Michael M. J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His most recent books include Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry and Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (winner of the American Ethnological Society’s Senior Book Prize), both also published by Duke University Press.

Anthropological Futures

By MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2009 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4461-2

Contents

Prologue………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ix1 Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems……………………………………………………………………………….12 Four Cultural Genealogies (or Haplotype Genealogical Tests) for a Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology……………………….503 Emergent Forms of (Un)Natural Life………………………………………………………………………………………………..1144 Body Marks (Bestial/Natural/Divine): An Essay on the Social and Biotechnological Imaginaries, 1920-2008, and Bodies to Come…………………1595 Personhood and Measuring the Figure of Old Age: The Geoid as Transitional Object……………………………………………………….1976 Ask Not What Man Is But What We May Expect of Him…………………………………………………………………………………..215Conclusion and Way Ahead: Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitics, and Anthropological Futures……………………………………………………..235Epilogue: Postings from Anthropologies to Come………………………………………………………………………………………..244Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….273References………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..331Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….379

Chapter One

Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems

Culture is (1) that relational (circa 1848), (2) complex whole … (1870s), (3) whose parts cannot be changed without affecting other parts (circa 1914), (4) mediated through powerful and power-laden symbolic forms (1930s), (5) whose multiplicities and performatively negotiated character (1960s), (6) are transformed by alternative positions, organizational forms, and leveraging of symbolic systems (1980s), (7) as well as by emergent new technosciences, media, and biotechnical relations (circa 2005).

Without a differentiated and relational notion of the cultural-the arts, media, styles, religions, value orientations, ideologies, imaginaries, worldviews, soul, and the like-the social sciences would be crippled, reducing social action to notions of pure instrumentality. When singularized, frozen, or nominalized, culture can be a dangerous concept, subject to fallacies of pejorative and discriminatory hypostatizations (we have reason, they have culture) or immobilized variables (their culture is composed of x features). The challenge of cultural analysis is to develop translation and mediation tools for helping make visible differences of interests, access, power, needs, desires, and philosophical perspective. To anticipate the conversation that anthropology has been having in the past decade with science studies, I draw upon the notion of experimental systems as developed in science studies, particularly Hans-Jrg Rheinberger’s Towards a History of Epistemic Things (1997), as a way of thinking about how the anthropological and social science notion of culture has evolved as an analytic tool. This chapter’s end is the starting point, in reciprocal manner, in chapter 2 to rethink the cultural genealogies of science studies.

The modern social science use of the term “culture” is rooted in the historical milieus that arose with the dismantling of the religious and aristocratic legitimations of feudal and patrimonial regimes, and the agons of third world particularistic cultures against first world claims of universal civilization. These agons began with the English Industrial Revolution, the American and French bourgeois revolutions, and the efforts of peripheral states in what would become Germany and Italy-and later in what would be called the second and third worlds-to catch up without losing their identity. The collection of folklore, epics, oral genres, ritual forms, customs, kinship terminologies, jural norms and sanctions, dispute mediation techniques, material-semiotic objects, musics, and the like were important in nation-building ideologies, in nostalgia-based constructions of identity, and in hegemonic struggles between what was counted as future-oriented modernity and what was counted, reconstructed, or reinvented as past-oriented tradition.

Official histories of anthropology often credit Sir E. B. Tylor’s “omnibus” definition-“culture or civilization is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”-as providing the first canonic counterpoint to definitions of culture as the best productions in aesthetics, knowledge, and morals. While such elitist high culture definitions of culture arose in dialectical relation to more demotic or foreign cultural forms, the anthropological understanding of culture that Tylor began to unpack asserts the importance of understanding the relations between all cultural forms at play, in contestation within social formations. The nineteenth-century rise of Quakers such as Tylor and scholars and reformers from other Dissenting Sects in England opened a space of critique of state-established forms of religious legitimation and cultural presuppositions, in synergy with scientific and political Enlightenment ideals of the previous century; these were taken up also in reform movements in India, the Islamic world, China, the United States, and elsewhere, as is acknowledged by the fluorescence of recent work on “alternative modernities” (e.g., Gaonkar 2001). Simultaneously, political economy reformers, including Chartists, abolitionists, Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx, and others, provided a space for critique and organizing political movements to reshape the material environments and infrastructures of cultural formations. These nineteenth-century articulations would develop into the methods of cultural accounting of classical sociology, British social anthropology, American cultural anthropology, French structuralism, and poststructuralisms as well as considerations of alternative modernities.

The “jeweler’s-eye view” of ethnographers of the early and mid-twentieth century succeeded in putting on the comparative philosophical map the cultural logics-and their social implications and historical circumstances-of the Trobriands, Nuer, Azande, Yoruba, Ndembu, Navaho, Kwakiutl, Shavante, Arante, Walpiri, and others. These cultural logics were used to create structural understandings of the possible cultural variabilities and their social implications in diverse domains, including exchange theory and kinship, political organization and cosmology, jural roles and personhood, speech genres and interactive sociolinguistic styles, economic spheres and informal power, gender roles and psychodynamic complexes, and the structuring of knowledge and awareness by linguistic grammars and cultural frames. The jeweler’s-eye view means not only the ability to bring out the different facets, but also a constant back-and-forth movement between (loup-assisted) close-up viewings and sitting back for a more global view of the settings. Classic ethnographies, constructed as synchronic snapshots of a moment in time-classically an annual cycle and a half, or eighteen months-need and are receiving historical recontextualization through restudy and archival work. They have become documents of a historical horizon for the cultures and societies under analysis as well as for those of the ethnographers.

Just as we increasingly recognize the cultures of classic ethnographies, both as they were and as they have become, as always already reworked parts of cultures of larger national, colonial, imperial, regional, and global formations, yielding often out-of-sync alternative modernities, so too the interactions of proliferating kinds of cultures, indigenous, ethnic, occupational, expert, linguistic, local-regional, are becoming more complex and differentiated. New forms of globalization and modernization are bringing all parts of the globe into greater, but uneven, polycentric interaction. New multicultural ethics are evolving out of demands that cultures attend to one another. Within transnational and global technoscientific networks proliferating specialized vocational and class cultures must pay attention to one another in information-rich and multiperspectival institutions lest high-hazard, mission-critical operations such as chemical, aeronautical, and medical industries, or even just ordinary trade, for example, global advertising, production, and sales operations, go awry.

Culture, defined as a methodological concept or tool of inquiry, might best be understood in terms of its historically layered growth of specifications and differentiations, refined into a series of experimental systems that, in a manner akin to the experimental systems of the natural sciences, allow new realities to be seen and engaged as its own parameters are changed. To think of the methodological concept of culture as experimental systems is to assert that there is something both experimental and systematic: that social science accounts of culture emerge from intermediate and interactional spaces, both intersubjective and institutional, that were awkwardly or poorly handled by prior accounts. Objects, theories, and techniques change in focus, resolution, or fidelity (to draw upon visual and sonic descriptive modalities) as we vary our cultural concepts. Historically, concepts of culture have been rhetorical as well as analytical tools in struggles over class and religion; universalistic versus particularistic claims about reason, aesthetics, morality; legitimate versus illegitimate forms of power; science, politics, public spheres, civil societies, and rights and justice. Alternative genealogies can be constructed for the word (cultura as a Latin future participle of what comes into being rather than what is), as can humanistic usages (Giambattista Vico’s eighteenth-century notion of culture as that which is knowable because created by man). But the modern social science and anthropological construction of the term arises initially in the intergenerational reformulation between the grand comparativists of the nineteenth century and the in-depth fieldworkers of the twentieth century.

While science, technology, literacy, poetics, religion, and capitalism have, since Marx and Tylor, been central to discussions of culture, the focus of debate, the drawing of metaphors and epistemic analogies from the leading sciences of the day, and the refinement of methodological concepts of culture have shifted over the past century and a half, layering themselves as a set of lenses and devices of increasing generativity.

(1) Culture is that relational (circa 1848) …

Premonitions and protoformulations of what later would develop into four components of relational cultural analysis or cultural accounting can be found already in various places in the mid-nineteenth century. The emergence of working-class cultures in relation to bourgeois and artistocratic class cultures can be found in Friedrich Engels’s proto-ethnography of working-class Manchester in 1844 (Engels 1887; Marcus 1974); and in the organized complaints of industrially displaced Luddites (skilled workers protesting not all machines but deskilling machines and the introduction of prices not related to custom and skill that would destroy their control over their means of production and turn them into unskilled proletarians), Chartists (workers who felt excluded by the suffrage Reform Act of 1832 and the Poor Law of 1834 and demanded charters of universal male suffrage and other political reforms), as well as the demands for “right to labor” at one’s craft, rather than as proletarianized unskilled labor, in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 in France. These organized complaints and political demands would develop into an explicit working-class culture in the late nineteenth century (Thompson 1968; Sewell 1980; Nimtz 2000). The emergence of a bourgeois culture can be seen in the discussions of Bildung (culture) in Germany, institutionalized by Johann Fichte’s new university in Berlin (Ringer 1969; Readings 1996; Lepenies 2006). The emergence of national cultures becomes crystallized in the standardized national languages, creation of university-taught canons of literature and history in these languages, and the print-mediated literacy required by industrialization (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Habermas 1962). The emergence of culture as a dialectical agonist to civilization can be seen in the nationalist and nation-state building discourses, in which locality, nation building, and universality contest. The emergence of notions of culture as hegemonic power relations becomes explicit in the sketches by G. W. F. Hegel, Heinrich Heine, and Marx of why different groups in society might see their interests in agonistic fashion as well as why, critically, they often misrecognize their interests in ways that benefit others (ideology, hegemony), as so memorably expressed in Marx’s essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852).

Four components of relational culture begin to become clarified in the mid-nineteenth century by the agonistic differentiation and reorganization of modern societies: (1.1) folklore and identity; (1.2) ideologies and political consciousness; (1.3) class and status cultures; (1.4) pluralized, relational cultures versus universalizing civilizational ideologies.

1.1. Folklore and National Cultural Identities

The nineteeth-century novels of Sir Walter Scott (d. 1832) began in English literature an exploration of looking back at fading regional cultural settings from an insider-outsider perspective. A member of the lowlander elite writing about highlander Scottish society, Scott wrote novels that became key to Scottish identity for unionist United Kingdom and English audiences, thereby helping to define an emergent British national and British imperial identity. The debates of the period over James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (1760), judged to be fraudulent and imaginatively composed, were not unlike efforts to compose national epics in eastern Europe and elsewhere, which Ernest Gellner credits as the background to the suspicion of Bronislaw Malinowski toward explanation by historical roots and insistence instead on the ideological functionality in the present of the formulation or retelling of such cultural forms (Gellner 1988: 175). Among such functionalities were also projections or models used in colonial settings: it is often remarked that Scottish clan structures provided models for William Robertson-Smith and others for understanding and characterizing tribal organization in Arabia, in the Hindu-Kush, and elsewhere. (See further, under late nineteenth century, below.)

1.2. Cultural Ideologies and Political Consciousness

Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, written in the aftermath of the failures of the revolutions of 1848, not only became a touchstone for later writers trying to puzzle out underlying structural patterns of social organization and cultural forms (Claude Lvi-Strauss says he would always reread The Eighteenth Brumaire before sitting down to write a new project), but is an early locus classicus for thinking about class cultures and how they are aligned under hegemonic ideologies. His resonant phrase about the peasants being like potatoes in a sack was not contemptuous but a summary tag for the ways in which their economic, organizing, and strategizing possibilities were fragmented and controlled. His dramatization of a revolution running backward (propelled by each higher class abandoning the interests of the next lower one when it thought it might gain momentary advantage, but thereby in the longer term isolating and weakening itself) was a vivid way of charting the different class fractions in the revolution (class fractions resonating with petrochemical fractioning of different grades of oil as well as with the arithmetic of voting, just as class strata and stratification resonated with slower but active geological processes of sedimentation, upheaval, intrusion, and temporary consolidation).

At issue in both examples were problems of political consciousness and ideology, not just economic interests. Crucial to the stabilization of ruling classes, fractions, or coalitions was the ability to make their control appear to be the natural order of things, legitimizing their society’s cultural forms, hierarchies, and practices. Marx was a pragmatic organizer, trying to prevent precipitous armed labor rebellions that could only be crushed and rethinking the failures of earlier conceptions as with the defeats of 1848. It became clear on the barricades of Paris in 1848 that this would be the last of the artisanal revolts and that an industrial proletariat would not come into political strength for many more years, and even then, as in Germany, would compete with a rapidly growing white-collar class for political power. Consciousness, alienation, commodity fetishism-cultural armatures of political economy-would be central to these struggles. Indeed, in the preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire (1869), Marx contrasts his explanatory narrative with great-man-in-history accounts (Victor Hugo’s Napoleon le Petit) as well as with deterministic ones (Proudhon’s Coup d’tat), insisting on the theatrical, linguistic-translational, allusional nature of cultural and social forms, including a fortiori revolutions, which draw upon and are haunted by cultural forms of the past and yet sometimes can leverage novel breakthroughs and transformations.

(Continues…)

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