Tag: Interconnection

Living and Enmeshed Societies

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“The processes that I have explored in this article, with Iraqw culture and society as my vantage point, may, I suggest, indicate that a certain not uncommon way of representing so-called ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ societies ought to be adjusted. These societies are not, and have never been, simply the passive victims of external modern forces ‘having an impact’ on them in more or less predictable ways. We are talking about living societies that consist of living and creative human beings, and which, like all societies, have mechanisms and procedures for coping with change in a manner which ensures cultural continuity” (Rekdal 1996: 382).

Thoughts on globalization, tradition, and modernity in Rekdal’s article on the Iraqw’s cultural ties to “Money, Milk, and Sorghum Beer.” How many times do we anthropologists have to remind ourselves that cultures are malleable? How many times do we anthropologists have to remind ourselves that everybody has agency? That being said, in cases where we anthropologists go out of their way to say that people are the makers of their own culture, we must also not forget the power dynamics at play that actually do move people against their will, or bind them to situations they cannot escape. These powers could be colonial, imperialist, oppressive forces, or even just acts of nature such as unforeseen natural disasters. Through small acts of resistance against these powers-that-be, culture is shaped, but that means that without these forces the culture afflicted would undoubtedly have found itself on a different path. We are all enmeshed in complex webs of interaction and while some communities may have coping strategies for change that “ensures cultural continuity,” these cultures are never isolated, and therefore they are not completely in charge of how their culture takes form. My conclusion for almost everything: humans are damn complicated.

References:
Rekdal, O.B. 1996. Money, Milk, and Sorghum Beer: Change and Continuity Among the Iraqw of Tanzania. Africa 66 (3), 367-385.

On Making a Home with COVID-19

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“When things melt past their assigned boundaries, when they touch each other across the wide ontological canyons that divide them, we name those resulting things ‘monsters.’ Monsters are stuff of nightmares. Monsters are a queering of categories, a disturbance of purity…. In response to accounts like these, we recoil in horror and repulsion–spitting out the aftertaste of the revolting stuff on our tongues. We fortify our foundations and raise the walls a few more inches, installing soldiers and searchlights at the tops…. Except that alterity (or radical otherness) has never been successfully excluded or mastered. Sooner or later, we will notice yet another demoniac infiltration, another monster sprouting from the cleanliness within: our searchlights will burn with greater ferocity, its sweeping gaze scanning the grounds for a speck that shouldn’t be there. This time, the light will settle on the least expected place: us” (Akomolafe 2013: 125-126)

Indeed the spotlight has been turned on us, as our bodies are the site of this new monster that has disrupted our lives: COVID-19. On news channels politicians, doctors, and everyday people use the vocabulary of warfare to describe our battle against this radical other, this uninvited house guest. Because literally, this monster has settled in our most intimate homes: our bodies. And following the new materialist logic that Akomolafe describes (that we are all entangled in relationship to ‘things’ around us, always in a state of becoming, see this previous post), then we are not human vs. virus, but humanvirus. Together with COVID-19 we have entered into a new state of being. Despite our efforts to build walls to the outside world, to keep diseases and weakness away – like a weed coming in the cracks of a sidewalk – our bodies have been infiltrated by this other being, this scary being, this being that causes fear and instability and death…

Many of us are responding in a completely valid and reasonable way: attack. Scream, kick, fight this monster until it leaves our bodies, until we have a vaccine, until it is gone forever. We must do this in the name of those we have lost… Let us take a moment to mourn those we have lost…

Let us take a moment now to listen. Listen above the screaming of your children in the room next door. Listen above the boredom that engulfs you, or the loneliness. Listen above the hunger pains in your stomach. Listen above your grief. Where did this virus begin? Or better, how did this virus emerge? (Akomolafe: “There are no beginnings that appear unperturbed, pristine and without hauntings” (2017: 112).) If it is true, as some say, that it emerged in the wildlife markets of China, where the human institution of caging wild animals in tight spaces led to the mutation of this virus — in the same way that SARS emerged — then isn’t it also true that we humans had a hand in creating this virus? Can we separate the processes of human culture and action from the emergence of disease and destruction?

And even so we must realize that even though through our battle with this alteration we are looking to ‘end’ its reign, it will never be truly gone from us. (Akomolafe: “And there are no endings that are devoid of traces of the new, spontaneous departures from disclosure and simmering events that are yet to happen” (2017: 112).) Our world has changed. Our bodies have changed. This monster will never leave us now. Those who have survived carry around traces of it in our blood in the form of antibodies.

So what now? Am I saying we should not scream, kick, fight, destroy this virus? No. We must do all we can to protect the lives of the people around us. Akomolafe reminds us that sometimes ‘monsters’ and nightmares and disasters do not have reason, do not have meaning, are not useful to any end. “The world is keener than neat form, correct answers, linear causality, social agency, or right responses” (2017: 129). Sometimes nightmares, disasters, viruses just happen. There need not be a reason WHY. It just is, and because it is we must find a way to live with it, to accept it into our worldview because it is not going away. As much as we want it to, this virus is here to stay, in some form or another.

“Our usual response to monsters is to curse them even further. They are unpredictable. Our survival is at stake if we allow them to multiply their perverted bodies. So we contain, medicate, bracket, paraphrase, and lock them away.” (Can I just say that it is spooky how much it feels like Akomolafe is speaking to this exact moment in time, to this exact monster we are facing now?) “But considering that the gift of the monster is a glimpse of our mutual porosity, other responses are possible and perhaps summoning both of us at this time” (2017: 130).

What does this mean? How can we have another response to the virus other than fight? There are deeper issues at play here. Perhaps this is a warning. We are lucky that this virus is not as deadly as future viruses may turn out to be. How can we prepare for them? How can we stop them from arising? What is this monstrosity teaching us, how is it shaping us, where will it lead us? (read Arundhati Roy’s and Paul Kingsnorth’s depictions of the virus and responses to these questions.) There are many valid responses to this virus, and each of us must find our own way the come to terms with the new, potentially nightmarish world we find our bodies entrenched in. Hopefully, together, we can see this monster for what it is: a companion of ours. Not necessarily the type of best friend companion you meet on the playground as a 6-year-old, but one we can learn lessons from and one that we must accept into our bodies, stories, and homes whether we want to or not. It is time to build new homes, new practices, new mentalities, in order to live with this virus and future monsters to come.

References: 
Akomolafe, B. 2017. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

To Be a Flower

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“Look how things sprout from other things. How nothing is itself all by itself–or without the contributions of other things. When you happen upon a flower, especially one whose otherworldly beauty and feminine fragility contrast sharply with its less endearing environment, you might immediately treat it as this localized ‘thing,’ as an object–one deserving of admiration–but an ‘object’ nonetheless: removed, unique, separate, and even audacious. What our linguistic conveniences blind us to is how that very flower is no more distinguishable from the dirt, the erratic weather, the traffic of pollen bearers that come from far off, the blazing sun, and even the occasional imprint of a boot worn by an uncharitable tourist, than a wave is distinguishable from the sea” (Akomolafe 2017: 123).

Bayo Akomolafe, in his book These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, sets out to write letters to his daughter in search of ‘home.’ What he finds on his journey is a never-ending procession of middles, not the illustrious homes found in the happy endings of fairy tales. In the ontoepistemology of new materialism (see works by Karan Barad) beginnings and endings are not possible, only emergences and becomings. The world is a meshwork of entanglements where nothing – not human bodies or minds, not flowers, not oceans, not waves – can be separated from the processes that make it. Akomolafe writes, then, that there must be a “redescription of the ‘human’ as a ‘becoming,’ not a final product. A doing, not a noun” (112).

These thoughts bring me back to my reading of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. Her chapter “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” teaches us about the failings of the English language to breathe agency into the material world around us. Our language sticks us in this Cartesian and postmodern concept of the centralized human that arose during the Age of Enlightenment and has engulfed us throughout the unfolding of modernity. While English fails to realize the agency of the world around us, Potawatomi has ancient wisdom about the world embedded into its grammar structure. Kimmerer uses the English word ‘a bay’ and its somewhat equivalent Potawatomi word ‘wiikwegamaa’ to describe the difference between these two languages:

“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. The bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa–to be a bay–releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise–become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us” (Kimmerer 2013: 55).

Akomolafe and Kimmerer speak to the same notion: that ‘things’ are constantly changing, always becoming, shaped by their agency and by the processes of the world around them. We must learn not to see ‘flower,’ ‘wave,’ ‘ocean,’ or ‘bay,’ but how these ‘things’ in this time came to be in this place. To BE a flower, to BE a wave, to BE an ocean and to BE a bay. This way of looking at the world opens up our minds to see our interconnectivity with the materials around us. How did we come to BE human? How did we come to BE ourselves, the you that is sitting now in the chair reading this post? I am as much shaped by my mother and father as I was by the woods I grew up in, and the microbes that live in my gut.

Next post: how Akomolafe’s writings ask us to treat COVID-19 — concepts of alterity, monstrosity, and more entanglements.

References:
Akomolafe, B. 2017. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Kimmerer, R. W. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

Tree vs. Rhizome, a Discussion of Networks

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“Networks are not just an omnipresent structure but also a symbol of autonomy, flexibility, collaboration, diversity, and multiplicity. As nonhierarchical models, networks are embedded with processes of democratization that stimulate individuality and our appetites for learning, evolving, and communication. They are, in essence, the fabric of life” (Lima 2011, p. 69).

Trees have been common and potent symbols across cultures and across time. They represent life, well-being and knowledge. However, as some modern day theorists have argued, they also represent centralization, finalism and essentialism (Lima 2011). Their hierarchical structure leaves little room for the complexities of modern day relationships – between species, between ideas, between people and the spaces they occupy. Thus, the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri (1972) suggest instead the concept of the rhizome. In sticking with a natural theme, rhizomes are the underground stems of plants. They grow multiple shoots that can reach off in many directions, connecting them to other parts of ecosystem. “There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines” (Deleuze & Guatarri 1987, p. 9). In seeing today’s complex world as a rhizome, we understand the multiple networks in which everything is dynamically connected, as opposed to the hierarchical structure in which everything has its due place.

This conversation of networks, while very philosophical, can be useful to anthropologists. In looking at our world as a complex and interconnected network, as opposed to a rigid and pre-determined structure, we can understand the diversity of ways people (and other species) act and inhabit the world. In today’s world of increasing globalization we must think of life as a democratic network and not a hierarchical structure.

If you are interested in these ideas, I suggest watching Manuel Lima’s youtube video “The Power of Networks.”

References:

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. B. Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Lima, M. 2011. Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.