 I bought this scholarly book on ritual theory because of Michael Puett and Robert Weller, both of whom I'd read and enjoyed engaging with.
These scholars attempt to re-think rituals in anthropology away from its post-Protestant influences. The dominant approach to understanding rituals have been to see it as an external and formal referent for something within the social actors who participate: this "attitude toward self and world" is what they call "sincerity." The scholars also want to move ritual away from the domain of the religious. Ritual for them is "an orientation to action" that need not be confined to religious spaces. Ritual and sincerity are "two 'ideal typical' forms of framing experience, action, and understanding that exist in all society, in tension with one another" and the essay attempts to flesh out and theorize these differences. Ritual is fundamentally a subjunctive; it is "the creation of an order as if it were truly the case." Puett's work comes to the fore here; in his view of early Confucian writings, Heaven and Earth are fundamentally chaotic and pattern-less, and it is human beings that create pattern and order through rituals. Ritual need not be limited to highly formalized and religious rites. Even the act of saying "please" and "thank you" and other such social niceties creates an "as if" world in which participants interact with one another as if the other is an autonomous individual with the power to decline. Note that this contrary to the mode of sincerity. One does not need to be "sincerely" thankful to engage in this ritual action and to recognize the other participant in this way. For these scholars, society is almost ritual writ large--it "is precisely a shared 'could be,' a mutual illusion of the sort that all rituals create." Rituals always operates in the tragic dimension, as the as if world created by ritual is ultimately overcome by the broken world of experience. Ritual requires endless work to renew pockets of order. Ritual and sincerity are often described as dichotomous concepts: as if (subjunctive) vs. as is (indicative), form vs. content, bound by history and tradition vs. a break from the past, and non-discursive vs. discursive, to mention a few key terms. Ritual allows mediation of boundaries while a paradigm of sincerity denies the existence of boundaries altogether. The power of ritual to mediate between boundaries makes it an important alternative to the boundary-less utopic imaginings of the contemporary world and the hardened boundaries by liberal forms of governance. These scholars re-evaluate fundamentalist movements using this new paradigm. While it is commonly thought fundamentalist movements are reactions to the atomized modern subject and a return to pre-modern religious traditions, these movements are actually religious movements of sincerity, which make claims of authentic belief. One additional note: I found these scholars' mode of collaboration to be interesting. Each scholar wrote and edited each others work until it became a collective whole; they did not just contribute one chapter each.
1 Comment
 This collection is the result of a conference at the Centre for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Speakers were asked to present papers on the topic of "Rethinking the Human." As the introduction reads, scholars were challenged to interrogate Western universal ideas of the Human without reconstructing a new universalism.
Below is a brief summary of the speakers and their papers. Arthur Kleinman talks about the practice of caregiving through providing care to his wife. Human beings are born not fully human, and it is through "the demanding practice of caregiving [that] we begin to realize the fullness of our humanity, as well as the limits of our capability to transcend the self and develop the interpersonal moral potential of what it means to be human." Veena Das explores the ways in which nonhuman entities and spirits call forth certain moral responsibilities of human beings. She demonstrates this through a case study of one of her interlocuters. "The person then is an aspect of this conjugation of human and inhuman rather than an aspect of humanity as an abstract concept." Charles Hallisey rethinks the human by rethinking the very long life. The talk is entitled "The Secret of a Woman of Ninety: Rethinking the Very Long Life"; the woman being referred to is his mother. He handles the topic in an indirect way through French essayist Charles Peguy, Adorno, Buddhist philosophy, and novelists like Mishima, in order to attempt an understanding of a subjective experience that is impossible for him. Lila Abu-Lughod offers kinship as an "alternative model for thinking about humans" that escapes thw dichotomies of universal and particular, and global and local. She relates her kinship with the Haj and his family, among whom she had done her fieldwork. She uses this experience to complicate the language used by liberal feminists of universal human rights and human development; while she lives in the world of liberal university campuses, the Haj lived in a thoroughly patriarchal society. Finally, Michael Puett discusses ritual theory from early China. In his reading, the world ("Heaven and Earth") that is described in ancient Chinese texts "possess no pattern or order" (a chaotic world). His assertion is that the ancient Chinese view of the human being is in contrast with the assumption of the autonomous individual, who stands outside of tradition as a modern subject with agency. In the former view, human experience is inherently fragmented; human beings are "a conglomeration of energies, emotions, and desires" that can "be quite dangerous and can lead people to do horrible things to each other..." Through ritual, human beings domesticate the world and themselves by creating "pockets of order." However, the effort is never complete--these spaces exist briefly before being infringed upon by the chaotic world.  A great book; it must have articulated some of the incipient ideas in anthropology at the time (1989). Some of the ideas expressed in the book feel familiar, and other ideas feel fresh.
Rosaldo recalls his fieldwork with the Ilongots, who lived near Manila in the Philippines. The Ilongots practice head-hunting because of "the rage in bereavement." He could not understand the grief that they spoke of and tried to understand head-hunting intellectually, as a system of exchange; only after the accidental death of his wife could he understand the grief and rage they spoke of. While anthropologists in his time used words like thick description, richness, texture, and webs of meaning, Rosaldo introduces the concept of emotional "force." Positionality affects the anthropologist's comprehension of culture. Anthropologists are not scientists with an objective bird's eye view onto the world; they are positioned subjects. The historical conjuncture of the late 1960s fractured the unified consciousness motivating "monumentalist" and classical forms of "objective" ethnographic writing that wrote of cultures in the "ethnographic present." As Rosaldo notes, writing in the ethnographic present sounds parodic for the "natives." Consider the following description of the mouth-rite (brushing one's teeth): "The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures." The classical form of ethnographic writing are but one possible mode. It strips events of the emotional force and render them as spectacle, and it makes it difficult to imagine spontaneity in these acts. Rosaldo senses something else happening in the classical form of ethnographic writing. The form constructs an innocent and detached observer that allows the anthropologist to avoid complicity with the structures of domination that were actively changing the societies in which the anthropologist was studying. Rosaldo terms this the imperialist nostalgia (a great concept), "where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed." In place of classical conceptions of culture, which have rigid structure and non-negotiable cultural boundaries, Rosaldo calls attention to the porousness of culture. Instead of "culture as a self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns," Rosaldo adopts the image of "culture... as a more porous array of intersections where distinct processes crisscross from within and beyond its borders." Interestingly, Rosaldo also describes rituals and individual identity in similar terms; ritual and identity is described as an intersection of various processes. (Perhaps this is due to the influence of structuralism, where the principles of structure at different levels are similar.) Rosaldo attempts to open up avenues of study that were previously inaccessible in classical conceptions of culture and classical forms of writing. Instead of viewing culture as order and control over chaos, Rosaldo wonders about the unexplored "realm of 'nonorder'"--he notes that "human conduct often results from improvisation." He also tries to think about the tempo of a culture, which is difficult to capture. Finally, Rosaldo wonders about the narrative forms that anthropologists impose on their interlocuters--what kind of ethnographies could emerge if the narrative forms of the "natives" were used instead?  How do we regard the pain of others? Sontag seems to ask; she develops these essays with her extensive knowledge of photography and art--the book almost reads like an extension from Sontag's On Photography.
Sontag identifies the privilege of regarding pain in locales all over the world through photography as "a quintessential modern experience" provided through the "professional, specialized tourists known as journalists." Depictions of suffering and pain through images are not a new emergence with photography; there is a rich history in painting for such depictions, like in Goya's The Disasters of War. However, Sontag comments that "Goya's images are a synthesis" that claim that "things like this happened," unlike photography's claim to literal representation that are built in formally. Photography unites "two contradictory features"; it is impartial and objective, but also subjectively positioned through the photographer: this allows it to be "both objective record and personal testimony." Of course, photography is not a transparent copy of an untouched, virgin reality; "to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude"--the photograph is the result of manipulation. Photographs thus transform captured reality, but nostalgia for the original copy leads to criticism of photos that are too "aesthetic." There is here an echo of the connection between surrealism and photography that Sontag explored in On Photography; there is an element of uncontrolled happenstance that goes into the final work. Sontag likens the photograph to "a quotation, or a maxim or proverb." Photographs have a "deeper bite" than moving images from the television because "memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image." Photographs thus have a functional role in the creation of collective memory. When this occurs, and the photograph is embedded in a specific narrative or is in use by a certain ideology, the shock value of photographs do not wear off. Or as Sontag says, "pathos in the form of a narrative, does not wear out." Her remark reminded me of Milan Kundera's definition of kitsch in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Do photographs of atrocity coerce an ethical response? Sontag begins her essay with this question and returns to this question at the end. Images are disseminated everywhere--they lose the aura of reverent contemplation and are involved in new settings and take on new meanings (a la Walter Benjamin). And ultimately, Sontag seems to suggest a chasm between the viewer of the photograph and the suffering subject that cannot be bridged: "'We'--this 'we' is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through--don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right."  A very good book by a great thinker. Scott makes the case for "an anarchist's squint"--he claims that this lens reveals unique insights on "popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state." I'm not sure how far Scott's commitment extends beyond this; he recognizes the ultimate necessity of the state to guarantee "relative equality." He presents his case through a series of fragment-essays.
This book is also a great introduction to his oeuvre. The fragments touch on the key concepts he presents in his other books. Unsurprisingly, the most important unit of analysis in Scott's anarchist lens is the individual. Scott begins with his idea of "anarchist calisthenics," which describes minor infringements against the law to prepare for the day when one will "be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality." These small acts of disobedience ("everyday forms of resistance"), once emulated and multiplied, can change the course of history (although these micro-events hardly register in official documents)--in his view, foot dragging, desertion, draft evasion "may well have been decisive" in the Confederacy's defeat during the American civil war. Small acts of disobedience are a temperature check on general levels of discontent among the populace. When levels of discontent reach boiling points, there is open rebellion. Scott takes a decisively oppositional view to the liberal consensus on non-violent protests. In his view, acephalous, chaotic, violent, and unorganized forms of protest lead to the greatest structural transformations--a very timely insight, given the George Floyd protests. These manifestations of public discontent cannot be bargained with and appeased, and force elites to act. Trade unions, left-wing parties, the vanguard of the proletariat--these are reactionary and "parasitic" institutions that funnel the unadulterated anger of the masses into a language that the elite can understand. Scott valorizes vernacular knowledge and practices, which are in contrast to the state's way of seeing and knowing. Vernacular knowledge and practices are rooted in localities and are "illegible" ("legibility" is one of my favorite concepts by Scott) to the synoptic, bird's-eye view of the state. The state's way of seeing (and knowing) is abstract, rational, and standardized; local conditions disappear in computerized modelling tools used by state planners. The vulnerability of these models are exposed once they are translated into real world conditions. While vernacular farming practices are the result of centuries of innovation and micro-experimentation with local conditions, factory farming creates one type of crop for a standard model of farming with a set of standard farming practices. Through the anarchist's squint, the story of the past two centuries has been a story of the a wholesale extinction of vernacular ways of seeing and knowing and vernacular practices. Local practices of governance are replaced by the model of the nation-state, and mutually unintellible dialects are dying and are being replaced with the national dialect. Whole worlds of meaning and seeing and knowing are replaced by the English language. The vernacular may only exist in museums in the future, a dessicated and mummified artefact that is preserved under the watchful and scientific eye of the official regime. Scott recognizes that the anarchist's vision of the individual does not exist apriori to societal structures, and he is concerned about the individuals that are being produced through modern institutions. Modern institutions (e.g. the school, the workplace, etc.) are hierarchical and autocratic, and are motivated by neo-classical concepts of efficiency. These institutions create a standardized product with "institutional neurosis," where those who suffer from it are "apathetic, take no initiative, display a general loss of interest in their surroundings..." The modern individual is also produced in the image of the neo-classical homo economicus. To this Scott asks this provocative question: "To what degree have the growing reach of the state and the assumptions behind action in a liberal economy actually produced the asocial egoists that Hobbes thought Leviathan was designed to tame?" In place of GDP Scott proposes another measurement: the Gross Human Product (GHP). This measurement would determine "how a work process enlarged human capacities and skills" and how "workers themselves [judge] ... their satisfaction." Throughout the book, I sensed a common affinity between Scott's narrative and the logic of neo-classical economics. I might not have read him closely enough, but Scott seems to suggest that politics is motivated by individual interest; small acts of disobedience are inversely correlated with adverse political-economic conditions (e.g. the harder it is to feed yourself and your family, the more you will commit small transgressions), until the perfect form of civil protest occurs--the headless and uncoordinated mob. In ECO100 level theory, the market works in a similar manner, and it is motivated by individual interest. Higher prices of commodity x are inversely correlated with levels of demand (or something like that, it has been a long time since ECO100). I write this because of Scott's exaltation of the much malaligned petty bourgeois. (I can't help but think of Maupassant!) As he writes, "A society dominated by smallholders and shopkeepers comes closer to equality and to popular ownership of the means of production than any economic system yet devised." It also comes closest to the ideal, neo-classical state of perfect competition, where the market is conpletely composed of small, individual entrepreneurs, and there are no market inefficiencies. This is as far as this observation goes--I just found it the connection interesting. Scott explicitly distances himself from libertarianism in the introduction; I do not wish to mislead anyone. All in all, a very good book. Three cheers for James Scott.  Motivated by his great series of lectures on economics, I bought this book. A truly great introduction to economics that is engaging and witty, making what appears to be a dry, academic subject accessible to the educated layperson.
Chang's introduction to economics advocates for a heterogeneous method of doing economics, contesting the hegemonic status of the dominant Neoclassical school. Chang identifies nine schools of economics: the Classical, Neoclassical, Marxist, Developmentalist, Austrian, Schumpeterian, Keynesian, Institutionalist, and Behaviouralist schools. As Chang explains in a concise but informative way, each school has a different way of analyzing the economy. Each school makes different assumptions about individuals, the economy, and the world, while analyzing different sections of the economy (e.g. the Neoclassical emphasizes consumption-based activities but does not focus on production, unlike the Marxist and Classical school). Chang takes Singapore as a case study for the necessity of heterogeneity: he challenges anyone to explain the development of Singapore from the perspective of just one school. Chang goes even further and recognizes the necessity of the other social sciences for a holistic understanding of human phenomena. He notes the trend of explaining all human phenomena with economics ("economic imperialism") as evidenced by books like Freakonomics. The dominant Neoclassical school defines economics by its theoretical approach (rational choice) and the ideological conditions allow manifestations like Freakonomics in popular culture--Chang wishes to reorient economics back to the study of the economy. To do this, Chang explores two areas that he claims are under-studied by economists today: history and real-life numbers, the latter of which are constructed and less objective than one might think. Ultimately, through his user's guide to economics, Chang hopes "to show the reader how to think, not what to think, about the economy." Chang are armed to form their own opinions and contest the economist's expert mystique, especially when, as Chang points out over and over throughout the book, economics today is a "political argunent often presented as a science."  A novel about the Korean War in two parts. The first part follows soldier Tong-Ho and his two comrades Hyun-tae and Yun-gu in the midst of the Korean War. Tong-ho tries to retain his innocence through the brutality of the war. While Hyun-tae and Yun-gu frequent prostitutes, Hyun-tae stays back and repeatedly returns to memories of Sugi, the woman he loves. He is unfit for war--nicknamed "the Poet"--he is passive and "feminine" while Hyun-tae is ruthless and in his element as a soldier. (Hwang writes in the hint of a homosexual relationship between the two.) The first and only murder of an individual--I want to distinguish this from an unfeeling massacre of a nameless crowd--occurs when Hyun-tae does away with a woman who stays behind in her village with her baby while the villagers had already fled.
The novel occurs through a series of episodes, and through their encounters with the trio, Hwang introduces a set of affecting and memorable portraits of men and women in the thick of the absurd war. Tong-ho changes as the war goes on; he becomes defiled and takes his own life, overwhelmed by the contradictions of war. "Are we the victims or the victimizers?" he asks. The war ends and part two begins. How do soldiers adjust back to civilian life? I read this part with 오발탄 (Aimless Bullet), a classic work of Korean cinema about the same period, in mind. There is a sense of misalignment between soldiers and a stagnant Korean society. Trees on a Slope ends with a pregnancy, but this is one without the hopes of a separation from the traumatic past.  "It is Nobel Prize-winner Hermann Hesse's most famous and influential work" reads the back cover of the novel; I wonder how Siddartha might have been informed and embedded in discourses of the exotic and spiritual Orient in the West--I remember reading (maybe on Wikipedia) that the novel was brought back into mainstream consciousness in the 60s by the hippies, some 40 years after the initial publication.
The story moves quickly. How to fit a whole lifetime in 150 pages? The story begins "[i]n the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddartha, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda"--an idyllic childhood passes by in 35 words or so. Siddartha's "awakening" is probably one of the more memorable novelistic depictions of a revelation. However, what is revealed is not a deeper truth behind the veil of falsehood. Siddartha the intellectual, the Brahmin, despised the external world--he rejected transience in the search of the eternal and absolute Atman--but his contempt is transformed into an affirmation of external reality. "He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, strange and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting... All this, all this yellow and blue, river and wood, passed for the first time across Siddhartha's eyes. It was no longer the magic of Mara, it was no more the veil of Maya, it was no longer meaningless and the chance diversities of the appearances of the world, despised by deep-thinking Brahmins, who scorned diversity, who sought unity. River was river... Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them." And Siddartha the artist is born. I can't help but wonder how much of Hesse's own Christian and Western cultural categories are written into this awakening, however. Did Indian Brahmin texts also write of Enlightenment as the struggle for the salvation of an eternal soul? At one point, Siddartha the enlightened becomes Siddartha the vulgar merchant who is trapped back into never-sated cycle of samsara. He reawakens thanks to the guidance of an enlightened river ferryman. I am reminded here of a book of short stories I read a decade ago by an Indian writer (I cannot remember his name). The only story I remember reading (and it is but a fragment) is of the encounter between an American hippie and an old Indian man in a nameless Indian town. The old Indian man looks curiously upon this rich white foreigner in his strange clothes. The hippie looks upon the old Indian man and wonders about the rich exotic wisdom the old Indian man contains within his depths. To repeat the initial question, how has Siddartha been informed by and embedded in discourses of the exotic and spiritual Orient in the West?  Ghost in the Shell made me aware of this old philosophical treatise on materialist philosophy (written mid-18th century). I was curious about how de la Mettrie could provide a context for thinking through a time in which man (human beings) are literally becoming mechanized and the strict separation between human and machine is disappearing. The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway is also a valuable companion for thinking through this.
de la Mettrie is a physician who wrote medical texts in addition to his engagement in philosophy, who, after a violent fever, "became obsessed with the vision of man as a machine." He is writing in a very particular intellectual context, in the midst of debates between rationalism and empiricism, spiritualism and materialism, and the existence of God. de la Mettrie himself proves to be an empiricist, a hard materialist, and an atheist. de la Mettrie begins by embedding the soul into the body: "In disease the soul is sometimes hidden, showing no signs of life..." "Is the circulation too quick? the soul can not sleep. Is the soul too much excited? the blood cannot be quieted: it gallops through the veins with an audible murmur." He then does a quick comparison of the anatomy of human beings and animals, de-exceptionalizing human beings (organisms with souls): "[If the ape were taught a language] then he would no longer be a wild man, nor a defective man, but he would be a perfect man, a little gentleman..." de la Mettries moves onto de-exceptionalize the innate human capacity for ethical behaviour (or natural law), demonstrating that animals can "show us sure signs of repentance, as well as of intelligence..." while human beings often behave in flagrant disregard for it. He concludes that "man is not moulded from a costlier clay; nature has used but one dough, and has merely varied the leaven." Afterward, de la Mettrie attempts to tackle the source of the soul. He starts disarmingly, and writes that he does "not mean to call in question the existence of a supreme being" (of course he does). Interestingly, he makes a critique of religion that is often recounted in contemporary political discourse: "if atheism, said he, were generally accepted, all the forms of religion would them be destroyed and cut off at the roots. No more theological wars, no more soldiers of religions--such terrible soldiers!" Through this process, the soul falls from its former sacred position: "... Since all the faculties of the soul depend to such a degree on the proper organization of the brain and the whole body, that apparently they are but this organization itself, the soul is clearly an enlightened machine." My edition of de la Mettrie's Man a Machine is excellent: it has the original French, supplementary notes to contextualize the essay and excerpts from de la Mettrie's "The Natural History of the Soul" to better contextualize his philosophy.  Some of these short, short stories felt shocking and absurd, either because of Kawabatan intention or because of the brutal reduction of the narrative--or both: Kawabata was an avant-garde writer back in the day, influenced by surrealism, cubism, dadaism, and other Western imports; three of the first four stories in this collection of many are dream-tales.
Scholium "Marriages of blood relatives had continued through the generations until the girl's family had gradually died out... She, too, was rather small in the shoulders. Men were probably startled when they embraced her. ... The girl, however, enjoyed daydreaming of a strong man's arms--strong arms that would make her ribs crack when they were wrapped around her. For, although her face looked relaxed, she felt desperate. When she closed her eyes, she saw her body floating on the ocean of life, drifting wherever the tide took it. This gave her an amorous air." The disjointed and pared down writing obscures the connections between the sentences. From Kawabata's The Old Capital and Thousand Cranes I sensed a non-Western and anti-individual conception of personhood, one in which human beings can be thought of as repetitions (I struggle for a better word)--some of the short, short stories seem to confirm my suspicions. Scholium The story "Mother," for example, begins as follows: "1/The Husband's Diary Tonight I took a wife When I embraced her--the womanly softness My mother was also a woman Tears overflowing, I told my new bride Become a good mother Become a good mother For I never knew my mother" The husband becomes deathly ill, the wife forces the illness into her, they both die from illness, leaving a 3 year old infant behind. The story ends: "4/The Husband's Diary Tonight I took a wife When I embraced her--the womanly softness My mother was also a woman Tears overflowing, I told my new bride Become a good mother Become a good mother For I never knew my mother" The last story in the collection is "Gleanings from Snow Country." I felt trepidation about reading the story: this was an occasion that called for solemnity, gravity, midnight--I did not want to read it casually for the same reason I dread treading on a fresh, unmarked field of morning snow (I actually don't). I've read it while un-sober, with the hopes that this would preserve the story for an actual first reading, for when I would be ready. |
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