October 2019 – On anthropology, education, culture, and more …

On the danger of “indigenous” as an adjective

While looking at archives from my childhood, I found what may be my first “ethnographic” text. It is a few paragraphs, written 60 years ago, when I was 11. It was a kind of school report of the type “what did you do last summer?” I had been on a family trip to South India. We had spent two days in Pondicherry. I wrote that the town was really “two towns”: “la ville indigène et la ville blanche.” On reading this, I first cringed at a language that, soon after I wrote this, I learned was an echo of French colonial racism at its most common sense and, most importantly, was not to be used again. And then I recognized that my use of “indigène” might not be insulting any more. The connotations of the word appear to have flipped as it may now be the preferred term for those who, in Pondicherry, were not “white.” Even so, I have mentioned to some of my students and colleagues my continuing discomfort with the word “indigenous,” particularly when it is used as an adjective rather than as a quote from some of the people about whom my colleagues are writing. The final trigger for this blog post was a review of a book about the East Asia Company in the New York Times (Morris Sept. 12, 2019). I read it at about the same time I read my account of Pondicherry and I found myself propelled back to 1960. I have not read the book but Ian Morris, the reviewer, wrote as it were a matter of course among the sophisticated readers of the New York Times that one could talk about “the indigenous Mughal Empire” and wonder whether changing anything would have permitted “native rulers” to survive.

“Indigenous Empire,” “native rulers,” what do the adjectives hide? In this case, they hide the history of invaders from Central Asia, descendants of Gengis Khan, imposing their rule on a population they defeated through military superiority, and doing this at about the same time Europeans were imposing their own rule in the Americas. The “Mughals” (they also go by other names) were actually the next to last (so far?) of many invaders of India. These included, a few centuries earlier, those who institutionalized in India a major religion “native” to the Arab peninsula but with world-wide ambition. Like the other religion also “native” to the northern part of the peninsula (what is now “Palestine” or “Israel”), it did eventually spread around the globe. Both of these religions had actually arrived in India centuries earlier. As for Hinduism, the religion most specifically associated with India, there is every evidence that it came to the place along with other invaders who, several thousand years earlier, imposed it, along with their language, on populations that were already there—or at least had been there for the preceding tens of thousands of years when members of what some call the most “invasive species” on earth crossed the Khyber Pass on their way east (Dennell 2017), as so many did in the following millenia.

All anthropologists will credit Boas for a negative achievement: demolishing the argument that “race” is something that could explain human variability. They are more reluctant to credit him for a positive achievement, particularly when they summarize it as “culture.” But Boas argued for much more than “culture.” More subtly he argued that humans make their doings “suitable” to the conditions they face and thereby making themselves a-new—not reproduction but history. Thus, as I teach it, Boas’ most important work consisted in making those interested in human variability notice matters like “diffusion,” “borrowing,” “appropriation,” etc. as well as the making of that which is borrowed “suitable.” As Ruth Benedict later noticed when she wrote about “islanding” (Varenne 2013), interaction with some “other” may actually lead to a refusal rather than a borrowing. Which is why I now wonder about the act that must precede borrowing, and that is noticing (or being made to notice) some trait (objects, ritual, discourse) as potentially suitable. First the encounter and then (sequentiality here is central) either “making it suitable” through forms of “appropriation” or rejecting it (possibly violently). Given all this, I am sympathetic to the anthropological critique of any kind of claim to the “authenticity” of some trait as if any could be “owned” by any population and copyrighted as another form of capitalistic property.

But, and this a big “but,” anthropologists, in their own encounters with the other human beings they are concerned with, do meet people who make a claim to ownership of some trait, to its authenticity as theirs, and to the subsequent claim that all others should respect this claim. This is a major dilemma for anthropologists. In many cases they feel obligated to respect such claims and broadcast them (say, if they are made by people who claim “the Amazon”). In other cases they feel obligated to “de-construct” them (say, if they are made by people who claim “Germany”). In both cases they are caught reconstructing the very dichotomy within humanity anthropologists have been fighting against (and criticizing each other for reproducing). There is what “we” do (as the form is used by the New York Times when criticizing the United States or Europe) and then there is “them,” the “indigenous” people whom “we” respect, or deconstruct.

There may be no way out of the dilemma. The best advice I can give students and colleagues, is to tell them that, if the people they get to know have appropriated the (European) word “indigenous” for themselves, and made it suitable in their political struggles, then we have no choice but to report on this claim in our ethnographic writing without criticizing it as appropriate, or not.

Thus my discouragement at the October 2019 issue of Anthropology News featuring “Indigenous Languages” and, not so implicitly, contrasting them to non-indigenous languages (as if there were any), thereby encouraging students and journalists to dichotomize.

At the same time, we must take care not to “theorize” the word and transform it into some ideal-typical (in the Weberian sense) “it” that might then be studied across populations who may not even make the claim, possibly leading to a book titled “The Mind of Indigenous Man” (to paraphrase Boas at his most easily criticizable). Minimally, we must fear any use of the term, particularly as an adjective. In the review which triggered this piece, to qualify the Mughal Empire as “indigenous” added nothing but might mislead readers into not noticing its own historicity (and their own). The same for the word “native” (which is of course but another way of saying “indigenous”). Those who inhabited the Red Fort in New Delhi when the East Asia Company attacked it may have been born there, but that is the least of what makes them interesting.

References

Dennell, Robin 2017 “Human Colonization of Asia in the Late Pleistocene The History of an Invasive Species” in Current Anthropology, vol. 51, 17: S383–S396.

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Who imagines nations?

I remain surprised by the continuing success of Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities ([1983] 1991). When it is was first brought to my attention I thought that there was not much there since, “everybody knew, or should know” that something like “nationalism” was a cultural construction, appearing at a certain point in time, with antecedents of course, and an ongoing evolution. While many political actors of the past two centuries have asserted that, say, “France” is an entity with full ontological reality, any anthropologist, steeped in the critique of “religion,” “social structure,” etc., would work from the stance that 1) “nation” is a native term among certain populations at a certain time and that 2) “nation” should not be reified any more than terms like “taboo,” “totem,” “caste,” etc. This would then lead to research into the actual deployment of “nation” in performances of all types, and particularly in all attempts by the States which claim “nation” to impose certain matters on recalcitrant populations, both inside and outside the boundaries imagined as those of “France,” “Germany,” or …

Recent anthropological theoretical developments would add that nationalism, to the extent that we take the metaphor of “construction” seriously, needs to be repaired, if not re-constructed, on an ongoing basis given 1) inevitable flaws in the construction and 2) the wearing down of the construction as people’s experiences with the deployment of the term will inevitably lead them to transform it in their local practices. As Lévi-Strauss put is in his inimitable way ,all systems of classification (and nationalism certainly is one) “tend to be dismantled like a palace swept away upon the flood, whose parts, through the effect of currents and stagnant waters, obstacles and straits, come to combined in a manner other than that intended by the architect” ([1962] 1966: 232). Thus the State must continually teach [nation] if [nation] is to be a thing with hoped-for consequences. In my own life, I started being taught France as a pupil in the elementary schools of 1950s France that still used books published in the 1930s and earlier. We were taught, again and again, that while France was eternal (or at least 2000 years old…), it only got to be was it was to be because of the heroic acts of individuals and kings, many of whom otherwise horrible fellows. There was Pépin-le-Bref, Jeanne d’Arc, Louis XI, Louis XIV. And there was the terrible genius of those who, in 1793, defeated the “Girondins” who were arguing for a decentralized France with semi-autonomous provinces. They lost their heads as the “Jacobins” won and established the centralized France the Third Republic eventually perfected (as I was taught even though we were then in the Fourth Republic soon to be replaced by the Fifth). I suspect that those who wrote the textbooks were specifically guided, and carefully watched,
by generations of government ministers. I am sure they expected us, pupils, to do more than repeat what we were being taught in the ongoing examinations of our “knowledge.” They must also have expected that we would accept this teaching as, we were told, our grand-uncles had done when they went singing to their death in 1914-18 to the greater glory of the French nation.

However, in the 1950s, many, if not most, pupils of French schools learned something else: nationalism had led to the deaths of too many Europeans over the earlier half century. What now was being taught, by the media and many if not most politicians as well probably by school children (and most probably teachers also) among each other, was the need to join the effort of the few who, in the late 1940s, had starting constructing something that would not be ‘France’ anymore. That which was being constructed had no name or category–or rather it had many from the “European Coal and Steel Community” to the “European Economic Community’ to what is now the “European Union.” Note the shift from ‘Community’ to ‘Union’. I am sure there was a lot of “discourse” around that!
Whatever “it” may now be, this construction is 1) not a nation, 2) very much an act of imagination leading to the constitutions of a massive assemblage of things (laws, regulations, etc.), 3) so consequential in the life of the five hundred million people it has now caught that they keep contesting this or that law or regulation. Contestation then leads to responses by those with authority to gently oblige, and maybe even coerce, the people by further entangling them in ties more and more difficult to cut (just ask the British!).

All that seems obvious to me. It may have been obvious to Anderson too who notes in passing that there are those who see nationalism as a “pathology” (p. 5) and who fear all attempts at reifying it as a concept of universal significance with political consequences about the future organization of human beings. As a political actor myself, I share these fears and will argue that any who read Anderson positively must not dismiss them. But the anthropological problem is elsewhere: Anderson is never clear as to the “subjects” who constructed nationalism. He shifts from the passive voice “the nation is imagined” (p. 7) with no indication as who is doing the imagining, to—and this is worse from my point of view—the active voice where “nations imagine themselves” (p. 7). Those who, in France, recently started using the French flag as a way to contest French State policy are imagining. The State and media who criticized them as “right-wing white nationalists” are also imagining actively and consequentially. This acrimonious “conversation” that is anything but peaceful has to be the focus of anthropological research.

“Nation” can be an index to a set of performances (discourses, etc.) but it cannot be treated as an actor (though perhaps Latour might argue otherwise, but more subtly). Anthropologists, particularly, when working among populations where the assemblage of stuff “nation” indexes (or is icon for) is still alive, must specify who is speaking, to whom, in order to achieve what, etc. Anthropologists, particularly, must be attuned that the imagination of nation has always be contested and resisted. In France, one could still find Girondins in the late 19th century fighting a loosing battles against those who were making France with all the policing authority of the State to, for example, coerce French citizens to speak French. And anthropologists who work in contemporary Europe cannot ignore the paradoxical imagination of the “European Union” as something that may not be named (unless it is as the “Schengen Area” to which one is “welcomed” when landing at the Paris airports).
Some of the more marginal actors in the European ideological revolt against nationalism did make the argument, and continue to make it, that Europe should indeed “imagine” itself as such—that is, very actively, produce the texts, discourses, symbols and rituals that might eventually convince the 500 million that they are indeed one. See de Rougemont (1968 [1966] and Varenne (1993) for more on this. The grammatical subject of the acts, the “we” who act, all but act-ively disappear France, Germany, etc., from much State displays is, of course, very much a State subject, acting through its authorized agents, imagining itself threatened by the lingering nationalism of the only groups that may be politely criticized by State agencies, the media, etc., those who in France or Germany claim the reality of the “French” or the “Germans” against the claims not only of those who have moved into Europe more or less recently but also of those who know lead the [EU] and, with great bureaucratic efficiency, control the writing of the text books, design curricula and pedagogies, fund performances and displays.

Coda (added on October 10, 2019)

To paraphrase Latour: “[nations] are not silent things, but rather tha provisional product of a constant uproar made by the millions of contradictory voices about what is a [nation] and who pertains to what” (2005: 31)

References

Anderson, Benedict 1991 Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Revised Edition.. New York: Verso. (First published in 1983)

Latour, Bruno 2005 Reassembling the social. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lévi–Strauss, Claude 1966 [1962] The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rougemont, Dennis de 1968 [1966] The idea of Europe. New York: Macmillan.

Varenne, Hervé 1993 “The question of European nationalism.” in Cultural change and the new Europe.. Edited by T. Wilson and M. E. Smith. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. pp. 223-240

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on communities with communities

For some reason, my anthropological imagination, these past months, has circled around renewed wonder about that reality indexed by words like “community” (polity, unum, cohort, congregation, plenum, etc.). This was first triggered as I tried to distance myself temporarily from what was bringing me to the neurological intensive care unit of a Large Urban Teaching Hospital. I knew enough to wonder what host of human beings were needed to keep my wife alive hooked to multiple machines in constant need of re-adjustment by this, but not necessarily by that, human being–with instructions by some to others to NOT do this or that.

So, I stood by the door, looking out. What struck me were the huddles of intense interaction and the spaces and silences between these. There had been the huddle who had greeted me with concerned stances, explained stuff I could barely register, asked me to sign various documents I did not read. They had introduced themselves as those who would operate on my wife—though I only found out later that their leader, the one with the ultimate authority (and responsibility) was not there. That huddle, I never saw again. But by the 2nd or 3rd day, I could identify recurring huddles. There was one I labeled “physicians” (students/residents/interns—clearly a divided community, even if they huddled together on the floor). There was one or more huddle made up of those I labeled “the nursing staff” (I discovered later that they too were divided into multiple units). There was a small one made by the police who were guarding one of the rooms. There was the janitorial staff. They were all in view of each other, often quite close physically. And yet they remained distinct. I could sense differences in the tenor of the speech each used (I was amused listening to flirting among the young cops…). But always they maintained boundaries which, I know from every research on the matter, require ongoing work to NOT acknowledge one another’s presence in the performance of their parallel duties—even when these duties required asking the other to move their bodies as happened regularly when floors had to be cleaned, or examinations done.

This led me to wonder about one limitation in the model of the “community of practice.” When I teach Lave, I focus on the power of her model to deal with classical problems in social structural analysis: the problem of the grounds of participation to a position (usually resolved by invoking “socialization”), and the problem of movement across the structure (usually ignored). Lave taught us that socialization (“learning”) follows participation (rather than being a prerequisite) and that all participation moves people. I knew that Lave was cagey about the boundary issue. She and I once had a friendly disagreement about this as she asserted that boundaries were not “real” when I countered that, of course they were, though always in need of repair. Maintaining boundaries is hard work. I have since mused about the “gravity wells” that some communities produce as they induce people to seek participation. In that metaphor, boundaries would be “event horizon” beyond which one cannot ever escape, in their future, “having been a participant” (even if one has quit, or been thrown out).

What I had not noticed is that all these theoretical developments were made in term of research in what are treated as just one entity, be it alcoholics in meeting, tailors, midwives, etc. So, of course, physicians in hospital training would be a classic “community of practice” (see dissertation by Yan-Di Chang (2017)). Nurses, police, even the janitorial staff could be advantageously looked at as polities of some sort where legitimate participants move into ever fuller positions. The paper by Magolda and Delman on campus custodians (2016) could easily be interpreted in that fashion. The question I now have to ask is: what happens when nurses, police, physicians and janitors move side by side? How are we to model the work of maintaining boundaries, particularly when the actual bodies arrange themselves in a limited physical space? To build on Yeats’ wonder about the individual and the dance, one must also wonder how, in ballroom dancing at least, the couples do not bump into each other.

Though of course, some time they do bump. On a hospital floor there are those who have not yet been in that dance even though they are now fully caught in it. Most salient probably among the newbies are probably the next of kin, in their anxious multitudes. They are in the paradoxical position of not “belonging” to any of the communities even as these communities are very ostensibly about them. I know what can happen to newbies for having been one in, eventually, five such ensembles of communities of practice, in the various “floors” and “services” of hospitals and the like. Newbies like myself keep addressing any person that passes by in often desperate efforts to get an authoritative voice to tell them something and give them hope. But how is this newbie to know which human being to address or evaluate this or that person’s authority to speak/act? This has to be a problem for all the dancers on the floor. Minimally, they must spend time instructing the newbie about who can say what about whom. They probably must resist the temptation to explain what they may not explain, or give interpretations about each other that would break the boundaries. One nurse, in one hospital, did make negative comments about one of the doctors treating my wife. I was surprised, not by the fact that she had such opinions, but by the fact that she told us about them, when, I suspect, she could have been sanctioned for doing this. As anthropologists well know, custodians may be best source of information about an institution, nurses about doctors, students and junior faculty about the elders who may, or may not, allow them to move into a fuller position. But this only makes more salient the ongoing work to maintaining boundaries against recurring challenges.