1. Empirical evidence and abstract theory: The language of ethnography in Friction and Everything Was Forever, Until It was no More
In its effort to produce knowledge, ethnography organizes a body of empirical examples or material evidence and places them in dialogue with a particular theoretical framework. It is not simply that the concrete serves to exemplify or to produce a given abstract theory (though it might be used to that end), but rather that the two are woven together, ostensibly and ideally creating a text that is at once rooted in specificity but also generalizeable. The interplay between abstract theoretical devices and material particulars effected by the act of citing from two distinct scales not only gives a loose structure to the ethnographic form, but, more importantly, creates relationships between and across these two scales. Yet, if one can claim by way of generalization that ethnography strives to bridge differences in scale by effectively creating (perhaps at times even imposing) relationships between the abstract and its manifestations, it cannot be claimed that this formal characteristic breeds uniformity in style, content or method. A brief survey of two contemporary ethnographies will be sufficient to demonstrate that even similar epistemological endeavors (that is, those doubly citing from and drawing relationships between the abstract and the concrete to illuminate the how or the why of a given phenomenon) generate varied meanings with regard to the following questions: What kinds of material does ethnography seek out to represent the concrete and specific? What are the kinds of abstract theoretical models with which ethnography engages? How does it effectively create relationships between the abstract and the empirical and what shape do these relationships take? To these introductory remarks and questions, one following point must be added, if only in a cursory manner. Both the collection and presentation of material evidence and theoretical abstractions that constitute ethnography presume the active presence and participation of the ethnographer. By not placing the ethnographer as author or as fieldworker at the center of this comparative analysis, my intent is not to elide the important, even definitive, role played by this figure in the construction of ethnographic knowledge. Rather, I want to suggest that ethnography cannot be exclusively explained by gesturing to the author/fieldworker. The questions raised above point to something larger and more complex than stylistic preference or personality. To generate some meanings in response to the questions prompted by ethnography, it is necessary to first ground ourselves in two contemporary examples with very different ethnographic objects. Taking as its point of departure the corporate destruction of Indonesia’s forests and the local reactions this environmental disaster incited, Anna Tsing’s Friction locates its ethnographic object precisely in the friction effected by the contacts and collisions between cultural diversity and global interconnectedness. The object of investigation is thus the new cultural formations created by the re-articulation of global schemes and ideals in the specific cultural locality of Indonesia. If friction is Tsing’s ethnographic object, Alexei Yurchak’s is paradox. In Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Yurchak untangles the paradox characterizing late Soviet socialism that rendered the system monolithic in its appearance and yet made its collapse largely unsurprising. It is the proliferation of meanings and interpretations generated simultaneous to a rigid, endemic adherence to prescriptive discourses and rituals that constitute Yurchak’s objects of inquiry. Without pausing to evaluate the success of each of these ethnographies with respect to their objects of study, we will turn to the theoretical abstractions and material particulars presented by each. For Tsing, the principle theoretical premise of her work is the destabilization of the local/global binary. This is not suggest that she denies scale differences between the local and the global or considers them to be coterminous. Rather, the abstract idea informing the approach to her ethnographic object is precisely an overhaul of abstract universalism in favor for what she terms an engaged universalism; the site of a frictional encounter between local and global processes (1). In place of a local/global dichotomy, Tsing proposes the concept of cosmopolitanism as a framework for the cultural analysis of knowledge and social change, emphasizing that it is only by means of a translation across scales and cultures that certain global ideas and practices are refigured as local ones (121-122). Translation, moreover, as Tsing contends, effectively unmoors these ideas and practices from their specific contexts and gives rise to both the frictional encounter, and cosmopolitan knowledge and subjects (127, 224). These being the principle abstract concepts of her ethnography, Tsing intersperses them with a host of varied and diverse empirical evidences. There are her personal journalistic accounts of walking through clear-cut forests and the harrowing testimonies of those who have witnessed their landscape turned to wasteland; there is the history of the New Order in Indonesia, its crony capitalism and repressive measures; there is Uma Adang’s compendious list of the flora and fauna of Borneo Island complemented by Tsing’s evocative descriptions of the diversity of life in Kalimatan; there are the journal entries, trips and interviews with the nature lovers, a local rearticulation of international practices and ideas regarding the environment; there are explanations of sustainable forest use by indigenous peoples derived from interviews and observations; there are references to the destruction of the Amazon and the stories of activist opposition reaching Indonesia in the form of an adaptable script for similar practices of opposition. These are but a few examples of the kind of manifest particulars that Tsing brings into relation with the theoretical concepts she employs. If Tsing begins her ethnography by first laying out the theoretical model of local/global friction and interconnectedness from within which she will unpack her ethnographic object, the empirical specifics she cites are not merely intended to ground her theory in a particular locality or to fill in the gaps of abstract knowledge. By tracing through material examples of how and where the global and local encounter each other and in what kind of contexts these encounters transpire, she also effectively derives a theory for social and environmental change, offering up the specifics of Indonesia as a universal, generalizeable model for future, transformative politics. Just as Friction approaches its ethnographic object by means of a theoretical denunciation of the global/local dichotomy, Yurchak similarly disavows binary abstractions of official/unofficial and Capitalism/Socialism. He contends that the paradox of the late Soviet era can only be understood through a theoretical vocabulary that does not reproduce these binaries and elide the contradictions embodied and cultivated by the system (9). Before delving into the empirical examples of the paradox, Yurchak develops a theoretical model through which the paradox can be located and explained. Drawing on J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, which distinguishes between constantive and performative utterances in speech, Yurchak formulates his own theory of the performative shift. Taking place in very specific historical and discursive contexts, such as that of late Soviet socialism, this shift is the growing importance of the performative dimension of speech acts simultaneous to the increasing unanchoring, open-endedness or irrelevancy of the constantive one. It is, moreover, precisely this shift that Yurchak maintains filled the system with new meanings, displacing it internally while also sustaining its external, immutable façade through faithful reproductions of authoritative discourse and rituals (19-29). Through letters about Pink Floyd and Deep Crimson, interviews with the regulars at the Saigon café, ventures into the boiler rooms of Moscow and meetings of local Komsomol branches, Yurchak dramatizes the paradox by subjecting various forms of speech and behavior to a rigorous textual analysis (whether they be specifically texts or not). Whereas Tsing brings a polyphony of voices to her ethnography ranging from Dayaks of the disappearing forests to Canadian gold hungry entrepreneurs like David Walsh, Yurchak is more selective and more systematic. With Andrei, Inna and her friends, Alexandr and Nikolai, among others, Yurchak gives detailed biographic information about his subjects and follows over time the ways in which they spoke and acted, at once abiding by the norms of authoritative discourse and generating new meanings within and throughout their conformity with the system. It is, moreover, through these interviews supplemented by archival research about popular culture, the Komsomol organization, authoritative discourse and cultural institutions that Yurchak elucidates the concepts of svoi (common people) and vnye (a state of being in between, both inside and outside). With both svoi and vnye constituting the concepts most integral to understanding the paradox of late socialism, Yurchak collects empirical examples that are not intended to be in any way representative of Soviet society but that specifically and exclusively demonstrate the socio-cultural manifestations of this paradox, containing his ethnographic investigation to empirical examples relevant to his theory of the performative shift. Unlike Tsing who begins with a theoretical framework and uses concrete cases to contribute to another theoretical project of social and environmental change, Yuchak employs material evidence only for the purposes of reifying his theory of the shift and, by extension, the paradox.
2. Sites of Contention: Short Paper 1
In this paper I would like to explore and assess the approaches of Marilyn Strathern, Anna Tsing, and Georgi Derluguian to the concept of relationality. I am specifically interested in this theme because of my own background. My fieldwork and thesis were both very much focused on discovering and analyzing the relationality present in upper middle class Egypt. I will first broadly outline my understanding of the concept of relationality, which is generally based on Norbert Elias’ understanding of it. Then I will consider each author’s approach to relationality and, lastly, I will discuss them in relation to Elias’ approach. Elias’ ideas regarding relationality have been adopted by a group of scholars, among whom not only sociologists, but also anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and psychologists. Their school of Figurational Studies is not based on a fixed set of doctrines, but certain common traits can be discerned. The focus of attention is to human beings who are interdependent with each other in a variety of ways, and whose lives develop in and are significantly shaped by the social figurations they form together. People are part of many figurations at the same time. These figurations are continuously reshaped, undergoing changes of many kinds, some rapid and transient, others slower but more lasting. These developments taking place in human figurations are generally unplanned and unforeseen. The development of human knowledge and the assignment of meaning take place within and are influenced by the overall development of the figuration. Marilyn Strathern’s book is concerned with scale and relations, and the representation of it. As she states in the introduction, her account is a move from a plural perception to a post plural perception of the world. Whereas, at first, it appeared to me an extremely experimental and strained exercise in postmodernism, it was very valuable the second time I read it. For someone who feels stuck in one particular set of mind, it is very beneficial to read an attempt of not closing things down, but of opening up and reassessing the common grounds in Anthropology. Strathern deals with scale and relationality through her concept of partial connections. Everything is part of a relationship, so everything is partial. Partiality only works as a connection, because when a part is on its own, it has become a whole. By focusing on the partiality of connections, she draws attention to the bias and incompleteness inherent in our approaches of understanding the world around us. No one perspective offers the totalizing vista it presupposes, which leads to the relativizing understanding that multiple perspectives will make everything seem partial and connected. “Certainty itself appears partial, information intermittent. An answer is another question, a connection a gap, a similarity a difference, and vice versa. Wherever we look we are left with the further knowledge that surface understanding conceals gaps and bumps.” (xxiv) Strathern comes up with an elucidative image for her concept of partial connections: the cyborg. This cyborg is an entry into how we could conceive the conduct of social relationships without assumptions of comparability. A cyborg is a prosthetic construct that enables us to extend our position and possibilities, by making non-comparable parts work for each other without encompassing it into a whole. Anna Tsing is equally interested in the network of relationships. Unsatisfied by the unproblematic way scholars in the 1990’s defined and explained the process of globalization (in terms of smooth flows of information, money, people), Anna Tsing comes up with her own concept: friction. This friction is what she observes in the sticky materiality of practical encounters that take place through unexpected and unstable global interactions. It prevents universal claims from making everything everywhere the same because, through long histories of regional-to-global networks of power, trade, and meaning, it shapes and transforms human cultures. That is the productive feature of friction: it creates new knowledge claims, interests, identities, and alliances in relation to concrete problems and possibilities for dialogue. Tsing is concerned with the location of the global in order to study it. She is able to demonstrate the global in the local, through her description of partial connections between parties, interests, and perspectives. She goes about this in a very evocative way, putting personal narrative, journals, historical research, and interviews next to each other. She makes you feel and understand – showing us the power of evocation! – the processes of meaning giving at the conjuncture of local practices and universal aspirations. Derluguian’s aim is to write a biography from a world-systems perspective. The terms he uses to describe relationality largely draw on class theory that defines class on the basis of socio-economic positions, complemented by Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and social capital. On page 12 he echoes Gould’s urge to grasp whole systems of relations by attempting to avoid reifications. “Objects of study should be situated in their extended environments and analyzed by locating them within pulsating and slowly evolving webs of relations.” To me, the crux of his book is the question whether he is able to redeem this objective. As has been expressed in class, it seems as if he tries to juggle with too many and too big balls (this might be a dutchism). While it would have been wonderful to learn how globalization or nationalism are analyzed by locating them within pulsating and slowly evolving webs of relations, he seems to take many of its causalities for granted without revealing the conditions for these claims. His broad social theoretical lens does not allow much for attention being paid to the concept of meaning. Having written down all this, how do the three approaches relate to Elias’ understanding of relationality? Ironically enough, they do not seem to contradict each other, indeed, more than that, they could complement and reinforce each other easily. Strathern’s concept of partial connections is resonated in Elias’ concept of figuration, emphasizing the contingency of the effects of social relations. Tsing’s concept of friction combines well with Elias’ assertion that social developments are generally unplanned and unforeseen, stressing the messy and sticky nature of social encounters. Derluguian’s combination of world system theory and historical sociology provide a more overarching perspective, in which friction, figurations, meaning giving, and partial connections could be studied. Both Tsing and Derluguian bring forward interesting ways to include the global dimension in the ethnography, which is not all together absent in Elias‘ work. Other considerations seem to be going on, which have not been addressed that much up to this point, but which, apparently unconsciously, did inspire me to write about the topic of relationality. One thing has to do with the representation of relationality, which is linked to the hard to describe notions of evocation, intension and pretension of the author, and the writing process. Particularly Anna Tsing proved to be a satisfying example. Her narrative and self-conscious style of writing, her smooth move between different registers, and her accessible notions of friction and engagement, both told and showed me the story of the global in the local. We experienced the zone of awkward engagement of the rainforests of Indonesia through her writing. Derluguian’s project was equally pretentious, but could not engage me as much. Another thing is a personal concern with being too attached to one perspective of explaining the world around us. Strathern has made me realize again to be as careful as possible in showing the coming-about of meaning and its contingency on partial connections. She, moreover, points to the bias and incompleteness of each theoretical approach. I will bear in mind her question as to what gets lost or hidden, or won and exposed, by moving one’s analytical position (xxix). I guess that concepts are not to be seen as a preliminary to research, but employed as sensitizing concepts in guiding investigations. Elias’ work can still prove useful in this context.
3. Moving Between Scales
How does an anthropologist’s interpretation of the concept of scale inform his/her ethnographic work? This is the question I propose to examine in relation to Tsing’s Friction (2004) and Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (2005). The concept of scale itself is elucidated and complicated in Strathern’s Partial Connections, and it through the use of her critical framework that I will examine Tsing’s and Yurchak’s work. Partial Connections is an attempt to think beyond the criticisms of what is called the reflextive turn in anthropology, and contemplate what exists outside the crisis of representation. She uses the examples from her fieldwork to question/critique/rethink anthropological theory. She wants to suggest a different means of thinking about scale. While complexity is imagined as increasing with particularized focus (xiii), Strathern suggests complexity is maintained regardless of scale. She writes, the interesting feature about switching scale is…that at every level complexity replicates itself in scale of detail (xvi), [thus] similar intellectual operation have to be performed on the data whatever the scale… Regardless of the way a change of perspective reveals whole new worlds, the ‘same’ coordinates of intellectual activities are summoned (xv). Another useful reformulation of scale is to think beyond simply analyzing discrete scales (moving from one level of analysis to another (from political to economic, for example)), or simply altering the magnitude (from looking at one thing versus looking at many), but rather to perceive more than one scale at the same time” (xiv – xv). Operating on more than one scale at the same time, and rethinking the association between complexity and level of analysis (small vs. big) speaks to Tsing’s analysis of global connections in Friction. In Friction Tsing aspires to rethink the conceptual separation between the global and the local. Her narrative mechanism for overcoming this dichotomy is the notion of friction, “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (4). Friction is elucidated within the framework (among others) of engaged universals. She writes, “every truth forms in negotiation… with aspirations to the universal” (1). To discredit it completely in favor of local interpretation is to overlook the cultural specificity of universal aspirations within particularized contexts. She explains that to see the universal as an aspiration, rather than the confirmation of a pre-formed law, allows one to see that universal aspiration must travel across distances and differences (7). It is these positions/instances/circumstances of engaged universals that form her ethnographic object (7). Thus scale is re-conceptualized to examine global processes within the particular contexts in which they are manifest. In fact Tsing suggests it is only within the particular that the universal/global is constructed (7). Thus the global and the local are not discrete units to be analyzed separately but are always already engaged within friction. However, another aspect of scale relevant to both Tsing and Strathern is that of scale-making. In PC Strathern is concerned with cross-cultural comparison, whether or not they are possible and if so, how? However comparison of any sort (between societies or within them) requires grounding on a common scale. She writes, “Frequently one tries to marry two different orders of phenomena so that each provides a context and grounding for the other” (72). She suggests this informs Hay’s survey of the ‘sacred flute complex’ in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (72). However, Strathern suggests the scale with which to analyze these divergent ‘things’ within the flute complex requires the creation of scale by the anthropologist (75). She suggests there still is a connection between the examples disclosed, but the connections between them are to be understood in terms of relations as conceived by the Melanesians (76). In a different context, Tsing suggests becoming aware of specific scale-making projects (in this example associated with the conjuring involved in the spectacle of globalist finance) allows one to find cultural specificity and contingency within the homogenous blob of the global (58). She explains that scale is not neutral, but rather “proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted” (58). In the case of globalist claims of finance, she states economic projects must conjure scales themselves (57), and points to three scale-making projects related to what she describes as spectacular accumulation. She writes, “Finance capital is a program for global hegemony; franchise cronyism is one particular nation-making project, frontier culture is an articulation of a region” (60). These projects, as exemplified by her account of Bre-X, ‘caused a great fire’ but did not play out in an expected or predicable manner. It is the contingencies and engagement of how these projects of scale-making are played out in particular contexts that should be the focus of scholarly work (60). How then does scale inform the very different project of Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever. Yurchak never makes any explicit reference to scale. His ethnography is not meant to be representative of a common Soviet experience or a normative experience of socialism (32). Instead Yurkchak’s examines practices of the last Soviet generation that highlight a particular paradox. His work revolves around the peculiar paradox that, “although the system’s collapse had been unimaginable before it began, it appeared unsurprising when it happened” (3). He is very clear that he is not writing about the causes for collapse, but rather about “the conditions that made collapse possible without making it anticipated” (4). Thus to lay out his question Yurchak writes, What was the nature of the late Soviet system and way of life that had this paradox at its core? On what kinds of internal systemic shifts at the level of discourse, ideology, social relations, and time was this paradox predicated? Further, what was the nature of production and communication of knowledge in this system, and of the forms in which it was coded, circulated, received and interpreted? (4). His intention is express examples that highlight his paradox particularly well, not to offer a representative analysis. Thus scale plays a very different role in this work than for Tsing. While he does turn to detailed and particularized accounts (café Saigon, Komsomol members, boiler room jobs) to make a comment about a ‘general’ phenomenon (he does suggest the paradox applies to a broader context than his own objects of analysis (4)), the nature of scaling is different for Yurchak. He in fact chooses, or creates his scale. The focus of his analysis is what he calls the performative shift in that constative and performative meanings of speech and ritual acts were disconnected in late Soviet socialism, which allowed for new and unexpected meanings and possibilities to be connected to them (26-27). He writes, “In a seemingly paradoxical twist, the immutable and predictable aspects of state socialism, and its creative and unpredictable possibilities, became mutually constitutive” (29). And according to Yurchak, the last Soviet generation is the paradigmatic type that expresses this paradox. He explains the members of this generation have the shared experience of the “normalized, ubiquitous, and immutable authoritative discourse of the Brezhnev’s years” (32), and this allowed them “to maintain an affinity for the many aesthetic possibilities and ethical values of socialism, while at the same time interpreting them in new terms that were not necessarily anticipated by the state” (32). In a preemptive defense for his decision to focus on this one generation (creating scale) he states explicitly, “Although the discourses, activities, relations and values of this cohort are not necessarily representative of an average social experience of the period, they serve as a powerful lens through which the emerging internal shifts in that system become visible” (32). So then, while he does not express his methodology in terms of scale, he chooses to focus on the last Soviet generation to express the paradox that is the primary question of his book. Yurchak is engaged in scale-making, in a sense, to make his theoretical argument. Strathern offers analytical tools to re-think scale and propose, as her analogy of fractal graphic suggests, regardless of scale of magnification, repeated motifs and details of form remain (xx). Level of analysis (scale) then does not necessarily predicate complexity or amount of anthropological information to be gathered. In Friction Tsing defines scale as such; “Scale is the spatial dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view, whether up close or from a distance, microscopic or planetary” (58). Thus it is an inherent aspect of ethnographic writing – it is a perspective from which the author writes. While Tsing’s analysis offers an example of engaging scales at the same time, Yurchak, in order to make the claims he does, seems to create his scale. For both authors the selection of scale is connected to their theoretical and methodological project. For Tsing, the very concept of friction that is central to her work is predicated on her scale-shifting. While for Yurchak, his choice of scale is tied to his attempt to understand the paradox of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
4. Scaling Down / Scaling Up
Thermoscope / Thermometer. The thermoscope and the thermometer function in different registers. Invented in 1596 by Galileo, the thermoscope indicates temperature differences. It functions in the register of fluctuation. Change is qualitative (colder – warmer, than before). Years later, Santorio Santorio applied a scale to an air thermoscope. Now the thermoscope could measure temperature differences; hence, we no longer have a thermoscope but a thermometer – we are now in the register of intensity. Measurable amounts of some quality (energy understood as temperature in this case) can be recorded for future reference. (Therefore it is incorrect to say that a thermoscope is a thermometer without a scale; their functions are incommensurable. The thermometer is not an improvement over the thermoscope.) Both the thermoscope and the thermometer indicate (they let us know) that a change in temperature has happened, but the latter measures this change in virtue of a fixed scale. Fluctuation is thus domesticated – it is cut into commensurable, discrete units forming part of a scale. Commensurability is endogenous; it is only possible in terms of intensity related to a presupposed scale (after all, we do not really need a thermometer to know that it is warmer or colder; a thermoscope will suffice, if not our own bodies. We just need it to know how warmer or colder it is in terms of a determinate scale, i.e. how intense is the change in temperature. Furthermore, a change in temperature’s intensity is not necessarily and univocally registered in our perceptions of ‘coldness’ or ‘warmness.’)
Description / Scaling down. Ethnography can function in both registers: it can indicate fluctuation and/or measure intensity. The difficulty is to know when it is doing one thing or the other or perhaps both at the same time, and to what purpose. In the case of fluctuation, the methodological tool that can register it is description – albeit a kind of description that avoids as far as possible the use of adjectives. Adjectives are processes of scaling in disguise. So much can be said about mapping; maps cannot be drawn without scales. Maps deploy proportions according to a scale, intensities according to magnitudes. But even is description refuses adjectives and drawing maps, one can argue, and here lies the core of the difficulty, that description is always already a process of scaling down. Given the seemingly inexhaustible relational character of any given social phenomena, total description seems an impossible task. Therefore, in this context the question is how much are we willing to scale down “the social and cultural entailments of phenomena”? The question is indeed one of scaling down for the complexity of the object of description has to be simplified enough to make it visible. (Strathern, xiii) Visible and social, I would add. Whereas the thermoscope suffices to let us know about temperature fluctuation, description seems to fall short on this account due to the inner complexity of what is being described (insofar as it is being described as having social function(s)). And besides, could mere description amount to ethnographic knowledge? Perhaps it may, but the point is that the question presupposes that one scales down ‘the social and cultural entailments of phenomena’ in order to scale them up (by relating them to social systems, cultural comparisons, modes of production or just theory.) (Consider how thermometers designed according to different scales –the Fahrenheit scale; the Celsius scales; the Kelvin scale– can nevertheless be rendered commensurable. This is achieved by using as reference phenomena extrinsic to every scale and extrinsic to the act of scaling itself. In the case of thermometers, these phenomena are the freezing and boiling of water. Thermoscopes, on the contrary, are impossible to compare.)
Trees, Spirits / Scaling up. Take this question for example: what happens when Wantoat people make themselves into ‘trees’ and into ‘spirits’? (Strathern, 64) Even more, how do we know that they are making themselves into trees and spirits? Very difficult questions indeed. To start with, field work (more precisely, observation and description) demonstrates numerous fluctuations within this metamorphosis. Time turns into festival time. People turn into dancers. Dancers magnify themselves. Dancers look thrice their size by wearing bark-cloth and bamboo extensions. The space of the village suffers the protrusion of a huge scaffolding at its center. The description of these phenomena lets us know that before the festival things were different. Why the change? What is its function? (The question for its meaning is a different once, and it is irremediably scalar.) The fact that we can raise this question is explained by the fact that (ethnographic) description has already scaled down determinate phenomena: we are in the time of festivities. The festival, as discreet unit of description, is already one step beyond indicating fluctuation. Hence, we can ask for its function. Reading Carl Schmitz’s ethnography of the Wantoat, Strathern indicates one possible strategy to provide an answer. It involves comparison, i.e. scaling. One can compare Wantoat festivals to other Wantoat phenomena that occur outside the time of festivities and that appear to hold some sort of resemblance to them. The dancer’s bark-cloth and bamboo extensions recall actual trees. Wantoat mythology often depicts spirits under the form of trees, and sometimes these figures refer to specific named deities. This resemblance serves to scale-up ethnographic description into the capacity of measuring intensities: fluctuation is assigned religious (or divine or spiritual) intensity. The function of the festival is to turn men into trees so that they evoke/invoke/summon/conjure/appease, etc. the spirits. The rigor of scaling down by means of meticulous description is thwarted by a scaling up oblivious to the fact that it is no longer describing. Indeed, there are no clear phenomena that could serve as referents that could make commensurable the time of festivities to other possible temporal units in Wantoat life. Thus, how can we know that wearing bark-cloth and bamboo extensions means that the Wantoat dancers are making themselves into trees and thereby into spirits? All we know so far is that wearing bark-cloth and bamboo extensions has the function of carrying on the festival (which function we still ignore).
Stalin / Lenin. Not only ethnography scales up and down. In fact, it can help us to understand when people are scaling up or down and what the function(s) is of such processes in ‘everyday life.’ This perspective introduces yet another complication. For it is not simply that ethnography imposes structures on the phenomena it describes and/or measures; on the contrary, it encounters these phenomena as already structured on their own account. This is tantamount to saying that social phenomena function according to their own scales. Yurchak’s lucid study of late Soviet society demonstrates how discourse production depended on the presence and later absence of Stalin’s figure. While Stalin occupied the master’s place, discourse was calibrated against “a position outside of language [Stalin’s] from which one could verify how adequately that language represented reality and how it should be adjusted accordingly.” (Yurchak, 40) In other words, discourse was constantly and necessarily scaled up to meet the standard of Stalin’s privileged (and extra-discursive) position. This is an example of linguistic intensity, which function was to validate an external canon of validity. So, if you were writing or speaking during this period of Soviet life, your words would have had to be measured by a scale that is clearly above you. If this is the case, ethnography of these years in the Soviet Union needs to account for this scaling process, even by means of just description. Even though the ethnographer is scaling down (describing) while refraining from resorting to external scales, the fact that people are scaling up has to come through. (Yurchak succeeds at this.) In this case, phenomena fluctuate due to a process of scaling. (In the case of the Wantoat it is unclear if the same is true.) Turning back to everyday scaling in Soviet society, it is possible to see that after the death of Stalin discourse is produced by scaling it down. The referent is no longer Stalin but Lenin, that is, a certain image of the past. Discourse is produced as it has already been produced before. Thus “this discourse became based on an implicit understanding that the meaning of authoritative texts depended on the objective scientific laws of language [that were not known in advance] and was independent of anyone’s subjective opinion.” (Yurchak, 47) We move closer to the register of fluctuation: words are spoken and written so that they are heard little as possible. They efface themselves so that discourse can fulfill its functions (among others, to portray the illusion of normality). Yurchak can describe these processes because he measures his units of analysis while keeping them in constant proportion. He pays respect to their proper scales.
Parentheses. Parentheses indicate a change of scale. They scale down (by delimiting, qualifying…); they scale up (by extrapolating, expanding…). Derlugian does not write Shanibov’s biography; if anything, Shanibov occupies a parenthetical position in his world-system analysis of the emergence of ethnic violence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Shanibov is the rhetorical place where he tests (scales down) the overriding historical framework of the world-system (but I stop here; the word count is already 1537).
5. Ethnographic Objects: Considerations of Scope and Scale in Event-Centered Anthropological Approaches
Anthropologists must continually struggle with both the task of delimiting their projects and understanding what such choices imply for their work, whether arbitrary, self-aware, or unseen. The ways in which we perceive the complexity, scope, and scale of our projects shapes how we ask questions, determine appropriate methodologies, and construct our subjects and objects of inquiry. One might claim that the choice of an event as a primary object of inquiry reflects anthropology’s romantic fixation with the local and particular as supremely authentic and the anthropologist’s conversation with the informant as supremely legitimate. I will argue that the ways in which Tsing and Derluguian use encounters-as-objects – theoretically, methodologically, and rhetorically – reflect Strathern’s notions of complexity, scale and the webs of partial connection through and within which everything is constructed and derives meaning. Strathern suggests that an object’s scale of detail or complexity is only kept seemingly constant by the position of an observer. Observation entails the constructive and limiting work of conceptualization (rather than simply viewing), such that if the position of that observer and the trajectory of their inquiry changes, “a ‘small’ thing can thus be made to say as much as a ‘big’ thing” (xix). Further, “if one can ask ‘big’ questions of ‘small’ data, then the difference between big and small disappears. It is reinstated only with the reinstatement of perspective and levels, and a concomitant sense of the partial nature of description” (xx). In other words, by problematizing scale classifications and understanding the work that scaling and delimiting do – particularly in terms of enabling us to see how everything is partial and connected – anthropologists can begin to determine the most useful and appropriate ways of delimiting and working with their objects of inquiry, which may deceptively appear “self-scaling,” while recognizing the dramatic creative and destructive roles their choices play. Anna Tsing’s ethnographic object could be described as a moment of friction, and her method described as tracing that which enables that moment of friction to occur in the manner that it does, or the webs of relationships that give that moment meaning(s). Though she moves across different narratives and voices, she finds that “it is necessary to begin again, and again, in the middle of things” (2). This is not simply a re-centering devise: a rhetorical technique to create narrative continuity or an effort to keep the reader engaged (though I will explore this further). Nor, as evidenced by her discussion of using universals, is it simply a manner of grounding the text in an authentic ‘local.’ While the moment in some ways grounds the text, in the sense that it provides a point in space and time on which the reader can focus – though the contents of that point may be shifting and unclear – it also allows for movement. Because the work that Tsing does is continually repositioning moments of friction, they become both small and big, simple and infinitely complex. These moments both include pieces of all that she incorporates in her book, and are made possible by the connections (or one might say accumulation) of the “historical trajectories” she explores. Additionally, using the notion of “friction” enables Tsing to trace the networks and pathways of partial global connection incorporated in and stemming from her ethnographic object with a vocabulary apart from “flows.” The manner in which she addresses using universals “to identify knowledge that moves – mobile and mobilizing – across localities and cultures…to form bridges, roads, and channels of circulation” (7) becomes effective through a language of friction rather than flows. “Roads are a good image for conceptualizing how friction works,” she suggests, “Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they limit where we go. The ease of travel they facilitate is also a structure of confinement. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding and particularizing.” Examining how people believe in universals, and how interactions are enabled by shared recognitions of universals does not require one to exclusively perceive universals as wholly generalizable nor as achieving meaning only through contingent articulation. She moves past those concerns to focus on how “engaged universals travel across difference and are charged and changed by their travels” (8). By exploring how work can be done through (rather than simply despite) disagreement, gaps, and misunderstanding, Tsing demonstrates how “through friction, universals become practically effective” (8). Working critically in this manner is one way anthropologists can ask broad questions about generalizability (more commonly addressed in other disciplines) while simultaneously engaging with the genealogies behind the terms of their discourse. Clearly, the anthropological approach I am addressing here is only one of many options, and is problematic in its own ways. Strathern emphasizes that parts and wholes are really only distinguishable analytically through our own descriptions and comparisons, and that scope is never self-evident. While she suggestions the choices involved in delimiting an ethnographic object are often “arbitrary,” it seems that events as ethnographic objects are also constructed in a particular familiar form that is reminiscent of Robert Desjarlais’ notion of “experience.” According to Desjarlais, “discourses of depth, interiority, and authenticity, sensibilities of holism and transcendence, and practices of reading, writing, and storytelling have helped to craft a mode of being known in the modern West as experience: that is, an inwardly reflexive, hermeneutically rich process that coheres through time by way of narrative” (17). As well as enabling different kinds of analytical work, centering a text on an event as object, or using narrative accounts of an encounter or moment strategically in a text, also enables readers (from these texts’ anticipated audiences) to comfortably engage with books as memorable, relatable stories. The positive response to Roxanne Varzi’s incorporation of fiction into her work – despite the poor delivery of that fiction in her lecture series presentation – evidences the power of such storytelling. It is through storytelling that I found myself responding as a reader to Derluguian’s text. Unlike in Tsing’s book, moments (the most central being Derluguian’s meeting with Musa Shanib) were not self-consciously used to convey a methodological or theoretical stance and were not meant to be the exemplification of an analytical tool and larger project. Because of this I find myself wondering if my response to his text is more due the ways in which I have learned to read than it is due to his intentions as an author, which Derluguian might say (judging from concluding remarks) are really beside the point. In Derluguian’s encounter with Musa Shanib I see more than a disarming, curious account of circuitous global connection that provides an amusing and comfortable entry point into a complicated historical and sociological text. The encounter itself is full of moments of misunderstanding, negotiation, and confusion – one might say “friction” – and is obviously lacking in transparency. However, it is these qualities that simultaneously make the moment possible and propel the conversation forward – being the “kinds of ‘friction [that] inflect motion, offering it different meanings” (Tsing 6) – and also allow us to better understand the relational positions of the different actors and what is at stake. In contrast to Yurchak, who often seems to dwell on explaining how his approach is not tied to the assumptions of related analyses, Derluguian’s use of world systems theory very clearly positions his materials on a particular plane where we know from the beginning what is considered large and small, simple and complex, what is to be included and excluded. For me, reading his text through the moment that I perceive as central necessarily destabilizes the text, which I found at times overly constrained in by its theoretical framework of relationally, behaviorally, economically, geographically, and politically divided “nomenklatura,” “proletarians,” (e.g. 325) and “sub-proletarians” or “ruling bureaucracy,” “proletarianized citizenry,” and “marginals” (e.g. 326). In other words, Derluguian lets his use of a world systems approach do a lot of his delimiting and scaling work, and it is that work that also shapes the questions he is able to ask and is interested in asking. “(How) can anthropologists ask big questions?” was an issue that emerged in class discussion. Perhaps this question is a logical response to Derluguian’s text, following his understanding of the big and the small. However, problematizing scope and scale, and their implications for complexity, Strathern might ask, “How do we know what is a small or big question if the big and small are not just relationally contingent but also flexible?” What does it mean to say something is specific and localized or is generalizable? Perhaps Tsing’s use of universals “to identify knowledge that moves” (7) in uneven and incomplete ways and at an awkward gait, whose paths become visible at moments of friction, is one way we can begin to examine how an anthropology of destabilized, shifting globals and locals might look.
6. Partiality in Two Ethnographies
Marilyn Strathern (2004) uses Donna Haraway’s relational image of the cyborg to illustrate what she conceives to be the tensions in and between anthropology, feminism, and ethnography. Part human part machine, the cyborg serves as a model for those relations between subjects, objects, processes and analyses which work together to construct a hypothetical entity that is formed from the interactions between independently conceived and discretely functioning parts (36-7). While Strathern primarily uses the cyborg to articulate the relationships between anthropology and feminism, it serves to underscore her theme of partiality in the construction of ethnography. The cyborg illustrates how postmodern ethnography can aim to “create networks of communication between people who do not require to be bound by appeal to common unity or origin, but who are connected as different, exterior presences to one another” (38). She believes that because the nature of description is inherently partial (xx), partial connections between non-comparable entities must be shown in order to create an effective postmodern ethnography. Fifteen years after Strathern, two ethnographies have been written that utilize this connection of parts in their efforts to develop theories of social interactions. Anna Tsing (2005) and Alexei Yurchak (2006) each produce texts that, in their own way, operate like a cyborg, integrating disproportionate and disparate aspects to create “a whole image, but not an image of a whole” (36). True to the cyborg, they are comprised of parts that require each other in order to be defined within the context of the narrative. Their approaches to the partial connections that they reveal are quite distinct, yet both are effective in articulating the complicated situations and processes that the texts aim to realize. I am interested in considering how each of these authors conceptualize and use parts and partiality to represent complex tensions and processes, as well as how their use of parts enables them reach their analytic goals. Tsing employs partiality not only in her choice of ethnographic objects and textual form, but also as a conscious structuring theme which informs each aspect of her study on cultural processes in the Indonesian rainforests. For Tsing, the parts that create her story are each interconnections, historically and culturally produced, and informed and developed by real interactions which take place on many scales. These interconnections consist of a diverse range of subjects, including social groups, cultural forms, social projects, conceptual entities, and places, each of which are partial themselves. She believes that by examining the ways in which these interconnections interact with each other, she will be able to find those spaces of cultural friction which allow change in each entity to occur (x). Though partial, each interconnection is allowed by cultural diversity, a uniting element that results in the differing goals and strategies which enable Tsing’s friction (ix-x). What is more, because her partial entities implicate individuals, groups, ideas, actions, histories, meanings, and power relations, they are imbued with the active power to exclude, enable, compromise, and empower (4). This gives each interconnection a political dimension that Tsing uses to illustrate the uneven character of interconnectedness itself, an unevenness in which she sees the possibility for change. Tsing is committed to ethnography as an analytical means to understanding the processes and networks between which she seeks friction. It is her use of partial ethnographic objects that allows her to see the complex relations and interactions in which each interconnection is engaged. By taking each entity as necessarily incongruous and contingent, she is able to see the “awkward conjunctures” between them, and examine those critical meeting points that generate movement, disrupture, and spaces that defy common understanding (271). This enables her to highlight the independent existence of each entity without losing the necessary connections it must bear to other process and networks in her story. Tsing draws her interconnections together in a story that is structured as partially as her ethnographic objects are. Her use of formal fragments is a palpable application of the partiality that she sees in the interconnections. It also serves to distribute the weight of her examined entities, breaking up the narrative flow thus allowing no single story to gain more privilege or momentum than another. As important as her fragmented structuring is the context in which she situates the components of her story. Tsing examines the concept of the universal as a widely informative and mobilizing knowledge category which is contingent on personal enactments and local knowledge, a fragmented interconnection in its own right (1, 7, 270). By taking the universal as neither inherently truthful nor dispensable, she creates a context that allows for the reconstruction of the ways that interactions generate changes in social mobilizations, cultural forms, and universals themselves. These changes necessarily take place through the interconnections that form her story and the places, networks, and processes they engage. Tsing does a masterful job in employing partiality as an effective means of creating an ethnography that is engagingly told and yet only partially resolved. Yurchak’s conceptualization and organization of parts differs markedly from Tsing’s. Though Yurchak’s entities take varied shapes as social groups, ideologies, processes, and relationships, his parts have a more discrete sense, despite their contingency on the other elements in his historical process. The components of his story produce and are produced by each other and necessarily give rise to new, effective, mutually constitutive entities, which function together to create the conditions that made the collapse of the Soviet system possible yet unexpected (4). His partial entities are not self-consciously porous, but rather intrinsically and necessarily mutable and agentive. It is precisely their ability to change and be changed that allows them to become implicated in the other examined processes and relationships, which together produce the paradoxes of everyday life, meaning, and discourse that emerged in the waning years of Soviet socialism. His object of study is particular: he aims to understand these paradoxes as an aspect of a large, complex, unified historical event. His approach to the production of these paradoxes is, however, the story of unpredictable, emerging processes and their interrelations. Yurchak is adept in his ability to identify uncontested whole historical situations, such as Stalin’s role in the production of authoritative discourse, and find resulting situations that are partial, incomplete, and formed out of relationships between people, discourse, knowledge, and history. His parts—which can be identified as the forms of and relationships with discourse, a particular deterritorialized public, methods of interpretation, and emergent milieus and lifestyles—are co-created and mutually informed within the context of a new perspective on Soviet history. By focusing on replacing binary dichotomies and on the agentive possibilities offered by performative theories, Yurchak reimagines the relationships between his co-producing entities. This enables creativity, agency, displacement, and unpredictability to inform often-contradictory actions, ideologies, and enactments which together generate a conception of Soviet life that is as optimistic and warm as it is alienating and dull (8). It is the partiality he sees in each process and relationship that enables his new perspective to emerge, full of contradictions and possibilities between these entities. Yurchak claims that the state’s ideological representations became increasingly normalized as the paradox between the constative and performative aspects of the authoritative discourse intensified (14). Despite this hypernormalization, he looks for the spaces in these representations that were unstable, incomplete, and open for reinterpretation. He finds them inhabited by very personal and often very creative exchanges and engagements, which were created by the discourse and yet which challenged conformity inside of it. He maintains a sense of ethnographic representation by incorporating intimate personal details acquired in fieldwork, which he uses to convey particular knowledge about the processes he identifies. These accounts become integrated as aspects of the story of the deterritorialized generation he examines, and as aspects of the relationships that existed between discourse, knowledge, and engagement. Yurchak employs partiality in order to give new perspective to a complicated historical particularity which rests on paradox and takes shape through contingent and partial processes. Both authors succeed in satisfying Strathern’s model of the cyborg, an entity composed of contradictory yet mutually productive parts. It is the partial connections between constitutive elements that enable a new kind of hypothetical story to emerge which allows a postmodern ethnography. Tsing does this by treating her parts as permeable entities within the context of the constructed global, allowing a context of connectedness to create communication between distinct yet mutually informed networks and realities. Yurchak does this by finding co-producing elements in his dynamic, contingent processes and relationships which serve together to create the necessary conditions for reaction to an unexpected historical occurrence. Both rely on partiality to produce new perspectives which themselves partially resolve aspects of the larger framework.
1 Comments:
At 6:24 AM,
Hugh said…
1. Empirical evidence and abstract theory: The language of ethnography in Friction and Everything Was Forever, Until It was no More
In its effort to produce knowledge, ethnography organizes a body of empirical examples or material evidence and places them in dialogue with a particular theoretical framework. It is not simply that the concrete serves to exemplify or to produce a given abstract theory (though it might be used to that end), but rather that the two are woven together, ostensibly and ideally creating a text that is at once rooted in specificity but also generalizeable. The interplay between abstract theoretical devices and material particulars effected by the act of citing from two distinct scales not only gives a loose structure to the ethnographic form, but, more importantly, creates relationships between and across these two scales. Yet, if one can claim by way of generalization that ethnography strives to bridge differences in scale by effectively creating (perhaps at times even imposing) relationships between the abstract and its manifestations, it cannot be claimed that this formal characteristic breeds uniformity in style, content or method.
A brief survey of two contemporary ethnographies will be sufficient to demonstrate that even similar epistemological endeavors (that is, those doubly citing from and drawing relationships between the abstract and the concrete to illuminate the how or the why of a given phenomenon) generate varied meanings with regard to the following questions: What kinds of material does ethnography seek out to represent the concrete and specific? What are the kinds of abstract theoretical models with which ethnography engages? How does it effectively create relationships between the abstract and the empirical and what shape do these relationships take? To these introductory remarks and questions, one following point must be added, if only in a cursory manner. Both the collection and presentation of material evidence and theoretical abstractions that constitute ethnography presume the active presence and participation of the ethnographer. By not placing the ethnographer as author or as fieldworker at the center of this comparative analysis, my intent is not to elide the important, even definitive, role played by this figure in the construction of ethnographic knowledge. Rather, I want to suggest that ethnography cannot be exclusively explained by gesturing to the author/fieldworker. The questions raised above point to something larger and more complex than stylistic preference or personality.
To generate some meanings in response to the questions prompted by ethnography, it is necessary to first ground ourselves in two contemporary examples with very different ethnographic objects. Taking as its point of departure the corporate destruction of Indonesia’s forests and the local reactions this environmental disaster incited, Anna Tsing’s Friction locates its ethnographic object precisely in the friction effected by the contacts and collisions between cultural diversity and global interconnectedness. The object of investigation is thus the new cultural formations created by the re-articulation of global schemes and ideals in the specific cultural locality of Indonesia. If friction is Tsing’s ethnographic object, Alexei Yurchak’s is paradox. In Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Yurchak untangles the paradox characterizing late Soviet socialism that rendered the system monolithic in its appearance and yet made its collapse largely unsurprising. It is the proliferation of meanings and interpretations generated simultaneous to a rigid, endemic adherence to prescriptive discourses and rituals that constitute Yurchak’s objects of inquiry.
Without pausing to evaluate the success of each of these ethnographies with respect to their objects of study, we will turn to the theoretical abstractions and material particulars presented by each. For Tsing, the principle theoretical premise of her work is the destabilization of the local/global binary. This is not suggest that she denies scale differences between the local and the global or considers them to be coterminous. Rather, the abstract idea informing the approach to her ethnographic object is precisely an overhaul of abstract universalism in favor for what she terms an engaged universalism; the site of a frictional encounter between local and global processes (1). In place of a local/global dichotomy, Tsing proposes the concept of cosmopolitanism as a framework for the cultural analysis of knowledge and social change, emphasizing that it is only by means of a translation across scales and cultures that certain global ideas and practices are refigured as local ones (121-122). Translation, moreover, as Tsing contends, effectively unmoors these ideas and practices from their specific contexts and gives rise to both the frictional encounter, and cosmopolitan knowledge and subjects (127, 224).
These being the principle abstract concepts of her ethnography, Tsing intersperses them with a host of varied and diverse empirical evidences. There are her personal journalistic accounts of walking through clear-cut forests and the harrowing testimonies of those who have witnessed their landscape turned to wasteland; there is the history of the New Order in Indonesia, its crony capitalism and repressive measures; there is Uma Adang’s compendious list of the flora and fauna of Borneo Island complemented by Tsing’s evocative descriptions of the diversity of life in Kalimatan; there are the journal entries, trips and interviews with the nature lovers, a local rearticulation of international practices and ideas regarding the environment; there are explanations of sustainable forest use by indigenous peoples derived from interviews and observations; there are references to the destruction of the Amazon and the stories of activist opposition reaching Indonesia in the form of an adaptable script for similar practices of opposition. These are but a few examples of the kind of manifest particulars that Tsing brings into relation with the theoretical concepts she employs.
If Tsing begins her ethnography by first laying out the theoretical model of local/global friction and interconnectedness from within which she will unpack her ethnographic object, the empirical specifics she cites are not merely intended to ground her theory in a particular locality or to fill in the gaps of abstract knowledge. By tracing through material examples of how and where the global and local encounter each other and in what kind of contexts these encounters transpire, she also effectively derives a theory for social and environmental change, offering up the specifics of Indonesia as a universal, generalizeable model for future, transformative politics.
Just as Friction approaches its ethnographic object by means of a theoretical denunciation of the global/local dichotomy, Yurchak similarly disavows binary abstractions of official/unofficial and Capitalism/Socialism. He contends that the paradox of the late Soviet era can only be understood through a theoretical vocabulary that does not reproduce these binaries and elide the contradictions embodied and cultivated by the system (9). Before delving into the empirical examples of the paradox, Yurchak develops a theoretical model through which the paradox can be located and explained. Drawing on J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, which distinguishes between constantive and performative utterances in speech, Yurchak formulates his own theory of the performative shift. Taking place in very specific historical and discursive contexts, such as that of late Soviet socialism, this shift is the growing importance of the performative dimension of speech acts simultaneous to the increasing unanchoring, open-endedness or irrelevancy of the constantive one. It is, moreover, precisely this shift that Yurchak maintains filled the system with new meanings, displacing it internally while also sustaining its external, immutable façade through faithful reproductions of authoritative discourse and rituals (19-29).
Through letters about Pink Floyd and Deep Crimson, interviews with the regulars at the Saigon café, ventures into the boiler rooms of Moscow and meetings of local Komsomol branches, Yurchak dramatizes the paradox by subjecting various forms of speech and behavior to a rigorous textual analysis (whether they be specifically texts or not). Whereas Tsing brings a polyphony of voices to her ethnography ranging from Dayaks of the disappearing forests to Canadian gold hungry entrepreneurs like David Walsh, Yurchak is more selective and more systematic. With Andrei, Inna and her friends, Alexandr and Nikolai, among others, Yurchak gives detailed biographic information about his subjects and follows over time the ways in which they spoke and acted, at once abiding by the norms of authoritative discourse and generating new meanings within and throughout their conformity with the system. It is, moreover, through these interviews supplemented by archival research about popular culture, the Komsomol organization, authoritative discourse and cultural institutions that Yurchak elucidates the concepts of svoi (common people) and vnye (a state of being in between, both inside and outside).
With both svoi and vnye constituting the concepts most integral to understanding the paradox of late socialism, Yurchak collects empirical examples that are not intended to be in any way representative of Soviet society but that specifically and exclusively demonstrate the socio-cultural manifestations of this paradox, containing his ethnographic investigation to empirical examples relevant to his theory of the performative shift. Unlike Tsing who begins with a theoretical framework and uses concrete cases to contribute to another theoretical project of social and environmental change, Yuchak employs material evidence only for the purposes of reifying his theory of the shift and, by extension, the paradox.
2. Sites of Contention: Short Paper 1
In this paper I would like to explore and assess the approaches of Marilyn Strathern, Anna Tsing, and Georgi Derluguian to the concept of relationality. I am specifically interested in this theme because of my own background. My fieldwork and thesis were both very much focused on discovering and analyzing the relationality present in upper middle class Egypt. I will first broadly outline my understanding of the concept of relationality, which is generally based on Norbert Elias’ understanding of it. Then I will consider each author’s approach to relationality and, lastly, I will discuss them in relation to Elias’ approach.
Elias’ ideas regarding relationality have been adopted by a group of scholars, among whom not only sociologists, but also anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and psychologists. Their school of Figurational Studies is not based on a fixed set of doctrines, but certain common traits can be discerned. The focus of attention is to human beings who are interdependent with each other in a variety of ways, and whose lives develop in and are significantly shaped by the social figurations they form together. People are part of many figurations at the same time. These figurations are continuously reshaped, undergoing changes of many kinds, some rapid and transient, others slower but more lasting. These developments taking place in human figurations are generally unplanned and unforeseen. The development of human knowledge and the assignment of meaning take place within and are influenced by the overall development of the figuration.
Marilyn Strathern’s book is concerned with scale and relations, and the representation of it. As she states in the introduction, her account is a move from a plural perception to a post plural perception of the world. Whereas, at first, it appeared to me an extremely experimental and strained exercise in postmodernism, it was very valuable the second time I read it. For someone who feels stuck in one particular set of mind, it is very beneficial to read an attempt of not closing things down, but of opening up and reassessing the common grounds in Anthropology. Strathern deals with scale and relationality through her concept of partial connections. Everything is part of a relationship, so everything is partial. Partiality only works as a connection, because when a part is on its own, it has become a whole. By focusing on the partiality of connections, she draws attention to the bias and incompleteness inherent in our approaches of understanding the world around us. No one perspective offers the totalizing vista it presupposes, which leads to the relativizing understanding that multiple perspectives will make everything seem partial and connected. “Certainty itself appears partial, information intermittent. An answer is another question, a connection a gap, a similarity a difference, and vice versa. Wherever we look we are left with the further knowledge that surface understanding conceals gaps and bumps.” (xxiv) Strathern comes up with an elucidative image for her concept of partial connections: the cyborg. This cyborg is an entry into how we could conceive the conduct of social relationships without assumptions of comparability. A cyborg is a prosthetic construct that enables us to extend our position and possibilities, by making non-comparable parts work for each other without encompassing it into a whole.
Anna Tsing is equally interested in the network of relationships. Unsatisfied by the unproblematic way scholars in the 1990’s defined and explained the process of globalization (in terms of smooth flows of information, money, people), Anna Tsing comes up with her own concept: friction. This friction is what she observes in the sticky materiality of practical encounters that take place through unexpected and unstable global interactions. It prevents universal claims from making everything everywhere the same because, through long histories of regional-to-global networks of power, trade, and meaning, it shapes and transforms human cultures. That is the productive feature of friction: it creates new knowledge claims, interests, identities, and alliances in relation to concrete problems and possibilities for dialogue. Tsing is concerned with the location of the global in order to study it. She is able to demonstrate the global in the local, through her description of partial connections between parties, interests, and perspectives. She goes about this in a very evocative way, putting personal narrative, journals, historical research, and interviews next to each other. She makes you feel and understand – showing us the power of evocation! – the processes of meaning giving at the conjuncture of local practices and universal aspirations.
Derluguian’s aim is to write a biography from a world-systems perspective. The terms he uses to describe relationality largely draw on class theory that defines class on the basis of socio-economic positions, complemented by Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and social capital. On page 12 he echoes Gould’s urge to grasp whole systems of relations by attempting to avoid reifications. “Objects of study should be situated in their extended environments and analyzed by locating them within pulsating and slowly evolving webs of relations.” To me, the crux of his book is the question whether he is able to redeem this objective. As has been expressed in class, it seems as if he tries to juggle with too many and too big balls (this might be a dutchism). While it would have been wonderful to learn how globalization or nationalism are analyzed by locating them within pulsating and slowly evolving webs of relations, he seems to take many of its causalities for granted without revealing the conditions for these claims. His broad social theoretical lens does not allow much for attention being paid to the concept of meaning.
Having written down all this, how do the three approaches relate to Elias’ understanding of relationality? Ironically enough, they do not seem to contradict each other, indeed, more than that, they could complement and reinforce each other easily. Strathern’s concept of partial connections is resonated in Elias’ concept of figuration, emphasizing the contingency of the effects of social relations. Tsing’s concept of friction combines well with Elias’ assertion that social developments are generally unplanned and unforeseen, stressing the messy and sticky nature of social encounters. Derluguian’s combination of world system theory and historical sociology provide a more overarching perspective, in which friction, figurations, meaning giving, and partial connections could be studied. Both Tsing and Derluguian bring forward interesting ways to include the global dimension in the ethnography, which is not all together absent in Elias‘ work.
Other considerations seem to be going on, which have not been addressed that much up to this point, but which, apparently unconsciously, did inspire me to write about the topic of relationality. One thing has to do with the representation of relationality, which is linked to the hard to describe notions of evocation, intension and pretension of the author, and the writing process. Particularly Anna Tsing proved to be a satisfying example. Her narrative and self-conscious style of writing, her smooth move between different registers, and her accessible notions of friction and engagement, both told and showed me the story of the global in the local. We experienced the zone of awkward engagement of the rainforests of Indonesia through her writing. Derluguian’s project was equally pretentious, but could not engage me as much. Another thing is a personal concern with being too attached to one perspective of explaining the world around us. Strathern has made me realize again to be as careful as possible in showing the coming-about of meaning and its contingency on partial connections. She, moreover, points to the bias and incompleteness of each theoretical approach. I will bear in mind her question as to what gets lost or hidden, or won and exposed, by moving one’s analytical position (xxix). I guess that concepts are not to be seen as a preliminary to research, but employed as sensitizing concepts in guiding investigations. Elias’ work can still prove useful in this context.
3. Moving Between Scales
How does an anthropologist’s interpretation of the concept of scale inform his/her ethnographic work? This is the question I propose to examine in relation to Tsing’s Friction (2004) and Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (2005). The concept of scale itself is elucidated and complicated in Strathern’s Partial Connections, and it through the use of her critical framework that I will examine Tsing’s and Yurchak’s work.
Partial Connections is an attempt to think beyond the criticisms of what is called the reflextive turn in anthropology, and contemplate what exists outside the crisis of representation. She uses the examples from her fieldwork to question/critique/rethink anthropological theory. She wants to suggest a different means of thinking about scale. While complexity is imagined as increasing with particularized focus (xiii), Strathern suggests complexity is maintained regardless of scale. She writes,
the interesting feature about switching scale is…that at every level complexity replicates itself in scale of detail (xvi), [thus] similar intellectual operation have to be performed on the data whatever the scale… Regardless of the way a change of perspective reveals whole new worlds, the ‘same’ coordinates of intellectual activities are summoned (xv).
Another useful reformulation of scale is to think beyond simply analyzing discrete scales (moving from one level of analysis to another (from political to economic, for example)), or simply altering the magnitude (from looking at one thing versus looking at many), but rather to perceive more than one scale at the same time” (xiv – xv). Operating on more than one scale at the same time, and rethinking the association between complexity and level of analysis (small vs. big) speaks to Tsing’s analysis of global connections in Friction.
In Friction Tsing aspires to rethink the conceptual separation between the global and the local. Her narrative mechanism for overcoming this dichotomy is the notion of friction, “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (4). Friction is elucidated within the framework (among others) of engaged universals. She writes, “every truth forms in negotiation… with aspirations to the universal” (1). To discredit it completely in favor of local interpretation is to overlook the cultural specificity of universal aspirations within particularized contexts. She explains that to see the universal as an aspiration, rather than the confirmation of a pre-formed law, allows one to see that universal aspiration must travel across distances and differences (7). It is these positions/instances/circumstances of engaged universals that form her ethnographic object (7). Thus scale is re-conceptualized to examine global processes within the particular contexts in which they are manifest. In fact Tsing suggests it is only within the particular that the universal/global is constructed (7). Thus the global and the local are not discrete units to be analyzed separately but are always already engaged within friction.
However, another aspect of scale relevant to both Tsing and Strathern is that of scale-making. In PC Strathern is concerned with cross-cultural comparison, whether or not they are possible and if so, how? However comparison of any sort (between societies or within them) requires grounding on a common scale. She writes, “Frequently one tries to marry two different orders of phenomena so that each provides a context and grounding for the other” (72). She suggests this informs Hay’s survey of the ‘sacred flute complex’ in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (72). However, Strathern suggests the scale with which to analyze these divergent ‘things’ within the flute complex requires the creation of scale by the anthropologist (75). She suggests there still is a connection between the examples disclosed, but the connections between them are to be understood in terms of relations as conceived by the Melanesians (76).
In a different context, Tsing suggests becoming aware of specific scale-making projects (in this example associated with the conjuring involved in the spectacle of globalist finance) allows one to find cultural specificity and contingency within the homogenous blob of the global (58). She explains that scale is not neutral, but rather “proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted” (58). In the case of globalist claims of finance, she states economic projects must conjure scales themselves (57), and points to three scale-making projects related to what she describes as spectacular accumulation. She writes, “Finance capital is a program for global hegemony; franchise cronyism is one particular nation-making project, frontier culture is an articulation of a region” (60). These projects, as exemplified by her account of Bre-X, ‘caused a great fire’ but did not play out in an expected or predicable manner. It is the contingencies and engagement of how these projects of scale-making are played out in particular contexts that should be the focus of scholarly work (60).
How then does scale inform the very different project of Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever. Yurchak never makes any explicit reference to scale. His ethnography is not meant to be representative of a common Soviet experience or a normative experience of socialism (32). Instead Yurkchak’s examines practices of the last Soviet generation that highlight a particular paradox.
His work revolves around the peculiar paradox that, “although the system’s collapse had been unimaginable before it began, it appeared unsurprising when it happened” (3). He is very clear that he is not writing about the causes for collapse, but rather about “the conditions that made collapse possible without making it anticipated” (4). Thus to lay out his question Yurchak writes,
What was the nature of the late Soviet system and way of life that had this paradox at its core? On what kinds of internal systemic shifts at the level of discourse, ideology, social relations, and time was this paradox predicated? Further, what was the nature of production and communication of knowledge in this system, and of the forms in which it was coded, circulated, received and interpreted? (4).
His intention is express examples that highlight his paradox particularly well, not to offer a representative analysis. Thus scale plays a very different role in this work than for Tsing. While he does turn to detailed and particularized accounts (café Saigon, Komsomol members, boiler room jobs) to make a comment about a ‘general’ phenomenon (he does suggest the paradox applies to a broader context than his own objects of analysis (4)), the nature of scaling is different for Yurchak. He in fact chooses, or creates his scale.
The focus of his analysis is what he calls the performative shift in that constative and performative meanings of speech and ritual acts were disconnected in late Soviet socialism, which allowed for new and unexpected meanings and possibilities to be connected to them (26-27). He writes, “In a seemingly paradoxical twist, the immutable and predictable aspects of state socialism, and its creative and unpredictable possibilities, became mutually constitutive” (29). And according to Yurchak, the last Soviet generation is the paradigmatic type that expresses this paradox. He explains the members of this generation have the shared experience of the “normalized, ubiquitous, and immutable authoritative discourse of the Brezhnev’s years” (32), and this allowed them “to maintain an affinity for the many aesthetic possibilities and ethical values of socialism, while at the same time interpreting them in new terms that were not necessarily anticipated by the state” (32). In a preemptive defense for his decision to focus on this one generation (creating scale) he states explicitly, “Although the discourses, activities, relations and values of this cohort are not necessarily representative of an average social experience of the period, they serve as a powerful lens through which the emerging internal shifts in that system become visible” (32). So then, while he does not express his methodology in terms of scale, he chooses to focus on the last Soviet generation to express the paradox that is the primary question of his book. Yurchak is engaged in scale-making, in a sense, to make his theoretical argument.
Strathern offers analytical tools to re-think scale and propose, as her analogy of fractal graphic suggests, regardless of scale of magnification, repeated motifs and details of form remain (xx). Level of analysis (scale) then does not necessarily predicate complexity or amount of anthropological information to be gathered. In Friction Tsing defines scale as such; “Scale is the spatial dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view, whether up close or from a distance, microscopic or planetary” (58). Thus it is an inherent aspect of ethnographic writing – it is a perspective from which the author writes. While Tsing’s analysis offers an example of engaging scales at the same time, Yurchak, in order to make the claims he does, seems to create his scale. For both authors the selection of scale is connected to their theoretical and methodological project. For Tsing, the very concept of friction that is central to her work is predicated on her scale-shifting. While for Yurchak, his choice of scale is tied to his attempt to understand the paradox of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
4. Scaling Down / Scaling Up
Thermoscope / Thermometer. The thermoscope and the thermometer function in different registers. Invented in 1596 by Galileo, the thermoscope indicates temperature differences. It functions in the register of fluctuation. Change is qualitative (colder – warmer, than before). Years later, Santorio Santorio applied a scale to an air thermoscope. Now the thermoscope could measure temperature differences; hence, we no longer have a thermoscope but a thermometer – we are now in the register of intensity. Measurable amounts of some quality (energy understood as temperature in this case) can be recorded for future reference. (Therefore it is incorrect to say that a thermoscope is a thermometer without a scale; their functions are incommensurable. The thermometer is not an improvement over the thermoscope.) Both the thermoscope and the thermometer indicate (they let us know) that a change in temperature has happened, but the latter measures this change in virtue of a fixed scale. Fluctuation is thus domesticated – it is cut into commensurable, discrete units forming part of a scale. Commensurability is endogenous; it is only possible in terms of intensity related to a presupposed scale (after all, we do not really need a thermometer to know that it is warmer or colder; a thermoscope will suffice, if not our own bodies. We just need it to know how warmer or colder it is in terms of a determinate scale, i.e. how intense is the change in temperature. Furthermore, a change in temperature’s intensity is not necessarily and univocally registered in our perceptions of ‘coldness’ or ‘warmness.’)
Description / Scaling down. Ethnography can function in both registers: it can indicate fluctuation and/or measure intensity. The difficulty is to know when it is doing one thing or the other or perhaps both at the same time, and to what purpose. In the case of fluctuation, the methodological tool that can register it is description – albeit a kind of description that avoids as far as possible the use of adjectives. Adjectives are processes of scaling in disguise. So much can be said about mapping; maps cannot be drawn without scales. Maps deploy proportions according to a scale, intensities according to magnitudes. But even is description refuses adjectives and drawing maps, one can argue, and here lies the core of the difficulty, that description is always already a process of scaling down. Given the seemingly inexhaustible relational character of any given social phenomena, total description seems an impossible task. Therefore, in this context the question is how much are we willing to scale down “the social and cultural entailments of phenomena”? The question is indeed one of scaling down for the complexity of the object of description has to be simplified enough to make it visible. (Strathern, xiii) Visible and social, I would add. Whereas the thermoscope suffices to let us know about temperature fluctuation, description seems to fall short on this account due to the inner complexity of what is being described (insofar as it is being described as having social function(s)). And besides, could mere description amount to ethnographic knowledge? Perhaps it may, but the point is that the question presupposes that one scales down ‘the social and cultural entailments of phenomena’ in order to scale them up (by relating them to social systems, cultural comparisons, modes of production or just theory.) (Consider how thermometers designed according to different scales –the Fahrenheit scale; the Celsius scales; the Kelvin scale– can nevertheless be rendered commensurable. This is achieved by using as reference phenomena extrinsic to every scale and extrinsic to the act of scaling itself. In the case of thermometers, these phenomena are the freezing and boiling of water. Thermoscopes, on the contrary, are impossible to compare.)
Trees, Spirits / Scaling up. Take this question for example: what happens when Wantoat people make themselves into ‘trees’ and into ‘spirits’? (Strathern, 64) Even more, how do we know that they are making themselves into trees and spirits? Very difficult questions indeed. To start with, field work (more precisely, observation and description) demonstrates numerous fluctuations within this metamorphosis. Time turns into festival time. People turn into dancers. Dancers magnify themselves. Dancers look thrice their size by wearing bark-cloth and bamboo extensions. The space of the village suffers the protrusion of a huge scaffolding at its center. The description of these phenomena lets us know that before the festival things were different. Why the change? What is its function? (The question for its meaning is a different once, and it is irremediably scalar.) The fact that we can raise this question is explained by the fact that (ethnographic) description has already scaled down determinate phenomena: we are in the time of festivities. The festival, as discreet unit of description, is already one step beyond indicating fluctuation. Hence, we can ask for its function. Reading Carl Schmitz’s ethnography of the Wantoat, Strathern indicates one possible strategy to provide an answer. It involves comparison, i.e. scaling. One can compare Wantoat festivals to other Wantoat phenomena that occur outside the time of festivities and that appear to hold some sort of resemblance to them. The dancer’s bark-cloth and bamboo extensions recall actual trees. Wantoat mythology often depicts spirits under the form of trees, and sometimes these figures refer to specific named deities. This resemblance serves to scale-up ethnographic description into the capacity of measuring intensities: fluctuation is assigned religious (or divine or spiritual) intensity. The function of the festival is to turn men into trees so that they evoke/invoke/summon/conjure/appease, etc. the spirits. The rigor of scaling down by means of meticulous description is thwarted by a scaling up oblivious to the fact that it is no longer describing. Indeed, there are no clear phenomena that could serve as referents that could make commensurable the time of festivities to other possible temporal units in Wantoat life. Thus, how can we know that wearing bark-cloth and bamboo extensions means that the Wantoat dancers are making themselves into trees and thereby into spirits? All we know so far is that wearing bark-cloth and bamboo extensions has the function of carrying on the festival (which function we still ignore).
Stalin / Lenin. Not only ethnography scales up and down. In fact, it can help us to understand when people are scaling up or down and what the function(s) is of such processes in ‘everyday life.’ This perspective introduces yet another complication. For it is not simply that ethnography imposes structures on the phenomena it describes and/or measures; on the contrary, it encounters these phenomena as already structured on their own account. This is tantamount to saying that social phenomena function according to their own scales. Yurchak’s lucid study of late Soviet society demonstrates how discourse production depended on the presence and later absence of Stalin’s figure. While Stalin occupied the master’s place, discourse was calibrated against “a position outside of language [Stalin’s] from which one could verify how adequately that language represented reality and how it should be adjusted accordingly.” (Yurchak, 40) In other words, discourse was constantly and necessarily scaled up to meet the standard of Stalin’s privileged (and extra-discursive) position. This is an example of linguistic intensity, which function was to validate an external canon of validity. So, if you were writing or speaking during this period of Soviet life, your words would have had to be measured by a scale that is clearly above you. If this is the case, ethnography of these years in the Soviet Union needs to account for this scaling process, even by means of just description. Even though the ethnographer is scaling down (describing) while refraining from resorting to external scales, the fact that people are scaling up has to come through. (Yurchak succeeds at this.) In this case, phenomena fluctuate due to a process of scaling. (In the case of the Wantoat it is unclear if the same is true.) Turning back to everyday scaling in Soviet society, it is possible to see that after the death of Stalin discourse is produced by scaling it down. The referent is no longer Stalin but Lenin, that is, a certain image of the past. Discourse is produced as it has already been produced before. Thus “this discourse became based on an implicit understanding that the meaning of authoritative texts depended on the objective scientific laws of language [that were not known in advance] and was independent of anyone’s subjective opinion.” (Yurchak, 47) We move closer to the register of fluctuation: words are spoken and written so that they are heard little as possible. They efface themselves so that discourse can fulfill its functions (among others, to portray the illusion of normality). Yurchak can describe these processes because he measures his units of analysis while keeping them in constant proportion. He pays respect to their proper scales.
Parentheses. Parentheses indicate a change of scale. They scale down (by delimiting, qualifying…); they scale up (by extrapolating, expanding…). Derlugian does not write Shanibov’s biography; if anything, Shanibov occupies a parenthetical position in his world-system analysis of the emergence of ethnic violence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Shanibov is the rhetorical place where he tests (scales down) the overriding historical framework of the world-system (but I stop here; the word count is already 1537).
5. Ethnographic Objects: Considerations of Scope and Scale in Event-Centered Anthropological Approaches
Anthropologists must continually struggle with both the task of delimiting their projects and understanding what such choices imply for their work, whether arbitrary, self-aware, or unseen. The ways in which we perceive the complexity, scope, and scale of our projects shapes how we ask questions, determine appropriate methodologies, and construct our subjects and objects of inquiry. One might claim that the choice of an event as a primary object of inquiry reflects anthropology’s romantic fixation with the local and particular as supremely authentic and the anthropologist’s conversation with the informant as supremely legitimate. I will argue that the ways in which Tsing and Derluguian use encounters-as-objects – theoretically, methodologically, and rhetorically – reflect Strathern’s notions of complexity, scale and the webs of partial connection through and within which everything is constructed and derives meaning.
Strathern suggests that an object’s scale of detail or complexity is only kept seemingly constant by the position of an observer. Observation entails the constructive and limiting work of conceptualization (rather than simply viewing), such that if the position of that observer and the trajectory of their inquiry changes, “a ‘small’ thing can thus be made to say as much as a ‘big’ thing” (xix). Further, “if one can ask ‘big’ questions of ‘small’ data, then the difference between big and small disappears. It is reinstated only with the reinstatement of perspective and levels, and a concomitant sense of the partial nature of description” (xx). In other words, by problematizing scale classifications and understanding the work that scaling and delimiting do – particularly in terms of enabling us to see how everything is partial and connected – anthropologists can begin to determine the most useful and appropriate ways of delimiting and working with their objects of inquiry, which may deceptively appear “self-scaling,” while recognizing the dramatic creative and destructive roles their choices play.
Anna Tsing’s ethnographic object could be described as a moment of friction, and her method described as tracing that which enables that moment of friction to occur in the manner that it does, or the webs of relationships that give that moment meaning(s). Though she moves across different narratives and voices, she finds that “it is necessary to begin again, and again, in the middle of things” (2). This is not simply a re-centering devise: a rhetorical technique to create narrative continuity or an effort to keep the reader engaged (though I will explore this further). Nor, as evidenced by her discussion of using universals, is it simply a manner of grounding the text in an authentic ‘local.’ While the moment in some ways grounds the text, in the sense that it provides a point in space and time on which the reader can focus – though the contents of that point may be shifting and unclear – it also allows for movement. Because the work that Tsing does is continually repositioning moments of friction, they become both small and big, simple and infinitely complex. These moments both include pieces of all that she incorporates in her book, and are made possible by the connections (or one might say accumulation) of the “historical trajectories” she explores. Additionally, using the notion of “friction” enables Tsing to trace the networks and pathways of partial global connection incorporated in and stemming from her ethnographic object with a vocabulary apart from “flows.”
The manner in which she addresses using universals “to identify knowledge that moves – mobile and mobilizing – across localities and cultures…to form bridges, roads, and channels of circulation” (7) becomes effective through a language of friction rather than flows. “Roads are a good image for conceptualizing how friction works,” she suggests, “Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they limit where we go. The ease of travel they facilitate is also a structure of confinement. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding and particularizing.” Examining how people believe in universals, and how interactions are enabled by shared recognitions of universals does not require one to exclusively perceive universals as wholly generalizable nor as achieving meaning only through contingent articulation. She moves past those concerns to focus on how “engaged universals travel across difference and are charged and changed by their travels” (8). By exploring how work can be done through (rather than simply despite) disagreement, gaps, and misunderstanding, Tsing demonstrates how “through friction, universals become practically effective” (8). Working critically in this manner is one way anthropologists can ask broad questions about generalizability (more commonly addressed in other disciplines) while simultaneously engaging with the genealogies behind the terms of their discourse.
Clearly, the anthropological approach I am addressing here is only one of many options, and is problematic in its own ways. Strathern emphasizes that parts and wholes are really only distinguishable analytically through our own descriptions and comparisons, and that scope is never self-evident. While she suggestions the choices involved in delimiting an ethnographic object are often “arbitrary,” it seems that events as ethnographic objects are also constructed in a particular familiar form that is reminiscent of Robert Desjarlais’ notion of “experience.” According to Desjarlais, “discourses of depth, interiority, and authenticity, sensibilities of holism and transcendence, and practices of reading, writing, and storytelling have helped to craft a mode of being known in the modern West as experience: that is, an inwardly reflexive, hermeneutically rich process that coheres through time by way of narrative” (17). As well as enabling different kinds of analytical work, centering a text on an event as object, or using narrative accounts of an encounter or moment strategically in a text, also enables readers (from these texts’ anticipated audiences) to comfortably engage with books as memorable, relatable stories. The positive response to Roxanne Varzi’s incorporation of fiction into her work – despite the poor delivery of that fiction in her lecture series presentation – evidences the power of such storytelling.
It is through storytelling that I found myself responding as a reader to Derluguian’s text. Unlike in Tsing’s book, moments (the most central being Derluguian’s meeting with Musa Shanib) were not self-consciously used to convey a methodological or theoretical stance and were not meant to be the exemplification of an analytical tool and larger project. Because of this I find myself wondering if my response to his text is more due the ways in which I have learned to read than it is due to his intentions as an author, which Derluguian might say (judging from concluding remarks) are really beside the point. In Derluguian’s encounter with Musa Shanib I see more than a disarming, curious account of circuitous global connection that provides an amusing and comfortable entry point into a complicated historical and sociological text. The encounter itself is full of moments of misunderstanding, negotiation, and confusion – one might say “friction” – and is obviously lacking in transparency. However, it is these qualities that simultaneously make the moment possible and propel the conversation forward – being the “kinds of ‘friction [that] inflect motion, offering it different meanings” (Tsing 6) – and also allow us to better understand the relational positions of the different actors and what is at stake.
In contrast to Yurchak, who often seems to dwell on explaining how his approach is not tied to the assumptions of related analyses, Derluguian’s use of world systems theory very clearly positions his materials on a particular plane where we know from the beginning what is considered large and small, simple and complex, what is to be included and excluded. For me, reading his text through the moment that I perceive as central necessarily destabilizes the text, which I found at times overly constrained in by its theoretical framework of relationally, behaviorally, economically, geographically, and politically divided “nomenklatura,” “proletarians,” (e.g. 325) and “sub-proletarians” or “ruling bureaucracy,” “proletarianized citizenry,” and “marginals” (e.g. 326).
In other words, Derluguian lets his use of a world systems approach do a lot of his delimiting and scaling work, and it is that work that also shapes the questions he is able to ask and is interested in asking. “(How) can anthropologists ask big questions?” was an issue that emerged in class discussion. Perhaps this question is a logical response to Derluguian’s text, following his understanding of the big and the small. However, problematizing scope and scale, and their implications for complexity, Strathern might ask, “How do we know what is a small or big question if the big and small are not just relationally contingent but also flexible?” What does it mean to say something is specific and localized or is generalizable? Perhaps Tsing’s use of universals “to identify knowledge that moves” (7) in uneven and incomplete ways and at an awkward gait, whose paths become visible at moments of friction, is one way we can begin to examine how an anthropology of destabilized, shifting globals and locals might look.
6. Partiality in Two Ethnographies
Marilyn Strathern (2004) uses Donna Haraway’s relational image of the cyborg to illustrate what she conceives to be the tensions in and between anthropology, feminism, and ethnography. Part human part machine, the cyborg serves as a model for those relations between subjects, objects, processes and analyses which work together to construct a hypothetical entity that is formed from the interactions between independently conceived and discretely functioning parts (36-7). While Strathern primarily uses the cyborg to articulate the relationships between anthropology and feminism, it serves to underscore her theme of partiality in the construction of ethnography. The cyborg illustrates how postmodern ethnography can aim to “create networks of communication between people who do not require to be bound by appeal to common unity or origin, but who are connected as different, exterior presences to one another” (38). She believes that because the nature of description is inherently partial (xx), partial connections between non-comparable entities must be shown in order to create an effective postmodern ethnography.
Fifteen years after Strathern, two ethnographies have been written that utilize this connection of parts in their efforts to develop theories of social interactions. Anna Tsing (2005) and Alexei Yurchak (2006) each produce texts that, in their own way, operate like a cyborg, integrating disproportionate and disparate aspects to create “a whole image, but not an image of a whole” (36). True to the cyborg, they are comprised of parts that require each other in order to be defined within the context of the narrative. Their approaches to the partial connections that they reveal are quite distinct, yet both are effective in articulating the complicated situations and processes that the texts aim to realize. I am interested in considering how each of these authors conceptualize and use parts and partiality to represent complex tensions and processes, as well as how their use of parts enables them reach their analytic goals.
Tsing employs partiality not only in her choice of ethnographic objects and textual form, but also as a conscious structuring theme which informs each aspect of her study on cultural processes in the Indonesian rainforests. For Tsing, the parts that create her story are each interconnections, historically and culturally produced, and informed and developed by real interactions which take place on many scales. These interconnections consist of a diverse range of subjects, including social groups, cultural forms, social projects, conceptual entities, and places, each of which are partial themselves. She believes that by examining the ways in which these interconnections interact with each other, she will be able to find those spaces of cultural friction which allow change in each entity to occur (x). Though partial, each interconnection is allowed by cultural diversity, a uniting element that results in the differing goals and strategies which enable Tsing’s friction (ix-x). What is more, because her partial entities implicate individuals, groups, ideas, actions, histories, meanings, and power relations, they are imbued with the active power to exclude, enable, compromise, and empower (4). This gives each interconnection a political dimension that Tsing uses to illustrate the uneven character of interconnectedness itself, an unevenness in which she sees the possibility for change.
Tsing is committed to ethnography as an analytical means to understanding the processes and networks between which she seeks friction. It is her use of partial ethnographic objects that allows her to see the complex relations and interactions in which each interconnection is engaged. By taking each entity as necessarily incongruous and contingent, she is able to see the “awkward conjunctures” between them, and examine those critical meeting points that generate movement, disrupture, and spaces that defy common understanding (271). This enables her to highlight the independent existence of each entity without losing the necessary connections it must bear to other process and networks in her story.
Tsing draws her interconnections together in a story that is structured as partially as her ethnographic objects are. Her use of formal fragments is a palpable application of the partiality that she sees in the interconnections. It also serves to distribute the weight of her examined entities, breaking up the narrative flow thus allowing no single story to gain more privilege or momentum than another. As important as her fragmented structuring is the context in which she situates the components of her story. Tsing examines the concept of the universal as a widely informative and mobilizing knowledge category which is contingent on personal enactments and local knowledge, a fragmented interconnection in its own right (1, 7, 270). By taking the universal as neither inherently truthful nor dispensable, she creates a context that allows for the reconstruction of the ways that interactions generate changes in social mobilizations, cultural forms, and universals themselves. These changes necessarily take place through the interconnections that form her story and the places, networks, and processes they engage. Tsing does a masterful job in employing partiality as an effective means of creating an ethnography that is engagingly told and yet only partially resolved.
Yurchak’s conceptualization and organization of parts differs markedly from Tsing’s. Though Yurchak’s entities take varied shapes as social groups, ideologies, processes, and relationships, his parts have a more discrete sense, despite their contingency on the other elements in his historical process. The components of his story produce and are produced by each other and necessarily give rise to new, effective, mutually constitutive entities, which function together to create the conditions that made the collapse of the Soviet system possible yet unexpected (4). His partial entities are not self-consciously porous, but rather intrinsically and necessarily mutable and agentive. It is precisely their ability to change and be changed that allows them to become implicated in the other examined processes and relationships, which together produce the paradoxes of everyday life, meaning, and discourse that emerged in the waning years of Soviet socialism. His object of study is particular: he aims to understand these paradoxes as an aspect of a large, complex, unified historical event. His approach to the production of these paradoxes is, however, the story of unpredictable, emerging processes and their interrelations.
Yurchak is adept in his ability to identify uncontested whole historical situations, such as Stalin’s role in the production of authoritative discourse, and find resulting situations that are partial, incomplete, and formed out of relationships between people, discourse, knowledge, and history. His parts—which can be identified as the forms of and relationships with discourse, a particular deterritorialized public, methods of interpretation, and emergent milieus and lifestyles—are co-created and mutually informed within the context of a new perspective on Soviet history. By focusing on replacing binary dichotomies and on the agentive possibilities offered by performative theories, Yurchak reimagines the relationships between his co-producing entities. This enables creativity, agency, displacement, and unpredictability to inform often-contradictory actions, ideologies, and enactments which together generate a conception of Soviet life that is as optimistic and warm as it is alienating and dull (8). It is the partiality he sees in each process and relationship that enables his new perspective to emerge, full of contradictions and possibilities between these entities.
Yurchak claims that the state’s ideological representations became increasingly normalized as the paradox between the constative and performative aspects of the authoritative discourse intensified (14). Despite this hypernormalization, he looks for the spaces in these representations that were unstable, incomplete, and open for reinterpretation. He finds them inhabited by very personal and often very creative exchanges and engagements, which were created by the discourse and yet which challenged conformity inside of it. He maintains a sense of ethnographic representation by incorporating intimate personal details acquired in fieldwork, which he uses to convey particular knowledge about the processes he identifies. These accounts become integrated as aspects of the story of the deterritorialized generation he examines, and as aspects of the relationships that existed between discourse, knowledge, and engagement. Yurchak employs partiality in order to give new perspective to a complicated historical particularity which rests on paradox and takes shape through contingent and partial processes.
Both authors succeed in satisfying Strathern’s model of the cyborg, an entity composed of contradictory yet mutually productive parts. It is the partial connections between constitutive elements that enable a new kind of hypothetical story to emerge which allows a postmodern ethnography. Tsing does this by treating her parts as permeable entities within the context of the constructed global, allowing a context of connectedness to create communication between distinct yet mutually informed networks and realities. Yurchak does this by finding co-producing elements in his dynamic, contingent processes and relationships which serve together to create the necessary conditions for reaction to an unexpected historical occurrence. Both rely on partiality to produce new perspectives which themselves partially resolve aspects of the larger framework.
Post a Comment
<< Home