Argonaut by Argonaut

ISSUE #1 - LSE SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY MAGAZINE - SUMMER 2015

Credits

Editor Jade Grogan Illustrators Jiazhi Fengjiang Charlot Schneider George Lo-Riches Design Rowena Wilson Printing Azo Print Ltd Acknowledgements Through attending initial meetings, showing continued enthusiasm, giving words of encouragement and indispensable advice; numerous people in the Department have helped to bring this publication to fruition. Thanks to Jiazhi Fenjiang, for painting a beautiful front and back cover and providing article-specific illustrations, Charlot Schneider and George Lo-Riches for their fantastically playful borders. Thanks to Andrew Bax for suggesting a brilliant title for the magazine. Thanks also to Deborah James and Rita Astuti for their continued support, advice and encouragement, to Rowena Wilson for working so expertly and creatively with the content of the magazine to design what we have before us. And thanks especially to all the writers – for their boldly original, thoughtful and insightful pieces. To Thom Herzmark for suggesting and making a brilliant anthropological crossword! Special thanks are due to the whole of the social anthropology Department here at the LSE and to Rita for agreeing to fund this initiative as head of Department. Argonaut Issue #2 If you are interested in being involved in the next issue of Argonaut through editing, illustrating or writing please get in touch: argonaut. magazine.2015@gmail.com

Contents

Students (UG & MSC) Performance and politics, Thomas Sellick-Newton’s ‘Lost Souls of Russia’ by Natalie Strange...........................4 Mingming Wang’s The West as the Other (2013) by Yufei Zhou..........................................................................................6

Staff Childhood in the migrant city, a photographic project by Catherine Allerton..........................................................8 Extract: Being German, Becoming muslim: Race, Religion and conversation in the New Europe (2014) by Esra Özyürek..................................................................................................................................10 Debt, here and elsewhere by Deborah James............................................................................................................................12

PhD Productivity, danger, and the ‘outside’: some structuring cosmological principles among the Acholi of South Sudan by Ryan O’ Byrne.......................................................................................14 Rane Willerslev’s Soul Hunters (2007) by Tom Heath (edited by Rita Astuti)..............................................................16

Student ethnography Playing from the stands, spectator participation at Fulham FC by Rebecca Fisher...............................................20 Overcoming shame: ‘dirt’, ‘dirty Work’ and the ‘supermarketisation’ of a Soho sex shop by Ed Bayes..........22 Walking with skateboarders, the Southbank struggle by Lucy Trotter..........................................................................24

Interview Interview with David Graeber by Sam Farrell...............................................................................................................................27

Critique Academic responsibility, free education and Open Book by Jasmine Holland........................................................30 Purity and peanuts by Maurice Bloch..............................................................................................................................................32 Crossword.........................................................................................................................................................................................................34

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Editorial The social anthropology department at LSE is special, special in the way every anthropology department is.

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he Social Anthropology Department at LSE is special, special in the way every anthropology department is. Each has its own history, theoretical underpinnings, regional focuses, contemporary figureheads; forefathers and foremothers. The title of this magazine, Argonaut, is a nod to our own particular ancestry, a nod which does not see one’s head bowed for too long. As the discipline grows so too does the way it is taught, embraced and disseminated. This magazine is nothing if not a celebration of the myriad ways in which students and lecturers themselves choose to define what anthropological research is. What it is which interests and fascinates them and how this fascination is brought to colleagues, students and those outside of academia. This first issue of Argonaut is made up of contributions from across the department, including contributions from current and past undergraduates, master’s students, PhD students, and staff members. These contributions take the form of original written pieces, hand-drawn illustrations, an interview, watercolour paintings, a book excerpt and an anthropological crossword! The creativity and originality behind each contribution has been nurtured, encouraged and reproduced here. It is my hope that future great ideas for Argonaut may too receive time, consideration and encouragement. Providing a vehicle for original writing from

both staff and students outside of the standard academic-course framework should continue to be the driving force behind future publications. Through embracing an editorial style focused on what contributors and especially students may get out of writing and being published for the first time is perhaps a more fruitful approach than searching for ‘the best’ writing one can find. Content then has been shaped by the interesting contributions people wanted to make, with the pieces printed here chosen to reflect as many different aspects of the Department at LSE and the discipline itself. Catherine Allerton and Deborah James provide thoughtful and personal snapshots into some of their most recent research projects and publications. Undergraduate Natalie Strange interprets a performance piece broadcast in Russia through the context of hyper-masculinity and identity. Master’s student Yufei Zhou too picks up on the theme of identity through a personal look at how the tradition of ‘the west’ imagining the ‘Other’ in anthropology may be thoughtfully probed and reversed in a review of Mingming Wang’s The West as the Other. Brilliant ethnographic research carried out by final year students is also presented from three students over the last two years. These small-scale ethnographies showcase the creativity behind the chance to do fieldwork in London. From sex shops in

Issue #1 - Lse socIaL anthropoLogy magazIne - summer 2015

Soho, skaters at Southbank, to spectators at Fulham FC – each study is an ethnographic puzzle carefully put together by perceptive and passionate students. Amongst other indispensable contributions, a carefully researched interview by Master’s student Sam Farrell gives an interesting portrait into one of the newest members of our department, David Graeber. Through the interview we are reminded of the fruitful ways in which activism may join up with and come from academia when it is most pressing for it to do so. In a similar vein the final section of the magazine, ‘Critique’ offers a critical lens through which we can look at anthropology today. Jasmine Holland introduces us to ‘Open Book’, a programme of learning and teaching based on the principle of free education which is opening anthropology up to wider audiences and challenging the exclusiveness of Higher Education. And to finish Professor Maurice Bloch playfully ponders why it is that anthropologists no longer seem to be interested in answering fundamental questions about human nature, invoking the age-old opposition between dirt and purity to do so. I hope that you enjoy this very first issue of Argonaut and support future issues in any way you can… even if that is just by reading them!

Jade Grogan 3

Performance and politics, Thomas Sellick-Newton’s ‘Lost Souls of Russia’ Natalie Strange The ‘Lost Souls of Russia’ is a dramatic depiction of the stories of ten people who were killed by the Russian militia between the years of 1996-2013; these people were targeted because they were gay or sympathetic to the plight of gay people living in Russia1.

he piece was produced and created by Thomas Sellick-Newton, a performance artist based on South-West England. It was performed in Bournemouth Square, Dorset in May 2014, where it was filmed and streamed live to a mobile television set in the centre of Saint Petersburg, supervised by one of Thomas’s colleagues. In this piece Thomas wanted to transform and humanize the representation of the people killed from mere statistical markings to full human beings, communicating their individual stories in the process. Sellotaped signs on the floor marked a boundary between Thomas as the actor, and the audience of passersby and engaged watchers. These people were encouraged to tap

Thomas on the shoulder to initiate interaction with him, and the characters he was “playing”. The setup of Thomas’s performance cut across transnational boundaries, and helped to cast light on the subject of gay rights and the legal and social position of homosexual people in the UK and Russia. I look at this piece through concepts and experiences of ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ which homosexual people navigate in an everincreasing homophobic context, whilst critically engaging with the hyper-masculine ideal that arguably pre-dominates in Russian society. Noting the subordinate position of homosexual people in Russian legal discourse, Alexander Kondakov (2013) argues that gay people occupy a ‘field of silence’ (2013: 403) in which homosexual

identity is desexualised to the point that its very existence is denied. The Family Code of the Russian Federation (1995) specifies that ‘in order to register a marriage mutual or voluntary [the] consent of a man and a woman, who are entering into a marriage, is required’ (Kondakov 2013: 415). In the eyes of the Constitutional Court (2006): ‘a homosexual man has the same right to marry as a heterosexual man, because the homosexual man still has the right to marry a woman’ (2013: 416). The sociolegal bias towards heterosexual relationships and marriage has a very traceable history from terms associated with sin (sodomsky) to contemporary terms such as muzhelozhstvovat (man-lyingwith-man). In popular everyday usage these terms often conflate homosexual behaviour with deviant behaviour (2013: 405). Within this history the homosexual subject, at least legally, is pushed to a realm of exclusion, deviance and invisibility, with official discourse only serving

to perpetuate and reinforce this. I would argue that Sellick’s performance is transformative because it fills the ‘lacunas’ (2013: 403) – the spaces in which gay people are made invisible in Russian legal discourse – by creating an arena, temporary or otherwise, through which modes of ‘visibility’ are brought to life and explored. Kondakov refers explicitly to both silence and visibility: ‘[we] are supposed to recognise that our sexuality is perverse, which is why we hide it’ (2013: 421). Mason (2001) explores a similar problem of visibility through highlighting a correlation between a perceived threat to homosexual subjects and the visibility of their sexuality. ‘The very suggestion that homosexuality can be flaunted is itself the product of the social and political hush that has historically enveloped the subject of same-sex sexuality’ (ibid: 78-79). In this way, Mason shows that this not only characterises the life of someone who is gay, but that it may constrain them in a way that pervades their everyday actions. In his study of the sexual identity of lesbian women in Australia, he finds that they are constantly negotiating the visibility of their sexuality in contextuallydependent ways, a conscious and strategic process which he describes as creating ‘safety maps’. This is pertinent to Thomas’s performance in two ways: firstly, Thomas controls his own visibility through selecting the performance space, time and medium of representation, and carefully constructs his own ‘safety map’. Secondly, Thomas negotiates the visibility of the people he embodies at the expense of his own visibility, embodying the identities of these people openly in contrast to the openness they were ultimately denied and/or killed for. Thomas’s ‘safety map’ at times failed to allow full distance from potential threats. At one point, a

From the ages of 18 to 45, this group includes students, teachers and mothers – these people’s identities are known and unknown. There is no one definitive document to situate these deaths in specific times or places. The actor who performed and created this piece has collected these life stories through word-of mouth and his own personal research, along with the help of a colleague in St. Petersburg. The performance piece then mixes fact with fiction to pass comment on the use of oppressive and violent force by the Russian state and military on gay people. 1

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man came aggressively close to the performance space and shouted homophobic slurs and disrupted the performance piece in quite a violent way. Here the overlap between Thomas’s own ‘safety map’ and the (indirectly created) ‘safety maps’ of the real life characters became fused and enmeshed to the extent that the sexual identities of both Thomas and the people’s lives he used as characters were made visible and subsequently threatened. The comparison between Kondakov’s (2013) perception of the dangers of making homosexual people invisible in the eyes of the law, and Mason’s (2001) suggestion that the threat of homophobia-related violence can cause homosexual people to review and moderate their visibility offer themes well explored and creatively manipulated by Thomas. The maintenance of his own invisibility, to ‘render the artist transparent’ (Askew 2007: 278), ensured that the audience’s attention was directed away from the actor’s own identity towards the identity and personality of the people’s lives he embodied. In one of the personal conversations I had with Thomas he emphasised that the authenticity and “success” of his performance was made possible through his commitment to playing a gender-neutral role. As such, he did not change his mannerisms or vocal pitch in ways that explicitly drew on gender stereotypes which could

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potentially distract from the personalities he wished to convey. In contrast to this vision, Russian ideals are heavily gendered, characterised by a powerful hyper-masculinity that is often used as a justification for the legal and religious exclusion of homosexual people in Russia. In line with this thinking Zorgdrager (2013) notes how post-Soviet society is pervaded by a ‘crisis of masculinity’: the socio-economic struggle of men to maintain their role as the sole ‘breadwinner’ whilst simultaneously being emasculated by a paternalist state which further displaces a traditional male identity. She argues that this has created an ‘imagined collectivity’ (2013: 217) borne out of the national trauma of the gulag system wherein ‘homosexual subculture and its violence shaped the prevailing imagery of same-sex relations in Soviet and post-Soviet culture’ (2013: 219). Examples of homophobic speech in Russia today are reflective of the language that originated in this context. The term blatari (criminals) is used to describe gay men who are thought to partake in perverse behaviour like bestiality and are cast as ‘hav[ing] nothing human [in them]’ (Shalamov, 2013: 220). Language like this constructs hierarchical categories of ‘us’ and ‘them ‘which may be naturalized within the larger hyper-masculine ideal so prevalent in Russian society. Hypermasculinity then stands in direct opposition to the sub-human and perverted homosexual. Their “deviance”, classified as a ‘disease’ responsible for the nation’s ‘moral decay’ and ‘the destruction of traditional family life’ (ibid: 227) is further associated with the effeminate, degenerative West, and is recast as representative of a collective position that threatens Russia’s national identity – which must be vigorously defended, ‘as a matter of life and death’ (ibid: 229). The subversive character of

Thomas’s performance is even more apparent in light of this context. In presenting the people killed as human beings with legitimate not deviant or perverse identities Thomas turns the prevalent and exclusionary anti-gay rhetoric on its head. In some ways, his approach to researching the lives of the victims, envisioning their personality, and embodying them in a performance piece is a process analogous to what anthropologists’ undertake. Both actor (Thomas) and anthropologist seek to understand, interpret and communicate the perspective of another to an audience or reader. However, in embodying the character, Thomas takes this one step further to the extent to which he actually “becomes” the people whose lives he is portraying; he goes native. In the eyes of the audience, he is that person and not, for a moment, himself. The shared belief in this reality, by both the audience and Thomas is crucial to the pieces’ affective impact. Thomas’s performance then transcends the colouring of his own interpretation through this process of embodiment (though it is limited by his own identification as a heterosexual male, which arguably affords him more mobility and opportunity). Moreover, it is in the very nature of performance that Thomas occupies a liminal space, able to be the people he uses as characters, returning to his own (heterosexual, male) identity when the performance is finished. In this respect his gay identity is both temporary and un-real. This does not however necessarily diminish the significance of the piece, because the characters are performed in a way that did not allude explicitly to their ‘gayness’, ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’ as such, and more to the people’s personalities. Manning’s (1985) study of calypso in Brazil is instructive here, showing that the ‘cultural force’ (1985: 49) of calypso performance is primarily about

what it can do and not the specifics of what are said. In this respect it is the socio-political context in which the lyrics are sung that allows the performance to have an emancipatory possibility. Similarly, the ‘cultural force’ of Thomas’s performance piece is the subversive character which comes through the portrayal of gay Russian identity in sensitive, positive and sympathetic ways. Importantly these portraits in motion help to challenge the stereotypes of, and negative preconceptions about being gay – in an increasingly discriminatory socio-political context that is hostile to such lives and identities.

Askew, Kelly M. 2007. ‘Anthropology of the Performing Arts: Artistry, Virtuosity and Interpretation in Cross-Cultural Perspective’. Anthropology Quarterly. 80(1): 277-281. Kondakov, Alexander. 2013. ‘Resisting the Silence: The Use of Tolerance and Equality Arguments by Gay and Lesbian Activist Groups in Russia’. Canadian Journal of Law and Society. 28(3): 403-424. Manning, Frank E. 1985. ‘The Performance of Politics: Caribbean Music and the Anthropology of Victor Turner’. In Anthropologica, New Series. 27(1/2): 39-53. Canadian Anthropology Society: JSTOR. Mason, Gail. 2001. ‘Body Maps: Envisaging homophobia, violence and safety’. In The Spectacle of Violence: Homophobia, Gender, and Knowledge. Pp. 78-95. Routledge: London. Zorgdrager, Heleen. 2013. ‘Homosexuality and hypermasculinity in the public discourse of the Russian Orthodox Church: an affect theoretical approach’. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology. 74(3): 214-239.

The West as the Other (2013) Yufei Zhou

Before I came to LSE, some friends were surprised that I was going to study a programme called ‘China in Comparative Perspective’. “Why do you want to leave China to study China?” they asked. My answer was easy: “Because I’m searching for another perspective.”

he search for “another perspective” is a central issue not just to individuals like me, searing for another perspective but to all countries and people in the globalized era we live in. Cultural globalization; the confrontation of, and integration between cultures started long before it became a distinctive phenomenon in scholarly literature. Just like the origins of nationalism described by Benedict Anderson (1991) globalization may too be thought of as a process of the imagination. This imagining depends not only on how a homogenous group imagines itself but importantly how what is perceived to be the ‘Other’ is imagined also. I would argue that the notion of an ‘Other’ is not exclusive to

‘the West’ and furthermore is something which is all too often ignored in anthropological literature. Everyone has an image of what they perceive to be the ‘Other’ – and such images undergo transformations and re-adjustments in the process of culture-contact. However, images of Europeans as ‘Others’ – when imagined by non-Europeans have arguably been neglected within anthropology mainly because of the discipline’s origins in its own European colonial encounters. Anthropology thus traditionally concerned itself with the study of pre-modern, pre-industrialized, small-scale societies to find the social and cultural origins of human nature. This mission was often carried

out by well-trained scientists from ‘modern’ industrialized societies. The anthropological study of the ‘Other’ then served the purpose of reflecting on the origin of the ‘Self’. By this logic the relationship between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ could be mapped in a linear progression. Despite the fact that such a progressivist viewpoint is vociferously questioned and mostly abandoned in contemporary research I would argue that ‘the West’ has not yet been properly studied as an ‘Other’ – through the ‘Other’s’ eyes that is. In his recently revised and translated book, The West as the Other: a Genealogy of Chinese Occidentalism (2013) Chinese anthropologist Mingming Wang gets to the heart of precisely these questions though tracing a genealogy of ‘the West’ as it has been imagined throughout Chinese history. Published in Chinese in 2006, Wang’s motivation for writing the book was primarily though his

experiences as a PhD student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the 1980s. The English version keeps the main structure and argument of the original, but is helpfully extended with more theoretical and historical clarifications, footnotes and analysis. In his book, the positions of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ are switched. Wang explores how ‘the west’ has been imagined from a Chinese perspective in two steps, drawing on core concepts of “ethno-directionology” and “cosmo-geography”. In the first step, ‘the West’ is imagined through a Chinese version of the world map which he calls “ethno-directionology”. He charts the historical transformation of this image of ‘the West’ from three thousand years ago all the way to the Europeanization of Chinese society in the present day. Secondly, Wang uses the term “cosmo-geography” to explore how ‘the West’ has been situated in the Chinese hierarchy of “Tianxia” (all-under-Heaven). Tianxia is both a Chinese word and an ancient Chinese cosmological belief encompassing the entire

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geographical world; it gained political significance when joined to the idea that China and everything in the world could be thought to be ruled by the Chinese Emperor. It was part of a sino-centric system in which China (zhongguo – which literally means the central state) lay at the center of the world map, and the Chinese Emperor, as the Son of Heaven (Tianzi), governed the whole world in the name of Tiandi (heavenly supremacy). Through this hierarchy Chinese dynasties always imagined themselves to stand at the center (as the ‘Self’) of the world, their relationship with ‘Others’ hierarchically ordered outwards from this central point. The interesting thing Wang shows in his book is that although China is called ‘the central state’, there was actually an oscillation between two types of West-China narrative. The first was “ethnocentric” (elevating China over the West), and the second “othercentric” (elevating the West over China). At the beginning of the first chapter a famous encounter between the Qing Empire and Europe is described during which the Qing Empire sends members of its first embassy to the “far corners” of Europe. One of the meetings which results from these travels takes place between the Qing ambassador and the Swedish Queen in 1866. A poem written by the ambassador describing their meeting compares the Queen to “Xi Wangmu” (King-Mother-in-theWest), who was the mythological daughter of Tiandi and the elder sister of Tianzi. This is a great

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To me, anthropology is unique for its continuing contribution to our knowledge that human life is not as simple as we might have thought.

example of the “other-centric” West-China narrative which placed Sweden and their queen on par with, if not higher than China and its dynasty. Wang argues further that the two China-West narratives take on particular saliences in different periods of Chinese history, for different reasons like the prevalence of religious ideals and mythical fantasies, the popularity of Buddhism, the imperial “tributary diplomacy” (the administration of the network of trade and foreign relations between imperial China and its tributaries), and the state’s own ‘civilizing’ projects. In the midst of these two narratives the book may have different significances for different readers, Chinese and European alike. The book may signal that the ‘anthropology of China’ (China as the object of study) is changing to encompass a ‘Chinese anthropology’ (China producing its own research tradition). As Chinese anthropologists recognise the importance and value in studying the ‘Other’ outside of China and even within China, great work is being produced every year which addresses possible biases in Eurocentric narratives and research

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which have characterised the discipline since its inception. The Overseas Ethnographic Project supports ethnographic fieldwork undertaken outside of China by scholars from Beijing University in countries including Malaysia, India, France and the USA and is one great example of China producing its own research tradition. Biao Xiang’s (a student of Peking University now teaching at Oxford) book, Global “Body Shopping” (2007) looks into the Indian labour system in the information technology industry and won the Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology in 2008. I suggest that such recognition from ‘Western’ academia adds importance to what I tentatively call a ‘Chinese perspective’ in the global academic discussion. However, starting to write about the ‘Other’, and not taking for granted the ‘Othering’ of oneself is just a small step, there is still a long way to go before a ‘Chinese’ theoretical tradition of anthropology comes into being, comparable to other taken for granted ‘traditions’ and ‘schools’ in social anthropology. On the subject of Wang’s book,

anthropology students of the western tradition might see it as a challenge to their own tradition. If ‘western anthropology’ is now an outdated category Wang’s book shows us what good anthropology looks like today and what it might look like in the future. It is at this juncture that anthropology becomes a real means of crosscultural communication and mutual reflection. Anthropology can and should serve as a mirror for every ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ to look at themselves through their own and other’s eyes. It is from this potential that multiple perspectives and discourses emerge equally and serve as reference points for each other against the backdrop of cultural globalization, hopefully promoting mutual understanding and co-operation. To me anthropology is unique for its continuing contribution to our knowledge that human life is not as simple as we might have thought. From this point of view, The West as the Other stimulates thinking ‘outside the box’ that is ‘the West’. With future anthropological research in mind, I hope it is not too unreasonable for me to imagine that one day me leaving China, to study China in the UK is well justified but to imagine also that a European student may too find it plausible, desirable even, to leave ‘the West’ in order to study it.

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Wang, Mingming. 2013. The West as the Other: a Genealogy of Chinese Occidentalism. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Xiang, Biao. 2007. Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Childhood in the migrant city, A photographic project Catherine Allerton

In October 2014, the LSE’s Anthropology Department launched a new photo exhibition on the sixth floor corridor of the Old Building.

he exhibition, ‘Childhood in the Migrant City’, aims to give an insight – through imageswith-words – into the lives of the children of migrants and refugees living in Kota Kinabalu, the capital city of the Malaysian state of Sabah, in northern Borneo. From 2012-13, I conducted a year of fieldwork in Kota Kinabalu with these children, in order to discover their perspectives on citizenship, migration, exclusion and belonging. In curating this exhibition, I wanted to give a sense of both the difficulty and normality of these children’s lives. A very large percentage of the population of Sabah originate from the neighbouring countries of Indonesia and the Philippines. Some of them came as refugees in the 1970s and 80s from a civil war between the Philippines

government and Muslim separatists. But many also came as economic migrants from poor agricultural and coastal regions, in order to take up jobs in Malaysia’s boom industries. During my fieldwork I met many migrant parents who had lived in Sabah for decades, working in construction, agriculture, factories, transport and domestic service. Their experiences in Sabah varied greatly from people who had made considerable sums of money and had built houses in their home villages to which they hoped to retire, to those who had struggled with poorly paid work, ill-health and lack of documentation. The vast majority of the children I worked with during my fieldwork were born in Sabah. Some had paid brief visits to a parent’s natal village in Indonesia or the Philippines, but many had never left Malaysia. These children speak fluent Malay, and many feel a strong sense of attachment to Sabah. Nevertheless, as the children or grandchildren of migrants, they are considered ‘foreign’ by the Sabahan state and local population, and are unable to

access government education or healthcare. Many of these children lack valid identification papers, including birth certificates, and are effectively stateless. Considered ‘unauthorised’ people, they are at constant risk of arrest and deportation. My fieldwork in Kota Kinabalu involved a range of different methodological strategies. I conducted participant observation in a number of informal learning centres, where children accessed basic education, and where I worked as a volunteer English teacher. I also visited children at home and employed a range of structured, ‘child-friendly’ techniques. However, the most popular methodological strategy with my research participants was undoubtedly what what ‘Photos of My Life’. This project, which I ran with over 70 participants, involved me lending a digital camera to an individual child for one or two weeks. During this time, each child was asked to take pictures of their everyday life and, in particular, to concentrate on people, things and places that were important

to them. I also gained children’s consent for the later, anonymous sharing of their images. Once an individual participant had returned the camera to me, I printed out copies of their photographs as a gift to them. Handing out these copies always provoked much excitement, as other children crowded round to look at the images, and children divided up group images amongst their friends. This delight in the physical copy surprised me, since many of these children possessed cheap camera phones and were forever taking ‘selfies’ with their friends. Photography was not new to them, but tangible copies of their images were relatively rare. As other researchers employing visual methods with children have pointed out, it is always useful to ask children to describe both what they have drawn or photographed, and also why they have done so, as the answers to these questions may not always be so obvious. Thus, I also photocopied the children’s photographs and tried to get them to describe each image, either in writing or

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verbally. In planning the exhibition ‘Childhood in the Migrant City,’ it was very important to me that I should include the children’s words alongside their images. In some cases, the description is relatively straightforward, and the words do not add much to the image. In other cases however the words reveal the complex set of circumstances and emotions which lie behind a particular photograph. Take, for example, Rensi, a 10 year-old girl with parents from Flores in eastern Indonesia. Rensi, for her ‘Photos of My Life’ project, took many photographs of her four sisters. The sister whose picture I chose to include in the exhibition is the youngest child of the family, and Rensi captioned her image of this girl as follows: “This is my little sister. She is called Angelina, you can just call her Lina. She only wears boys’ clothes. She is nice but she is also the naughtiest child in the world.” The caption invites us into Rensi’s intimate world: we are told we can call Rensi’s sister by her shortened name, and Rensi confides that her sister is both nice and a world-champion of naughtiness. However, the caption also stimulates our ethnographic curiosity: why does Lina only wear boys’ clothes? What does she do that Rensi considers so naughty? Many children chose to photograph their house, and the captions to these images reveal the costs of making a home in squatter settlements or worker’s accommodation. 12 year-old Flora’s picture of her ramshackle house at the back of a welding workshop is poignantly captioned:

“We live in the mangrove trees. There is lots of rubbish and it smells. Our house has fallen into the water four times.” After he wrote this, I was shocked. “Really”, I asked “your house has collapsed four times?” He shrugged as though it was normal, and several other children piped up: “Teacher! My house has collapsed too!” What became apparent through the children’s captions were the implicit challenges they levelled against any assumptions about the ugliness of and the difficulties in their lives. 11 year-old Melki’s photograph of his house is captioned thus: “This is my house, isn’t it beautiful? We live near a tyre factory.” 10 year-old Asma’s photographs, taken in a squatter settlement that has since been demolished, are captioned with messages of familial productivity (“I work selling my grandmother’s snacks in the neighbourhood”) and positive post-refugee sentiment (“Everything in Sabah is good. There is no war here.”) In selecting the images for this exhibition, I of course had to be highly selective. There were almost 1000 images from which to choose, and when I look at the photographs on the walls of the sixth floor corridor, I also

see many of the images I was unable to select. One 13 year-old Bugis girl took a range of paired photographs of herself in different places: always one photo with her wearing a veil, and one with her hair down. Another, 14 year-old Suluk girl managed to work out how to use the record function on the camera, and shot a 10 minute video of her two younger sisters doing a ‘pangalay’ dance to music. Though I never met these sisters, I enjoy watching this video as during fieldwork I learnt how important music and dancing are to notions of Suluk culture. The images I am most haunted by, however, are a wonderful series of shots, taken by her friend, of 11 year-old Jimi working cheerfully in an onion warehouse. When he showed me these images on the camera he had borrowed, Jimi told me that he had worked in the warehouse just the day before, and that it was fun. He then, in front of me, deleted all of the images from the camera, leaving me heartbroken for my future exhibition, but keen also to not make Jimi feel he had done anything ‘wrong’. Pressing

delete was his editorial decision, a decision strangely representative of the enduring temporariness in which many migrant families live. I hope that students, staff and visitors enjoy these photographs over the next couple of years. I’ve already noticed people taking their time to read both the captions and my brief descriptions of each child. One colleague even spotted someone taking detailed notes on each of the frames, making me wonder whether the Malaysian authorities that refused my research permit had finally caught up with me. These children live in unsanitary squatter settlements, cramped workers’ housing and water villages. Anti-migrant sentiment, poverty, restrictive labour policies and document-checking operations all have a very real impact on their lives. However, as the children’s captions and personal explanations of their photographs (of a grave, toys, animals, houses and families) revealed, these photographs were mere windows into a world that was a lot more complex than the bleak aesthetic seemed to suggest.

“This is my old house. It is important to me and I love it, but I am always just inside the house because I have no friends where I live.” 10 year-old Jeri’s picture of his house in the mangroves is captioned:

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Extract: Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion and

Conversion in the New Europe (2014) Ezra Özyürek “I would never have become a Muslim if I had met Muslims before I met Islam.” During my three and a half years of research among German converts to Islam, I heard this repeatedly.”

urad Hofmann (1998, 135), also a German convert to Islam, writes that toward the end of his long life, the renowned German Jewish convert Muhammad Asad told him that he doubted that he would again find his way to Islam, as he had done in 1926, if he were a young man in today’s Muslim world. “With some bitterness he shared the frequently heard opinion that one could find lots of Muslims in the Orient, but precious little Islam these days, whereas the Occident had very few Muslims, but now much Islam.” Although almost all German converts I met during my research embraced Islam following intimate relations with born Muslims, since their conversion many nonetheless distance themselves from immigrant Muslims. Converted Germans love Islam, and in most cases they had fallen in love with a Muslim, but they do not always find it easy to love born Muslims in

Germany or elsewhere. In a political climate that sees no place for their religion and is antagonistic toward their conversion, some German converts try to open up a legitimate space for Islam by disassociating it from Turks and Arabs. Some promote the view that Islam can be experienced as a German religion; others call for a totally postnational Islam. Both groups argue that being German is not only compatible with but also can even lead to a better way of being Muslim, and some advance the idea that becoming Muslim can be an especially proper way of being German. In doing so, German converts to Islam simultaneously challenge and reproduce biological and cultural racisms as well as a homogeneous understanding of a German and European culture. Being German, Becoming Muslim focuses on such contradictions and challenges in the lives of converts to Islam, and aims to understand

what it means to embrace Islam in a society that increasingly marginalizes and racializes Muslims. It explores different ways in which converted German Muslims— who now number in the tens of thousands—accommodate Islam to German identity and carve out legitimate space for Germans in the Ummah, the global community of Muslims. In other words, this book examines the socially transformative consequences of the seemingly individualistic and politically unmotivated acts of converts for the German society and Muslim community. It inquires into how today’s German converts come to terms with their admiration for Islam alongside the widespread marginalization of Muslims. How and why can one love Islam, yet find it so difficult to love immigrant Muslims or their Islamic practices? What does it mean to be a “white” Muslim when Islam is increasingly racialized? How do German Muslims relate to immigrant Muslims once they convert? How do previously Christian or atheist German Muslims shape debates about the relationship between race, religion,

and belonging in Germany? By focusing on the experiences of indigenous Europeans who have embraced a religion that is seen as external to Europe, this book also seeks to understand the complex set of prejudices and exclusionary practices that are called Islamophobia. The reactions of both mainstream German society and born Muslims to converted Muslims, and the latter’s responses to born Muslims, shed light on the intersection of biological with cultural racism. Muslim identity is something that is scripted on the bodies of immigrant Muslims, but Islam can also be chosen by indigenous Europeans. Can we call converted Muslim criticism of born Muslims and their traditions Islamophobia? What are we to make of the abhorrence that converted Muslims generate in mainstream society? Or to put it another way, where do belief and individual choice fit in the racialized and religiously defined exclusion of Muslims in Europe? I explore these questions in the context of social and political developments that shape German society at large, paying special attention to the political consequences of conversions. The arrival of millions of Muslim workers to rebuild the war-torn country was one of the most significant post–World War II developments. It transformed, and continues to transform, Germany. These workers and their families brought an unexpected challenge

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to the mostly homogeneous post-Holocaust German society, and forced it to come to terms with difference again. One result of this development was the construction of racial dichotomies between Turks and Germans as well as between Muslims and Christians/Europeans/secular subjects. Another related, perhaps inevitable outcome was cultural interpenetration and boundary crossing between these dichotomies. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants and their children took citizenship after changes in the German citizenship law in 2000, while a small but increasing number of formerly Christian or atheist Germans converted to Islam. Such border crossings have a profound effect on transforming these categories because they challenge how we define Germans and Muslims. Mainstream society marginalizes German converts to Islam, and questions their Germanness and Europeanness, based on the belief that one cannot be a German or European and a Muslim at the same time. Converts to Islam are accused of being traitors to European culture, internal enemies that need to be watched, and potential terrorists. Having become new Muslims in a context where Islam is seen as everything that is not European, ethnic German converts disassociate themselves from Muslim migrants, and promote a supposedly denationalized and de-traditionalized Islam that is not tainted by migrant Muslims and their national traditions but instead goes beyond them. Some German Muslims along with some other Europeanborn ethnic Muslims promote the idea that once cleansed of these oppressive accretions, the pure Islam that is revealed fits in perfectly well with German values and lifestyles. Some even argue that practicing Islam in Germany builds on the older but now-lost values of the German Enlightenment (Aufklärung), including curiosity about and

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tolerance of difference. For East German Muslims who converted after the fall of the Berlin Wall, becoming Muslim was a way of escaping their East German identity. Born Muslims who grew up in Germany increasingly adopt these discourses and promote de-culturalization of Islam as a way for Muslims to integrate into German society without giving up their religious beliefs. At the same time, a newer and even more popular trend of Islamic conversion bypasses the questions of national tradition and identity altogether by ostensibly going back to the earliest roots of Islam, with converts isolating themselves not only from non-Muslim society but also from other Muslims. Religious converts throughout the world have different ideas regarding the relationship of their new religion and indigenous culture. Converts to evangelical Christianity in Papua New Guinea (Robbins 2007) and Ghana (Meyer 1998) believe that their conversion involves a complete transformation, and that they have not only left their old religion but also their old culture behind. In other places, such as Turkey (Özyürek 2009) and India (Roberts 2012), converts to evangelical Christianity believe that they have changed only their religious beliefs and what they have embraced is totally compatible with local culture. At the same time, revivalist religious movements often aim at “purifying” their creeds of antithetical cultural practices. Muslim revivalists worldwide fall back on Islam’s foundational texts in an attempt to attain a purportedly true Islam freed of cultural accretions (Göle 1997; Mahmood 2004; Hirschkind 2009). In her study of Shi’i Muslims in Lebanon, Lara Deeb (2006, 20) calls this “authenticating Islam,” a process “dependent on textual study and historical inquiry as well as on a particular notion of rationality.” Regardless of how clear such a differentiation between culture and religion may look to religious actors, the separation between

these two realms is problematic. As Nathaniel Roberts (2012) reminds us that there is “no natural ground from which to answer” questions regarding the nature of either religion or culture. Hence, it is important to understand seemingly parallel efforts to separate or relate culture and religion in their social contexts as well as in terms of their political consequences. Purifying Islam for young Turkish women, for example, might mean breaking with the limiting worldviews of their parents and allowing for increased social freedom (Göle 1997). For Shi’i activists in Lebanon, it might mean self-improvement and accepting modern ways of being Muslims (Deeb 2006). For Moroccan Dutch Muslims, it can be a way to negotiate the dilemma of having to choose between being Moroccan or Dutch, while for the Dutch authorities, attempts at Islamic purification might indicate radicalization (Koning 2008). One of the main arguments of this book is that the call of many German- and other Europeanborn converts for a purified Islam can be best understood in its context of increasing xenophobia and Islamophobia, where being Muslim is defined as antithetical to being German and European. When confronted with unexpected hostility from mainstream society, converts to Islam take an active role in defending the place of Islam in Germany by disassociating it from the stigmatized traditions of immigrant Muslims. The German Muslim take on a purified Islam is inspired by Islamic revivalism worldwide, but also based on Enlightenment ideals of the rational individual and natural religion. While this call for a culture- and tradition-free Islam that speaks directly to the rational individual seems universalistic, in the contemporary German context it ends up being strictly particularistic or, more precisely, Eurocentric. It assumes that the “European” or “German” mind is truly rational— and hence the “Oriental” mind is not—free of the burden of cultural

accretions, and thus uniquely capable of appreciating and directly relating to the real message of Islam in its essential form.

Deeb, Lara. 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘I Lebanon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Göle, Nilufer. 1997. Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hirschkind, Charles. 2009. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hofmann, Murad W. 1998. Journey to Makkah. Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications. Koning, Martijn de. 2008. Searching for a “Pure” Islam: Religious Beliefs and Identity Construction among Moroccan-Dutch Youth. Amsterdam: Bert Bakkar. Mahmood, Saba. 2004. Politics of Piety: Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Meyer, Birgit. 1998. “Make a Complete Break with the Past: Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse.” Journal of Religion in Africa 28 (3): 316-49. Özyürek, Esra. 2009. “Convert alert: Turkish Christians and German Muslims as Threats to National Security in the New Europe”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (1): 91-116. Robbins, Joel. 2007. “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time and the Anthropology of Christianity.” Current Anthropology 48 (1): 5-38. Roberts, Nathaniel. 2012. “Is Conversion a Colonization of Consciousness?” Anthropological Theory 12 (3): 272-94.

Deborah James

of violent force, into a relationship of unequal power and enduring hierarchy in the modern world: between first and third-world nations, rich and poor. To reject the power of that system explicitly had been driven to change their challenges the obligation which bank account in order to stop the requires borrowers to repay their lender from such a practice loans. Societal support for this What do such issues have kind of challenge can be seen to to do with anthropology? Debt have traction with the success of – the deferment of immediate initiatives like the 2000 Jubilee repayment – has long been part Debt Campaign of what we study, as anyone who My own research into the topic has read The Gift will know. Its in South Africa shows that very importance for anthropology has similar practices occur there – and resurfaced with the publication that borrowers question, even of David Graeber’s book, Debt: sometimes resist, such obligations. the first five thousand years (2011) The payday lending model in which explores the extensive its starkest form was arguably and interesting history of the developed in South Africa and phenomenon. Economists seldom imported to the UK. Wonga.com question the premise that “one has was founded by a South African, to pay one’s debts” (Graeber 2011, Errol Damelin, and run by him, 3-4) but Graeber interrogates that until – under increasing pressure premise, criticizing the deepfrom the media and under seated assumptions that lie at the threat of stringent regulation heart of the global capitalist order. by the FCO (Financial Conduct Something originally thought of Authority) – he stepped down as reciprocity, in which gifts or from the company’s management favours, once given, are returned in June 2014. The company after long delays or are transferred was subsequently required by indefinitely over numerous the FCA to give £2.6 million in generations Graeber argues have compensation to customers, in been transformed by the modern acknowledgment of its unethical financial system, backed by the debt collection practices, power of the state and the threat

The problem of debt, and especially of payday loans, has been a matter of great concern in the UK. The aggressive operations of Wonga.com, which lent money to all and sundry without checking borrowers’ ability to repay, brought these concerns into sharp focus.

ast November new restrictions were passed, which limited the rate of interest charged on such loans. On a special feature broadcast by BBC radio 4, the pros and the cons of payday lending were hotly debated, showing that the problem has no simple solution. Supporters of the industry pointed out how borrowers – not necessarily drawn from the ranks of the poorest, but simply not earning enough to live on let alone save money – often need ready access to cash for emergencies. One couple said they’d had no option but to borrow £2000 in order to repair their car. Without payday lenders, it was claimed, they might have been driven to the ‘back streets’ and to loan sharks. Opponents pointed to the intolerably high interest rates – within three months that couple’s debt had spiralled to £3000 – and decried the ease with which payday lenders are able to reach into borrowers’ bank accounts in order to secure repayment. That couple

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Debt, here and elsewhere

which included sending fake solicitor letters to customers Of course, the demand for easy credit in the UK did not begin with payday loans. But when Wonga. com started doing business here, borrowers were immediately attracted to this kind of credit. A recent report, commissioned by the FCO from ESRO – a research company founded by two LSE PhD students, Will Norman and Robin Pharoah – explains why. The report, researched and compiled by another LSE PhD student, Agnes Hann, and a number of other colleagues, made it clear that certain potential borrowers took out payday loans because these loans seemed to offer a shortterm solution, easily controllable compared to any alternative. They “were suspicious of, or even hostile towards credit cards”, with the feeling that such facilities, which some of them had previously used, “fuelled temptation and made it too easy to get into trouble”. Wishing now to impose limits on their own spending, they opted instead “for short-term, high interest loans” that (they thought) “made it easier to ‘self‑police’” (ESRO and FCO 2014: 12). Others preferred these loans because they were easy to apply for and could be secured on-line rather than requiring the embarrassment of personal contact with

a relative or bank manager. Unfortunately, however, as soon as such consumers found themselves unable to pay back such loans within the “short-term” as they’d intended, they ended up in a debt trap with interest rates escalating uncontrollably, and with the payday lenders either reaching into their bank accounts to recoup their money, or sending threatening (but fake) lawyers’ letters. If this model was imported to the UK from South Africa, what made the latter country such a perfect breeding ground for its development? During the 1990s, the country’s economy experienced a sudden liberalisation. Earlier legislation that had prevented the charging of “usurious” interest rates was repealed. At the same time, some members of the black population in South Africa, previously disenfranchised under apartheid had new aspirations to wealth and upward mobility at the moment of the country’s democratic elections in 1994, and needed ready access to cash in order to live the lifestyles from which they had previously been barred. By some strange logical fit, certain sectors of the white population, forced to take redundancy as they left the civil service to make way for its new recruits – ANC supporters and members of the country’s black majority – invested their severance pay to become the creators of the new “micro-lending” sector, offering high-interest, unsecured,

short-term credit of the kind now known in the UK as “payday loans”. They had spotted a new demand among borrowers, from those new members of the civil service among others, and were starting businesses to cater to that demand. Other entrepreneurs set up their new ventures with (perhaps ironically) borrowed money. As I was told by one informant: A large number of unscrupulous lenders piled into the market. … Someone …borrowed R20,000 from his father and started extending loans at a bus depot. He lost the first R20,000, then told his father he had figured out how to do it properly and borrowed a further advance. Within a short time he had made enough money to buy a house in Johannesburg’s upmarket suburb of Sandton, for cash. The South African government later stepped in to regulate this credit free-for-all, resulting in some of these businesses leaving the country to operate their businesses in other parts of Africa – and, eventually, if my claim is correct, in the UK. But others, operating in a semi-legal limbo, remained in place, continued to charge high interest rates, and carried on taking repayments directly out of borrowers’ accounts. Many debtors, like the UK couple

mentioned in my opening paragraph, have been driven to abandon their bank accounts and open new ones: a practice that became endemic and was often repeated as creditors continued to pursue them from one account to the next. While these practices might sound indefensible, as well as being ultimately unsustainable, the situation – in South Africa as in the UK – is too complex to be readily condemned. Gustav Peebles draws attention to the lack of logic in our assumption that “debt is bad, but credit is good” (2010: 226). A borrower may have good reasons – other than short-sighted materialist consumerism - to “borrow speculative resources from his/her own future and transform them into concrete resources to be used in the present” (2010: 206). If s/he is unable to borrow from the formal/ regulated sector, s/he may look elsewhere. Many South Africans have been doing just that, going to one of an (under)estimated 30,000 mashonisas (loan sharks) to borrow. But they often do so alongside, rather than instead of, approaching banks and payday lenders who offer unsecured loans. For the new black middle class, among them a swathe of state employees, their expectations and hopes – of moving into a suburban house, securing higher education for children, procuring medical insurance – have increased, exponentially and out of

BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, 11th November 2014. ESRO and FCO. 2014. Consumer Credit Research: Payday Loans, Logbook Loans and Debt Management Services.

proportion to the incomes that are needed to underpin them. If responding to these aspirations entailed borrowing “speculative resources” from “the future,” this need not necessarily be seen as leading to unsustainable crisis. It was credit – the “good” meaning of debt (Peebles 2010:226) – that, at least in part, enabled the very growth of this new middle class. The positive social consequences, at least in some cases, were outweighing or at least counterbalancing the negative ones. When I finished my research, I tried to express this ambivalence by concluding my book (2015) with a series of questions rather than answers. If lenders operate by the logic of the self-regulating free market, as they claim, then why is state regulation required to restrain them from offering products that will lead borrowers into penury? And what about borrowers – are they extravagant or thrifty? Are they unsustainably over-indebted, or do the items they invest in justify the means used to do so? Do they have a view of the long term, like the ant in the proverb, or only of the short one, like the grasshopper? Many who do anthropological research on debt are asking similar questions. Post Script: Money from Nothing: indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa (2015) is out now, published by Stanford University Press.

James, Deborah. 2015. Money From Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Peebles, Gustav. 2010. The anthropology of credit and debt. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:225–240.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: the first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House. Issue 1 Summer 2015

Productivity, danger, and the ‘outside’: some structuring cosmological principles among the Acholi of South Sudan Ryan O’Byrne In the Acholi sociocultural world, the spiritual and physical spheres are not separate but intertwined, leaching into and affecting each other, with multitudinous and very real results. What happens in one realm has profound consequences upon the other.

t is important to note that these consequences have both positive and negative dimensions, and many day-to-day and longer-term rituals, activities, and events within the Acholi world are attuned to the requirements of these spiritual dimensions. Despite recent transformations in Acholi social life, the growth of a cash economy, appearance of a Christian God and the effects of modernity more generally agency in the Acholi world is still conceived of as spiritually or ancestrally determined. Further, the causes and cures of social problems are predominantly understood to be rooted in the rupture and repair of fundamental social relations with these important cosmological entities. Indeed, because such entities are both the ultimate cause as well as the predominant cure for all social ills, they remain a morally ambiguous and therefore an extremely important part of most Acholi lives. In the Acholi cosmological framework, the ‘outside’ is an important and multi-faceted meta-abstraction, one which resonates with Mary Douglas’s (2002) theories about basic human systems of classification concerning structural and categorical purity. Not only do Acholi ideas about the ‘outside’

define much of the Acholi worldview, they also determine how people, places, and things are understood and discussed. For example, in the Acholi world, the gang (‘home/village’) is considered the domain of humans. Likewise, places outside the gang are wild and dangerous; the realm of the animalistic and foreign. Such places include the uninhabited ‘bush’ and also the homes and villages of other peoples, both Acholi and non-Acholi. Thus Acholi understandings of the outside define many of the categorical distinctions they make between the home and the wild, the cultural and the natural, the human and the non-human. These distinctions thus determine who is considered a dangerous structural and conceptual outsider. Such dangers include not only wild animals or people like the Lord’s Resistance Army, but dangerous cosmological entities also such as shapeshifters, sorcerers, poisoners, and witches. My understanding of these cosmological entities is based on 18 months fieldwork in Pajok, a predominantly Acholi speaking community in South Sudan. I argue that much of the Acholi world is structured by cultural and cosmological logics of production and destruction, especially as these relate to social and biological (re)production (cf. Girling 1960: 14, 73; Seligman & Seligman

1932: 120), and especially as they connect to the powers, needs, and desires of former or current group members. As Malandra (1939: 27) suggests, the spirits of the Acholi kwaro (‘ancestors’, but also ‘grandfathers’ or ‘male elders’) are revered precisely because doing so encourages the positive and beneficial “exercise [of ] their power so… hunting will be successful, evil spirits will be deterred from entering their villages, sickness may be unknown…, women may not be barren, children will enjoy health and happiness and crops will be abundant”. Such spiritual intercessions are based on a conceptualisation of relationality in which familial, lineal, and communal (re)production is tied to pragmatic activities which simultaneously produce sociocosmic relations at the same time as they (re)produce and reinforce group identity. Indeed, virtually all aspects of cosmological life in Acholi Pajok connect to these underlying cultural logics. Kwaro and other esteemed cosmological entities are those primarily responsible for ensuring the productive success of such activities as agriculture and hunting, as well as sexual reproduction. Their activities ensure the continuation of social and biological life. They are therefore also charged with continuing the future reproduction of their families

and clans, and ultimately even the community itself. On the other hand, those creatures and powers thought most dangerous are those that strike right to the heart of these interconnected logics of production and classificatory purity. They ruin hunting, destroy harvests, and make people ill and infertile (cf. Girling 1960: 73). Most feared of all are sorcerers – witches. Similarly, community members who commit reprehensible anti-social acts are recognised as a great danger; ostensibly functioning members of Pajok society who actively and maliciously set out to destroy the physical, social, and environmental

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basis of life itself. Thus outsiders are thought to pose an extreme threat to the Acholi sociocultural order. These outsiders are not only foreigners – although Ugandan poisoners and Madi shapechangers are two of the most common dangers Pajok locals speak about – but outsiders within the community itself, structural and conceptual outsiders whose position outside the family, subclan, or community is mirrored in the everyday, productive, and cosmological insecurities their presence generates. Such outsiders are dangerous because they are not connected by genealogical ties

to the people and place in which they reside. This means they are not accountable to clan ancestors or other spirits that are the customary means of maintaining positive intra-communal relations. The normal cosmological sanctions will not prevail, and so, in a world where ancestors can exact retribution upon whole families or lineages for the faults of one individual, there are no moral restrictions to bind their needs, acts, and desires to those of the community. Alongside foreigners, women are the social category most likely accused of being poisoners, sorcerers, or witches. When considering why women and foreigners are conceptually interlinked, it is important to note that both groups are structural and categorical outsiders: just as foreigners come from outside the community so a woman comes from ‘outside’ the family and the clan. As a patrilineal and patrilocal society, a woman leaves the home and clan of her birth when she marries, entering those of her husband. However, she is not considered fully part of her husband’s clan until she gives birth. This is even more of a problem for women originating outside Pajok, who may never be fully integrated into their husband’s clan, especially if they are not of Acholi origin. Further, an Acholi woman is first and foremost valued for her social and biological reproductive potential. It is her body’s reproductive capacities, her specifically gendered skills, and the power of her labour that are considered most vital to produce and reproduce Acholi families and Acholi society. However, in being a structural and conceptual outsider, she is simultaneously considered

dangerous, potentially a poisoner or a witch. This is especially so if she is yet to bear children and fulfil the potential of her social and biological productive power. The structural position women hold relates to a social group which is composed of, and thus comprises the always-foreign. I suggest that outsiders (like women and those others already discussed) are considered so inherently perilous because, in breaching, inverting, perverting, or otherwise crossing the boundaries and definitions which order the Acholi world, they strike right at the heart of the productive creation and maintenance of Acholi cosmological and sociocultural life. They destroy the bases of human sociality and as outsiders they defy, mix, or permeate the definitional and categorical imperatives which help to create and define the parameters of the human world. They are conceptually impure, classificatory disparate, and socioculturally dangerous. Indeed, they are forces of danger precisely because they cannot be fixed with certainty. They are cosmologically as well as categorically incongruent and therefore their motivations can never be known. Thus, not only inherently imbued with the potential for multitudinous insecurities their very existence and social presence actually generates these insecurities, almost as an essential quality of their very being. Similar themes emerge from the neighbouring Lugbara (Middleton 1960), where Allen and Storm (2012: 27) argue the most important function of the ojo (Lugbara female diviner) was ‘mediating that which was

‘‘outside’’… the social and moral order’. Indeed, I suggest that, despite the recent turn towards a Christian cosmological paradigm throughout contemporary Acholiland, many of the everyday as well as the more formal ritual activities continue to be oriented toward those acts and entities which have the potential to be both productive (in the case of kwaro) and hugely destructive (in the case of physical and ‘supernatural’ outsiders discussed throughout this article). As outsiders are considered to be the everyday manifestation of all cosmological and existential uncertainty, engagement with or cognisance of them, as evidenced in my fieldwork, was both a frequent and essential part of Acholi sociocultural life.

Allen, Tim, and Laura Storm. 2012. Quests for therapy in northern Uganda: healing at Laropi revisited. Journal of Eastern African Studies 6(1):22-46. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge. Girling, F.K.1960. The Acholi of Uganda. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Malandra, A. 1939. The ancestral shrine of the Acholi. Uganda Journal 7(1):27-43. Middleton, John. 1960. Lugbara religion: ritual and authority among an East African people. London: Oxford University Press. Porter, Holly E.. 2013. After Rape: Justice and Social Harmony in Northern Uganda, International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science. Seligman, C.G., and B.Z. Seligma1932. Pagan tribes of the Nilotic Sudan. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Rane Willerslev’s Soul Hunters (2007)

Tom Heath (October 2010)

[Editorial note by Rita Astuti: Tom was both an undergraduate student in the Department (2005-2008) and one of my MPhil/PhD students (2011-12). Tragically, he died on 24 October 2012. This review was the first piece he wrote for me and Harry Walker (his other supervisor) when he started the MPhil. He focused on Willerslev’s work because of his interest in animism and perspectivism. The main question he wanted to explore in his PhD was: To what extent is animism/ perspectivism a psychological reality (as opposed to a ‘mere’ product of the analytical/theoretical imagination)? The question stemmed from his extensive reading of cognitive science, philosophy and anthropology. I have slightly edited the text with a view to keeping the character of Tom’s writing, which was always sharp, witty and somewhat polemical.]

Does the cognitivist approach fail to take animism seriously? It comes as no surprise, therefore, that anthropology as an intellectual product of the Cartesian tradition has tended to see indigenous claims about the existence of nonhuman persons as a particular cultural construct, intensely intriguing and interesting perhaps, but without any foundation in reality (Willerslev 2007: 15, italics added). Willerslev argues that Cartesian assumptions have filtered down through the ages into anthropological theory, with the consequence that animism is not taken seriously, i.e. is ‘reduced’ to a false representation. The Cartesian assumptions at issue are two: (1) humans and animals are ontologically distinct (animals have only one substance (body) whereas humans have two

(body and mind)); (2) the world can only be presented to, or grasped by, the subject if it is first mentalised/cognised, that is, represented in the (subject’s) soul. The first (metaphysical) assumption renders animism false (a conceptual scheme which ‘subverts’ reality), while the second (epistemological) assumption renders it a representation or ‘an imposed mental design’ (as opposed to something which is ‘revealed through involved activity’ or has some ‘foundation in reality’). I do appreciate Willerslev’s central point regarding the pernicious influence of Cartesian metaphysical assumptions; the point being that animism is a non-dualistic ontology (it draws no distinction between nature, a realm of ‘object-animals’, and culture, a realm of ‘subjectpersons’) and therefore [ipso facto] it is not ‘taken seriously’ by Durkheimian/naturalist approaches, which take the object-person/nature-culture distinction for granted. Yet, I do not quite see how Willerslev’s

approach is going to solve the problem. His approach is to say: ‘Let’s reject the Cartesian tradition (and follow Heidegger’s lead)’. But this move away from French rationalism towards German romanticism is barely distinguishable from the (Durkheimian/naturalist) move away from animism towards Cartesian dualism. In both cases, the gravest of anthropological crimes is committed, to wit, ethnocentrism. In Willerslev’s case the crime is self-directed (he engages in a peculiar form of auto-ethnocentrism) but it is no less a crime for that (he probably gets away with it

because, at least for the time being, self-criticism is a moral virtue, while criticising others is dreadfully bad form). In the case of the Durkheimians and the naturalists the crime is the usual one – prioritising/privileging etic notions. In characterising Willerslev’s adoption of a Heideggerian epistemology as an instance of auto-ethnocentrism I am, of course, using decidedly polemical rhetoric – obviously we have to adopt one epistemology or other in order to do ‘theory’. I suppose my point is that instead of just saying that he is going

...the beauty of the cognitivist approach to animism is that it enables us to reserve, in an absolute kind of way, epistemic judgement.

”

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to use a phenomenological epistemology because he finds it (heuristically) useful, Willerslev argues (in a rather self-righteous manner) that adopting a Cartesian or ‘representationalist’ epistemology is somehow criminal. But it is not. It would only be criminal if it inevitably led to the ‘falsification’ of animism. But it does not. Why does it not? It does not because epistemology is not the same as metaphysics, that is to say, we can accept that the world has to be mentalised/cognised (before it can be grasped/experienced) without being Cartesian dualists, i.e. without subscribing to the relevant ontological dichotomies, mind vs. body, subject vs. object, nature vs. culture. We can, for example, argue – in a vaguely kind of Kantian way – that the world has to be mentally represented not because it is not of the mind, but because, without mental representation, it would be totally unintelligible (and thus un-navigable). Now, if it holds (and I think it is quite easy to see that it does) that ‘cognitivist’ assumptions and ontological dualism are logically independent, then there is potentially – i.e. theoretically – a way to give a ‘Durkheimian’/‘cognitivist’ account of animism without denigrating it as a bit of arbitrary foolishness (to borrow Bertrand Russell’s description of Leibniz’s monadology). However, in order to do so we have, I think, to make a fairly bold assumption (well, actually, we don’t, but let’s, for the sake of ‘drama’, pretend here that we do): animists are (or once were) Cartesians. We can see why this assumption

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is necessary by taking a brief look at Arhem’s Durkheimian/ cognitivist/Cartesian account of animism (as it exists amongst the Makuna of the Columbian Amazon). Arhem (2003) argues that ‘Makunian’ animism constitutes a ‘symbolic reflection’ or model of nature/animals based upon structures and dynamics internal to the social domain. Even from this brief and highly schematic account of his theory it is clear to see that it involves (or better presupposes) a non-animistic distinction between a social domain (in which persons and their relations are real) and a natural domain (in which persons and their relations are ‘metaphorical’). However, and this is the key point, this Cartesian distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (or animals as automata and humans as spiritual) is not postulated (or certainly needn’t be postulated) as a ‘transcendental’ metaphysical truth, but only as something which once was (or sometimes is) a psychological reality for the ‘native’. In other words, we can read Arhem’s theoretical account as explaining how the Makuna got from a Cartesian position to an animist position, rather than as explaining how they came to be arbitrarily foolish. To sum up: we can hang onto a representationalist view of knowledge – which to my mind is much more plausible than Willerslev’s phenomenological view – and take animism seriously (i.e. reserve epistemic judgement). But we can only do so if we imagine that animists are not (or have not always been) anti- or non-Cartesian.

In fact, this is not quite true. Things are even ‘better’ than that: a cognitivist account of animism does not – as I indicated earlier – even need to posit an original indigenous dualism (although Arhem does). It is easy to imagine a ‘representationalist’ theory of animism which finds, so to speak, that what needs to be explained is not animism (because it represents the natural/default mode of cognition/representation) but rather the Cartesian partitioning of the world into ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (or mechanical and rational ‘beings’). A brief interlude. Is there any evidence that the Yukaghir hunter refuses, some of the time, the non-dualistic ‘assumptions’ of animism? When Willerslev writes, ‘A non-dualistic perspective is also evident among the Yukaghirs’ he seems to have forgotten what he said a few pages earlier: The personhood of animals and things is… something that emerges in particular contexts… Outside these particular contexts, Yukaghirs do not necessarily see things as persons any more than we do, but instead live in a world of ordinary objects in the which the distinction between human subjects and nonhuman objects is much more readily drawn (Willerslev 2007: 8). A dramatic instance of objectsubject ready-drawing (taken from Chapter 4, Ideas of Species and Personhood):

…I asked Old Spiridon if the elk, bear, and reindeer were persons. At first he reflected a long while as if he did not really understand my question, then he looked extremely insulted and replied, ‘What do you take me for, a child! (Willerslev 20017: 75) Willerslev, of course, presents the temporal/contextual contingency of animistic (non-dualistic) thinking, as evidence for his (Heideggerian) thesis that, ‘[The] Personhood [of people and things] is…a potentiality of…their being-inthe-world, which may or may not be realised as a result of their position within a relational field of activity.’ After laying out this thesis (presumably with a straight face) Willerslev writes, ‘[It]explains what anthropologists since Tylor could not help noticing, namely that indigenous peoples do not endow all things with personhood all the time, but only ascribe personhood to certain things and only every so often.’ Leaving aside the neon-signed-fact that Willerslev’s phenomenological theory of personhood is profoundly (catastrophically?) counterintuitive, let us point out that the contingency of animism in no way constitutes positive evidence for the relevant thesis. In using the word ‘explains’ rather than a phrase such as ‘is capable of accounting for’, Willerslev comes dangerously close to ‘packaging’ the transience of animism as ‘good evidence’ for his Heideggerian claim(s) (when in fact all it does is leave open the possibility that his theoretical claims are not false). By page

118, Willerslev is confidently proclaiming that, ‘…in the world of the Yukaghirs, entities gain personhood by virtue of being practically bound up together within specific contexts of realworld engagement’, but he has provided (by this point in the book) no additional evidence beyond that which (much to its discredit!) does nothing more than refrain from falsifying his thesis. I suppose my point is this: If the contingency of ‘animistic thought’ supports Willerslev’s ‘relational theory of personhood’, then it equally well supports the ‘two-cognitive-maps’ thesis. Of course, to those living outside the lax epistemological universe of anthropology, it is apparent that the flicking-on-and-off of animism supports neither position. That Willerslev provides very little evidence for his ‘relational theory of personhood’ is bad enough, but the ‘problem’ is compounded, as they say, by the fact that a priori the theory is exceptionable. It is exceptionable because some of its implications are, to be frank, bordering on the ridiculous (they can only be imagined as obtaining in an otherworldly world). Take, for example, the implication that one member of the species Homo sapiens might (in the absence of an evil ideology) ‘present’ to another member of the species Homo sapiens, as an object. Back to the main issue: Does the cognitivist approach fail to take animism seriously? At this point Willerslev might retort by saying, ‘But your cognitivist epistemology is an ethnocentric imposition – hunter-gathers are less ‘Kantian’ than ‘Heideggerian’.’ (Just to reassure you that I’m not putting words into Willerslev’s mouth: For the Yukaghirs, however, animals and other nonhumans are conceived as persons, not because

personhood has been bestowed upon them by some kind of cognitive processing, but because they reveal themselves as such within relational contexts of real-life activities, such as hunting (Willerslev 2007: 19-20).) How is one to respond to this kind of argument? Firstly, one can point out that it is not for the Yukaghir hunter to decide how he gets his knowledge. He either gets it from ‘direct perceptual engagement with the lived-in world’ (the phenomenological view) or he doesn’t – and whatever he says one way or the other won’t make the slightest bit of difference. In other words, the epistemological question is a serious philosophical one and (ergo) it cannot be adequately answered by (self-righteous) deference to the ‘native’ (unless one has good reason to suppose that the ‘native’ is a very good philosopher). Secondly, one can point out that the evidence given in support of the claim that the Yukaghir hunter is a disciple of Heidegger is, in any event, pretty weak. If I say that I prefer ‘doing’ over ‘saying’ (Willersley 2007: 94) or that I think that you shouldn’t ‘trust’ information conveyed linguistically to the same extent that you ‘trust’ the information you get from your own engagement with the world (Willersley 2007: 159-165), I am hardly telling you that I am more ‘Heideggerian’ than ‘Kantian’ (or that I think that the acquisition of language closes down the possibility of ‘direct access to the world (Willersley 2007: 163)’). I am not even speaking (am I?) to the relevant issue, viz. Does the world have to be cognized before it can be experienced (or does ‘meaning already inhere in the relational properties of the subject’s practical engagement with the world’ (Willersley 2007: 23, italics added))? In his final chapter (chapter 9), Willerslev really goes off the rails, and makes clear that he does

not appreciate the distinction at issue. He writes: This book has been an attempt to break with this Cartesian legacy and provide an alternative starting point for the analysis of animism, one that follows the lead of the Yukaghirs… this has meant eradicating the ‘representationalist’ picture of human beings as subjects standing apart from a world of external objects about which they come to beliefs by projecting onto it some kind of ‘cognised’ system of mental representations. For the Yukaghirs, as we have seen, the basic state of human existence is not that of a contemplating subject making abstract assertions about the world, but of a being immersed from the beginning in active perceptual engagement with others, humans as well as nonhumans…(Willersle 2007: 184-185) But the distinction at issue is not that between ‘active perceptual engagement’ and ‘a contemplating subject making abstract assertions about the world’, but rather that between perceptual engagement as direct and perceptual engagement as always already mediated (by some ‘cognised system of mental representations’). To sum up: Willerslev does not properly appreciate the distinction at issue (or pretends not to); this leads him to interpret statements such as ‘I prefer engaging with the world rather than contemplating it’ as evidence for his claim that Yukaghirs do not think that the world has to be ‘cognised’ before it can be ‘grasped’ (note here that statement does not even look like evidence for the claim). Furthermore, in following ‘the [epistemological] lead of the

Yukaghirs’, Willerslev seems to subscribe to the absurd notion that if people say they get their beliefs about the world via x, then they do get their beliefs about the world via x. Arguments thus far: (1) A Cartesian/Kantian epistemology does not inevitably lead to the denigration of animism as false (this is because accepting the epistemology does not entail accepting the relevant [Cartesian] ontological dualisms); (2) The contingency of animistic thinking provides no better evidence for Willerslev’s thesis – personhood is not an essential/ intrinsic property of particular entities in the world, but is rather a mere ‘potentiality’ which may or may not be ‘revealed’ in experience – than it provides for a two-frames-of-mind cognitivist thesis; (3) Willerslev’s sententious claim to be following the Yukaghirs’ lead (in rejecting a representationalist epistemology) is evidentially weak. Moreover (and much more devastatingly), the strategy of ‘deferring to the native’ constitutes, much to its foolishness, nothing less than a denial of the philosophical nature of the epistemological question. Does the phenomenological approach really take animism seriously? I argued above that the beauty of the cognitivist approach to animism is that it enables us to reserve, in an absolute kind of way, epistemic judgement. Despite Willerslev’s protestations to the contrary, the phenomenological approach he adopts does not benefit from this much virtue (he thinks that it actually benefits from more virtue, by allowing us to regard Yukaghir animistic remarks as ‘the literal truth’ (Willerslev 2007: 18)). In fact, what it [the ‘phenomenological alternative’] inevitably does – by trying to find some ‘foundation in reality’/‘embodied experience’ for every indigenous belief – is (ironically) to present the ‘native’

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as somebody who is ‘all-thetime-slightly-wrong-abouteverything’. Let me illustrate with reference to Chapter 3, Body-Soul Dialectics, and Chapter 5, Animals as Persons. In Chapter 3, Willerslev argues that Yukaghir ideas about the soul and its relationship to the body are grounded in (even originate in) Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ (which is then conveniently posited not as a developmental stage but a ‘straight’ description of ‘the nature of selfhood and embodiment’). Willerslev writes: Lacan’s account of the ‘mirror stage’, although it cannot be applied directly, offers a potentially appropriate framework for coming to terms with the Yukaghirs’ ideas about a body-soul dialectic (Willerslev 2007: 66). Then later on: …it seems to me that what Lacan’s theory is really describing is the nature of selfhood and embodiment, not a moment in time (Willerslev 2007:72). The point I want to make here is that ‘coming to terms with the Yukaghirs’ ideas’ within the ‘framework’ of the ‘mirror stage’, logically involves first erecting/ privileging the ‘mirror stage’ (as the framework) and second trying to get ‘Yukaghirs’ ideas’ to ‘fit’ on it (or over it or in it). The

inevitable consequence of such a procedure is to reduce that which is supposed to ‘fit’ to a pale reflection of that which ‘supports it’. Of course, it might be possible to get Yukaghir ideas to perfectly reflect (or fit) the mirror stage (by interpreting them in a particular way), but if this were in fact done, then the mirror stage would have no ‘logical space’ in which to perform an explanatory role, and so would be redundant for theoretical purposes. In other words, if it could be shown that the two – Yukaghir ideas and the ‘mirror stage’ – perfectly reflect one another, then the ‘mirror stage’ (or, what the hell, Yukaghir ideas!) would become the object of theory – the thing to be explained or accounted for. In conclusion then: For a phenomenological account of an indigenous belief to have any explanatory power, it must construe that belief as a pale reflection of the truth (about the nature of selfhood and embodied experience). So much for Willerslev’s claim that Heidegger enables one to take animism seriously! I made the argument above in a rather analytical fashion, so let me now offer a concrete example to ‘seal the deal’. Lacan argues that in order to develop a sense of self the child has to first internalise an image (a reflection caught in a mirror) of him- or herself. ‘This [apparently] is because it is by identifying and incorporating

Is there any evidence that the Yukaghir hunter refuses, some of the time, the non-dualistic ‘assumptions’ of animism?

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the image of another, which in turn becomes the image of itself, that the subject begins to represent itself to itself as a separate being ’(Willerslev 2007: 67). Now, Willerslev relates this account of the ‘emergence of selfhood’ to the Yukaghir belief that the child’s body contains within it the soul of a dead relative. His point is that the Yukaghir child develops a sense of self in just the same way as Lacan’s theoretical (‘Western’) child, namely ‘by identifying and incorporating’ some alter. But note here the radical disjuncture between Lacan and the Yukaghirs: while Lacan’s account (which is said to describe the nature of embodiment and selfhood) involves the internalisation of an image, the Yukaghirs’ account makes reference to the inheritance of a metaphysical substance (i.e. the reincarnated soul of a kinsperson). If Lacan’s account of the ‘mirror stage’ really is an accurate description of the nature of embodiment and selfhood, then we cannot but conclude that Yukaghir ideas about the body-soul dialect constitute a sort of ‘mystical’ reflection of reality (or, perhaps better) a mere approximation of the truth. Another ‘concrete example’ (this time from Chapter 5): In Chapter 5, which in many ways seems to be the centrepiece of the monograph, Willerslev argues that when the Yukaghir hunter mimics an elk – in order to lure it out into the open so that it can be shot – he comes to experience that elk as a person with a point of view. (I don’t know enough about phenomenology to appraise the plausibility of this argument, but let us assume here that it is at least credible and indeed true). Willerslev writes: While the elk sees its body through the hunter’s act of mimicry – that is, it sees

its own species kind – the hunter sees the reflected image of his own body through the acts of the elk, mimicking his acts of mimicry. In other words, the hunter does not just see the elk walking toward him, but he also sees himself from the ‘outside’ as if he himself were the elk – that is, he adopts towards himself the same kind of perspective of the other (as subject) has of him (as object)…accordingly the hunters human identity comes to reside in his mimetic double rather than in himself [he is ‘dehumanized’]…Still the hunters experienced ‘humanization’ of elk is not complete. The elk’s body is perceived from the outside, meaning that it is external and somewhat alien to the hunter…what we are dealing with is a strange fusion or synthesis of me and not me into not not-me (Willerslev 2007: 98-100) We are back again once more with a theoretical account that portrays the Yukaghirs as believing what is in fact not quite true. While the Yukaghir hunter claims that, when he is out in the forest, elk are persons, Willerslev says that elk are not in reality persons (subjects) any more than they are animals (objects), but they are ‘constructed’ as subject-persons during (or by) the hunters mimetic hunting practices. In other words, Willerslev implies that just as the Yukaghirs posit an inherited metaphysical substance where they ought to be positing an internalised image, they posit animal personhood where they ought to be positing a phenomenological trick executed by an intelligent hunting practice. A general commentary on the speculative nature of the whole monograph (!)

Playing from the stands, spectator participation at Fulham FC Rebecca Fisher

t was apparent throughout my fieldwork that supporters did not just come to watch the matches passively, they too were participating in a performance through their singing, chanting and bodily actions. It made me consider, following Davies (1998: 142), the possibility of understanding the audience as a part of, rather than separate from the spectacle of the match itself. This reading opens up the possibility of understanding spectator participation as creative and spectacular, not just routinized and ‘ritualistic’. Craven Cottage, South West London, located along the bank of the Thames between the Putney and Hammersmith bridges, was my primary field site. On match days, throngs of supporters make their way through the adjacent Bishop’s Park in order to reach the ground. This combination of settings provides a picturesque setting for the stadium, “many Fulham supporters claim that Craven Cottage is the most attractive ground in Britain” (Spaaij 2006: 164). The majority of my observations were conducted in the Hammersmith End or the ‘Hammy’ End as it is frequently referred to by supporters. It is at the opposite end of the pitch from the section designated for away

supporters, although this does not prevent interactions between these different sets of fans. Those seated in the Hammersmith End tend to be regular match-goers and help to make this the noisiest section of the ground. Sitting in this crowd full of noise and activity, I was far more interested in watching their behaviour, indeed their ‘performance’ over the one taking place on the pitch. My observations took place across a number of matches and were guided by the types of participation outlined in Spradley’s Participant Observation (1980). Initially I engaged only in “passive participation” (1980: 59) in order to gain a broad overview of what was happening. During these early visits, I employed techniques suggested by DeWalt & DeWalt (2002) such as mapping, counting and listening. By my third visit, I wanted to “do what other people [were] doing, not merely to gain acceptance, but to more fully learn the cultural rules for behaviour” (Spradley, 1980: 60) and become an active participant. It was not long before I could join in with songs and know when to stand and sit, but I clearly did not have the same passion or emotional motivation to carry either the songs or my actions the same as those around me. In order to understand

more fully what was happening I conducted a number of interviews. Notable among these were those life stories I collected from two informants, Ash and Adam, which gave me an insight into the close relationships between supporters, players, the club and its officials. Their narratives shared common themes, in particular ideas surrounding escapism and family. These were easily identifiable through the repetition of key words and phrases during their narratives. Phrases such as “it’s a part of me” and “I felt like I was meant to be here” showed how being a Fulham supporter was a key part of my informant’s personal identities. For both men growing up football was an escape from other life events and seemed to have cemented a personal connection to the club over time, one which linked specific moments in their lives to what was happening to Fulham at the time. Ash discussed how football was a constant during his childhood, despite the major changes he was experiencing at home. The impact that those good moments had and the memories from them forged emotional investment in the club, so much so that spending a couple of hours every weekend singing, cheering the players on and wearing the club colours was all a part of

reciprocating what the club had done for them. Adam said he owed “a massive debt to the club” for the memories and sense of belonging it had given him. Of particular importance were the relationships he had created there. For Adam what most attracted him to the club was the sense of family, of ‘brotherhood’ which it had given and continued to give him. This family was non-biological, in the case of Ash however the sense of family he got from the club was intertwined with memories created at the club with this immediate biological family. He described how learning to be a fan was “a generational thing that’s passed down.” Ash took this point further in relation to learning how to sing and chant appropriately: “You’re taught songs – what to sing, what not to sing, what to do, the right way of going about things, you know...” Thus it seemed that people learnt how to participate through a process not dissimilar to the participant observation I myself was conducting. These life stories revealed the participation I observed to be indicative of motivations and feelings which went well beyond just having a good time. Participation in the form of chanting was a prominent form of

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From my first visit to Craven Cottage, the home ground of Fulham Football Club, I was intrigued by the dynamic between the spectators in the stands and the players performing on the field.

expression and communication for FC supporters, and was a central means through which supporters themselves entered the arena of spectacle and creativity over simply following in the footsteps of older family members or through copying leaned behaviour at the club. These chants far from being routinized, blindly followed or deafly sung acted as a vehicle for critical assessment on player performance, managerial decisions, even for self-deprecating humour directed against the club and by proxy themselves also (“we lose every week, we lose every week, you’re nothing special, we lose every week”). This is not however meant to deny the amount of support and positivity which defined both the chanting and the singing (examples include: “Come on Fulham”, “Come on you whites and “Oh when the whites go marching in”) throughout the matches more generally. Chants may express anger and annoyance when directed towards specific underperforming players. Justifications for this kind of shout centred on supporters not being fully satisfied with Fulham’s play and yet having paid the full cost of a season ticket. One match, Ash got particularly annoyed

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by Byran Ruiz, shouting “Come on Bryan, you lazy fucker”, “Run for it Bryan”. These chants show that chanting is often a means for supporters to communicate their grievances with the club and its management. Supportive communication and encouragement tended to be fairly predictable and scripted. It was mainly matches against rival clubs, special occasions which sparked more creative and humorous songs. Tom, one supporter, recounted how (after Fulham played Brentford away) one of the most popular chants that night was “Ross McCormack cost more than your ground”- a song designed to mock the Brentford stadium and assert Fulham as the financially superior club. Through chanting and being active participants supporters actively shape the game. Where participation was often borne out of a personal and emotional connection to the club, it was also borne out of active engagement with the ups and downs of the club; offering support and critique, spectators communicated what they liked and what they didn’t. My ethnographic study emphasised that supporters, playing from the

stands, were not just passive bystanders, indeed their behaviour possibly had more in common with the spectacle of the game itself. Following Davies (1998) I would argue that spectator participation is best understood as a spectacle. Despite observing a good majority of spectator participation which was‘ritual’ and formalised spectator behaviour remained a site for invention. Participation then was not just about the performance of duties and obligations, or even deference to a set of acculturated standards and norms, though it often could be. It had, I conclude something of the spectacle and ritual about it. When I reflect on this short period of fieldwork I am left with more questions than answers. The fact that the spectator behaviour I observed came from one particular area of the stands, and that my informants were overwhelmingly male leads me to question the universality of the spectator behaviour I observed. It was perhaps a drawback of relying on one gate-keeper to introduce me to different participants; this led to all my informants having very similar social make-up in terms of class and gender. I could perhaps have pursued other potential informants more

persistently and creatively. The men I spoke with were by far the most vocal group in the crowd, so whilst my study shows the active side of spectator engagement and participation, a different focus may yield further interesting and alternative forms of participation outside of the majoritively male, young and vocal group who were my main informants.

Davies, C. 1998. ‘A oes heddwch?’ Contesting meanings and identities in the Welsh National Eisteddfod. In F. Hughes-Freeland. Ritual, Performance, Media. London: Routledge. Ch.7. DeWalt, K. & DeWalt, B. 2002. Participant Observation: Becoming an Observer. Oxford: Alta Mira Press. Spaaij, R. 2006. Understanding Football Hooliganism: A Comparison of Six Western European Football Clubs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Spradley, James. 2005. Participant Observation. Ohio: Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Overcoming shame: ‘dirt’, ‘dirty Work’ and the ‘supermarketisation’ of a Soho sex shop Edward Bayes

Walking through Soho it is easy to forget its reputation as a historical and global nexus of commercial sex.

ince the 1980s, Westminster County Council has actively tried to “clean up” its seedy image through the use of laws and regulations, turning the area into a fashionable entertainment district. Brewer Street however, is a reminder of how Soho used to be. Neon signs advertising ‘DANCING’ and ‘XXX SHOWS’ illuminate Victorian archways and dark alleys. Simply Pleasure, although it has changed hands over the years, is one of the oldest sex establishments in the area. Over eight weeks in late 2013, I carried out fieldwork in Simply Pleasure, a licensed sex shop on Brewer Street, Soho. I drew on Douglas’s (1966) notion of “dirt” as “matter out of place” (ibid: 36) to examine how staff members and customers produce and manage boundaries between dirt and cleanliness. The dirt associated with Simply Pleasure manifests itself in shame and embarrassment in customers. As a result, staff members employ a number of strategies to overcome this shame, not just to increase sales figures, but also to deal with the “physical, moral and social taint[s]” that are projected onto their job, rendering it “dirty

work” (Hughes 1951: 319, 1958). Through “supermarketisation”, the application of supermarket principles to the management of sex shops, staff members manage to overcome these taints by creating a “clean ambience”. Following Douglas’s (1966) claims that societies equate symbolic notions of dirtiness and cleanliness with moral beliefs about goodness and badness (Ashforth and Kreiner 1999: 416), my observations suggest that in British society, sex shops are symbolically dirty. Staff members used the terms “perverse” and “transgressive” to describe public opinion about sex shops. Perhaps this is due to the fact that in sex shops, customers’ private sexual desires are made public. In a conversation about British attitudes towards sex, Jane, a shop worker argued that this shame and embarrassment stems from British cultural norms. She argued that the only

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Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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time you really hear about sex on the news is if it’s something bad, like perverts, paedophiles, rapists, that sort of thing... As a structuralist, Douglas would link such ideas to a broader symbolic system of defilement where “dirt” as a “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966: 36) symbolises a violation of the social and cultural order. She argues that boundaries are important in defining and separating dirt from the rest of society in order to maintain structural stability. The same is true of Simply Pleasure where boundaries are drawn physically and symbolically, separating the clean outside of the shop from the dirty inside. How this is achieved has a lot to do with official legislation and specific prescriptions on what can and cannot be displayed to passersby looking from the outside in. Such prescriptive legislation1 requires “sex establishments” selling a “significant degree” of “sex articles” to obscure the shop contents from general view through the use of frosted windows. The symbolic boundary may be further observed around the shop in the contrasting behaviour between customers entering Simply Pleasure and other shops in the area. Customers often exhibited signs of embarrassment entering Simply Pleasure. These included looking both ways before entering and exiting,

approaching the shop from the opposite side of the road and fiddling with props such as bags or headphones. I compared this behaviour to what was the norm for customers entering and exiting a nearby café. Customers often approached it in groups of three or more, something rarely seen in the case of Simply Pleasure. If they approached the café on their own, their body language was relaxed; most held their arms loosely by their side and looked straight ahead as they entered. An important aspect of the ”physical, moral and social taint[s]” which produce the ’transgressive’ atmosphere in and around Simply Pleasure is the way in which those taints come to be associated with staff members, ultimately rendering their work ”dirty work” (Hughes 1951: 319, 1958). I would argue that their work is tainted physically since many of the products that staff members interact with in the shop are associated with sexual intimacy and because the shop is thought of as being situated in a materially ’unclean’ area. Social and moral taints however are harder to identify. They manifest in the way customers act towards staff members and how staff members speak about their work. It is likely that Soho’s association with prostitution feeds into customers’

Schedule 3, Section 4(1)(a) of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982

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staff members with prostitution or the other “social taints” synonymous with Soho.

Some people get arsey … [they] say things like “you’re a woman, you shouldn’t be working here” … often they just ignore you.

presumptions about staff members. Two shop-workers, Maddy and Lianne detailed how male customers often discriminate against female staff members by either suggesting that they are sex workers, or avoiding them completely: Two guys approached me and one of them was really close to me, he was like, “is there a wanking booth here, is there a wanking booth?”, “No, we‘re not that kind of store sorry” I said, then he followed me round the shop and was like “babes, how much are you?” (Maddy) Some people get arsey … [they] say things like “you’re a woman, you shouldn’t be working here” … often they just ignore you. (Lianne) Although Jane, the manager, has held her current position for over three years, she has yet to tell her father since she worries he will judge her. This shame or awkwardness mirrored my own experience, I too felt unable to tell certain family members about my research topic. In this way, like Tyler (2012), I found that “researching ‘dirty work’ becomes dirty work in itself” (ibid: 74). However rather than having low occupational self-esteem as a result of constant reminders they are performing ‘dirty work’, I observed that staff members

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Lianne

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drew on, following Ashforth and Kreiner (1999: 427) what may be termed ”occupational ideology”. Staff members thus drew a “psychological boundary” (ibid: 419) around the shop through strategies similar to what Douglas (1966) calls “pollution rituals”. These included “reframing” their job as an ’advice service’ and ”recalibrating”; using a method of differentiation to create and find value (Ashforth and Kreiner 1999: 423). Another strategy staff members use to overcome these taints is “supermarketisation”, described by staff members as the application of “supermarket principles” to sales-service work in the shop. They argued that the commercial success of Ann Summers2 as well as a recent proliferation in ‘cliterature’3, such as E. L. James’s (2011) Fifty Shades of Grey has normalised sex toys in the public imagination. As such, they maintain that the “supermarketisation” of Simply Pleasure has contributed towards, and been implicated in, a broader shift in societal attitudes about sex and sex shops. These “supermarket principles” consist of creating what Jane calls a “clean ambiance” free from the physical taints she observed in other sex shops such as dark lighting, grumpy staff members and a bad smell. She simultaneously discouraged overtly sexualised presentations of femininity that would associate

I would argue however that there are limits to applying “supermarket principles” to Simply Pleasure. The shop front is obscured by frosted glass and thus they cannot operate an open-door policy like Ann Summers. And although staff members have observed that similar customers can found in both shops, staff members constantly remarked that in Simply Pleasure customers were much harder to approach. Shop workers explained how barriers need to be broken down– people need to be enabled to feel comfortable, it’s almost like talking to your doctor. Because of this, “supermarket principles” have to be adapted somewhat. Humour may be used as a strategy to ease the tension associated with the ‘transgressive’ nature of the shop though I would say that it is the customers, not the staff, who benefit the most from these adaptive and strategic ‘supermarket’ principles. For attitudes to sex shop work as ‘dirty work’ to really change however, it is the boundary separating dirt and cleanliness at the level of society which needs to change first. Such changes may help to ease the tensions and other associated difficulties with working in the shop, from potential harassment to familial embarrassment. However it is worth considering that Douglas’s categorical separation between dirt and cleanliness may remain pertinent, as new notions of ‘dirt’ and ‘cleanliness’ continue to develop and re-assert themselves, in spite of macro-level societal change that is. Staff members

at Simply Pleasure for their part, actively work towards producing and investing in an environment in which the “taints” discussed throughout this article no longer affect their work. To this end I would argue that we may need to move away from a rigidly strucuralist analysis to a more fine-grained ethnographic one in order to reveal those strategies and changes on the micro-level in sex shops like Simply Pleasure. This may be recognised as being especially important in the case of sex shop work which, by its very nature, resists public discussion and display – this small-scale study is hopefully a fruitful starting point in that direction.

Ashforth, B. and Kreiner, G. 1999. “How Can You Do It?”: Dirty Work and the Challenge of Constructing a Positive Identity. The Academy of Management Review 24(3):413-434. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge and Keegan Paul. Hughes, E. C. 1951. Work and the self, in Social psychology at the crossroads, ed J. H. Rohrer and M. Sherif, 313-323. New York: Harper & Brothers. ———. 1958. Men and Their Work. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. James, E. L. 2011. Fifty Shades of Grey. Vintage Books. Tyler, M. 2012. ‘Glamour Girls, Macho Men and Everything in Between’: Un/doing Gender and Dirty Work in Soho’s Sex Shops’, in Dirty Work Concepts and Identities, ed R. Simpson, N. Slutskaya, P. Lewis and H. Hopfl, 65-90. Palgrave Connect.

A high street chain specialising in sex toys and lingerie Literature with pornographic elements

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Walking with skateboarders, the Southbank struggle Lucy Ellen-Trotter Every weekend, especially in the late afternoons between two and six o’clock, the mundane architectural structures of Southbank skatepark are brought to life by a group of approximately thirty skateboarders.1

ostly male, their ages range, from around eighteen to thirty, with the majority being somewhere in between these two figures. Queuing against the eclectic graffiti-covered wall, they engage in idle conversation for a few minutes at a time before their boards and bodies become one fluid movement as they take turns to skate across the space, paying little, if any, attention to the crowd of photographers, onlookers and tourists watching their unintended performance. Their actions, “collectively orchestrated without…a conductor” (Bourdieu 1990:53) fill the air with echoes of rhythmic clicking, whirring and cheering; the sound of skateboard wheels against concrete is punctuated with constant encouragement from other skateboarders. In 2013, development plans were proposed by

the Southbank centre in collaboration with Lambeth council to replace this skatepark with cafés, restaurants and retail shops. The idea was to relocate local skateboarders to a new, bigger, better-lit, and more technically challenging purpose built skatepark just a hundred meters away under the Hungerford Bridge (see Lambeth Council 2014; The Guardian 2013). However, the Southbank skateboarders politically mobilised themselves to oppose these plans, leading the Southbank centre and Lambeth council to delay their proposal. It was against this backdrop that an intriguing ethnographic puzzle arose. Street skaters who appropriate public space without permission have, throughout history, been evicted in various ways without ever being offered an alternative space (Borden 2001; Brooke 1999). An offer of a new multimillion pound skatepark was “unlike any other offer that [has] been made to skateboarders anywhere else in the world” (Evening Standard 2013). Why, then, were the Southbank skaters refusing to move? Following Hammersley and Atkinson’s (2007: 41) statement that “it may be necessary to go outside of the setting to collect

information on important aspects of it”, the material presented here is based on three months of participant observation in two street skating parks: Clapham Common and Southbank (cf. Spradley 2005). I also became a member of UCL skate society, a group of twenty eight male students (though by now, I believe they more women in the society) who skate weekly on Wednesday afternoons in non-street skateparks in London. Finally, I conducted hour long semi-structured informal interviews with a number of informants from all three locations in cafés, bars, and within the skateparks themselves (cf. Briggs 1986; Spradley 1979; Rubin & Rubin 2005).

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...rhythmic clicking, whirring and cheering; the sound of skateboard wheels against concrete is punctuated with constant encouragement from other skateboarders.

The piece here is a modified version of the longer paper, which I am happy to circulate upon request (l.e.trotter@lse.ac.uk) Defined by Shibaz, who skates at Clapham Common as “a girl who can’t skate who hangs round at skate-parks to pick up guys”

1 2

I originally envisaged that gaining access to the field-site would be problematic given my position as a female non-skater in this male-dominated and overtly heterosexual context (Kelly et al 2008; Yochim 2010; Borden 2001; Beal & Wilson 2004; McRobbie & Garber 1975). To an extent, the skateboarders tended to use the tactics of flirtatious joking as a way to include me whilst maintaining a very clear gender boundary (see also Yochim 2010; Leblanc 1999; Borden 2001). During my first visit to Southbank, this was prominent by example, when I was referred to as a “pretty lady who wants to talk to us about culture”. Despite being referred to as a “ramp tramp”2 on more than one occasion, my increasing awareness of what were called the “unspoken rules of skateboarding” in combination with an ability to laugh at myself I eventually developed rapport, trust and respect with my informants. On the whole reactions to my presence were positive. One skateboarder in Clapham Common skate-park, for example, proclaimed to me that “it’s wicked that skating’s finally getting recognition”. On one particular September

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afternoon in 2013, Henry, a freelance film-maker from South London who has skated at Southbank for nearly fourteen years took a rare break from skateboarding to sit with me on his skateboard on a concrete wall, overlooking what he referred to as the “mecca for skateboarders”. Pulling off his red beanie hat, he wiped the sweat from his brow, popped open a can of Fosters beer, took a minute to catch his breath and turned to me with a wide grin. Speaking with an

engaging combination of anger and passion, detectable in the electric spark in his eyes, the emphatic tone of his voice and the enthusiastic waving of his arms, he explained his personal opposition to the current development plans at Southbank, pausing only momentarily to deftly roll a thin cigarette; “If we get moved…it’s going to take away the ethos of what skating is about…it’s about freedom of expression and adapting to the environment […] skate-park skating causes competition […] who can skate the best who can do the most tricks… people who skate in skateparks can’t even navigate

the urban world, they can’t even skate along the road… that’s the whole point of skateboarding” […] “[the new skatepark is] gunna become a middle class place…mummy goes to the coffee shop for a latte and drops off her kid in the skate-park… (puts on false feminine voice) ‘my child’s engaging with the urban

environment’… (returns to normal voice) fuck that bullshit man…” (Henry, in conversation, his emphasis) This “ethos” of street skating as a working-class, egalitarian space, is intrinsically connected to the creative freedom of street skating. The fact that each skateboarder relates to the urban environment in a unique way renders the skateboarders incomparable, counteracting any hints of competition or hierarchy. Furthermore, the creativity of street skating is a crucial component of the skateboarders’ maintenance of their “reflexive subculture” (Leblanc 1999: 163); a subculture which critiques the capitalist world and class system

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If we get moved…it’s going to take away the ethos of what skating is about…it’s about freedom of expression and adapting to the environment

(cf. McRobbie 1994). Southbank was represented to me several times as being, in Henry’s words, “the only place in London where the human spirit survives”. Street skaters overturn the symbols of the city in a way that creates a mockery of the current system. A handrail, in its appropriation by a skateboarder who ollies3 onto it and slides down it back onto the ground, for example, changes from being a symbol of safety to resemble the very opposite; a risk (Borden 2001). The capacity for doing this was generally referred to by street skaters in both Clapham Common and Southbank skate-parks as having “the skaters’ eye”. What they meant by this is that they view London through a particular lens. Where one passer-by might see concrete slabs of pavement, skateboarders see the potential for ollies. Skateboarders look beyond the seemingly un-functional banks, to see opportunities for 180° kick-turns4. However, the critique posed by street skaters is more complex than it might at first seem. It is important to keep in mind that the Southbank skaters, especially those who are prominent members of the campaign to save the skatepark,

Henry

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in reality occupy a liminal space between critiquing and accepting dominant society in two specific ways (see also Yochim 2010). Not only do they implicitly perpetuate evolutionist ideology, but also they have incorporated capitalist marketing strategies into their campaign. Firstly, although the boys’ representations of street-skating and the Southbank skate-park as rare spaces in the city where distinctions based on money or class are irrelevant hold an important grain of critique about central London, I found their comments with regard to the “freedom” that street skating offers curious. Their explicit arguments that street skating represents the naked “human spirit” without the constraints of capitalism are problematically reminiscent of Rousseau’s (1967) “noble savage”. Their representation not only reproduces the dominant conception of a linear progression of history, but further suggests that life before capitalism was happier and easier, an idea undermined by anthropological literature on the same subject (see, for example, Harris 2007). Secondly, they have incorporated capitalist marketing strategies into what otherwise

3 The skateboarder kicks the back of his skateboard, causing the front of the skateboard to pop up into the air, which enables him or her to move up onto a kerb, for example. 4 The skateboarder skates up a bank then lifts the front wheels, using the back wheels to rotate the skateboard back onto the bank.

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[press release], 9 September, accessed on 31 October 2013, available at < http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/ukengland-london-24022025

To present the Southbank skateboarders with a brand new purpose built skatepark was an insult to their entire ethos and was not an appropriate gift in return for privatising their public space.

remains an anti-capitalist critique. Their attempts to raise money for their campaign involve selling t-shirts, hats, and badges with the words “Long Live Southbank” printed on them.. Thus in attempting to be anti-capitalist, they are in some ways advancing the capitalist project. Ultimately however, what has always been clear to me in this debate is that the new development plans were drawn up based on stereotypes of skateboarders as lazy and politically un-active; given that the skateboarders were not consulted before the plans to take over their space were publicised and that the plans were rooted in the assumption that skateboarders form a homogenous group. In fact, skateboarders fall into two broad groups – street skaters vis-à-vis skatepark skaters. Street skating is based on appropriating a public space without permission, and is a style which promotes freedom and creativity and often gives rise to egalitarian social relations in a working-class space. The “anarchist tendencies” (Borden 2001: 132) of street skating are central in their maintenance of their quite profound though

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liminal critique of capitalism and the class system. This stands in contrast to skating in a purpose built skatepark which generates hierarchical or competitive relations between its middle-class frequenters. The biggest fear of the Southbank skateboarders, then, is that moving to a new purpose built skatepark would engender just the types of social relations and class distinctions that street skating succeeds in avoiding. On my first visit to Southbank, on a Friday evening in September, upon asking a skateboarder how he felt about the new skatepark plans, he looked at me and with great conviction, simply stated, “we’re not fucking moving”. Following the completion of this project, the Southbank skaters have successfully won their fight to keep the space. I, for one, am not in the least bit surprised. To present the Southbank skateboarders with a brand new purpose built skatepark was an insult to their entire ethos, and was never going to be an appropriate ‘gift’ in return for privatising the public space they had established such an ethos on.

BBC News, 2013, Southbank development: designs for new skatepark released,

Beal, B & Wilson, C, 2004, “Chicks dig scars: commercialisation and the transformations of skateboarders’ identities”, in Wheaton, B, (ed.), Understanding lifestyle sports: consumption, identity and performance, New York: Routledge, pp. 31-54 Borden, I, 2001, Skateboarding, space and the city: architecture and the body, Oxford: Berg Bourdieu, P, 1990, “Structures, Habitus, Practices”, in Bourdieu, P, The logic of practice, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 52-65 Briggs, C, 1986, “Interview techniques vis-à-vis native metacommunicative repertoires; or, on the analysis of communicative blunders”, in Briggs, C, Learning how to ask, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39-60 Brooke, M, 1999, The concrete wave: the history of skateboarding, Toronto: Warwick Publishing Inc. Hammersley, M, & Atkinson, P, 2007, “Research design: problems, cases and samples”, in Ethnography: principles in practice, Third Edition, pp. 20-40 Harris, O, 2007, “Chapter 6 – what makes people work?”, in Astuti, R. et al (eds.), Questions of anthropology, Oxford; New York: Berghahn, pp. 137-167

Kelly, D.M et al 2008, “Chapter 6: you can break so many rules: the identity work and play of becoming skater girls”, in Giardina, M.D & Donnelly, M.K, (eds.), Youth culture and sport: identity, power and politics, New York: Routledge, pp. 113-126 Lambeth council 2014, Application summary, [development plans], accessed on 7 January 2014, available at <http:// planning.lambeth.gov. uk/online-applications/ applicationDetails.do?active Tab=summary&keyVal=MM U2FHBO03000> Leblanc, L, 1999, Pretty in punk: girls’ gender resistance in a boys’ subculture, New Brunswick, New Jersey & London: Rutgers University Press McRobbie, A, & Garber, J, 1975, “Girls and subcultures: an exploration”, in Hall, S, & Jefferson, T, (1975), Resistance through rituals: youth subcultures in post-war Britain, London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, pp. 209 –222 Rubin & Rubin 2005, “Assembling the parts: structuring a qualitative interview”, in their Qualitative interviewing: learning how to listen, pp. 145-167 Spradley, J, 1979, The ethnographic interview, Wadsworth Cengage Learning Spradley, J, 2005, Participant Observation, Holt Yochim, E.C, 2010, Skate life: re-imagining white masculinity, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press

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Interview with David Graeber Sam Farrell

t is somewhat of an oddity for an anthropologist to reach the status of a popular intellectual – to write bestselling books, to appear regularly in mainstream media, and to stand at the forefront of controversy and debate. Yet Professor David Graeber, a recent addition to the Department, has gradually carved out a niche in this world. Conducting fieldwork in rural Madagascar from 1989 to 1991 under the supervision of Marshall Sahlins, Graeber established himself as an anthropologist of considerable proficiency, going on to teach at Yale University in the late 90s. It was in the post-financial crash era, with widespread economic insecurity, financial debt and the breakdown of enthusiasm for electoral politics, that Graeber was propelled into the public discourse. He is widely cited by journalists as one of the co-founders of the occupy movement, and often treated as its spokesperson. A role only furthered by the publication of his international bestseller Debt: The First 5000 Years (2007), he is now a first port of call in many public discussions of radical politics and heterodox economics. His time at Yale came to an end in 2005 under controversial circumstances. Eventually David settled in London teaching at Goldsmiths University from 2008 before moving to the LSE in 2014. I sat down with Graeber to discuss his life and work. What emerged was a portrait of a man deeply committed to human freedom. Whether it be in the revolutionary fervour of the Spanish civil war, the disregarded communities of rural Madagascar or the popular assemblies of the alterglobalisation movement, the places and events that colour Graeber’s consciousness speak to the capacity of individuals to organise their lives outside the purview and control of states or bureaucrats, whether they be left or right, progressive or conservative.

WHEN AND HOW DID YOU FIRST DISCOVER ANTHROPOLOGY AND HOW DOES THAT INITIAL DISCOVERY RELATE TO THE RESEARCH YOU PURSUED LATER? Well, actually there were a lot of anthropology books around

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me when I was growing up. My parents were not academics at all they were working-class intellectual types, my mum worked in factories at different points, my father worked in printing as a plate stripper, but they were very political. It’s interesting, I noticed when I was going through their books

that there were almost no books critiquing the world or capitalism, I think they had this copy of Capital and a couple of things like that you have to have lying around, but other than that what they mainly had was history, anthropology and science fiction books. So basically they knew the world

was bad, they just wanted to think about something else, whether removed in time, space or what have you. So I grew up surrounded by this sort of thing and then my first real sort of fascination with something anthropological was when I was around 11 or 12. I had a school presentation

about Egyptian hieroglyphics, it was interesting but someone had already figured those out – I wondered if were any hieroglyphics that hadn’t been figured out yet? Maya hieroglyphics! I got really into Maya hieroglyphics. In fact I became so fascinated by them that I eventually came up with some ideas on how to decipher them which I sent to some scholars at Harvard. They replied to tell me that this had already been published, but when I told them I was 13 they became very excited. They even arranged for me to go to this boarding school to be groomed as a Maya hieroglyphics guy, but of course at 15 I rebelled and moved into something else instead, but that was the original connection.

YOU HAVE DONE FIELDWORK IN MADAGASCAR. WHAT DID YOU FOCUS ON AND WHAT WAS THE RESEARCH ABOUT? I guess you could say it was about politics and magic. I was interested in historical anthropology and finding a place where we had enough records of what was going on 100 years ago that you could look at how the past changes, and how history becomes mythologised and remembered in different ways by different people for different purposes. The part of Madagascar I was in, the northern part of the great plateau (in the centre) is a very literate society and there are lots of records going back all the way to the 19th century. So I did a project where you could take a village and actually go into the archives, find out everything that had been going on 100 to 200 years ago and then go back again and see what people thought was going on – what they remembered and what they

didn’t. Basically how the past changed, that was my original idea. But, more than anything else it came to all be about slavery. It’s a part of Madagascar where a quarter to a third of the population descended from people who were slaves in the 19th century. The village was divided between a noble clan and descendants of their former slaves, who were coexisting in a community where the state had basically vanished police just wouldn’t come to the countryside. So you have these people who imagine their historical relations ¬¬as utterly based on state power suddenly trying to deal with one another in a situation where that simply no longer exists. All sorts of interesting things were happening, for one thing the descendants of the slaves had managed to convince the nobles that they controlled the weather, everybody was using magic, and they were basically fighting through every means possible except for physically fighting. But it was a fascinating case for political anthropology for that reason.

YOU HAVE WRITTEN A LOT ABOUT ANARCHISM, WHAT DOES ANARCHISM MEAN TO YOU? To me anarchism means the belief that it would be possible to have a society which is not based on forced bureaucracies of systematic coercion.

AND DID YOUR RESEARCH IN MADAGASCAR INFORM THAT VIEW? Well interestingly enough I didn’t even realize right away that I was living in the middle of such

a situation. It’s ironic. My father fought in the Spanish civil war, in the International Brigades, he was in Barcelona where anarchist principles were put into practice and I always say most people don’t think anarchism is a bad idea – they think it’s insane! They think sure, it would be lovely, but people aren’t capable of that. But if you know they are, if you’ve seen it happen then there is really no reason for it not to be. So even though my father never called himself an anarchist I didn’t grow up in an environment where it was considered nuts. One thing that is really interesting in this regard is that if you ask the average person what would happen without the law they would say everybody would end up killing each other. There would be chaos and violence. But this statement can be empirically tested. There are places where the police just went away and that didn’t happen, there are occasional cases where state authority breaks down and people are already killing each other, like Somalia where they already had a civil war, but in places like Madagascar, people carried on more or less like they had before; certain things become much more difficult like charging interest on loans or wage labour(which basically vanished) but to a large a degree it was surprising how little difference it made.

SOME SCHOLARS, LIKE THE ANTHROPOLOGIST BRIAN MORRIS, HAVE CLAIMED THAT THERE IS AN AFFINITY BETWEEN ANARCHISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY, DO YOU SEE ANY CONNECTION? Traditionally there has been an obvious affinity in the sense that

the people who anthropologists tend to study actually exist in stateless societies. If you go back in history even someone like Radcliffe-brown, called ‘anarchy Brown’ in college, who became the most pompous aristocratic figure possible, with a cloak and a monocle, was essentially theorizing about how we can maintain social order in the absence of top-down bureaucracies of control. So in a certain way there is always going to be an affinity, because the historical record of how people actually managed stateless societies has largely fallen into the hands of anthropologists.

SO HOW DO RECONCILE YOUR POLITICS WITH YOUR CAREER? As I said I come from a political family so I always considered myself somewhat political. During the 80s I occasionally tried to get involved in political projects but never really found anything I liked. In Madagascar I had stumbled into this area where people were in a certain sense living outside the state, but I came back and for a long time I was really just an academic. The key point for me came when I was teaching at Yale. I remember this quite well, I was teaching a course called ‘Power, Violence and Cosmology’ and had just given the last lecture. I stepped out of class and saw a newspaper box that read “martial law declared in Seattle’, and I discovered what was going on in late November 1999 with the WTO, and like most people I had no idea because the media had not been covering it at all. So I did some research and realised that the kind of large social movement I had always wished

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existed had materialised when I wasn’t paying attention. So my first thought was cool! And I didn’t see any contradiction between doing that and operating within universities, but my university seemed to mind. YOU LOST YOUR TENURE AT YALE… I should clarify that nobody gets tenure at Yale, it’s very unlikely. I never thought I would get tenure anyway, so I thought well this is liberating – if I’m not going to get tenure anyway why be apolitical. So it wasn’t a tenure case, they cut me off in this very irregular fashion before I could even come up for tenure. But then they told everybody that it was about tenure so as to make me seem unreasonable. AND DO YOU THINK YOUR ACTIVISM PLAYED A PART? Well, all I can say is I had a year off, a sabbatical year – I said I was going to do research on direct action and anarchism and was occasionally quoted as a spokesperson for these groups in the press. When I came back to Yale I didn’t expect a welcome back, the senior faculty are not nice, warm friendly people but I thought a hello wouldn’t go amiss. But these guys would walk by me like I wasn’t there and they refused to even acknowledge my existence. I couldn’t have done anything to personally offend them because I wasn’t there, so I figured it must have been the politics. NOW YOU’RE AT LSE ARE THERE ANY SPECIFIC POLITICAL ISSUES THAT YOU’RE ENGAGED IN? I’ve been doing a lot of things, in Michaelmas term I got thrown

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into this Kurdish stuff. I’m not a student of Kurdish beliefs, I don’t really know anything about this, but they have adopted me. Someone said to me, ‘oh yeah, they’ve been reading Debt in the Quandil Mountains’. So I’ve been in contact with all these people and was well placed to get involved when that became a story. It’s been quite successful and we’ve really turned it around with appeals to internationalism and socialism.

IT SEEMS AS IF THE MEDIA AND THE POLITICAL CLASS HAVE NOT GRASPED JUST HOW DISILLUSIONED PEOPLE – ESPECIALLY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE WITH THE VERY IDEA OF THE STATE… I think that’s right. Historically 2011 is going to be remembered as a break in that regard because as Wallerstein said, all revolutions are world revolutions. Some of them like the French revolution and the Russian revolution seemed to happen in one place but the ramifications affect everyone, and then you have the ones in 1848, 1968 and 2011 where power is not seized directly but it doesn’t matter because it transforms the idea of what politics is. And I think that’s what has happened, a transformation of a basic idea of what it is to be a democratic movement. There seems to be an understanding now that the state apparatus is ultimately aligned with global capitalism and there’s no way to change that. There’s a planetary bureaucracy that is public and private, equally composed of things like the IMF, and for that matter the EU, the WTO, all these giant bureaucratic organisations and things like Goldman Sachs. They are all the same thing, and

ultimately they are the people running things so it doesn’t matter who you vote for. These people can only be pressured from the outside but you have to create that outside, so that’s what we’re doing by occupying things, like what happened in Hong Kong.

WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE TIME ARTICLE ON HONG KONG OCCUPY WHICH DESCRIBED IT AS ‘PURE ANARCHISM’? Yeah, they used that term. It might actually seem like it’s completely opposite because they are actually calling for representative democracy but ultimately what they say, if you go and talk to people in Hong Kong, is that the formal government is ultimately controlled by a very small number of very rich people who are using it to make more money. This is basically the same point we were making when we made up the phrase “the 1% and 99%”. It’s not really about class it’s about class power, there are these people who can take their wealth and turn it into political power, and use the political system to make more wealth.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE LSE’S RELATIONSHIP TO FINANCE AND WHAT INFLUENCED YOUR DECISION TO COME HERE? When I was at Yale I think what really upset them about me is that I was using the Yale name to legitimate ideas that would otherwise have been considered insane. Here at the LSE they told me it was okay, so I thought, alright, why not! I think that the LSE is very much on the nexus of

reproducing all these things we are campaigning against, that is true. It’s funny it reminds me, I did my undergraduate at a place called Purchase, a lot like Goldsmiths University, a kooky radical arts school. And then I went to the University of Chicago for graduate study, which is kind of like the LSE. In both places there’s this evil right-wing economics department and an anthropology department as the defiant internal opposition undermining all the premises of their ideas. You have to get a job somehow and I’ve effectively been exiled from the United States, I couldn’t even get anyone to look at me.

WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS? HAVE THEY BEEN PUT UNDER PRESSURE? It’s difficult to say. The principle of Ockham’s razor says the simplest explanation is always the most preferable, I guess the simplest explanation is that the students protested on my behalf when I was fired from Yale. I later realized in retrospect that if students protested on my behalf, which wasn’t my idea, then people say “oh no, you’ll turn our students against us, he’s really a rabble-rouser”. So it could have been something like that, but it kind of makes it hard to understand why it was that people everywhere else in the world wanted to hire me, but it was only in America that no one would hire me, so something weird was going on. There were other people who had very similar things happen to them, suddenly blacklisted, so I don’t know. Whether something more was going on we’ll have to wait some decades, but in a way I think it’s very nice that there is a major institution that is willing to give me a legitimate platform.

Academic responsibility, free education and Open Book

As university education is increasingly drawn into the spectre of marketisation and elitism, some educational projects like Open Book, with the help of supportive academics are actively challenging the status quo.

n Wednesdays as the Seligman librarians clear away the weekly tea party and the Social Anthropology Department at the LSE opens its doors to individuals who have likely never set foot in a HE institution before. Open Book started at Goldsmiths University 10 years ago and now has a significant presence in several universities across London. Through Open Book the department at LSE provides free weekly drop-in classes to underprivileged adults. It is an organisation which works to lend a hand to socially excluded people through the provision of free education. In the last year over 30 members of staff from

across departments at the LSE have signed up to teach two hour classes on a Wednesday afternoon. For two hours, people with significant socio-economic struggles to overcome gather to discuss and debate over tea and coffee. For many of these students entering university for the first time is an incredibly daunting process, one student explained how “walking into university for the first time was scarier than walking into prison.” Due to negative experiences with official institutions like mental health facilities, prisons and schools students often feel hostile towards these authoritative structures. Individuals learn to isolate

themselves from wider society, capitalising on a marginalised status to create a community in which value is placed upon their position as an “Other”. During a creative writing class at Goldsmiths students discussed Shakespeare’s ability to create new words: “We do it all the time, I could make up a word now, but that don’t mean it’ll be in the dictionary.” Keith, an Open Book student said. James, another Open Book regular replied: “What about chav? That was made up and now it’s practically in the dictionary.” “Why is it in the dictionary though?” Keith then answered his own question: “Because they started using it to talk about us!” In the course of the classes formal education is often recognised as an ideological tool that many of the students have learnt to resist and at

times distrust. In contrast the Open Book project aims to be accessible and non-judgemental. Asking one of the students what she thought of the project, she explained that she had left school at a very young because of an early pregnancy. She had struggled economically, suffering with depression and anxiety. Whilst desperately wanting to change her circumstances finding childcare was always an issue and returning to education would have affected her muchneeded benefit allowance. Open Book thus provided a viable and positive alternative. Helpfully most of the project’s founders and co-ordinators have firsthand experience of the issues that new students face, and classes are intentionally informal, with no registration process and an emphasis on collaborative group discussion. As a result, she

Argonaut Magazine

Jasmine Holland

felt that no one judged her, that “they spoke the same language.” In the Open Book community students articulate and understand their own experiences through academic readings and perspectives. When first learning about Edward Said’s theories of orientalism, one class agreed that although Said refers to Oriental cultures in faraway places the theory was relevant to many of the students’ own personal experiences here in Britain. From comedy sketches like Little Britain and the character of Vicky Pollard, to tabloid depictions of “chavs”, negative stereotypes of British working-classes were recognised as pervasive. Whilst such depictions were condemned, they too remained the object of much fascination. Video clips of comedy sketches and reality TV series like Benefits Street and My

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Big Fat Gypsy Wedding provide material for students to develop an anthropological perspective on the exotic world of the “Other” and in turn their own. In the ten years the project has been up and running over a hundred students have completed undergraduate degrees, five have gone onto masters’ programmes and two have completed PhD’s. What is perhaps even more impressive is the correlation between regular attendance and extremely low rates of drug relapse and criminal re-offence. From working for the Prison Reform Trust, to setting up successful businesses and charity organisations, many students go on to challenge mainstream narratives through becoming a voice for the voiceless. In addition to the clear benefits of Open Book’s free

drop-in classes at LSE the classes actively challenge inequalities within higher education and social anthropology itself. “Where did anthropology go?” Maurice Bloch asked in 2005. In this piece Bloch critically reflects on what he calls the “cloistered world of academia” (2005: 2) and laments the (default) quiet position anthropologists take on the world stage. Bloch argues that there should not only be more inter-disciplinary dialogue but an attempt also to formulate and be a part of the grand narratives which define our time. I believe, as Open Book’s project co-ordinator at the London College of Communication and founder at the LSE that it is through engaging with projects like Open Book that social anthropology may begin to open itself up again. Through not being neutral and inward looking anthropologists should make and be a part of the grand narratives and debates which do define our time; namely, the provision of and access to free education. Although LSE spends certain amounts of time and money reaching out to students from under-represented backgrounds it is still underachieving in relation to every benchmark set by the HESA for access to higher education (The London School of Economics, 2015). It is only through the ongoing support of the social anthropology department at LSE that the Open Book project continues to have a presence on campus. LSE is still reluctant to officially recognise it. Having a representative student body should not just be about making students feel comfortable – it should be about the kind of knowledge which is produced: with, by, and for whom. As many students at the LSE will have had little or no contact with the kind of people who frequent the Open Book classes it is worth considering the changes the School could make to challenge the increasing privatisation of

education and the exclusivity which accompanies it. With many students from the LSE going on to work in policymaking, law and development it seems like it would only be in everyone’s interest to encourage more dialogue, exchange and mutual learning between those within and outside of university education. If you believe in the goals the Open Book project is striving to achieve there are various ways in which you can show your support; from teaching a class to helping us to reach out to those who may benefit from the programme. For further details and queries please contact Jasmine Holland at j.holland@lcc.arts.ac.uk

Bloch, Maurice (2005) Where did anthropology go?: or the need for ‘human nature’. In: Bloch, Maurice, (ed.) Essays on Cultural Transmission. LSE monographs on social anthropology. Berg Publishers, Oxford, UK, pp. 1-20. Ministry Of Justice (2015). ‘Proven reoffending statistics: April 2012 to March 2013’ [online]: https:// www.gov.uk/government/ statistics/provenreoffending-statistics-april2012-to-march-2013 Said, E (1978). Orientalism, London, Penguin. The London School of Economics (2015) ‘The LSE Access Agreement 2015’ [online]: http://www. offa.org.uk/agreements/ London%20School%20 of%20Economics%20 and%20Political%20 Sciences.pdf

Purity and peanuts Maurice Bloch Mary Douglas’ book Purity and Danger (1966) is one of the two or three really important books of twentieth century anthropology.

he book and the articles incorporated in it came out of nowhere. It was and remains a kind of UFO. It can only be compared to Levi-Strauss’s Savage Mind (1962) in ambition, though it differs significantly in its epistemological foundations. The book was completely different to the work of British social anthropologists of the time. The reason why I consider Purity and Danger a great book is that it frontally tackled one of the most obviously recurrent aspects of human thought: the fear of pollution and the desire for purity. Most anthropology has now given up trying to illuminate these basic anthropological puzzles which any thoughtful person wants explained; which is why most of the work of contemporary professionals is of so little interest to the general public. Mary Douglas did not hesitate, she jumped right in, and this is why the book remains so well-known so widely. This is so even though most subsequent anthropologists don’t quite seem to know what to do about the topic of purity and pollution. The crucial importance of pollution and purity beliefs in different cultures and at different times is clear. There are the ancient Jewish laws on which Douglas focused with their lists

of what one must eat and not eat. These seem to have stood the test of time not only for Jews and Muslims but also by being taken up again and again by certain modern Christian denominations such as the Seven Day Adventists, Jehovah’s witnesses and Mormons. Their significance can be highlighted further by the fact that their adoption or rejection was a key element in the definition of what became Christianity. Hinduism also, in its many forms, famously involves beliefs centred on notions of pollution and purity especially those concerning the body and food. Going beyond these well-known examples, we find that Japanese Shintoism is equally obsessed with a somewhat different of form of purity in the ; African sacrifices for their part are ordered in terms of the degree of purity of a particular sacrificial animal, and so on and so on. Concern with purity and pollution is so common that one would be hard pressed to find a place where they are not exemplified, though, of course, in somewhat different ways and degrees. The catchiness of beliefs about pollution and purity are manifest also in the modern west, probably more so now than ever. Recently the attractiveness of what is considered “pure” and “natural” characterises the desire for organic food. It may be reflected further in the growing fashion for cremation which diminishes the putrefaction of burial. The fear of “chemicals” in food and the avoidance of ever new mysterious “pollutants” is a major

resource for the media and private musings. The popularity of holidays in deserts and “uninhabited” places can be seen in this light also. Note how the ancient Jews, and Jesus among them, quarantined themselves in the desert to depollute themselves, (anticipating detox clinics?) This possibly tiresome list shows well how the obsession with pollution and the search for purity is just as active in exotic and ancient times as it is in more familiar localities and modern times. The argument of Mary Douglas’s book consisted in nothing less than an explanation of the existence of a universal feature of the human mind. She argued something equally fundamental: that belief in pollution and purity were the basis of human classification and subsequent formulation of core concepts. Indeed without the fear of pollution and the search for purity, the world, the animals, plants and the humans it contains would simply make no sense to us. According to Douglas the horror of pollution was the basis on which we are able to organise and that which made human life possible – it was the basis of culture. In fact, she got a lot wrong (Morris 1976), notably her argument about pollution as the foundation of classification (Sperber 1975), but never mind. The explanatory ground on which Douglas stood was far from clear. Some of the ideas came from her ethnographic observations in the Congo. Sometimes she seemed to propose a kind of innatist determinism. But, I suspect, that her real motivation was a characteristic form of religious pessimism; a motivation which she carefully kept in the background of what she was thinking and writing. She was committed to a very intellectual, rather Old Testament version of Roman Catholicism. The famous chapter on Leviticus in Purity and

Danger argues that, in the end, the world we live in can only be meaningful if we accept the total arbitrariness of the will of God, manifested, for example, in the essentially bizarre dietary rules of the Old Testament. The moral, only hinted at, is that human life may well make sense only once one has submitted to the divine will through an act of faith without trying to make sense of it. What subsequent anthropologists mostly retained from Purity and Danger was less Douglas’s positive claims than her dismissal of popular explanations of rules about purity and pollution. Her book was seen as a key contribution to anthropological theory since it put a nail in the coffin of functionalist explanations. These are explanations which see the effect of something as the necessary cause. Thus she showed how wrong such popular assumptions were = for example= that the taboo on pork in Judaism was not just about practical health considerations, a kind of mysterious medical intuition about one shouldn’t be eating. Perhaps the ancient Jews would have got diseased from pork, but the real reason why they thought they should not eat it was because they were obeying God.. Her specific attack on what one might call folk functionalism (of the kind about health and pork) are quite convincing. But functionalist arguments as a general type are not so easily dismissed. There is a sense in which one can argue that any “explanation” is ultimately necessarily functionalist. One could even rephrase Douglas’s theological argument in the following functionalist terms: one must have ideas about pollution and purity because one needs them in order to classify and organise one’s actions, and the only way that one can legitimate these taboos

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is by believing in God and accepting his arbitrariness. God is somewhat out of fashion in modern scientific circles and, as far as I am concerned, a good thing too, but he has reappeared in some quarters in another form under the guise of evolution. A number of psychologists associated with Paul Rozin (Rozin and Haidt 2013) have been arguing that the emotions of disgust (what anthropologists would call the fear of pollution) observed in experimental situations in various parts of the world are far from arbitrary. According to these scientists, while some fears of pollution are culturally specific, many things such as faeces, bodily decomposition and putrefaction are not. These scientists countered the standard anthropological reaction to such a proposal by showing that disgust reactions were not as culturally specific as is often argued. When they took their experimental protocols to India, a country famous for its elaborate and surprising pollution beliefs, they found that bodily secretions and decomposition were just as disgusting to Indians as they were to North American students. They thus argued, that we, as human beings are hard wired to react with disgust to certain forms of contact. The explanation was that these polluting things were vectors of infection and that natural selection had instinctively made us avoid these things. Pollution ideas and consequently the desire to seek purity are good things and whatever explicit reason this group or that gave for them is irrelevant since the reactions to pollution are unconscious. I don’t want to argue here for the rights or wrongs of such a conclusion but to note that, in very general terms, we seem to be back to a version of the old functionalist explanations that

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Mary Douglas was criticising. According to both theories, in the end, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for pollution and purity behaviour. If we are to categorise as functionalist both the explanations for pollution belief in terms of 1) conscious motivation (so effectively dismissed by Douglas) and 2) evolution and natural selection we must also do that to Douglas’s surreptitious theological argument. For this explanation too is surely a functionalist explanation of a kind. So it seems that everybody is agreed. The agreement extends to the theologians, the health food stores, the evolutionists and the funeral directors. We all need to be disgusted by polluting entities and we should all seek pure things. What could be more intuitive than that? However in this unanimity may well reside a danger. Two pieces of recent medical research seem to suggest that, unfortunately things may not be so straight forward. The first is a recent work on allergies (Du Toit et al 2015). Discourse about allergies seems to be spreading like wild fire and dealing with allergies is becoming a major medical speciality. As concern with allergies grows so too do folk explanations for this perceived growth in the west. The most common is that we live in an “artificial” environment full of hidden chemicals, pesticides, additives and so on. Given this, it is not surprising that we are all developing ever more allergies. We are being polluted and as a response we should resist and seek a purer life by eating organic vegetables and sleeping in tents, preferably in uninhabited deserts. Well, that sort of functionalist reasoning does not seem to work for a group of allergies which are believed to be increasing at an alarming rate.

These are allergies to nuts and more specifically to peanuts. Recent research seems to show that the cause for the growth of this allergy is not that we have been ever more exposed to peanuts in nefariously produced industrial foods but rather that we have not been exposed enough to peanuts from an early age. Thus we have not been polluted enough by nuts and so our health is threatened and we become allergic to these seeds in later life. According to this logic the ancient Jews were perhaps susceptible to diseases caused by pork because they had not eaten enough of the stuff. Thus the folk functionalist belief, in the case of nut allergies at least, is exactly the opposite of what scientific findings now seem to show. And there is another even more striking example. Recent work on the bacteria in our body has shown just how essential they are to us. Our genes and our environment might, to a certain extent, explain our personality, our physique and our health but so do those billion of faecal microbes that live in our gut. Research shows that we cannot do without them if we want to live a healthy and happy life and many diseases are due to our lack of some of these essential microbes which enthusiastically live, eat and reproduce inside us. In a recent TED talk (Knight 2014) and in a number of papers Rob Knight (Turnbaugh et al 2007), professor of molecular biology at the University of Colorado argued that some of the health problems of babies born by Caesarean section are due to the fact that they have not been properly polluted by vaginal bacteria. The solution to the problem is obvious. Inject them after their birth with vaginal fluids from their mothers or other willing women! He has also identified other medical problems that are due to a lack of intestinal microbes and again the solution is clear: inject the

patient with faecal matter from a willing donor! (Leviticus, Mary Douglas and Paul Rozin please note.) The moral of the story is that, sometimes at least, pollution is good for you and furthermore purity is often very, very dangerous.

Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger. An Analysis of concepts of pollution and purity. Routledge: London Du Toit, G. et al. 2015. ‘Randomized Trial of Peanut Consumption in Infants at Risk for Peanut Allergy.’ New England Journal of Medicine Knight, R. 2015 ‘How our microbes make us who we are.’ TED Talk. Accessed online: https:// www.ted.com/talks/ rob_knight_how_our_ microbes_make_us_who_ we_are?language=en Levi-Strauss, C. 1962 La Pensée Sauvage. Paris Plon. Morris, B. 1976. ‘Whither the Savage Mind?’ Man Volume 11: 130-137. Rozin, P. & Haidt, J. 2013. ‘The domains of disgust and their origins: contrasting biological and cultural evolutionary accounts.’ Trends in Cognitive Science Volume 17: 367-368. Turnbaugh, P.J, Hamady, M., Ley, R., Fraser, C., Knight, R., and Gordon, J.I. 2007 ‘The human microbiome project: exploring the microbial side of ourselves.’ Nature 449:804.

Crossword Test your knowledge of the discipline and the Department with this fun crossword. Thomas Herzmark Across 1. Non-blood relation [6] 3. “Instead of the economy being _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ in social relations, social relations are _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ in the economy” (Polanyi 1944: 57) [8] 7. Durkheim argued that sociology must be a science of _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ [6-5] 9. Oklahoma kid [8] 12. Primary and given; impervious to experience and learning [6] 14. “Their idiom is a bovine idiom” [4] 15. King and queen of political anthropology [9] 17. Circulates: 1) anthropological knowledge online, and 2) between Maoris [3] 19. A regal authority for British anthropology [3] 22. The opposite of ‘marry out or die out’ [8] 23. A scholar of religion concerned with presence and absence [7] 25. The austere side of the philosophical dichotomy re-imagined by Ruth Benedict [10] 26. James, or Michael for us [5]

Down 1. Actor, 2. Faction, 3. Ethics and Freedom, 4. Data, 5. Etat, 6. Astuti, 8. Coorg, 10. Firth, 11. Duality, 13. Nomothetic, 16. San, 18. Urapmin, 20. Ideal, 21. Agent, 24. Ong Answers Across 1. Affine, 3. Embedded, 7. Social Facts, 9. Stafford, 12. Innate, 14. Nuer, 15. Comoroffs, 17. Hau, 19. RAI, 22. Endogamy, 23. Engelke, 25. Apollonian, 26. Scott

Down 1. At the heart of practice oriented anthropology [5] 2. Result of a split within a group [7] 3. M.M.L. 2001 [6-3-7] 4. Often qualitative over quantitative; indispensable to ethnography [4] 5. The _ _ _ _isation of society is less important to our modernity than the governmentality of the state, Foucault claimed (1991:103). [4] 6. Interested in experimental methods [6] 8. Once deemed a “martial race” of South-West India by colonizers and ethnographers alike 10. “Social anthropology aims at a reasoned comparative analysis of how people behave in social circumstances.” (_ _ _ _ _ 1951: 1) [5] 11. Binary opposition [7] 13. Aiming at universal generalisations over specific descriptions [10] 16. Less pejorative than previous terms for these hunter-gatherers [3] 18. Robbins’ informants [7] 20. A normative value; or half an analytical category [5] 21. Someone or something with the capacity to act and or affect; not necessarily a human being [5] 24. Ethnographer of resistance, citizenship and globalisation [3]

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Final thought

What might an anthropology of wonder look like? An evocation by Michael Scott

‘The anthropology of wonder I have in mind would suspend the impulse to sort true wonder from pseudo-wonder or to claim for any one ontology a capacity for openness to wonder. It would recognise that there may be many modalities of wonder… and it would follow any kind of wonderer to see where wonder takes people, or to what lengths people will go to find it. It would morph and jump between reinventing wonder through encounter with the wondrous wonder of others and constructing a typology of wonder. It would investigate whether wonder, in all its forms, may be an indicator that something ontological is at stake in any given situation and would ask what wonder… may reveal about possible ontological configurations and their historical transformations. If wonder is, indeed, the primal passion that precedes moral judgement, let us wonder about wonder in that spirit.’ (Scott 2014: 50)1

Scott, Michael. 2014. To be a wonder: anthropology, cosmology, and alterity. In Abrahamson, A. & Holbraad, M, ed. 2014. Framing cosmologies, the anthropology of worlds. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1

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