Baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top.
I'm beginning to feel that a course solely devoted to James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture should be a bare minimum prerequisite for any anthropology course, even (especially?) CULT ANTH 101.
Our session last week was on subsistence and economics. Invariably, the question of what is the "best" way to live comes up over and over and over again every time I teach this class. One would think that by this point in the term, the students would be able to catch themselves in these judgment calls, but no.
Furthermore, the question is always brought up in the form of Western:Non-Western / Industrial:Non-Industrial dichotomous juxtapositions, and the 'winner' is the romanticized 'otherness' of the Non-Western, Non-Industrial, which, of course, is a uniquely 'Western' production for which anthropology has been largely responsible. ::hangs head in shame::
On the one hand, this is really fascinating. What we have here is a manifestation of 'western' ethnocentricism in which 'we' say that our fantasy notions of The Other are the top, in which we sing an inverted ethnocentric Rousseau-ian love song to our image of The Other:
You're the Nile, You're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa.
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, Baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!
The actual human bodies on which our fantasies are pasted, meanwhile, think we're a bunch of stupid, self-centered prats. That is, in a nutshell, Clifford's thesis.
On the other hand, I was trained -- in the apex days of the postmodern project -- to battle such productions, to deconstruct them, to burst the bubble. That the latest thing in Fantasy Otherness indicates that such constructions are as strong as ever, and that it has been haunting my classrooms the past couple of years, is getting really annoying.
Yes, a student in our little_anthros community cited ::drum roll:: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, sending me off on an absolute toot.
___________________________________________________________
[A student] brought in the subject of one of the definitive millenarian movements of our time. The speculation in [the student's] post builds off of Jared Diamond's quote in the textbook in which he says that agriculture, "is the worst mistake in the history of the human race." [The student] further brings in the pop culture writing of Daniel Quinn and the Ishmael series. For those of you who have not heard of these books, Quinn is basically postulating that the only thing that will save humanity and the earth is if we "go back" to living in small, food gathering bands, which would, of course, require a major Malthusian meltdown. Quinn writes of this in a very romanticized way, promotes the benefits of such a scenario, and has further acquired quite the fan base and built quite a network to promote the idea.
I have to admit to not being terribly impressed with Quinn's thesis, and I'll second Ferraro's warning to steer clear of dewy-eyed romanticizations of the simulacral Eden of "non-industrial" societies, which is precisely the fantasy Quinn is pushing (with quite a bit of post-industrial economic success, apparently... All this Ishmael stuff has become something of a tidy little money-maker for the guy, complete with "New Tribal Markets" where you can buy more stuff that will help you find the answer to all your problems, such as more books, videos, coffee mugs, bumper stickers for you car and baseball caps: www.ishmael.com, www.readishmael.com.)
Aside from the distasteful idea of a social movement opportunist monetarily preying on people suffering from fin de siècle angst, I have too much "faith" (for momentary lack of a better word) in human ingenuity, adaptive strategies and cooperation on a grand scale (i.e. civilization), which, it must be said, would not be terribly advanced by an over-arching mindset that says we're all doomed. I would have a bit less faith if everyone is yelling, "Get off my life raft!" and trying to retreat "back" (in quotes, because it is simulacrum) to an early-21st century neo-neo-romanticist's fantasies of how marvelous everything was before the neolithic revolution.
The premise that human survival will only come when we disconnect into self-sustaining little units is not the way humans are evolving, in any case. We'll flesh this out some more in the final section on culture change, but this is such a perfect opportunity to introduce the topic. By way of contrast, I'd recommend taking a look at Robert Wright's Non-Zero, which puts forward an idea that, while not without controversies and certainly not above critique, is none-the less based on much sounder anthropological scholarship than Quinn's. Wright talks about the progression -- movement toward, change toward -- of human cultures toward greater network complexity and interaction, drawing us, on a broad scale, toward more reliance on non-zero-sumness (win-win scenarios) rather than zero-sum games (win-lose).
For his part, Quinn does love rehashing and evoking pop culture notions about what we've supposedly 'learned' from anthropology, but that's not the same as anthropological scholarship, and anthropologists have been trying to deconstruct and undo those myths of [what we've "learned"] since the beginning of the postmodern project some 25 years ago.
There's another thing to consider here. The success of Quinn's New Tribalism would actually be quite dependant on strong networks. If human civilization as we know it breaks down and everything becomes unglued and the networks that have helped spread the Word about New Tribalism vanish -- and they would in a Malthusian meltdown -- no one is going to have any control over how human societies reconstitute themselves, so New Tribalism is not really a practical model. Anarchism (and that's what Quinn is branding here in a touchy-feely way) is predicated on decentralization, but the delicious irony here is that the establishment of Ishmael's anarchic New Tribalist dream would be highly dependent on the centralization (mass buy-in) of, at least, ideas and ideologies.
I would argue that this ideological model is very much a product of and dependent upon the time and place that we're living in, very much fixed in the boundaries of the current and momentary structures of civilization (which are constantly in flux, of course). What New Tribalism really lends itself to is a cultic millenarianism, and I would further argue that it already has [become such]. Some millenarian movements are fairly innocent and innocuous. One might even say that they can, on occasion, give people food for thought, not to mention give scholars more subjects for research, dissertations and papers in the publish/get grants-or-perish world of academia.
Other millenarian movements can be decidedly dangerous. If a group of people is so convinced of the rightness and beauty of what will come after the 'apocalypse,' they may very well do more than 'just wait' or 'pray' for Armegedon. They may try to provoke it. That's what the Nazis tried to do and it's what al Qaeda is trying to do, and their visions of the Golden Age were/are certainly not New Tribalism.
So, for me, this brings up the question of warring millenarian visions. Might we have the potential for a millenarian arms race? In some ways we already have one; it's neo-conservatives of New American Century-ism vs. the religious fundamentalists of Islamicism. Throw in the eco-anarcho-syndicalists of New Tribalism and the millenarian fundamentalism of the Christian religious right, plus dozens and dozens of others, and we have ourselves a real mixer. In my estimation, that sort of thing poses a bigger threat than resource depletion and environmental degradation, if for no other reason than it distracts us away from actually solving real world problems and addressing real world challenges in a productive, mutually beneficial manner.
In any event, in such a scenario, it's doubtful that the new world order after the dust settles would look like the predicted and hoped for Golden Age of any one of those groups or any of countless others. That's where strong ideologies tend to break down. Their visions can never be achieved. Never, ever, ever forget that one person's Utopia is another person's hell.
___________________________________________________________
That said, all this gives me the perfect opportunity to problematize for them millenarianism and utopian visions, which is quite possibly among my top favorite past times, almost to the point of obsession.
Our session last week was on subsistence and economics. Invariably, the question of what is the "best" way to live comes up over and over and over again every time I teach this class. One would think that by this point in the term, the students would be able to catch themselves in these judgment calls, but no.
Furthermore, the question is always brought up in the form of Western:Non-Western / Industrial:Non-Industrial dichotomous juxtapositions, and the 'winner' is the romanticized 'otherness' of the Non-Western, Non-Industrial, which, of course, is a uniquely 'Western' production for which anthropology has been largely responsible. ::hangs head in shame::
On the one hand, this is really fascinating. What we have here is a manifestation of 'western' ethnocentricism in which 'we' say that our fantasy notions of The Other are the top, in which we sing an inverted ethnocentric Rousseau-ian love song to our image of The Other:
You're the Nile, You're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa.
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, Baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!
The actual human bodies on which our fantasies are pasted, meanwhile, think we're a bunch of stupid, self-centered prats. That is, in a nutshell, Clifford's thesis.
On the other hand, I was trained -- in the apex days of the postmodern project -- to battle such productions, to deconstruct them, to burst the bubble. That the latest thing in Fantasy Otherness indicates that such constructions are as strong as ever, and that it has been haunting my classrooms the past couple of years, is getting really annoying.
Yes, a student in our little_anthros community cited ::drum roll:: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, sending me off on an absolute toot.
___________________________________________________________
[A student] brought in the subject of one of the definitive millenarian movements of our time. The speculation in [the student's] post builds off of Jared Diamond's quote in the textbook in which he says that agriculture, "is the worst mistake in the history of the human race." [The student] further brings in the pop culture writing of Daniel Quinn and the Ishmael series. For those of you who have not heard of these books, Quinn is basically postulating that the only thing that will save humanity and the earth is if we "go back" to living in small, food gathering bands, which would, of course, require a major Malthusian meltdown. Quinn writes of this in a very romanticized way, promotes the benefits of such a scenario, and has further acquired quite the fan base and built quite a network to promote the idea.
I have to admit to not being terribly impressed with Quinn's thesis, and I'll second Ferraro's warning to steer clear of dewy-eyed romanticizations of the simulacral Eden of "non-industrial" societies, which is precisely the fantasy Quinn is pushing (with quite a bit of post-industrial economic success, apparently... All this Ishmael stuff has become something of a tidy little money-maker for the guy, complete with "New Tribal Markets" where you can buy more stuff that will help you find the answer to all your problems, such as more books, videos, coffee mugs, bumper stickers for you car and baseball caps: www.ishmael.com, www.readishmael.com.)
Aside from the distasteful idea of a social movement opportunist monetarily preying on people suffering from fin de siècle angst, I have too much "faith" (for momentary lack of a better word) in human ingenuity, adaptive strategies and cooperation on a grand scale (i.e. civilization), which, it must be said, would not be terribly advanced by an over-arching mindset that says we're all doomed. I would have a bit less faith if everyone is yelling, "Get off my life raft!" and trying to retreat "back" (in quotes, because it is simulacrum) to an early-21st century neo-neo-romanticist's fantasies of how marvelous everything was before the neolithic revolution.
The premise that human survival will only come when we disconnect into self-sustaining little units is not the way humans are evolving, in any case. We'll flesh this out some more in the final section on culture change, but this is such a perfect opportunity to introduce the topic. By way of contrast, I'd recommend taking a look at Robert Wright's Non-Zero, which puts forward an idea that, while not without controversies and certainly not above critique, is none-the less based on much sounder anthropological scholarship than Quinn's. Wright talks about the progression -- movement toward, change toward -- of human cultures toward greater network complexity and interaction, drawing us, on a broad scale, toward more reliance on non-zero-sumness (win-win scenarios) rather than zero-sum games (win-lose).
For his part, Quinn does love rehashing and evoking pop culture notions about what we've supposedly 'learned' from anthropology, but that's not the same as anthropological scholarship, and anthropologists have been trying to deconstruct and undo those myths of [what we've "learned"] since the beginning of the postmodern project some 25 years ago.
There's another thing to consider here. The success of Quinn's New Tribalism would actually be quite dependant on strong networks. If human civilization as we know it breaks down and everything becomes unglued and the networks that have helped spread the Word about New Tribalism vanish -- and they would in a Malthusian meltdown -- no one is going to have any control over how human societies reconstitute themselves, so New Tribalism is not really a practical model. Anarchism (and that's what Quinn is branding here in a touchy-feely way) is predicated on decentralization, but the delicious irony here is that the establishment of Ishmael's anarchic New Tribalist dream would be highly dependent on the centralization (mass buy-in) of, at least, ideas and ideologies.
I would argue that this ideological model is very much a product of and dependent upon the time and place that we're living in, very much fixed in the boundaries of the current and momentary structures of civilization (which are constantly in flux, of course). What New Tribalism really lends itself to is a cultic millenarianism, and I would further argue that it already has [become such]. Some millenarian movements are fairly innocent and innocuous. One might even say that they can, on occasion, give people food for thought, not to mention give scholars more subjects for research, dissertations and papers in the publish/get grants-or-perish world of academia.
Other millenarian movements can be decidedly dangerous. If a group of people is so convinced of the rightness and beauty of what will come after the 'apocalypse,' they may very well do more than 'just wait' or 'pray' for Armegedon. They may try to provoke it. That's what the Nazis tried to do and it's what al Qaeda is trying to do, and their visions of the Golden Age were/are certainly not New Tribalism.
So, for me, this brings up the question of warring millenarian visions. Might we have the potential for a millenarian arms race? In some ways we already have one; it's neo-conservatives of New American Century-ism vs. the religious fundamentalists of Islamicism. Throw in the eco-anarcho-syndicalists of New Tribalism and the millenarian fundamentalism of the Christian religious right, plus dozens and dozens of others, and we have ourselves a real mixer. In my estimation, that sort of thing poses a bigger threat than resource depletion and environmental degradation, if for no other reason than it distracts us away from actually solving real world problems and addressing real world challenges in a productive, mutually beneficial manner.
In any event, in such a scenario, it's doubtful that the new world order after the dust settles would look like the predicted and hoped for Golden Age of any one of those groups or any of countless others. That's where strong ideologies tend to break down. Their visions can never be achieved. Never, ever, ever forget that one person's Utopia is another person's hell.
___________________________________________________________
That said, all this gives me the perfect opportunity to problematize for them millenarianism and utopian visions, which is quite possibly among my top favorite past times, almost to the point of obsession.