Anthropology and Philosophy: A Dynamic Engagement

Transcription

1 Jenn Cole Anthropology and Philosophy: A Dynamic Engagement A review of Das, Veena, Michael D. Jackson, Arthur Kleinman and Bhrigupati Singh The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 224 The Ground Between is a collection of essays based on years of informal conversations between the book s contributors, which editors say became focussed more formally during a workshop at the Rivers Symposium at Harvard University. The anthropology scholars in The Ground Between offer reflexive writing on how they in particular find their thinking moved by specific philosophers and how these philosophical investments intersect with and shape their work, which in turn exerts its own forces on their thinking through and with philosophy. The editors frame the text as an initiated conversation (25) and resist offering a summary of how anthropology engages philosophy. Indeed, the book chapters are not structured thematically, geographically, according to the philosophical traditions they engage, or otherwise. Rather, each anthropologist, working with his or her chosen philosophers, is assigned a chapter, resulting in twelve essays that speak to and across one another with emphasis on multiplicity and a lack of closure. Inconclusiveness, it turns out, is one of the sites where anthropology and philosophy brush up against one another most dynamically. The editors acknowledge the impossibility of grappling with the discipline of philosophy in its entirety, though authors are preoccupied with the question of what philosophy does generally as much as they are concerned with what philosophical works do as they become dialogic companions to the ethnographic work of living, relating, thinking and writing. The list of philosophers whose ideas influence the book s contributors includes Agamben, Arendt, Austin, Benjamin, Bergson, Bourdieu, Canguilhem, Cavell, Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger, James, Merleau- Ponty and Wittgenstein. The authors bring these philosophers thoughts into communication with the thinking of the human subjects they study: among others, two Kuranko brothers in Northern Sierra Leone ( Jackson); a mother and son in Gaza

2 (Fassin); neighbours acutely aware of the power dynamics implicit in everyday kindnesses in a poor, urban neighbourhood on the periphery of Santiago, Chile (Han); a madwoman named Catarina from Southern Brazil (Biehl); an ethnographic subject turned evangelist in Wyndal (Crapanzano); even ghosts in China (Puett). Among the canonical anthropologists in the collegial-feeling literary fusion the authors create are Clastres, Geertz, Levi-Strauss and Mauss. Freud too makes an appearance. The most salient feature of The Ground Between is its reflexivity. Readers will enjoy a rare opportunity to delve into the authors auto-ethnographies of their processes of thinking through philosophy as they do the work of anthropology. For instance, Ghassan Hage realizes that his anthropological practice is infused with the thinking of his teacher, Bourdieu. Hage s philosophical approach comes into relief as he experiences hearing loss, a deafness that is intricately linked to Beirut-ness, and that causes him to reexamine Bourdieu s concepts of illusio and habitus as they become activated by his new modes of listening (138). As another example, Benjamin s theory of the aura of objects in context causes Veena Das to appreciate Sanjeev Gupta s vibrant rhetorical strategy, in which Gupta recounts how his community in low-income Delhi was first supplied with electrical power. To do this, Gupta uses everyday objects as place markers, or starting points for sharing stories about specific events. Not known for his communicative skills, Gupta nevertheless constructs a strong narrative by walking through quotidian spaces, allowing his story to be kindled by encounters with electrical poles, features of the terrain, signs and doorways (289-94). In another chapter, Arthur Kleinman explores his relationship to philosophy in times of distress, and finds his way to William James as he thinks through what it means to become a caregiver to his ailing spouse (120-31). As these examples indicate, the contributions in The Ground Between are at once incisive and personal, far from objective or generalizing in their engagement with philosophy and anthropology. 225 In an attempt to pin down a concrete definition of philosophy, Fassin (50), Biehl (107) and Singh (159) turn to Deleuze s (1994) efficient assertion in What is Philosophy: that philosophy creates concepts (2). Other working definitions of philosophy emerge throughout the volume. For Jackson, philosophy can give distance from the world of our experience social as well as sensory, or in other words, in order to gain perspective, one can move one s thought to the abstract (28). For Singh, philosophy acts as a framing device for thinking of and about the world; the conceptual company scholars choose to keep alters modes of perception quite directly (161). The authors demonstrate what philosophy can do, and also what it cannot. As Bhrigupati Singh reminds readers, working closely with Deleuze s ideas, philosophy is not a unified project and it is not a system (161-2). Rather, Deleuze s philosophy teaches resistance to unity and synthesis in favour of sharpening oppositions and

3 multiplicities (163). For Singh and others, philosophy s contribution to the field of ethnography can productively complicate perception and explanation, assisting in ethnographers project to recognize and render complexities rather than conclusively offer answers. Nevertheless, many of the book s contributors assert that while philosophical concepts gain material support or challenges from the materiality of fieldwork and that philosophy has much to offer a thinking ethnographer, there are moments when the abstractions of philosophy, or particular philosophies, resist application to the variability and specificity of everyday lives. Companionable dialogue between philosophy and anthropology can falter upon encountering the everyday becomings and struggles of people living their lives in their worlds and contexts. 226 No author in the volume suggests that the best project for philosophy is to theorize the art of living for which anthropologists provide human material examples. It seems worth noting, though, that philosophical concepts often favour the universal and anthropology is a discipline that continually butts up against the particularity of social circumstances. Anthropologists are experts at self-reflexively positioning themselves and their interpretive placement within a field of social knowledges and behaviours. Upon having to do the attentive work of gaining perspective on real lives in real places in the world, anthropologists simply cannot apply theory to people and their practices of daily life without a living remainder of some kind. In other words, personhood continually overflows conceptual containment. This is exactly where an ethics of thinking both philosophically and anthropologically becomes a truly textured site of inquiry. For instance, two authors in particular, Didier Fassin and Bhrigupati Singh, take Agamben to task, remarking upon the attention Agamben s notions of bare life and sovereignty received in the field of anthropology in the late 1990s. For Fassin especially, Agamben and Foucault s philosophies are insufficient for thinking through the disparities between lives. Bios and zoē are concepts that leave social and political lived experience parenthetically aside (an assertion that keen readers of Agamben and Foucault are likely to debate) (59). Fassin suggests that Arendt and Canguilhem provide more fitting tools for thinking about life as understood ethnographically. To take an example where the ethnographic subject exerts her own resistances to conceptualization, João Biehl writes a stunning chapter about his relationship with Catarina Ines G. Moraes, a woman in a Brazilian mental institution. He remarks that both her way of speaking and how she envisions the events of her life make translation and understanding difficult. Nonetheless, it is her own theorizing of [her] conditions that requires attention, in order for ethnography to be doing its job well (96). While Catarina s semi-mad utterances act as a disruptive example of unknowable subjectivities encountered in the field of ethnographic research, Biehl suggests that any honest ethnography deals with unfinished subjects, people in

4 states of becoming, irreducible and often only partly knowable even to themselves (109, ). Biehl recounts an anecdote of a moment a colleague asked him when he planned to cease returning to Catarina, both literally and scholastically. Biehl s reply is that his return, his inability to cease being moved by Catarina, is precisely the locus of the mutually formative relationship that ethnography ought to foster (105-7). Inquiry about the human condition and social practices is also inquiry about what people make out of what they are given. Entangled in these processes of becoming, making and relating, Biehl asks, provocatively, what is it that anthropologists make (107)? His answer seems to be that, in part, anthropology ought to make space for the explanations of its research subjects, however convoluted. Through acute listening, rendered through ethnography, people s own theorizing of their conditions may leak into, animate, and challenge present-day regimes of veridiction, including philosophical universals and anthropological subjugation to philosophy (96). Vincent Crapanzano who is also interested in the unknown parts of discourse, or what he calls shadow dialogues (265), that which is unsaid within interlocution writes about both the unknowable aspects of any other person and the ethnographic impulse to know. He remarks, without directly citing Levinas, whose philosophical work on ethical relationships to the Other is most well known, I am confronted with the Other others in all their complexity, their opacity, the responsibility they demand of us, the morality they source, their presumed desire for recognition, to be known and yet to preserve a secret, a mystery, the wholly personal, that preserves identity despite inner and outer contextual pressures (257-8). And yet he also comments, refreshingly, upon the desperate hermeneutics that constitutes ethnography, going as far as saying that he turns the others he encounters into informants (258). Crapanzano struggles fruitfully with questions about appropriation of voice and the ethical dilemmas of representation. Shadow dialogues moments of self-conscious delivery and withholding of information, questions about the other interlocutor s true intentions, reluctant acknowledgement of rifts between the form and content of speech became a point of focus in Crapanzano s work in the affluent community of Wyndal in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. He reminds readers that while ethnography engages the particular, as ethnographers deal with people in specific social, economic, cultural and perceptual circumstances, human encounter by no means guarantees intimacy. Human encounter, and not just human reflection, resists cohesive understanding. 227 One last example: On top of giving a deft summary of Bergson s notion of duration, Steven C. Caton revisits his field notes from when he witnessed the antagonistic conflict mediation that followed a kidnapping in Yemen in Recognizing the potential for his telling of events to reflect narrative formations forged by differing durational experiences, Caton offers a solution that asks scholars and philosophers of literature, writing and history to take a closer look at representation s relationship to duration. In this essay, he revisits his field notes and describes rewriting his

5 2005 book, Yemen Chronicle (248-52). His revisionary writing practice, performing durational ethnography based on past in situ work now seen in retrospect, is exciting material for thought. Caton disrupts conventional chronologies and offers an exercise in dividing time by point of view. Events unfold only as his perception does. His position as a partially understanding outsider becomes integral to his descriptions. For Caton, Bergson s philosophy shifts the material conditions of his writing practice. He is not the only author in the volume to be shaped by the philosophy he reads but his practical and radical expression of the thoughts that perplex him, as he takes a literary turn, is distinctive. 228 In the introduction, the editors state that The Ground Between asks what perplexes both anthropologists and philosophers. The volume asks many incisive questions and introduces some tough puzzles with no simple answers. For instance, how do we know that we are communicating? And, as Biehl, Crapanzano, Das and Han ask, how do we account for the unsaid and the indirect utterances and gestures between us? What are the ethical conundrums of representing the suffering of others? As Fassin, Fischer, and Hage explore, how ought we best grapple with representing human encounters while resisting appropriation, misrepresentation or ignorance? Further as Puett asks, based on his study of the endless ritual labours in traditional and modern China to appease and relate to ancestors and ghosts what do we write when what we see and experience is not just a shifting social landscape or changing person but also an entire cosmos in flux (226-7)? Often, the authors of The Ground Between show what philosophy can do as they actively investigate what anthropology can do. The book s sense of what anthropology is and does, seen through the lens of philosophy, is not simple or singular. For Singh, ethnographers are devotees of life in this world (183). For Biehl, ethnography aims at keeping interrelatedness, precariousness, uncertainty and curiosity in focus (101). The Ground Between, likewise, presents a muscular spirit of inquiry that does not shy away from difficult questions. References Das, Veena, Michael D. Jackson, Arthur Kleinman and Bhrigupati Singh The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles What is Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.