Open Anth Coop – discussion of Lance Armstrong essay, Twilight movies, and much else

Re: Lance Armstrong essayFrom KH: Fantastic essay, Lee. Just to kick off, I have long been intrigued by the dualism at the heart of the American ideology, but your identification of the separation of nature and culture as its base is very convincing to me. People can and do carry contradictory ideas of the same thing in their head. For example, that the police uphold law and order (culture), but they are usually crooks too (nature?). When personal publicity forces Americans to acknowledge the two at once, the explosion is gigantic. People knew Nixon was a crook, but he could be elected President, custodian of ultimate values, until Watergate broke down the separation between these ideas. hence his punishment. I agree also that, in the absence of history, there is a strong emphasis on nature in the American ideology which underpins the notion that change is impossible. What I am not sure about is whether sporting prowess is held to be incompatible with corruption. CLR James tells a story about a betting scam affecting the NCAA college basketball final around 1950. He was plotting revolution in New York at the time. With his colonial cricket background, he was outraged that these youths could suborn the school for the sake of money. His colleagues, on the other hand, were largely indifferent. Why shouldn't the kids make a buck, if they can? Remember that they were radical lefties. This points to something else. How homogeneous is the great American public (Midwestern Protestants and New York Jews, for example) when it comes to being susceptible to moral panic when the two sides of something they already know are forced into the open, as in Lance Armstrong's case? This is nitpicking. It's a glorious read and I recommend it to all our members.------------ Keith, Thanks very much for your kind words about the essay. Your remark that “people can and do carry contradictory ideas of the same thing in their head” captures exactly the main point of the essay. The tragic thing is that rather than acknowledge the inconsistency of their ideas and confront the crippling ambivalence attendant on that inconsistency, people insist on things being a certain way, on there being clearly defined values which must be upheld – or else. The anecdote about CLR James is an excellent illustration of how we are thrust on the horns of dilemmas we don’t recognize: the

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revolutionary who would overthrow, but not cheat the System (the System, of course, having defined what constitutes “cheating”). Your question about the homogeneity of the American public in responding to a crisis or watershed event (I like the popular phrase “tipping point”) touches on a paradox that has long intrigued me: America, like every society, is not a system of shared values, but of shared differences: Midwestern Protestants and New York Jews, along with Southern blacks, Oregon loggers, California surfers, and on and on are “bonded” only through their mutual abrasiveness. Social life is a set of edges that constantly abrade and in doing so shape an ever-changing configuration of what we are pleased to call a “society.” And when it all hits the fan, as in the Lance Armstrong case or in the all-consuming cultural conflagration of 9/11, well, then everything is up for grabs.

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John McCreery commented on your blog post "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)" on Open Anthropology Cooperative Lee, Serendipitously, I took along my copy of Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality for train reading on a trip to Akita in northern Japan. Thus, I found myself reading Eco's essay "Sports Chatter" (1969) while thinking about your piece. Both essays approach talk about sport in a critical mode. Your approach is to focus on the role of the nature/culture distinction in talk about drugs and sports, deconstructing the distinction by pointing out all of the numerous ways in which sport is unnatural, from special training regimens, dietary supplements, and carefully engineered facilities and equipment to the demonized use of performance-enhancing drugs during competition. Eco's is to argue that talk about sport is the true opiate of the masses, exercising the desire and ability to talk about strategy, tactics, leadership, winning, losing — the stuff of political discussion — safely removed and diverting attention from politics itself.Some commentators would now argue that sports chatter has come full circle, becoming the favorite idiom for ostensibly political commentary while diverting attention from the serious content of issues deserving political attention. But, be that as it may, it is not what moves me to respond to your essay.As far as I can make out, both you and Eco treat talk about sport in the way that 19th century anthropologists treated what they regarded as primitive superstition — demonstrating either why the distinctions drawn by the superstitious are fundamentally nonsensical or functioning in the service of political mystification. I find myself wondering what the two of you would have written had you approached the issue in the

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spirit of Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, neither deconstructing nor explaining away, but asking instead why the nature/culture distinction is so important in sport, as opposed to other domains of contemporary life, why, for example, cyborg enhancements for the disabled or elderly may be seen as desirable but similar enhancements for athletes are treated as taboo. Why is it so important to defend the boundary in the case of sport, but not in other domains? There, it would seem to me, is the problem for cultural analysis — as opposed to cultural critique.

------------John, Thanks very much for your thoughtful comments. I’m flattered that you would compare my little essay with a piece by Eco – whose work in semiotics has been a beacon for me. While I would very much agree that we all inhabit a cultural space Eco nicely described as “hyperreality,” I am increasingly apprehensive about exploring that space through the textual or discursive productions of its inhabitants. I don’t dispute that it is interesting and worthwhile to conduct a close study of sports chatter and tie that to other discursive genres, but that approach does not get me to what I find most important / distressing about American spectator sports and reality shows, which are performances rather than texts. The immediacy and intensity of witnessing human bodies doing amazing things on the big screen HD set is engrossing on a phenomenological level; only subsequently are those experiences talked about, thus providing grist for Eco’s mill. And, of course, grist for the legion of scholars, including quite a few cultural anthropologists, who regard the text as the new Holy Grail. I began to grow apprehensive about this approach to understanding culture quite a few years ago, when I fell out of love with the work of Roland Barthes. His Système de la Mode is an exhaustive study of women’s fashion through the language of French fashion magazines (what he called “written fashion”). While he offers brilliantly constructed arguments for taking this approach, the whole exercise left me feeling it was just that – an exercise. Whatever is going on in the minds of fashionable women and their admirers, I don’t think it’s primarily about the strained prose of magazine editors. In anthropology the enthusiasm for studying culture as an assemblage of texts (for “writing culture”) reached such a fever pitch that it provoked a delightful rejoinder in the form of Gísli Pálsson’s The Textual Life of Savants. At the end of your Comment you pose an extremely important and difficult question: “why the nature/culture distinction is so important in sport, as opposed to other domains of contemporary life. . .” My essay takes what I would argue is the first necessary step in tackling that question by attempting to describe how the nature / culture dichotomy operates in shaping public opinion and behavior in one particularly noteworthy case involving professional sports. I do think my discussion of that episode is consistent with Mary Douglas’ argument that things or actions deemed dirty or taboo are such because

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they are “matter out of place”: shoes on the table, barnyard jokes in the living room, etc. The American socio-logic and its bureaucratic appendages strive to maintain the fiction that its sports heroes are “healthy and clean” embodiments of superb natural ability unsullied by the unnatural products of a technological society (hence drugs are polluting and “dirty” à la Douglas). The dichotomy will not go away; it cannot be resolved by the conceptual acrobatics of a belief system (Freud, of course, used a less highfalutin term, calling those acrobatics lies that people tell themselves to maintain some semblance of social order). And it does make itself felt in what you refer to as “other domains of contemporary life.” I would suggest that the whole set of issues surrounding human reproduction – abortion, in vitro fertilization, hormone treatments, contraception, genetic engineering, and, looming on the horizon, cloning – are made unsolvable and raw as a boil by our insistence on defending one or other set of incompatible values attendant on the nature / culture dichotomy.

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John McCreery commented on your blog post "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)" on Open Anthropology Cooperative

Lee, thanks for continuing the conversation. To me, the Mary Douglas proposition that tabooed things are out of place immediately raises the question why are they out of place in this particular corner of cultural space. A pair of dirty boots left at the kitchen door may be perfectly acceptable, while wearing them into the parlor violates a taboo, especially if the farmer's wife has just cleaned and waxed the floor. In a similar way, why performance-enhancing drugs should be taboo in sport, but acceptable in elderly folk with high blood pressure, for example, raises the question what is it about sport, in particular, that makes the drugs taboo.

  As a tentative stab at the problem, I see the intersection of two sets of categories: nature and culture and on and off the field. What happens off the field, the training, diet, equipment, etc., by which the athlete improves her performance is not taboo because it is seen as preparation. Entering the field with performance-enhancing drugs active in the body is, however, a clear case of cheating, in what is supposed to be a competition of natural talents. What, then, of students who take performance-enhancing drugs before taking exams? Their behavior is certainly regarded with concern or suspicion but is not yet tabooed, though perhaps it should be. What is it about the exam that makes it different from arenas in which athletic competition occurs? Here I speculate that another set of categories comes into play: athletic competition is to schoolwork as body is to mind. The body is

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nature. Mind is not. Keeping nature pure is a major modern imperative. Keeping minds pure is an infringement on the freedom of the self and thus arouses different concerns. Since all this is totally off the cuff, I am sure that you or others can find exceptions. But if we toss this around for a while, we may get a clearer picture of the cultural mappings whose boundaries Armstrong so clearly violated.Shall we continue? ----------------------------------------------- Lee Drummond responded to John McCreery’s comment on Lance Anderson essay

John, By all means, let’s continue. Sorry for the delay in responding. I’m delighted that we can pursue the conversation by focusing on concepts of cultural space and the cultural mappings of boundaries, for I find those ideas crucial to formulating a thorough-going cultural analysis. Following on work in semantics, James Fernandez’s seminal idea of culture as a “quality space,” and work in Creole linguistics on continua and intersystems, I’ve attempted in earlier work to construct a theory of culture conceived as a “semiospace” – admittedly not the most felicitous term but it seemed to fill the bill (see Chapter 3, “A Theory of Culture as Semiospace,” in American Dreamtime at www.peripheralstudies.org ). The term suggested itself to me for three reasons. First, if we are to approach the concept of culture as a space in more than a vague metaphorical sense, we need to identify the specific dimensions of that space. Second, those dimensions must be semiotic rather than strictly physical if they are to map the symbols and meanings within a cultural system (that is, not at all the familiar dimensions of “up,” “down,” “right,” “left”). What are the poles of those semiotic dimensions? Third, the term “culture” has acquired a lot of baggage over its brief history. Anthropologists have supplied only the loosest of definitions, which add little to Tylor’s original description of it as a “complex whole.” Lacking analytical precision, the notion has become fair game for journalists, politicians, and, generally speaking, anyone with an ax to grind. As if that weren’t enough, a number of anthropologists themselves have administered a crippling blow to the concept in denouncing it as altogether too “essentializing,” and “hegemonic” – a tool The Man uses to suppress us. It is a tragic irony: the concept of culture has become an embarrassment to cultural anthropologists. Hence, adios to “culture,” hello to “semiospace.” I won’t trouble you and OAC readers with a comprehensive summary of the properties of semiospace; let me mention only a couple that are salient to our discussion of the Lance Armstrong affair. The most relevant has to do with the poles of one dimension:

Animal < ---------- > Artifact / Machine

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It is this dimension which figures largely in my discussion of the Lance Armstrong affair. The human body is an incongruous synthesis of both animal and artifact / machine; its physical nature having developed in the context of tool use required for survival. Yet in conceptualizing what it is to be human, we resort to the typical ploy of embracing a dichotomy, a fundamental feature of thought. Thus the world is said to contain some entities that are animal, others that are artifacts, and never the twain shall meet. But they do meet, and crucially so in the dynamics of human society. We erect categories and identities which purport to separate one distinct type of social being from another, say athletes and rock stars, in a vain effort to impose a tidiness to our social world. We celebrate the animal / physical prowess of the athlete while we more or less accept that the rock star, whose dissipated, high-energy life style undercuts whatever physical ability he may possess, divorces himself from the “natural” aspect of human existence. Hence the taboo on performance-enhancing drugs imposed on the athlete, and the punishments administered for violating that taboo. Under the lens of cultural analysis the dichotomies we erect, which, and this is a fundamental part of my argument, generate culture, are seen to form and reform, moving that construct we call “humanity” around the domains of semiospace. “Humanity” is a floating cipher. As you note, this betwixt-and-between aspect of human identity is an involved, nuanced, and messy business. Kids taking brain-booster drugs for an exam, the elderly taking scads of powerful medications just to hang in there, the handicapped using an ever-increasing variety of prosthetic devices – all these examples and many more reveal just how convoluted are the supposed “boundaries” we erect and forever attempt to reinforce. In the spirit of charting those boundaries, here’s a brain teaser: Would we loose the lab coats of the U. S. Anti-Doping Agency on heavily medicated athletes participating in the Special Olympics? Are they engaging in the prohibited act of taking performance-enhancing drugs? The beat goes on.

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John McCreery commented on your blog post "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)" on Open Anthropology Cooperative

Lee, allow me to be a bit self-indulgent; I am just back from INSNA 2013,  a social network analysis conference in Xi'an, the first such conference in Asia. Not jet-lagged (only an hour's difference) but slowly recovering from thinking in other directions.

Be that as it may, In 1990, I published an article in the Journal of Chinese Religions. The title is "Why don't we see some real money here?" The topic was offerings of spirit money in Chinese rituals. What's the connection with this topic? In it I combined ideas about culture as an n-dimensional manifold in which metaphors move pronouns around taken from Fernandez with ideas taken from Lévi-Strauss' Mythologiques, especially The Raw and the Cooked.  My contribution was converting Lévi-Strauss' binary oppositions into dimensions in Fernandez' quality space. This made a lot of sense in discussing Chinese rituals, where food offerings can be more or less raw/cooked, whole/cut up and spirit money can be silver/gold, in various sizes representing different amounts. The point was being able to see symbols as located at the coordinates where several dimensions intersect and ritual as the articulation of metaphors that move their subjects from one position to another. 

Might something like that work here? ----------------------------------------------------------------

John, you can really catch a fly ball on the run (to stay with the sports trope). I move at a slower pace, so please excuse the delayed response. Your 1990 article sounds intriguing; could you send me a copy? (leedrummond@msn.com ). Applying Fernandez’s brilliant essay (in my opinion one of the very best in anthropology) to the towering edifice of Mythologiques is exactly the project I’ve had in mind in laying out the (rather cockeyed) notion of semiospace. What I’ve been trying to do is cut through or organize the welter of Fernandez-type continua and Lévi-Strauss-type binary oppositions in order to distill a smaller, discrete set of metaphors / oppositions that possesses order or coherence (dare we, in these afterological times, call it cultural structure?). In Persuasions Fernandez calls for just this kind of thing, but does not quite identify the core or key metaphors that might operate in different societies. Your proposal that symbols come into being at the intersections of metaphoric / semiotic dimensions is absolutely first rate. It is a stunning idea that should be the basis for a major line of inquiry in cultural anthropology (or anthropological semiotics as I’ve come to call it; that term has less of the dreadful pomo baggage). It shows the way to mapping the quality space of culture. And your corollary that defines ritual as the means of articulating metaphors that move their inchoate subjects from one point to another

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provides the crucial dynamic that is pretty much missing in Lévi-Strauss’ binary oppositions. In thinking about the properties of quality / semiospace it occurred to me that the pattern formed by cross-cutting dimensions of metaphor and opposition is rather like a hologram, a virtual image constructed from a pattern of interference. That wild hare led me to suggest that the mind is a holographic engine, a superb device which continually constructs and transforms what we like to call the real, or physical world. This was a roundabout way of arriving at Bateson’s mantra that mind and nature are a “necessary unity.” I thought that put me in good company, but various readers sharply disagreed. My one demurral or add-on to this celebration of cultural structure is that it is most definitely not what Geertz called it long years ago – turning culture into toys and playing with it. For the impetus or motivation in all this metaphor and symbol-making and moving is the profound ambivalence (really, dread) a collective humanity harbors in being unable to fix itself within the web of symbols it constructs. For one thing (along one of several semiotic axes) we are forever torn between the antipodes of our nature: animal and artifact / machine. Both are generative entities that do things in the world and make us what we are; yet we are simultaneously both and neither. I think it is this deep well of cerebral magma that has bubbled, really erupted, to the surface in the Lance Armstrong affair. ______________________

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July 31, 2013

Keith Hart’s “Selling an Online Community. . .” comments

Selling an online community of readers and writers in search of a Voice

Posted by Keith Hart on July 27, 2013 at 11:22am in The OAC Forum View Discussions

The great mystery of modern life is selling. Even the specialists don't know how it works, but they have their rituals. I have had more success selling the human economy as a brand than the OpenAnthCoop. People like how the human economy brand sounds, they want to be part of it, feel that it reinforces their sense of who they are. The OAC has many members who mostly read, if they do anything at all.The problem is that reading is free, but good writing often isn't and the few who contribute for free are dragged down by the mass of free riders. Any online club is a two-sided market of readers and writers.Whereas many are pessimistic for the future of the serious media, a recent article in OpenDemocracy, "Commercial masters of our voice", says we have to work out new ways of generating cash from our interaction as readers and writers. 

"Commercially marginal web media simply has to join the long historical line of projects that have to invent their own politics to deliver a collective good...Does the Voice address a persona that is at the heart of an identity, something that defines you not just as an indulgence, but in your whole being, your attitude to the world?.... The two sides are readers and writers - the necessary input is money, and the output are stories. Or more accurately, the output is the Voice itself - the elaboration of a worldview that brings together readers, writers, editors and all others involved in the joint creation. Writers tune their writing to a readership; editors commission with a stake in their roles as both writer and reader; readers react, click, comment and share. And so on. Ask any of them what is valuable in the process, the answer is not going to be “the revenues”, as would be the natural answer that comes out of the manufacturing model. What’s valuable is the process of the elaboration of the Voice." 

The human economy group on Facebook has only a handful of members, but a core of these are sustained by membership of an academic operation in South Africa that receives serious money and aspires to make a difference to the world. Maybe a Human Economy Magazine could evolve out of this conjuncture. What of the OAC? We too have a fast-growing OAC Facebook page, but our organization was born in a spirit not far from the anti-market mentality that plagued aristocratic, peasant and early socialist reactions to capitalism and was of course traditionally reproduced by academia, until capitalism bit back. As we have rehearsed repeatedly, we can hardly be said to have resolved the contradictions of being open and free. So hold your nose while we think a bit about advertising, whether it is paid for or not.Share Twitter Views: 68

▶   Reply to This Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on SundayI wonder how many of us would pay the equivalent of US$25 per year (let's say $10 a year for students) to belong to a more strongly curated OAC? I certainly would. 

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How big would the membership be if we dropped members who have contributed no posts or comments within the last three months? We could send them a "Sorry we're losing you" message in an effort to draw them back in.

How much more lively would the site become if groups with no activity for, say, six months, were removed and archived automatically? This could be set up so that they could still be accessed if someone wanted to take the trouble to search the archive.

Consider a two-tier structure, with a private, invitation-only space for regular contributors. It would still be an open cooperative. Only getting from the fringe to the core would require a little extra effort.

P.S. It isn't true that, "Even the specialists don't know how it works." We know that, first, you have to have something of value to enough customers to make the effort put into sales worthwhile. We know, second, that markets are constantly changing, so that you can't count on the same product or pitch working forever. At the end of the day, learning to sell a product or service is like learning to play poker. You don't win every round, but if you keep your wits about you, you can win frequently enough to walk away with more money in your pocket than you brought to the table in the first place. 

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Keith and John,On Anthropological Writing as ProductThe Open Anthropology Cooperative is a marvelous achievement; it delivers just

what it promises, even if the membership is not as active and the forums not as dynamic as one might wish. But like they used to say about democracy before George Jr, the Patriot Act, AIG, and the NSA came along, it’s better than the dreadful alternatives.

Your work and expense in launching the website and keeping the discussions lively are especially valuable today, when the open exchange of ideas and information is increasingly subject to government restriction or, what may be almost as bad, half-measures that make a sham of their professed goal.

On the first matter – government restriction – the free and open communication of the Internet has barely survived a recent attempt to cripple it through last year’s repugnant Congressional bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Were it not for the concerted resistance to that bill mounted by Google, Wikipedia, and other prominent service providers and websites, the venal lackeys in Congress would almost certainly have made it the law of the land. Had that occurred the Internet would have been transformed, its creative flow of ideas stifled forever.

That victory was impossible to savor, however, for while the battle was being fought the U. S. Justice Department was in the process of hounding one of the Internet’s most productive figures, Aaron Swartz, to taking his own life. Swartz’s heinous crime (which triggered thirteen felony counts carrying a potential thirty-five-year sentence in federal prison) was to download and attempt to make freely accessible academic journal articles which the “non-profit” organization JSTOR charged exorbitant fees to read. The vindictive prosecutors at the U. S. attorney’s Boston office, Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz, pursued their drummed-up case even when JSTOR itself (understandably

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eager to avoid publicizing their extortionist practices) refused to press charges. Those persecutors / prosecutors elected to follow in the footsteps of Torquemada and Anytus, thereby ensuring their place in the tradition of vicious stupidity that has blighted Western civilization since its beginnings. At Aaron Swartz’s funeral his father declared that the government had murdered his son. He only needed to add that this man, murdered by the federal government, was an Einstein of the Information Age. The wonders he might have wrought are incalculable, and are now lost forever. If they have not done so already, members of OAC, who are almost by definition advocates of the free exchange of ideas possible only on an open access website, should familiarize themselves with the shocking details of the case. See in particular:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HAw1i4gOU4 .

On the second matter – half-measures to promote the free exchange of ideas – we only need to look close at hand. The American Anthropological Association, usually happy to pile on extra fees for its spin-off journals (with their minuscule circulation), apparently has been gripped with the fervor of the open access movement sweeping an emergent global culture of intellectuals. So the Association labored mightily and gave birth to (bring on the drum roll and cannon volley) Open Anthropology. This bold venture makes freely available: Choose One:

A. the latest and best anthropological thinking on important theoretical and topical subjects;

B. a rehash of old American Anthropologist articles now long forgotten if they were ever read in the first place.The correct answer? (better hold the drum roll): B. Have you been itching to read what one W. J. McGee wrote in 1896 about the beginning of marriage? Your wish has been granted! Just access Open Anthropology and read away! Truly pathetic, and a slap in the face to genuine efforts, like that of OAC, to provide a public forum for the conduct of anthropological thought. The Editorial Board of the AAA could at least have been honest with readers and titled their new journal Old Anthropology.

-------------------------------------------------On selling anthropology:

No one would suggest that I am an economic anthropologist, but from my admittedly limited knowledge of the field I nevertheless would like to say that Keith’s concept of the “human economy” is a superb idea: it accomplishes the essential task of making what living, breathing people do in daily life the basis of any discussion of that abstraction, the “economy.” In that way it is genuinely anthropological. It is the most impressive work I’ve seen since Sahlin’s classic, Culture and Practical Reason applied a structuralist argument to the practical world of the marketplace. But Keith’s approach is

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a decided improvement on Sahlins, for it avoids parsing the complexity and messiness of life into well-defined categories.

If life is about living and a good part of living is about buying and selling, then, as Keith points out, we must consider what is involved in selling anthropology. Here John’s comment on Keith’s piece goes straight to the heart of the matter (one might say it is “right on the money”): selling requires that “you have to have something of value to enough customers to make the effort put into sales worthwhile.”

Since the topic before us is the selling of (cultural) anthropology, the all-important question then becomes: What is there in cultural anthropology of value “to enough customers” that would make it salable? Or, more concretely, how do we assess anthropological writing as product?

Here we encounter an enormous problem: the visibility, not to say marketability, of cultural anthropology is practically non-existent. [For a more detailed discussion of this point, see my brief essay, “As Others See Us. . .” at www.peripheralstudies.org , written in 2000 and the situation has only worsened since then] Despite admirable efforts by Robert Borofsky and others to promote a “public anthropology,” the field has become almost completely irrelevant, not only in the public eye but in the areas of policy-making and academic affairs. For a (depressing) proof of this remark from the perspective of a human economics, one need only conduct a series of (wo)man-in-the-street interviews, asking respondents to name an individual cultural anthropologist or an anthropological book / essay. The silence and stammers would be deafening (our version of the Jay Walk). The customers John rightly insists on as an index of value would be missing.

This problem takes a sinister turn when one considers that the rare cultural anthropologist who does acquire a public presence is vilified by his colleagues. It has been said before: We devour our own kind. Since Margaret Mead gained the public eye nearly a century ago with her fictional romance, Coming of Age in Samoa, only two American cultural anthropologists have become familiar names with the educated public: Carlos Castaneda and Napoleon Chagnon (although widely published, we really cannot count Marvin Harris or Clifford Geertz). Castaneda has now passed beyond the reach of the chorus of critics, and when I last visited my local Barnes and Noble (it has been quite a while) his Don Juan books were shelved in the “New Age” section. The community of cultural anthropologists apparently has succeeded in writing its Orwellian history of his work: it is no longer even anthropology. Chagnon, however, has been another matter. His classic work on the Yanomamo (“Yanomami” to his detractors) has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving to our politically correct colleagues. Among his many sins, he has persisted in identifying his ethnographic work as “science,” at a time when the Executive Board of the AAA has decreed that the once grand “science of humanity” is no longer science – instead it is being retooled as an insipid blend of social advocacy and public instruction. Original thinkers are not needed; The equivalent of C-minus majors in social work and political science will now be our standard-bearers.

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In the same vein, it is ironic to note that there are in fact anthropological works which have appeared over the past twenty-plus years and have attained best-seller status. The embarrassing problem is that the author of those books is not an anthropologist: Jared Diamond, a polymath in the remarkably diverse fields of physiology, geography, and ornithology. Everything but anthropology. But never fear: As with Castaneda and Chagnon, our discipline’s nits are busily picking at Diamond’s corpus (while wondering how a poacher could eclipse them on their own turf).

Unflattering as it may be to our professional egos, it is important to give a scale to just how hard it is to disseminate, yet alone sell, anthropological writing. Journalists and travel writers are now producing lucid, insightful accounts of social life that equal or exceed the quality of our best ethnography, and placing their work in mainstream publications. As an example, an old friend who is a journalist recently wrote a fine ethnographic piece on the North Dakota oil boom which appeared as the cover story in National Geographic:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/bakken-shale-oil/dobb-textThe circulation of National Geographic is something over 4,000,000. On a somewhat more modest scale, Scientific American, with a circulation over 800,000, is very likely closed to cultural anthropologists now that we have renounced the entire enterprise of science. We’ll show them. Near the trickle-end of this scale of publications is our esteemed “flagship” journal (Oh, imperialist metaphor!), the American Anthropologist. After being around more than a century AA clings to a subscription base of around 11,000. I will not say “readership,” because we all know that many of those dreary volumes remain in their mailing pouches, unread, taking up space on the nether regions of our bookshelves, staring down at us and filling us with what Tom Wolfe imaginatively calls “subscription guilt.” In John’s comment he does not specify how many “enough customers” has to be, but the track record of AA makes us suspect that nobody much cares what cultural anthropologists are writing (or, perish the thought, is prepared to pay good money to find out).

Although my remarks could be amplified, I think I have established the unhappy truth that selling cultural anthropology in today’s (post?)modern world is a terribly difficult job. By almost any estimation, John and other marketing experts would surely find that there are not enough customers to support a sales / marketing campaign. As cultural anthropologists we cannot expect fat royalty checks or magazine article fees to roll in any time soon. But as cultural anthropologists we can pose a major question, one that goes straight to the fundamentals of an evolving American society: Why is our discipline so alarmingly marginal to current intellectual debate? Or, rephrased in terms of the selling of anthropology project that concerns us here: Why is there a dearth of anthropological works in the wider society? This is a puzzle that will not go away whenever anyone proposes applying an anthropological perspective to contemporary life. It is a puzzle that has been with me for a number of years.

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On the face of it, cultural anthropology, with its wide-ranging, essentially humanist concern with societies around the world would seem to have a considerable appeal to the educated public. Or even not-so-educated public: look at Indiana Jones! Apparently not. Instead, best-selling books by the most improbable collection of academics dominate public discussion. I’ve already mentioned the curious example of Jared Diamond, physiologist and ersatz anthropologist. He is joined in the limelight by theoretical physicists (Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku), mathematicians (Roger Penrose), linguists (Noam Chomsky, Derek Bickerton), biologists (Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins), cognitive scientists (Steven Pinker) and a rafter of thinkers representing that hard-charging field, complexity theory.

I suggest that it is imperative for cultural anthropologists to explore this thorny issue, for without plausible answers there can be no solution that, just possibly, may give us a voice in discussions of events that, as Walter Cronkite used to say, “alter and illuminate our time.” In that search for answers, which will require the free and open give-and-take of serious intellectual debate, members of the OAC are ideally suited to participate.

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September 6, 2013: Reply to Keith Hart’s email Sept 2 re inappropriate comment

Hi Keith, Your website, your rules. I will certainly abide by them. On a positive note, I do want to thank you for exercising an editorial latitude (“push[ing] the boat out”) to provide a forum for my Lance Armstrong essay. I will try not to disappoint or embarrass during the e-seminar. I have long recognized that my thinking / writing is edgy (peripheral), and, particularly in my efforts to mix high (academic) and low (popular) culture, off-putting to readers / listeners who expect to be addressed on a rather narrow cerebral band width. But my intent is actually very simple and straightforward: to strive my hardest for an approximation of the truth and toss in a few jokes along the way (thereby honoring Nietzsche’s sage advice to greet the serious with laughter). Your admonishing my “inappropriate” language is perfectly justified, given the (evolving) traditions of the OAC. But I would return to the premises of the Lance essay: every judgment or evaluation, while directed at a particular subject, provides a window onto the value system of the judge, of the cultural structure within which judgments are made.

My daily life is quite limited in scope, but nevertheless involves exposure to an incredible range of, what shall I call them, communicative channels. I leave my home and the cozy companionship of intellectual websites, drive a couple of miles, stop at a gas

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station. Perhaps I have my ten-year-old granddaughter with me. At the pumps next to me a low-rider with tinted windows and an oversized spoiler bar pulls in, its sound system cranked up so that the bass is a gut-churning assault on everyone at the station. And the car’s sound system is playing gangsta rap, blasting out a stream of obscenities, racist epithets, and murderous fantasies for all to hear. Don’t know if you run into this sort of thing much on the Rue du Faubourg, but go online and check out the lyrics of some gangsta rap classics, such as the immortal “N....., N....., N......” (I won’t use inappropriate language here). This incomprehensible mix of human communication, between home and gas station, is my culture, my life, the ever-present background of my thought. That mix is a fixture of American culture writ large, to be found coursing through the Main Vein of our society. I witnessed a particularly extreme example a number of years ago, in 1994-95 to be precise. Again, it involved the dreaded “N” word (so awful that we dare not speak its name – even Mark Twain’s classics have been censored to spare the children). The movie sensation at the time was Pulp Fiction, as La La Land a creation as you could hope to find: its director grew up in L. A., it was filmed in L. A., and its story line is pretty much unique to L. A. While Pulp Fiction was still topping the charts another event of great cultural significance occurred in the Brentwood neighborhood of L. A. It was a particularly grisly double murder. O. J. The O. J. trial went on for nearly two years. Toward the end of that trial, O. J.’s dream team of millionaire lawyers (American justice is a wonderful thing, and you can have as much of it as you can afford) savaged a prosecution witness, an L. A. police detective named Mark Fuhrman. Fuhrman had been an L. A. policeman for over twenty years, protecting and serving the human sewers of that city (as one of the finest ethnographers of contemporary America, Joseph Wambaugh, has phrased it – check out Wambaugh’s “cop syllogism,” not to be found in Logic 101 texts). During his years of service there was evidence that Fuhrman had used the “N” word on occasion. O. J.’s lawyers pounced. They played the race card. The judge at first did not allow this line of questioning, then caved and let the lawyers go at Fuhrman. He was obviously prejudiced, a bigot who would resort to anything, including planting evidence, to send another black man to prison. If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit. The trial was winding down (its antics would have amazed even Kafka). A not-very-nice joke began to make the rounds: What’s the difference between O. J. and Christopher Reeve? . . . . . . O. J.’s gonna walk. The joke was prophetic. O. J. walked. The only person to be convicted of anything as a result of the double murders and the two-year trial was . . . Mark Fuhrman, for perjuring himself about his past use of the “N” word. In the meantime, during all those months of courtroom antics, all over the city movie theatres were screening Pulp Fiction to capacity crowds. The public ate it up. Critics announced that it was probably one of the very best Hollywood movies ever made. Now, I am not much on statistics, but the movie contains at least a couple of dozen usages of

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that dreaded “N” word. Used time and again, not in the back rooms of L. A. precinct stations, but before millions of movie-goers and video tape buyers. The “N” word here, the “N” word there, often used in venues just a few blocks apart, to the same TV and movie audiences: How does one begin to strike a balance? To discover anything resembling coherence in a seizure of cultural vertigo, of a world suddenly tipped at a crazy, precipitous angle, inducing in all who experience it an acute sense of things gone hopelessly awry. How? Sociolinguistics has identified the operation of registers in everyday speech: It is appropriate to use certain pronunciations, words, grammatical constructions in some situations, inappropriate in others. To shift the scale from a simple double murder (what Wambaugh, in discussing the O. J. case, called a “garden variety domestic homicide”) to mass murder, what is “appropriate” and “inappropriate”? Whatever the language, however appropriate or inappropriate, however crude or abrasive, it’s never enough to alter events. Is it?

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Reply to Keith’s opening remarks to the Lance e-seminar, August 8, 2013

Keith, OAC readers and seminar participants, First, I’d like to thank Keith for selecting my Lance Armstrong essay for OAC e-seminar treatment. Although I’m familiar with websites and email, the world of blogs, links, threads, posts, tweets and “friends,” was wholly alien to me until about a month ago. So please bear with me as I fumble my way through the two weeks of comments and replies that comprise this e-seminar. Keith’s detailed summary of the essay covers its main points very well. Telescoping the argument in that way also brings to the forefront a feature some readers may find disconcerting, if not questionable: How does one go from an account of a single episode – an athlete appearing on a TV talk show – to ruminations on the basic values and cultural structure of American society? I suggest that procedure, that reach, is at the heart of cultural analysis. One identifies a particular event or situation, in this case Lance Armstrong’s confession on the Oprah Winfrey Show, that seems somehow to stir deep waters of its host society, and to trouble those waters. Lance Armstrong is / was iconic, emblematic, a one-person cultural symbol, and his downfall disturbed the easy flow of our daily life and thought, provoking questions that cannot be answered without venturing far from the original event that inspired them. That is what I attempt to do in the essay. It is also a procedure that in my view is perhaps the very best thing about doing anthropology: to combine a fine-grained ethnographic study with a cultural analytic inquiry into the foundations of human society / culture.

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I was quite astonished when Keith opened his questions with a reference to Edmund Leach’s “A Runaway World” lecture. One of my most intense intellectual experiences was when, as a first year anthropology graduate student at the University of Chicago, I was browsing in the university’s formidable periodicals reading room and came across the text of Leach’s lecture (printed, I think, in Commentary, but I’m not sure; it was a long time ago). Reading it well and truly sank the hook. It was the late 1960s, the world around me was coming apart while in the Department of Anthropology it was business as usual. Leach’s essay showed me what was possible for an anthropologist to think, what was possible for anthropology to be. In my occasional lucid moments, I want to think I am continuing the quest Leach called for all those long decades ago. Keith phrases that project quite well: the reinsertion of ideas into life. I might adjust the phrasing just a little: the analysis of the seamless fit between the world of ideas and the world of things, between the world conceived as information (Bit) and as object (It). On Keith’s following point: sustaining contrasting images of one’s society. As I mentioned in an earlier Comment, that pretty well summarizes a principal argument of the Lance essay. I inhabit and study American society, a society riven by fundamental, irresolvable contradictions. They’re not hard to spot; one doesn’t need to look too deeply. For starters, check out bumper stickers on cars. Or pickup trucks. Here’s an example of a “contrasting image”: it’s a beat-up pickup, with, yes, a gun rack across the cab window. Its dented rear bumper has two weathered stickers plastered on it. On one side a sticker reads “Support the Death Penalty;” on the other side, “Right to Life.” The driver sees no inconsistency, and would become downright hostile if pressed. Here’s the opposite “contrasting image” (careful, you may find this one a bit too close to home). It’s a Volvo station wagon, freshly washed and waxed. Its rear bumper also boasts two stickers: “Repeal the Death Penalty” and “Freedom to Choose.” Freedom to choose. . . what? Well, whatever label we put on it (and Camille Paglia doesn’t mince words here; she calls it murder), that choice is not going to do much good for its intended object. Ah, you see how easily we step off the shoals of feel-good sentiment into dark, clouded waters.  “would you. . . like to reflect on other prominent individuals who triggered a profound moral crisis in the way that Lance Armstrong and Nixon did.” Sure, and in keeping with the topic of high-profile professional sports, I would propose Tiger Woods as an ideal case study. Tiger was a made-for-television hero. Young, personable, clean-cut. Why, he was Mr. Clean. None of those revolting tats and piercings like Dennis Rodman was flaunting. And happily married to boot. Well, not all that happily. It turns out that Our Boy had been getting in on with six or seven women. Oh, the horror, the horror! Sports commentators and cable news anchors were aghast: How could this be? Sponsors like AT&T, Gatorade, and General Motors dropped him like a red-hot poker (perhaps not the happiest phrasing here!). In the midst of all the uproar, as Tiger fell from grace at warp speed, the voice of D. L. Hughley (my personal candidate for George Carlin’s

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replacement) was almost drowned out. D. L. said, in effect, Well, let’s see. Here’s a handsome superstar black athlete who’s been having sex with six or seven women. Hell, that’s a slow week in the N. B. A. [National Basketball Association, for non-American readers] Double parenthesis: the N. B. A. super-superstar, Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlin did not get his nickname because he was tall. OAC seminar participants can probably nominate a slew of such individuals. -------------------------------------------------

Reply to John McCreery’s comment on Lance essay e-seminar Sept 9, 2013

John, You have an instinct for going right to the heart of the matter. My little essay, with all its humorous asides and, as them French fellas say, bone motes, does require the perceptive reader to stare into an abyss, an abyss in which cherished values and deeply held ideals dissolve before one’s eyes. And we both know what Fritz said about gazing too long into an abyss: it gazes back into you. Here’s a photograph of that effect (post-breakdown), one of the most chilling images I’ve ever seen:

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You ask if eroding the Nature / Culture dichotomy as it operates in contemporary American society doesn’t also undermine the theory of natural rights (of humans) which many of us hold sacred? Good question, tough question. I think the question has to approached from the two perspectives I mentioned to Keith earlier: the ethnographic and the cultural-theoretical. Here I must defer the latter issue to another time, when we might open a discussion of political philosophy. In the essay I claim that a close inspection, that is, an ethnographic account, of the Lance Armstrong scandal leads to identifying irreparable contradictions in American society. One of those contradictions is our simultaneous embrace of an ethic / ideology of equality and a popular culture (organized sports and reality television) based on an ethic of competition-reward. On being, usually vicariously, a winner. I think the ethnography, glimpses of which are provided in the essay, indicates how that struggle is going. It is necessary to frame an ethnographic account of natural rights in an eyes-wide-open look at a particular situation, in this case early 21st century America. I’ve been a (somewhat reluctant) ethnographer of that society for quite a while. Here are a couple of salient facts that must be confronted. First, while we may be “created equal” in Jefferson’s famous words, one American adult in thirty-two is either locked up or on probation or parole (what our jailors at the Department of Justice call being under “correctional supervision”). http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/aainjail.htm

That disheartening fact, however, is not as alarming as documentation regarding how our imprisoned population is “recruited”:

By age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime, according to a new study that researchers say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal justice system in everyday life.

This information comes to us from the New York Times :http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/us/nearly-a-third-of-americans-are-arrested-by-23-study-says.html Solzhenitsyn would be stunned; Stalin’s Gulag was a fraction of that now being operated in “the land of the free.”

If United States domestic policy challenges an official ideology of natural rights, the government’s foreign policy indicates that ideology does not rank high on the list of American exports (it is one of the few items that is not being out-sourced). Consider that U. S. military expenditures exceed those of the other ten countries that spent most on their military. The other ten countries’ expenditures combined. That money does not go

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to securing the basic needs or human rights of the wretched inhabitants of Darfur or the millions swelling refugee camps and occupied territories around the world. I think the virtue of an anthropological approach to any question, here that of the status of natural rights, is to fix the matter firmly within a specific, ethnographic setting. Wider implications of that process may then be pursued.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures

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Photo of N to John

http://blogs.walkerart.org/filmvideo/2012/03/16/the-madness-letters-friedrich-nietzsche-and-bela-tarr/

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Reply to Huon Wardle re Lance seminar Sept 9, 2013

Huon, As with John’s earlier comment, yours seems to operate on a general and specific level (or perhaps that’s just my mind-set after replying to John). The general level is how we might apply the notion of a creole or cultural continuum to social processes fueling the Lance Armstrong scandal. On that level, let me just say that I’ve come to regard the notion as a fundamental property of every cultural system (that later, grandiose view is developed in the long theoretical chapter of American Dreamtime). On the specific level, that is, on the level of ethnographic description and analysis, I didn’t invoke the cultural / creole continuum theory in trying to piece together what was involved in the Lance affair. As a theoretical construct, American society past and present would incorporate creole processes. However, when we switch our focus to specifics, I think you’re right that the pace or amplitude of those processes has increased dramatically in recent times, say post-World War II. In the late 1980s I put together a paper called “La La Land and the Dawn of the Fourth Great Awakening, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Teriyaki Tacos.” There I argued that a sort of cultural dawn, something on the order of American historical religious “Great Awakenings” had been underway for some time. Only this time around individuals’ heightened awareness stemmed from interacting and inter-thinking in a complex multiethnic milieu rather than from traditional religious fervor. Los Angeles and its environs is such a dynamic mix of people from all over the world that its new world of teriyaki tacos (they exist) makes the creole processes of Caribbean societies look rather staid.

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Your final question really puts me on the spot: Since I’m highly critical of American cultural anthropology, what do I propose to do about it? On any kind of historical scale, I’m not sure there is a happy solution; it may be that the enterprise of cultural / social anthropology has about run its course. But on the scale of the here-and-now I would like to think that the activity you, Keith, John, and others have been engaged in – the lively exchange of ideas in the open forum of the OAC – is a ray of light, a breath of hope (all those positive metaphors) that may encourage original thought. That in itself is a positive, meaningful shift away from the tedious business of academic anthropology. Let’s hope (‘til hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates).

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Reply to Abraham Heineman’s comment in the Lance e-seminar, September 10, 2013

Abraham, Thanks very much for your kind words about the essay. Regarding the passage you cite about Kant taken from The new dynamics ofstrategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world (the article on the Cynefin system for decision-making cited by John): Although I never know where to jump in in a discussion about Kant (to be honest, one of my least favorite philosophers), the ideas in that article are exciting. I’ve been intrigued by complexity theory for quite a while, and have incorporated it in some of my work. I’m particularly keen on a key concept of that theory: self-organized criticality. Every complicated situation – which takes in just about all human existence – operates on the verge of catastrophe; there are just too many elements in too fine a balance for that situation to remain “stable.” [Complexity theory is the functionalist’s nightmare: things become highly organized only to fall apart]. In thinking about the Lance Armstrong scandal this was, in fact, in the back of my mind. Armstrong had faced allegations of drug use throughout most of his cycling career; there had even been a couple of major exposés. And still he went on, winning race after race, retaining a small army of lawyers to deal with all the flak he kept getting. Then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, he walks onto The Oprah Winfrey Show and confesses all. Why there? Why on that particular day? I write these words on the evening of September 10. Twelve years and a few hours ago, airliners began slamming into buildings. Literally, from out of the blue. Although hordes of commentators of every stripe rushed in to fill the air with explanations, none seemed ready to entertain what might have been the most terrifying explanation of all: it just happened. [I develop this argument at some length in “Shit Happens: An Immoralist’s Take on 9/11 in Terms of Self-Organized Criticality at www.peripheralstudies.org – perhaps not a felicitous title, but I am simply quoting Forest Gump]

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Regarding my invoking Camus: In a world one might characterize as systematic randomness, his work has a lot to recommend it. In the essay I asked how it is that Camus receives so little attention in social / cultural analysis. Here’s an ethnography of social thought project for someone with an institutional affiliation and access to the Social Sciences Citation Index: check out citations of Camus in all our usual journals. The results could be revealing. Regarding your final comment that fieldwork should not be confined to semi-structured interviews: I agree. Hey, life is fieldwork.

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Discovering the Mind: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel. Volume 1. Walter Kaufmann 1980 -----------------------------------------------

Keith, About “Time as a T-Bar” – George Carlin does an interesting bit on “The Moment” that somehow reminded me of your model. Don’t remember which of his skits has it, but they’re all fun, and on YouTube. You’re probably right that Americans are another “people without history.” Have you seen any of Leno’s Tonight Show “Jay Walk” routines? Also on YouTube. To round out this unholy trinity, and to update our discussion of reality television (“reality”? But, yes!) check out a couple of episodes of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. You may be giving both my analysis and its object too much credit in suggesting that it “partly seems to depend on bringing historical sensibility to what is otherwise represented as a nature understood by scientific laws.” I really don’t think Americans seek to escape their history, what little there is of it, by taking refuge in a belief in nature as scientific law. I think that weekend football has that covered. [ESPN, the sports mega-network now arranges its programs for the “breakfast to bedtime” viewer; no time to think about Fibonacci sequences and such things when there is always a game to watch.] Also, I’m not sure about “the current fad for cognitive evolutionary science” among my friendly natives. At least the “evolution” part: them’s still fightin’ words for a lot of us folks: Per the Huffington Post: ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/23/evolution-god_n_3640658.html

Evolution And God: Only 21% Of Americans Believe Humans Evolved Without Divine Guidance The article goes on to note that 40% of Americans favor teaching creationism and intelligent design in schools; 32% oppose it and 29% are “unsure” – hey, you can’t be too careful; better hedge your bets in case the Big Guy is watching.

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The e-seminar is great fun so far! [It’s kind of a two-way “peer review,” without the anonymous judge part.]

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Reply to John McCreery’s comment on the Lance e-seminar September 10, 2013

John, The Slough of Despair: A View from the Mountain Peaks As a newcomer to these OAC clambakes, I can’t yet tell familiar from unfamiliar turns. But I don’t think I’ve stumbled into the Slough of Despair, or that I’m dragging others into it (Was that a layover in Pilgrim’s Progress? My memory fails me). Just the opposite. The topographic metaphor I prefer here – and always – is Zarathustra’s mountain peaks, where one can roam free, breath clean air, and think to the limits of ones thoughts. The Slough you allude to sounds a lot like the village, with its flies of the marketplace, where Zarathustra would visit only to return to his mountains, to keep company with his companions the eagle and serpent. In the Lance Armstrong essay I do argue for a cultural anthropology practiced as a pathologist would conduct his laboratory studies. The pathologist of the cultural does not work under a cloud of gloom – of despair – but with the goal of identifying the precise nature of the pathogen or malignancy infecting his subject. He may even hold out the hope that his analysis will aid that subject or others who come after it. For some time now I have advocated a Nietzschean anthropology that would follow the program I describe here. I think it is possible that it may have salutary results, but for now and the foreseeable future it is, as I’ve described it elsewhere, an outlaw anthropology, a smash-mouth, take-no-prisoners assault on much of society. [I just can’t figure out why the anthro journals don’t line up for this stuff.] Even so, I don’t think I speak of mah fellow Amuricuns with quite the contempt Nietzsche used for those “Germans” he despised. After all, Nietzsche did not have the opportunity to read Tom Wolfe. --------------------------------------------

Reply to John McCreery in Lance seminar September 10, 2013

John, I too remember those seminar games, but I think we had the long knives out for others of our kind. Then when we got big we went after the likes of poor old Napoleon Chagnon and Jared Diamond. In the late 1960s through the 1970s there was, in fact, lots of “cultural critique,” but that was almost always focused on obvious targets: the diabolical “military-industrial complex,” Southern racism, and the like. Generally the

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common wo/man got a pass. And, of course, the same only more-so for our ethnographic subjects: The Native was the very fount of authenticity (much-discussed of late). Contrary views were few, although I remember one in particular. It was just a passing remark, but it has stayed with me: Somewhere in, I think, “Religion as a Cultural System,” Geertz makes the claim that the anthropology of religion will have come of age only when studies begin to appear of hypocrites in indigenous societies. On a Nietzschean anthropology as a tear-down project: Fritz indeed does a lot of slicing and dicing, but always with the aim of building, or at least heralding, the “something new.” In that he is in fundamental (and surprising) agreement with our mutual hero, Lévi-Strauss. But for both there is just the tiniest catch: That “something new” won’t include us; we’re outta here. Humans and humanity are a transient affair.L. S. : The aim of anthropology is not to constitute, but to dissolve Man. And Fritz / Zarathustra: Man is a thing that will pass.

But, hey, it was fun while it lasted! We really got blasted!

(Two minutes to 9/11, CalTime. Have to go. Got to duct tape the plastic sheets to the windows and doors.)

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Mark, I’ll try to reply to both your Comments here, since they are, I think, closely linked. You ask: “I agree that a ‘Nietzschean anthropology’ should point to ‘something new.’ So, what did you have in mind?  Robots, perhaps?” I hadn’t realized I’d telegraphed my Nietzschean sympathies in the Lance essay, but I suppose they’re difficult to conceal. Let me sketch – the merest sketch, something of a “gesture drawing” – the Big Picture I see in the tea leaves of the Lance essay and my subsequent call in a Reply to John for a Nietzschean anthropology: As sentient, sapient beings, humans occupy a domain or region of possibilities in a vast (how vast? don’t know) universe of sapience, which elsewhere I’ve given the ungainly name, “semiospace.” At one time or another – five centuries, ten, a hundred, a thousand – “we” were fundamentally different from what we are today, so different that it is misleading to use the pronoun, “we” at all. Regarding identifying the cultural anthropologist as a pathologist of culture: I think I am following in the (meandering and criss-crossing) footsteps of Freud, Camus, and Nietzsche. A pygmy on the shoulder of giants, etc, etc. The pathology argument is perhaps easier to make if we wind the clock back a bit, say to fifteenth

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century Spain and the atrocities of its Inquisition. A poison, a virus, that infected its human host. I think many of us would say that Torquemada does not deserve to be called “human;” he was, quite simply, a monster. Now the difference between him and (most of) us is not that we have smart phones and he did not, or that we may be well on our way to becoming cyborgs. The difference is that, in a mere five centuries, the human vessel has acquired radically new properties. But here is where dark clouds roll in. Before we congratulate ourselves on how much more advanced and humane we are over those fifteenth century torturers, let’s try to wind the clock ahead to a “humanity” five centuries in the future. I would suggest that our world wars, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, super-max prisons (some fifty-seven and counting in the U. S.) may well look as appalling to those future beings as the Inquisition appears to us. Even the wholesale persecution of Lance Armstrong may deserve a small, very dark footnote in the work of some future cultural analyst. As you expand the time scale, both backward and forward, the differences mount up and the boundaries of “humanity” become more and more indistinct. You ask what those future beings will be like, those denizens of their own, impermanent and ever-shifting domain of semiospace, those übermensch . I wouldn’t hazard a guess, and if I did the best I could hope for, as history would judge, would be that my speculation was deemed quaint, a relic of an impossibly remote time and mind-set. I’ve thought about these matters for a number of years; your Comment has reached what is for me bedrock. So I don’t feel too bad now about resorting to that last defense of the (lazy) scoundrel and quoting here a couple of passages that address your questions better than I can right now, right here.------------------------------------------------------------

From “Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay”:

With Lévi-Strauss as with Bateson and the present essay, we come to realize that our “science of humanity” can only function as such because as anthropologists we systematically explore the boundaries and transgressions (the over-goings) of human-ness. We study people before they were people (australopithecines and the early Homo lineages); we study evolutionary offshoots (primates) who are something like people; we study – a few of us – what we will be like when we stop being people (cyborgs? sapient squid? transgenic mute ants? or just plain old-fashioned deviated pre-verts? [What did Jeffrey Dahmer say to Lorena Bobbit? . . . You threw it away?! But that was the best part!] The old humanism in the glitzy wrapping of postmodernism offers up a subject that is a pauvre trésor, indeed. If it is to survive, anthropology must necessarily become part of a comparative science of sapience; we must pursue the study of a rationality which, if not entirely lacking a subject, possesses a subject that is not much like folks.

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When L’homme Nu appeared in English as The Naked Man, no one was very happy with the title’s translation. Yet the real loss was not in the clumsy if amusing English title; it was in the abandonment of the original’s cover illustration: a painting by Paul Delvaux, illustrating a naked wo/man (?) climbing up into a tree. The figure has ascended the trunk and is about to select one of several large branches spreading out in all directions, about to continue her/his climb along just one of those branches. The spreading tree, icon of the manifold complexity of a world of fractional dimensions (fractals), maps the future of a species about to transmute from its modest presence at the base of the canopy into a wealth of possibilities, a riot of diverse beings some of which we or our unusual heirs may even choose to call “human.” ---------------------------------------------- And again,From American Dreamtime, page 29”

The paradox, perhaps the definitive, crippling paradox of our age, is that we yearn for (and even proclaim as doctrine) a world of consistency and continuity, for a society that is a certain way, just at a period in history when technological change and population growth are utterly transforming the very basis of what it means to be human, and in the process ushering in a being, a “form of life” in Wittgenstein’s phrase, as different from ourselves as we are different from our hominid ancestors of a million years ago. Humanity’s tortuous movement toward that Something Else is the stuff of myth, as I propose myth’s nature to be in these pages. That movement, however, is both tortuous and contested. Against the irreversible tide of change, and against the profound generativity of myth (which directs that change), we erect hopeless, hateful institutions to proclaim that life, after all, is a certain way, that things are unquestionably this rather than that, and that we should think and act accordingly or suffer the consequences. Our classrooms, law courts, and government offices are all variations of an institution that, following Foucault, has come to embody the spirit of our age: the prison. Yet despite the best efforts of our wardens (every schoolteacher, lawyer, and bureaucrat) to suppress the mercurial truths of myth, the intensity and persistence of our forbidden longing for the Dreamtime world of the movie theatre or of the simple momentary reverie bear witness to our desire to abandon the doomed effort to impose meaning and uniformity on an enigmatic and diverse humanity. -----------------------------------------------

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