‘Gift giving entails reciprocity.’ Discuss.
Gifts transcend commodities. They are given not exchanged. They are inscribed in webs of meaning and identity. Gifts are special, a testament to affection between individuals. Yet, to say this is to overlook the subtle, at times hidden, but fundamental reciprocity in gift giving, to overshadow the semantic slippage that the concept of the ‘gift’ has been subject to.
This essay will ask whether gift giving necessarily entails reciprocity. It will first focus on the idea of the gift and how it compares to the reality of the gift in practice. It will then address the question of the boundary between gift and non-gift.
Theoretically, pure and selfless gifts exist. A gift is thought to be something that is wholly given; something free and uncoerced, not given by way of purchase or compensation but rather as a disinterested statement of love and affection between giver and recipient (Carrier, 1990). Laidlaw (2000) contends that a gift, freely given, supposedly leaves the donee free insofar as the gift is ‘given and that is that’. Further, gifts are thought to transcend commodities, with sentimental value superseding their monetary value rendering gifts innately immaterial. Carrier notes on how addressing the monetary value of a gift is absent from gift giving interactions lest it break the illusion that the object (gift) given is something more than an object (commodity). She highlights that it would be improper to ‘[crow] over the cheap price of the expensive-seeming gift, like openly comparing costs of gifts given and received, [as it would] cross a line that is important, the line that separates people from an open recognition of the contraction between commodities and gifts’ (Carrier, 1990). By casting a shadow on the monetary value of a gift and instead focusing on its inherently immaterial nature enables the maintaining of the pretence of altruism, enabling gifts to be seen as selfless, disinterested, caring statements of affection. Yet, in practice, gifts, however subtly crafted to appear as genuine ‘pure’ gifts, always involve a form of reciprocity.
In fact, in practice, gifts create and produce relationships. They juxtapose the identity of the donor transmitted through the gift with the possibility of identification with the gift by the done, ensnaring individuals in webs of meaning and identity. Gift exchange creates a form of dependency, summarised by Gregory (1980) as ‘an exchange of inalienable objects between people in a state of reciprocal dependence’. For instance, Christmas and birthdays have become times where receiving gifts is expected. Although operating on distinct time frames, with Christmas implying immediate and mutual gift giving and birthdays allowing for delayed but expected gift giving, reciprocity is ritualised, tainting the ideal of a perfectly selfless gift.
Of note, however, is Bourdieu’s (1994) assertion that, outside these ritualised instances of gift giving, while reciprocity inevitably exists in gift exchange, it is skilfully concealed in the interaction between time and reciprocity. He underlines the importance of the time interval in gift exchange as a distinctive feature from commodity exchange. Indeed, while gift giving is more often than not a gift exchange, the illusion of the absence of expected reciprocity is maintained by the interval between receiving a gift and receiving one back, allowing for two perfectly symmetrical acts to appear as ‘unique and generous ones in themselves’.
As such, while gift giving is innately defined by reciprocity, the reciprocity entailed is not always symmetrical or of equal standing. Indeed, while gift giving creates a form of indebtedness, the debt gifts create is not always monetary insofar as some gifts cannot be ‘counter-gifted’ with something of equal value. Gutierrez-Garza (2019) underlines that in the context of sex work, ‘gifts produce a myriad of social relations either of debt and unequal social obligations or of further emotional and social links between workers and employers or clients’. Indeed, gifts are often used as strategies to create the illusion of intimacy, concealing its commodification, in an attempt to normalise the emotional dependencies that could emerge in these relations. This can be exemplified by Gutierrez-Garza’s informant Vanessa, a sex worker in London) who has at once a Sugar Daddy, Mark, and a husband, Giorgio. Vanessa’s marriage to Giorgio was enabled by Mark ‘gifting’ her the money for the wedding, thus immersing her in a series of gifts and other exchanges with both of them but leaving her emotionally and financially vulnerable insofar as despite Mark paying for her flat with Giorgio as well as for groceries, Giorgio was jealous of Vanessa still seeing men as a way to earn a living, leaving her with very little means of sourcing income). Hence, Vanessa became indebted to both these men with her ‘livelihood’ dependent on Mark, who could ‘withdraw his help and gifts when he wanted’ and her ‘legal status in the hands of Giorgio who could do the same’. Thus, while Mark is generously gifting Vanessa with rent, groceries and the like, he is also obstructing the creation of a meaningful connection between Vanessa and Giorgio by expecting reciprocity for these seemingly selfless gifts. Gifts as such are ambiguous and never as altruistic as the ideal of the gift, blurring the boundary between interested exchanges and disinterested gifts. This can be further illustrated in relation to gift giving in domestic work. Felipa, one of Gutierrez-Garza’s informants, notes that during her six years of employment for Fiona, she had not only been given furniture and material hand-me-downs but had also been financially assisted by Fiona’s family in paying for an immigration lawyer to sort her citizenship application. Interestingly, while she considered herself ‘in their debt forever’, she did not experience this debt as burdensome or overwhelming, rather she felt morally indebted to Fiona’s family and would offer her babysitting services for no economic retribution. In Felipa’s view, she was, to some extent, becoming part of the family and was happy to consider these services a favour rather than work, although Fiona would ‘pay’ with more gifts when Felipa needed help. Hence, gifts can be used to strategically extract free labour, as Romero (1992) states, ‘when employers grant favors, make promises and give gifts, the employee becomes ensnared in a web of debt and obligation that masks considerations of the employee’s rights’. Here, reciprocity in gift giving is masked by relations of care and affection.
Asking what constitutes a gift brings into question how intimacy, affection, distance, anonymity play out in gift giving. Does a gift become more or less of a gift the closer relationship is between donor and donee? Does intimacy in gift giving affect feelings of indebtedness? Is a gift always meaningful?
In western conceptions, gift giving is intrinsically linked to meaning, to intimacy, to finding a way to express a personal relation with someone, fostering a feeling of moral obligation to reciprocate, either fueled by affection or a sense of obligation, guilt. Yet, it would seem that potentially the truest form of the gift is one that is given away rather than given to.
Strathern’s (2012) work on organ and tissue donation is interesting in thinking of the place of anonymity in gift giving. She argues that organ donation is not a gift; rather it is established as a gift through language, enabling a concealment of the commodification of the body in order to cast it in a positive light. The simple fact of using the word ‘donor’ rather than a more neutral term such as ‘provider’ inscribes the commodification of the body in a gift narrative wherein organs and tissues are not referred to as what they are but rather as what they do. This narrative allows for organs and tissues to transcend their materiality, becoming the ‘gift of life’. Arguably, organ donors, in their anonymity, thus appear as the most selfless gift givers insofar as what they give in not given but abandoned, with recognition or thanks not being the intent of the donation, echoing Derrida’s idea that a gift should not be perceived or received as a gift. Yet, arguably, the lack of recognition is precisely the problem of donor gifts. A gift needs to be recognised in some sense otherwise it can become too much to handle morally given that the identity of the donor is, albeit anonymously, embodied in the donation, rendering it a sacrifice rather than a gift and changing the relation the donee has with the gift, creating feelings of ‘donor guilt’ whereby questions such as ‘why me not them?’ become overwhelming.
To conclude, while gifts are reciprocal by nature, the illusion of altruism and selflessness is maintained to validate people in their moral standing and agency. A gift becomes a gift, whether it will be reciprocated (i.e. birthday presents) or sacrificed (i.e. organ donations), when one decides to conceptualize and categorise it as a gift, which may imply the concealment of reciprocation, enabled by the semantic slippage between gift giving and gift gifting which is contingent on the context of the gift.
‘Anthropology has been more successful in studying “hidden” resistance than large-scale, openly political phenomena like revolutions.’ Discuss.
Resistance refers to the refusal to accept or comply with something. While resistance can be expressed on various scales and in differing forms, anthropology has arguably tended to focus on the small-scale, quotidian resistance.
This essay will assess whether anthropology has been more successful in studying ‘hidden’ resistance than large-scale, openly political phenomena like revolutions. It will first question whether there are different kinds of resistance. It will then address why ‘hidden’ resistance is of interest to anthropologists.
To ask whether anthropology has been more successful in studying ‘hidden’ resistance rather than large-scale, openly political phenomena is inherently biased insofar as it ascribes political importance and relevance to a certain type of resistance. Is there such a thing as ‘real’ resistance? Ortner (1995) suggests that there is a tendency to romanticise resistance. Indeed, she argues that there is never a ‘single, unitary, subordinate, if only in the simple sense that subaltern groups are internally divided by age, gender, status’ and, consequently, individual resisters within a large resistance movement have differing, at times opposed, yet still legitimate, perspectives on the situation. Hence, internal political complexities often render large-scale resistance movements ‘conflicted, internally contradictory, and affectively ambivalent’. As such, the creation of a binary between ‘large-scale, openly political resistance’ and ‘hidden resistance’ is nonsensical insofar as all resistance is inherently nuanced. This can be illustrated by Aretxaga’s (1995) work on the Dirty Protest. Albeit large-scaled and openly political, the Dirty Protest reveals the ambiguity and incoherence of resistance. The protest, which took place in the late 1970s in a Northern Irish prison by male, subsequently joined by female, inmates, had no precedent in existing political culture. Through deep humiliation, the will of the prisoners was defeating, transforming them from autonomous individuals to dependent and infantilised subjects through recourse to physical pain and humiliating practices. While the recourse to faeces may did not make apparent sense to those outside of the prison walls, Feldman (1991) notes that through humiliation, prisoners were ‘constantly propelled into an infantile role’ and to an extent the Dirty Protest can be understood as ‘virtual resistance to toilet training in a bizarre way’, enacting at once a literal and symbolic resistance to prison socialisation as well as the accompanying moral system legitimising it. Aretxaga posits that the Dirty Protest took the form it did as it allowed innates to reckon with and articulate the dangerous feelings of hatred towards the screws (i.e. the guards) that could not be expressed in other forms ‘without risking madness or serious physical injury’. In that sense, the smearing of faeces over the walls constituted not so much the instrument of a mimetic violence but rather ‘the crystallisation of a conflict between the desire of mimetic violence against prison officers and the need for restraint to preserve some physical and psychological integrity’. As such, as an act of resistance, it entailed a deep personal involvement which proved to be a tremendously painful process for the prisoners, both psychologically and physically. However, what is more, these acts of resistance were not only linked to personal subjectivities but also to a collective subjectivity, one going beyond the individual, enabling others to make sense of the protests according to shared understandings. In the case of the Dirty Protest, the historically founded scars of colonialism could be seen as a larger discourse within which the relation between the prisoners and guards was embedded, this relation thus being mediated by a ‘relation of social inequality larger and historically more significant than that in the existing prison universe’. Here, to oppose the concepts of large-scale, openly political and hidden resistance would assign the Dirty Protest to one side of the binary. In being openly political, the Dirty Protest would be seen as resistance to an established, recognised and coherent, single form of power, obscuring the more nuanced reality of the resistance entailed in the protest, a resistance at once collective and historical yet also psychological and personal to the prisoners. Thus, anthropologists’ success in studying ‘hidden’ resistance may be contingent on the reality that there is no large-scale, openly political expression of resistance that does not entail ‘hidden’ resistance in its midst, even in the simple sense of the presence of varying intentionalities and subjectivities involved in any large group.
Abu-Lughod (1990) subjects Foucault’s statement on power and resistance to an inversion, stating that where there is resistance, there is power. Resistance as such can be used as a ‘chemical catalyst so as to bring light to power relations, locate their position, find out their points of application and methods used’. This use of resistance as a diagnostic for power allows for reconceptualization of both the concepts of ‘power’ and ‘resistance’, with each coming to be seen as multifarious, manifesting in various forms, and malleable. Scott (1989) contends that if only ‘open, declared forms of struggle are called ‘resistance’, then all that is being measured may be the level of repression that structures the available options’. He stresses that various peasantries have been reduced from ‘open, organised, radical activity at one moment to sporadic acts of petty resistance at the next’, noting that what has changed is not the aims of the peasantry but rather the effectiveness of domination. Thus, it is not that Anthropology has not been as successful in studying large-scale and openly political phenomena as it has hidden resistance, rather it has followed the resistance in its varying forms and ever-changing manifestations. Yet, while Scott frames everyday resistance as ‘background’ resistance that invariably goes unnoticed through acts such as foot-dragging, dissimulations, false compliance, feigned ignorance, O’Brien, Land and Lianjiang (2006) draw attention to how everyday resistance can encompass openly political, small-scaled and non-violent expressions. In their work on Rightful Resistance in rural China, they reject the binary which opposes power to resistance, instead bringing to the forefront internal dynamics of resistance. They note that popular resistance can occur within official norm and often depends on a ‘degree of accommodation with the structure of power’. Rightful resisters in rural China take on a collective approach to resistance rather than subscribe to the view that ‘the state and its laws are typically inaccessible, arbitrary and alien’ (Scott). In fact, an increasing number of discontented villagers cite laws and regulations when challenging cadre malfeasance. Rightful resisters, through acts such as the withholding of grain tax payment because they did not receive the fertilizer and fuel the government authorities were contractually obliged to provide, demand accountability, using materials at hand and aligning themselves with lawful authority to ‘confront power holder who comprise the ideals that justify their rule’.
As such, Anthropologists have not been more successful in studying hidden resistance at the expense of other forms of resistance, rather they have been successful in studying various forms and types of resistance that locate and reveal different forms and manifestations of power. Further, the question of the existence of ‘hidden’ resistance emerges. Does resistance require recognition? Does total anonymity undermine resistance?
Further, Anthropology’s success in studying resistance can be challenged insofar as it allows for analytical and textual domination. Indeed, texts are ‘completely able to distort or exclude the voices and perspective of those being written about’ (Ortner 1995). Brown (1996) echoes this in saying that resistance studies are at time imbued with moral self-validation given that ‘the concept of resistance is informed by an explicitly moral sensibility … there is an inexorable tendency for it to spill into contexts of questionable relevance, since no analyst wishes to be seen as politically naïve or morally insensitive’. Thus, Anthropology treads a fine line in studies of power and resistance insofar as the desire to study the ‘hidden’ side to resistance can undermine the analytical salience of the concept of resistance if it is overused.
To conclude, Anthropology has not so much been more successful in studying ‘hidden’ resistance than large scale, openly political phenomena; rather it has allowed for ‘hidden’ resistance to become an analytical interest, broaden the scope of concepts such as resistance as well as power, enabling them to encompass more seemingly mundane and quotidian expressions.
‘Kinship is an open-ended set of opportunities and constraints.’ Discuss.
Kinship at once refers to a blood relation and to a sharing of characteristics or origins. It can be understood as biologically determined or socially constructed. It is both inclusive, through mechanisms such as adoption, and exclusive, through the severance of familial ties.
This essay will assess the ways in which kinship is an open-ended set of opportunities and constraints. It will first focus on kinship in the face of uncertainty and change through an ethnographic exploration of infertility. It will then look at new understandings of kinship, engaging with gay and lesbian conceptions of kinship and kinship’s relation to sex.
Blood relation is the commonly acknowledged marker of kinship. Parenthood is often associated with procreation, with parents seen as the origin of the genetic makeup of their offspring. This is deeply ingrained in Euro-American contexts to the extent that to some, parenthood is contingent on procreation. Weston in Families We Choose (1997) notes that Stephen Richter, a gay man in his fifties at the time of the interview, attributed never having become a father to not having been in a relationship with a woman. Envisioning ‘parenting and procreation only in the context of a heterosexual relationship’ and regarding the two as ‘completely bound up with one another’, had led him never to consider having children an option. Yet, biological underpinnings of kinship are challenged in the face of infertility. Bonaccorso in Conceiving Kinship (2008) points out that the shock of infertility is usually expressed in terms of ‘why has this happened to me’. She outlines how, when confronted with the news of infertility, feelings are often of loss, ‘for discovering what one always takes for granted: a fertile body, able to reproduce others like oneself’, and disillusion, when realizing that ‘one is living a different life from the one he/she had imagined for oneself and one’s partner’. Infertility, as such, is so shocking insofar as it challenges readily accepted notions of kinship as biological. It disrupts taken for granted expectations such as ‘settling down, starting a family, having children with and from the partner couples say they have chosen for life’. This outlook denotes an inherently biological component in imagining future offspring. As Matilde, one of Bonaccorso’s informants, suggests, ‘I am waiting for egg donation and have already had an IVF cycle. It failed. If the American treatment becomes available in Italy I will go for that. Even if it is still experimental. Not because genes are really important in themselves, but because my genes are a part of me and my husband married me for what I am, he did not marry somebody else’. Yet, Ragone (1998) stresses that with the introduction of ARTs, ‘seemingly simple yet nonetheless culturally bound assessments of what constitutes family, motherhood, and fatherhood … can no longer be taken for granted. ARTs have served to defamiliarize what was once understood to be the natural basis of human procreation and relatedness’.
As such, ARTs such as gamete donation, can be seen as an opportunity for the creation of kinship. Yet, because of the deeply ingrained ideas of ‘natural’ kinship, i.e. biological kinship, heterosexual couples often struggle with coming to terms with these new reproductive technologies which depart from normalised models of kinship.
Interestingly, for gay and lesbian couples, for whom the ‘natural’ path to kinship through procreation was never available, the idea of non-procreative reproduction is not an issue and does not take away from the kinship ties that will ensue. Whereas heterosexual couples find reassurance in clinicians using kinship language to normalise the ‘unnatural’ process of IVF, even prior to conception or birth, homosexual couples do not feel the need to create a kinship imaginary. Bonaccorso contends that the very fact that there is no explicit lesbian and gay reproductive and familial model out there in the world to adhere to inherently pushes lesbian and gay couples to rethink and reconceptualise their ‘reproductive choices, conception stories, family project, and biological and social relatedness anew’.
Here, gay and lesbian imaginings of kinship allow for a move away from the constraints of biology and embrace optative, malleable, distributive forms of kinships. For instance, while heterosexual couples progressively transform donors from highly moral persons to cells, ‘non-persons’ (Strathern 1992), gay and lesbian couples favour the practice of inclusion of unknown or known donors, placing them in some sort of relationship with the offspring, ‘the contributor of genetic material is, since the early days of planning the pregnancy, thought of and made into a presence’. What is interesting is that such practices of inclusion ‘reflect the relevance assigned to biogenetic ties’ and attests to the fact that lesbian and gay couples ‘do not totally depart from a kinship model that incorporates biology; they still rely on it, although in very diverse ways’. Thus, reconceptualization of kinship in relation to gay and lesbian realities to some extent, transforms biological constraints into opportunities to extend the reaches of kinship and enable the concept to be in better adequation to reality. Further, studies of lesbian couples enable a move away from the naturalised desire of parenthood to an optative, choice-based opportunity. Paolo, one of Bonaccorso’s informants stresses that ‘if you want to have a child, you need to ask yourself why, where that desire comes from. You cannot just assume that it is OK. As women we are so much expected to want and long for a child that as soon as we feel that desire, we automatically believe that it is OK… But [as] women we must learn to ask ourselves questions, and wonder what we feel and want and why we feel that way’. of nature as independent of social intervention’.
New understandings of kinship have been put forward in order to better represent the lived realities of individuals. Carsten in Cultures of Relatedness (2000) contends that ‘the more nature is assisted by technology, and the more the social recognition of parenthood is circumscribed by legislation, the more difficult it becomes to think of nature as independent of social intervention’.
Weston (1997) draws attention to how representations of what kinship entails can be exclusive. For instance, representations excluding lesbians and gay men from ‘the family’, invoke what Blanche Wiesen Cook (1977) has called ‘the reduction of lesbians and gay men to sexual identity, and sexual identity to sex alone’. Weston asserts that to claim that ‘straight people ‘naturally’ have access to family while gay people are destined to move toward a future of solitude and loneliness, is not only to tie kinship closely to procreation, but also to tie gay men and lesbians as members of a non-procreative species set apart from the rest of humanity’. However, as Weston notes, chosen families do not directly oppose genealogical modes of reckoning kinship, rather ‘they undercut procreation’s status as a master term in order to provide the template for all possible kin relations’.
Of note is the relation of kinship to sex and love. Berstein (2007) highlights that the move from impersonal ‘sexual release’ associated with street level sex trade to ‘bounded authenticity’, referring to the sale and purchase of authentic emotional and physical connection in sex work, blurs the traditional boundaries of kinship. Kin imaginaries are more frequently deployed in sex work, often creating the illusion of kinship. Yet, arguably, kinship is chosen, therefore kin relations, having been disembbeded from their fundamental biogenetic tie, can come to refer to relations of care and affection.
Nonetheless, while sex and affection can foster kin imaginaries, the moral harnessing of sex to love can constrain individual to enact roles in accordance with ideals of kinship. Kulick (2005) notes that creation of the sex-love dyad in Sweden ensures that many women, even in what they themselves would consider progressive heterosexual partnerships, continue to do all housework as well as accommodate their husband’s moods, desires, decisions, ‘not because they have to but because they ‘love’ their husbands and see their accommodating behaviour as evidence of that love’.
To conclude, kinship as a concept can be both constraining and opportunity enabling. Yet, the opportunities it allows or constraint it imposes are contingent on what understanding one decides to have of kinship. As Bonaccorso’s work on infertility shows, kinship understandings are adaptable and malleable in accordance to varying situations if one allows oneself to move away from understandings of kinship as inherently rooted in biogenetic ties, instead conceiving of kinship as a created and re-created relation based on care.
How does transnational migration transform, or disrupt, experiences of care and ageing?
The process of ageing introduces vulnerability into the lives of individuals. With age, they become more prone to illness (i.e. hearing loss, cataracts, chronic pain, dementia) and the potential juxtaposition of several conditions at once. Thus, ageing often implies increasing dependence and need for care, one that is active and quotidian rather than emotional. Yet, in the face of the reality of transnational migration, where geographical proximity cannot be taken for granted, how do families contend with the novel challenges posed by old age? Is care contingent on proximity? Is it adaptable?
This essay will assess how transnational migration transforms, or disrupts, experiences of care and ageing. It will first look at how transnational migration in inherently disruptive to practices of care, forcing the creation of new narratives. Then, it will address the issue of care provided beyond the family.
Care from kin in old age, to many, is expected, stemming from what Thelen and Coe (2019) term ‘deferred reciprocity’, present across the lifespan and generating a sense that elderly care is ‘deserved’. Lamb (2013) explores this naturalisation of the expectation of care in her work on old age security in India. Narayan Sakar, a retired engineer who she interviewed, reflected that ‘in our families, we raised our children – why? Our idea, our dream was that when we grew old, our sons and daughters-in-law would serve us. And it is our dream, and a natural thing, to hope for this, to want this. We did this for our parents, and they for theirs’. This expectation of intergenerational care largely originates from the widely practiced family set-up, that is, joint living. Co-residence across generations is still by far the most common living arrangement in India, with about ‘eighty percent of India’s population aged sixty or older [living] with adult children’. Lamb underlines that those of both older and younger generations relate that ‘in a joint family system, adult children, in particular sons and daughters-in-law, provide care for their ageing parents – out of love, a deep respect for elders, and a profound sense of moral, economic and even spiritual duty to attempt to repay the inerasable debts they owe their parents for all the effort, expense and affection their parents expended to produce and raise them’. Thus emerges a notion of pure reciprocity insofar as adult children reciprocate what their parents once gave them as young children – including ‘co-residence, food, material support, love, time together, assistance with daily routines, and toileting’ – when their parents become old. However, this ideal of pure reciprocity is challenged by contemporary realities, with an increasing number of children living abroad or favouring nuclear family living over joint living. Yet, in spite of this, stigma persists around non-kin provided elderly care; as Patrima outlines ‘[elderly care] is expensive and a hassle. Maybe an old age home would be a good solution, but the social stigma! What would people say? I could never do it’. Nonetheless, attempts to reconcile the ideal of elderly care and its reality are made, with many families making efforts to adapt to these new realities. For instance, some non-resident Indian children fund NGOs services when they are able to provide money but not time or proximity. The director of such a NGO, the Agewell Foundation, compared hired elder-care counsellors to ‘surrogate sons’, commenting that while this may be a ‘sad situation indeed when children cannot gift their parents time’, it is a ‘contemporary reality that has to be faced’.
Further, given that time and proximity cannot be taken for granted anymore, some old age homes are trying to rework, recreate a narrative that allows for care to be understood as multiple and non-exclusive; it is not because kin are unable to provide proximate and daily care that they do not think of their elderly parents or care for them in other ways, and it is not because old age homes are a form of ‘collective’ care that they are any less inclusive. As Sanjita, head of an old age home, stresses: ‘we are trying to wipe out the stigma of living in an old age home … ‘come happily stay with us’ is our motto. It’s not that children are throwing away their parents – it’s not always that … These are just the circumstances of modern society … Children are [more] than eager to pay for their parents’ happiness, and parents are also able to pay’. Additionally, some emphasise the value of old age homes as enabling belonging through the creation of new social ties, noting that living in an old age home is ‘less culturally alien and bizarre than what for some would have been the alternative option of living alone’, highlighting how ‘it is not natural for human beings to live alone’. Thus, while altering the expected forms of care, transnational migration and the subsequent adaptations that must be made allow for a different experience of ageing, broadening understandings of care beyond intimacy, allowing for care to encompass ideals of belonging.
What is more, the realities of transnational families highlight how reciprocity cannot be taken for granted in familial care. Baldassar (2007) emphasises how ‘families, ethnicities, and nations can be seen as imagined communities’ whereby, while one may be born into a family and a nation, the ‘sense of membership can be a matter of choice and negotiation’. As such, intent comes to the forefront in relation to the globalisation of elderly care in the context of migration. Indeed, Baldassar underlines that, despite many migrants being separated from their elderly parents by national borders, they continue to ‘maintain mutual care-giving relationships’. While distance and the passage of time might disrupt, fracture, transform, these care exchanges, they do not fundamentally diminish them if intent to care is present. Arguably, that transnational families manage to adapt to the new challenges of distance attests to the strength of the caring relation – some families do not entertain caring relation even in close proximity to one another.
Yet, sometimes, intent, or ability, to care for elderly kin is absent. Hence, this transforms the interaction between care and ageing, displacing the experience of elderly care from a context of ‘care’ work (i.e. reciprocal kin care) to one of care ‘work’ (i.e. independent from kin). Elderly care removed from the arena of kinship becomes fraught with inequality insofar as it is inherently unilateral in ways that care among kin is not. Buch (2018) remarks on the dichotomy between conceptualisations of kin care as real, warm, loving and paid care as cold and somehow inferior. While care work entails two subjectivities, one is subject to erasure. Buch stresses how, despite Maria spending most of her adult lives caring for people in every direction, that is children, husband, elderly clients, she feels that ‘nobody really cares’. She notes that rather than interpret Maria’s own care as insecure, this can be interpreted as a comment on the ‘way her life [is] shaped by flows of empathic attunement that only [runs] in one direction – from her, and care workers like her, to those they [serve]’. Strikingly, in Maria’s experience, those for whom she cares at work are more concerned with ‘the ways in which her emotional performances [affect] them than with her actual wellbeing’. As a result, she used her permanent smile to ‘camouflage exhaustion and absent-mindedness produced by the unrelenting strain of economic and social precariousness’. As such, Buch contends that the implicit association of care with sentiment and moral practice is flawed. Indeed, ‘imagined as inherently private, care is paradigmatically found in bodily intimacies between mothers and children, and thus evokes notions of domestic warmth, attachment, love, and sustenance’. Yet, these associations make it difficult to think of care as a ‘source of violence or suffering’ with the term often used in ways that ‘excise or romanticise the physical pain, exhaustion, and exploitation that many carers experience’.
Further, it is worth stressing that although home care workers ‘sustain older adults’ personhood and enable their residential stability in later life, their jobs do not enable workers to similarly create stable lives for themselves’, amplified by the stratified reproduction that care work generates.
The stark contrast between experiences of elderly care in transnational families as opposed to those of care workers raises questions about the valuation of care and the inherent bias present in familial, reciprocal, often loving care, that overshadows the violence and strain of care work when the premium is on the independence of the elderly person rather than on the creation of a relation, or dialogue of care.
To conclude, transnational migration impacts experiences of care and ageing. Yet, whether adversity is embraced and channelled into something positive, enabling negotiations and re-definitions of what care entails, is contingent on the mentality of those engaged in those relations. However, in conceptualising care as malleable and adaptative, extending beyond normal arrangements of kinship, the issue of the contrast in valuation of ‘care’ work’ as opposed to care ‘work’ becomes salient. As such an interesting follow up to the question of whether care is contingent on proximity becomes whether care should be caring.
Discuss the relation between care and one or more of the following:
(a) obligation;
(b) coercion;
(c) freedom;
(d) belonging;
(e) dependence.
(b) coercion;
(c) freedom;
(d) belonging;
(e) dependence.
To care can be understood as an action, as looking after, providing for, the needs of something or someone. To do something withcare suggests an attentiveness, a consideration to do something correctly, to avoid risk or damage.
To care can be understood as an emotion, to feel concern, interest or to attach importance to something, someone. To be caring suggests empathy, awareness, and understanding.
Without the ‘to’, care becomes an idea and an ideal, referring to the provision of what is deemed necessary to the health, welfare or protection of something or someone.
To depend has antithetical meanings. To depend can be understood as being controlled or determined by. Yet it can also be understood as being able to trust or rely on.
To be dependent can be understood as being dependent on someone or something for support or as being unable to do without.
Dependence taken as more of a concept encompasses those opposed realities and is taken to refer to either the state of relying on orbeing controlled by someone or something else.
To ask what the relation is between dependence and care can appear quite simple. Yet, this takes on a newfound complexity once the plurality of meanings each word can take on is acknowledged.
This essay will address the ambiguous nature of the relation between care and dependence. It will first look at how the malleability of care and dependence. It will then look at the interaction between care and dependence and how the relation between the two comes to be valued.
Dependence and care are inherently malleable by nature, as meanings and understandings are negotiated through lived experiences. Sometimes, care is not expressed in expected ways. For instance, when care and dependence and intricately mixed, unexpected forms of care and dependence might be created. Han (2012) draws the attention to the surprising tenacity of care, illustrating this with Sra Flora and her family. She notes how despite her daughter and her boyfriend’s addiction to pasta base (a cocaine-based paste similar to crack cocaine) which led aggressive behaviour, worsening of debts and no financial contribution to the household, Sra Flora continued to care for them both. This form of care is a kind of ‘active awaiting’ (Cavell, 2005), a ‘patience for the possible which draws on the hope that relations could change with time’ (Han, 2012). However, the situation changed for Sra Flora when her daughter, Florcita was hospitalised because of her boyfriend Kevin’s aggressiveness. This prompted Sra Flora to ask them to leave the family home. Yet, even then, care doesn’t disappear, it is simply transformed. Indeed, although Sra Flora requested Florcita and Kevin leave, she did make arrangements with a neighbour for them to rent a room in a house down the street, she still brought food to them each day. Han observes that ‘with the move, Sra Flora and Florcita had, for the moment, crafted a new way to maintain proximity while distancing Kevin from the home’. Hence, care is not a given, rather it is responsive to new developments, adjusting to changes in dependency, whether it be dependence on drugs or on the financial and emotional support and security of Sra Flora.
The idea of care as responsive is interesting in thinking of care as cyclical. Dependence and care are both subject to change, they can evolve. For instance, the ‘who’ can be interchangeable, with the dependent becoming the carer or the carer becoming dependent, either due to illness, drugs, or other external factors. Han points out that when Sra Flora fell ill, her partner Rodrigo felt a sort of moral indebtedness to her, felt he couldn’t leave her. Roles are reversed for a while, Sra Flora is cared for, becomes dependent, instead of bearing her usual responsibilities to care for those dependent on her, pointing to the non-static nature of the relation between care and dependence.
Moreover, Garcia (2010) highlights how, in situations of interdependence between heroin addicts, here a mother and her daughter, responsibility is exchanged. In a drug raid on her mother’s (Eugenia) trailer, Bernadette faced the consequences in her place. Bernadette argues that her mom had ‘more to lose’ than she did, explaining that she suffered from depression and had tried to commit suicide. Thus, Bernadette, through her silence, took the blame, and with it, responsibility, for the drug possession. Garcia notes that here, Bernadette’s silence ‘was intended to protect her mother’ who, arguably, was the most vulnerable of the two, ‘but Bernadette was also a mother, was also vulnerable – as were her own children’. What can be understood from this is that care, much like dependence, is not straightforward. Care is improvised in a context where dependence varies – sometimes the mother requires more help and attention, sometimes it is the daughter – and in which caring duties are ascribed and re-ascribed. This challenges assumptions about who needs care, who gives care, how dependency affects care. Care thus appears to be responsive and adaptive to varying realities of dependency. Hence the relation between care and dependence is in fact multiple.
Given the multiscalar nature of both care and dependence, how does the interaction between the two come to be understood, valued? Rivas (2004) outlines a paradox: people with disabilities are dependent upon personal assistants for their independence. For instance, as one consumer of personal assistants highlights, his parents did all the work now done by his personal assistant until he was thirteen, which was when they hired someone to help with homework, giving him his first taste of independence. To him, not living with his parents anymore was equated with independence. Interestingly, what mattered to him was not that he was receiving care but rather, what type of care he was receiving. He argues that being independent not only means living apart from his parents, but, crucially, not having them care for him. Yet, the fact that he believes he got his ‘first taste of independence’ when he was thirteen, when his parents were paying for a personal attendant, attests to the fact that his sense of independence is not contingent on his ability to financially deal with his own care. Rivas highlights that, rather, his sense of independence rests on ‘the fact that his care is somebody’s paid work’. In fact, while their work may seem identical, paid caregivers deliver a different cultural good than family members or friends can provide, that is the ‘illusion of independence’. Here, the type of care received greatly influences how his dependence is perceived. Money creates a link between two strangers and a strange balance between independence stemming from dependence.
Interestingly, the value ascribed to the relation of care and dependence is contingent on asymmetrical realities. Notably, there is a tension between what personal attendants would qualify their care as versus what the care receiver would qualify it as. Many personal attendants pride themselves in their ability to be caring, to empathise, to really learn how to listen to verbal and non-verbal cues, they believe their care can be equated to a form of love, a love they voluntarily give because they deem it important to make the receiver of their care feel ‘like they’re still humans who deserve respect, love and care’. In stark contrast, the care receiver is sometimes oblivious to this generous expressing of affection, simply interpreting it as an execution of a job for which they are remunerated. As Rivas sums up, ‘the consumers felt that they had fully purchased the time of their personal attendant; therefore, there was nothing the attendant did within his or her work time that the consumer did not consider part of the job’. Hence, there is often a lack of reciprocity in situations where care and dependence interact. Rivas notes that, for instance, while personal attendants often know exactly the needs and desires of their disabled employer, there is, ‘no reciprocal gaze on the caregiver’; while it can be argued that the disabled employer’s bodily needs are so great, this focus is justified, it is important not to underestimate the needs of the caregiver, which are ‘not as obviously embodied, but may nevertheless be great’. In fact, when they are women, and they usually are, their ‘care workload generally extends beyond their clients, into their families. Often, they have no one to take over their care responsibilities or to help them when they need care themselves’.
To conclude, to single out a relation between care and dependence would be quite an impossible task insofar as the relation between the two is complex, interdependent, and malleable. The cyclical nature of care and dependence forces a re-evaluation of restrictive and unifocal understandings of what care and dependence are. Care and dependence bleed into one another in novel and unexpected ways to such an extent that perhaps there is more value in questioning not the interconnectedness of the two but rather the interaction.
Sexuality, in its commodified forms, leads to less authentic intimate relationships. Discuss.
Intimacy is often confounded with love, leading to the occlusion of commodified sexuality from such narratives. Yet, sex worker is multifarious, presenting many types and manifestations, and as such the inherent decoupling of sex work from intimate relationships is reductive, flattening the lived realities of sex workers and their clients.
This essay will ask whether sexuality, in its commodified form, leads to less authentic intimate relationships. It will first look at how sex work can be construed as a pretence. Then, it will focus on the permeability of the boundary between sex work and intimacy. Lastly, it will present sex work as adaptive of understandings of intimacy.
The commodification of sexuality has led to a decoupling of sex and love. Yet, Brennan (2003) shows how Dominican sex workers in Sosua, actively engage in the creation of a transnational pretence of love and intimacy. For instance, Andrea, distinguishes between two forms of marriages; marriage ‘por amor’ (i.e. for love), and marriage ‘por residencia’ (i.e. for visas), contending that a marriage should not be wasted on romantic love when it can instead be transformed into a visa, into new land and economic security. Here, commodification of sexuality has led to the emergence of less authentic intimate relationships, yet the relation is still to some extent mutually beneficial. Indeed, sex workers in Sosua are both independent and dependent, resourceful and exploited, ‘local agents caught in a web of global economic relations [trying to the best of their ability] to take advantage of the men who are in Sosua to take advantage of them’. Interestingly, while European men frequenting Sosua see Dominican sex workers as exotic and erotic because of their ‘dark skin’, viewing them all as ‘commodities for their pleasure and control’, Dominican sex workers often find the men to be too readily exploitable, ‘potential dupes, walking visas, means by which the women might leave the island, and poverty, behind’. Brennan notes that while sex workers the world over pretend they desire their clients, enjoy the sex, in Sosua, sex workers also pretend to be in love and have staked a lot on these performances. In this regard, sex work as a commodity has allowed for inauthentic forms of intimacy manifest, wherein authenticity is replaced by pretence, and intimacy by opportunity.
Some sex workers in fact, consider all commodified intimacy to be innately inauthentic. In relation to gifts in sex work, which in any other context might be taken as a testament of love, affection, Gutierrez-Garza (2019) underlines how keeping relations between clients and sex workers strictly professional is considered necessary. Amanda for instance, refuses to entertain a sugar daddy or develop personal relationships with regulars, commenting that to her, sex work is a pretence, a simulation of intimacy at a price. It follows that she conceived of gifts from clients as part of the charade of attempting to normalise something that was strictly business but also as strategies used by clients to obtain free sex, remarking that ‘when they give [us] gifts, all they really want is a free ride’.
Yet, the boundary between illusion, pretence, and reality in sex work can be unclear. This can be illustrated Gutierrez-Garza’s informant Vanessa, a sex worker in London, has a Sugar Daddy, Mark, and a husband, Giorgio. Vanessa’s marriage to Giorgio was enabled by Mark who ‘gifted’ her the money in order for her to obtain legal status and security through her husband, as such being able to stay in London as his official mistress. Interestingly, Vanessa’s attempts to normalise her relationship to her husband, or rather, signal that theirs was romantic in contrast to hers and Mark’s, were through gift giving. Here, the gifts took on a symbolic and emotional relevance, as opposed to those she received from Mark in the context of sex work, due to the emotional investment she was putting in the relationship. However, this stood in stark contrast to Giorgio’s approach to the relationship, given that, due to a lack of trust, and an abundance of insecurity, he was not interested in developing a loving relationship with Vanessa. Indeed, although he had accepted that Vanessa earnt her money by seeing other men, jealousy preventing the creation of a romantic and loving relation. As such, Vanessa was caught between a non-romantic, purely commodified relation with Mark on one hand, and a failed romantic relation, in spite of her efforts, with her husband, who perceived sex work and real intimacy as irreconcilable.
However, because of their ambiguity, gifts can acquire different meanings, contingent on the context of the exchange. For instance, Sabrina, also a sex worker in London, felt indebted to one of her clients, Robert, who had payed for her flat and utilities after an incident with the police; although Robert did not explicitly demand special services from her, there was a ‘tacit agreement that she would spend more time with him’. As such, this commodification of intimacy was not perceived as ‘real’ intimacy. However, right before going back to Brazil, Robert gifted Sabrina with several things for her son Ronaldo that he knew the son would like; Sabrina was pleasantly surprised insofar as, while there had been an ongoing purchasing of gifts in the relationship, it was the first time the gifts received felt personal, with these gifts reflecting the ‘intimacy they had shared and the relationship Robert was trying to create’ which entail a familiar, almost kin-like relation. Sabrina notes that despite there being many exchanges between them, monetary or not, these objects held emotional value, ‘they were not a form of payment; these were real gifts because they were intended to please the most important personal in her life, her son’. Hence, sex work, despite being inherently commodified, can at times become permeable to intimacy.
Asserting that commodified sexuality fundamentally entails less authentic intimate relationships is restrictive and casts a shadow on the reality of intimacy as multifarious. Stout (2015) in her work on Cuban male sexual laborers challenges traditional understandings of intimacy. She outlines that ‘unlike the heterosexual sex trade in which female sex workers [foster] illusions of fidelity by calling their clients boyfriends, queer transnational families [incorporate] male sex worker’s foreign clients alongside their female partners’; and that, interestingly, it is when gay foreigners find themselves in cramped kitchens and overgrown backyards alongside the female partners, parents, and siblings of Cuban sexual labourers that ‘kinship imaginaries [emerge] and become salient’. In fact, while male sex workers do not introduce foreigners as husbands or boyfriends, family members often address tourists as ‘son’, ‘brother’, or ‘uncle’, to make sense of these ‘unprecedented encounters’. This leads to unexpected feelings of intimacy in these relations, with one tourist, Anthony, describing the satisfaction gained from feeling ‘seen for who they really [are] and simply loved by Cuban families’. Stout notes that ‘while tourists might label male sexual labourers as opportunistic, they often describe hustlers’ families as generous, accepting, and empathic’, with many tourists ‘astonished to have older generations of Cubans such as sex workers’ mothers or grandmothers wholeheartedly embrace them, constantly offer food when supplies are limited, and protectively watch over them’. What is more, these manifestations of intimacy are not attenuate or lost with distance. For instance, John and Michael, a wealthy North American couple, continued to send money every month to the Cuban sexual workers they had been visiting over the years, even when sexual relations with these younger men ceased. They even went on to ‘pay for the emigration of two young Cuban sex workers to California, who stayed with them briefly before moving to Miami’. Additionally, when the couple vacationed in Havana, they would make a point of visiting the families of the men who had migrated. Stout accompanied them on such a visit and relates how she watched as ‘one young man’s mother cried and thanked them for their help’. She states that these visits, where John and Michael were referred to as ‘brother’ or ‘son’ left the tourists feeling ‘appreciated and as if they had ‘done something that mattered’ with their wealth’. Here, the intimacy, although it manifests in an unexpected form, transcends naturalised understandings of the love-intimacy dyad.
Berstein (2007) claims that the relocation of sexual labour from the street to indoor venues have created new geographic boundaries of vice and contributed to the rise of emotion and eroticism in sex work, formerly relegated to the private sphere. She contrasts ‘counterfeit intimacy’ with genuine feeling, ‘deep acting’ now involved in sex work – as Michael, a male escort comments, ‘in a way, I’m surprised that there isn’t more of a market among men for prostitution… You’ll hear people talk about “cold, mechanical, detached.” But to me it’s one of the most beautiful things you can do. It’s like a sacred, wonderful, beautiful thing to do for other people and to get money for doing that’
To conclude, intimacy and sex work are not mutually exclusive, rather, traditional, restrictive understandings of intimacy do not adequately map on to the realities of sex work, calling for a re-working of the definition of intimacy to extend beyond the love-sex dichotomy.
What have been the most positive and negative influences on social anthropology of the writings of Michel Foucault?
To ask what the most positive and negative influences on social anthropology have been in Michel Foucault’s writing is a tenuous task given the breadth of insights he has contributed to the discipline. As such, this essay will concentrate on the positive and negative influences of Foucault’s works on power. It will first look at Foucault’s reconceptualization of power and how subsequent anthropologist have contended with his ideas. It will then address Foucault’s analysis of the interaction between power and resistance.
There is no denying that Foucault has left a mark on anthropology, notably through the advancement of new understandings of the notion of power. For instance, he notes on the versatility and adaptability of power. In the subject and power (1982), he interrogates power in rather novel ways. He outlines that in thinking of power, it is interesting not to think about what it is or why it comes to be but rather to ask ‘how’. To him, asking ‘how’, not as in ‘how does it manifest’, but rather by what means it is exercised and what happens when individuals have power over others, enables interrogation into the imaginings of power. He claims that asking how allows for reflection on whether it is ‘legitimate to imagine a power which unites in itself a what, a why, and a how’; to start with ‘how’ is ‘to suggest that power as such does not exist’. Analysing in this manner allows for power to be thought of as particular rather than universal, as multifaceted rather than unified. For instance, he distinguishes between power understood as that which is ‘exerted over things and gives the ability to modify, use, consume, or destroy them’, which he refers to as ‘capacity’; and power understood as that which is brought into play relations between individuals or groups, thus a relational form of power.
In bringing relationality to the forefront of power analysis, he warns that ‘the exercise of power is not simply a relation between partners, individual or collective; [rather] it is a way in which certain actions modify others’. Thus, in his view, something called ‘Power’, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffuse form, in reality does not exist; instead ‘power exists only when it is put into action, even if [it] is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures’. In this sense, a notable influence Foucault has had on anthropology and its investigations into power is to actively refute the universality of power, focusing instead on particular manifestations of power and how they came to be.
Nonetheless, Foucault has been critiqued for contributing to the emergence of a totalising view a world in which power manifests, as Ortner asserts, ‘in every crevice of life’, and in which there is no outside to power’. Notably, Kelly (2013), noting on the marked increase in anthropological work looking at experiences of violence and cruelty, asks ‘at what point does an ethnography of suffering turn into a voyeuristic quasi-pornography?’, with many echoing her sentiment, asserting the need for a move beyond the suffering subject, turning instead to issues of ‘wellbeing’, ‘care’, ‘love’. Lambek (2010), in Ordinary Ethics, states that focusing on attempts of ‘real actors to grapple with moral dilemmas and to make ethical choices’ offers a positive and humane counterweight to the ‘darkness of the work on neoliberal oppression and governmental constraint’. Likewise, he posits that a focus on themes such as ‘care, love, empathy, responsibility, on trying – even if failing – to do the right thing’ would offer a refreshing counterpoint to a ‘steady diet of (early) Foucault, in which no good deed goes unpunished, and in which every would-be positive action simply magnifies the webs of power in which we live’.
These claims that there is a need for a counter anthropology to Foucauldian power is interesting in relation to issues of influence. Indeed, here, Foucault’s influence is characterised as somewhat negative, casting a shadow on the good, the positive. Yet, while many understand Foucauldian power in the sense of an all-encompassing and totalising thing, Foucault himself in The subject and Power (1982) refutes this fatalism by noting on how power can be understood as particular, variable, and located. He argues that ‘to live in a society is to live in such a way that action upon other action is possible and in fact ongoing’ making it all the more politically necessary to analyse ‘power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength of fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others’. Indeed, to say that there ‘cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined’. Thus, Foucault, in saying that the analysis of power cannot and should not be reduced to the study of institutions insofar as power relations are, in fact, ‘rooted in the system of social networks’ suggests the following: power is everywhere if understood in terms of action or of potentiality, and that is not necessarily a bad thing; to actively try to remove power from analysis or observation is not necessarily a good thing, insofar as it would result in an analysis in many ways divorced from reality.
Foucault’s analysis of power as multifarious has been extrapolated to apply to conceptualisations of resistance. For instance, Abu-Lughod (1990), deconstructs fantasies of resistance, deromanticizes it. In using the example of a ‘deceptively frivolous issue: lingerie’ and the attitudes of the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins towards it, she argues that young women, in resisting older women and their opinions on buying ‘frilly nylon negligees’ and moisturising cremes, are at once resisting and inscribing themselves in narratives of power. Yet, their resistance differs from that of their grandmothers: they aren’t against the idea of arranged marriage, they resist certain matches. Ideally, they wish to find a husband that is rich, educated and willing to buy them what they desire, hence the need to subscribe to an ideal of beauty their grandmothers did not. Resistance here underscored how the well-being and standard of living of women now ‘depend[ed] enormously on the favour of husbands in a world where everything costs money … and where women have almost no independent access to it’; male powers are, quite literally, enriched, as they now importantly ‘include the power to buy things and to punish and reward women through giving them.’ As such, finding out how people resist, in ways that might not correspond to our expectations of ‘Resistance’, shows that these taken for granted resistances, of whatever form, signal ‘sites of struggle’.
Yet, Foucault’s influence is at time taken out of context. Indeed, many quote his assertion that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ but few quote the entirety of the statement. Indeed, he does not only suggest that resistance is contingent on power, he notes that ‘yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’, implying that power not only works negatively (i.e. denying, restricting, prohibiting, repressing) but also positively (i.e. producing forms of pleasure, systems of knowledge, discourses). This in fact allows an ethnographically productive inversion of Foucault’s statement into ‘where there is resistance, there is power’, allowing resistance to become a ‘chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their points of application and the methods used’. In their example of Rightful Resisters in rural China, O’ Brien, Kevin and Li (2006) stress the ambivalence of the distinction between power and resistance, stating that the binary is not always so clear cut, with some resisters opposing the idea that ‘the state and its laws are typically inaccessible, arbitrary and alien’ (Scott 1989), believing instead that there are ways to exploit symbolic and material capital made available by the modern state. Indeed, although this type of resistance is pursed by those who, at least outwardly, accept party rule and go along with unwelcome measures, rightful resisters are unflinching in their expectations of the state’s execution of all promised beneficial policies, and are prepared to confront power holders who compromise the ideals that justify their rule. Thus, Foucauldian insights into power allow for not only new understandings of what power entails to emerge, but also for a reconceptualization of resistance, undermining the ideals of what ‘real’ resistance might involve.
To conclude, asking what the most ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ influences of Foucault might be is a contentious issue, if not simply because ascribing a qualitative value to an author’s work is subjective and restrictive. Further, it obscures the conflation of influence and interpretation. In many respects, Foucault’s ‘influence’ is very much dependent on what one takes away from his work as well as the extent to which the one influenced is aware and familiar with the breadth of his material.
What have been the most crucial insights (and if relevant, limitations) of the work of any one or more of these persons and other ethnographers applying their ideas:
(a) A.R. Radcliffe-Brown;
(b) Marilyn Strathern;
(c) Fredrik Barth;
(d) Sherry Ortner;
(e) Nancy Munn;
(f) Claude Lévi-Strauss;
(g) Michael Silverstein;
(h) Pierre Bourdieu?
(a) A.R. Radcliffe-Brown;
(b) Marilyn Strathern;
(c) Fredrik Barth;
(d) Sherry Ortner;
(e) Nancy Munn;
(f) Claude Lévi-Strauss;
(g) Michael Silverstein;
(h) Pierre Bourdieu?
Bourdieu’s anthropological insights and theoretical contributions are manifold. His works touch on issues of stateness, embodiment, social reproduction, practice. In the purpose of brevity, however, this essay will engage chiefly with Bourdieu’s theory of practice, asking what the most crucial insights that can be taken away from it may be. It will first assess the novelty of such a theory to then address the practical applications of it.
Practice theory emerged in a context theoretical realignment, offering a shift from a concern with representation to a desire for uncertainty, improvisation. Bourdieu (1977) outlines the inherently flawed logic of the omnipotent analyst in noting that it confines one to pre-emptive categorisations insofar as they do not engage in the practical realities of situations in which agents interact, thus being more at risk of glossing over the internal complexities of interactions in favour of familiar analyses. Practice theorists recognise the importance of ‘playing the game’ as an effort to move away from rules to patterns, strategies, and to acknowledge uncertainty, unpredictability. In his analysis of the gift, Bourdieu emphasises how observing practices challenges readily accepted truths, offers nuance to commonly acknowledged social interactions. In gift-giving practices, the reality of the nature of the practice, which is an exchange, is concealed by the time interval between gifts and counter-gifts. Indeed, for a gift to be adequately countered, it must be ‘deferred’ and ‘different’ insofar as the immediate return of an identical object ‘amounts to a refusal’. Further, a counter-gift too hastily given betrays one’s desire to be free of an obligation incurred, revealing the desire to pay off services rendered, or gifts received, in order to ‘be quits’, denounces the ‘initial gift retrospectively as motivated by the intention of obliging one’. Thus, gift ‘exchange’ comes down to a question of style (i.e. choice of when and where) with gift-exchange taking on very different meanings depending on when it is reciprocated insofar as it is the ‘lapse of time separating the gift from the counter gift’ that allows the deliberate oversight, the collectively maintained and approved self-deception, the ‘meconaissance’ of the reality of the objective mechanism of exchange entailed in gift-giving.
Building on this notion of time, Bourdieu notes that practice theory, in substituting ‘strategy’ for ‘rule’ is to ‘reintroduce time, with its rhythm, its orientation, its irreversibility’. He contends that anthropology requires the reintroduction of time to differentiate it from scientific practice, which he sees as ‘de-temporalized’; he argues that science tends to ‘exclude even the idea of what it excludes: because science is possible only in a relation to time which is opposed to that of practice, it tends to ignore time and, in doing so, to reify practices’. Thus, time, as revealed in observation of practice, allows for a break from static representations of reality confined to analytical realms of categorisation. Moreover, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (which he builds on from Mauss) reveals how the process of socialisation, and the embodied dispositions it creates, influence and structure the socialisation of generations to come, with the past becoming present in current practices and shaping the future, thus producing enduring features of social life that are, Sneath (2018) underlines, ‘identified by structuralist and objectivist analysis but that cannot be properly explained by it’.
Further, habitus is about embodiment, how bodies are conditioned to move, rest, gesture and talk, how they are trained and formatted in different social contexts. Practice theorists maintain that bodies are cultural, that they are culturally shaped in the ways we use them, what we can do with them; with our own upbringing, Bourdieu claims, being a ‘structural apprenticeship that leads to embodying of the structures of the world’.
Yet, what is novel about practice theory in its study of the body is its nuanced position on obedience to rules. Habitus entails ‘structuring of practices and representations that can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being product of the orchestrating action of the conduction’. In drawing a parallel to jazz, whereby ‘parts actors play in society are in some sense spontaneous [but] conform to a certain order and sense of what is appropriate’. Bourdieu likens habitus to musical improvisation, presenting it as ‘the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisation’. Insofar as habitus provides limits in the operations of intervention, practice theory puts forth the idea that agents improvise their social practices within those very limits.
Cowan (1990) in her book on Dance and the body politic in Northern Greece, takes on Bourdieu’s practice theory insights to offer new perspectives on gender, focusing on ‘practices’ rather than ‘roles’ to explore how ideas about genders and the relations they format are ‘embedded in and structure these practices’. She claims that practices are ‘the means through and site in which gender ideas and relations are realised, that it is comprehended and made real’. In turning to everyday sociability and its relation to gendered practices in northern Greece, Cowan purposefully elects a trivial practice - coffee drinking - to show how it expresses and reproduces the gendered ordering of the Sahoians. She argues that in the community, sweet substances form the basis of daily female exchanges. She observes that by ingesting sweets ‘girls and women literally produce themselves as properly feminine persons ; they do what they “should” (observe etiquette of guest-host relations) and what they “want” (since they “naturally” desire sweets)’. By blurring the distinction between moral propriety and desire, the essentially ‘socially constructed nature’ and ‘coercive dimension’ of this pleasure, the association of femininity and sweetness hence becomes naturalized insofar as it becomes encoded in both practices and substances.
Likewise, Fassin (2015) offers a new perspective on the nature of the state through focusing on its embodiment and the practices individuals engage in in making and remaking the state . He notes that ‘beyond the idea of abstraction and neutrality which tends to be associated with it, the state is a concrete and situated reality … simultaneously embodied in the individuals and inscribed in a temporality’. People reveal the state insofar as they make up the state; ‘far from being a readily essentialised entity that exists in a sort of permanence, the state is at any given moment a product of its time’. What is more, people are often not content simply with ‘implementing the policy of the state – they make it. They are the state’. For instance, ‘when a liberty and detention judge inquires into an undocumented person’s past or present situation as the basis to request for their release, she exceeds the strict delimitation of her role and resists the repression of immigrants’. This echoes Bourdieu’s claim that practice theory is novel, not because it dispenses of the idea of ‘rules’ driving social practices, but rather because it engages with improvisation and adaptation. For instance in the case of custom or ‘pre-law’, the ‘customary rules’ preserved by group memory are themselves the ‘product of a small batch of schemes enabling agents to generate an infinity of practices adapted to endlessly changing situations, without those schemes ever being constituted as explicit principles’. Consequently, customary law always seem to be able to pass from particular case to particular case, never expressly formulating the fundamental principles which ‘rational’ law spells out explicitly, insofar as it comes down to practice, to individual choice and judgment.
To conclude, it is impossible to ascertain what Bourdieu’s most crucial insights were, especially given his vast contributions to the discipline of anthropology. Undoubtedly, Bourdieu’s practice theory has left succeeding generations of anthropologists with an enduring analytical perspective, yet the evaluation of the value of his insights is not only contingent on individuals reckoning with Bourdieu’s theories but also dependent on the temporality from which the ‘novel’ quality of his works is judged.
‘In addition to “determining” and serving as a “backdrop for human action”, things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on’ (LATOUR). How, if at all, can this observation be used to enrich anthropological work?
Extending the scope of anthropological analysis beyond actors to include objects is the novel quality Actor-Network theory (henceforth ANT) ascribes itself. In allowing events to unfold and agency to apply to both human and non-human entities, Actor-Network theory positions itself as a stance that has the potential to enrich anthropological work.
This essay will assess the extent to which Latour;s observation that, things, in addition to ‘determining’ and ‘serving as a backdrop for human action’, might ‘authorise, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid’, can be used to enrich anthropological work. It will first look at ethnographical engagement with objects has enriched understandings of embodiment and care. It will then address the theoretical shortcomings of ANT.
Theories of embodiment posit that bodies are made, they are acquired, shaped, modelled; bodies are products of what they have been taught, how they have been conditioned, of the interactions they engage in with their environment. Latour (2004) contends that due to the ongoing interaction with the environment, the distinction between where the body starts and where it ends is blurred. Through the study of odour kits used in the training of ‘noses’ in the French perfume industry, he ‘extends’ human bodies beyond their materiality, highlighting how in training processes, bodies and kits become co-constitutive, producing a transformation in the body of the person as well as the universe of which they part, through mutual interaction and articulation of kit and body. Insofar as the odour kit itself has already been set up through ‘publications, conferences, documentation, conventional materials [and the] practices of the chemists and engineers who made it’, trainees, by using this kit, learn to be affected by ever more subtle distinctions. However, he outlines that it is not here a question of a more and more accurate ‘representation of odours that are already there in the world’ but rather a process of mutual articulation; the more ‘sensitive the bodies the trainees acquire, the more the world offers them – in this instance, the subtler fragrances they smell’. As such, bodies appear not to be fixed entities but instead readily changeable, affected by objects and things of the world in such a way that it reconstitutes their corporeality in new ways, becoming more ‘articulate’, newly receptive and sensitised. Hence, the extension of anthropological focus from subjects to subjects and objects, reveals the subtle ways in which things nuance the view of bodies as finite and bounded, revealing them to be permeable to their environment, thus enriching the study of embodiment.
Likewise, in studies focusing on how children learn to care for others, an engagement with things allows for a more complex picture of caring practices to emerge, revealing a distinction between taught and learned care. Indeed, while care can be taught through socialisation and imitation, children are often required to make sense of situations in their own way and express care adequately yet subjectively. For instance, illness precipitates how a child will learn to care given that it destabilises parent/child dynamics. Hunleth (2019) focuses on how children learn to care, but also express care, in the case of Zambian children whose parents have Tuberculosis. She emphasises the value of using images in understanding how children make sense of care by stressing that ‘engaging with images [decentres] the privileging of voice that excludes from research people who are silent, silenced, or alternately expressive’. Indeed, given that there are many times where ‘children, [cannot], in conversation, articulate what they [want] to communicate … the image as a ‘language that expresses without formulating’ … proved, perhaps, all the more powerful’. As such, images allow for the formulating of care that makes sense to the child, that is accessible to them, as well as enabling the expression of care through acting as a medium, bridging the distance (and difference) of child and adult forms of care. For instance, Hunleth relates how Abby, one of the children whose parent had tuberculosis, explained her drawing: ‘the pot, it was for cooking for her mother; the beer bottle, it was for her father, who ‘likes beer’ … the schoolbook was a schoolbook, without further explanation. The orange, a fruit known for its health benefits and also a rarity in households in George because of its price, rose off the page. Abby told her mother that this was an orange ‘for her’’. Hunleth stresses that ‘while [Abby’s] mother and her other relatives could still overlook, minimise, or reject [her] desire to live with and provide care to her mother, the drawings of care … circulated in that room as visual reminders that she both cared for her mother and was herself in need of care’. Thus, drawing as medium through which care can be expressed allows for children to ‘prove’ that they care, using imaginal manifestations of care, echoing Weiss’s (2002) claim that children’s fantasies are not ‘quaint, they are not delusional, and they are not separate from materially evident care’; rather they are ‘social acts’. Similarly, while Luka could not be besides his father, who was fighting tuberculosis in hospital, very much wished he was, to such an extent that he would borrow Hunleth’s recorder and describe a ‘fantastical plot to scale the brick walls of the hospital and climb through a window and into his father’s ward, so that he could see him and give him medicine’ or hold imaginary conversations imploring the doctor to take care of his father; as well as creating multiple drawings of him by his father’s bedside. Importantly, ‘through the acts of creating and showing such drawings to loved ones, [children’s] imaginal (bedside) caring [is] brought into existence and [serves] as a form of assertion, [telling] family members: ‘I have not stopped caring for or about you’’. These drawings also convey the message ‘Recognise me, I am here’.
Beyond being used as a medium to convey and express care, images or drawings are also sometimes used as mediums in the negotiation of a child’s own aspiration. In fact, one of the children Hunleth worked with, Paul, drew a plane of his own volition, representing his desire to be a pilot, presented it to her in the presence of his father, also ill of tuberculosis, and ‘used it as a tool to redirect the conversation … to talk about his future’. As such, Paul was not only speaking to Hunleth, but to his father throughHunleth. Drawings serve as a way for children to express their desires, their aspirations, in a way understandable to all, thus enabling a form of self-care to some extent. Hence, allowing things to be the object of focus can inform understandings of agency as enabled by things, thus conferring onto objects an importance that should not be overlooked, lest it impede on the emergence of a more encompassing and refined outlook on social processes.
Yet, while it may have valuable insights when applied in practice, ANT, as a theoretical approach is limited, namely in its desire to distance itself from explanation, favouring description instead. Latour (2006) asserts that to observe as an actor-network ‘theorist’ is to say to the actors ‘we won’t try to discipline you, to make you fit into our categories; we will let you deploy your own worlds, and only later we will ask you to explain how you came about settling them’. In short, Latour posits that ‘the task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves, not taken up by the analyst’. However, Amsterdamska (1990) comments that the desire to simply describe and translate, which enables processes to be revealed in their own time and on their own terms, is flawed. She claims that Latour’s assertion that ‘the ideal of explanation … is not a desirable goal’ and that what should be aimed for instead is ‘telling stories’ would lead to an abandonment of ‘all responsibility for what we are saying’.
Further, Shapin questions the utility of something which aims to be just description. He argues that the world ANT is creating is the world as a seamless web, ‘a world in which everything is connected to everything, in which even the discrete existence of things and the categorisation of processes cannot be used to interpret or explain the actions of those who are said to produce them’ (1988). He further suggests that ‘there is much to be said in favour of the monistic impulses and the close inspections of seams, but there is little to be said from within a seamless web’. Arguably, in its desire to not limit its scope of inquiry and describe processes, letting them reveal themselves rather than trying to pre-emptively make sense of them, ANT, theoretically, has little analytical purchase.
To conclude, ANT’s overt desire to reveal the manifold interactions between people and things is valuable insofar as it reveals how agency is not confined to human entities but rather exists as an interdependence, a mutuality between subjects and objects. However, ANT and its insights lose in relevance if no effort is made to cut networks, to restrict the potentiality of the infinite and focus on finite situations. Engagement with things is enriching if engaged with ethnographically, specifically.
What have been the most productive ways in which anthropologists have made sense of some Melanesians’ strong disavowal of being able to know others’ thoughts?
That individuals are able to imagine what is in or on someone’s mind is taken for granted insofar as intersubjectivity is often thought to be contingent on the capacity to reveal, to make sense of others’ intentions and desires. Yet, in many Melanesian societies an avoidance and/or reluctance to verbally speculate about intentions, desires, motives, thoughts, emotions, has been observed.
This essay will assess some of the ways in which anthropologists have made sense of some Melanesians’ strong disavowal of being able to know others’ thoughts. It will look at how anthropologists have tried to make sense of opacity doctrines socially, morally, and politically by focusing on Schieffelin, Keane, and Stasch’s works respectfully.
To understand the opacity doctrine solely in fatalistic terms, as referring to the fundamental inability to see into the hearts and minds of others, is limiting. Indeed, while it may appear to be a damning statement, rather, the opacity doctrine in many cultures of the Pacific is a ‘widely shared and taken-for-granted fact about the world, and one that shapes normative orders and everyday practices’ (Robbins, Rumsey, 2008). Keane (2008) contends that Stasch’s claim that when receiving a gift that seems to have neither motivation nor explanation, it is treated as something that is due to ‘unknowable thoughts’, is in a sense misleading insofar as an unexplained gift does not exist given that it would not be left entirely uninterpreted by the recipient. Keane instead claims that in Melanesian societies’ approach to gift exchange there is a form of ‘unknowing knowing’ to the extent that gift recipients are also gift givers, and gifts givers are ‘commonly skilful manipulators’. Keane thus emphasises that perhaps the opacity doctrine relates less to the idea that others’ minds are innately unintelligible to others, and more to a strong disavowal, a refusal to know others’ thoughts, noting that opacity claims are not necessarily ‘epistemological claims, but are claims about the sources of action, autonomy … and the expression of a great deal about the role of others in my life’.
Interestingly, this disavowal to know others’ thoughts is instilled in Melanesians from a young age. Schieffelin (2008) focuses on Bosavi children’s socialisation, notably the ways in which children are taught to interact with third parties. She observes that caregivers, through ‘say it’ routines, whereby utterances are followed by the imperative a:la:ma ‘say like this/that’’, prompt a range of assertive utterances that include first person internal states of desire and affect. Yet, she stresses that while one might think that in providing utterances that can be readily repeated in interactions with others, caregivers are speaking for children, i.e. reading their minds, ‘caregivers’ directives … are deemed to be situationally or interactionally appropriate rather than originating with the child’s interest or internal state’, which, Bosavi claim, cannot be known, thus helping constitute the child as a ‘responsible social actor who can be held accountable for what [he/she] has said’. Likewise, children, while encouraged to verbalise their own desires, intentions, are socialised not to ‘verbally guess at or express others’ unvoiced intentions and unclear meanings’. To do so, children are taught to use culturally appropriate ways of verbally reporting what others are saying (using ‘auma’ do like that, rather than ‘sama’ say) without attributing meaning. Sheiffelin draws a parallel between materially and verbal ownership, highlighting that ‘just as one does not take and use things that are not theirs to take, one does not speak others’ thoughts, ones that they have not themselves articulated… [thus], thoughts and desires are one’s own, in some sense, inalienable’. This echoes Robbins and Rumsey’s observation relating to empathy; people who hold opacity doctrines often do not consider themselves empaths insofar as they believe in a ‘strong sense of psychic privacy [referring to] the assumption that other people’s mental space belongs to them alone, [hence rendering] the suggestion that one has tried to simulate another’s mind in one’s own is regarded as extremely invasive and unethical’.
That invasion into one’s psychic privacy is considered intrusive and immoral is further illustrated by Keane’s reflections on Robbins work on confession. In reflecting on the shame Urapmin people felt in hearing others’ talk about their inner thoughts, he notes that it is, more than a social issue, a moral one. Indeed, he argues that shame stems not solely from intruding on someone’s interior, private space, but also from ‘being made witness to the embarrassment of seeing them lose the ability to keep hidden what they ought to have kept hidden’. He further underlines that it is not that ‘inner thoughts are inherently unknowable, but that they ought to be unspeakable’. The tension brought about by Christian confession, whereby Urapmin people found themselves confession not only their thoughts but those of others, is not ‘whether’ thoughts can be put into words but ‘who’ can do so. Thus, the opacity claim can be understood as an ‘assertion to the right to be the first person of one’s own thoughts, and an acknowledgment of others’ right to be the first person of theirs’. Ideals of authority and authorship bring power into the equation insofar as it relocates the issue from can we know what others think to who has the right to say so in words.
Stasch (2008), in his ethnographic engagement with the Korowai people, comments on the interaction between thought and politics. He suggests that a feature of Korowai collective life is the overt representation of otherness of thought as a ‘matter of politics, and politics as a matter of otherness of thought’. He observes that, in asking informants why someone had performed a certain action, or whether they would produce a certain action in the foreseeable future, he was met with the assertion that ‘She has her own thoughts’. Interestingly, assertions such as ‘she has her own thoughts’ or variants (Herself her/ Himself his thoughts) are not only anti-telepathy or mind reading, but also pro-autonomy. In fact, Stasch notes that in making these statements, speakers ‘affirm a principle that people’s actions are determined by their thoughts, not something outside their thoughts’; hence attesting to the reality and consequentiality of other people’s thinking’. What is more, ‘thought’ and ‘thinking’ feature prominently in conceptualisations of the overall polity. Chiefly, people describe their polity through complaints that the population is heterogenous in its thoughts rather than unified (xulmelun lelipfano; ‘it is not as though our minds are unitary’). One informant comments ‘We Korowai, our minds are like smoke’, highlighting the belief that the thoughts of different people go in different directions, thus resulting in the impossibility to grasp or shepherd those ‘billowing thoughts’ in their totality. Moreover, there is also an emphasis on self-opacity, with Korowai people stating that they are of ‘two minds’ about possible courses of action; hence ‘single persons’ internal lives, not just the lives of the social population, are characterized by plural thinking’.
Of note however is that in spite of the absence of unity, a person’s ability to ‘think’, or talk about ‘thought’ is considered a political condition insofar as it can be likened to the ability to claim authority to ‘know or determine one’s own actions and one’s reasons for them’ or at times claiming authority to ‘impinge on others’ relation of knowledge and authority vis-à-vis their own actions and reasoning’. Here, authority goes hand in hand with responsibility. As such, that Korowai present a strong disavowal of being able to know others’ thoughts relates more to establishing a boundary in relation to responsibility than to the assumption that another’s thoughts are inherently inaccessible.
To conclude, anthropologists have productively shown that Melanesian reluctance to know others’ thoughts is linked to questions of agency, responsibility and moral upstanding rather than founded on a fundamental belief in the opacity of minds as absolute. Opacity claims thus actively transform and influence socialisation processes and raises questions not only concerning intersubjectivity but also intrasubjectivty and collective, political subjectivity.
How have ethnographers working in Melanesian settings theorized the relation between ‘state’ and ‘society’?
Ethnographic engagement in Melanesia has revealed a paradox: a strong desire for the state in places that endemically have weak states. Yet, this desire is not as straightforward as it seems, calling for an interactive relation between ‘state’ and ‘society’.
This essay will look at how ethnographers working in Melanesian settings have theorized the relation between ‘state’ and ‘society’. It will look at Schwoerer’s work on unofficial village courts and desire for statehood, Street’s study of bureaucracy and visibility in a Papua New Guinea hospital, and Stasch’s inquiry into unequal human worth in encounters with the state, to attest to the multifaceted relation between ‘state’ and ‘society’.
Mimicry of state forms is pervasive in Melanesia. Opperman (2015) contends that such mimicry alludes to local hopes that ‘desired engagement with state … is more likely to eventuate if local systems are reconfigured in a manner that renders them more legible to these actors and more compatible with external systems of administration’. This can be exemplified by Schwoerer’s ethnographic exploration of unofficial village courts and local perceptions of order in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG). He illustrates desire for statehood through the example of an unofficial village court that took place in 2006. The village court, presided by three komiti, was held on market day and concerned a man from a nearby village who came to Bibeori to sue to men from Bibeori for slander; slander that took place during an argument over ownership of a hand-cranked coffee pulper. The court proceedings ended on amicable terms, with the komiti instructing the claimant and defendants to pay the other party a fee to settle the dispute. The money was ceremonially exchanged, with both sides handing over their compensation money as well as a fee for the komiti, with one of the komiti holding his hands above his head, declaring that his hand symbolises the law of the state of PNG and that both parties were consequently subservient to the law. Interestingly, in announcing the verdict, the komiti used the words ‘mipela makim gavman’ or ‘we represent the government’. However, despite these pronouncements, these komiti are not in fact constitutionally authorised to hold court and hand out verdicts, rather they are ‘non-state’ actors taking up state function in situations in which ‘state institutions are not or no longer able to fulfil these functions’. Even in the case of outright refusal from National courts to recognise and give authority to unofficial courts, councillors and komiti see themselves as ‘the only guarantor of a local order’. What emerges is an interlacing of state and non-state forms of dispute settlements: on the one hand there is an evident formalism to court proceedings, with komiti presenting themselves as not just mediators but unbiased adjudicators; on the other hand, the non-state aspect of dispute settlement is salient in the komiti’s efforts to get not only to the what but to the why, delving into ‘other unresolved conflicts in the relationship between the parties to the dispute, in order to bring them out into the open and thus start healing the rift in the relationship between affines’.
Despite explicit desire for stronger engagement of the state, with councillors petitioning provincial governments to extend the village court system to area where they are still unrecognised, due to lack of funds, these requests are often denied. Thus, an interesting dynamic surfaces; in remote parts of the Eastern Highlands, people taking recourse in alternative forms of dispute settlement are not in fact defending their ‘local order’ against an imposed state, rather they express a desire for a stronger engagement of the state, albeit contingent on the appointment by the state of local people as magistrates, people who are familiar with local conditions and cultural specificities.
A tension exists between desire for the state and the reality of mutual illegibility. Street’s (2012) inquiry into a PNG government hospital is exemplary of this. At birth, a PNG child is given a government health card which records future clinic or hospital visits as well as any vaccinations. Patients interestingly took pride in their clinic books, happily going through the pages explaining different aid posts or health centres they had been admitted to as well as written notes by nurses or doctors, in spite of their inability to read English or understand medical jargon. Scott (1998) contends that the reduction of complexity for the purposes of legibility can be understood as a process of constraint and normalisation. What Street’s ethnographic engagement reveals however, is that for patients, the conventional form of the clinic book contains within it the possibility to tap into new kinds of relations to power, insofar as she suggests that what Scott describes as ‘legibility’ can also be understood as a ‘technology of social visibility’ whereby patients are made apparent in a recognisably treatable form. Contradicting the idea of a uni-directional flow of power inherent to conceptions of legibility, by which a state knows and exerts control over others, technologies of social visibility both ‘mould people into conventional forms’ as well as ‘elicit an appropriate response from the viewer’. Thus, the productive capacity of bureaucratic technologies is revealed in their ability to both limit the ‘forms in which persons can appear and enable those persons to act’. As such, Street remarks that the ‘reductive force of bureaucratic convention is not experienced as domination to be resisted but as a source of relational power’. Hence, while not able to understand and describe their medical conditions in biological terms, with the writing in their clinic books being referred to as ‘white men’s medicine’, Papua New Guineans, in caring and looking after their health card, ‘self-consciously construct themselves as patients who are visible to a state that is otherwise blind to their existence and needs’. A form of discursive relation emerges between state and society insofar as the health card in this context ‘does not operate as a technology of self-governance that affords an inward-looking gaze but a relational technology that compels the state to recognise and provide for its people’.
This relational aspect to the relation between state and society is further illustrated in Stasch’s work on Korowai encounters with the state. He asserts that the fluidity with which Korowai and state actors today relate and interact is ‘theoretically surprising’ given Korowai insistence on egalitarian politics that could arguably be described as ‘anti-state’ or ‘anarchist’ insofar as they ‘ are very quick to rebuke anyone among themselves who tells others what to do, has more possessions than others, or claims to be better than others’. Stasch comments on how despite the figure of the ‘primitive’ applied by state official gives them a role of paternalistic benefactor, obscuring the ‘harm done to Papuan people by actual state policies and practices’, Papuans enact a self-understanding of the figure of the primitive applied to them. For instance, the visit of a government official, Darmono, reveals that in fact, ‘primitivist ideology is an important path of actual relating between stereotypers and the people stereotyped, thanks to Korowai perceiving and adopting outsiders’ stereotypy of them, and actively performing in its terms’. Interestingly, central to their performativity is underlying expectations that primitivity in its performed state will emphasises deprivation, moving state officials to give them objects they are lacking. Thus, Korowai performances for state officials can be understood as revealing of broader understandings of how societies ought to function, notably that material objects can be imagines as ‘sites of the truth of relations and personal being’, reflecting ‘a conviction that the way to deal with radical others is to transact with them’. Thus, while desire for increased state engagement is undeniable, that the interaction between state and korowai society is relational enables a form of agency in state making for non-state officials.
To conclude, ethnographic investigation into the relation between state and society in Melanesia challenges ethnographic findings beyond Melanesia that the state is often rejected, undesired. Indeed, the state and its involvement are objects of desire in Melanesian societies; yet, this involvement is desired if in adequation with local principles and if the relation between state and society is dialogic.
What lessons do tourism encounters in Melanesia hold for anthropological work on ‘ideology’ and/or exoticising stereotypes more widely?
Tourism encounters in Melanesia are based on conceptualisations of otherness. However, to assume that the ascribing of otherness is innately one-sided obscures the more nuanced and agency rich encounters that occur between tourist and Melanesians.
This essay will ask what lessons tourism encounters in Melanesia hold for anthropological work on exoticizing stereotypes. It will look at both the casting of stereotypes and the validity of such stereotypes through ethnographic inquiry into the issues of money and nudity.
Tourist often venture into Melanesian tourism with a skewed and idealised conceptions of the Melanesian as primitive and thus innocent, untainted, pure. This is often due to media representations of Papua New Guinean ‘otherness’. Notably, the documentary Cannibal Tours has been critiqued for its somewhat unidimensial portrayal of PNG people. Silverman (2012) for instance notes that money is presented as foreign to PNG people despite the fact that local people have been using currencies for over a century and has mediated significant social encounters for an extended period of time. That the documentary casts PNG desire for money as non-sensical is criticised by Silverman who stresses that Sepik inhabitants desire money ‘because they have no desire to regress to premodern subsistence farming and fishing, and no desire to cast away their modern desires and identities. They need money because they inhabit a thoroughly postcolonial and globalized world, not some Rousseauistic primitivist fantasy’. Yet, visitors to parts of Melanesia such as the Trobriand Islands often articulate concern over the idea that money has a destablising and potentially disastrous effect on the ‘moral fabric’ of societies they perceive that ‘pure’. MacCarthy (2015) notes that there is a discrepancy between anthropological understandings of primitivism as an essentialised view of culture as ‘static and homogeneous’, primitivist ideals are still very much alive in the orientations of tourists noting that ‘idealizations of a ‘primitive economy’, where most things are given freely rather than bought and sold and where people produce most of what they need locally, are central to the romanticization and allure of tourist destinations such as the Trobriands’. Interestingly, visitors stress their desire to see what a ‘pure’ society looks like: ‘I wanted to come and see it before it gets corrupted,’ or ‘I worry about this place being spoiled by tourists’. Thus, many tourists, in the face of the reality of money exchange in touristic interactions, express suspicion regarding whether hospitality and entertainment were ‘authentic’, ‘untainted by money’. Conversely, Trobriand Islanders view payment as the appropriate return ‘gift’ for the goods and services they provided to visitors. Hence, a tension exists between tourists who feel ‘ripped off’ by Islanders asking for money when they ‘thought they were guests’ and accepted ‘gifts’ without concern for reciprocity, and the ideal they had constructed of Melanesians as free from ‘cash mentality’, givers of ‘pure gifts’. Stereotypes are challenged when faced with the reality of money exchange between tourist and non-tourist; with tourists reckoning with their ethical conundrums and attempts to not ‘corrupt’, ‘spoil’ Trobiand economic life, and Islanders having to re-assess their judgment of ‘selfish’ rich visitors who do not adequately reciprocate. This taps into fundamental differences in conceptualisations of money. Indeed, while Western tourists see money as infused with morally ambivalent agency, with many carrying the ‘metanarrative that money is … ‘the root of all evil’’, to Melanesians, money is neither fundamentally good nor bad insofar as money, despite having the potential to store value, is often quickly recirculated, becoming part of social interaction. Tourist encounters thus reveal how lack of transparency about the other’s conception of money can unnecessarily complicate interaction insofar as both parties are biased in their conceptualisation of otherness.
What is more, tourist encounters reveal the inherent performativity of primitivism that exists today. The media plays a crucial role in creating the particular image of otherness ascribe to Melanesian people. Stasch (2014) for instance notes that dozens of TV shows alongside hundreds of magazines and newspapers have cast Korowai as iconic representatives of ‘Stone Age’ existence. As such, over the course of their lifetime, tourist acquire particular expectations of Korowai people, notably that they will be nude from the distinctive ‘look’ prescribed to them by media outlets such as the National Geographic or the Discovery Channel. He remarks that tourist focus on and expectations of nudity are innately linked to convictions they hold about knowledge and being, chiefly that ‘to see is to know, and the sight of an unclothed Korowai body is knowledge of a pure human state’. Of note is Stasch’s comment on how in tourists interpretations of Korowai clothedness as a loss of their ‘valued and beautiful true characters’, observing that in their shirts, shorts, and skirts, they look like ‘beggars’, the unease is actually due to a collapse of difference that clothing on Korowai bodies brings out in a tourist’s eye, putting them into ‘a single system of material possession and economic inequality with the tourists, the system in which there are people who are wealthy and others who are destitute’.
However, what tourists often do not realise is that nudity has become performative for Korowai people. Due to the awareness of the stereotypical expectations tourists will have of primitive people, Korowais wear traditional dress, playing on nudity ideals, to attract attention, photographs, money. Stasch notes that while tourists would describe this staging and performance of nudity as deceptive, Korowai by contrast ‘routinely use the verb mbemo-, “deceive, mislead,” to describe what would happen if they did not don traditional dress for the visitors [i.e.] the tourists would feel “misled” about the experiences they would have on their trip’. This in turn underlines how stereotypes are mutual, with Korowai strongly conceiving of tourists as a type, referring to them as an ‘ethnic group’, drawing a parallel to how tourists feel that meeting an individual Korowai person is ‘to meet a walking embodiment of the transhistorical condition of “Stone Age” life’.
To conclude, anthropological inquiry into tourism encounters allow for the recognition of mutuality; otherness is not simply one sided insofar as both parties appear mutually opaque to one another. It further enables the revelation of the interactive nature of tourist encounters, with each side playing along to what they believe the other to desire, as is exemplified by the awkward relation between performance, gift ideals, and money, and the playing into of stereotypical fantasies in the case of nudity.