor is one as well,” declared political columnist Richard Cohen. “We may be our brother’s keeper, but we are not carbon copies of our ancestors.”
Cohen’s reprimand to Affleck that he was “dumb to pressure PBS” is itself interesting. That attitude fits Western-type hyper-individualist cultures, where family bonds are typically weak or restricted though not completely absent. Even, I surmise, in Hollywood or in the offices of the Washington Post.
Tear gas is not uncommon in Port au Prince. Over the past decade, whether it has been protests over food shortages, controlling political demonstrations, or ‘peacekeeping’ actions by the infamous MINUSTAH UN forces, tear gas and other methods of crowd control have been a reality of the political and social landscape in downtown Port-au-Prince. A veteran reporter in Haiti told me that he had developed all sorts of strategies to deal with tear gas, ranging use of lime under his nose to more preventative measures like always having a paint masks handy.
But as of late, a new method of mass crowd control has been quite literally ‘sweeping the streets’ in the capital of Haiti. A type of pepper spray spiked water is being shot out of water cannons and into crowds of protesters. Dlo grate, or itching water, as it is referred to in Haitian Creole, is a now common term in Port au Prince. While not all have felt its devastatingly powerful effects, knowledge of the new tactic is widespread throughout the city.
The visit of French President François Hollande was the backdrop for the most recent student protest and excessive police response. Student protests are not uncommon in Port-au-Prince, and for the past years these demonstrations have often targeted the government in power. On May 12th, outside of the Faculté d’Ethnologie, the storied home of Haitian anthropology and site of many student demonstrations, 50 or so university students protested the arrival the French President– the first official state visit of any French President to Haiti. Given that Hollande had just rescinded an offer of reparations to Haiti for the damages of slavery and exploitation (officials insisting he was talking about a ‘moral debt’ and not a financial one), such a protest was largely predictable. Other protests in the plaza of Champ de Mars supposedly numbered around 200. During the day of his visit, students and protesters chanted ‘Nou pa esklav anko!’ (We won’t be slaves again), invoking France’s historical role as a slave owning colonial power, and hinting at the continual neocolonial tactics used by France and the broader international community. Some students provocatively dressed as slaves outside the university campus.
Student Protestors at Faculté d’Ethnologie on May 12, 2015.
During the late morning that Tuesday, I was in the second floor computer of the Faculté d’Ethnologie preparing a seminar that would be cancelled 45 minutes later. I could hear student chants that had been building for an hour or so. But new noises soon entered the air-conditioned room, and students sitting around me got up from their computers to see what caused the loud commotion.
From the second floor balcony, we could see that a black armored national police truck had parked itself outside of the walls of the school. On the top of this tank, visible over the wall, was a large turret fixed with a water cannon. The noise we could hear was the water that was being shot at students, occasionally hitting the metal door of the courtyard. The demonstration was non-violent (a Professor later remarked that he saw one student throw a stone, only to be quickly reprimanded by other demonstrators), yet the tank was parked right outside the courtyard, knocking students to the ground with a surge of water even when they were inside the gates of the university. From its position higher than the university walls, the water cannon was policing actions of even the students inside the gate. Continue reading “Pepper water and protests in Haiti”→
Last Friday, after it was announced that the Conservative Party had won a wholly unexpected overall majority in the UK parliament – “the sweetest victory” according to its leader and returning prime minister, David Cameron – I decided that the best thing to improve my mood would be to cook my family a Keralan-inspired chicken curry. Looking in the refrigerator and cupboards I found that I had all the ingredients except for some curry leaves, which impart a distinctive citrus-like flavor to the dish.
So I head to my favorite Pakistani-owned food and spice shop, one of several such stores on Hatfield Road in my home town of St Albans, an affluent commuter town nearly 20 miles north of central London.
Curry tree.
The shop I visit is a type found in urban areas throughout the U.K. wherever there is a sizeable south Asian population. This one caters for the local British Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities, as well as a small number of people from other ethnic minority groups, including black Africans and Indo-Mauritians, keen to lay their hands on a wide range of competitively-priced goods –branded pickles, powders and sauces; vegetables such as okra, sweet potato and aubergine; and freshly-picked herbs like coriander, mint and, of course, curry leaves. At the back of the shop is a halal butcher. The team of young men clad in white overalls chop chicken and lamb into large or small pieces as requested, a service notably absent at local supermarkets run by large retailers such as Morrisons, Sainsbury’s or Tesco.
When I arrive at 1:30 in the afternoon, I find that the lights in the shop are off. I try the door. It’s locked. Of course, I say to myself, all the staff have gone to Friday prayers at one of two mosques further along the street.
What to do? I walk to some of the other South Asian-owned stores thinking that one might be open, but have no luck. Evidently everyone is at prayer. I look at my watch and calculate that that it won’t be very long before prayers are over and the shopkeepers and their staff return. Because it’s a sunny day and I have time to kill I sit on a bollard and watch the world go by. Sure enough, just before 2 pm, people pour out of the mosques and the retail sector in that part of Hatfield Road returns to life (thus neatly demonstrating how individuals animate or energize institutions). I purchase the curry leaves and a few other bits and pieces, and make my way to the checkout at the front of the shop. The friendly, elderly bespectacled owner, still wearing his skullcap, begins to press the keys on the old but still functioning cash register.
We have never discussed politics before, but out of curiosity I ask him what he thinks of the election result. “Well, she’s back again,” he sighs referring to the re-election of Anne Main, the St Albans Conservative candidate. “I don’t think anything will change round here. We had better get used to it.”
I think to myself that he is answering my question according to a local perspective, whereas I was expecting that he would offer his opinion about the national scene. Nevertheless, like many first-generation South Asian migrants, the manner in which he answers my query clearly signals that he is not a Conservative supporter.
The shopkeeper carries on processing my items, carefully placing them in a plastic carrier bag. Then, with a twinkle in his eyes, he adds: “I was saying to my wife yesterday that back in our home town at election time two or three people would probably have died. Nothing like that happens in St Albans.”
“Yes that’s true,” I say. “It’s a bad result for Liberal Democrats and Labour in St Albans but at least no one died.” We both laugh, and in doing so celebrate a change of government without bloodshed, even though it’s a government neither of us approves of.
‘In the UK using a pencil to mark ‘X’ in the box alongside the name of one’s preferred candidate really is magic, isn’t it?’
My heart is heavier than the Heart Sutra, which is usually translated as: “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Gone. Gone. Gone beyond. Gone altogether beyond.”
Mhanegang, Nepal, where David Holmberg, Ph.D. ’80, professor of anthropology, and I have worked for 40-plus years, is gone.
Students dance with Mhanegang villagers.
According to our longtime friend, host and research partner, Suryaman Tamang, all the houses in Mhanegang have been destroyed. They already have lost 17 people in this one small community. Up the mountain, in Balche,Jay Tamang reports that 30 people were killed by a single landslide. And at the head of the valley, according to Sarita Lopchen Himdung, the large, dense community of Bomtang was flattened. Cremation pyres have been burning almost nonstop throughout the entire Salankhu Khola valley, where these villages are located, in the very severely hit Nuwakot District.
I can almost hear the keening of mourners all the way here in Ithaca.
It is incredible to me that we were just in Mhanegang a few weeks ago. The Cornell Nepal Study Program (CNSP) students and faculty were with us there a few weeks before that. We sang and danced well into the night: The CNSP students showed everyone the macarena and square dancing; the Mhanegang villagers taught the CNSP students Tamang line and circle dancing. There were newborn goats and fried doughnuts. The students bathed at the spring in the sun.
Mhanegang, like all of Nepal, was, of course, very lucky that the first earthquake occurred at noon, when few people were asleep or in their houses, and on a Saturday, when no one was at school. Most people were relaxing or working outside with family and friends. They are not lucky now. Everything they had is buried under the rubble of their houses. They are not on anyone’s relief radar. And the quaking continues.
A village man tries to salvage belongings through collapsed roof after the Nepal earthquake.
The initial quake was centered a bit to the west of Mhanegang near Barpak, but according to geologists, the shallow nature of this quake meant that its greatest devastation rippled out to the east – right toward Mhanegang. And, of course, hundreds of other villages. Estimates are that 90 percent of the houses in Rasuwa district were destroyed. U.S. Fulbright Scholar Austin Lord gives a vivid account of how terrifying it was to be in Langtang during the earthquake. Yale anthropologist Sara Shneiderman, Ph.D. ’09, and anthropologist Mark Turin report extensive damage in Dolakha. Roshan Phyuba Tamang visited his home village of Darkka in Dhading and posted photos of the damage, which are still among the only pictures available from the region between the epicenter and Kathmandu.
Unfortunately this earthquake isn’t done yet either. The U.S. Geological Survey reports a total of 40 separate quakes/aftershocks, including three “significant” ones: the original 7.8 quake, followed by a 6.6 roughly 3 hours later a little further east, and the next day by a 6.7 one at Kodari, following the pattern of movement observed by the geologists – from the original epicenter east and a little north.
And it’s not just the ongoing repeatedly quaking earth that is shocking – although it must make everything seem very terrifyingly impermanent indeed. The people in Mhanegang and the other villages most directly in the path of this earthwreck are going to become very desperate very soon. They need medical attention, blankets, tents and food. Their water systems and sanitation need to be fixed. They will need almost unimaginable amounts of help rebuilding their homes. And lives. And hearts. As a village friend of Shneiderman said, “My heart can’t stop shaking.”
Kathryn S. March, Ph.D. ’79, is a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has worked on questions of anthropology, gender and social change in Himalayan Asia since 1973.
Note: this post is republished from the Cornell Chronicle, with permission.
SC: When many anthropologists (and other social scientists) think of Fredrik Barth, ideas of ethnicity tend to spring to mind. What was it that was so original in Barth’s thinking in this area, and why has his influence been so long-lasting?
TE: In a way, you could say that what Barth did, back in 1967 (the book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries came in 1969), was to systematise and clarify ideas that had been circulating for some time, especially in British anthropology, among people as different as Edmund Leach and Max Gluckman. So the degree of originality could always be questioned. However, he showed, more clearly than any earlier author, the absurdity of the view that ethnic differences were simply a product of cultural differences; that what mattered were social boundaries, usually propped up by mutual stereotypes. Later developments in the bustling industry of ethnicity research have introduced concepts of creolisation and hybridity and thus problematised the concept of the boundary; the state has been brought in, as have concepts of inequality, power and hierarchy that were weakly developed in Barth’s initial statement. However, these are elaborations on his perspective, not refutals.
SC: You mention the state. Is Barth the godfather of progressive multiculturalism? Furthermore, does his analysis of ethnicity lend itself to the formulation of practical social (and economic) policies in developed and developing societies?
TE: The perspective from Ethnic Groups and Boundaries has doubtless seeped into a general public, or intellectual, understanding of what matters in ethnic relations; what it tells us, among other things, is that we should look beyond cultural differences and stereotypes, focusing instead on what people do and I suppose the structural features of society. So yes, there are practical applications of this perspective, but Fredrik would be loath to consider himself a godfather of any kind of multiculturalism. He is not a very political man, you know; yet, an implication of his view, which many have developed in a more applied way, is that a society may well contain considerable cultural diversity without becoming totally fragmented, as long as it is socially cohesive. If you give people the same de facto opportunities within a shared public space, cultural differences come to appear as less relevant, or perhaps even a positive element. The latter has certainly been my view. Just think about what English, or Norwegian, food used to taste like before the new diversity.
SC: Do you think that Barth’s contribution to the field of ethnicity and ‘race’ relations has overshadowed his contributions to other areas of anthropology, including, for example, his novel insights into ritual and other forms of symbolic behaviour which grew out of his fieldwork amongst tribal peoples in New Guinea?
TE: I think the answer is yes, but then again these things are unpredictable, and the world is not always just and reasonable. Ethnicity was only one of Barth’s many theoretical interests. Although his writings over the decades contain a scattering of texts about ethnic relations and, later, complexity – from his 1956 article on ethnic relations in Swat to a 1994 article assessing Ethnic Groups and Boundaries after 25 years – he would see his contributions to political anthropology and ‘transactionalism’, and to the anthropology of knowledge, as being more important.
SC: I see. It’s interesting that Barth’s early work on political organisation and leadership amongst the Pashto-speaking Pathans of northern Pakistan’s Swat Valley was more influenced by the British ‘social action’ perspective pioneered by Edmund Leach and others rather than the structural-functionalism of Radcliffe Brown. Did Barth’s transactionalism come about because of his personal relationship with Leach, or do you think other factors were at work?
TE: There were definitely other factors. Leach was just moderately interested in the theory of games, for example, and remained less willing than Barth to throw overboard the concepts of society and social structure. Curiously, when Barth returned to Oslo in 1950, after his studies in Chicago, he was a warm admirer of Radcliffe-Brown, and somehow his respectful dialogue with structural-functionalism continued at least up to Models of Social Organization in 1966. However, he would later be influenced by Leach, but also by Raymond Firth, and firmly belonged to the ‘Malinowskian’ lineage, or sub-lineage, throughout his early career, emphasising social process and agency rather than structure and social cohesion. The great hero of his youth was the naturalist Niko Tinbergen, whose maxim ‘watching and wondering’ Barth continued to cite for many years. There was, in other words, a strong inductivist bias in his approach – even now, he would emphasise that we need to go out and ‘see what is actually there’ without a strong theoretical bias. The fact that Barth also fell out with Evans-Pritchard in the early 1950s might also have been a factor, though not a major one.
SC: Unlike Leach, however, it appears that Barth was not so impressed with the type of structuralism propagated by Claude Lévi-Strauss. It prompts the question: was Barth a more thoroughly British-type empiricist than his intellectual mentor?
TE: Well phrased! Yes, you could say that. Leach, like Mary Douglas, became something of an intermediary, trying to explain to the British what Lévi-Strauss and the French were up to; while Barth remained a rather clear-cut anthropological version of the analytical philosopher. He wanted clarity and logical consistency, and was frustrated by the lofty speculations and untestable assumptions he saw in Lévi-Strauss.
SC: Barth was also influenced by Erving Goffman. How so?
TE: They were students in Chicago at the same time, you know, and knew each other then, at least a bit. But it was years later, upon reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) that Barth discovered that Goffman’s microsociology, and his ability to turn tiny observations into fully-fledged social analyses, that Barth discovered a kindred spirit in Goffman. They both believed in observation (and not just conversations) as a means of collecting data, and were adamant that society is best understood through minute and meticulous attention to fine-grained social life.
SC: It’s clear, then, that Barth places a high value on concrete, observational fieldwork as the basis for theorising, rather than the other way round. In fact, in your book you refer to Barth as ‘something of an anthropologist’s anthropologist’ in that sense. Can you comment further?
TE: Not everybody is likely to agree about this formulation of mine. But let me put it this way: Last year, our department in Oslo celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and we organised various events, roundtables and that sort of thing, to celebrate ourselves. We disagreed about lots of things, and had some lively discussions about ‘ontology’ and ANT, methods of comparison and so on. But we agreed on one major thing, namely that good anthropology always has an ethnographic component. So we shared the conviction that detailed descriptions of people’s lives are the kind of high-octane data anthropology can bring to the table. This remains a very fundamental aspect of what we do, and Barth excelled in it. He was simply an extraordinary ethnographer.
SC: Barth sees himself as a scientist and humanist. But what sort of science and what sort of humanism?
TE: These are big questions, Sean, and I try to discuss them in the book. For one thing, Barth’s science is not a positivist one, although he has a weakness for explanation and not just interpretation. The reason is that he has always been aware that fieldwork has a strong interpretive element. You cannot just register ‘what is out there’ when you study other people’s meaningful universes. I’d say that his science is modelled on the natural sciences, but with a strong hermeneutical element. When it comes to his humanism, Barth was never a very political man; but what he has tried to tell us for sixty years is that all human lives have value, and that there are many roads to the good life. And the bad. This simple, but fundamental wisdom from anthropological thought and knowledge comes through in particular in his popular books, which — alas — have only been published in Norwegian.
SC: If Barth did not exist would we (including his critics) need to invent him?
TE: Erm, that’s a good one! Well, actually, in the 1950s and 1960s, he arguably made his critics better and contributed to improving the quality of anthropological debate by shaking things up a bit. The old guard and the new alike (I’m here thinking about Marxists and structuralists) had to sharpen their arguments and rethink their assumptions. The transactional perspective of Models, phrased in a deliberately polemical way, produced a clear theoretical position that people had to relate to. At the end of the day, few embraced it wholeheartedly, not even Barth himself, but it was a position that was very good to think. I really don’t know what to answer. But I see him as one of a handful of anthropologists from the latter half of the 20th century who really made a difference to the discipline, through his work on ethnicity, political strategies and knowledge, but primarily through his insistence that you should know what you’re talking about, especially if you happen to be talking about people who are not present.
“Will Uptown Funk! be US Billboard’s Hot 100s No 1 Song of 2015?” is a question that is already being asked by both pop moguls and pop aficionados.
I must confess that I heard the song just a couple of weeks ago (I know what you’re thinking: where has this guy been?). It has an undeniably catchy, retro disco feel while still being part of today’s pop zeitgeist – which, I think you will agree, is a very clever trick to pull off.
Because I subsequently found myself humming the melody (not the lyrics which I could not remember) when I was on my way to do some shopping and not thinking of anything in particular I understood very well why Uptown Funk! had shot to the top of the charts, not only in the U.S., but also in neighboring Canada, as well as Australia, New Zealand, France, Ireland and the U.K.
Then, by chance, I saw the accompanying Uptown Funk! video on TV. It immediately struck me how good, Hawaiian-born Bruno Mars and his four backing singers are at dancing. Quiff-haired English music producer Mark Ronson, from whose album Uptown Special the song is taken, also makes occasional appearances. But for the most part he is either standing or sitting, simply clicking his fingers, tapping his feet or rotating his head on his neck.
By contrast, Mars and his group perform some very intricate moves with their whole bodies, using the street and a nightclub stage as backdrops. Occasionally Ronson pops up in one of the group sequences on the street but you can see for yourself that he doesn’t do very much. Overall he cuts a fairly reticent figure – the nerdy introvert to Mars’s street-wise extrovert, as it were. Perhaps Ronson is purposefully embodying the stereotype that white, middle-class British guys can’t dance – or at least can’t dance very well. Continue reading “Uptown Funk! has the moves – and the endorphins”→
anthropologyworks 