OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY

I meant to mention previously that we can observe, after a decline and almost dismissal of ideas of imperialism, dependency, and colonialism in the 1990s academic and anthropological literature to be specific, one can see a return of the terms “imperialism,” “empire,” and “colonialism” in the titles of mainstream journal articles. It’s nice to see reality being welcomed back into the discussion. In some parts of the world, colonialist reality was never marginalized. Here are some links and quotes to current newspaper debates concerning colonialism and tradition in contemporary Africa:

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The rebirth of Africa means discarding foreign religions
by Sentletse Diakanyo
Mail & Guardian (South Africa), July 20, 2008

The traditional religions of most Africans altered significantly as a result of colonial rule. Colonial rulers interfered with the African way of worship. Where the modes of worship conflicted with those of the colonialists, restrictions were placed on religious practice. African cultures were seen as primitive and were gradually impoverished through neglect and suppression by colonial hooligans.

The rebirth of Africa has become even more urgent under growing recolonialisation of Africa under the false guise of globalisation. Africans need to reclaim their religion and culture, and discard many of those which were imposed on them, by embracing Afrocentricism as the essential element of the African renaissance as popularised by President Thabo Mbeki in recent times.

See the tremendous debate that follows beneath the article, almost every imaginable position is voiced, and few appear to be in favour of the argument above. The author of the piece is himself a Formula One race car driver, and that too became the subject of some comments.

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African traditions corrupted
by Keith Ross
IOL (South Africa), July 21, 2008

African traditions have been corrupted over many years by the influence of Western values, with its emphasis on materialism.

The corruption is particularly marked in the urban areas of South Africa, where there has also been a breakdown of the family as the vehicle of traditional values.

This was one of the conclusions drawn in SAfm Radio’s After Eight Debate on the topic: “Are African cultures being corrupted?”

The debating panel felt traditional culture would have to be restored by a conscious and broad-based effort, through the family and all levels of education.

‘To be poor in the world is to be the doormats of people’

“We should accept that the culture of any people is dynamic and we should not be afraid of its dynamism,” said Dr Mongane Serote, executive chairperson of the Freedom Park Trust.

“But Africans as a whole on the continent went through what was almost like nuclear war on us in terms of ideas,” he said.

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Mugabe, Britain and the abuses of anti-colonialism (version 1)
by Priyamvada Gopal
ZNet, June 29, 2008

Somehow, this version seems to have more balanced criticism of British political and media hypocrisy in their war against Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, than does the version (below) published by The Guardian in the UK. I wonder if that was the point in publishing “the longer version” at another source? Given that bias, underplayed by The Guardian, I am emphasizing the comments here that are critical of Britain’s stance:

Were the BBC and Channel 4 to show as many close-ups of injured and dead Iraqis as they do of Mugabe’s maimed victims, criticism of violence against innocents might be somewhat more evenly distributed than it currently is. The British government turns accusatory fingers in Zimbabwe’s direction while Mugabe shouts back anti-colonial slogans. It is a perfect symbiosis, a mutually convenient embrace of denunciation, with each party laying claim to the higher moral ground. The only innocents, however, are ordinary Zimbabweans. …

Britain’s persistent refusal to acknowledge its own colonial legacies is contradictory. It reneged on its commitments to the land reform programme claiming, in Claire Short’s words, that there were no ‘links to former colonial interests’ while nevertheless concerning itself with the fate of the white farmers who represent these interests. Alongside an extremely selective use of human rights discourse, such contradictions mean that Mugabe’s denunciations have some truth to them even if their main purpose is to detract from the ruling elite’s own depravities. While Africa is ostensibly central to Britain’s international development agenda, the emphasis has always been on the paternalism of aid rather than acknowledging and making reparations for the economic devastation wrought by colonialism. Rarely do condemnations of land seizure, violence and intimidation extend back to the time Matabeleland came under British rule. This too was accompanied by the seizure of vast swathes of fertile land by a handful of British farmers while large numbers of Ndebele and Shona people were killed or forced into labour. Brutal modern regimes in that part of the globe didn’t begin with Mugabe.

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Mugabe has recolonised his people (version 2)
We should recognise that Zimbabwe was brutalised by colonisation. But Mugabe liberated his country only to install another tyranny

by Priyamvada Gopal
The Guardian (UK), Friday, June 27, 2008

Mugabe and fellow African liberationists should reacquaint themselves with the real meaning of anti-colonialism. Having resisted the anti-poor agendas of international monetary institutions and initiated necessary land reforms, Mugabe has also refused all responsibility for those many failures of his rule not reducible to the colonial past.

A party of freedom fighters has degenerated into thugs brandishing liberationist sticks to starve and brutalise an entire population. Real anti-colonialists like Gandhi and Fanon always insisted that freedom was not about replacing the white tyrant with the black one, whereas Mugabe has essentially recolonised his people. Indeed, the very techniques of suppression and intimidation deployed by the Zimbabwean leader, a knight of the British Empire until Wednesday, were taught him by the colonial masters he professes to despise. Quick to claim credit for spreading parliamentary democracy, Britain is less forthcoming about acknowledging the legacy of authoritarian rule also left behind by its empire.

I must say that I like Gopal’s analytical approach, embracing both Fanon and Gandhi, and not aiming for “balance” as much as an anti-colonial perspective that is directed at both external and internal neo-colonialists. Because she is equally critical of Robert Mugabe and Gordon Brown, some might mistake that as a middling position, which in that very limited sense it is.

What I also appreciate about Gopal’s approach is that she reminds us of the legacy of British authoritarian rule. One must recall in the Caribbean context how Britain’s colonies were directly administered from Britain, hence their designation as Crown Colonies, without any effort, any pretense, to allow locals to practice democracy. Token opposition in local legislative assemblies was usually opposition for the sake of opposition, there was no need to be responsible to an electorate, and no role to be played in governance. The colonial governors themselves were not slow to exact merciless physical punishment against their non-white critics. From that, a rapid transition to “self-rule,” with a colonial historical context and cultural repertoire of power exercised through beatings. Why massacres of political opponents are not the norm is incredible testimony to the power of the “formerly” colonized to escape the cultural bindings of the recent past.

True scientific knowledge, on the contrary, demands abandonment to the very life of the object
– G.W.F. Hegel, Preface, The Phenomenology of Mind

Discourse of all kind is heavily embedded with speech that has previously occurred, typically in the form of the first person direct quotation.
– Joel Sherzer, quoted in Michael Taussig (1993, p. 109), quoted here.

Another installment of “Monday Morning Madness,” a double feature in fact, that begins with a song/performance that I very much enjoyed the first time I witnessed it on Dimanche Gras in 1992 in Trinidad, during the Calypso Monarch finals in Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain. I was pretty sure that I was one of very few people who thought the performance by Singing Sonia was enjoyable and distinctive, so I am thankful that a Trinidadian “youtuber” seems to have picked this for uploading, among the dozens and even hundreds of candidates from years gone by.

And, as seen below, I think a lot is going on in Sonia’s performance, teaching anthropology and social theory at every step.

Sonia in the Shadow of the Mighty Finds Originality

The ever charming Singing Sonia performs a piece called, “Professional Advice” — the advice coming from The Mighty Shadow, who is the author of the song, and this is just the start of the tension between learning and creation, between originality and mimesis. First let me say the performance was, as far as I can tell, unprecedented, and nothing similar has been done since. The melody has a Ska beat, with some of the big brass of modern calypso, featuring dramatic bursts that might remind one of theme music for a James Bond film, interspersed with a staccato rhythm and an innocent looking bird dance to suit. During calypso monarch finals, and given the finite number of standard calypso melodies (and only one for ex tempo performances — you can get a sample of that here), yes, definitely not part of the crowd. Also “original” was the fact that she was impersonating another calypsonian, and doing it very well, adopting his voice, his mannerisms, his dance. Singing Sonia did not win the crown, by the way, so perhaps the judges frowned on innovation, even when it bore the imprimatur of a figure as great as The Mighty Shadow, who put in an appearance in the performance itself, as seen in the first video below.

The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power. In an older language, this is “sympathetic magic,” and I believe it as necessary to the very process of knowing as it is to the construction and subsequent naturalization of identities.
– Michael Taussig (1993, pp. xiii-xiv)

First, about the singing. Sonia sings with her hands, so one should look at them as she sings — they punctuate. Note also the very smooth voices of her backup singers, who play in the role of the girls in the circle … I have yet to explain that one. Sonia sings in two voices, mirrored by her split costume. On her right, she sings mimicking Shadow, the darker side of her (without suggesting any moral quality here). On her left, she sings in her own voice, the lighter side, and she seems to have chosen a dress that resembles a wedding gown.

The chanter chanting creates and occupies a strange position, inside and outside. …This is not to be confused with liminality because it is both positions at one and the same time.
– Michael Taussig (1993, p. 111)

Sonia has become the shadow of The Shadow, a corporeal photograph, and in that there is magic, for as Taussig tells us, among the Cuna of Panama their notion of “purpa” (spiritual doubles) includes the shadow and the photograph (1993, p. 101).

Sonia even borrows Shadow’s “ay-yay-yay” line, singing it in his heavy voice, and then alternating with her own broad voice. She claims to be learning, to be taking the professional advice, and boasts of her originality, and does this by dividing herself, and always seeking out her master. The mimetic faculty, as Taussig (1993, p. xviii) argues, involves the compulsion to become the Other — Sonia is here performing an attempt at shamanic / anthropological crossing into the Other, into the Shadow. By imitating Shadow, she acquires Shadow.

the chanter chants [herself] into the scene. [She] exists not just as a subject but also as a mimeticised Other. In this way, as both chanter and person chanted about, as demonstrator and demonstrated, [she] creates the bridge between original and copy that brings a new force, the third force of magical power, to intervene in the human world.
– Michael Taussig (1993, p. 106)

Is Sonia’s performance a statement on the classic education pattern of the colonial, West Indian, “Afro-Saxon”? Or is it something much more fundamental?

Now the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically correct, socially created, and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. We act and have to act as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real and that all around the ground lay firm.
– Michael Taussig (1993, p. xvii)

Second, I would ask the viewer to pay attention to Sonia’s dance. Her dance visually mimics the staccato of the music, but also the famous up-and-down bounce of her mentor, The Mighty Shadow, who in a culture of elaborate “wining” restricted his movements to a kind of skip-rope style, going against the grain. She takes that on for this song, and adds a dance routine of her own, performed when she is not singing. I am calling it a bird dance since it seems to mimic some of the movements of a bird. She dances around the stage like a lone, lost, little birdie, her little wings attempting to fly, and look at how she steps out in the darkness of the stage looking for orientation, scouting for her parent. The dance also conveys innocence, and Sonia never ceases to smile. There is no point in seeking and being open to advice if you do not have some “innocence.”

One of the key elements of the song is the repetition of “girl, show me your motion!” People who went to school in the Caribbean would immediately recognize where that line comes from. It is about learning and performing in the school yard, encouraged by peer spectator-participants, in a ring game. What happens is that little school girls, as shown in the second of today’s videos, form a circle, with one girl in the centre. Those forming the circle sing: “There’s a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la, and she looks like a sugar and a plum, plum, plum. Girl show me your motion!” Then the girl in the centre is supposed to make some physical movement, a motion.

Protean Sonia appears split into two, one side her master, the other side her emergent self. In her dance at the end, as the crowd erupts in applause as Shadow appears on stage, she dances over to meet him. They then part — he takes the centre of the ring, conveniently provided by the logo of Carib beer. She dances around the perimeter. From the girl in the ring she has now become a moon orbiting Shadow, a satellite that is half illuminated by him, copier revolving around copied. The bird dance has now turned into a playful enactment of centre and periphery. The divided self, resulting from a child that has undergone mentoring, is one that exists in a state of tension between originality and mimicry. The blurred dividing line between learning and mimicry places a question mark over authenticity, originality, and even sovereignty. The self becomes impossible without the other, by viewing oneself in the eyes of the other. And their relationship spans the spectrum as tutoring begins to resemble fathering which then mutates into a subtle courtship, and finally a partnership (the collaboration between the two artists). And courtship is not far fetched here, as we shall see below.

Shadow and Sonia do not teach social theory, they chart it out in dance, and practice it through sung metaphor. And as Taussig argues, they show us one critical motion: that any representational act cannot possibly be achieved without the intervention of the mimetic faculty. It also puts the currently dominant, orthodox notions of “copying” in a different light, revealing them as pompous misunderstandings that arise from aspiring monopolists who can never own that which comes distributed to begin with.

Sonia, show me your motion

The quality is not the best, yours ears will hopefully filter out the static after some time, and you may need to increase the volume.

Pulling you this way and that, mimesis plays this trick of dancing between the very same and the very different. An impossible but necessary, indeed and everyday affair, mimesis registers both sameness and difference, of being like, and of being Other. Creating stability from this instability is no small task, yet all identity formation is engaged in this habitually bracing activity in which the issue is not so much staying the same, but maintaining sameness through alterity.
– Michael Taussig (1993, p. 129)

Brown Girl in the Ring

Alan Lomax, J.D. Elder and Bess Lomax Hawe’s There’s a Brown Girl in the Ring, featuring an anthology of Eastern Caribbean song games, suggest that ring games are children’s precursor to adult courtship. Indeed, the second video, a Jamaican one, shows the “grown up girls,” doing altogether different motions, and you can see examples of the Butterfly Dance in that video. Lomax, Elder & Hawe explained that in the ring game the players form a ring by holding hands, then one girl goes into the middle of the ring and dances around to the song, exactly like we see Sonia do at the end of her video. At some point, the girl in the centre is then told “show me your motion”, and she does her favourite dance moves as explained above. The authors here note that she may be asked “show me your partner”, in which case she picks a friend to join her in the circle. In Sonia’s case above, she picked Shadow.

There has been some discussion about the use of the phrase “brown girl.” Some think this is an internalization of the colour-coded hierarchy inherited from colonialism. Others argue, that in such a festive, positive, joyful setting, “brown girl” enhances self-esteem. In fact, it helps to form solidarity as well, by exclusion — no mention of “white girl.”

Brown Girl in the Ring

References

Hegel, G.W.F. (1807). Phenomenology of Mind.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/phindex.htm

Lomax, Alan; Elder, J.D.; and Lomax Hawe Bess. (1997). There’s a Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Random House.

Taussig, Michael. (1993). Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge.

News of a link, kindly sent to me by a commenter, relating to a previous post here on Caribbean responses to events in Zimbabwe. I have forgotten to link to the overall site before, www.raceandhistory.com, a Trinidadian umbrella for a mass of websites, and certainly one of the best developed websites in Trinidad, in terms of depth of interesting content and scope.

Zimbabwe Watch is a part of that site that is worth seeing, for alternative views on what has been happening in Zimbabwe.

Yes, I do devote a few hours each week to randomly trawling blogworld, and when one blog seems to melt into another it is sometimes something as little as an eye-catching design or a “strange” blog name that arrests my attention.

MONKEY SMASHES HEAVEN is certainly an arresting name, and blog, both in terms of the heated text and the unique visuals. The blogger(s) at MSH identify themselves as communist. This is an extract of their philosophical statement:

“We revolutionaries are monkey kings. We will turn the world upside down — the messier, the better…”
- Red Guard leaflet

Monkey Smashes Heaven is a journal dedicated to smashing the old world to smithereens. The old world is rotten to the core. The First World as a whole exploits, rapes and plunders the whole planet and its peoples. It’s time to turn the tables.

Do they mean it is time for the “third world” to rape, plunder, and exploit what they call the first world? I am not so sure that means much of an improvement then. I certainly like their fighting spirit, and their discontent with the current state of affairs, but there are a lot of good reasons for even a committed Marxist-Leninist, which I am not, to take serious exception with the old Soviet model which seems to attract their sympathies. Nevertheless, I will read their blog and try to keep an open mind. I have not yet understood why much of it seems focused on Nepal, for example, with a detour into “KKKolumbus Day” (this ought to be the official spelling, but then that would mean keeping the day) so there is a lot more for me to learn.

Given the particularities of the way Jamaican creole English is pronounced, the word education often sounds like head-decay-shun. I once heard a Guyanese professor claim that this pronunciation, in this case, was more than just coincidental: it was a critical rejection of the formal school system by some Rastafarians in Jamaica, given what they saw as the continuing mental colonization being perpetrated and perpetuated in those schools. Volumes, novels, and decades of discussions and debates have been devoted to the subject of Caribbean education, and this is not the place, nor am I the one to do the reprise of all the material, much of it critical with famous examples including learning the history of Oliver Cromwell and Sir Walter Raleigh rather than Sam Sharpe or Paul Bogle, or reading about farms in temperate climates, or poems about nightingales, and so forth. Yet, and yet, there has been widespread recognition in the Anglophone Caribbean that education is the path to “success,” especially among working class urban African descendants, with notable success stories of achievement through education being figures such as Eric Williams. Indeed, it seems that the Anglophone Caribbean has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world.

But, I am not convinced, not entirely anyway.

I recently viewed some documentaries about Canadians overseas teaching poor children and orphans in India how to read, and these teachers were really devoting themselves, body and soul, spending their life savings, changing their lifestyle, and so forth. Seeing the little children reading big pink and blue letters accompanying pictures in their books, their little fingers dragged across each letter as they read each word … prompted me to think some gloomy thoughts.

I thought of people I have known, living in rural areas, whether in Canada, Trinidad, or Central America, who almost seemed to boast that they had no education at all, and lived full and happy lives and had everything they needed and wanted. I then think of these urban children in India, with nothing, no land, no food that they grow for themselves, the exact opposite of self-sufficiency, and the perfect picture of dependency.

Education, centred in cities, in urban civilizations, post-hunting and gathering, post-nomadic, accompanying the rise of inequality and tyranny. If we want to talk about the social context of education, we have to keep in mind the conditions under which education became education, and when it became mandatory. Those children in India need literacy if they are to have any chance of succeeding, of surviving, in modern India — and while that is almost certainly true, is it an endorsement of literacy as good in itself?

Few would question the value of literacy, not even the Taliban (who rejected literacy for females only), people of the book. Literacy is a tool of the dispossessed and displaced, those urban refugees who are born as “citizens” without any stake, without any basis in their nation, divorced and cut off from any independent access to resources of their own. Citizenship comes without land, and with lots of dependency on institutional structures, on wages, on rented apartments, and so forth.

What strikes me as being endlessly ironic is that “development workers” will then take the tools of the refugees, the dispossessed, the urban landless, into rural areas, to peasants and claim that literacy is for their good. To me this is the equivalent of someone who lives in a tent in a refugee camp telling someone with a mansion that if they want to improve their lives they ought to try on a tent for size. It’s always amazing how “we” can make the “fruits” of dispossession and displacement look like “progress.”

So filled with anti-imperialist scorn on this blog, but when it comes to Mugabe, and the possible cooptation of anti-imperial discourse as justification for oppressive rule, then this blog suddenly goes silent. And why is that?

No apologies here, I cannot comment on everything and everyone in the world, but having said that I will confess that I have deliberately avoided the subject of Robert Mugabe on this blog, as much as it touches on issues that are near and dear to this blog: independence, liberation, anti-colonialism, post-colonialism, and power.

Given that much of the “information” I receive about Mugabe comes from Western media, I have reason to distrust the picture that has been painted, and I simply do not know enough about Zimbabwe to comment, and perhaps neither do BBC reporters who “cover” Zimbabwe all the way in Johannesburg. And who is this Morgan Tsvangirai? Media reports never seem to describe or discuss his emergence, his background, in what he is grounded, and what role if any foreign governments may play in supporting him. But when George W. Bush proclaims the recent election in Zimbabwe to be a “sham election,” I have enough reason to balk, to switch off, and to give Mugabe the benefit of the doubt. After all, Mugabe has all the right enemies to suggest that the story is more complicated than one of a power-hungry dictator and a heroically democratic opponent. Finally, I confess that I am biased by where I first heard of reports of Mugabe’s persecution of white farmers: I was still living in Australia then, and right wing media hearts were bleeding for these expropriated rich white folk who owned obscenely vast tracts of Zimbabwe, even going so far as to urge granting them refugee status in Australia, while ignoring black asylum seekers from other parts of Africa, and while those fleeing the Taliban were mocked by the immigration minister as “queue jumpers” and bundled off to Nauru, or sequestered in detention camps in the Australian outbacks, like criminal “wogs”. As I said, Mugabe seems to have the kind of enemies that dignify him, enough to give me reason for pause and consider giving him the benefit of the doubt and to remain very skeptical of the media, the kind which asserted the “fact” that Iraq had WMDs in 2003.

What I am more interested in here, and closer to home, is how the image of Mugabe is being handled in the Caribbean. On the blog, My View of JamDown from Up So, a post titled, “Is it just a cartoon?” features an astounding cartoon from The Jamaica Observer:

The blogger, diatribalist (Dwight Dunkley, a Jamaican in New York) makes some excellent observations:

It’s one thing when white supremacists on YouTube post a racist comments under videos of news from Zimbabwe implying that black people are unfit to run our own countries. It is another thing entirely when a black cartoonist, in a country where over 90% of the population is black, chooses to portray an African leader as an ape [MF: as King Kong to be exact] - and to put the words “Black man time” on the ape as if to imply that the problems taking place in Zimbabwe are due to the color of the leader.

Not only that, he links this image to the racist undertones of all King Kong images, and makes some useful comments on the inherent anti-black stigma that has been internalized and reinforced by Jamaican media, inherited from British colonialism … and this is 2008. So much for “change.” And so much for those who would challenge the validity of the generalization that black identity is still the most stigmatized identity in the Caribbean.

On a Trinidadian blog, instead, Ramblings and Reason (not to be confused with my Trini friend GirlBlue’s Rantings and Ramblings), a post on today’s date titled “Hail Robert Mugabe” features this sign on a street in Trinidad:

It is by the Beetham Estate, what is in fact a sprawling garbage dump in which people live and work. This is a controversial sign, which in some ways reinforces the racial supremacy message of the Jamaican cartoon above, this time presumably not to lampoon it. Ramblings and Reason does not take kindly to the sign:

I’ve heard opinions on why Mugabe is so popular. Land ownership is an emotional subject for Africans because the place where your ancestors are buried is very important. Mugabe’s expropriation of white-owned farms appealed to Zimbabweans and all Africans whose ancestors had had their lands taken from them in less than ethical (read violent and tyrannical) ways. Mugabe, like Castro and Chavez, is also seen as a bastion against Western neo-imperialism. Yet, like others who spew similar rhetoric and live in luxury while their people struggle for food, Mugabe’s methods of maintaining power are violent and repressive and human rights take a back seat. So black people must suffer in order to fight the white oppressors.

I have actually not heard that Mugabe is popular, so this is interesting. Apparently, at least in Trinidad, there are those who liken Mugabe to Chavez and Castro — that may be good news for Mugabe, or bad news for Chavez and Castro, I am not sure if either would be true. Either way, R&R is not buying into the imputed heroism of Mugabe.

Mugabe remains an enigmatic figure as much in the Caribbean as in my mind.

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Another Trinidadian blogger, Attilah Springer a.k.a. tillahwillah of four fingers and a thumb 2.0, writes in a post titled, “Dictators in our midst“:

A dictator in the world is like the abusive father in the community that no-one wants to report.

Everybody knows what is going on. Everyone hears the screams coming from the house. Night after night. Everyone sees the state of the children. No one questions the father’s authority.

I for one am fed up of the unquestioned authority of the patriarchy.

Enough already. And in the same way that communities have to start speaking out against abusive fathers, I began to feel a huge sense of relief this week when Nelson Mandela finally publicly expressed concern about what is going on in Zimbabwe.

Tillahwillah also quotes a song by Fela Kuti, titled “Beasts of the Nation” that reminds me a little of the Jamaican cartoon at the top of the post:

Many leaders as you see dem
Na different disguise dem dey, oh
Animal in human skin
Animal, he put on tie, oh
Animal, he wear agbada
Animal, he put on suit, oh

You can read more from tillahwillah’s post here. Her quote from Fela Kuti reminded me of another video using a Fela Kuti song, and I include it here mostly for that song. Incidentally, my ambivalence about Mugabe remains, but I am thankful for the alternate views from writers I am more likely to trust than the BBC or CNN.

This week’s installment of “Monday Morning Madness” (missed last week’s I am afraid, as the real madness of an imperial anthropologist seemed much more entertaining).

You won’t be seeing Trinidadian artist Ataklan walking naked in this video, not literally anyway. One of Ataklan’s messages in this interesting video, which takes us with him from a yard and a garbage dump in Trinidad to Wall Street, can be summed up using his words: “the more them fakers dress it up, is the less I wear.” He also speaks to the cultural prejudices built into a Westernized society such as Trinidad’s, the imposition of foreign education, teaching foreign history, and marginalizing local creations. He does not appear to be calling for “reform,” but for personal disengagement and indifference to reigning models of prestige and power. Apart from the simply stated messages in the video, I once again like this video for featuring footage of Trinidad of the kind that I lack, and that one often does not see on Trinidadian television.

“How was the field?”

“Are you going to the field?”

“I just got back from the field.”

“I’ll be away, in the field.”

One of the striking features of MIT’s Doing Anthropology video (see the video sidebar), an attempt to market and pitch anthropology, is that it actually looks and sounds an awful lot like sociology, except for one thing: its insistence on only one particular methodology, one with the very peculiar name of “fieldwork.” Otherwise, the content of the research projects is far ranging, far reaching, and not especially distinctive (marine biology, immigrants, cheese making), and without much to hold them together that would be apparent in any way to a novice, apart from the idea that we talk to people in person. And if it tries too hard to be distinctive, it can end up looking like “Cannibal Tours” with its voyeuristic “fieldworkers” (as in the photograph). The language of the MIT video sometimes sounds borrowed from other disciplines, for example, when speaking of “authoritative knowledge,” or otherwise lacks a definite shape beyond generalizing statements that anthropology allows you to look beneath the surface and to make connections, to ask questions, to see the links between social and cultural life (which surely is neither the monopoly of anthropology, nor is it something that it “allows” as such). This is not to criticize the video. I think it is good, and when examined with some distance it appears as an accurate and quick rendition of what is the “shape” of contemporary anthropology, what it says about itself to attract new recruits perhaps.

One positive feature, from my perspective, is that it shows the great degree to which anthropology has become open to other disciplines, and opens itself out onto them, in a manner that becomes routine and taken for granted. I am tempted to believe that with a few shifts in naming practices and organizational design, anthropology can easily bleed into all other disciplines and vice versa, and may even be a pioneer in de-disciplining itself. (There are other forms of opening anthropology, and I am not yet ready to get into that.)

And why is that openness “good”? One reason is that it shows a declining need to continue to uphold irrelevant traditions that do not make any sense. Anthropology arose out of a nineteenth century European structuring of knowledge in the social sciences that saw the radical separation of the social, economic, political, cultural, and historical. Upholding this as if it were sacred, besides being too obedient for my tastes, is an abdication of the social responsibility of the full time thinker (because one hopes that they are thinkers and not just researchers). Anthropology is itself an arbitrary invention, rendered conventional, and we should never forget that, especially when we lecture others about the constructedness of their communities and traditions. We should be asking some hard questions about ourselves, and not just others.

What is distinctive about anthropology today is precisely that it is not distinctive. What is special about anthropology is not that it has any particular content or meaning, but rather that it does not. And in that there should be great freedom, freedom to undertake virtually any kind of study that is imaginable. That is, unless, one wants to stop and insist on speaking in terms of “an anthropological contribution,” or “the anthropological perspective,” in the defensive and uncertain manner that this is often done, as if one has to become one’s professional identity, as if we cannot do, say, or think anything unless it redounds to the credit of “anthropology.”

Where some sense of “anthropological” distinction is manufactured usually is in the notion of “fieldwork.” Unfortunately, for all of our famous questioning of the taken-for-granted, and our careful scrutiny of naming practices and the intersection of knowledge and power arising in labeling, we seem to be little prepared to question our own labels and names when it comes to our sacred cow: fieldwork. We can even talk about how “field sites” are “constructed” as units of analysis, but not about how we construct peoples, communities, and cultures as “fields” to begin with.

The start of the video above features an anthropologist beginning with discussion of “the field” noting that the term came from the natural sciences, and was meant to signal a difference from lab work. He is right in noting these distinctions, and that really is the basis for marking the difference between experimental and naturalistic science. We tell students that traditions are constantly changing, the world is in flux, everything is on the move … everything and everyone except us? So why hang on to this peculiar way of labeling people and their lives? Are we still trying to show off that we too can be scientific? Do we still need to objectify and dehumanize the people we research, turning them into static and inanimate “fields,” lest anyone accuse us of being too subjective, too partial, too human?

(And if we choose to persevere in maintaining certain traditions, and to hold them beyond the pale of questioning, then why we do we continue to deny “stillness” to others as if it were beyond their human capabilities? Can there even be movement without stillness as its backdrop? This will take us off track for now, but it is worth mentioning that we still live in a world where — in spite of all the “immigration studies” — the vast majority of people remain where they were born [only 3% of all humans live in a country other than the one in which they were born].)

The hangup here is not just one of natural science, but of colonialism as well, and it’s not surprising to see that pair together again. Decolonizing knowledge ought to involve a reconceptualization of where others stand, and to show some basic respect. When those we write about can now read what we write with much greater ease, I wonder how many are surprised to learn that their anthropologist “friend” refers to them and their homes in cold and dry terms as a “field.” Moreover, as came out during an exchange in my story about Daniela Rubin, there is something definitely proprietary, turf-like, and territorial about the notion of “the field” like something that is to be owned and cultivated by the anthropologist.

“Field” also echoes the notion of terra nullius, of an empty land ready to be appropriated by those arriving from outside. That the Human Terrain System should implicitly invoke the field image, by referring to social and cultural life in terms of territory, is not surprising, especially as the program involves colonialist fieldwork on behalf of an invading and occupying power, the United States.

I hope that eventually we will grow out of these scientistic and colonialist hangovers and hangups.

Note: the MIT video is also hosted on the AAA Public Affairs blog, and can be seen below:

In line with an earlier post about the repatriation of First Nation remains held in museums, I am happy to tell readers of the recent publication of a new book, by AltaMira Press, titled Spirited Encounters: American Indians Protest Museum Policies and Practices. The publisher’s synopsis reads as follows (with minor edits): “During the twentieth century, dozens of protests, large and small, occurred across North America as American Indians asserted their anger and displayed their disappointment regarding traditional museum behaviors. In response, due to public embarrassment and an awakening of sensitivities, museums began to change their methods and laws were enacted in support of American Indian requests for change. Spirited Encounters provides a foundation for understanding museums and looks at their development to present time, examines how museums collect Native materials, and explores protest as a fully American process of addressing grievances. Now that museums and American Indians are working together in the processes of repatriation, this book can help each side understand the other more fully.”

The author, Karen Coody Cooper, is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and has occupied positions in museums such as the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. Karen has just begun working as a historical interpreter at the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, south of Tahlequah. She was born in Tulsa, and graduated from Collinsville High School. She will be a keynote speaker at the Oklahoma Museums Association annual meeting in September in Bartlesville and will be teaching a course on American Indians and museums at Northeastern State University this fall. To obtain the book Spirited Encounters (available in soft cover or hardback), visit the Web site of Altamira Press or Barnes & Noble, or contact your local book dealer.

Karen sent me the following press release as well, discussing the key issues pertaining to her work for this volume:

NATIVE AMERICANS TRANSFORM MUSEUMS

TAHLEQUAH - American Indian corpses taken from nineteenth-century battlefields often wound up in museum collections, and museum agents commonly dug up skeletal remains from Native burial sites. During the first part of the twentieth century, major museum exhibitions were created from grave goods and war trophies, along with confiscated ceremonial items. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum in the 1960s, that agencies and institutions were forced to reconsider their treatment of minority groups. In the 1970s the American Indian Movement, American Indians Against Desecration, and other Native social action groups launched protests across the nation.

American Indian protests caught the attention of the U.S. Congress in 1987 when hearings disclosed that the Smithsonian Institution alone possessed 34,000 American Indian remains. Native activists pushed for passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The enactment of NAGPRA in 1990 served to transform museums by requiring them to release information about their holdings to pertinent federally-recognized tribes and to return Native remains, burial goods, and ceremonial objects to their homeland governments. Museum inventories received by the National Park Service, which manages NAGPRA, finds that as many as 600,000 Native human remains have been held by museums across the United States. Today, museums no longer collect Native remains, burial items, or ceremonial materials. As a result of the repatriation act, museums and American Indians have had to engage in an exchange of information which has helped the two entities better understand each other. Through interactions with Native spokespeople, museums have learned more about Native communities, leading to improved exhibitions and programs.

During the 1980s American Indians protested major exhibitions that were ignoring American Indian concerns about accuracy and appropriateness. Two major protested exhibitions were The Spirit Sings in Calgary, during the 1988 winter Olympics, and First Encounters, originating in Florida during the quincentennial of the 1492 voyage of Columbus. The latter exhibit traveled to museums in Albuquerque and St. Paul, Minnesota with protestors taking action at each location. Those museums sought to address the concerns of protestors by enhancing the exhibit with additional exhibit panels, program presentations, and visitor handouts. Prior to organized protests exhibits in natural history museums and in historical societies often contained distorted information about American Indians and created poorly informed scenarios. Some exhibits had labeled garden and woodworking tools as weapons. Today, most museums consult with Native advisors to assure that descriptions of practices, materials, and activities in museum exhibits are accurate.

American Indian artists experienced problems with art museums, which generally wanted to relegate Native art to ethnographic status. In the 1950s and 1960s, Tulsa’s Philbrook Art Center was host to one of the nation’s premier Native art shows. But, they accepted only art that conformed to the museum’s definition of Native art, serving to severely restrict American Indian artists who were seeking to create new, dynamic art forms and who wanted to make a living as artists. Innovative Native artists struggled to open their own galleries while resenting their exclusion from museums.

The book also discusses protests at state and national parks containing Native sacred sites, where ongoing battles concern access and propriety. Also, chapters are devoted to museums or national parks that have long celebrated “heroes” deleterious to American Indians, such as the Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation and the former Custer Battlefield National Monument, now the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument. Plimoth Plantation has instituted a Wampanoag presence at their living history site, now conforming to historical knowledge that Wampanoag people and Pilgrims were in constant interaction. Colonial Williamsburg, which once included a school for the sons of area Native chiefs, is also beginning to incorporate a Native presence there to conform to historical evidence of repeated visits by Native contingents and individuals.

Following a chapter discussing the development of museums managed by Native governments, the book’s summary chapter reviews the changes invoked by the protests and suggests that improved communication between museums and Native communities has led to better exhibitions and to more lively programs. Many museums are now friendlier to community researchers, having opened their doors to Native emissaries inviting them to view archives, photographs and collections from generations past. Forty years ago Native researchers were not welcome at many museums, which often restricted museum holdings to visits by credentialed academic researchers.

This is a list of the contents of the volume:

Introduction: American Indians, Museums and Protest
Part I: Protesting Exhibitions
Chapter One: Politics and Sponsorship
Chapter Two: Display of Sacred Objects
Chapter Three: Display of Human Remains
Chapter Four: Art Confined to a Reservation of its Own
Part II: The Long Road to Repatriation
Chapter Five: Demands for Return of Material Objects
Chapter Six: Demands for Return of Human Remains
Part III: Whose Heroes and Holidays
Chapter Seven: No Celebration for Columbus
Chapter Eight: Thanksgiving Mourned
Chapter Nine: The Custer Chronicles
Part IV: Claiming Our Own Places
Chapter Ten: Native Cultural Sites
Chapter Eleven: Transforming Museums
Conclusion: Achievements Gained by Protests

For more information, see the publisher website linked to above, or contact Karen Coody Cooper at:
cooper46@sbcglobal.net

Today, June 21, 2008, the first day of summer, the summer solstice, is National Aboriginal Solidarity Day in Canada. I attended the advertised event for Montreal, incorporated into the Montreal First People’s Festival, and dubbed the Solstice of Nations. This was the fourth annual Solstice of Nations. The weather was excellent: deep blue sky, cool fresh breeze, wet grass, and everyone in the park appeared to be happy, refreshed, and outgoing. The event took place in Montreal’s very beautiful Mount Royal park, which is on what is essentially a broad and low mountain in the centre of the city, somewhat higher than the skyscrapers near its base. Approximately between 80 and 100 people attended the event, including Gilles Duceppe, the leader of the Bloc Québécois. The proceedings began with drumming and chanting, followed by very brief speeches, then the lighting of the flame in a large copper brazier, and more drumming and chanting. At one point, as one onlooker told me, a large bird with a very broad wingspan and appearing to be an eagle flew overhead and circled as the drumming ended. The embers from the burning of the flame were preserved and are to be taken to the Fête national du Québec (the national festival of Quebec). The embers will be used to light the bonfire at that festival, on June 23rd, on the Plains of Abraham, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City.

Also present at today’s events were indigenous Wayuu from Venezuela and Colombia. They were formally welcomed into the circle by the main speaker who addressed them in Spanish: “Bienvenidos, esta es terra indígena también” (welcome, this is also indigenous territory). (The proceedings were otherwise carried out entirely in French — which is interesting, because local Mohawks especially, and many Cree and Inuit in the province, speak English in addition to their native languages, rather than French.) As many others have observed, it is has become increasingly common in many parts of the world to find even small-scale, local indigenous events attended by at least some indigenous representatives from another nation.

The drummers’ circle…

…and two friends follow the ceremony: