2020/11/25

Ontological turn - Wikipedia

Ontological turn - Wikipedia

Ontological turn

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The ontological turn broadly relates to a development in a number of philosophical and academic disciplines that led to an increased focus on being. The ontological turn in anthropology is not concerned with anthropological notions of culture, epistemology, nor world views.[1] Instead, the ontological turn generates interest in being in the world and accepts that different world views are not simply different representations of the same world. More specifically, the ontological turn refers to a change in theoretical orientation according to which difference are understood not in terms of a difference in world views, but a differences in worlds[1] and all of these worlds are of equal validity.

Definitions[edit]

The term 'ontologia' itself first appeared in 1606 in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, a German philosopher.[2][3][4] Ontology can be broadly defined as the study of reality as constructed in both human and non-human worlds.[5] Conversely, ontology has also been understood as a process of "becoming".[6] Finally, ontology has also been defined as the set of historical circumstances through which individuals comprehend reality. However, this last definition in particular has garnered significant critics due to its similarity to definitions of culture.[7]

Philosophical influence[edit]

The field of ontology corresponds to the philosophical study of being.[8] This focus on being, draws on Martin Heidegger's insights into the specific nature of what it means to "be" in the world. Heidegger's theorizing on the fundamental nature of being drew on ontological ideals that emerged from the traditions of the Platonic school.[9] In this view, the mind or the experience of being a human, does not refer to a singular entity.[citation needed] Instead, the mind refers to a collection of events, life events, or material objects an individual experiences. Thus, ontology relates the experience of being in the world. Further, interest in ontology is associated with a greater understanding of existence, reality, becoming, and how these concepts relate to broad categories of entities.[10]

Development[edit]

Within the field of anthropology, ontological ideas first began emerging around the 1990s. However, the first influence of ontological understandings within anthropology emerged in the work of Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.[11] Following these initial deliberations, the ontological turn took hold of British anthropology. From there, North American anthropologists began considering how ontology might be useful in ethnographic research. The application of ontological frameworks really gained popularity following 2010[citation needed] and were brought to national anthropological attention at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago,[12] where ontology became the focus of several sessions there.[13][5] After the conference one of the oldest and prominent[14] anthropology blog, Savage Minds, declared ontology to be "the next big thing"[15] in anthropological theory. This burgeoning interest in ontology spawned a number of articles that highlighted the usefulness of ontological premises in anthropological research.[16][17][18][19]

Ontology in anthropology[edit]

The concept of ontology and what people mean by ontology is diverse; therefore, tracing the ontological turn in anthropology remains difficult. However, if ontology refers to the study of reality then ontological anthropology incorporates theoretical and methodological elements of anthropology to a study of being or existence.[20] Ethnographies are the most widely utilized method in anthropological research.[21] While, in a theoretical sense, anthropology has contributed greatly to the concept of culture. These two elements in anthropology have broadened philosophical notions of ontology so that ontological anthropology is not simply about the world; rather, it is about the experience of being a human in the world.[5] Moreover, ontological anthropology is explicitly concerned with how humans communicate and interact with a host of non-human actors.[22] For example, as a trained biologist turned anthropologist, Donna Haraway insists on including other beings, both human and non-human, in her accounts of living with pets.[23] Finally, ontological anthropology is not claiming that individuals or communities are living in distinct universes and by crossing into a different setting you are suddenly in a different reality.[1] Instead, ontological anthropologists are claiming that we "should allow difference or alterity to challenge our understanding of the very categories of nature and culture themselves".[24]

Turns in anthropology[edit]

Anthropology as a field has experienced a number of turns in its history, including the linguistic turn, the reflexive turn, the temporal turn, the affective turn, the literary turn, and the post-human turn.[citation needed] The ontological turn presents differences in cultural phenomena not as different interpretations of a singular, natural world. Rather, the ontological turn in anthropology suggests that there are alternate realities and other ways of beings that exist in parallel with our own. The proponents of this movement claim that this way of framing cultural difference is the first attempt anthropologists have made in taking the beliefs of their interlocutors "seriously" or "literally".[25] Critics of the ontological turn argue that claims of different worlds tend towards essentialism.

Narrow turn towards ontology[edit]

The works of French authors Philippe Descola[26][27] and Bruno Latour,[28] and Brazilian author Eduardo Viveiros de Castro[29] gravitated towards what has been termed "a narrow ontological turn".[5] This narrow ontological turn produced much concern and curiosity within North American anthropology.

Descola's beyond nature[edit]

Philippe Descola in his work among the Amazonian Achuar suggested that the category of nature is not a human universal and therefore, should not be considered a line of anthropological inquiry.[26][30][31] The domain of "nature", Descola argues has emerged from modern, Western notions that intend to posit "nature" as ontologically real. Instead, Descola claims that "Other civilizations have devised different ways of detecting qualities among existents, resulting in other forms of organizing continuity and discontinuity between humans and nonhumans, of aggregating beings in collectives, of defining who or what is capable of agency and knowledge".[31] Meaning Descola treats animism not as some sort of mistaken belief, but as an extension of social relationality to nonhuman actors. In this sense, Descola utilizes ontology as an elementary analytical tool to explore how worlds are constructed in a manner that is distinct from the way anthropologists generally discuss worldviews. Descola proposes that anthropology can utilize ontological frameworks to best account for how worlds are composed.[31]

Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism[edit]

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro utilizes a framework perspectivism in his synthesis of Amazonian ethnographic literature.[32] His discussion of Amazonian understandings takes into account how perspectives of human versus nonhuman are not inherently different. Viveiros de Castro's reflections on perspectivism lead him to conclude that we are dealing with a perspective that is fundamentally different from those which inform Western academic thought. Viveiros de Castro's approach inherently takes an ontological approach that "allows him to see more clearly the ways in which anthropology is founded on a nature/culture divide that posits nature as a sort of universal, unitary, and existent ground and culture as the infinitely variable form of representing nature."[5]

Latour's modes of existence[edit]

Sociologist Bruno Latour argues that researchers should not sort entities into the "social" world and the "natural" world. Latour argues that instead of predetermining what things are deemed as part of society and what things are deemed as part of nature, social scientists should view these categories as complex negotiations between people and their world.[33] This resistance to the division between the social and natural is integral to ontological anthropology.

Reception[edit]

Haidy Geismar, one of the critics of ontological anthropology, has claimed that in presenting others not as having different cultures, but in having different worlds, is just a novel form of essentialism.[34][35] Further, many critics of ontological anthropology have demonstrated that this framework does not take difference as seriously as it claims to. Specifically, Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish have brought attention to the fact that many ontological anthropologist have drawn similar conclusions to anthropologists not using ontological frameworks, while also utilizing much of the same theoretical bases in their arguments.[36][1][37] However, the ontologists have responded that many of these critiques are merely attempts to reproduce the status quo.[38] In response to turn towards ontology a Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory's debate was held on 9 February 2008 in Manchester, on the motion 'Ontology is just another word for culture'.[39] Speaking for the motion were Michael Carrithers (Durham) and Matei Candea (Cambridge), and against Karen Sykes (Manchester) and Martin Holbraad (University College London). The final vote - 19 in favour, 39 against and six abstentions - reflected a general consensus that between culture and ontology, ontology might have something to contribute.[39] Marshall Sahlins in the forward to Beyond Nature and Culture, echos this consensus in his claim that ontology "offers a radical change in the current anthropological trajectory—a paradigm shift if you will—that would overcome the present analytic disarray by what amounts to a planetary table of the ontological elements and the compounds they produce".[27] Sahlins celebrates how anthropology, through this ontological focus, will return to its true focus - the state of being other.[40]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Heywood, Paolo (1 January 2012). "Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on 'Ontology'". The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. University of Cambridge. 30 (1). doi:10.3167/ca.2012.300112. ISSN 0305-7674.
  2. ^ Ogdoas Scholastica English translation by Sara L. Uckelman of Chapter 8.
  3. ^ Jacob Lorhard’s Ontology: a 17th Century Hypertext on the Reality and Temporality of the World of Intelligibles Peter Øhrstrøm.
  4. ^ The Development of Ontology from Suarez to Kant
  5. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Kohn, Eduardo (21 October 2015). "Anthropology of Ontologies". Annual Review of Anthropology. 44 (1): 311–327. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014127. ISSN 0084-6570.
  6. ^ Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0816614011. OCLC 16472336.
  7. ^ Carrithers, Michael; Candea, Matei; Sykes, Karen; Holbraad, Martin; Venkatesan, Soumhya (2010). "Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester". Critique of Anthropology. 30 (2): 152–200. doi:10.1177/0308275X09364070. ISSN 0308-275X.
  8. ^ "Ontology | metaphysics". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 26 March 2019.
  9. ^ Heidegger, Martin (1971). On the Way to Language (1st Harper & Row paperback ed.). San Francisco: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0060638597. OCLC 7875767.
  10. ^ "Definition of Ontology". Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 25 March2019.
  11. ^ Holbraad, Martin; Pedersen, Morten Axel (2017). The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107103887. OCLC 985966648.
  12. ^ "Ontology as the Major Theme of AAA 2013". Savage Minds. 27 November 2013. Retrieved 25 March 2019.
  13. ^ "About AAA - Connect with AAA". www.americananthro.org. American Anthropological Association. Retrieved 26 March 2019.
  14. ^ Price, David H. (2010). "Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs". American Anthropologist. 112 (1): 140–142. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01203.x. ISSN 0002-7294. JSTOR 20638767.
  15. ^ "On Taking Ontological Turns". Savage Minds. Retrieved 26 March 2019.
  16. ^ Ries, Nancy (2009). "Potato Ontology: Surviving Postsocialism in Russia". Cultural Anthropology. 24 (2): 181–212. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01129.x.
  17. ^ Alberti, Benjamin; Fowles, Severin; Holbraad, Martin; Marshall, Yvonne; Witmore, Christopher (2011). ""Worlds Otherwise": Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ontological Difference" (PDF). Current Anthropology. 52 (6): 896–912. doi:10.1086/662027. ISSN 0011-3204.
  18. ^ Course, Magnus (2010). "Of Words and Fog: Linguistic Relativity and Amerindian Ontology". Anthropological Theory. 10 (3): 247–263. doi:10.1177/1463499610372177. ISSN 1463-4996.
  19. ^ de la Cadena, Marisol (2010). "Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond "Politics"". Cultural Anthropology. 25 (2): 334–370. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01061.x.
  20. ^ Kohn, E. (2015). "Anthropology of ontologies". Annual Review of Anthropology. 44: 311–327. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014127.
  21. ^ Monaghan, John and Peter Just (2000). Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 13. ISBN 9780192853462.
  22. ^ Kohn, Eduardo (2013). How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley. ISBN 9780520956865. OCLC 857079372.
  23. ^ Haraway, Donna Jeanne (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816654031. OCLC 191733419.
  24. ^ Heywood, Paolo (19 May 2017). "The Ontological Turn". Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. University of Cambridge.
  25. ^ Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1 January 2011). "Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other Truths". Common Knowledge. Duke University Press. 17 (1): 128–145. doi:10.1215/0961754X-2010-045. ISSN 0961-754X.
  26. ^ Jump up to:a b Descola, Philippe (1994). In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521411035. OCLC 27974392.
  27. ^ Jump up to:a b Descola, Philippe; Lloyd, Janet (2013). Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226145006. OCLC 855534400.
  28. ^ Latour, Bruno (19 August 2013). An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN 9780674724990. OCLC 826456727.
  29. ^ Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo; Skafish, Peter (2014). Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9781937561970. OCLC 939262444.
  30. ^ Descola, Philippe; Pálsson, Gísli (25 July 1996). Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780203451069. OCLC 1081429894.
  31. ^ Jump up to:a b c Descola, Philippe (1 June 2014). "Modes of Being and Forms of Predication". HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 4 (1): 271–280. doi:10.14318/hau4.1.012. ISSN 2575-1433.
  32. ^ Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1998). "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 4 (3): 469–488. doi:10.2307/3034157. JSTOR 3034157.
  33. ^ Latour, Bruno; Porter, Catherine (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN 978-0674948389. OCLC 27894925.
  34. ^ Geismar, Haidy (7 July 2009). "On Multiple Ontologies and the Temporality of Things". Material World. Retrieved 17 April 2019.
  35. ^ "Turn, Turn, Turn". Public Books. 20 June 2017. Retrieved 1 April2019.
  36. ^ Charbonnier, Pierre; Salmon, Gildas; Skafish, Peter (2017). Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology. London. ISBN 9781783488575. OCLC 929123082.
  37. ^ Abramson, Allen; Holbraad, Martin. Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds. Manchester. ISBN 9781847799098. OCLC 953456922.
  38. ^ Pedersen, Morten Axel (2012). Common Nonsense: A review of certain recent reviews of the 'ontological turn'. OCLC 842767912.
  39. ^ Jump up to:a b Rollason, William (June 2008). "Ontology – just another word for culture?". Anthropology Today. 24 (3): 28–31. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8322.2008.00593.x. ISSN 0268-540X.
  40. ^ Bessire, Lucas; Bond, David (August 2014). "Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique". American Ethnologist. 41(3): 440–456. doi:10.1111/amet.12083.
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(PDF) Thinking through Things

(PDF) Thinking through Things

Evocative Objects comprises thirty-four quiteshort pieces (most four to six pages) reflectingin often very personal ways on the ‘dynamicrelationship between things and thinking’. (9)Each piece in the collection is preceded by ashort (half-page) excerpt reflecting on aspectsof objects from the ‘classics’ of philosophy,history, literature and social theory, includingLévi-Strauss, Piaget, Derrida, Vygotsky,Haraway, Kristeva, Mumford, Foucault,Baudrillard, Mauss, Latour, Marx, Barthes,Kopytoff, Winnicott, Lacan and Eco, amongothers. A synthetic conclusion elaborates on the theoretical links between the pieces, andthe bibliography broadens the context andprovides an extended reading list.While Sherry Turkle is well known for herhighly influential work on the psychology ofcomputing, including The Second Self: Com-puters and the Human Spirit and  Life on theScreen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,1thisvolume reflects a wider interest, since it ‘con-tributes a detailed examination of particularobjects with rich connections to daily life as well as intellectual practice’. (7) Turkle isdirector of the Initiative on Technology and the Self at MIT, and the Evocative Objectscollections arose as a result of seminars at the Initiative. In all, three edited collectionshave been published by the MIT Press. Evo-cative Objects is the first, published in August2007. The second volume, Falling For Science:Objects in Mind, appeared in May 2008. Thethird volume, The Inner History of Devices, waspublished at the end of October 2008.Turkle’s interest in evocative objects, she tellsus in the introduction to this first collection,ELAINE LALLYSHERRY TURKLE (ED.)Evocative Objects: Things We Think WithThe MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 2007ISBN: 9780262201681RRP: US$24.95 (HB)thinkingthroughthings
originated in her childhood. Indeed, she wrotein the introduction to The Second Self that we humans ‘search for a link between who weare and what we have made, between who weare and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy withour own creations, we might become’.2Thecomputer itself is often an evocative objectbecause:like a Rorschach inkblot test, [it] is apowerful projective medium … TheRorschach provides ambiguous imagesonto which different forms can be pro-jected. The computer, too, takes on manyshapes and meanings. In what follows, weshall see that, as with the Rorschach, whatpeople make of the computer speaks oftheir larger concerns, speaks of who theyare as individual personalities.3Turkle’s childhood experience of searchingthrough family photographs and trinkets forevidence of her absent father showed her thatobjects can be ‘clues’ allowing mysteries to besolved. (4) This is because, following Lévi-Strauss, material things are ‘good(s) to thinkwith’, and are essential resources for thebricolage of everyday life. Turkle’s personalexperience as a child was of interaction withobjects having high emotional intensity, andshe therefore ‘began to consider bricolage as apassionate practice’. (5)The contributions in Evocative Objects col-lectively reflect on a diverse array of objects.This volume, then, brings together a series ofsometimes intimate reflections on how thebiographies of people and things intertwine.Reflecting on the cello allows the author ofthe first piece to reflect on his relationship tomusic and to his mother; considering the cello also speaks to the intimate relationshipbetween bodies and things, and to issues oftechnical and cultural improvisation. Con-sidering archival objects that have belonged toand had a very close association with Le Cor-busier allows another author to reflect on theinterpersonal closeness that can be gainedthrough handling the objects a much admiredperson worked with. But digitisation changesthe relationship to the objects, making themmore widely available but no longer giving asense of awe at the tangibility of connection.Digital objects, it is suggested, cannot be evo-cative in the same way as an original.Changes in technology and evolution in the form of a class of objects can be part of the biography of the object: keyboards, bothmusical and computer or typewriter keyboards,mediate creativity and allow for ‘composition’as a manual activity. Ballet slippers areexemplars of a technology that has shaped acultural form. The shoes themselves shapephysical artistry but the gradations comingwith increasing expertise and seniority sym-bolise and physically track changes in thedevelopment and maturation of the dancer.Shoes can also represent the physical disciplin-ing and transformation of the dancer’s body.A diabetic author’s glucometer provides anindicator of the state of the body that is notavailable to direct perception, allowing for208VOLUME15 NUMBER1 MAR2009
‘tight control’ of blood sugar levels. Theevolving relationship between people andmonitoring technologies in everyday life is ref-erenced here: the author imagines a futurescenario as a ‘cyborg’ whose diabetes is con-trolled, not through external monitoring andconsciously controlled action, but via a small implantable device that operatesautonomously: ‘In this fantasy, I do not controlmy disease; my computer pancreas controls itfor me … In this scenario, it is difficult for meto remember that I have diabetes’. (67)From the point of view of a child, a yellowraincoat can provide a kind of armour and givea sense of control against the complexities(even chaos) of the external world. Anotherwriter thinks of a datebook as ‘an externalinformation organ—a piece of my brain madeout of paper instead of cells’. (80) Knowing it isnearby allows her to relax, although the senseof herself as cyborg bothers her. When thedatebook is lost, her ontological security isundermined. Moving to a digital diary doesn’tsolve the problem of the vulnerabilities ofrecording events in one physical location, butinstead leaves her feeling ‘destabilised’, sincethe digital record doesn’t leave traces of choicesmade and options erased.Many of us will recognise the sense that alaptop is ‘practically a brain prosthesis’. Buthow many of us would say that we love ourlaptops? ‘It doesn’t just belong to me; I belongto it.’ (88) This object, however, is not simplyitself a loved object, but also mediates intenselyemotional relationships with other people,through the text on the screen and the feelingof the keys under the fingers. Evocative objectsdo not just attach themselves to us but are also interfaces for our relationships with otherpeople.In Durban, one author sees a boy carrying a wooden facsimile of a transistor radio:‘although it looked like a Braun transistor radio,this object never produced sound’. Asking theboy about this object of ‘emulation and imagi-nation’, he is told: ‘“It can’t play music, but Ising when I carry it. One day I’ll have a realone.”’ (105) A young sister’s stuffed bunny,named Murray, teaches a scholar of child devel-opment about the power of personified objects.A rolling pin evokes more than nostalgia(which seems to trivialise the bond), butdemonstrates how the materiality of an objectmakes a tangible link to the past and to lovedones who are no longer with us. But evocativeobjects can evoke difficult and contradictoryemotions. In contrast with a gold orchidbrooch, which reminds the wearer of hermother but is simply a pretty object carrying nostrong emotion, the silver pin that is the focusof the piece ‘evokes bruises and ambivalence,emotional knots difficult to untangle’. (191)‘Blue cheer’ reminds us that pharmaceuticalscan also be evocative objects for many. A lastsingle pill, kept as a reminder of the person theauthor used to be, shows us how objects areable to act as mnemonics or placeholders. The pill is also an example of how aestheticsand function intertwine in evocative objects.An epigram from Baudrillard tells us thatdesign reduces all the possible valences of anobject ‘to two rational components, two general209ELAINE LALLY—THINKING THROUGH THINGS
models—utility and the aesthetic’ which areopposed to each other. But ‘neither has anyreality other than being named separately’, andindeed they are ‘two equally arbitrary agencies[that] exist only to mislead’. (102)The collection perhaps works best if it isviewed as a network of nodes, as starting pointsfor thinking about how objects come to beevocative. Indeed, the pieces of writing them-selves operate (sometimes at least) as evocativeobjects. Like all objects, our responses to themwill be individualised and idiosyncratic. One ortwo of the pieces, it must be admitted, touchedme personally through an emotional connec-tion with the objects or situations described. Agranddaughter, for example, gathers togetherclothes and other mementos and packs theminto a small suitcase. It remains unopened fortwo-and-a-half years, because ‘increasingly itfeels dangerous to open it. Memories evolvewith you, through you. Objects don’t have thisfluidity; I fear that the contents of the suitcasemight betray my grandmother.’ (248) When itis finally opened, the author’s strong emotionalresponse will no doubt find its reflection inmany readers’ responses (including this one),who can readily resonate with the impulse togather the objects that might recreate a lostloved one.The study of material culture has experi-enced a surge of interest in the past few years.Daniel Miller, a British anthropologist whosework has been at the forefront of the develop-ment of material culture scholarship since the mid-1980s, has suggested that artefactsmay be difficult to investigate within intellec-tual traditions based profoundly on languageand the language-like features of culture.4While the now extensive recent literature onmaterial culture is not referenced, this is notappropriate, since the genre of the EvocativeObjects collection is not highly academic orfocused around theoretical development,though there are many theoretical elementsbrought together in loose counterpoint. Thecollection certainly offers a wide selection ofpointers to relevant theory. In the conclusion,Turkle suggests that one role of theory withinthe volume is to defamiliarise the familiarobjects represented in the chapters. In turn, ‘astheory defamiliarizes objects, objects familiarizetheory. The abstract becomes concrete, closer tolived experience.’ (307)Readers will in all likelihood find some ofthe pieces in Evocative Objects more interestingto them than others. The volume is most likelyto appeal to students and teachers in fields atthe intersection of material culture, technologyand everyday life, who will find illustrativematerial and pointers to theoretical directionsacross a broad range of kinds of objects. Miller’srecent book The Comfort of Things, interestingly,is also less academic and more literary in form,perhaps indicating that material culture lendsitself quite naturally to analysis in more literarygenres of writing than more traditional aca-demic styles.5Reading the volume from cover to cover wasquite a fragmentary experience, and it is diffi-cult to develop a sense of flow in the text,because the pieces themselves are all quiteshort. It would perhaps be better to read210VOLUME15 NUMBER1 MAR2009
Evocative Objects by dipping into it rather thanreading straight through. Indeed, it would be agood book to take on holiday, or on a longplane journey. It was good to be reminded ofthe works and perspectives brought to bear onthe examples through the juxtaposition withthe short ‘orienting’ extracts, and to be intro-duced to some unfamiliar ones. My ownfavourite quote is not one of the ones included,but it might as well have been, since it capturesthe power of evocative objects to anchor us inthe world:Indeed, things are perhaps the most faith-ful witnesses of all, and in their fidelity tous they function as extensions of ourselves,reflections and echoes of who we are, were,and will become. Those things in yourroom, for example, those simple, ordinarythings mirror who and what you are, andsituated in that room they give a shape toits space, they form it into a place, theyoutline a world … Staying in their place,they give us our place, and without suchthings in our lives we would have no placeat all.6——————————ELAINE LALLY is a Senior Research Fellow andAssistant Director of the Centre for CulturalResearch at the University of Western Sydney.She researches in the areas of art and technologyas material culture, and the role of arts andculture in regional development (especially inWestern Sydney). She is currently undertaking amajor ARC-Linkage funded project, and hascompleted consultancies for ArtsNSW and theAustralia Council as well as other short-termresearch projects. Dr Lally is author of At Homewith Computers (2002). <E.Lally@uws.edu.au>——————————1. Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and theHuman Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition), Cam-bridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984/2005 and Life on theScreen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York:Simon and Schuster, 1995.2. Turkle, The Second Self, p. 18.3. Turkle, The Second Self, p. 20.4. Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consump-tion,: Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, p. 100.5. Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things, Polity, Cam-bridge, 2008.6. R. D. Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom andDream, Routledge, London, 1989, pp. 193–4.211ELAINE LALLY—THINKING THROUGH THINGS

Citations (0)

References (4)

Technology as Symptom and Dream
Book
Jan 1989J Aesthet Art Critic
Robert D. Romanyshyn
View
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition), Cambridge
Jan 1984
Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition), Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984/2005 and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Jan 1987100
Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption,: Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, p. 100.
The Comfort of Things, Polity, Cambridge
Jan 2008
Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things, Polity, Cambridge, 2008.
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(PDF) A Global Anthropology? (Friedman's Cultural Identity and Global Process ):Cultural Identity and Global Process

(PDF) A Global Anthropology? (Friedman's Cultural Identity and Global Process ):Cultural Identity and Global Process

A Global Anthropology?  Richard Wilk Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington IN  47405, U.S.A.   Cultural Identity and Global Process. By Jonathan Friedman. London: Sage Publications, 1994. 270 pp.   The twelve essays that compose this book were published in various journals and collections between 1980 and 1995. Given that they were written over a considerable period of time for different audiences, they are remarkable coherent and consistent in their approach, outlook, and style. They provide one of very few recent anthropological approaches to global cultural phenomenon, seeking a grand historical synthesis of how all the disparate localities studied by anthropologists fit together.  Ethnographic examples are drawn from Friedman's and Ekholm-Friedman's fieldwork in Congo, Friedman's work in Hawaii, and a variety of historical cases from Greece to China.   Friedman establishes a theoretical home-base using a refined form of cultural neo-Marxism, within the umbrella of world-systems-theory. Friedman's historical analysis of the relationship between global economic and cultural cycles underpins every chapter of the book.  His driving force is the cyclic rise and fall of economic empire. At their peaks, these empires exercise real cultural hegemony and project a unified cultural model founded on a coherent vision of progress. As empires dissipate and collapse, they become culturally fragmented and their hegemony is increasingly questioned. New centers grow on the old periphery. It happened to the Hellenes, says Friedman, and it is happening to us.  As a result of this modern "crisis of capitalism," of economic fragmentation, deindustrialization, and capital flight to the periphery, the West is in rapid decline. New nationalisms, ethnicities, and identities arise, each incorporating fragments of Western consumer culture, but each negotiating different sorts of relationships to Western cultural forms. Postmodernism and anthropological struggles over representation and authority are simply the scholarly reflections of the new era of disorder, downward mobility, and fragmentation.   Friedman devotes several chapters to exploring a cyclic model of rise, hegemony, and fragmentation. His most stimulating and original sections juxtapose modernism, primitivism, and postmodernism as positions taken within an "identity space" of late capitalism, as local cultures and groups struggle with a declining West for authenticity and identity. His global typology of movements highlights the key roles of history and consumer goods in these articulations.  The strong critique of current anthropology aims directly at the roles and functions served by our field in a declining political economy, a role which he thinks will inevitably bring us into conflict with our subjects. The last three chapters of the book are concerned with identity and modernity, and include a sustained attack on cultural essentialism and theories of creolization and cosmopolitanism. Here he introduces an important concept with his distinction between "strong" forms of globalization that extend Western cultural dominance, and "weak" globalization which extends the form but not the substance, allowing for local appropriation of Western ideas, practices, and goods.   Chapter seven "Globalization and Localization," is my choice for the best single essay. He develops a contrast between urban Congolese and rural Hawaiians, identifying their different 
strategies of creating identity at the margins of powerful systems. He persuasively argues for the importance of consumption in the crafting identities with different relationships to the West.     Friedman is definitely a pessimist, almost a catastrophist who sees the West in the terminal phases of collapse; he foresees a "lumpenized" violent West awash with fractious immigrants and sub-nationals who float around the deindustrialized husk of the old capitalist core. Science and empiricism are headed to the junk-pile along with modernism. It is dangerous to depict the rise of new forms of nationalism, ethnic identification, and aspirations for local cultural autonomy as symptoms of decline and disorder. While Friedman is neutral about these changes, seeing them as symptoms of an inevitable global development of capitalism, his conclusions are uncomfortably close to the ideas of reactionary cultural purists who blame minorities and immigrants for the destruction of Western society. Global synthesis is difficult territory for anthropologists.  We tend to know a few places very well through our own ethnography, but must depend on reading a very inconsistent and uneven literature to learn about the rest of the planet. We are always in danger of casting the globe in terms of the few places where we have worked, seeing global processes through a very small lens. There is constant tension between the 'big pictures' we want to paint in terms of general, and usually highly abstract processes, and the tiny fragments of evidence that we control. Other fields use aggregate statistics, indices, surveys, and other measures to try to understand global processes, but Friedman, along with other recent anthropological synthesizers like Ulf Hannerz and Arjun Appadurai, shun such crude devices. Instead they tend to rely on historical narratives and ethnographic illustrations, which are usually truncated into sketches or anecdotes. In global anthropology richness and creativity of ideas and diversity of theoretical connections are not complemented by much empirical evidence. In Friedman's book (as in others of the genre), the author's veracity rests on clever argument, dazzling and sophisticated references and connections, and striking examples which appeal to our own experience, all of which Friedman provides in abundance. But the theoretical richness begs the question of what kinds of comparative, historical, or ethnographic evidence a truly global anthropology will need to call upon if alternate propositions are to be evaluated. I found this book a stimulating read, full of original ideas that point the way towards the next generation of global anthropology. Friedman's argument about the political economy of anthropology make a lot of sense out of many recent trends in the discipline. The scholarly exuberance and eclecticism of the writing is often stimulating, but some sections are also sloppy and repetitious, and the author sometimes stretches a point or analogy far past the breaking point. More seriously, I am not convinced by the main thesis, that hegemony is over and the West is in a terminal decline.  I am not convinced that Western hegemony was ever quite so thorough or all-encompassing, preferring Bruno Latour's formulation that "we have never been modern." I suppose that only time will tell if the resurgence of local identity and ethnicity is indeed the death knell of the West, or merely one of the more visible features of the latest phase of capitalist expansion and consolidation.    

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