Ingie Hovland | Blog

Anthropology Matters: "Fieldwork Support"

2009-12-05T09:56:00.003-05:00

The latest issue of Anthropology Matters is now online - my last issue as editor!

LATEST ISSUE OF
ANTHROPOLOGY MATTERS:

FIELDWORK SUPPORT
Autumn 2009, Vol 11(2)
ISSN 1758-6453
http://www.anthropologymatters.com

The latest issue of the Anthropology Matters Journal features an opening piece by Amy Pollard, which presents the results of her interviews with 16 PhD students concerning difficulties encountered during their fieldwork. The piece is both powerful and provocative, and will hopefully serve as an aid for thoughtful discussions in pre-fieldwork courses, post-fieldwork seminars, and departmental planning meetings. Anthropology Matters invited four academics – Christine Barry, Sara Delamont, David Mills, and Judith Okely – to start the discussion by writing brief responses to Pollard’s account. The journal issue then presents two in-depth accounts of fieldwork, by Larissa Begley and Julie Soleil Archambault. Finally, the issue is rounded off with a piece that moves from PhD fieldwork to collaborative field research with undergraduates, written by Laura DeLuca and five of her undergraduate students.

Anthropology Matters is an open access journal. All articles are available free of charge at http://www.anthropologymatters.com

EDITORIAL:

FIELDWORK SUPPORT: INTRODUCTION, by Ingie Hovland.

LEAD ARTICLE:

FIELD OF SCREAMS: DIFFICULTY AND ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK, by Amy Pollard (Cambridge University). This study seeks to document some of the difficulties that PhD anthropologists at three UK universities have faced. It describes a range of feelings as experienced by 16 interviewees…

RESPONSES:

RESPONSE TO AMY POLLARD’S PAPER "FIELD OF SCREAMS", by Christine Barry (King’s College London)

FAMILIAR SCREAMS: A BRIEF COMMENT ON "FIELD OF SCREAMS", by Sara Delamont ( Cardiff University )

SILENCED? by David Mills ( University of Oxford )

RESPONSE TO AMY POLLARD, by Judith Okely ( University of Oxford )

ARTICLES:

THE OTHER SIDE OF FIELDWORK: EXPERIENCES AND CHALLENGES OF CONDUCTING RESEARCH IN THE BORDER AREA OF RWANDA / EASTERN CONGO, by Larissa R. Begley ( University of Sussex ). The current conditions of this region, which remains a conflict zone under tight government control, have contributed to feelings of isolation, frustration, fear, distrust, insecurity, and with no clear way to seek support for both the informants and the anthropologist. This paper will address these challenges and the ways that they impact on the research process itself, as well as the effects they have on the anthropologist…

BEING COOL OR BEING GOOD: RESEARCHING MOBILE PHONES IN MOZAMBIQUE , by Julie Soleil Archambault (SOAS). My paper tackles issues of acceptance and rejection. As I sought to gain acceptance amongst youth I found myself participating in various controversial and, at times, dangerous activities that made me the victim of intense gossip and outright rejection by some. In this paper I present the challenges of “being cool”, while also “being good”, and the repercussions of my research choices on my social standing. I then discuss how, instead of compromising my research, this predicament had a positive outcome…

LOST AND FOUND: LESSONS FROM COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH WITH UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS ON THE LOST GIRLS OF SUDAN, by Laura DeLuca ( University of Colorado ), with assistance from Katherine Bruch, Lauren Rhoades, Lindsay Eppich, Jordan Olmstead, and Jackie Holder. This article focuses on the challenges and rewards of working with undergraduate research assistants. Five undergraduates share their reflections as neophyte anthropologists…

All articles can be found at:
http://www.anthropologymatters.com

ABOUT ANTHROPOLOGY MATTERS
Anthropology Matters is the postgraduate arm of the Association of Social Anthropologists in the UK and Commonwealth (the ASA). Anthropology Matters runs a website (http://www.anthropologymatters.com), an open email list, and an online journal. If you would like to join the email list, please sign up through the website.

Last post...

2009-07-14T11:36:00.006-04:00

I have not been posting lately. With house moving and a baby on the way, the blog seems to hold less priority. I think this will be my last post (at least for a good while!) But I have enjoyed blogging over the past year or so - and here is one of my favourite PhD comics to round off the last post...

Latest issue of Anthropology Matters

2009-07-14T11:29:00.002-04:00

Spring 2009, Vol 11 (1)
ISSN 1758-6453
http://www.anthropologymatters.com/journal/2009-1/index.html

"FIELDWORK IDENTITIES"

EDITORIAL: FIELDWORK IDENTITIES - INTRODUCTION, by Ingie Hovland.

PRIEST, DEVELOPMENT WORKER, OR VOLUNTEER? ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND ASCRIBED IDENTITIES IN RURAL MOZAMBIQUE, by Michael Madison Walker (Michigan State University). During 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in central Mozambique I was mistaken for a priest, alleged to be a spy, and assumed to be a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. In this article, I explore how my identity, and the identities ascribed to me, shaped my interactions with people living in rural Mozambique and structured the types of relationships and data I was able to collect...

BEING AN IDENTITY PROP: SOME ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS, by Joel Busher (School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia). During recent fieldwork in Namibia I noticed that the people I worked with often took care to arrange our public encounters so that onlookers did not interpret our relationship in ways that might be inconvenient. I was cast as a friend, colleague, employer, customer, acquaintance. My presence created opportunities for the extension of people's "repertoire of identities" in both desirable and undesirable directions, and their choreography of our public encounters can be seen as part of their "impression management"...

BEING SIMILAR: OTHER-IDENTIFICATION DURING FIELDWORK, by Olumide Abimbola (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology). The paper discusses instances of other-identification when the other is similar to the self, and when difference is brought out by the similar. The fact that the fieldworker is a native of sorts helps overcome some difficulties, while at the same time throwing up others. This paper discusses some forms of such identifications and difficulties, and the constant negotiation that is present in the identification process...

MULTIPLE IDENTITIES: GENDER, POWER AND THE PRODUCTION OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE, by Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta (Central European University, Budapest). This article discusses my "outsider within" status in terms of gender, age, nationality, race and perceived positionality and alliance with the "Whiteman" (by virtue of my western educational status) during my fieldwork. My research centered on the contentious debate over female circumcision in Southwest Cameroon...

BEHIND THE SCENES: REFLECTING ON CROSS-GENDER INTERVIEW DYNAMICS IN MEXICO CITY, by Mariana Rios Sandoval (University of Amsterdam and GIRE, Group of Information for Reproductive Choice). During the summer of 2007 I set out on a qualitative exploratory study in Mexico City focused on conversations with a group of men about everyday practices, expectations, ideas and feelings related to parenting, and this was an entry point into exploring constructions of fatherhood and masculinity. As I stumbled through my first in-depth interviews I felt excited, thrilled and touched, but also uneasy, overwhelmed and undeniably puzzled by a whole range of dilemmas...

"IF YOU GIVE ME SOME SEXING, I MIGHT TALK TO YOU": RESEARCHING THE SENEGALESE BEACH-BOYS "AT MY SIDE", by Emilie Venables (University of Edinburgh). This paper examines some of the difficulties that I encountered during my doctoral fieldwork on aspirations of migration amongst young men and women in Senegal. I discuss how my fieldwork with the beach-boys of the Casamance often led to compromising situations that I had not experienced in other areas of my research. Using one interview in particular, I describe the discomfort and guilt I often felt during my fieldwork, and show how I felt torn between being loyal to myself, my work and my informants...

PARENT AND ETHNOGRAPHER OF OTHER CHILDREN, by David Poveda (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and University of Wales, Lampeter). In this article I examine the role my parental identity and my daughter's presence in the field played in the relationship I established with a group of Gitano (Spanish Roma) children and their families. This study was conducted as part of a linguistic ethnography focused on children's peer interactions and social organisation during their informal daily activities. The discussion addresses the more general issue of how researchers from various social disciplines incorporate their own children into the research process...

"SISTER AKUA, THEY SAY YOU SHOULD DANCE": NEGOTIATING ROLES IN PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION, by Elizabeth Graveling (University of Bath). Relationships, and specifically the relationship between the fieldworker and the research subjects, are at the core of the process of all anthropological and ethnographic research and to a very large extent determine the outcomes of the research. Drawing on experiences of recent ethnographic fieldwork among members of churches in a village in southern Ghana, this paper explores aspects of identity that contribute to the ambivalent status of the fieldworker. It considers the extent to which the researcher has control over her research roles...

IS A HAPPY ANTHROPOLOGIST A GOOD ANTHROPOLOGIST? By Katherine L. Smith (University of Wales, Lampeter). The purposes of this paper are to introduce and contextualise my recent doctoral fieldwork research in Higher Blackley, North Manchester, England, and to discuss the difficulties in understanding and monitoring the fragmentation of the self in fieldwork. How do we deal, as ethical but also politically motivated human beings, with responses or actions which make us cringe, make us afraid, confused or unhappy? How do we reconcile our own moral, ethical and political perspectives with those of individuals who hold very different perspectives in the field? ...

DANCING MY TRUE DANCE: REFLECTIONS ON LEARNING TO EXPRESS MYSELF THROUGH ECSTATIC DANCE IN HAWAI'I, by Lucy Pickering (Oxford Brookes University). While I was doing fieldwork with hippies and drop outs in Hawai'i, my mother came to visit. During her visit I took her to an ecstatic dance. At this dance one of my research participants, Stan, told me, "Lucy, I've been watching you dance today and you've really learned to express yourself". Discussing it later, my mother remarked, "Yes, but what he meant was that you've learned to dance like everyone else". In this paper I explore how the same piece of dance could be interpreted so differently...

IN SORCERY'S SHADOWS: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO A NARRATIVE GENRE, by Bartlomiej Walczak (University of Warsaw). This paper is concerned with the researcher/fieldwork relationship as expounded in Paul Ricoeur's thesis about a mutual configuration/refiguration relationship between the verbal and the textual perspective. Using Paul Stoller's project for eidetic anthropology as an example, I seek to demonstrate the boundaries of cognition in anthropology: the limitations of integrating two different cultural perspectives in one narrative...

HOW MUCH CAN A KAP SURVEY TELL US ABOUT PEOPLE'S KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDES AND PRACTICES? SOME OBSERVATIONS FROM MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY RESEARCH ON MALARIA IN PREGNANCY IN MALAWI, by Annika Launiala (University of Tampere and University of Kuopio, Finland). Knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) surveys are widely used to gather information for planning public health programmes in countries in the South. However, there is rarely any discussion about the usefulness of KAP surveys in providing appropriate data for project planning, and about the various challenges of conducting surveys in different settings...

All articles can be found at:
http://www.anthropologymatters.com/journal/2009-1/index.html

ABOUT ANTHROPOLOGY MATTERS
Anthropology Matters is the postgraduate arm of the Association of Social Anthropologists in the UK and Commonwealth (the ASA). Anthropology Matters runs a website (http://www.anthropologymatters.com), an open email list and an online journal. If you would like to join the email list, please sign up through the website. The Anthropology Matters Journal aims to promote innovative perspectives, critical reflection and questioning of established anthropological boundaries. We encourage submissions from PhD students and early-career anthropologists. If you would like to submit a paper, please contact the new editor, Amy Pollard.

Adam and Eve

2009-05-20T10:55:00.007-04:00

Adam and Eve, c. 1550, Museo del Prado, Madrid

In the past few decades many interesting feminist/gender studies of the story of Adam and Eve have appeared. Some of my favourites are Deborah Sawyer (God, gender and the Bible), Kim Parker ("Mirror, mirror on the wall, must we leave Eden, once and for all?"), Mieke Bal ("Sexuality, sin and sorrow"), and Christine Froula ("Rewriting Genesis").

While going through my archive notes and literature on "mission feminists" in Norway, however, I was surprised to find another interesting gendered take on the story. One female theological author in mid-twentieth-century Norway, Henny Dons, seems to have put forward a couple of evolving interpretations of Adam and Eve. Henny Dons was a prolific author but also an activist for greater gender equality within church and mission circles in Norway in the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, she was fairly conservative in her views on theology and the Bible. These two positions led her to a seeming struggle as she attempted to understand Genesis 1-3.

First, in the 1928 book Bibelens kvinner (Women of the Bible), she posits that Eve was created as Adam's equal. However, she argues that Eve then bore greater responsibility for the fall than Adam, and therefore God's judgement of Eve included a certain "reduction" or "weakening" of her character ("karakterforringelse"), which was later inherited by all women. This especially applied to all women who lived under "the old covenant" - i.e. women who lived in the vast parts of the world that Henny Dons characterised as non-Christian. It explained why women, and especially non-Christian women in Henny Dons' view, were subjugated to men. This interpretation seems to indicate that gender inequality is in large part due to Eve's original sin and the resulting weaker character of women.

In the same book, however, Henny Dons underlines that Christ is in some sense a descendant of Eve, not Adam. Dons held that Christ was born of a virgin, Mary, and hence did not receive his humanity from a biological father, Joseph. The narrative of salvation that runs from the fall, in the Garden of Eden, to the crucifiction and resurrection of Christ, in the New Testament, is therefore not a narrative that can be traced through a line of men, e.g. Adam-Joseph-Christ. Rather, the narrative of salvation can be traced through a line of women leading to the divine, namely Eve-Mary-Christ.

These are interesting attempts to combine her conservative theology with her fight to increase the role, status and space of women within the church. In the late 1940s, however, Henny Dons seems to have found some of the inconsistencies in her first interpretation of Eve too problematic. She has now started putting forward a different type of interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. In her undated manuscript "Guds ord til kvinnen" ("God's word to women"), she posits that in the Garden of Eden, Eve acknowledged her sin when God confronted her, whereas Adam did not - instead he shifted the blame away from himself. In Henny Dons' view, Eve therefore becomes the carrier of the hope and promise of conversion, as opposed to Adam, who is aligned with the shifty tools of Satan. Based on this picture, Henny Dons suggests that gender inequality in the world is largely caused by the repetition of this same pattern: Satan works through men to subjugate women, hope, and conversion.

Lisbeth Mikaelsson, who has written an article on Henny Dons in which she outlines these and other aspects of her life and writings, notes that it is not clear whether Henny Dons dared to speak about and teach the latter and more radical interpretation of Adam and Eve, or whether it was reserved for her unpublished manuscript.

-- Mikaelsson, Lisbeth. 2002. “Kvinne, ta ansvar og ledelse i dine egne hender”: Historien om Henny Dons [“Woman, take responsibility and leadership in your own hands”: The story of Henny Dons]. Norsk Tidsskrift for Misjon 56(2), 107-37.

Anthropologists on birth and babies

2009-05-11T17:03:00.002-04:00

Since becoming pregnant I have started paying more attention to a number of anthropologists who do research on women's bodies, birth, and parents' interaction with their babies.

The first anthropologist I read on this topic was Robbie E. Davis-Floyd, who writes about the symbolism of a "standard" birth procedure in a US hospital in the early 1990s. She maps out various associations tied to the wheelchair that greets a woman in labour at the door, the hospital gown, being hooked up to an electronic monitor, the IV drip, the bed, and the offer of pain medication before the woman requests it. As Davis-Floyd puts it: "all these convey to the laboring woman that she is dependent on the institution. She is also reminded in myriad ways of the potential defectiveness of her birthing machine," namely her own body. "Routine obstetric procedures cumulatively map the technocratic model of birth onto the birthing woman's perceptions of her labor experience" (452, 455). Yet Davis-Floyd points out that within this richly symbolic ritual, as in any ritual, there is also space for women to revise and add their own meanings to the space that they are surrounded by (e.g. viewing the wheelchair as unnecessary, viewing technology as a resource that they are free to utilize or ignore), and to occupy this space differently.

Other anthropologists whose work I have just become aware of are James McKenna, who runs the mother-baby sleep lab at Notre Dame University in the US, and Helen Ball, who runs the parent-infant sleep lab at Durham University in the UK. So much interesting research, there's never enough time to read it all...

--- Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. 2005. Gender and ritual: Giving birth the American way. In Gender in cross-cultural perspective, 4th edition, eds. Caroline B. Brettell and Carolyn F. Sargent, 449-461. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Tedium...

2009-04-18T17:46:00.002-04:00

I have had time to get back into my writing project again over the past few weeks. As always, however, when I spend weeks on end filtering through notes, drawing out what I think might be relevant, filing it under different themes and sections, translating from the Norwegian sources, etc etc, I am inevitably reminded that this stage of the writing process is pretty tedious... In hindsight I forget about the tedium, but when I'm in the middle of it, I have to keep convincing myself that it is worth going on and that it's part of something bigger and more enjoyable.

"It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I'm a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don't enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult."

- Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, London: Harcourt, 1953, on p. 25.

Eat my flesh and drink my blood

2009-03-28T10:58:00.004-04:00

One of my first posts on here, about a year ago, was about writing and eating God. I was reminded of that post last Sunday in the John study group at our church. We talked about a few verses in the Gospel of John (6:48-60):

[Jesus said,] “I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live for ever.” He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.
When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”

What was interesting about the discussion in our study group was how strongly most of us reacted to this passage. Even though in our church we are used to taking part in the Eucharist, the bodily imagery that is used by the author of the Gospel of John still retains some shock value: eat flesh, drink blood. I must admit, though, that I think the shock is well-placed by the author, and that I'm happy he does not fall back onto any facile resolution of it at the end of the passage; rather, he simply leaves the impenetrability.

This is the only text in the Gospel of John that could be said to pertain directly to the ritual of the Eucharist. In other words, the author of John may have given these words to Jesus in the text while thinking about how the Eucharist was already being practiced in the early Christian community of which the author was a part. And it intrigues me that his understanding of the Eucharist is so fleshly and material. He seems to have had a very robust idea of the importance of the bodily aspect of communal rituals - and the bodily aspect of people's ideas of God.

Women's space and housekeping (Marilynne Robinson)

2009-03-06T08:52:00.003-05:00

A friend told me that Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson was "strange but beautiful", and she was right. I also found it much more disturbing than I had anticipated!

Housekeeping is about two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who grow up with their grandmother and then with their aunt, Sylvie. A lot of the book is about the house that they grow up in, how it is kept, and how it changes. While their grandmother is caring for them, the house is almost like a little fortress, well kept, clearly demarcated as a separate space from the outside world. There is a clear line between the house's private space and the outside, public space.

Then when their aunt Sylvie arrives, everything starts to change. Sylvie treats the outside world as if she has a right to make use of it. She naps on park benches, she jumps on trains to go for rides. She does not believe in maintaining a separation between inside and outside spaces. When it is dark outside in the evening, she lets it be dark inside, and the girls eat their dinner in darkness. When leaves fall outside, Sylvie lets leaves blow in and gather in the corners of the house, too. Furniture is moved outside and left in the orchard. The house is no longer a separate, private, domesticated, cozy space.

Since Sylvie does not keep her house "properly" - i.e. as a separate, domesticated space, the kind of space that a woman who knows her place ought to keep - she is regarded as crazy by the townspeople. And her two nieces, Ruth and Lucille, are forced to choose between the "proper" type of housekeeping, in which women know their place and create a domesticated environment for themselves (and are regarded as sane), and Sylvie's type of housekeeping, in which women are free to blend private and public spaces and make use of both as they please (and are regarded as crazy).

As the girls make their choice, the reader is forced to either support or reject it - and this is what disturbed me about the book. Because both options available seemed to be so sad. At first glance, conventional housekeeping seems the safer, happier option for the girls - but then the book touches on so many of the inhibiting aspects of conventional housekeeping. On the other hand, the act of breaking with conventional housekeeping seems to bring a lot of sadness too, as social norms and bonds are broken.

Embodying ritual

2009-02-20T08:41:00.004-05:00

I have been thinking about how to describe women's religious rituals lately. Specifically I want to describe the all-female rituals, i.e. organized meetings, held by Christian women in Oslo, Norway, in the early twentieth century. They would come together to eat, listen to a devotion, hear news from "the mission field," pray, and talk. It seems to have been important to them that they managed to create this kind of semi-public all-female religious space.

I have been wondering, however, whether I can really describe their meetings as "rituals." I guess the short answer is that it depends on what I mean by "ritual." But I found a slightly longer and more useful answer recently when I came across an article by Simon Coleman and Peter Collins: "The 'plain' and the 'positive': Ritual, experience and aesthetics in Quakerism and Charismatic Christianity" (Journal of Contemporary Religion 15(3), 317-329, 2000). They discuss how religious meetings contribute to the "ritualization of life" (a phrase they borrow from Csordas, Language, Charisma and Creativity, 1997:74). The religious meeting should not just be seen as a ritual separate from everyday activity. Rather, it is part of a process of creating and embodying a wider life aesthetic that marks both the meeting itself and life beyond the meeting.

The aesthetic that Coleman and Collins describe includes both physical and ideological aspects, material as well as non-material elements. And indeed, the early-twentieth-century women I am studying would include all of these aspects in their own descriptions of their meetings too; the meeting minutes may mention what they had to eat, or how the room was decorated, or what kind of flowers were put on the tables, as well as the Bible reading, the prayer topics, and the theme of the devotion. The meetings were different from ordinary life, yet at the same time they were similar enough that the women could carry some of the aesthetic and "feel" of the meetings with them when they returned to their everyday spaces. The meaning of the ritual could be embodied outside of the ritual itself.

On not working...

2009-02-13T17:55:00.003-05:00

A return to idle pleasures after last summer...

"Taking a Bath
In a world of 'power showers' and invigorating pick-me-up gel products for the modern striver, it's well to remember the simple pleasures of a long, relaxing bath, preferably taken at 11am when everyone else is toiling in the mills and you have phoned in sick. Follow the medieval tradition and fill your bath with spices and rose petals. Invite your lover to join you. Linger in the bath too long and top up the hot water levels by twisting the taps with your feet, because you are too lazy to sit up and use your hands. Lie there and stare at the ceiling, almost - but not quite - drifting into the land of Nod, perfectly at ease, as the steam rises around you and the workaday world recedes into the realm of unimportance."

- Tom Hodgkinson, in The Book of Idle Pleasures (eds Dan Kieran and Tom Hodgkinson, 2008)

Discovering new anthropology blogs

2009-02-06T17:16:00.002-05:00

Holly McCarthy has written a great post over on onlineuniversities.com where she has collected 100 anthropology blogs. Browsing through the list there were especially two that caught my attention - first, Space & Culture, all about spaces, and second, Mundane Ethnography, which seems to be mostly about food, and recent posts compare food shopping experiences in the UK and the US. Having moved from the UK to the US not so long ago, these posts really resonated with me!

Online anthropology magazine rack

2009-01-30T18:02:00.002-05:00

My blog has been added to Alltop's "All the Top Anthropology News" site... so I checked it out. It looks pretty good. It's supposed to be an "online magazine rack" and that is exactly the feeling you get, browsing through the latest feeds from all kinds of anthropology-related sites.

Lévi-Strauss on the possibility of unhitching

2009-01-06T15:17:00.005-05:00

Since I missed posting something on Claude Lévi-Strauss's 100th birthday last year, I thought I would start the new year by posting my favourite Lévi-Strauss quote. It is the long and winding and wonderful last sentence of Tristes Tropiques:

"When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; man may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists - Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations! - in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat."

New issue of Anthropology Matters

2008-12-08T10:05:00.003-05:00

...is now online here! Below is the official announcement...

* * * * * * * * * * * *
LATEST ISSUE OF
ANTHROPOLOGY MATTERS

ISSN 1758-6453

The latest issue of the Anthropology Matters Journal contains new research from seven PhD or early-career anthropologists. Their topics range from how one "kills time" in Albania and Georgia (by Frederiksen) to the lively carnival experience in Spain (by Salazar-Sutil). Some reflect on the different ways in which they have adapted classical fieldwork to fit their specific topics, including Craciun's reflections on practicing anthropology "out of the corner of one's eye", Wiencke's use of colour drawings as part of his fieldwork, and Enav-Weintraub's experiences of "sensing the political" in the West Bank. Finally, Klein and van Steenwyk both examine marginal communities and how they interact with society: people with variations of gender identity and/or sex development in South Africa , and the Deaf community in Australia .

All articles can be found on the Anthropology Matters website.

RESEARCHING FAKES: PRACTICING ANTHROPOLOGY OUT OF THE CORNER OF ONE'S EYE, by Magdalena Craciun (University College London). This paper discusses the style of anthropological inquiry forged through attempts at grasping the elusive presence of fake branded goods. Practicing anthropology out of the corner of one's eye is a method of capturing something that is not discussed straightforwardly, something that quickly turns from visible into invisible. At the same time, it is an attitude in which discretion and respect mingle with diffidence…

TEMPORALITY IN PARTICIPATION AND OBSERVATION: PERSPECTIVES FROM ALBANIA AND GEORGIA , by Martin Demant Frederiksen ( University of Aarhus ). Whereas the notion of time has usually been seen as an analytical concept, this article focuses on issues of time and temporality as methodological tools in anthropological fieldwork. Based on empirical examples from Albania and the Republic of Georgia , the article explores issues of observation and participation in relation to time seen objectively as history and change, that is, time passing by leaving various signs of alteration, and time as a subjective experience, that is, the way time is experienced locally…

CARNIVAL POST-PHENOMENOLOGY: MIND THE HUMP, by Nicolas Salazar-Sutil (Goldsmiths College , University of London ). This article is an autoethnographic reading of carnival as an inter-cultural and interpersonal event, and one that does not always profit from anthropological models such as inversion or safety-valve theories. The radical proximity of carnival experience destroys the objectivity of the event and makes it meaningful mainly as a lived-in moment. The following is an account of an individual experience that defines the significance of carnival as a form of kinesis, the shaking up of the static ethnographic "I"; an (un)expected humping…

THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE WORLD OF TANZANIAN STREET CHILDREN, by Markus Wiencke (Free University, Berlin). In this article I reconstruct the life world (Lebenswelt) of the street children of the Tanzanian city Mwanza from an emic perspective that emphasises meaning-making, in order to depict them as subjects solely responsible for their actions. Accordingly I shall present how two youths conveyed to me, in numerous colour drawings, their everyday urban life…

(UN)SETTLING THE WEST BANK OF ISRAEL/PALESTINE: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CITIZENSHIP IN "NO MAN'S LAND", by Yarden B. Enav-Weintraub (University of Edinburgh). This paper answers Yael Navaro-Yashin's call for ethnographic research of "no man's land(s)", and to the ethnographic challenge she poses in her call for anthropologists to "sense the political" in such territories. The paper is based on my fieldwork in an Israeli college in the " West Bank" of Israel/Palestine and deals with the ambiguous political status of this geo-political territory. The paper analyses the " West Bank" of Israel/Palestine as a (political) "no man's land" and attempts to "sense the political" there…

QUERYING MEDICAL AND LEGAL DISCOURSES OF QUEER SEXES AND GENDERS IN SOUTH AFRICA , by Thamar Klein (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology). South Africa is one of the most progressive countries worldwide regarding the rights of people with variations of gender identity and/or sex development. This paper queries medical and legal discourses of queer sex and gender. It takes a look at the medico-legal discourses on people whose identities and/or bodies exist outside of the binary of male and female or transition within this binary in South Africa…

GOING, GOING, BUT NOT GONE: THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL INFLUENCES ON THE AUSTRALIAN DEAF COMMUNITY, by Ingrid van Steenwyk. Australia' s Deaf community, whose members consider themselves part of a distinct socio-cultural minority group identified by their use of Australian Sign Language (Auslan), is experiencing significant and rapid change. Recent social and technological influences such as cochlear implants, telecommunications technology, mainstreaming and the closure of Deaf Clubs are changing the way Deaf people communicate, socialise and identify. Some research suggests that these influences combined with advances in medical care and genetics have the potential to wipe out deafness altogether, taking with it the entire community, its unique culture and one of the world's few native signed languages…

All articles can be found on the Anthropology Matters website.

Anthropology Matters

2008-12-01T13:27:00.004-05:00

A couple of weeks ago Savage Minds held an informal competition for most excellent open access anthropology journal, and most excellent anthropology blog, as well as most excellent uncategorizable digital thing-a-ma-job for anthropology...

Well, Anthropology Matters (the journal that I'm editing at the moment) was nominated for most excellent open access anthropology journal - and we won! Yippee.

Learning how to read her body

2008-11-21T08:20:00.003-05:00

I recently bought Rebecca Lester's monograph Jesus in our wombs: Embodying modernity in a Mexican convent. This is one of the few monographs I've been able to find that specifically deals with the topic of the female body within a Christian community (Caroline Walker Bynum's work is another excellent example!)

Lester did her fieldwork among a group of young women who were training to become nuns in a Mexican Catholic convent. She writes of each young woman:

"As she progressed in her training, she learned how to read her body - its sensations, inclinations, energies, temptations, frustrations - as indicators of how successfully she was managing this relationship between worldly and spiritual demands. She learned to view her body as the domain of negotiation between these two existential frames, a negotiation that became manifest in the very inclinations of her flesh." (p. 5)

Lester's descriptions from her fieldwork and interactions with the postulants are very well written and really give the reader a feel for what life must be like inside the convent walls. I enjoyed the way she presents her findings. She takes the reader on a journey through seven stages that the postulants go through: brokenness, belonging, containment, regimentation, self-critique, surrender, and re/collection. These chapters form the heart of her study for me. They touch on a range of bodily actions, thoughts about bodies, management of bodies, and so on, including how the postulants started to regiment their bodies to become more silent, more economical in movements, to have the right intentions when eating, to be able to kneel for longer periods of time, to become more aware of their shifting inner instincts and desires - in short, to create a mindful body (p. 179).

Lester will be one of my guides when I start writing about the female body among women in (Protestant) church and mission circles in Norway in the early twentieth century. I'm still searching around for other monographs that address the female body in a Protestant community...

Female hunger

2008-10-31T09:28:00.002-04:00

A while ago I wrote a blog post about the (self-)disiplining of the female body and the issue of taking up room, filling space. I was reminded of some of the same self-disciplining when I read one of Susan Bordo's great reflections on female hunger the other day:

"On television, the Betty Crocker commercials symbolically speak to men of the legitimacy of their wildest, most abandoned desires: 'I've got a passion for you; I'm wild, crazy, out of control' the hungry man croons to the sensuously presented chocolate cake, offered lovingly by the (always present) female. Female hunger, on the other hand, is depicted as needful of containment and control, and female eating is seen as a furtive, shameful, illicit act, as in the Andes Candies and 'Mon Cheri' commercials, where a 'tiny bite' of chocolate, privately savored, is supposed to be ample reward for a day of serving others (Bordo 1986). Food is not the real issue here, of course; rather, the control of female appetite for food is merely the most concrete expression of the general rule governing the construction of femininity that female hunger - for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification - be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be circumscribed, limited." (18)

- Bordo, Susan. 1989. The body and the reproduction of femininity: A feminist appropriation of Foucault. In Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist reconstructions of being and knowing (eds) Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, 13-33. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

The male gaze - the male voice

2008-10-17T19:00:00.003-04:00

"Those familiar with feminist critiques of the 'male gaze' and the phallocracy that gaze institutes ... may, like myself, have cherished the idea that in more ear-, less eye-minded societies, like that of the Suya [of central Brazil], women's senses would not be as suppressed. But the Suya case dashes that expectation. In place of the 'male gaze' there is the 'male voice': 'plaza speech' - the most valued form of oratory - is only spoken by fully adult men ... In short, there is a politics to the Suya sensory order and a markedly sexual politics at that." (177-178)

- Howes, David. 1991. Sensorial anthropology. In The varieties of sensory experience: A sourcebook in the anthropology of the senses (ed.) David Howes, 167-191. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Tiramisu

2008-10-10T07:48:00.006-04:00

This is a rather random post, but today I am making tiramisu to bring to our reading group... I've found a great recipe (slightly adapted from Cooking Basics for Dummies! by Bryan Miller and Marie Rama) and I love tiramisu. For a long time in London I used to have tiramisu for breakfast every morning at Caffe Nero's. Good memories...

Tiramisu

In a bowl combine:

1 pint heavy cream
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Whip the mixture with a whisk or electric mixer until it forms soft peaks. Then refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl or coffee mug combine:

4 tablespoons instant coffee granules
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 cup boiling water

Stir. Set aside and let cool to room temperature.

Wait 1 hour while the whipped cream is in the refrigerator...

Then in another bowl combine:

1/3 cup mascarpone cheese (or softened cream cheese)
3 tablespoons sour cream

Stir the mixture until smooth.

Take the whipped cream mixture out of the refrigerator. Fold half the whipped cream mixture into the mascarpone-cheese-and-sour-cream mixture until it is well blended. Then fold in the rest of the whipped cream, being sure not to overmix.

Now you can start to assemble the tiramisu. Have ready:

12 ounces ladyfingers
3-4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder and some grated chocolate

Place about half of the ladyfingers on the bottom of a serving dish (I use a round glass bowl). Drizzle half the coffee evenly over the ladyfingers. Spread half the cream mixture on top of the ladyfingers.

Place another layer of ladyfingers over the cream. Drizzle the remaining coffee over the ladyfingers. Then cover with the remaining cream.

Sprinkle the cocoa powder and grated chocolate over the top.

Refrigerate for 2 hours before serving.

Toward an anthropology of Christianity

2008-10-03T07:51:00.006-04:00

I've just read and enjoyed John Barker's recent book review essay in the latest issue of American Anthropologist (vol 110, no 3), "Toward an anthropology of Christianity". He reviews three books: Fenella Cannell's edited volume The Anthropology of Christianity, Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson's edited volume The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity, and Webb Keane's monograph Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter.

As John Barker says:

"The three volumes under consideration here, along with a symposium edited by Joel Robbins (2003) [in Religion vol 33], have a more ambitious aim: the development of an anthropology of Christianity. This is a significant move, not so much because it legitimates the historical and ethnographic study of Christianity within the discipline - that battle has largely been won - but because it suggests that anthropology can provide a unique perspective." (377)

In other words, the authors combine ethnographic study of Christian communities, practices and meanings with larger questions.

In Cannell's edited volume, the larger questions circle around themes such as conversion, words and things. I especially liked the chapters by Simon Coleman and Fenella Cannell on the use of words (recitation, speaking, reading, writing), combined with the use of material things in the process (notes, books, gifts). Their focus is on Christian communities in Sweden and the Philippines respectively. David Mosse's chapter combines words and bodies among Catholics in South India, Eva Keller looks at words and the process of exploration among Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar.

I've already written a post on Engelke and Tomlinson's edited volume. The themes that come out strongly in their volume are meaning and ritual.

And at some point I should write a separate post on Webb Keane. His work examines the relationship between subjects, objects, and language. In particular he looks at how Protestant Christians in Indonesia draw moral boundaries around themselves (as modern subjects) through constructing proper relationships to language and to objects around them. It gets complicated. But intriguing...

Go Green

2008-09-25T11:35:00.005-04:00

I love PhD comics.

Gender and concrete

2008-09-11T11:27:00.005-04:00

Material World recently posted a note on the project Gender and the Built Environment. I looked at their case studies and especially enjoyed these two:

"Planning the non-sexist city"
While I was aware of how shapes within a city reproduce phallic symbolism, and that some planners and artists try to counter this by providing more "containing" spaces, I had not thought of the fact that cities are sexist in another respect too: women's journeys across a city landscape are often more challenging than men's. As long as more women hold primary day-to-day responsibility for their children than men (dropping chidren off at school, picking them up, buying school supplies, buying medicines, driving them to activities, etc), their journeys across the city are often constituted of a series of shorter stops that criss-cross the city grid. City lay-out and transport systems, on the other hand, are often designed on the assumption that journeys across the city will occur as straight lines: driving from the suburb to the center, and then back to the suburb. Women's journeys are made more challenging, therefore, by the relative lack of transport options and amenities needed for their types of journeys. This sentence from the case study made me smile: "The true position of women in society can be gauged by the length of the line/queue for the women's toilets."

"Girli concrete" -- !
The shape of cities also reflect qualities that have come to be associated with "masculine" characteristics rather than "feminine" (though I won't go into the problem with these labels here!) Suffice to say that city surfaces are mostly hard, strong, square - think of concrete, metal, glass, straight lines, etc. Two women at the University of Ulster (in Northern Ireland) are now working on what they call "girli concrete." They are mixing concrete with materials that evoke new associations - lace and cashmere cloth, for instance - and they are drawing out round and playful patterns. I have posted some of the beautiful results below - also check out their blog Girli Concrete.

Ingie Hovland: publications

2008-09-11T08:22:00.009-04:00

Journal articles

"Regulating emotions and aiming for a Ph.D.: Excerpts from Anthropology Matters," Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, forthcoming (special issue on "graduate socialization").

"Umpumulo, place of rest: A nineteenth-century Christian mission station among the Zulus," Radical History Review 99 (2007), 140-57.

"Fieldnotes on some cockroaches at SOAS and in Stavanger, Norway," Anthropology Matters Journal 6:2 (2004), 1-8.

"Careful, you might lose something: On being disciplined into the anthropology of religion," Anthropology Matters Journal 5:2 (2003), 1-8.

"Macro/micro dynamics in South Africa: Why the reconciliation process will not reduce violence," Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 1:2 (2003), 6-20.

"Fra Jerusalem d.e. Stavanger: Misjonsstrategi vs misjonsinformasjon i Misjonstidende," Norsk Tidsskrift for Misjon 55:2 (2001), 67-86.

Book chapters

"'What do you call the heathen these days?' Renewal in the Norwegian Mission Society." In Multi-sited ethnography: Problems and possibilities in the translocation of research methods, eds. Simon Coleman and Pauline von Hellermann. London: Routledge, forthcoming.

"Follow the missionary: Connected and disconnected flows of meaning in the Norwegian Mission Society." In Multi-sited ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary social research, ed. Mark-Anthony Falzon, 135-47. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.

"Who’s afraid of religion? Tensions between 'mission' and 'development' in the Norwegian Mission Society." In Development, civil society and faith-based organizations: Bridging the sacred and the secular, eds. Gerard Clarke and Michael Jennings, 171-86. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

"Acceptable stories or acceptable boundaries? On managerial optimism, critical reflection, and one particularly intractable development organization." In Negotiating boundaries and borders: Qualitative research on, in and for development, ed. Matt Smith, 197-215. Oxford: Elsevier, 2007.

Editorials

"Fieldwork support: Introduction," Anthropology Matters Journal 11:2 (2009).

"Fieldwork identities: Introduction," Anthropology Matters Journal 11:1 (2009).

"Writing up and feeling down…: Introduction," Anthropology Matters Journal 9:2 (2007).

"Fielding emotions: Introduction," Anthropology Matters Journal 9:1 (2007).

Reviews

Review of Ethnographic fieldwork: An anthropological reader, eds. Antonius C.G.M. Robben and Jeffrey A. Sluka, Blackwell, 2007. In Qualitative Research, forthcoming.

Review of Cultivating development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice, by David Mosse, Pluto Press, 2005. In Development Policy Review 23(6): 750-51, 2005.

PhD in comic book format

2008-09-03T08:57:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I came across Ju Hui Judy Han's 24-page comics - she has drawn up her PhD research in comics format! I actually read all of it, so much easier to read than hundreds of pages of dissertation... and very interesting. She is a cultural geographer and is studying Korean missionaries. Highly recommended!

When rituals don't "make meaning"

2008-08-28T11:28:00.004-04:00

I've just finished reading all (yes, all - the collection is that good!) the chapters of The limits of meaning: Case studies in the anthropology of Christianity, edited by Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson (2006). One of the reasons I decided to read all of it is that the volume has a core theme running through all the chapters: When and how does Christianity create meaning, and when do Christian rituals create what seem to be the limits of meaning, the absence of meaning, or meaninglessness?

What should we make, for example, of a church service in which a person gets up to give the sermon, but then fails to say anything and sits down again (as described in the chapter by Matt Tomlinson)? Or what should we make of a service in which the speaker purposefully leaves a long silence after his sermon, which makes the congregation start to feel increasingly awkward (as described by Simon Coleman)? Instances such as this, occurring in the middle of Christian rituals, challenge the assumption that rituals are invariably "meaningful" or that they always "make meaning".

I found this line of thought interesting, and have collected three quotes here about the "unclarified spaces" of rituals - ambiguous, absurd or chaotic spaces:

"The historian of religion J.Z. Smith has argued that 'ritual precises ambiguities' (1987:110). This is itself a perfectly ambiguous phrase, and purposefully so. Ritual makes things clear; it also makes them unclear. Ambiguity and clarity are mutually constitutive." (Matthew Engelke, p. 79)
"For something to be illogical or uninterpretable, ethnographically, is for it to be absurd. To interpret ritual as agency or world-making (De Boeck and Devisch 1994; Devisch 1993) as a productive process is to eliminate the possibility of ritual manifesting the absurd, the meaningless, and the helplessness of humans in the face of larger forces - whether political, economic, or divine ... When we, as ethnographers, embrace the possibility of indeterminacy in ritual, we also acknowledge the realm of the sacred: that which cannot be spoken." (Erica Bornstein, p. 100)
"Rituals of meaning-making necessarily create the possibility of a vague and chaotic realm in which meanings might be present but cannot be made, or might be absent and have attention to be called to such absence." (Matt Tomlinson, p. 141)

Engelke, Matthew and Matt Tomlinson, eds. 2006. The limits of meaning: Case studies in the anthropology of Christianity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Alienation by the observation of an other

2008-08-20T20:57:00.007-04:00

"As a woman who had birthed five children, literally under the male obstetric gaze, I had been surveyed, noted, measured, scanned, calibrated and monitored in a hitherto unprecedented manner. My body was both an intimate arena of new conversation between myself and the child who was becoming, and an incubator for a scientific quest which had nothing to do with my relational inter-subjective life with my child. With every injection, urine sample, weight check and pelvic measurement I experienced my bloated body undergoing personal erasure as the scientific gaze scanned me in every detail but lost my subjectivity. I felt objectified, and my sensate intimacy with my child diminished, as s/he withdrew into uterine secrecy. Even though she kicked and swirled inside, my own knowledge of her passed ineluctably from myself, her conceiving and birthing mother, to those who charted units of blood, urine, fats, sugar, hormones. This is modern knowledge. This is what it is to be.

"Irigaray's analysis of the differences between women in their places assigned by men, as mother, whore, virgin, alienated, literally thrust or torn apart by the phallogocratic order in which she abides, resonated deep inside me. I ached with the hole in my persona left behind by the crisis of childbirth, and I was lacerated by cool obstetric observations of my 'incompetence', from the incompetence of uterine contractions, to the difficulties presented by 'inverted' nipples. I was left in no doubt as to the frailty of my female flesh. And yet I had birthed: gloriously, outrageously, divinely. A competence essentially sexed outside of the male domain. Yet I felt displaced.

" 'Woman has not yet become subject. She has not yet taken her place. And this is a result of a historical condition ... for woman is still the place, the whole of a place in which she cannot take possession of herself' [...] 'scattered into x number of places that are never gathered together into anything she knows of herself ... and yet these remain the basis of reproduction in all its forms' (Irigaray 1994:227) [...]

"As I settled into research soon after the birthing of my last child, and read Irigaray for the first time, I realized that my mandate from my supervisor to research, chronicle and abstract theological themes and concerns in the work of certain African women theologians had some disturbing reminiscences of my own recent experience of alienation by the observation of an other. I, the alienated, was in the process of de-subjectifying those whom I was researching [...] I too was in danger of ripping apart, dissecting and scattering whilst the objectified subjects of my enquiry were rendered inert. How was the violation to be averted, and the touching of lips, the jouissance of life, the interplay of subjects to be manifest?" (Pemberton 2005:250-251)

Pemberton, Carrie. 2005. Whose face in the mirror? Personal and post-colonial obstacles in researching Africa's contemporary women's theological voices. In Gender, religion and diversity: Cross-cultural perspectives (eds) Ursula King and Tina Beattie, 250-261. London and New York: Continuum.

Irigaray, Luce. 1994. Speculum of the other woman, trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Attentiveness

2008-08-15T14:20:00.004-04:00

Parent and child dancing (from Bali Karma)

"Janet Martin Soskice ... draws on Iris Murdoch's notion of 'attention', to express the idea of 'a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality' (Soskice 1992:60). Drawing principally on Murdoch and Charles Taylor's work, Soskice shows that paying attention is a moral effort, as when a parent attends to a child and so 'tries to "see more" in Murdoch's sense, or to be "more fully there", in Taylor's' (Soskice 1992:70-1) ... Soskice seeks emphases within Christianity that can yield a more engaged notion of both God and humanity. She suggests that God looks on us with the gaze of attentiveness ...
"But most philosophy of religion works with a model of God and a parallel model of the rational agent, as beings who enjoy an ideal vantage point by virtue of being detached; able to rise above it all ... Now I would like to advance a stronger claim, that being attentive rather than detached not only takes moral effort, as Soskice says (Soskice 1992:70), but that it is conducive to advancing truth." (Harris 2005:55-56)

Harris, Harriet. 2005. On understanding that the struggle for truth is moral and spiritual. In Gender, religion and diversity: Cross-cultural perspectives (eds) Ursula King and Tina Beattie, 51-64. London and New York: Continuum.

Soskice, Janet Martin. 1992. Love and attention. In Philosophy, religion and the spiritual life (ed.) Michael McGhee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Methodological belief

2008-08-13T17:25:00.005-04:00

I have just read Tina Beattie's chapter "Religious identity and the ethics of representation: The study of religion and gender in the secular academy". I remember hearing Beattie speak on this subject a few years ago at SOAS in London and was very inspired.

As a starting point, she questions the need, which is often felt by researchers, to cast the study of religion within a post-Enlightenment rational framework. "Rationality" here is understood as that which keeps the researcher "objective" or "detached" from the "object" of study, simply observing and describing it as neutrally as possible. What would happen, Beattie asks, if the researcher acknowledged their own (ir)religious position?

In particular, she is interested in two strands of thought related to this question: (1) the religious faith of the researchers who carry out research on gender and religion, and (2) the religious faith of the women and men whom they study. Both of these strands, Beattie suggests, carry the potential for a deeper critique of the "rational" study of religion and a deeper understanding of the roles that faith plays in people's lives and stories. Indeed the language of faith, including concepts such as prayer and transcendence, may promise an alternative epistemological locus for researchers who wish to take tenets of feminist research seriously (such as questioning the image of an omniscient researcher).

So far so good. But how is this actually done in practice? Beattie's chapter lays out the theory, but it is difficult to find good examples of research where this has been done - where researchers have parted ways with "methodological agnosticism" (or "methodological atheism") and have instead incorporated a thoughtful approach to "methodological belief" into their work.

The closest I have come so far is not an actual example, but more of a review essay: Matthew Engelke's short article "The problem of belief: Evans-Pritchard and Victor Turner on 'the inner life'":

Evans-Pritchard and Turner worked against what [Katherine] Ewing calls the "reductive atheism" (1994:572) that often characterizes the main currents in the anthropology of religion influenced by Durkheim. Each had strong religious convictions themselves (both were converts to Catholicism), and each tried to fold their "inner lives" into the work of their anthropology. (p 4)

when we read their work we should also take note of the moments when they slipped out of a clearly "professional' frame and treated such considerations as a mixture of personal and intellectual challenges - when belief, in other words, became method. This may not have resolved all of their anthropological concerns, but then again perhaps that was not the point. Perhaps the point was to suggest that the study of religion, even in the tradition of scholarship indebted to Durkheim, often retains something ineffable. (p 8)

Beattie, Tina. 2005. Religious identity and the ethics of representation: The study of religion and gender in the secular academy. In Gender, religion and diversity: Cross-cultural perspectives (eds) Ursula King and Tina Beattie, 65-78. London and New York: Continuum.

Engelke, Matthew. 2002. The problem of belief: Evans-Pritchard and Victor Turner on "the inner life". Anthropology Today 18(6), 3-8.

Ewing, Katherine. 1994. Dreams from a saint: Anthropological atheism and the temptation to believe. American Anthropologist 96(3), 571-83.

Gendered spaces

2008-08-09T10:11:00.005-04:00

I am always interested when I come across the work of Jorunn Økland, a fellow Norwegian who now teaches at the University of Sheffield (England), and who writes on the intersection between gender and space. This week I read a chapter by her on space, gender and religion:

one way of making spaces meaningful is to associate them with a particular gender ...
For Massey, "'place' is formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location" (Massey 1994:168). Add to the set of social relationships a kind of discourse that more or less explicitly constructs and structures the activities taking place there as male or female, and you have gendered spaces ...
Character, action and place are intimately linked to each other and stand in a legitimizing, reinforcing, dialectic relationship with each other: type 1 performs action 1 on place 1; since type 1 performs action 1, type 1 becomes type 1. If one is located on place 2, one performs action 2 and is type 2, etc. In my own work, this insight has been particularly helpful to illuminate how the distribution of ritual patterns of actions (roles) between men and women serves to gender sacred places (Økland 2005:152-153)

Økland, Jorunn. 2005. "Men are from Mars and women are from Venus": On the relationship between religion, gender and space. In Gender, religion and diversity: Cross-cultural perspectives (eds) Ursula King and Tina Beattie, 152-161. London and New York: Continuum.

Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, place and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Missing Grantchester

2008-07-30T17:53:00.003-04:00

This week I am missing Grantchester orchard in Cambridge. The walk through the fields, along the river, the green deck chairs, the lawn under the trees, the scones and clotted cream and strawberry jam and English afternoon tea...

Photo: wjmarnoch

Photo: wjmarnoch

Photo: KK07

Photo: gasindius

The body in the pulpit

2008-07-25T15:43:00.004-04:00

So I am reading about gender. Right now I'm trying to understand écriture féminine.

Ecriture féminine has evolved into its own brand of feminist poststructuralist/literary theory - primarily associated with the French feminist "holy trinity": Hélene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Ecriture féminine is sometimes translated as "writing the (female) body". It's based on the proposition that forms of patriarchy have systematically repressed, invalidated or ignored women's experiences. In particular, a connection is drawn between experiences tied to women's bodies and to texts. Ecriture féminine is expressed e.g. through modes of bodily praxis or modes of writing (women's or men's) that pinpoint a certain unease with prevailing social relations, challenge them and alter them.

I have just read an article by Elaine Lawless on women clergy in the United States ('Writing the body in the pulpit: Female-sexed texts', Journal of American Folklore 107:55-81, 1994). She argues that even just the presence of a female minister in church can at times act as écriture féminine. She focuses on the figure of the woman pastor in the pulpit: a female body, heavy with allusions, covered in vestments, heavy with religious meaning and authority. This female body might pose certain threats - threats to theological ordering, to fixed gender roles, to the perception that God can only be understood through and in human male terms.

Seeing a female figure in the pulpit can also suddenly raise the question of gender and sexuality in the lives of the congregants. Lawless argues that male pastors in the West have for long been associated with a certain degree of asexuality. But when a woman steps up to the pulpit, she suggests, it becomes much more difficult for congregants to regard her as asexual - especially if she has been or becomes pregnant - and this in turn raises the question of bodily experience and sexuality for them inside the church, rather than outside it: "At the very best, the woman presents a dilemma in that she forces a confrontation with sexuality for everyone involved" (p. 62). In this way bodily experiences - female, male, human - can suddenly be included more visibly in the religious space.

While Lawless presents very interesting ethnographic material, I'm not sure I agree with her that female ministers or pastors cannot be perceived to be asexual in the same way as many male ministers. I agree that the female body comes laden with sexual signification. But it also seems to me that in some instances female ministers can take on - or be placed in - the same apparently asexual role as some of their male colleagues through, for example, their choice of short haircut, full-length clothing, general appearance and demeanour. The fact that a young female pastor who wears long hair, lipstick and a short skirt will raise eyebrows shows precisely that it is still largely strange for congregants in general to associate religious space with any signs of female sexuality.

Gender and Christianity - some random images

2008-07-23T18:16:00.005-04:00

Mary Magdalene
Unfortunately I don't know who the artist is. But I love this picture.

The Madonna by Richard Campbell

African Virgin from Jesus Mafa

Ok, this one is not actually Christian, apparently, but I like it --

Fertility Goddess (Celtic) by Norman Ernsting

New reading

2008-07-19T12:14:00.004-04:00

New project

2008-07-16T18:30:00.004-04:00

I have started organizing a new book project. I have spent today collecting together some books from our shelves that I want to read (or skim...), articles on gender and Christianity that I've been saving, stray references that I've noted down on green post-its.

My new project is on gender and Christianity. It is going to be an anthropological project again, or more precisely it will be historical anthropology. My specific case study is a network or movement of women who were active as part of the Norwegian Mission Society in the early twentieth century. They managed to secure the right for women to vote within the Society, they managed to get a woman formally employed at the headquarters of the Society in Norway, and so on. I'm interested in how they blended gender and theology - sometimes they would use what was perceived as "feminine" traits (e.g. feminine piety, an emphasis on intimacy) in order to try to get their will, at other times they would use theological arguments (e.g. related to Jesus' conversations with women).

Over the next months I'll try to carve out time to read about gender and religion. I always like this phase of the writing process.

Eucharist and expenditure

2008-07-09T17:09:00.007-04:00

A few weeks ago Ben Myers over on Faith and Theology posted a quote from a new book by William Cavanaugh, Being consumed: Economics and Christian desire. Cavanaugh comments on one of the tensions that should strike him and others who take the Eucharist in our society:

We live our lives at the intersection of two stories about the world: the Eucharist and the market. Both tell stories of hunger and consumption, of exchanges and gifts; the stories overlap and compete... (2008:89)

This reminded me of Derrida's essay "From restricted to general economy", in his Writing and difference, in which he critiques how systems of meaning are made to make sense. A system based on Hegel's philosophy of forward movement, for example, has to be made to make sense by silently repressing various "blind spots". Such a blind spot, Derrida suggests, is

the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity - here we would have to say an expenditure and a negativity without reserve - that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or system. (1978:327)

In other words, they can no longer be determined as negativity in the Hegelian sense of a negative move that fits in with the overall positive thrust of history. The expenditure that Derrida speaks of is of a more "radical" kind; a kind that does not fit in, that plays itself out without reserve. This is the "blind spot" of a Hegelian system within which elements must be made to fit.

I wonder if the Eucharist might be seen as such an expenditure and negativity without reserve, no longer determined. Its symbolism draws on the received tradition that here was a God who chose to try to engage with human beings by dying. Of course, it is possible to interpret this in a Hegelian spirit and to see it as simply one move in a cosmic Christian narrative that will end in a new heaven and earth. But perhaps it is also possible to interpret some of the pull of the Eucharist as a drawing towards just the moment of death. The ritual offers the possibility of pausing at the destruction: an "irreversible expenditure" that does not make sense within our normal economies.

Derrida too goes on to mention the relation to alterity (e.g. God) as an example of something that can destabilise our restricted economy. God is an absent presence, an impossible presence. This is especially clear in the Eucharist, which claims to offer an impossible presence - body and blood in bread and wine - as an impossible gift - freely (Or not so freely? Hard to tell with the Eucharist).

In any case, all that to say that the quote from Cavanaugh made me think...

Taking up room and filling space

2008-07-05T11:31:00.007-04:00

The last two chapters in Juliet Miller's The creative feminine and her discontents focus on the work of two artists: Cornelia Parker and Louise Bourgeois. I like so many of the works that she discusses, especially of course Parker's exploded garden shed ("Cold, Dark Matter: An Exploded View").

Photo: Tate

But I was particularly struck by some of Bourgeois' pieces. "The Destruction of the Father," for example, is a large open mouth-like cavern, filled with smooth forms that might be teeth. In the middle is a table with smaller forms on it.

Photo: Rafael Lobato

For Bourgeois, it harks back to memories of childhood dinners that were ruled over by her father in a nervous and stifling way. In her later imagination, she tries to break with the claustrophobia of those dinners by reconstructing it: this time, in her art work, the father is thrown on the table, dismembered, and devoured - creating a different and more disturbing form of claustrophobia in the viewer. Bourgeois rekindles the memory and embodied experience of having to perform "nice", as a girl and young woman, and in this work, as Roger Cook says, "Louise is determinedly not nice" ("Critical essay", Harvest vol. 45, 1999:150). Instead she creates a space for her rage and violent feelings.

"The Destruction of the Father" was made in 1974. Two and a half decades later, Bourgeois made the three towering steel constructions for the opening of the Tate Modern in London, which she named "I Do, I Undo, I Redo".

Photo: Sean Smith

Each construction had a set of steps and mirrors at the top, and visitors were invited to enter into them. The coupling of love and destruction - "I Do, I Undo" - were here followed by the possibility of reparation, "I Redo". But, as Juliet Miller points out, the most powerful thing that the towers communicated was their enormous size and the way in which they filled up the space. Miller argues that historically and culturally in the West, "femininity" and being a woman has been associated with making and containing space, such as in the home, rather than moving into, filling out or affecting space (p. 30-31). Bourgeois' sculptures then are also interesting in the way they challenge what it means to be a woman: "Here was a woman taking up room and filling space with a freedom and abandon not usually associated with the feminine" (p. 117).

Have you destroyed anything lately?

2008-07-02T17:07:00.005-04:00

I came across Juliet Miller's book The creative feminine and her discontents: Psychotherapy, art, and destruction when I read Michèle Roberts' review of it in the Guardian. I went ahead and bought the book, and have since thoroughly enjoyed reading through the thoughtful, provocative and stimulating chapters.

One of Miller's central themes is that "to bring something new into being something else has to be destroyed" (p. 12), and I like the way she discusses different ways in which destructive and aggressive drives can productively be given more room in our lives (and especially, in terms of her argument, in women's lives) - not in order to act out the violence against others, or to turn it against oneself, but rather to use it in order to gain freer and more creative expressions.

Quote for today:

When Marion Milner discovered in A Life of One's Own that she was terrified of the force of her internal patriarchal God, this cannot all be explained by her introjects of patriarchy but also, as with Matisse and Freud, as an expression of her fear of the creative archetype in all its uncertain raging power. Dionysus, as the embodiment of energy and new life, can also be raving, fearsome, and out of control. However, to be creative the archetype has to be engaged with. For women, disobedience of the patriarchal strictures against creating may be a beginning. Disobeying God, as Eve did, could be understood as part of the powerful side of the feminine archetype that comes into play when one point of view is too rigid. (p. 14)

I like the ambiguity of this brief passage. Miller seems to be drawing connections between the Christian patriarchal image of God on the one hand, and a powerful creative archetype on the other - and then the tricky question is whether this powerful divine creativity can actually be engaged with.

Inhabiting Christian spaces

2008-06-26T16:00:00.007-04:00

I have a complete draft manucript for my book! It is still a little too long, and I will revise it again as I incorporate comments, but all in all it feels great to have a complete draft.

The working title is Inhabiting Christian Spaces, and in general it is about how we shape the spaces that we inhabit, and how those spaces then in turn shape us. In particular it is about how Norwegian missionaries who went to Natal and Zululand in Southern Africa in the nineteenth century tried to shape certain spaces (the "mission stations"), and how these Christianized spaces in turn came to shape the missionaries' Christianity.

Here are the first three paragraphs of the introduction:

Umpumulo is the most beautiful place I know. Not because of any particular splendor, though the warm, hard-packed red earth, the hundreds of shades of encapsulating green, and the tall blue sky do something to your senses. I lived at Umpumulo in the late 1980s because my parents were missionaries for the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS), working at the Lutheran Theological College at Umpumulo, near Maphumulo in the so-called “homeland” of KwaZulu, South Africa. The students at the college, most of them black, were monitored by the apartheid government. At one point my father was ordered to leave the country by the government because of his work at Umpumulo. The order was later withdrawn, though for us it lingered in the air. Umpumulo was a contested space and had been for a long time – since around 1850, to be exact.
In 1850, Umpumulo was set up as the first Norwegian mission station among the Zulus. Its history, like that of the other Norwegian mission stations among the Zulus, is filled with contradictions. The Christian faith tradition of NMS, which in the late 1980s was underlining that the gospel held a message of racial equality, had a century earlier made an unresolved shift toward developing a theological justification for colonialism and racial inequality.
In fact, two subtle shifts in emphases occurred among the first missionaries for NMS in Natal and Zululand from 1850-1890. The first was their shift from being in agreement with an abstract idea of equality between all Christians, whether European or African, toward developing practices that facilitated European rule over African converts, and putting forward a theological justification for European political rule over African people. The second was their shift from an abstract idea that it would be desirable to travel among the Zulus in order to reach as many as possible with the gospel, toward a firmly established “station strategy” (Simensen et al. 1986:230), that is, a strategy of building up and residing on permanent and physical mission stations on the African landscape. This book considers the connection between these two shifts. In short, how did the mission stations produce difference? And how did the act of inhabiting these Christian spaces influence the missionaries’ Christianity?

As on a darkling plain

2008-06-24T11:31:00.003-04:00

I like this nineteenth-century poem by Matthew Arnold, which Ian McEwan uses in the novel Saturday.

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

By Matthew Arnold (1867)

There is grandeur in this view of life

2008-06-20T17:31:00.010-04:00

"Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet."

A couple of people have told me they didn't get excited about Saturday. But London (where the novel is set) is one of my favourite cities, and Ian McEwan is one of my favourite authors. I especially like the way he is able to pose moral questions - what does it mean to be human, what does it mean to be human towards others - within an explicitly secular frame of reference.

In Saturday, the main character Henry Perowne is preparing for a normal Saturday, squash game, grocery shopping, seeing his mother, and a visit home from his daughter, when his car scrapes along another car and he encounters Baxter. Through the remainder of the day he comes up against many questions. Most of them concern how we live in the West today, with the knowledge of scientific, medical advances, and a so-called war on terror. Our genotype has become "the modern variant of a soul." If we were to see a burning plane descending towards a city, one thought would inevitably spring to mind.

What does it mean to be a person in this world? I was struck by a couple of the thoughts that Henry Perowne had during the course of the Saturday. He has read a biography of Darwin and is "faintly depressed by the way a whole life could be contained by a few hundred pages - bottled, like homemade chutney." At another point he remembers clearing out his mother's house: "It took a day to dismantle Lily's existence [...] her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked." Although these thoughts were laced with sadness for Perowne, there is something very down to earth and true about them as well.

In this context, it is all the more noteworthy that Perowne knows, when he encounters Baxter, that it matters how he behaves towards him.

And without giving too much away, the book ends with an image of Henry Perowne kissing the nape of his wife's neck, and the scent and warmth of another body, and what it means, come to stand side by side with the bleaker thoughts. Which I like.

I noted down the phrase "There is grandeur in this way of life" because it seemed to capture some of the book's question as well - it is a phrase that repeats itself in Henry Perowne's early drowsiness on the Saturday morning, before everything starts to happen.

Blessinz. Srsl.

2008-06-18T19:17:00.004-04:00

Believe it or not I have been delighted to discover the Bible in kitty pidgin. Here is the beginning of Genesis 1:

Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz. 3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz. 4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin. 5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

6 An Ceiling Cat sayed, im in ur waterz makin a ceiling. But he no yet make a ur. An he maded a hole in teh Ceiling. 7 An Ceiling Cat doed teh skiez with waterz down An waterz up. It happen. 8 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so wuz teh twoth day.

9 An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet. 10 An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good. Read more...

The Christians who don't read the Bible

2008-06-14T13:28:00.005-04:00

I took Matthew Engelke's book A Problem of Presence with me on holiday. He writes about a congregation known as the Friday Apostolics in Zimbabwe. The most striking thing about this Christian group is that they refuse to read the Bible. In their view, the Bible is a material object that eventually falls apart, like other material objects. It seems "stale" to them. Above all, it doesn't communicate "live and direct" with God, which is what they are looking for. Since it is seen as a sort of physical obstacle for their faith, they have dispensed with it.

Engelke presents a very nuanced and perceptive reading of how the Bible has become this kind of thing - "a mere thing" - for the Friday Apostolics. He touches on how this is in many ways an apt response to the way that Biblical literacy was introduced to Southern Africa in tandem with colonialism and the wish to replace African cosmologies with a European world view. While other African groups have chosen to claim the Bible and make it their own in the struggle against colonialism, the Friday Apostolics chose to remain suspicious of it. But more importantly, Engelke argues, they have at the same time chosen to re-interpret the theological "problem of presence." All Christian groups in some way have to come to terms with the question of how to relate to a God who is simultaneously present and absent - an invisible, intangible God whom believers have to relate to through more tangible words, images, objects, actions. The Friday Apostolics have concluded that the material book known as the Bible - and many other material objects - do not "work" when they seek to establish God's presence. They don't want a "thingified faith" built on things that fall apart. They want something more solid than that.

Engelke has found a fascinating case study. But what really makes it interesting to read is how he ties it into broader issues that are so important in Christianity, and in the anthropology of Christianity - issues such as materiality, presence, representation. The book made me think again about the fact that "what things mean, and what they can be used for, is neither settled nor certain" (p 33).

Remembering idle pleasures

2008-06-11T12:23:00.005-04:00

So we're back from holiday - it was good to catch up with friends and family, help my mom move house, enjoy the Norwegian sunshine.

I bought both Saturday and Beloved and enjoyed them both very much (posts in due course...). I also bought another more random and whimsical book entitled The Book of Idle Pleasures, edited by Dan Keiran and Tom Hodgkinson, which basically has short paragraphs on 100 idle pleasures - such as taking a bath, poking the fire, waiting for the tea to brew, not opening letters, autumnal sneezing, watching hail bounce off the pavement, and so on. Quite British in its way.

I had a great time browsing through it while on holiday. Now that I'm back home and have sat down to catch up with Anthropology Matters correspondence, consultancy project, translation, paper I need to revise, etc, the idea of idle pleasures seems a little further off... But nevertheless here is an idle pleasure that I do like:

Waiting for the Tea to Brew

Enforced idleness is a rare treat. Those brief moments in life where for one reason or another you are forced to just stop and think. In waiting rooms, queuing, for example, or even just sitting on a train. Waiting for the tea to brew is one of such moments. It doesn't offer enough time to "do" anything else so you just have to sit and wait, salivating at the prospect of your golden brew. If you do attempt to do anything in the time it takes tea to brew you always take too long or too short a time to do it, leaving the tea too strong or too weak. The teapot is fully aware of this fact. The only way to gauge the time perfectly is to sit, do nothing and watch. (Dan Kieran)

Holiday reading

2008-05-07T17:35:00.004-04:00

We're going on holiday for a month. I'm going to bring two books that I've been dipping into over the past year, but have not yet read all the way through:

And if I start to miss reading fiction, I might perhaps buy one or both of these:

So many good options...

A small good thing (Raymond Carver)

2008-05-05T08:55:00.005-04:00

In our reading group last week we read the short story "A small good thing" by Raymond Carver. I found it to be quite a hard-hitting story, especially since it's set in a contemporary setting that I could relate to - the shopping centre, the hospital - and also because it's written in such matter-of-fact, hard, clipped sentences. But the story did allow the reader a moment to re-orient herself right at the end, and I thought the experience of reading a hard story and then finding this moment of grace, as it were, at the end, was quite profound.

I don't think it's giving too much away to say that this moment of re-orientation involves simply sitting down around a table with coffee, cinnamon rolls, and a dark loaf of bread. While the darkness is still there in the bread, something nourishing has entered the story as well. I like that Raymond Carver chooses to depict this moment of re-orientation and personal nourishment with the physical act of eating - showing that our physical bodies are always there and always important.

In our group we talked a bit about whether parallels could be drawn from this moment to the Eucharist - there is the breaking of bread, the darkness and nourishment, the brief grace. I think it's a good image, though I also think that there are different layers of communion going on in the short story and in the Eucharist, some of which overlap and some of which don't. They are two different rituals. On the one hand, the Eucharist is highly stylized, with a mass of "intended" meanings that mesh with the more personal, random meanings of the participants. On the other hand, sitting around a table with coffee and cinnamon rolls is less stylized, more unpredictable and immediate, and more open to be shaped by the personal meanings that are brought along. I'm not even sure that most people would call it a ritual. But I think both can be effective.

Cutting words

2008-04-30T11:17:00.002-04:00

I hate cutting words. Inevitably, I always end up with too many words when I'm writing something, and then I have to cut. My manuscript on Norwegian mission stations in Southern Africa is now exactly 106,343 words long, excluding notes. (It used to be over 120,000, so I have made some progress.) But since a first-time monograph in the humanities that is over 100,000 words is generally considered ~~too dead boring and repetitious for anyone to ever get through~~ inadvisable, I still have to cut at least 6,343 words. Even though they all seem so painfully important. There is no time like cutting words to bring out one's megalomaniac tendencies. I am even saving all the sentences that I cut out of my manuscript, in a kind of joyful 3-year-old illusion that in this way they won't be lost but will go to word heaven.

Paul O'Hare wrote a thoughtful article about this in Anthropology Matters last year - entitled "Getting down to writing up" - in which he talked about working through the anxieties that come with cutting and streamlining material.

But I'm not quite there yet. So one of the pages that has been the hardest to cut I am pasting in here instead. It probably makes no sense to anybody who is not into the Norwegian missionaries in Natal and Zululand from 1850-1890 (so that excludes all but 3 other people in the world), but I like it. It is a diary entry by the Norwegian missionary Lars Larsen in which he recounts a random conversation that he had one day, on the mission station Umpumulo in the Colony of Natal, with his wife, Martha Larsen, and his fellow missionary, Ommund Oftebro (taken from Norsk Missions-tidende 1852/53:104-105):

The 6th [of March 1852]. Conversation between Oftebro, my wife and I. M.w. [my wife]: It is really a great loss, that we cannot get fish here, and now for several weeks we have been without meat, the flour is gone and the rivers are still so full, that it will take a long time before we can get to D’Urban to shop; can we not slaughter a sheep today? I do not know what to think of for dinner. Me: You have probably forgotten, that we have eaten fish since we came here to the Colony. M.w.: When was that? Me: Can you not remember, that Mad. Cato in D’Urban sent 2 smoked herring up to Uitkomst last year as a gift to us? M.w.: That is true, but can you not remember, that they seemed to have been brought from England to Africa. Me: Well, we are not suffering, we have corn, milk, roosters, potatoes and butter, yes even coffee and all good things, so that if the Savior were to ask us now

– Lars liberally interspersed, perhaps for the benefit of the Board back in Norway –

as He once asked His disciples when He said: “where I sent you, did you ever want for anything,” we would have to reply: “No Lord, we want for nought.”

He included a little gesture to all those in Norway who might read this and of whom, Lars knew, many were donating money to the new mission stations and praying for him and his wife:

In addition to all this we still have hearts at the other pole that beat warmly for us and care for us, both in material and spiritual concerns, what more would we want? M.w.: You are right, but I can hear, that you do not know, that you are drinking potato-coffee and corn-coffee every day; I have no complaints either, we have lived and are living well each day, and far better than I, when I was at home, could have imagined that we would be living, but I just want to have the sheep. Me: Is it possible, that the coffee is gone already? Now you can see, how decayed my taste is, I have been drinking your corn-coffee [mistaking it] for real coffee; but humans are truly made up of downright extremes, when I was in my dear cold homeland, I drank cold water, when others drank coffee, here in the warm climate I now drink coffee, but it is your fault, since you have seduced me; but now we are digressing from the sheep, I do not know whether anyone can stop us from taking more than the interest of the 2 sheep that we have. Oftebro: That is true, but we have only slaughtered 2 so far, and the sheep have given birth to 3 since we got them. Me: Yes you are right, so let us slaughter one today; but then we must also give a piece to Missionary Abraham [at Mapumulo], because they have several times sent us meat and other gifts since we came up here. Oftebro: Yes we can do that, a boy can walk there and back in less than 1 hour. Me: But I do not have the heart to slaughter a sheep. Oftebro: Umbijana [the wagon driver] can slaughter it. Me: Well, the verdict has been announced.

Lars then copied out, for the sake of the curiosity of readers in Norway – or perhaps purely for his own pleasure – the notes that were subsequently exchanged, in English, between Umpumulo and the American missionary Andrew Abraham at nearby Mapumulo:

Letter to Abraham Umpumulo March 1852. Dear Si [sic]. We here by send You a piece of a dead sheep which we slaughter, to day, wishing it may taste You well. Mrs. Larsen thanks Mrs. Abrah. very much for the nice cabbages which she sent her yesterday, Yours as [?] ever L. Larsen. Letter from Abrh. Mapumulo March 1852 Dear Sir, Yours of to days date is just received we are much obliged for the nice piece of mutton You sent us. With kind regards from us both to You three. I remain Yours very truly A. Abraham.

So there you go. Random conversation between Norwegian missionaries at Umpumulo in 1852. And 747 more words gone from my manuscript.

Missing the Guardian Review

2008-04-25T10:59:00.003-04:00

It seems that sometimes when people have gotten used to reading a certain newspaper or publication, and they switch to another one, they find all kinds of reasons why it's not as good as the first - it doesn't have as much material, it has a less appealing lay-out, it doesn't have as nice pictures, it doesn't have their personal favorite series, and so on. True to form, since we've moved from England to the States, I have tried to switch from the Saturday Guardian to the Sunday New York Times, and have found that the Sunday New York Times - specifically the book review section - doesn't have as much material, has a less appealing lay-out, doesn't have as nice pictures, and doesn't have a series on writers' rooms!

Maybe I'll get used to it later. But for now, I am going to ask Wayne for an overseas subscription to the Saturday Guardian Review for my birthday. Then I can get that weekend feeling by curling up on the sofa with the Review, coffee, and a Dunkin Donut (donuts = good thing about the States).

When the blood creeps

2008-04-22T09:50:00.004-04:00

A final post on Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me. As you can tell the book troubled me - in a good way. O'Hagan chose to use one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems as an epigraph, and the first time I read it I had to read through it twice.

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

It is taken from the collection "In Memoriam A.H.H."

I think it's both beautiful and haunting, even eerie. Hilary Mantel used the phrase "the heart is sick" from this poem as the title of her review of Be Near Me in the Guardian, whether alluding to Father David or to the villagers who surround him, I am not sure. But the repetition of the phrase "Be near me" in the poem sounds as if the author is also able to imagine and accept consolation in the midst of this heart-sickness.

Father David (Andrew O'Hagan)

2008-04-18T17:33:00.006-04:00

I think I might have been too hard on Father David in my last post. The reason that I decided to read Be Near Me in the first place was because I read Andrew O'Hagan's "In truth" in the Guardian - his reflection on one of the moments that led to the character of Father David:

I was alone in a cafe near the Rue Balzac when the first seeds of Be Near Me were planted. [...] I remember noticing a grey-haired priest who was sitting alone at a table beneath the window. He stared at his hands and after a while he stirred his coffee and a tear rolled down his cheek.

That's all he says about the memory. But it was enough to make me interested.

O'Hagan says that he imagines Father David's voice to have about it "something both wise and deluded at the same time," which I found to be true, and also that Father David's narration "may animate a true moral drama in the mind of a sensitive reader."

I did find that I was continuously slightly confused, while reading, about whether I liked Father David or not. O'Hagan is adamant that a character does not need to be likeable, but I think in this instance it goes back to his point about a moral drama. Father David wishes to give a full account of himself. I was confused about whether I liked him or not because I could not quite decide how immoral it was for him to harbour such illusions about himself - and, by implication, how immoral all of our life illusions are in general... Towards the end of the book, though, I was intensely concerned for him when it became unclear how his story would finally end - and whether, with his growing awareness of some of his delusions, he would decide to live or die.

Room for life, stifling life (Marilynne Robinson and Andrew O'Hagan)

2008-04-16T18:17:00.006-04:00

I have been thinking about the difference between Gilead and Be Near Me. I read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson a bit over a year ago, and I loved the picture she slowly paints of an old preacher in a little town, Gilead, in Iowa. He is looking back over his life. I remember that one of the things that struck me was how much room there was in the book for imperfection. The old preacher, John Ames, does not try to present a particularly rosy view of his past, but yet as he reflects on his family history and on God and on random, everyday observations, it feels like he brings things to life.

Andrew O'Hagan's priest in Be Near Me, Father David, is quite different. He takes up the post as Catholic priest in a small town in Scotland for a year, and during that year finds himself increasingly drawn to the rowdiness and disorderliness of some teenagers. He starts hanging out with them. As he tells the story of that year, and brings in moments from his past, it becomes increasingly clear what is going to happen. It also feels very sad, as Father David (and the reader) slowly becomes aware of how hollow his faith is.

Both books deal with love. Marilynne Robinson has given her character a young wife and son to love, and this in some way redeems the memories of previous times when he walked through the night-time streets of Gilead alone. Andrew O'Hagan, on the other hand, has given Father David in Scotland only a past love that ended too quickly. It was at that point that David escaped into the role of a priest.

Both books also deal with beauty and the things we surround ourselves with. Father David enjoys wine and rose bushes, music and books - but while these things seem beautiful at first, they gradually start to seem very empty toward the end of the book. His life charts a progression of beautiful objects, and it seems to me that O'Hagan suggests that the objects in themselves are beautiful, but that the way that Father David uses them - to define himself, as he is devoid of other meaningful definition - hollows out their beauty. John Ames on the other hand fills up his pages with moments of beauty that he enjoys, such as watching his wife and son blow soap bubbles at the cat, and the beauty in life suddenly seems to spring out of nothing, in all kinds of moments.

I have been wondering about these two priests, and the difference between them. One of them is able to create and bring life to what he observes, while the other has hollowed himself out. One draws on the church as something that fills his life and blesses its imperfections, while the other gradually comes to realize that he has used the church as an escape, a means to cut himself off from life.

Curiouser and curiouser...

Coffee cups

2008-04-12T12:33:00.009-04:00

Before we even knew that we were going to move to Athens, GA, we were visiting and bought this coffee cup. It says THINK.

Then when we were going to move here it felt good to know that I already had something from Athens that I really liked. After we'd moved we went back to Helix and bought another one. This one says PAUSE.

I think Helix is now officially my favourite shop downtown.

The cups are made by Rae Dunn - and I have just found out that she has a cool blog called Rae Dunn . . . Clay.

Down to earth (Patricia Hampl)

2008-04-09T10:19:00.008-04:00

Once a month I go to a reading group where we talk about authors who have incorporated Christian themes and experiences into their writing. So far we've read Flannery O'Connor and Frederick Buechner, and last week it was Patricia Hampl (all from the collection "Listening for God," edited by Paula Carlson and Peter Hawkins).

The excerpt that we read from Patricia Hampl was taken from Virgin Time, a memoir in which she thinks through her Catholic upbringing and her current quest / questions. One of the things that struck me about the excerpt we read (chapter 6) was the way in which she contrasted the clouds in the sky with the more solid earth beneath it. As in her childhood encounter with one of the neighbors:

He allowed me to assist him in rooting out his dandelions [...] I introduced religion while he plunged the dandelion gadget deep into the lawn.
No, he said, he did not go to church. "But you do believe in God?" I asked, hardly daring to hope he did not. He paused for a moment and looked up at the sky, where big, spreading clouds streamed by. "God isn't the problem," he said.
Some ancient fissure split open, a fine crack in reality: so there was a problem. Just as I'd always felt. Beneath the family solidity, the claustrophobia of mother-father-brother-me, past the emphatic certainties of St. Luke's catechism class, there was a problem that would never go away. Mr. Bertram stood amid his dandelions, a resigned Buddha, looking up at the sky, which gave back nothing but drifting white shapes on the blue.

This is one of the first encounters in chapter 6, and it frames what follows: between the clouds in the heavens, with their elusive and insubstantial character, and the ground, with all its dandelions, solidity, and (mistrusted) certainties. The ground may be more tangible, but it is also more difficult.

In terms of space, and how Christianity relates to spaces, it is interesting to see how Hampl at the end of this chapter locates God - or religious contemplation - at ground level, rather than up above. The encounter with her neighbor is matched at the end of the chapter by an encounter with a woman whom she passes on the street every day. Patricia Hampl, as a girl, was intrigued by this woman because she looked up and smiled at her every time - "a complete smile" - and because she seemed to be praying. Nevertheless the woman "didn't look up to the blank clouds for a response," but down at the ground as she was walking.

Anthropology Matters

2008-04-04T09:53:00.007-04:00

We have just released the latest issue of Anthropology Matters - the online anthropology journal that I am currently editing. All the articles in this issue are written by former MA students who are also dedicated youth or community workers. They use ethnography to understand what's going on around them in present-day Britain.

I think all the articles are worth reading for anyone interested in engaged anthropology, Britain under New Labour, political participation and citizenship, and youth and community work. There were two that particularly grabbed my attention because of my own interests.

First, Saffron Burley's "My dog's the champ" is the most insightful analysis of the phenomenon of young men owning "fight dogs" that I have come across - and far more thoughtful than average media portrayals. It did make me think differently about the young hoodies with stocky dogs in tow that I used to pass on the streets when I lived in North Hackney, London.

Second, Paul Hendrich's "Charting a new course for Deptford Town Hall" presents an engaged discussion of the history and current symbolism of a sculpted town hall that is now owned by Goldsmiths College (University of London), and which boasts a ship (a trading vessel? a slave ship?) as weather vane. He charts ways of responding that acknowledge the "horrible histories" of the building, but overwrite these with new associations. -- The fact that we were able to publish Paul Hendrich's article was suddenly made all the more important when I received news in January that he had tragically died when he was hit by a lorry on his bicycle. Although I don't know his wife and one-year old daughter, many warm wishes and thoughts have gone to them while I was finalizing this issue.

In addition to the contributions by Saffron Burley and Paul Hendrich, Rachel Ashcroft writes on how political participation can (and has) become de-politicized in Britain under New Labour, Helen Clark examines some examples of how youth in London have experienced such participation in practice, and Beccy Blow presents a nuanced discussion of whether one can "empower" a person with learning difficulties. And if you're interested in "folk devils," Rayen Salgado-Pottier explains what they are in her aptly entitled article, "A modern moral panic."

Doorways

2008-04-01T11:06:00.007-04:00

I've been painting doorways recently. Here are two of them - though I guess you have to use your imagination to turn them into doorways.

By the way, recently I ~~was avoiding work~~ came across a beautiful blog post full of doors - over on The House in Marrakesh. She has several other posts about doors too.

Writing and eating God

2008-03-28T14:54:00.007-04:00

Another post on the regional AAR/SBL conference. I followed the Women and Religion panels, and I was especially struck by one session, entitled Women, Writing, Theology.

Min-Ah Cho from Emory started by presenting her paper "The body, ever hungered and ever desired," in which she drew a picture of Hadewijch of Antwerp's explorations of the Eucharist - eating it, sensing the body of God intimately melded with her own, writing it. Meghan Sweeney from Boston College then spoke about the connections between self-authoring and self-authorizing. She used the example of presenting a conference paper to draw out how performance exposes us - but also legitimates. Wesley Barker, also from Emory, reflected on some of her own experiences in finding her voice as a female author and female theologian - particularly in her ongoing conversation with others. Her paper, "From othered to otherwise," drew on Luce Irigaray to pose the question of what it means to identify as a woman when writing within the space of (scholarly) language.

At the end, Prof Wendy Farley from Emory responded to all three papers - and many people commented afterwards how her response had been akin to a final prayer, in which all the preceding concerns were swept up and woven together. She spoke of the different ways in which we police ourselves internally, as we write, and as we attempt to fit in with academic traditions and gendered expectations. Then she turned to the other face of writing, and spoke of the connection between writing and eating - being nourished as one finds one's voice - and of what it might mean to be called to write and eat God.

So far theology. Within anthropology too there is a long-standing if largely silent question, at least since E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Victor and Edith Turner (all converted Catholic anthropologists), on what it means to write on belief as a believer. Can one compose anthropological descriptions of religious practices one day, and take the Eucharist the next? Can one both write and eat God as the same person?

Soundscapes

2008-03-26T09:02:00.001-04:00

Two weeks ago I was at the regional AAR/SBL religion conference in Atlanta, and sat in on several enjoyable sessions. One of the papers that has continued to intrigue me since then was read by Jessica Starling, University of Virginia, who has done research on female priests in Japanese Temple Buddhism. Her paper touched on the question of how sounds impact our experience of religious rituals. Specifically, she raised the issue of how a female voice fills a ritual space, as compared to a male voice, and what this different soundscape means.

She described how she had once heard another woman softly wonder out loud, following a ritual led by a female priest in a Japanese temple, whether this ritual was indeed effective. The ritual, usually led by a man, is typically associated with the speaking and chanting of a male voice - a deeper voice, which carries further. The experience of listening to a woman's voice is different. It evokes different associations and, at least in this particular case, it confounded expectations and led to doubts about the authority of the ritual.

I remember that I too was struck by the voice of the female minister in our church when we first went there. It made me feel somewhat disjointed to realize that while one part of me breathed a visceral sigh of relief at hearing a woman in that space, another part of me felt an equally visceral void - no sound of a man's voice reading, preaching, and blessing in the name of the trinity. But even after only a few months my senses have spun a new web of associations around her voice, and she is now part of my body's experience of the church room. It is pretty intriguing how rituals can jar and mesh with our senses like that.