Stacy A. A. Hope
Book Reviews Editor, OACP

© 2010 Stacy A. A. Hope

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

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MADDEN, RAYMOND. Being Ethnographic: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Ethnography. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2010. Ix + 197 pp., bibliography, index. Paperback £22.99.

Madden’s volume is a guide to how to practice ethnography. Through concise and manageable chapters, the reader is not submerged in theoretical jargon, which can appear to be grandiloquent to those new to the discipline. As he describes in the introductory chapter, his anticipated audience is “budding ethnographers”.

Madden approaches his guide to ethnography through anecdotes, both classical and modern ethnographic accounts. In addition, each chapter is concluded by a summary and questions section, which introduces his “budding” investigator to current questions within ethnography. These sections are reminiscent of text books due to their repetitive nature. Furthermore, this book is not only written for persons now approaching ethnography, but for individuals who are more interested in ‘applied anthropology’. This is important to note, since Madden, being an applied anthropologist, takes a reflexive approach through use of examples and constantly posing questions to the reader.

In the style of many books that focus on disambiguating ethnography, Madden starts off with a “’Definitions, Methodology and Applications” chapter, highlighting key terms that characterize ethnography. Although he describes these in relatively brief paragraphs, his writing is clear and packed with detailed descriptions. This is evident when distinguishing between American and British Anthropology through their key figures, Boas and Malinowski. I applaud Madden for making these distinctions, as individuals and users of ethnography often become confused by them.

Chapter 2 focuses on the ethnographic ‘field’, and the importance of relationships between humans and places. He states that “ethnographers are place-makers” (p.38) which, he goes on to state, does not mean trying to control the group or institution studied. Rather, Madden sees this role of the ethnographer “as an attempt to put boundaries around an ethnographer’s enquiries into a human group or institution” (p.38-9). As a result, Madden later reflects on the ambivalence of conducting ethnography at home, through excerpts from his PhD thesis and the questions that surfaced as a result of conducting his fieldwork in his “home”.

In the second section of this book, ‘Doing Ethnography’, Madden addresses the encounters one may have when entering the field and practicing there. Hence, chapters 3 and 4 both revolve around how the ethnographer interacts with his/her environment. Chapter 3 focuses on how we use speech to make ‘negotiations’ within the field. He outlines interviewing and conversation techniques that contribute to the negotiating process, which he thinks is crucial to the ethnographic experience. Included are examples of interview scenarios taken from classical ethnographies, such as Evans Pritchard’s The Nuer. He uses the Nuer to demonstrate the “tricky business” that is interviewing and how having the right questions is pertinent to acquiring knowledge about the people we study. To further emphasize the importance of mastering the ethnographic interview, Madden refers to Spradley’s (1979) twelve speech events, highlighting certain criteria entailed in a successful interview. However, these do not guarantee its success.

Madden moves on from the language we use to the way we participate and observe. He notes that, aside from talking to participants, we must also consider how we participate and see. Why do we engage with certain roles in the field, and why do we see what we do? He separates participation into immersion ethnography—the classic image of fieldwork—and step-in-step-out ethnography. Neither is the “right” way. Instead, he emphasizes that both of these methods are used in order to get “close but not too close” to the participants we encounter. This, he states, occurs through ‘inter-subjective embodiment’, as “the ethnographer’s body needs to acquire some competence relevant to the participants he or she is working with” (p.83). In relation to observation, Madden states that we systematically deploy the ethnographic ‘gaze’, which refers to the “specific way ethnographers have trained their observations on others” (p.96). He mentions a number of gazes, from the ‘feminist gaze’ to the ‘white male gaze’ (p.97), which refer to a sort of perspectival positioning that reflects their social position. Here, Madden brings in Visual Ethnography, outlining the use of films and photographs as tools for representing participants in the field. However, as he rightly notes, using images comes with many complications, due to a lack of “solid contextualizations” (p.112).

In chapter 6, he employs the idea of a ‘systematic hand’ to describe the transcription of field notes. It is easy to see the connection between the ethnographic gaze and the ethnographic hand, although the ethnographic hand requires strategies for transferring observation into words: this is our raw data. Madden suggests that ethnographers should use a strategy that works for them when it comes to writing field notes. He then categorizes these as participatory, consolidated and other. Participatory refer to notes taken during active fieldwork and consolidated notes are usually written at the end of the day. Madden warns that we should be careful how we use language, especially when carrying out applied ethnographic research.

With this in mind, the following chapter, ‘Analysis to Interpretation: Writing “out” data,’ focuses on the “language of data, and securing, managing and organizing the data” (p.136). Therefore, the next stage is to organize notes using individual strategies of coding—i.e. indexing and identifying themes. Here, Madden again makes a point of addressing the process of systematization. In this case, he focuses on thematic codes, which could be used to show relationships within the primary data (i.e. field notes). At the same time, coding also refers to pre- and post-fieldwork forms of data.

Chapter 8 calls for a “storied reality” in which the ethnographer makes the data interesting and accessible. This depends on the type of audience. Knowing ones audience influences the ethnographer’s interpretations, as highlighted in his previous chapter. Hence, writing up is part of the ethnographic method, as analysis and interpretation are both active during this period. Madden goes on to describe the structure of ethnographic writing, while acknowledging the importance of style, mentioning Van Maanen’s identification of realist and confessional genres.

He concludes by appealing to those forms of ethnography, such as ‘cyber-ethnography’, that do not relate to face-to-face fieldwork. He questions whether the authority of cyber-ethnography is diminished by the lack of embodied exchange that has hitherto defined ethnography.

Madden further draws our attention to the ethnography of non-human others, which, in many societies, provide rich insight into social relationships. He uses the example of the relationships people have with greyhounds in gambling. He argues that ethnographers should pay more attention to these relationships. It is hard to imagine a rural ethnography that would not take such relations into consideration.

Does this book constitute a conceptual advance in how we understand ethnography? Although it offers a concise introduction for beginners wishing to prepare themselves for the field and what it could possibly entail, it lacks depth. The emphasis on systematization is also rather heavy-handed. One accomplishment of this book, however, is to encourage the reader to engage with classical ethnographies, as well as with the author’s own fieldwork experiences. This publication is a useful aid to study, especially as Madden is constantly raising questions for his readers to ponder and answer.

Alberto Corsín Jiménez
CSIC, Spain’s National Research Council

© 2010 Alberto Corsín Jiménez

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
www.openanthcoop.net/press

Forum discussion in the OAC network.
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‘the most admirable operations derive from very weak means’
– Galileo Galilei (1968: 109)

‘Not just judgments about analogy but judgments about proportion inform any organization of data.’
– Marilyn Strathern (2004 [1991]: 24)

‘A strange thing full of water’
– Michel Serres (1995: 122)

I open with a myth of origins:

All political thought evinces an aesthetic of sorts. Dioptric anamorphosis, for instance, was the ‘science of miracles’ through which Hobbes imagined his Leviathan. An example of the optical wizardry of seventeenth century clerical mathematicians, a dioptric anamorphic device used a mirror or lens to refract an image that had deliberately been distorted and exaggerated back into what a human eye would consider a natural or normal perspective. Many such artefacts played with pictures of the faces of monarchs or aristocrats. Here the viewer would be presented with a panel made up of a multiplicity of images, often emblems representing the patriarch’s genealogical ancestors or the landmarks of his estate. A second look at the panel through the optical glass, however, would recompose the various icons, as if by magical transubstantiation, into the master’s face.

Noel Malcolm has exposed the place that the optical trickery of anamorphosis played in Hobbes’ political theory of the state (Malcolm 2002). According to Malcolm, the famous image of the Leviathan colossus that furnishes the title-page of Hobbes’ book came as an inspiration to Hobbes following his encounter with a dioptrical device designed by the Minim friar Jean-François Nicéron. Nicéron’s design involved a picture of the faces of twelve Ottoman sultans which, on looking through the viewing-glass tube, converged into the portrait of Louis XIII (Malcolm 2002: 213). Seduced by the structural symbolism through which such optical illusions could be used to represent relations between political persons (e.g. between the state and its subjects) (Malcolm 2002: 223), Hobbes commissioned an iconographic representation of similar effects for the title-page of his book. Here the image of the colossal Leviathan rises over the landscape energized by a mass of small figures. These morph by congregation into the body of the monarch, that hence takes a life of its own. A projection onto a one-dimensional surface of the dioptric trick, the figure of Leviathan aimed to capture the political innovation of Hobbes’ theory of representational personification. For Hobbes, the aggregation of the political will of multiple individuals into an overarching sovereign person brought about a political transubstantiation: the Many became the One, which contained, but also transcended, the Many. This is why for Hobbes the theory of (political) representation is a theory of duplicity and duplication: it calls for the critical capacity to see oneself as both the creator of a political object (the body politic) and its subdued servant; both a distant outsider to the body and in partial identity with it. This entails, as Malcolm puts it, ‘a curious structure of argument that requires two different ways of seeing the relation between the individual and the state to be entertained at one and the same time.’ (Malcolm 2002: 228)

Building on the implications of Malcolm’s analysis for our theories of the state, Simon Schaffer has recently offered a phantasmagorical reinterpretation of the place of optical illusionism in political perspectivism (Schaffer 2005). For Schaffer, the dioptric capacity to ‘see double’ is in fact but a first step towards the cancelling of all visions but the sovereign vision. According to Schaffer, dioptrics enables this parallax shift because it rationalizes as illusory all political perspectives that do not conform with the One: outside the body politic all visions are but the visions of political phantoms (Schaffer 2005: 202; on parallax shifts see Žižek 2006). In seventeenth century politics this was easily accomplished, according to Schaffer, because outside the rule of sovereign law – as Hobbes noted – lay only a chaotic state of nature, shaped by mistrust, fear, witchcraft accusations and the mischievous play of invisible phantoms. The rise of Leviathan exterminated the invisible, neatly aligning, in a supreme gesture of political illusionism, the planes of the natural and the phantasmagorical.

* * *

This paper offers anthropological insight into a certain fashion of Euro-American intellectual practice, namely, the operations through which knowledge comes-unto-itself as a descriptive register (of other practices). I am interested in the cultural epistemology that enables knowledge to become an enabler itself: what the growth of knowledge – or its rise as an expression of enablement – looks like. What does knowledge need to grow ‘out of’ for such an escalation to become meaningful or, simply, visible?

The making visible of knowledge as an object of growth has an anthropology to it.ⁱ It involves playful operations with social ideas of size and vision, and is materialized in a practical epistemology where the optical plays an intriguing culturally salient roleⁱⁱ. Optics makes size an effect of exploration. It makes things big and small in different proportions, intensities and shapes. It provides a form or carrier for the expansions and contractions in/of knowledge. There is a seductive analogy between how knowledge has been rendered a mode of enablement in some Euro-American social theory and the perspectival technique known by art historians as anamorphic illusionism. (This should not be taken as pejorative: an illusion can be both hopeful and delusive.) As a praxis or craft of optical deformation, the anamorphic offers a useful imago for the cultural comportment of some aspects of Euro-American knowledge (De la Flor 2009).

As will come evident throughout, a source of inspiration for what follows has been the work of Marilyn Strathern. Of her own experimentation with narrative and analytic strategies in Partial Connections, she described the use she made of the imagery of the fractal (Cantor’s Dust) in that book as ‘an artificial device’ that allowed her to ‘experiment with the apportioning of “size” in a deliberate manner.’ (Strathern 2004 [1991]: xxix) My interest in the anamorphic lies likewise in its use as a tool for making explicit how social theory and critique size themselves – that is, how ‘size’ has become an idiom for what theory does.

A rather obvious and yet rarely acknowledged route through which the imagination of ‘size’ has made its way into the sociological canon is via the descriptive and analytical purchase afforded by relations of magnitude known as ‘proportions’. The analogy between enablement and escalation that I drew above – the image of knowledge as an expression of escalating enablement – is a case in point. There is an important and not-always acknowledged current in Euro-American social theory and philosophy that refracts the work of knowledge through the operations of a proportional imagination. Proportionality becomes the enabling mechanism of knowledge: how knowledge escalates out of itself.

Take the Leviathan. Hobbes’ iconographic choice makes the Leviathan appear as a supreme trickster figure, at once enabling and concealing its own source of agency. The state’s power figures as an aesthetic effect: the effect of a parallax shift, the alignment of two perspectives in one optical illusion. Importantly, the illusion is held in place through the work of a proportional imagination: ‘the relation between the individual and the state’, as Malcom puts it, is tricked into view and held stable as a proportional artifice. The One and the Many stand in a political relation to each other because of their proportional relationship. As a symbolic form, the meaningfulness and ‘comparability of phenomena rests on preserving proportion or scale.’ (Strathern 1990: 211) Nicéron’s dioptric lens generates the perspective from which knowledge of the political surfaces. ‘The political’ emerges as a modern theoretical object thanks to the effect of the anamorphic artifice: it is what the world looks like from the point of view of the lens. Anamorphosis situates and aligns the world of political theory for us.

The anamorphic operates a second effect on the workings of knowledge, which I shall call ‘reversibility’. Reversibility describes the double and simultaneous vision required to grant theoretical status to an object. When commenting on the illusionary character of Hobbes’ Leviathan, Malcolm described it as ‘the curious structure of argument that requires two different ways of seeing the relation between the individual and the state to be entertained at one and the same time.’ (Malcolm 2002: 228) The relational character of sovereign power emerges thus as another effect of the anamorphic artifice. It is a produce of having to hold simultaneously an internal and external vision on the images of the twelve sultans and Louis XIII’s emblem. Not without reason, Simon Schaffer described the methodological exigency underpinning our encounter with the phantom qualities of the Hobbesian body politic as ‘seeing double’ (Schaffer 2005). Moving in and out of the dioptric lens – performing the anamorphic – lends political theory its relational purchase.

The rest of this paper explores the hold that proportionality and reversibility have over the make-up of social theory. It may be read as an exploratory foray into the cultural analytics of some aspects of Euro-American knowledge,ⁱⁱⁱ and in this sense as an investigation into the novel anamorphic devices through which contemporary social theory may be generating its escalatory effects. Some comments are also made in passing about the contemporary economy of knowledge as, itself, an anamorphic configuration.^iv

* * *

Let me start with a rich and evocative account of how architects visualize their building projects by sociologist Albena Yaneva. Her field site is the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the workplace of the famous Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas; and her focus is the work carried out by architects at OMA during the design and development of a number of models for the new exhibition hall at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (Yaneva 2005). Yaneva writes from a self-confessed social studies of technology perspective, and indeed declares that in her account ‘the architectural office will be studied in the same way that STS has approached the laboratory.’ (Yaneva 2005: 869)

The ethnography starts from the premise that ‘knowing through scaling is an integral aspect of architectural practice’ and the author sets as her task to describe ethnographically the so-called enigma of the ‘rhythm of scaling’ (Yaneva 2005: 870, 868). The scales that Yaneva takes to task here are differently sized models of the Whitney building project. Architects in OMA work with two scale models of the projected building: a small-scale model, which is quickly put together by architects to provide a sketchy and abstract materialization of the basic concept guiding the project, and which includes a number of site constraints, such as urban and local zoning regulations or client requirements; and a much larger scale model, which is used to fine-tune the small model by fleshing-out its concrete details.

The small and large models are set up in two adjacent tables and architects spend a good amount of time moving from one table to the next, “‘scaling up’, ‘jumping the scale, ‘rescaling’ and ‘going down in scale’”, in the vernacular terminology used by Yaneva’s informants (Yaneva 2005: 870). In moving between tables and models, architects spend a considerable amount of time working with an instrument known as a ‘modelscope’, which is used to explore the inside of the small model. By inserting a miniature periscope into the model, architects redeploy themselves as human users of the building. ‘The modelscope’, an architect tells Yaneva, ‘gives you a view that is like the scale of that model. So, you get to express the space at that scale. It gives you the opportunity to move around spaces you ordinarily can’t get into and to see how they look… We are able to see how space is inside.’ Yaneva further notes that ‘minimized to the scale of the tiny model, [the architect] is exploring these microscopic spaces like in Gulliver’s travels, he ‘enters’ the spaces and experiences them.’ (Yaneva 2005: 876) Having cruised the inside of the small model, architects then assemble to discuss possible changes in the architectural layout of the building, which are later given concrete expression in changes made to the large model.

The scoping in and out of the small and large models is a recursive process: ‘Scaling up’, writes Yaneva, ‘is immediately and reversibly followed by scaling down.’ (Yaneva 2005: 883) However, as times goes by, the larger model inevitably amasses more information and detail than the smaller one, for it is to the larger model that the insights gained from exploring the small model eventually get transported and where they get reflected. Thus, the larger model grows in power and information by gathering the produce of the recursion. But importantly, Yaneva insists, this does not mean that the design involves a linear or evolutionary movement from the small model to the large model. The small model is not a pre-condition, or an evolutionary antecedent, for the revelation of proper and useful knowledge at the level of the larger scale model. Rather, the design is simultaneously present in the small and the large, the before and after of every recursion, the scoping in and out through which architects multiply the versions and the trajectories of the design. According to Yaneva, the shape the project finally takes emerges gradually as a form of extended and ubiquitous co-presence in the time and space of all such scalar operations. As ‘it passes through these trials,’ she says, ‘it becomes more and more visible, more present, more material, real. ‘Scaling’ is not a way to fit into reality; rather, it is a conduit for its extraction.’ (Yaneva 2005: 887)

There are two points I would like to make about the architects use of scaling as a method of knowledge and design. One is the extraordinary ease with which it sits next to Gulliver’s Travels. The second is what this figure of scale takes for granted.

It is certainly worth noting how Jonathan Swift and Yaneva resort to a similar imagination of size to make their arguments carry force. For both size is important; it helps render certain insights valuable and visible. In fact, literary theorist Douglas Lane Patey has described Gulliver’s Tales as ‘laboratory experiments based on difference of size’ (Patey 1991: 827), much like Yaneva describes her ethnography of architecture as a laboratory study in the ‘rhythm of scaling’.

Of course, Swift’s use of size has long attracted the attention of literary theorists for its satirical effects. It is satire that size aims for. I want to suggest, however, that one may explore the use of size in Swift not for its effects on something else, but for its effect on itself – that is, on its own self-apprehension as a body of knowledge. Size, then, as a vehicle for making knowledge an adequate expression of itself.

There is a wonderful episode in Gulliver’s Travels that captures something of what I am hoping to convey here, namely, the extent to which knowledge comes in different sizes. At Brobdingnag, the land of the giants, Gulliver is taken to court for the diversion of the Queen and her ladies. Impressed by Gulliver’s demeanour, the King, ‘who had been educated in the Study of Philosophy, and particularly Mathematicks’, suspects of Gulliver being ‘a piece of Clock-work… contrived by some ingenious Artist.’ He therefore sends for three great Scholars to examine Gulliver’s shape and make-up. The scientists all agree that Gulliver ‘could not be produced according to the regular Laws of Nature’. However, an opinion that he was an ‘embrio’ was rejected, as was his characterisation as an ‘abortive Birth’; nor could he be a dwarf, because his ‘Littleness was beyond all degree of comparison; for, the Queen’s favourite Dwarf, the smallest ever known in that Kingdom, was near thirty Foot high.’ (Swift 2002 [1726]: 86-87) Thus, ‘After much debate’, the scholars finally sentenced that Gulliver

was only Relplum Scalcath, which is interpreted literally, Lusus Naturae [a freak of nature]; a Determination exactly agreeable to the Modern Philosophy of Europe, whose Professors, disdaining the old Evasion of occult Causes, whereby the Followers of Aristotle endeavour in vain to disguise their Ignorance, have invented this wonderful Solution of all Difficulties to the unspeakable Advancement of human knowledge. (Swift 2002 [1726]: 87)

The episode is emblematic of Swift’s mordacity, and in particular his dislike of the new Modern science of the Royal Society, epitomised here in the figure of the three scholars. For Swift, modern science falls trap to tautology (circular and self-explanatory arguments, such as something being a ‘freak of nature’) inasmuch as ancient science did. But the episode is further remarkable for its defence of size as comparative epistemology. Gulliver does not survive comparison, not against dwarves, embryos or abortive births, so he is in the last instance catalogued as a freak of nature. Not even the use of a ‘Magnifying-Glass’ can help the scholars reach an agreement on what Gulliver may be. They size him up and they size him down, only to conclude that he is not a product of nature. ^v Thus, for Lane Patey, ‘Swift’s play with perspective (relative size and its implications)’ ultimately enacts the question: ‘what is there in us that survives comparison – what that cannot be rendered ludicrous, shameful, or disgusting when magnified to Brobdingnagian proportions or shrunk to Lilliputian?’ (Patey 1991: 826) Said differently, in Brobdingnag country, Gulliver lacks ontology because he is out-of-proportion with the world.

My second remark on architects’ use of scaling as a method of knowledge builds on this question about size and the proportionality of the world. In Yaneva’s account, what is at stake is how the project grows and consolidates its own size, or how it finds in the small and large models different capacities to deploy different aspects of the design. The qualities of the design are therefore allowed to emerge through the recursive travelling between models of different size. Thus, the scale that dominates is that of size. I want to suggest, however, that Yaneva’s ethnography provides some room for speculating about an alternative scale; to imagine the architects looking into the models for certain qualities other than those of adjustment to size. For example, when the effect that a giant red escalator has on the interior of the exhibition hall is examined through the modelscope, the architects agree that the escalator needs to be moved to a different spot within the hall. We are left in shades as to what exactly motivates the relocation, although Yaneva intimates that the ‘scaling team engages in a dialogue… [about] dispositions, objects they see inside the model, spatial transitions, material properties of the foam [used to build the model], proportions and shapes.’ (Yaneva 2005: 875) Things do not quite fit together for the architects, but it is no longer clear that this fit is a question of scale. Thus, the adjustment that the architects appear to be looking for now seems to aim for a different kind of harmony, or an equilibrium of different proportions.^vi

Adjustments to scale

In an age of computer technology, the use that OMA’s architects make of the use of scale models may appear a little surprising for those of us who are new to the field of architecture. But in fact, as historian of architecture Paul Emmons has shown, the use of scale and scalar drawings has played a fundamental part in architectural practice throughout history (Emmons 2005). For example, from ‘the middle of the second millennium BCE,’ writes Emmons, ‘a statue of Gudea, leader of the City State of Lagash in present day Iraq, is seated with a building floor plan resting on his lap. Also on the tablet are a stylus and a scale rule, showing fine divisions of the finger measure.’ (Emmons 2005: 227). Like Yaneva, in his historical survey Emmons draws too an analogy between the use of scale in architecture and Swift’s Gulliver travels, and the 17^th century scalar imagination at large. Thus, he compares Swift’s use of scale with that of Voltaire’s in Micromégas, and identifies further in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia a locus of general influence for the period. Hooke, who was a Surveyor for the City of London and designed himself a number of buildings along with his friend Christopher Wren, ‘transferred his familiarity with scale from architectural drawing to the microscope.’ (Emmons 2005: 231) Published in 1665, Micrographia described Hooke’s use of a microscope to make observations of miniature aspects of the natural world, such as fly’s eye or a plant cell. The book became an immediate best-seller of its day.

Of interest for our purposes here is Hooke’s mode of use and relationship to the microscope. Emmons cites a passage in the Micrographia which echoes in fascinating ways how Yaneva’s architects scooped in and out of the small and the large scale models. ‘Hooke organised his microscopic observations’, writes Emmons, ‘progressively from simple to complex, like a geometer ascending from point, line, plane to volume and the chain of being from mineral to vegetable and animal. He began with observing the point of a pin under the microscope… He next analysed a dot made by a pen, and in a scalar reverie imagined this dot as the earth in space.’ However, Hooke was also aware that this amassment of detail – from the simple to the complex – required a second operation to remain epistemologically productive. He went at quite some effort to keep the observations made inside the scale of the microscope at a par with those made outside the microscope. As Emmons puts it, ‘Hooke explained his method determining the microscope’s scale of magnification by looking with one eye through the microscope as the other naked eye examines a ruler, simultaneously engaging both scales.’ (Emmons 2005: 231, emphasis added) This simultaneous engagement of both scales echoes the parallax shift of Hobbes’ Leviathan: an illusion of epistemological and political efficacy enabled by the dimension of reversibility at work in the anamorphic. I shall come back to this point later.

Emmons concludes his observations on the historical importance of scale for architecture by commenting on architects’ contemporary use of computer software to generate 1:1 or full scale CAD projections of architectural designs. For Emmons, the use of CAD technology emulates a Cartesian approach to the generation of objects, where things can be described or plotted through systems of notational or algebraic relations. Thus, the use of CAD-enabled full scale drawing ‘makes it more likely that the designer looks at the image as an object rather than projecting oneself into the image through an imaginative inhabitation. Scale sight is not an abstraction; it is achieved through judging the size of things in relation to ourselves.’ (Emmons 2005: 232) His ‘handbook advise’, then, is to ‘learn to think within a scale rather than translate from actual measure.’ (Emmons 2005: 232) Against Cartesianism, for Emmons, the ‘empathetic bodily projection’ of scale is ‘critical to imagining a future edifice.’ (Emmons 2005: 232)

Of Emmons’ description of the history of architectural practice there are two aspects that I would like to hold in view. The first deals with the proportionality of architecture as a skill and trade; the second, to which I shall return later, with the deployment of the ‘double vision’ that is entailed in the practice of scoping in and out of scale.

Emmons’ concern is with current architectural practice, where scale fares as a context-free metric, and advocates instead a return to ‘judging the size of things in relation to ourselves.’ This form of empirical judgment echoes what Yaneva called a ‘rhythm of scaling’: an iterative re-proportional exercise through which the world sizes its ontology (its human and non-human landscape) to a proper shape and form.

In fact, architectural practice provides in this context an interesting place for seeing not only the work of proportionality at play, but its recurrent entanglement in larger debates about the epistemic structure of scientific knowledge. David Turnbull, for example, has described how in the absence of knowledge about structural mechanics the use of proportionality in medieval times enabled the construction of imposing and majestic Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres. According to Turnbull,

In the absence of rules for construction derived from structural laws problems could be resolved by practical geometry, using compasses, a straight-edge, ruler, and string. The kind of structural knowledge which was passed on from master to apprentice related sizes to spaces and heights by ratios, such as half the number of feet in a span expressed in inches plus one inch will give the depth of a hardwood joist…. This sort of geometry is extremely powerful; it enables the transportation and transmission of structural experience, makes possible the successful replication of a specific arrangement in different places and different circumstances, reduces a wide variety of problems to a comparatively compact series of solutions, and allows for a flexible rather than rigid rule-bound response to differing problems…. Essentially it enables a dimensionless analysis precluding the need for a common measure. Geometrical techniques in this case provide a powerful mode of communication that dissolve problems of incommensurability that the use of individual measurement systems might otherwise have. (Turnbull 2000: 69)

Turnbull is interested in the constitution of what he calls ‘knowledge spaces’. These are the ‘kinds of spaces that we construct in the process of assembling, standardising, transmitting and utilising knowledge’ (Turnbull 2000: 12). Western science is in this respect no different from other knowledge systems, such as indigenous or amateur knowledge systems. What distinguishes the epistemic robustness of technoscience, rather, is its development of a corpus of techniques and protocols that enable knowledge to move and travel beyond localised sites of production. The further knowledge can travel, the more coherent and robust its epistemic make-up. This is why for Turnbull one can imagine the architectural site of a cathedral in no different terms from those of a laboratory (Turnbull 2000: 66-67). All that it takes is identifying an analogical ‘scalar’ denominator: something that can operate the changes in scale required for knowledge to cohere and travel. For Turnbull, in the context of medieval cathedral building this task was performed by the ‘template’:

Three major ‘reversals of forces’ are achieved with this one small piece of representational technology; one person can get large numbers of others to work in concert; large numbers of stones can be erected without the benefit of a fully articulated theory of structural mechanics or a detailed plan; and incommensurable pieces of work can be made accumulative (Turnbull 2000: 68).

Turnbull’s focus on proportionality as a tool for sense-making provides a vivid example of the terms through which knowledge is said to ‘grow’ as an epistemic object. The work of proportionality suffuses knowledge with an ontological structure. In Turnbull’s account this is actually so in two senses. On the one hand, proportionality is what masons used to calculate the fit between spaces and heights. The proportion is the vehicle for lending the world a certain height, length and width. But the imagery of proportionality is also what underpins Turnbull’s very own analytical explanations. Thus, in an echo of the Galilean epigram that heads this paper – ‘the most admirable operations derive from very weak means’ –, Turnbull writes of how the use of the template by masons enabled ‘one person… [to] get large numbers of others to work in concert’. This is a truly Archimedean metaphor, where a sociological effect is made visible by imagining agency as a leverage of sorts.

Architectural optics of volumes

The movements in size, the dynamics of aggrandizement and miniaturisation that Turnbull describes as characteristic of the epistemic work of science, are nowhere rendered in so vivid a style as in Bruno Latour’s historical ethnography of Pasteur’s microbiology. According to Latour, amongst Pasteur’s greatest achievements is his translation of the interests that nineteenth century farmers and veterinarians had in the anthrax bacillus into the discourse and practices of bacteriologists. This Pasteur accomplishes by becoming himself a ‘microbe farmer’: by removing a cultivated bacillus from the ‘outside’ real world of farming and veterinary science and isolating and culturing it ‘inside’ a sanitised laboratory space. Whereas in the former the ‘anthrax bacilli are mixed with millions of other organisms’ and therefore practically invisible to the scientific gaze, in the latter ‘it is freed from all competitors and so grows exponentially’, ‘growing so much’ that it ‘ends up… in such large colonies that a clear-cut pattern is made visible to the watchful eye of the scientist.’ (Latour 1983: 146) The inside:outside::visible:invisible equation creates and enables different zones of empowerment and agency for different actors. Thus,

the asymmetry in the scale of several phenomena is modified: a micro-organism can kill vastly larger cattle, one small laboratory can learn more about pure anthrax cultures than anyone before; the invisible micro-organism is made visible; the until now interesting scientists in his lab can talk with more authority about the anthrax bacillus than veterinarians ever have before. (Latour 1983: 146)

Translation works therefore as a sort of rebalancing mechanism, where Pasteur stands as fulcrum: the messy and cloudy world of outside farming and veterinary diseases is funnelled through the inside of Pasteur’s laboratory to crystallise and make visible a new balance of powers. Pasteur’s laboratory becomes a lever for a new distribution of power. In Latour’s succinct formulation:

The change of scale makes possible a reversal of the actors’ strengths; ‘outside’ animals, farmers and veterinarians were weaker than the invisible anthrax bacillus; inside Pasteur’s lab, man becomes stronger than the bacillus, and as a corollary, the scientist in his lab gets the edge over the local, devoted, experienced veterinarian. (Latour 1983: 147)

In these and other accounts Latour uses the imagery of scale to produce sociological explanations. He sizes objects and agencies up and down vis-à-vis each other to make certain sociological effects visible. A similar appraisal of the Latourian project has been offered by Simon Schaffer, who has remarked on the extent to which ‘The model of the lever plays a fundamental role throughout Latour’s oeuvre: scientists achieve astonishing reversals of force by rendering lab objects commensurable with the forces of the world, then manipulating the former to shift the latter.’ Schaffer notes how in his descriptions Latour chooses an ‘Archimedean point’ around which he then proceeds to effect an ‘inversion of scale’ letting certain beings (human or nonhuman) ‘move forces apparently more powerful than’ them (Schaffer 1991: 184).

Latour is certainly aware of the choice of imagery through which he fleshes-out his epistemology. Of his Pasteur article, ‘Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world’, he writes that ‘I used in the title a parody of Archimedes’s famous motto’ because ‘[t]his metaphor of the lever to move something else is much more in keeping with observation than any dichotomy between a science and a society.’ (Latour 1983: 154) His point, quite rightly, is that the reception and endorsement of Pasteur’s scientific advances by French society cannot be explained by a simple dichotomic framework of Science-Society encounters. Rather, one needs to attend to the different strategies and practices through which a variety of partisan interests are recruited and converted into laboratory skills and techniques, and vice versa, the way in which the laboratory and its infrastructural equipment gets deployed and travel outside the laboratory walls sensu stricto. In other words, the way in which Pasteur becomes a farmer and farmers becomes Pasteurians.

Notwithstanding this declaration of epistemological self-awareness, what remains intriguing is the long lineage of proportional epistemologies to which this style of sociological reasoning and argumentation belongs. In We have never been modern Latour comments on the Hobbes-Boyle controversy by observing how Hobbes insisted on denying what was ‘to become the essential characteristic of modern power: the change in scale and the displacements that are presupposed by laboratory work.’ (Latour 1993: 22) For Latour, the laboratory performs for modernity the role of a ‘theatre of measurement’ or instrument for size-making, and indeed it is the self-explicitation of size that in his own work becomes his analytic trademark. His sociology fares as a sociology of size, or rather of the fluctuations of size.

The term ‘theatre of measurement’ is Michel Serres’ (1982). It is used by Serres to describe ‘the scene of representation established for Western thought [by ancient Greeks] for the next millennium.’ It marks the ‘instauration of the moment of representation’ by philosophy, an instauration brought about through the use of ‘a perspectival geometry, of an architectural optics of volumes’ (Serres 1982: 92). This is a wonderful phrase that captures much of what I have been dwelling on up to this point. Serres’ argument builds on the tale of Thales’ measurement of the height of the great pyramid. Thales accomplishes this feat by placing a post in the sand. As the sun sets, the triangular shadows cast by the pyramid and post are then compared. In so doing, Thales invents thus ‘the notion of a model’ (Serres 1982: 86):

By comparing the shadow of the pyramid with that of a reference post and his own shadow, Thales expressed the invariance of similar forms over changes of scale. His theorem therefore consists of the infinite progression or reduction of size while preserving the same ratio. From the colossal, the pyramid, to the small, a post or body, decreasing in size ad infinitum, the theorem states a logos or identical relation, the invariance of the same form, be it on a giant or a small scale, and vice versa. Height and strength are suddenly scorned, smallness demands respect, all scales and hierarchies are demolished, now derisory since each step repeats the same logos or relation without any changes! (Serres 1995: 78)

Steven Brown, who has commented on the originality of Serres’ oeuvre for social theory at large, glosses Serres’ analysis thus:

Here truly is the ‘Greek miracle’ – one man dominates a mighty pyramid. In this ‘theatre of measurement’ invented through the simple act of placing a peg in the sand, it is as though everything changed place. The weak human overcomes ancient hewn stone, the mobile sun produces immobile geometric forms… There is an interaction or communication between two diverse partners (Thales, Pyramid) which involves a switching or exchanging of properties (weak/strong, mortal/durable). (Brown 2005: 220)

We are back, then, to the Archimedean image of the leverage. The world’s intelligibility holds itself together through an image of ontological balance. Whatever the world turns out to be – however and wherever we locate its sources of agency – this will always ‘net-out’ as an exchange of equations: weak/strong, mortal/durable, cathedral/template, gigantic/infinitesimal, etc. The use of a proportional imagination allows social theory to net-out its descriptive projects in ontological fashion.^vii

Proportions in perspective

Of course, in some sense, the importance of proportionality for architectural, and indeed socio-spatial reflection at large, has always been a matter of perspective – of optics. The origins of perspective in the fifteenth century have long been traced back to the renaissance of classical proportionality. As Martin Jay has observed, ‘Growing out of the late medieval fascination with the metaphysical implications of light – light as divine lux rather than perceived lumen – linear perspective came to symbolize a harmony between the mathematical regularities in optics and God’s will.’ Pictorial and aesthetic preoccupations shifted from a religious interest in objects to ‘the spatial relations of the perspectival canvas themselves. This new concept of space was geometrically isotropic, rectilinear, abstract, and uniform.’ (Jay 1988: 5-6) Thus, famously, for Erwin Panofsky Renaissance perspective realised reflexivity as a spatial gaze (Panofsky 1993 [1927]). The difference between classical and renaissance perspective is one in the mode of occupying space and imagining spatial relations. In the Renaissance, the perspective marks a mode of taking the world in by looking through it. This is different from the classical disposition of bodies in space, which remains anchored in the physical mimesis of experience and bodily movement (Iversen 2005). We may say that Renaissance perspectivalism introduces epistemological gradients to the way we look at the world: perspective does not drive us to a singular epistemological residence. There are differences between ‘looking at’ and ‘looking through’ something; the movement of the gaze through space – the achievement of depth and the skewing of vision through off-centred displacements – generates different sorts of friction. In this context, rather than, or beyond its comprehension as a geometrical or symbolic form, the way Panofsky did, perspectivalism may be seen instead as a ‘general capacity for producing effects’ (Damisch 1997 [1987]: 41, my translation).

What kind of effects are those the deployment of perspective produces? Very early on in the theorisation of perspectivalism, Renaissance writers already described Brunelleschi’s architectural use of perspective (for it is Brunelleschi who is widely acknowledged for discovering the technique of perspectivalism), for its very special effects on making objects diminish in size. Hubert Damisch cites Antonio Filarete’s famous Trattato di archittettura, where the use by Brunelleschi of a mirror to help frame the lineaments of whatever the architect needs to represent is praised for ‘making easily observable the contours of those things closer to the eye, whilst those that are farthest away will diminish proportionately in size.’ (cited in Damisch 1997 [1987]: 68) The observation is common: Antonio di Tucci Manetti, an early biographer of Brunelleschi, likewise describes perspective as a ‘science which requires to determine well and with reason the diminutions and augmentations… of things close and afar’ (cited in Damisch 1997 [1987]: 70-71). An acknowledged novelty of perspectivalism, then, seems to lie in the cultural salience lend to the technical capacity for making variations in size visible. Moreover, size becomes an effect of scoping: a consequence of zooming-in and out of representation. A spectator can enter a picture’s plane so long as she can keep certain proportions in place. The world inside the painting is therefore made to appear geometrically co-extensive with the world outside. An ontological continuity between pictorial and world space is obtained through the friction and play entailed in making things big and small.

In its original formulation, the question of perspective raised yet another cultural complex with epistemological significance, namely, the problem of reflexive distance. The experiment or demonstrations for which Brunelleschi is regarded as the discoverer of perspective involved two paintings of the Baptistery of St. John and the Palazzo de’ Signori, both long lost. The only eye-witness account describes the Baptistery painting as being executed on a small wooden panel. Once the painting was accomplished, Brunelleschi drilled a small hole in the panel at the point which would represent his equivalent viewpoint on the Baptistery’s plane (the vanishing point). He then invited spectators to peer through the hole from the back of the panel at a mirror held in front to reflect the painting. (In passing, let me draw attention to the emphasis that Filerete’s account of the drawing places in how it is the sharp use of ‘one eye’ that will best bring to life the full power of the perspectival illusion (Damisch 1997 [1987]: 69).) It remains uncertain whether Brunelleschi realised he needed to control the viewing distance for spectators to replicate his original point of view on the Baptistery (Damisch 1997 [1987]: 98; Kemp 1990: 13, 344-345). What Brunelleschi’s experiment did accomplish, however, was to throw into relief the significance of distance as an epistemological figure. There is a proper distance between our holding the world in view and the world’s presentation or disclosure of its forms. A subtle shift is introduced: between the point of view on the world and the relational variance through which the view obtains.

Anamorphosis

The relation between perspectivalism and proportionality assumed a number of forms from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.^viii In keeping with the optical trope, Martin Jay has identified at least three scopic regimes of modernity: Cartesian perspectivalism, of the symbolic kind analysed by Panofsky; the so-called art of describing, where the viewer is drawn to the surface or material qualities of objects and not their relational disposition in space; and, finally, baroque or anamorphic modernity (Jay 1988). It is with the latter that I am concerned here.

Anamorphic illusionism deployed the epistemological power of relational variance to its full. Anamorphic projections of objects are distorted such that it takes the use of a special device or manoeuvre to have the object restored to its original form. Remember the Leviathan and Nicéron’s dioptric device. Sometimes it is the use of a special kind of lens that does the trick of reconfiguration; sometimes the observer is required to skew her vision, for example, by approaching the picture at a particular angle. As Lacan famously argued, vision is here confronted with a blind spot of conscious perception (Lacan 1979). The object stares back from a point of view that remains oblique to us. In the Brunelleschian demonstration, what is excluded is the other eye: the eye that does not look through the peephole and yet which is reflected back from the vanishing point. This one-eyed optics is intriguingly reminiscent of Hooke’s microscopic vision, where one eye holds the scale of the miniature in view whilst the other is focused on the scale of representation. It further echoes the ‘seeing double’ at play in the Leviathan’s optics. An eye is constructed that is therefore simultaneously internal and external to vision.^ix The eye becomes the optical metaphor through which the body is made visible as a conduit of dis/proportional relations: the bodies of the architect, the micrographer and the perspectival illusionist holding the world to account by virtue of a ‘double vision’. Double vision foregrounds thus the body as a figure of scale between the natural and the social worlds. In Margaret Iversen’s formulation, ‘The real in the scopic field is formed when the eye splits itself off from its original immersion in visibility and the gaze as objet petit a [as unattainable object of desire] is expelled.’ (Iversen 2005: 201) A split eye that signals in turn the birth of the Baroque as an aesthetic of the uncanny: an aesthetic ‘which consisted in making something visible, in being a pure apparition that made appearance appear, from a position just on its edges’ – and which citing Paul Klee, Christine Buci-Glucksmann describes as ‘to see with one eye and consciously perceive with the other’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1994 [1984]: 60).

Under the scopic regime of the anamorphic, then, the illusions of knowledge undergo a transformation from a concern with proportionality to an obsession with reversibility – with the illusions of double vision – the eye that sees inside/outside itself. It is indeed in these terms that Deleuze described too the anamorphic as the condition of possibility of the Baroque age – and by extension of our neo-Baroque contemporary. In his lectures on Leibniz about the rise of perspectivalism in the development of projective geometry Deleuze asks, recalling Leibniz’s thought, ‘What produces a point of view?’, to which he answers, ‘That regional proportion of the world that is clearly and distinctively expressed by an individual in relation to the totality of the world that is expressed confusingly and obscurely.’ (Deleuze 2006 [1980/1986/1987]: 37, emphasis added, my translation) However, in his book on the expressiveness of Baroque thought as a philosophy of curvature and sensuous shadows, which represents Deleuze’s mature reflections on Leibniz (Deleuze 1993), this very same thought is rendered somewhat differently: ‘every point of view’, writes Deleuze there, ‘is a point of view on variation. The point of view is not what varies with the subject… it is, to the contrary, the condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis), or: something = x (anamorphosis).’ (Deleuze 1993: 20)

What is at stake in the holding of the world as an ontological infinitude of variance, Deleuze realizes in editing his lecture notes on Leibniz for publication, is not the movement of proportional changes through which the world transforms itself, but the condition of variance itself: ‘The infinite presence in the finite self is exactly the position of Baroque equilibrium or disequilibrium.’ (Deleuze 1993: 89) What is of interest to Baroque thought, therefore, is no longer the proportions through which the world holds itself together, but the distortions and disproportions (the shadows) that call for its deformation (anamorphosis).^x It is the anamorphic, the politics of the gigantic and the exaggerated – of variance as a sense of amplitude, expansion and/ or subsequent contraction – that characterises and is worthy of commentary in modernist thought. The anamorphic becomes the distinguishing characteristic of modern society.

The economy of knowledge

Let me change registers for a moment and turn to the knowledge economy.

Much has been written about it so I will be very selective today on the aspects I want to focus on. My concern is the relatively recent discourse on knowledge as a social product. It is the explicitly ‘social’ dimension of knowledge that I am interested in here.

Prompted by recent developments in intellectual property law, legal theorists and information and knowledge economists have turned to the Internet for understanding the emergence of new distributed and collaborative platforms for the production and consumption of online media. There is a sense in which the velocity of distribution, circulation, modification and consumption of new media by an expansive community of users imprints the nature of such an exchange economy with a distinctive ‘social’ dimension (Benkler 2006; Lessig 2008). The social is here identified with a sense of expansion, velocity and online presence. This is a relational economy of knowledge where the social is the outcome of people being partners in the exchange of knowledge for one another. We may push the analogy by saying that if there is no knowledge and no exchange, then, in this economy, there is no sociality – or at least no productive sociality (Shirky 2008). It appears that knowledge, economy and the social are therefore conceptualised as some kind of substitutes for one another. Karin Knorr-Cetina and Alex Preda have described this allegedly mutual transparency of knowledge, economy and the social to each other as being founded on (again using an optical metaphor) a ‘specular epistemology’ (Knorr-Cetina & Preda 2001: 34). The work that the specular performs here reminds us of Emmons’ rendition of CAD-enabled full scale architectural drawing, where a computer-generated object is presumed to map transparently, one-to-one, to the future edifice. Architects work with the model as if it was the real building. Thus, both the specular and the ‘as if’ function seem to operate with an underlying principle of substitution which regardless of the changes in scale does not neutralize the importance of size. The computer-generated building is scale-free but it is sizeable nonetheless; as Michel Serres said of Thales’ accomplishment, it ‘expresses the invariance of similar forms over changes of scale.’ (Serres 1995: 78) Social theory and philosophy thus no longer need scale to deliver impressions of size. We could say that the substitution has effected a sort of proportional equivalence that allows one to stop thinking of size in terms of scale but which retains a sense of dimensionality. In the context of the new economy of knowledge, this is patently obvious: knowledge has a size because the economy has a size and because society, naturally, has a size too!

Such specular epistemology points to a second characteristic of those approaches to knowledge that take for granted its sociological condition, as if knowledge were indeed a sociological object per se. Knorr-Cetina distinguishes between ‘interiorized’ and ‘exteriorized’ theories of knowledge. The former focuses on knowledge as something to be wrought and struggled with, sometimes with care, often with effects that are distressing, maybe even painful. Knowledge is something that is put together through time and whose permanency and stability is often transitory and contingent. Exteriorized theories of knowledge, on the other hand, see knowledge as a ready-made object upon which other forces exert their pressure. Knowledge is here imagined as an object of sorts, a commodity or resource to be transacted, stored, managed or appropriated in different ways. The idea that knowledge can be put to work alongside other objects of political economy, such as governance, interdisciplinarity or user-centred designs, partakes of the specular epistemology described above, because insofar as knowledge is treated as a self-contained object it can sit comfortably next to other political objects. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘governance’, for example, are specular to each other because arguments can be made about one as if refracted or optically accommodated through the other. They function as proportionate forms for each other.

If exteriorized theories of knowledge treat knowledge as an ‘unspecified ‘it’’, ready to be grasped and deployed in policy circles, interiorized theories, on the other hand, bring ‘into focus knowledge itself, breaking open and specifying the processes that make up the ‘it’’. (Knorr-Cetina & Preda 2001: 30) In her study of the cultures of contemporary science (molecular biologists and physicists), Knorr-Cetina has unpacked some the processes that interiorize knowledge as an epistemic form (Knorr-Cetina 1999). Her focus is what laboratory work does to scientific knowledge: the reconfiguration of objects and human relationships that take place in laboratory settings. According to Knorr-Cetina, what laboratory work accomplishes in essence is the adaptation and reconfiguration of natural processes and objects to suit the spatio-temporal requirements of scientists. In a laboratory a scientist can resist the natural tendencies and properties of an object in at least three ways: (i) she ‘does not need to put up with an object as it is, it can substitute transformed and partial versions’; (ii) she ‘does not need to accommodate the natural object where it is, anchored in a natural environment’, and; (iii) she does not need to ‘accommodate an event when it happens’; she can ‘dispense with natural cycles of occurrence and make events happen frequently enough for continuous study.’ (Knorr-Cetina 1999: 27) Under such conditions

Laboratories recast objects of investigation by inserting them into new temporal and territorial regimes. They play upon these objects’ natural rhythms and developmental possibilities, bring them together in new numbers, renegotiate their sizes, and redefine their internal makeup… In short, they create new configurations of objects that they match with an appropriately altered social order. (Knorr-Cetina 1999: 43-44, emphasis added)

The image of re-combinatorial and re-configurating processes draws of course on a familiar genealogy in science and technology studies. The ‘partial versions’ that are substituted for natural objects in laboratory experiments echo for example the ‘partial connections’ that relate difference in Donna Haraway’s famous cyborg assemblages (Haraway 1986: 37). Manipulating a laboratory object’s internal rhythms and developmental possibilities is not unlike what a cyborg’s prosthetic extensions realize by way of supplementary or accelerated capacities. The experimental and the cyborg both operate as scale-shifting devices: they bring about enhancements that are of a different order of magnitude to their original state. ‘The one component is of different order from the other, and is not created by what creates that other. They are not built to one another’s scale.’ (Strathern 2004 [1991]: 39) They both create extensions beyond a 1:1 equivalence. Importantly, as Strathern points out, such enhanced capacities work because the partial versions ‘are neither proportionate to nor disproportionate from one another.’ (Strathern 2004 [1991]: 36) There is a displacement, an extra-effect, that echoing Deleuze we might describe as a ‘variation (metamorphosis), or: something = x (anamorphosis).’

There is also central place warranted to bodies in cyborg politics. In

a cyborg world… people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.’ (Haraway 1990: 196, emphases added)

The architect, the micrographer, the illusionist, the microbiologist… and the cyborg. The eye becomes the optical metaphor through which the body is made visible as a conduit of dis/proportional configurations. Double vision foregrounds the political body as a figure of scale of natural and social relations.

Conclusion

If I may sum up my argument to this point, I have tried to elucidate the terms of a proportional analytic underpinning in profound ways modernist social theory and philosophy. This is characterised by the work of scale and size as modes of explicitation of knowledge. The point is worth underscoring: it is not that knowledge takes a size (which in a very crass sense it certainly does) but that it becomes self-explicitated as an epistemic object in terms of size and scale, and in particular through movements of aggrandizement and/or miniaturisation. The epistemic productivity of knowledge appears in this context as being premised on an analytic of what may be described as a play of scopic deformations. The figure of anamorph, I have suggested, may work as both an epistemic and political imago for these kind of effects.

The anamorphic provides us also with an interesting commentary on anti- or non-modernist social theory, or in the words of Martin Jay, with the point of view afforded by a scopic regime that operates at the margins of modernity, within the vicinity of its material wreckages.^xi A point of view, then, apprehended as such from its own displaced remainders. Anamorphism is what modernity looks like when residual vision (the other eye) pushes its discarded bodies centre stage. When the object, that is, stares back. In this sense, if there is a form of aesthetic elicitation that takes the point of view of the non-modern for granted (including non-human persons and objects), that would certainly be the anamorphic. We may therefore say that the anamorphic is the analytics that elicits ‘perspectivism’ itself as an analytic; the analytic that allows an object-centred epistemology to come into view.

In a beautiful image, Michel Serres has described Thales inauguration, his emplacement of the peg in the sand, as ‘a strange thing full of water’: the creation of a ‘logos-proportion’ capable of providing accounts of ‘objects whose appearance and birth are independent of us and which develop by themselves in relation to other objects of the world’: things that are born from air, fire or water, and that do not attend to the laws or rules of kings or gods. The Nile floods to which Thales was a witness washed away the fields’ crops and his ‘proportion’ came to the rescue of, indeed, a strange world full of water: a world which demanded a new logos to measure the land, re-establish the cadastral register, net-out the outstanding balances between creditors and debtors (Serres 1995: 122).

Today the proportion has dried-up the world again. In their examination of the status and place of atlases in the history of objectivity (and the wider history of epistemology), Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have searched for a type of explanation that is ‘on the same scale and of the same nature as the explanandum itself.’ In their own words,

If training a telescope onto large, remote causes fails to satisfy, what about the opposite approach, scrutinizing small, local causes under an explanatory microscope? The problem here is the mismatch between the heft of explanandum and explanans, rather than the distance between them: in their rich specificity, local causes can obscure rather than clarify the kind of wide-ranging effect that is our subject here… Looking at microcontexts tells us a great deal – but it can also occlude, like viewing an image pixel by pixel. The very language of cause and effect dictates separate and heterogeneous terms: cause and effect must be clearly distinguished from each other, both as entities and in time. Perhaps this is why the metaphors of the telescope and the microscope lie close to hand. Both are instruments for bringing the remote and inaccessible closer. But relationships of cause and effect do not exhaust explanation. Understanding can be broadened and deepened by exposing other kinds of previously unsuspected links among the phenomena in question, such as patterns that connect scattered elements into a coherent whole. (Daston & Galison 2007: 36)

Although they surreptitiously subscribe to the language of scale and the playful operations of scopic deformations, the call to attend the problems of ‘The mismatch between the heft of explanandum and explanans’, as they put it, is of course a call to re-describe the weights that inhere in the forms of the explainer and the explained; in other words, a call to creatively re-imagine the dis/proportions that exist in the languages of social-scientific explanation. We need, they are suggesting, forms of explanation that escape our proportional imagination. It is about time a flood washed ashore a new strange thing full of water.

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Notes

This venture will serve as a platform through which to publicise new books to our growing body of members and the general public. A book reviews section will add another dimension to this vibrant and engaging network which already takes the form of forums, blogs, seminars, discussion groups and online publications.

To submit a notice or make inquiries, please contact the Reviews Editor—Stacy Hope—at saah@st-andrews.ac.uk.

John McCreery
Independent Scholar, The Word Works Ltd.

© 2010 John McCreery

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Prologue

I invite you to imagine a tourist visiting Japan. She has seen a number of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Friends take her to Yokohama’s Chinatown for dinner. On the way to the restaurant they stop for a look at a Chinese temple, the Guandi Miao. The vivid colors and baroque decoration of the Chinese temple contrasts sharply with the subdued simplicity of Japanese Buddhist temples and shrines (Figures 1, and 2). The red face and piercing eyes of the Chinese deity on this altar (Figure 3 differ dramatically from the lowered eye-lids and meditative serenity of the Japanese Buddhas (Figure 4) she has seen. In Japanese Shinto shrines, the gods are not visible at all (Figure 5). The question she asks is simple but profound: “Why do Chinese gods look like that?”

When, however, we turn to the anthropological literature on Chinese religion, we discover, as Wei-Ping Lin points out, that anthropologists have paid little attention to the material forms that gods take in their statues on Chinese altars (2008:454-455). Instead of looking closely at god statues to discover what they might tell us about the gods in question, we have tended to look through god statues in search of something else. The statues themselves are treated as arbitrary signs, as, in effect, texts, whose material form is of no intrinsic interest.

If we adopt, instead, an art historical or connoisseur’s perspective, we encounter a different approach. Here the primary focus of interest is iconographic details that that identify the god or the style in which the statue is carved, with the style then further specified geographically and historically. Once again, however, the existence of the statue is taken for granted.

In the Japanese context in which our tourist asks, “Why do Chinese gods look like that?” her question points to larger issues. We have noted that the demeanour of Japanese Buddhas is noticeably different from that of Chinese gods. The contrast sharpens when we turn to Shinto shrines, in which there are no god statues at all; Shinto deities remain invisible. If we go a step further in enlarging our context, we encounter Protestant Christianity, Judaism and Islam, religions that taboo any attempt to represent deity in anthroporphic images.

Lin tells us that in Wan-nian, the village in Taiwan where she did her fieldwork, she was told that,

Gods are formless. When you call them, they come! (2008: 459)

They are three feet above your head (Gia-thau sann-chioh u sin-bing; Jutou sanche you shenming)! (2008:460)

They have no shadows and leave no trace (Lai bo-iann, khi bo-cong; Lai wuying, qu wuzong).

Why, then, are there statues of gods on Chinese altars? Lin asks a spirit medium,

Why do people need god statues, and what is the relationship between gods with and without form? (2008:460)

The medium responds,

Everyone respects and prays to gods, but they ‘have no shadows and leave no trace,’ so people carve statues to make the gods settle down where they want them. That means to contain them inside the statues. People should worship the statues, so that a special bond grows between gods and worshippers. If the bond is strong, the spirit won’t leave. (208:460)

As Lin points out, the medium’s interpretation has several implications: people need images in order to believe. Images are places for gods to reside. They also facilitate a particular kind of relationship.

God statues make the formless omnipresent gods settle down and build a stable connection with the villagers, who worship them in return for protection; this creates a strong reciprocal bond between the villagers and the gods. (208:460)

The remainder of Lin’s paper provides a wealth of evidence for this interpretation and focuses, in particular, on steps taken to localize the god’s attachment to a particular community. We may note, however, that while this paper explains in detail how god statues are made, consecrated, and localized, it contains no answer to the question why Chinese god statues depict Chinese gods in the way that they do. We are neither shown or told what these particular statues look like. And one nagging, but fundamental, issue remains. Lin’s informants tell us that Chinese worshippers require images to reinforce their belief and, further, that god statues contribue to creation of strong reciprocal bonds. But why should this be, when worshippers in other traditions do not require images — in fact, their traditions forbid them?

We are still, then, at the point described by Alfred Gell in “The Technology of Enchantment,” when he says of Bourdieu’s sociological approach and Panofsky’s iconographic approach that the former, “ never actually looks at the art object iteself,” while the latter, “treats art as a species of writing” and thus fails to consider the object itself, instead of the symbolic meanings attributed to it (2009: 10). My purpose here is to consider what we might learn by going a step further and considering the object itself.

Adding the Material, Thickening the Description

In this case the object itself is a god statue, the statue of Guandi that sits on the altar of the Guandi Miao in Yokohama’s Chinatown. To learn more about it, I compare it with other representations of Chinese gods, including, in particular, other images of Guandi himself. I want to emphasize, however, that the approach taken here is to add investigation of the material forms in which Guandi is represented to advance a deeper understanding that also includes the other approaches to Chinese religion sketched above. It does not propose to replace them.

The approach I employ is inspired by Claude Levi-Strauss’ injunction in the “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked to search for the logic in tangible qualities (1970:1) and by Clifford Geertz’ call for thick descriptions in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). The model I attempt to follow, however, is that provided by Victor Turner in The Ritual Process (1969), enriched by recent discussions of the importance of material cultures and objects to cultural understanding (Miller, 1998; Candlin and Guins, 2009). It is, in other words, informed by Turner’s approach to ethnography but also a contribution to what Daniel Miller calls the second stage in the development of material culture studies, in which the goal is to demonstrate, “what is to be gained by focusing upon the diversity of material worlds which become each other’s contexts rather than reducing them either to models of the social world or to specific subdisciplinary concerns” (1998: 3).

Context is, however, a particularly tricky issue. When Levi-Strauss looks at tangible qualities, he is searching for universal structures that shape cultures everywhere and pointing to binary contrasts, e.g., the raw and the cooked, that appear fundamental in human thinking everywhere. His context is all of humanity. Geertz directs our attention, instead, to the richness of layered meanings that interpreters of culture must seek to unpack in particular situations. He leaves unanswered, however, a fundamental question: where does the relevant context begin or end?

Is it found in that place and moment where the observation is made or the informant’s comment collected? Our tourist is looking at a statue of Guandi in a temple in a Chinatown located in Yokohama, Japan. Is the significance of what she sees confined to this particular temple in this particular location? Or to what someone she meets at the temple may tell her? Or, this being the twenty-first century, should we take as authoritative the account provided on the temple’s Website? If not, how far should we search for connections, in Chinese culture and history? In specific Chinese or religious traditions? Across the length and breadth of Asia? There is, I suggest, no a priori answer. Depending on the observation, any and all of these contexts may be relevant.

When working in a conventional social science framework, the limits of context problem is easy to overlook. We pre-select the scope of our research, develop an hypothesis within it, then search for evidence that confirms or contradicts the hypothesis we are testing. The same is true when doing qualitative research, if we start with a well-defined topic. The topic’s definition defines the limits of relevance.

Invert the problem, however, and start with the observation, the tangible thing itself, a case of something, but we don’t yet know of what. As ethnographers we are not supposed to make assumptions. But, as noted in The SAGE Handbook of Case-based Methods,

From a trans-disciplinary perspective, what unites different kinds of cases, regardless of the discipline, is that all cases are complex and multi-dimensional objects of study. Furthermore, all cases are situated in time and space, as are the disciplines within which they might be situated. Arguably, therefore all cases, as objects of study, need to be described in an ever-increasing and changing variety of ways, and each of these ways may in fact be representing something ‘real’ about the object of study as well. (2009: 141-142)

Thus, for example, when I wrote “Why don’t we see some real money here?” (1990) I began by observing the difference between spirit money and offerings of food in Chinese rituals. I wanted to know why the money was mock money, while the food was real food. Combining ideas from Levi-Strauss and James Fernandez and looking at the ritual process, I developed the hypothesis that the food asserts a relationship; the money restores social distance. In “Negotiating with demons” (1995) I began with the text of a Taoist exorcism and three approaches to analyzing magical language, as performative act, metaphor, and formalized, restricted code. Each did, in fact, show something real about the case in hand, and together the three approaches produced a richer thick description than any one approach by itself.

In this case, I will focus on why some representations of gods are fully rounded figures, seated or standing, some in dynamic poses, while others are literally flat tablets on which a title is written. I will argue, in a Levi-Straussian mode, that this contrast embodies the difference between abstract, and thus absolute, claims to authority and concrete, more personal relationships, rooted in reciprocity that opens the way for exchanges of gifts and favors. I will situate this argument in a Geertzian thick description that builds on existing scholarly analyses of Chinese gods that relate the ways in which gods are envisioned to structure and change in Chinese society. I will speculate on possible extensions of this analysis to comparisons between Chinese popular religion and other religious traditions.

First, however, we need some empirical grounding. Here my model is Victor Turner, who taught us that anthropologists always work with three kinds of data: What we observe, what the people whose lives we study tell us about what we see, and information from other places, ideas and other data that inform interpretation. All are parts of the puzzle from which the anthropologist attempts to construct a convincing picture of the whole of what he is writing about. The place to begin, however, is the way in which the people we study explain their own symbols. I begin, then, with the contents of the Yokohama Guandi Miao website (http://www.yokohama-kanteibyo.com/).

A Twenty-First Century Chinese Temple in Japan

The Yokohama Guandi Miao website (http://www.yokohama-kanteibyo.com/ ) is in Japanese. Its intended audience appears to be Japanese tourists who flock to Yokohama’s Chinatown to enjoy a local but exotic experience. The top page displays a link to Yokohama Chinatown’s own official website (http://www.chinatown.or.jp/). Three additional buttons are indicated on the photograph of the temple’s main gate that is the single largest visual element on the page. Button No. 1 opens a description of the gate, which towers 12 meters above street level. Its elaborate wood carvings are covered with gold leaf, and two dragons sit (one on each side) on the top of its roof. Button No. 2 opens a description of the stone slabs with images of dragons cavorting in the clouds that frame the stairs leading up to the gate. Imported from Beijing, the slabs are single pieces of stone, each weighing four and a half tons. A third, cloud-shaped blue button reads, “Go inside.”

The camera has now moved through the gate, and the temple proper fills the frame. Now there are five buttons that point to information on visually interesting details. Button No. 3 describes the colorful tiles on the roof. Like the stone slabs to which Button No. 2 pointed, these two were specially ordered from Beijing. They are attached with special hooks to enhance rain and wind resistance. Dragons and other beasts made of glass complete the rooftop decorations. Button No. 4 describes four elaborately carved stone columns, two with dragons, two with images of Guandi in action. These were imported from Taiwan. Button No. 5 describes the main incense burner and notes that it is one of five incense burners. Those who wish to worship are directed to purchase five sticks of incense, one for each of the burners. Button No. 6 shows the reception building where incense and spirit money can be purchased. Button No. 7 describes the stone lions that guard the temple, noting that they were imported from Taiwan and survived the fire that in 1986 destroyed the previous version of the temple. Another blue cloud invites the visitor to enter the temple.

Now the image contains five pictures, each with a button of its own. The largest, which fills three quarters of the frame, shows the main altar, where a seated Guandi, stroking his long beard, looks straight toward the visitor. Button No. 8 reveals the following brief description.

The divine form of Guanyu, a Chinese general who lived around 160 a.d. His loyalty and fidelity have made him a god of commerce worshipped around the world. On his left stands his adopted son, Goan Ping, on his right his faithful follower Zhou Zang. Both also receive worship.

Beneath this description are four phrases highlighted in blue, indicating prayers for which Guandi is especially efficacious: traffic safety, business success, entrance exams, and study.

Buttons No. 9, 10, and 11 point to descriptions of other deities worshipped at the temple: Earth Mother, the Bodhisattva Kwannon, and Tu-di Gong. These also include areas in which these deities are particularly efficacious. Earth Mother, for example, is especially good for those who pray to be safe from disasters and to enjoy good health.

To the left of screen is a menu offering additional information. Here we can discover that this temple is is the fourth in a series, the first of which was built in 1873, shortly after the opening of the port of Yokohama in 1859. The site was enlarged in 1886 and a larger temple built in 1893. That temple was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The second-generation temple that replaced it was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. Its replacement, the third-generation temple, was destroyed by fire in 1986, though miraculously its god statues remained unharmed. Construction of the current temple was completed in 1990. We can also learn that as Chinese began to emigrate overseas in large numbers during the 19th century, temples dedicated to Guandi were built in Chinatowns the world over.

With these facts in mind, we turn now to anthropological and historical discussions of Chinese gods.

Celestial Bureaucracy, The Limits of Metaphor

When our tourist asks, “Why do the gods look like this?” the first answer that comes to mind is that Chinese conceive of their gods as celestial bureaucrats. They wear official robes, and their temples resemble the yamen from which imperial officials governed the Chinese empire. Their ranks correspond to the scale of the territories for which they are responsible. On closer inspection, however, all of these propositions turn out to be dubious.

The idea that Chinese conceive of their gods as celestial bureaucrats was forcefully articulated by Arthur Wolf in the “Introduction” to Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society (1974), a collection of papers that marked a pivotal moment in the anthropological study of Chinese religion and framed subsequent debates. Should Chinese religion be treated as an integrated whole tightly linked to Chinese social structure or a motley bricolage of traditions that, as Donald Deglopper put it (Personal communication; see also 1974: 43-69), stood in relation to Chinese society as the colors refracted by the oil on the surface of a puddle stand to the water in the puddle, a far looser and more liquid relationship?

When this collection appeared, the dominant theories in the anthropology of Chinese society were the structural-functionalism of Maurice Freedman’s studies of lineage organization and the standard marketing regions of G. William Skinner. Synthesized by Stephen Feuchtwang, they provided a plausible grounding for the notion that Chinese spirits fall into three broad categories, gods, ghosts and ancestors. Ancestors were kin whose descendants looked after their worship and afterlife. Ghosts were prototypically hungry ghosts without descendants, angry at their fate. The gods were the spiritual counterparts of government officials, the celestial bureaucrats in charge of dispensing both favors and punishments to those whose lives they ruled. Like their earthly counterparts, they formed a spatial hierarchy, with officials at different levels in charge of smaller or larger geographical areas.

Subsequent research, however, would enormously complicate this picture. Shahar and Weller’s Unruly Gods (1996) provides numerous examples of deities who slip betwixt-and-between Wolf’s categories. Gods, it turned out, frequently started their careers as demons. The Wang-yeh, whose demonic role is to spread plagues, are one example (Katz, 1995). Powerful females like Guan-yin and Mazu had no obvious place in what should have been, in principle, an all-male officialdom. The local gods of the soil, Tu-di Kong, were frequently said to have been virtuous individuals raised to divine status after death; but the territories they governed were at a level far below that to which imperial China’s bureaucracies extended. There is also the awkward fact that the last of the Chinese empires on which the celestial bureaucracy is supposed to be modeled had, by the time that the anthropologists cited here began their research in the 1960s and ‘70s, long since ceased to exist. The Republic of China had been founded in 1911, and the Peoples Republic of China had followed in 1949.

A case might be made for similarity between the powers and habits of modern Chinese bureaucrats and their imperial predecessors. That argument could then be extended to the proposition that Chinese worshipers approach Chinese deities in a way analogous to that in which they approach mortal officials. But as Steve Sangren asks, “If gods are modeled on peasants’ images of officials, why officials so different from any in most peasants’ experience?” (1987: 130). Adam Chau, writing about his observations in Shaanbei, notes that in northern China, too, people liken deities to bureaucrats. He then goes on to note, however, that,

The relationship between local state agents and ordinary peasants in Shaanbei is strained, to put it mildly. Indeed, the image of local bureaucrats in the minds of Shaanbei peasants is most negative: they take things away from you but rarely give anything back (2006:73).

Expectations of bureaucrats and expectations of gods appear to be strikingly different. In Way and Byway (2002), historian Robert Hymes proposes that Chinese deities are conceived in terms of two analytically separate models, one bureaucratic, the other personal. On the one side are officials. Described abstractly, in terms of name, rank, and title, these gods are temporary appointees who represent a multilevel authority imposed from the outside. On the other are individuals with rich biographies; stories about their miracles are legion. Instead of appointed officials, these are extraordinary persons, with inherent powers enhanced through self-cultivation. They enter into direct, dyadic relations with persons and places and are see as permanent fixtures in the localities where they are worshipped. In these respects, they resemble the gods worshipped in Wan-nian, the community studied by Lin Wei-ping, who like the Daoist immortals studied by Hymes, traveled to a particular place where they settled, where their statues are not only consecrated to bring them to life but also localized through rites that attach them to this particular place.

From this perspective, however, the Guandi who sites on the altar in the Guandi Miao in Yokohama’s China is problematic. He is, on the one hand, an intensely individual god. He has a rich biography, elaborated with stories of numerous miracles. He epitomizes abstract virtues, loyalty and righteousness; but is also said to be particularly efficacious in dealing with problems related to traffic safety and achieving business and academic success. His virtues and powers are his own; but the god who occupies his statue may, in fact, be only a delegate, like those said to be worshipped in his place in thousands of temples throughout China and around the world. Neither his virtues nor his stories attach him to one particular place. He is, on the contrary, a favorite deity of overseas Chinese, who have taken him with them as traveled to new places in search of new opportunities. From from being a deity with strong local ties, Guandi is, arguably, the most cosmopolitan of Chinese gods.

Not surprisingly, how Guandi is perceived and the stories told about him vary from place to place and speaker to speaker. How he is seen and represented has been subject for centuries to a process that Prasenjit Duara calls “superscription,” elaboration and editing to suit a variety of purposes (1988:778). In this respect he resembles Lü Dongbin, the Daoist immortal of whom Paul Katz writes that, “more than one Lü Dongin existed in the minds of the late imperial Chinese” (1996: 97). One way of summarizing the argument of this essay would be to say that, like the murals of the Yongle Gong studied by Katz, god statues that represent Guandi are works of art that “have not been adequately used as sources for the study of Chinese hagiography” (1996:72); with the additional caveat that, like the historical documents analyzed by Duara, Chinese god statues are also subject to superscription. They, too, can be elaborated and edited to fit various purposes. These depend, in at least one important respect, to how the relationship between worshipper and god is conceived.

The Importance of Being Ling

One point on which anthropologists of China and their informants appear to agree is that gods are supposed to be ling, i.e., efficacious. How ling should be interpreted is the focus of several attempts to explain the relationship between Chinese deities and the mundane realities of Chinese society.

To Sangren, ling embodies a logic that pervades the whole of Chinese culture and, “can be fully understood only as a product of the reproduction of social institutions and as a manifestation of a native historical consciousness” (1987: 2). Ling refers to situations in which Yang, the principle of order, encompasses and overcomes Yin, the principle of disorder. Deities are ling because they operate at the margin where Yang confronts Yin.

Chau offers a more mundane interpretation that turns on a familiar saying, ren ping shen, shen ping ren (people depend on gods and gods depend on people). A god, he says, is ling, efficacious, when the god responds effectively to his worshippers’ prayers, which leads to the hong huo (red heat) of ritual celebration, which enhances the god’s reputation and makes the god appear more ling (2006:9).

In his review of Miraculous Response, Feuchtwang agrees that Chau is onto something by focusing on the Durkheimian social effervescence that reflects and sustains a god’s reputation for being ling. What is left unaccounted for, he observes, is the “disavowal of human agency” involved in attributing efficacy to the god (2006:978).

Like Sangren, Feuchtwang bases his own analysis on the notion of collective representations that precede and define the attribution of ling to deities. Feuchtwang, however, is not content with a cultural logic that, while pervasive in Chinese rites and religion, is so pervasive that it ceases to account for the different local and historical contexts in which ling appears. He agrees that ling appears at the margins that define the spaces and times in which Chinese individuals find themselves but argues that the frames of reference are multiple — household, community, region, and, only ultimately, China as a whole (Feuchtwang, 2000).

These brief summaries hardly do justice to the complex and subtle arguments of which they are, at best, caricatures. The gods may be Yang overcoming Yin, mark boundaries on several levels of territorial hierarchy, or have won reputations for efficacy reinforced by lavishly decorated temples and noisy celebrations. But, why do they look like that? Why do they display the particular tangible qualities that motivate our tourist’s question? What if, in fact, some representations replace ling, efficaciousness in addressing specific requests, with uncompromising authority? This is an issue to which we will soon return. First, however, we consider iconography, the details by which art historians and collectors identify particular deities and styles of representation.

The Collector’s Eye

Keith Stevens is a collector. According to his Chinese Gods: The Unseen World of Spirits and Demons (1997) he became interested in the iconography of Chinese deities in 1948 and, by the time he wrote this book, had visited more than 3,500 Chinese temples in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and across Southeast Asia. His personal collection included over 1,000 god statues and 30,000 photographs of temples and images. He had documented the legend and folklore surrounding approximately 2,500 deities.

Stevens candidly describes his book as, “An introduction to the imagery of Chinese deities and demons and their legends and beliefs in relation to the common people, as observed from a Western point of view” (1997:11). His description of Chinese popular religion is consistent with what anthropologists have written. There are, he notes, two orders of deities: a higher order of gods associated with Daoist and Buddhist pantheons and a lower order of humans deified for exceptional accomplishments while alive or miraculous powers after death. The deities on Buddhist altars generally appear in conventional sets; those on Daoist altars or in the temples of popular religion tend to be a more mixed lot. Broadly speaking, he says, there are three standard forms of images.

1. In Buddhist images, the faces are calm and characterless, lacking distinctive features. The deities are dressed in simple priestly robes and cross-legged.
2. Daoist images may lean, stand or be seated. Characteristic features include black beards, tiny Daoist crowns, and hands holding either a gourd or fly switch.
3. The standard deity of popular religion is a seated scholar-official with a full black or red beard, holding a tablet with both hands in front of his chest. Alternatively his hands may rest on arm rests or his knees, or one hand may clutch his official girdle. Alternative elements include the cap, crown or helmet.

These standard forms are only prototypes with numerous variations. Buddhas may be depicted standing, and the deities who serve as their guardians may be demonic in appearance. Daoist images include figures on mythical beasts, like Zhang Dao-ling on his tiger. As previously noted, the deities of popular religion include females and demonic figures whose scowls and gestures are inconsistent with official restraint.

Of particular interest, however, is the way in which Stevens describes his research. Deities can, he notes, be identified in several ways, including titles on placards associated with them or the names of their temples. The groupings in which they appear may also be indicative. Some are easily identified by distinctive iconographic features. But for others there is no recourse but what informants say, and this may be problematic. Here it is, I believe, worth quoting Stevens at length.

A major problem has involved the contradictory stories and legends, with the temple staff giving different versions during successive visits. These contradictions would appear to be due to sheer lack of interest on the part of the temple custodian or to an unwillingness to admit to a foreigner ignorance of the identity of the deities in their temple. Suggestions are usually offered in a confident voice, suggesting unequivocal accuracy. It is only later, on revisiting and perhaps talking to others, that the positive identification becomes less certain. It has been somewhat surprising to me how little many temple watchmen, devotees and even god-carvers know of the myths, legends and histories behind the deities in their own temples and shops (1997:11).

Our second collector, Liu Senhower (劉文三), the author of The God Statues of Taiwan, brings an insider’s perspective to Chinese popular religion. Born in 1939, Liu was a child during World War II. He has vivid memories of his mother, a true believer in popular religion, who made sure that everyone in his family knew how to light incense, bow and worship properly. These memories were reinforced when his father was drafted by the Japanese army and sent to Hainan and his mother prayed day and night for his safety. Then came the Allied bombings and hearing his mother repeating the names of the gods as the family huddled together in their air raid shelter. A story circulated among their neighbors about a bomb that fell into a fishpond instead of the village, diverted by divine intervention. As an artist, author and collector, Liu knows intellectually that god statues are simply blocks of wood, brought to life as works of art by the god-carver’s craft. When he’s tired or troubled, however, they seem to be something more. Liu has a Chinese intellectual’s mixed feelings about the gods, with nuances added by his personal history. He has, however, no trouble identifying the thirty gods whose statues, background and iconography he presents in his book. These are all among the most popular and best documented gods.

With these two collectors to guide us, let us return now to our tourist in Yokohama, looking at the statue on the altar of the Yokohama Guandi Miao (Figure 6).

Describing Guandi

What our tourist sees is an image consistent with the classic description of Guanyu, the hero who would later be deified as Guandi, in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Xuande [Liu Bei] took a look at the man, who stood at a height of nine chi, and had a two chi long beard; his face was the color of a dark jujube, with lips that were red and plump; his eyes were like that of a crimson phoenix, and his eyebrows resembled reclining silkworms. He had a dignified air, and looked quite majestic. (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms/Chapter_1#11)

The first of our collectors, Keith Stevens, notes that the legends surrounding Guangong have become the subject for prints, story tellers, operas and plays. He recounts two examples with a more earthy tone than the stories that appear on the Yokohama temple’s website. According to the first, Guanyu was a simple bean curd hawker who rescued a girl from an evil magistrate, whom he killed. He then fled and joined the army. Near Beijing he encountered a butcher who challenged passersby to lift a 400-lb stone off the well in which he stored his meat. Guanyu lifted the stone, took the meat, and was pursued by the butcher, who turned out to be Zhang Fei. The two were fighting when Liu Bei intervened. According to the second, when Guanyu was captured by Cao Cao, he and the wives of Liu Bei were given a single room to share. Guanyu stood by the door all night holding a candle, to avoid any hint of impropriety.

Liu Senhower provides two additional tales. According to one, collected in the countryside in Taiwan, the Jade Emperor, the supreme god in the popular pantheon, had come down to earth to investigate conditions there. Appalled by the human misbehavior he discovered, he was about to punish humanity with devastating disasters and plagues. Hearing of these plans, Guangong prostrated himself before the Jade Emperor and tearfully begged the Jade Emperor to show mercy instead. That is why, the tale says, Guangong’s face is red, from all the crying he did. According to the second, which, I note, also found its way into my field notes, some Chinese believe that Guangong became the Jade Emperor, promoted to the position during the 19th century.

The effect of these tales, considered as superscriptions, is to further humanize Guandi. The awe-inspiring general starts out as a simple beancurd hawker. He may have inhuman self-control; but, like other men, he is subject to sexual temptation. He can cry until he is red in the face. He may, like the founder of a new Chinese dynasty, rise from humble origins to the highest power in the land. But as Robbie Burns once said, “A man’s a man for a’ that.” This god remains approachable.

The opposite is true of another superscription described by Duara.

In 1914 the president of the Republic, Yuan Shikai, ordered the creation of a temple of military heroes devoted to Guandi, Yuefei, and twenty-four lesser heroes. The interior of the main temple in Beijing, with its magnificent timber pillars and richly decorated roof, was impressive in the stately simplicity of its ceremonial arrangements. There were no images. The canonized heroes were representedby their spirit tablets only (1988: 779).

Here there is no mention of ling, no humanizing detail. The message is clear and unequivocal, a pure and uncompromising assertion of the value of loyalty.

Neither wholly abstract and dehumanized nor dynamically ling in appearance, the seated Guang Di on the altar of the Yokohama Guandi Miao falls between these extremes, nicely positioned for a god who is both an epitome of classic virtue and willing to lend a worshipper a hand with a traffic accident, a business problem, or passing a school entrance exam. What happens to the god, however, when his image is globalized?

When Liu analyzes the historical and cultural background to Chinese popular religion in Taiwan, he frequently employs a style of functional analysis that anthropologists associate with Malinowski. The central premise is that Chinese emigrants to Taiwan, struggling to reach and then to carve out new lives on the island found themselves in uncertain and frequently dangerous circumstances. They venerated gods who offered supernatural aid: Mazu, for saving them from the dangers of the four-day sail from the mainland to Taiwan; Tu-di-gong for protecting against storms, drought or other threats to the harvest; Bao-sheng-da-di for protection against and cure of illness.

In this context, Guandi stands out as the epitome of values essential to social order: 仁 (ren, benevolence), 義 (yi, righteousness), 禮 (li, propriety), 智 (zhi, wisdom), and 信 (xin, honesty). His legendary strictness in keeping his promises has made him a favorite deity of businessmen as well as soldiers. His lack of association with any particular set of material dangers may, in addition, make him especially apt as a symbol of morality elevated above the sorts of worldly concerns that motivate worshippers looking for ling. It is thus, I suggest, that since the Qing dynasty, we have found him paired with Confucius, with his wu miao (military temples) built alongside the wen miao (temples of culture) in which Confucius is venerated. It is thus, too, I suggest, that of all the gods in the popular pantheon, he is the one being celebrated globally as a symbol of Chinese culture.

Divine Body Language

At this point we should all be ready to concede of Guandi what Robert Weller (1994) has said about Chinese religion and ritual in general. The forms are familiar. The possible meanings ascribable to them seem endless. They resemble the chemicals suspended in saturated liquids, ready to precipitate in a multitude of forms depending on what is added to them.

Are we left, then, with a generalization of Adam Chau’s conclusion about his Longwanggou case in Shaabei?

No “interpretive community” has emerged out of the cacophonous and “saturated” jumble of texts to present clearly “precipitated” meanings and ideological or theological statements (2006:97).

Let us look once again at the tangible qualities of the statue of Guandi at which our tourist is looking and compare them with other images, first of Guandi and then of other deities.

Google searches for “Guandi, ” “Guangong,” and “Guanyu” yield thousands of images. In most of those clearly identifiable as god statues, we see what we might call “sedate dynamism.” In the seated figures the god seems alert but relaxed. He strokes his beard. His feet are planted on the ground, but his legs are spread but not rigidly squared off. In standing poses the right leg is thrust forward.

The significance of these poses emerges in contrast with other deities. The Jade Emperor is represented sitting four-square, looking straight ahead, his hands joined in front of his chest (Figure 7). In some communities, he is represented only by a tablet bearing his title. He is seen as “too awesome and too powerful to be represented by an image….Among the Fukienese in particular, his spirit was believed to reside in the ash of the main incense pot on the primary altar table in the temple dedicated to him, and not even a tablet is permitted” (Stevens, 1997: 53).

Other spirits who are typically represented by tablets include ancestors and Confucius. In the case of Confucius, we know that until 1530 sculptural images of the Sage were found in state-supported temples all over China and, “the icons’ visual features were greatly influenced by the posthumous titles and ranks that emperor conferred on Confucius and his follows,” treating them, in this respect, like Daoist and Buddhist deities. This treatment aroused the ire of Neo-Confucian ritualists, who led a successful campaign to replace images with tablets and posthumous titles with the designation “Ultimate Sage and First Teacher” (Murray, 2009: 371).

Compared to the Jade Emperor, Guandi seems more relaxed, more human. But compared to other, more dynamic, images, his statues seem sedate. Consider, for example, Xuantianshangdi, possessor of spirit mediums, who is barefoot, with his feet resting on the snake-tortoise who symbolizes the North, the most Yin of all directions (Figure 8). We have noted the legend that describes Guandi as a tofu maker before he became a soldier. A similar legend describes Xuantianshangdi as a butcher and the snake-tortoise as his intestines, torn out in an act of repentance for killing so many living things while plying his butcher’s trade. Guangong is sometimes depicted standing, but his statues are never so dramatically dynamic as those of Nazha, the Third Prince, whose statues depict him standing on his wheels of fire and wielding his spear (Figure 9). In some images, Guangong appears to be frowning, but his face is never so distorted as those of, for example, the goddess Mazu’s demonic attendants Shungfenger, Fair Wind Ears, and Chianliyan, Thousand-Mile Eyes (Figure 10).

With these examples I have, I would argue, briefly sketched an iconographic continuum that stretches from tablets inscribed with text to demonic or once-demonic figures whose dynamic poses or expressions express more humanized, more magical forms of divine power. The statues of Guandi mentioned here represent authority humanized, accessible to human sentiments, but fundamentally righteous. But what of other superscriptions more tailored to the modern world?

Guangong Globalized

Google searches turn up a number of images from manga and video games in which the pre-divine Guanyu, the hero from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is depicted as a warrior superhero. He glares with intent fury at enemies outside the frame. His robe is slipped off one or both shoulders to reveal a heavily muscled body. In some his pose is similar to that of Nazha on Taiwanese altars. He is shown swooping down thrusting with his halbred. Here, however, I turn to another superscription, Guangong (not, we must note Guandi), as a symbol and salesman for China and Chinese culture.

I refer here to another website, World Guangong Culture (世界關公文化, http://www.guangong.hk/). Here, the hero deified as Guandi (Emperor Guan) is presented as Guangong (Honorable Guan). Di, a Chinese character associated with divine or imperial status, has been replaced by gong, which, while formerly the the highest of five orders of nobility and translated “Duke,” is now a common honorific, applied, for example, to a father-in-law.

First up in the list of dignitaries whose statements appear on the site is PRC President Hu Jintao, who says,

In current era, culture has increasingly become the important source of national cohesion and creativity. In addition, it has increasingly become the important factor of the comprehensive national power competition.

He does not mention Guangong by name.

Next is Lui Chun Wan, chairman of the board of directors of the World Guangong Culture Promoting Association, who, after reviewing Guangong’s history, concludes that,

We believe that the rich and colorful Guangong Culture will become a strong force to unite the Chinese people from home and abroad!

There is, however, no mention in his comments of miracles, of magical response, of ling. In this superscription, however, Guangong is not reduced to a title on a tablet, an impersonal abstraction.

The standing image of Guangong chosen to brand the World Guangong Culture Promotion Association shows the god standing and striding confidently forward (Figure 11). In this conspicuously cleaned up version of more traditional depictions of the deity, all traces of armor and glittering gold have been removed. The green of the robe is a paler, more subtle hue than the the blue or green of the more traditional representation. The overall green tone of the image may reflect, I speculate, current “green” concerns with the state of the global environment.

While he does carry his halberd, this version of the god has a warm, modern look, more like a prosperous businessman striding forward to shake your hand than a model of warrior virtues. The “magic” in this image is no longer the traditional ling but instead, I suggest, the economic miracles to be expected from doing business with China.

Beyond China

As we return to where we started, it is, I believe, important to recall that our tourist is looking at the statue of Guandi in a Chinese temple in Yokohama. Our analysis so far has included only Chinese data. Our tourist’s question, however, is motivated by the contrast between what she sees at the Yokohama Guandi Miao and what she has seen elsewhere in Japan, especially when visiting Shinto shrines. There the gods are invisible, posing the question why Chinese temples are filled with god statues, full-figured anthropomorphic representations of gods, while Japanese shrines are not.

Some might question whether an anthropologist should consider such a question at all. Isn’t it wrong, especially when studying religion and ritual, to rip what we see from its cultural context? Isn’t this the kind of speculation for which such 19th century predecessors Sir James Frazer, the author of The Golden Bough, were so roundly condemned by such critics as Sir E. E. Evans-Pirchard who called their work telling “If I were a horse” stories?

But no, this is not what our 19th century predecessors were up to. Frazer and his contemporaries were constructing speculations about the prehistoric origins of religion, a topic for which the direct evidence is very slim, indeed. What I propose here is to extend the method that Robert Weller describes when, having shown that Wolf’s thesis that Chinese gods are bureaucrats is, at best, only party true, then goes on to say,

At a deeper level these cases force us toward some position like Wolf’s: that Chinese religious interpretation moves hand in hand with social experience (1996: 21).

The classic Durkheimian vision in which religion mirrors society may be too simplistic. We now recognize that,

Religion is not a reflex of Chinese social structure, or even of class, gender, or geographical position. It is instead part of an ongoing dialogue of interpretations, sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating (1996:21).

We can, however, go a step further and recognize that the on-going dialogue that Weller describes extends beyond the borders of China. Chinese ideas and images have been absorbed and adapted throughout East Asia and, in some cases—one thinks of Chinese medicine, martial arts, fengsui, the Yin and the Yang—have spread worldwide, carried now by film, video games and the Internet as well as overseas Chinese and other East Asian diasporas. To explore these transmissions and transformations in search of pan-human patterns is far from telling “if I were a horse” stories. It is, instead, the sort of thing that historians do all the time when engaging in comparative research within or across regions or eras, a task that can now be grounded in a rich and growing body of scholarship. In the case of China, we are not dealing with speculation about what happened in prehistory. If anything, we confront the opposite problem; the relevant literature is enormous compared to the number of scholars who research it (McCreery, 2008: 304-305).

In this context, there is, I would argue, much to be said for embracing the “methodological fetishism” that Arjun Appadurai (1986:5, cited in Brown, 2009:142) ascribes to material culture studies. Brown’s “Praesentia” (2009: 177-194) and Michael Taussig’s “In some way or another one can protect oneself from the spirits by portraying them” (2009: 195-207) offer numerous opportunities for close comparison with Lin Wei-Ping’s findings concerning the consecration and localization of god statues in Wan-nian. Closer attention to Chinese god statues reveals not only a richly detailed iconography but also general principles that have broader implications. They make inescapable the larger question: Why are Chinese gods, like the gods of Hindu India and ancient Greece and Rome, Christian saints and Christ himself represented in human form?

The kami venerated in Japanese shrines are concealed from their worshippers. Only priests may see the sacred regalia in which they reside when invited to participate in Shinto ceremonies (Nelson, 1997). We have seen that when held in greatest awe, the Jade Emperor is also invisible: a feature he also shares with the gods of the Old Testament, Calvin and the Holy Koran.

What we see here in tablets, books and other non-anthropomorphic forms of material representation is, I would argue, a precise analogue to Maurice Bloch’s description of ritual language as a language deliberately impoverished to force particular interpretations (cited in McCreery, 1995: 158). Abstraction and formalization assert unimpeachable authority. Conversely, however, concrete representations, and especially those that take a full-figured anthropomorphic form, render the gods approachable, transforming them into patrons with whom it is possible to form particularistic relationships in which both emotion and exchange can be used to secure the gods’ favor.

In this paper we have seen anthropologists whose eyes are focused beyond what they see, on theories that purport to explain how Chinese culture or society works. We have seen collectors, whose iconographic perspectives draw our attention back to the visual evidence that our eyes provide and noted the diversity of stories that add meaning to what we see. The author has sketched one dimension of a visual grammar, a continuum that extends from authority abstracted in inscribed tablets to power expressed in near-demonic forms.

There are no final answers here. If, however, we open our eyes to the tangible qualities we find in Chinese god statues, we will, I suggest, be able to write thicker descriptions, descriptions that challenge our theories and demand more subtle ones, theories that may, at the end of the day, enable us to situate Chinese religion more firmly in relation to religion as a human phenomenon.

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1986), “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.

Brown, Peter (2009) “Thing Theory, ” in Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds., The Object Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 139-152.

Brown, Peter (2009) “Prasentia, ” in Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds., The Object Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 177-194.

Byrne, David and Charles C. Ragin, eds. (2009), The SAGE Handbook of Case-Based Methods. Sage Publications, Ltd.

Chau, Adam Yuet (2006) Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

DeGlopper, Donald (1974) “Religion and Ritual in Lukang,” In Arthur Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Feuchtwang, Stephan (2001) Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor. Richmond, England: Curzon Press.

Feuchtwang, Stephan (2006) “Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China.” In Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 12:4:978.

Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Gell, Alfred (2009) “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology, ” in Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds., The Object Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 208-228.

Katz, Paul R. (1995) Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: The Cult of Marshal Wen in Late Imperial Chekiang (Suny Series in Chinese Local Studies) New York: State University of New York Press.

Katz, Paul R. (1996) “Enlightened Alchemist or Immoral Immortal? The Growth of Lü Dongbin’s Cult in Late Imperial China,” in Shahar and Weller, eds., Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China. Honolulu: U. of Hawaii Press, pp. 70-104.

Lin Wei-Ping (2008) “Conceptualizing Gods through Statues: A Study of Personification and Localization in Taiwan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 50, No. 2: pp. 454-477.

Liu Senhower (劉文三) (1981) The God Statues of Taiwan (台灣神像藝術). Taipei: Yishuchia Press.

McCreery, John (1990) “Why Don’t We See Some Real Money Here? Offerings in Chinese Religion. Journal of Chinese Religion 18:1-24.

McCreery, John (1995) “Negotiating with Demons: The Uses of Magical Language. American Ethnologist 22:1:144-164.

McCreery, John (2008), “Traditional Religions of China” in Ray Scupin, ed., Religion and Culture, An Anthropological Focus, 2nd edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice-Hall.

Miller, Daniel, ed. (1998) Material cultures: Why some things matter. Chicago: Chicago University Press

Murray, Julia K. (2009) “‘Idols’ in the Temple: Icons and the Cult of Confucius.” The Journal of Asian Studies 68:2:371-411.

Nelson, John K. (1997) A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine. University of Washington Press.

Sangren, Steven (1987) History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Shahar, Meir and Ropert P. Weller, eds. (1996), Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China. Honolulu: U. of Hawaii Press.

Stevens, Keith (1997) Chinese Gods: The Unseen World of Spirits and Demons. London: Collins & Brown Ltd.

Taussig, Michael (2009) “In some way or another one can protect oneself from the spirits by portraying them, ” in Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds., The Object Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 195-207.

Weller, Robert P. (1994) Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts, and Tiananmen. University of Washington Press.

Wolf, Arthur, ed. (1974) Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Figures

Figure 1: The Yokohama Guandi Miao (Exterior)

Figure 2: Sengen Jinja (a Shinto Shrine)

Figure 3: Guandi on the altar of the Yokohama Guandi Miao

Figure 4: Japanese Buddha

Figure 5: Shinkoyasu Jinja (Interior)

Figure 6: Guandi at the Yokohama Guandi Miao

Figure 7: The Jade Emperor

Figure 8: Xuantianshangdi

Figure 9: Nahza, The Third Prince

Figure 10: Thousand-Mile Eyes

Figure 11: Guangong on the Guangong World Culture website

We hope to bring what anthropologists have to say to the attention of the general public and invite everyone to take part in our debates. Each paper published will be linked to an open discussion thread in the OAC network, which will offer authors feedback for further revision. We place no restriction on publication elsewhere.

We encourage contributions in various genres, such as ethnography, conversation, debate, and fiction. Submissions may not be limited to text, and may include mixed media such text, sound, image or video. To submit work for consideration, please contact Huon Wardle at oacpress@openanthcoop.net.

Huon Wardle

University of St. Andrews

© 2009 Huon Wardle

Open Anthropology Cooperative Press

www.openanthcoop.net/press

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HORATIO

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

HAMLET

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

(Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)

The paradox of a ‘stranger’ welcoming something ‘strange’ was not lost on her Tiv audience when Laura Bohannon recounted Shakespeare’s Hamlet to them in 1950s West Africa: without a relevant genealogy how could they assess the meaning of the ghost King’s relationship to Hamlet? (Bohannon 1966). The same paradox looms in the idea of a cosmopolitan or world anthropology: who plays host to whom intellectually in a discipline without favoured sites or privileged genealogical matrices? Who will arbitrate which ‘spectres’ are honoured and which are relegated (Derrida 2006)? If we accept that both the ethnographic field and anthropology as a discipline are now not simply multi-sited but in truth ‘unsited’, then this paradoxical predicament is already with us (Cook et al. 2009, Lins Ribeiro 2006). Modern anthropological knowledge has always been imagined in a certain way; it comes in emic form from a fieldsite to a centre of knowledge where it is welcomed for its potential to inform etic debates. But who will play host and whom guest in an ethnography and anthropology which does not distinguish fixed intellectual loci or points d’appuis?

In what follows, I argue that pursuing the logic of a cosmopolitan anthropology will inevitably open up a renewed discussion on the meaning of subjectivity vis-à-vis the social. I take as my focus a debate between Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour over the notion of the cosmopolitan or cosmopolitical. Their contrary positions signal the increasingly strong divergence between a humanist and an organistic answer to the question ‘what is a subject’? On the one side, Beck stands for an enduring humanism associated especially with Kant and refracted in latter-day anthropology by diverse figures including Firth, Mintz and Hannerz. For Beck, the human subject is ‘a primary substance’ (Whitehead 1978:157): in his stance, understanding the current condition of human subjectivity is paramount for social science; other questions are questions only relative to this substantial one. On the other side, Latour ranks with proponents of organistic philosophies and anthropologies including Peirce, James, Whitehead, Bateson and, closer to the present, Strathern. For these thinkers, subjectivity derives its qualities from its distribution across emergent networks: it is not a property solely or necessarily even mainly of human individuals. The important discussion on cosmopolitanism is not, in the first instance, then, about whether this term will replace other terms or even whether cosmopolitanism is a ‘good thing’; it rather has to do with the diverging conceptions of subjectivity it engages, and the intellectual and ethical effects of these engagements.

This paper begins with an excursus into the debate in question, looking first at Beck’s cosmopolitanism then at Latour’s contrasting cosmopolitics. We will see that Latour’s critique revolves around the proposition that Beck’s cosmopolitanism is too sociological and not anthropological enough (Latour 2004). My worry is that Latour’s comparative anthropology may itself be too purified – insufficiently comparative, plural or subjectivized, but I will leave those concerns until later. However, Latour makes some points that we undoubtedly need to consider in arriving at a distinctly anthropological cosmopolitanism – one that accounts for the common sense of ethnographic knowledge. Against Beck’s humanistic cosmopolitanism, Latour posits a cosmopolitics in which people, along with many non-human agents, create conflicting natures which they then fight over. I suggest that the positions of Beck and Latour may usefully be triangulated with a certain type of 19th Century skepticism or ethical egoism. Via a discussion of Kantian common sense I return to the issue in hand – what might be distinctive about an ethnographically informed anthropological cosmopolitanism? What assumptions concerning subjectivity might it presuppose or engage? An initial rapprochement between cosmopolitics in the Latourian sense and cosmopolitanism may involve acknowledging the activity of some of Latour’s non-human agents both in the common sense of anthropologists and of their informants.

Zombie categories made visible

Ulrich Beck has described extensively the crisis in ‘methodological nationalism’ that he sees at the centre of the fragmentation of latter-day social theory – and its cosmopolitanization (2002, 2004, 2006). The roots of this crisis lie in how the state has lost its metaphysical priority as the cause, frame and context for all the social phenomena that constitute it. There is an awareness that most of the stock concepts of Twentieth Century social science; the statistics that give mathematical meaning to state practices; society (understood as a synonym of the ‘national fallacy’ 2002:29); the family; the household; social class have become what Beck terms ‘zombie categories’ under current conditions (2002: 24). Taking their meaning each from the other, these concepts continue to do intellectual work even though the lived reality to which they refer no longer exists. The symptom of these developments, and in certain respects the cure, is the ‘clash of cultures and rationalities within one’s own life’ (2002:35). Insofar as the awareness of attachments across these supposedly bounded categories becomes an ethical project, it lends itself to acknowledging a sense of ‘global responsibility in a world risk society, in which there are “no others”’ (2002:35-36).

methodological cosmopolitanism implies a new politics of comparison… The monologic national imagination of the social sciences assumed that Western modernity is a universal formation and that the modernities of the non-Western others can be understood only in relation to the idealized Western model (2002:22).

In this new field, ‘there is not one language of cosmopolitanism, but many languages, tongues, grammars’ (2002:35). However, on this point Beck is wary of giving value to culturally relative ‘cosmopolitanisms’ since with this move we revert to the conspectus of multiculturalism in which each individual becomes ‘the product of the language, the traditions, the convictions, the customs and landscapes in which he came into the world’ (2002:35). In the specific intervention that becomes the object of Latour’s critique (2004), Beck argues that rather than positing multiple and incommensurable forms relative to one another, cosmopolitanism must be based on a type of contextualized universalism.

The true counterposition to incommensurability is: there are no separate worlds (our misunderstandings take place within a single world). The global context is varied, mixed, and jumbled—in it, mutual interference and dialogue (however problematic, incongruous, and risky) are inevitable and ongoing. The fake joys of incommensurability are escape routes leading nowhere, certainly not away from our intercultural destiny (2004:436).

It is this ‘single world’ cosmopolitanism that becomes the focus of Latour’s criticism. Beck, Latour argues, has taken his cosmopolitanism ‘off the shelf, from the stoics and Kant’ (2004:453). For Latour, Stoical and Kantian cosmopolitanism both imply an ‘already unified cosmos’ (Latour 2005:262,fn362). I will dispute this further on, but it is certainly true that this represents Beck’s stance – we have each internalized ‘jumbled’ versions of a single world (Beck 2004:436). Further, in Latour’s view, it is no use our continuing to say that if only we could agree about the one world we all inhabit then our problems could be resolved: we do not inhabit one world but instead a pluriverse of divergently mediated worlds (‘pluriverse’ being an adoption from William James, 1909). In the sense that people will not give up these multiple worlds without a fight, then they are incommensurable. In an ironic echo of Kant’s proposal that enlightenment consists in throwing off a ‘self-imposed immaturity’ (Kant 1983:41), Latour tells us that instead of continuing to appeal to a shared (human) nature, Westerners need to jettison the Eurocentric ‘exoticism they have imposed on themselves’ (2004b:43); that is to say, they need to join the others in recognising many, variably mediated, natures.

As elsewhere in his writing, on this point Latour is fulsome in his approval of Viveiros de Castro’s account of Amerindian multinaturalism (Latour 2009). Unlike Westerners who hold that there is one nature but many cultures, Amerindians entertain many natures and a single anthropomorphic culture. For Amazonian indians the specific natural form of an entity hides its general anthropomorphic meta-structure. Latour presents the parable of a fight between Amerindians and conquistadores: Amerindians debate whether Spaniards have bodies while Spaniards discourse over whether Amerindians have souls – there is no shared nature regarding which their arguments can be resolved. The most important lesson here from Latour’s point of view is that the stabilization of any given form of nature involves the mobilization of hosts of non-human agents who intervene, interfere and play diverse negotiative roles; whether as divinities, test tube cells, DNA profiles, or ‘non-material couplings’ (1996). No purpose, then, in invoking Amerindians as participants in a shared cosmopolitan future: Amazonian Indians ‘are already globalized in the sense that they have no difficulty in integrating “us” into “their” cosmologies. It is simply that in their cosmic politics we do not have the place that “we” think we deserve’ (2004:457,fn13).

Latour’s cosmopolitics is, hence, not simply a struggle between human individuals and their diverse worldviews, it is a fight between human subjects plus all the non-human actors who participate (and can be thought of as having an interest) in the mediation and institutionalisation of specific fields of nature-and-culture. Thus Latour defines subjectivity in the following pragmatic (some might say generous) way: ‘every assemblage that pays the price of its existence in the hard currency of recruiting and extending is, or rather has, subjectivity’ (2005:218). This formulation has the effect – and this is of course central to Latour’s project – of reanimating, repersonalising and resubjectivising numerous inert or ‘dead’ commodities, categories, symbols, properties and objects, and making their cosmopolitical role visible and analytically crucial.

Subjectivity amidst a multitude of Gods and Demons?

This matter of redefining subjectivity is surely the most fundamental point of divergence between Beck and Latour. In Beck’s stance, subjectivity remains without question a property of human individuals. For him, cosmopolitanisation further pushes to the front the only kind of subjectivity that counts – the subjectivity of the thinking and acting human individual. As he states, ‘the question “who am I?” is now irrevocably separated from origins and essences’ (2004:449): cosmopolitanisation entails intensified individualisation. Without resort to a frictionless ethnic or national mandate, individual human subjects increasingly must answer directly to (and ethically for) the multitude of ‘gods and demons’ populating their versions of the world (Weber 1948:148). At the same time, despite their divergence, an emphasis on re-envisioning subjectivity is shared by Latour and Beck precisely because both eschew Twentieth Century social constructionism. Beck shows how the category ‘society’ has crumbled because the ‘transnational’ has become so irrefutably knotted into every aspect of subjective experience. The ‘national fallacy’ may, nonetheless, become intensified in these conditions. Even while it has lost its ‘institutional or geographical fixity’, the state continues to act – individuals are still forced to build their practices around its manifold intrusions (Trouillot 2001:126). But, Beck argues, nationality has at the same time become decreasingly comprehensible in value-rational terms: belonging to a particular nation-state has dwindling value as an explanation of anything else. Latour, in the same vein, indicates the futility of invoking a ‘society’ that lies behind, and at the same time explains, every political manoeuvre apart from itself:

To insist that behind all the various issues there exists the overarching presence of the same system, the same empire, the same totality, has always struck me as an extreme case of masochism, a perverted way to look for a sure defeat while enjoying the bittersweet feeling of superior political correctness. Nietzsche traced the immortal portrait of the ‘man of resentment’, by which he meant a Christian, but a critical sociologist would fit just as well (2005:252).

Latour and Beck share something very significant, then: they reject a cornerstone of classic sociological critique and in so doing they reach back to social philosophies that predate ‘society’ as an analytical category. For Beck this involves an explicit return to Kant. Meanwhile Latour, as we have seen, calls on the pragmatism of Peirce and James in support of his revised sociology of actors and networks. But this reaching back takes them in distinct directions.

The reversed gaze beyond Twentieth Century social theory is a highly significant facet of the current intellectual dialogues around cosmopolitanism: there is a search for a conceptual language and this can involve either a redefinition of concepts already in play, new coinings, or a return to parallel dialogues from the past. Here I will briefly triangulate the position of Latour and Beck by introducing a relatively unknown mid-Nineteenth Century social philosopher, Max Stirner, into their controversy. Stirner, if not the most subtle of debaters, nonetheless brings some of the relevant issues into strong contrast. ‘Saint Max’ as Engels and Marx nicknamed him (1963), was one of the Young Hegelians who clustered in Berlin in the 1840s. It seems that he was amongst the quietest of that group (Mackay 2005). He published his only significant book, The Ego and its Own, in 1844. The foundational stance of the Ego and its Own is that the entire array of apparently humanizing institutions – the state, humanity, human rights, man, society, marriage, family and money comprise ‘spooks’ or ‘fixed ideas’ not absolutely different to the gods and ghosts of previous eras. The idea of ‘man’ or humanity is as much a ‘spook’ as is the ‘nation’ which it appears to transcend. These concepts stand in an authoritarian relationship to the individual ego which is unable to know itself while they continue to dominate its consciousness. Nationalist, revolutionary and humanist movements evidence in common a generalized respect for Man, or the Citizen, or the Party Member alongside a uniform contempt for the individual as an individual ego.

The inability of the self to distinguish itself from its own fixed ideas is ubiquitous, argues Stirner. ‘How ridiculously sentimental’, he comments, ‘when one German grasps another’s hand and presses it with sacred awe because “he too is a German”’ (1907:302). Anyone who rejects incorporation into marriage or fatherland or humankind is labeled an ‘egoist’; but it is the label that reveals the sanctity of the specific category, the particular ‘spook’. As a young Hegelian, Stirner’s narrative of how the ego (‘I who really am I’) comes to know itself vis-à-vis these other lion-skinned ‘thistle-eaters’ is historical and dialectical:

What manifold robbery have I not put up with in the history of the world! There I let sun, moon, and stars, cats and crocodiles, receive the honour of ranking as I; there Jehovah, Allah, and Our Father came and were invested with the I; there families and tribes, peoples and at last Mankind, came and were honored as I’s; there the Church, the State, came with the pretention to be I, and I gazed calmly on… so I saw I above me, and outside me, and could never really come to myself. (1907:294-295).

To which a latter-day commentator might add: ‘here I allowed multinational corporations, private security firms and CCTV cameras to act extraterritorially as ‘I’; there supermarkets, university ethics committees, banks and lobby groups, web portals and credit agencies ranked themselves unquestioned as ‘I’, while I, ‘who really am I’, continued to draw money from the cash point.

Stirner’s ethical egoism demands that any principle or idée fixe that I invoke I should appropriate as a principle for myself alone. The ‘money’ I use is therefore not a metaphysical money somehow independent of myself, but is rather my money – money according to me; likewise any of the other ‘spooks’ that are important for how I act or think. The others likewise speak, not in the name of some further ‘moral, mystical, or political person’, but from their own unique ego (1907:294). In response to Fichte’s humanistic ‘transcendental idealism’, Stirner posits a ‘transitory egoism’ that rejects the assimilation of myself into any other transcendent human ‘I’ (1907:237). Taking back ‘the thoughts [that] had become corporeal on their own account… I destroy their corporeity… and I say “I alone am corporeal”’ (1907:16). I will act, then, only in accord with whatever principles guide my action because those ideas alone truly exist for me and I will assume that the others will act with consideration to their fixed ideas and spooks.

Curiously, the more we read about Stirner’s ‘egoism’, the more we may feel there is something self-less about it. If, as Stirner suggests, I accept that my limits are purely of my own subjective making then I relinquish the fundamental egoist’s rationale that the remit of my idees fixes should expand where and when I please because my ideas must be true objectively for all. In contrast, Stirnerian skepticism – the extension of an indifference regarding the presuppositions of others into how I consider my own principles – rather than exemplifying egoism, suggests instead a stance that Bakhtin calls ‘playing a fool’. In Bakhtin’s account, a ‘self-consciousness’ may emerge for the ego whereby, in its attempts to extricate itself from the rhythm of its relations with others, it ‘has passed all bounds and wants to draw an unbreakable circle around itself’ (1990:120). Hence, perhaps, the element of holy idiocy suggested in Marx’s nickname for Stirner.

However, some important themes emerge here. On the one hand, the strident emphasis on ethical individualization connects closely with Beck, on the other, the recognition of how non-human agents or ‘spooks’ participate as actors in the lives of individuals is significantly Latourian, albeit that Latour is more generous towards his ‘actants’ (2005). Speaking teleologically, Stirner occupies a pre-Durkheimian world where individuality can still be thought of without reference to a society that preconditions it. He can nonetheless cognise some of the forces that will coalesce to establish that understanding. We should remind ourselves that Stirner lived in a German milieu that was ideologically but not socially or politically unified – the disparity between the exercise of power, subjective imagining and shared sentiment was all too obvious to him. Either way, Stirner would surely have agreed with Beck about the historical processes leading to individual self-recognition and no doubt he would have approved of Beck’s description of ‘zombie categories’ so close as it is to his own notion of the ‘spook’. Stirner would nonetheless have disapproved of the further idealistic step towards a shared cosmopolitan project. With Latour, he would have concurred that we live in many disparate worlds in the company of a multitude of non-human agents, though, again, he would strongly have disavowed the intellectual decentring that enables Latour to equate the subjectivity of these ‘spooks’ with my own self – ‘I who really am I’.

The point in contention is not simply that Nineteenth and Eighteenth Century intellectual conditions seem suddenly more familiar; that these parallel conceptualisations appear more than ever synchronously available and salient as part of our own apprehensions. The problem can be posed another way: what stands between these perspectives and our moment is Twentieth Century mechanistic nationalism and the sociology and anthropology that accompanied it. Perhaps there are ways nonetheless of thinking through, round and beyond that monolith.

To begin with we need to take heed of the conceptual revision that is entering the foreground. The Twentieth Century use of the word ‘culture’ familiarized us with the idea of a system of signs that could be grammatically ordered and exchanged at the collective and personal levels. One thing that Latour – and Stirner too in retrospect – tells us is that the matter is not so simple at all: the entities we have come to call cultural signifiers or symbols are not inert exchangeables, nor do they fall into place within mechanical systems: instead they act on us and for us; they are, in this sense, agents with subjectivity of their own. And, as Beck indicates, they may well – are likely to – have a life after their own death. Whatever social science now emerges will have to encompass those insights within its own common sense: we need to rethink the common sense of anthropology looking backward and forward.

The common sense of cosmopolitan knowledge and ethics

The loss of interpretive power of social and cultural constructionism is by no means a new predicament; Hannerz has explored extensively the ecumenical situations and orientations that this loss opens up for view (1989, 1997, 2006). As long ago as the 1950s, Firth had indicated how social boundaries are ‘in any case arbitrary… [human beings] are continually overcoming barriers to social intercourse’ (1951:28). Nevertheless, Beck and Latour combined present us with new challenges for how we rethink both the modes of communication and the models of subjectivity that are now in question. Since I want to bring Kant to my aid in exploring these issues without jettisoning either Beck or Latour, I must first dispute Latour’s argument that Kant offers us the cosmopolitanism of an ‘already unified cosmos’ (Latour 2005:262,fn362). It seems one thing to criticize Kant for his unified architectonics of subjectivity, rather different to suggest that the cosmos that this subjectivity confronts is itself already completed for Kant. My suggestion here, which builds on earlier work, is that Kantian common sense offers a distinctive frame for figuring what is involved in a cosmopolitan imaginary and by extension for understanding the current common sense of anthropology (Wardle 1995, 2000).

Cosmopolitan ethics and knowledge are closely tied in Kant’s writings with the capacity for reflective judgement ¹ (Arendt 2003, Kant 1983, 1952:96-97). Reflective Judgement, as Veblen tells us, can be understood as the ‘faculty of search… the faculty of adding to our knowledge something which is not and cannot be given in experience’ (1884:264). Those who consider Kant to have taken for granted the outcome of this search (a unified cosmos) have in Veblen’s words ‘taken up the Critique wrong end foremost’ (1884:263). Subjectively, cosmopolitanism exemplifies not a world that is already unified but a reflective search for unification which takes place with others in mind. The shifting horizon of our judgement at any given moment is whatever ‘everything’, whatever ‘cosmos’ we can summon to encompass what we know. Far from being unified before the event, our cosmopolitanism is fundamentally relative to each situation of subjective judgment.

Hannah Arendt ends her essay ‘Some questions of moral philosophy’ by drawing on what Kant has to say about common sense in his Critique of Judgement (Kant 1983, Arendt 2003). She argues that what he states there should act as a central point of reference for those who wish to understand ethics after Nazism. In Arendt’s view, this final Critique of Kant’s, surpasses the rational ethics of the Critique of Practical Reason. The fascist disaster was not caused, Arendt suggests, by a failure of rationality (Nazi functionaries were rational enough; overly capable of applying a purely technical reasoning to human affairs) the failure was rather one of judgement, an incapacity to judge commonsensically that the rational procedures in question were universally monstrous and wrong. She points to Kant’s treatment of ‘common sense’ in aesthetic terms. Kant answers the potential fragmentation and individualization of public knowledge by examining the subjective ability to organize communal knowledge through an aesthetics of common sense judgement.

Arendt argues that each of my common sense judgements, results from an imaginative process that involves me in exploring the field of associations that make up the community to which I understand myself to belong. Community is here radically relative to my own striving and imagining; it could well include known individuals but it might equally involve the heroes of novels or films, dead relatives, figures I know from the pages of wikipedia, people who I observe on the street but whom I never choose to keep actual company with. I am as a result ‘considerate in the original sense of the word, [I] consider the existence of [these] others and… try to win their agreement, to “woo their consent,” as Kant puts it’ (Arendt 2003:142). I cannot communicate concretely with Elias Canetti or Fellini’s filmic hero Guido, but I may well have them in mind in arriving at certain judgements (the sense in which I try to woo their consent is complex, of course). In this regard, when I explored the cosmopolitan imaginings of my Jamaican friends in earlier work, I realize in retrospect that I did not always take full account of how the spirits of the dead and other divinities can be interactively present in how situations are imagined and common sense judgements arrived at (Wardle 2000; I have explored these issues in more recent work 2007). Particularly, given his early flirtation with Swedenborgism (De Beaumont 1919), Kant would have understood the part played by the voices and visions that told Socrates to cross-examine the Athenian pretenders to wisdom (Plato 1997).

Common sense (unlike pragmatic moral reasoning in Kant’s view) is, again, an aesthetic faculty not a matter of logic. The common sense of a particular individual includes their distinctive gestus, their tonality, the particular rhythm of that person’s modes of expression in arriving at judgement. It describes a style of characterising events and objects imaginatively and applying these patterns judiciously to particular situations. Of course how an individual’s common sense expressiveness looks to an observer is incommensurable with how common sense is experienced in the first person. Either way, this judiciousness is not simply a matter of organizing perceptions correctly or not: on this it is worth quoting Arendt at length.

The point of the matter is that my judgement of a particular instance [depends]… upon my representing to myself something which I do not perceive. Let me illustrate this: suppose I look at a specific slum dwelling and I perceive in this particular building the general notion which it does not exhibit directly, the notion of poverty and misery. I arrive at this notion by representing to myself how I would feel if I had to live there, that is I try to think in the place of the slum dweller. The judgement I come up with will by no means necessarily be the same as that of the inhabitants… but it will become an outstanding example for my further judging of these matters. (2003:140)

Common sense is, hence, an active capacity: it entails the ability to search out and organize the examples and exemplars we need in order to form judgements about people and situations.

True to his Copernican turn, for Kant, common sense is hence a subjective faculty, not an objective body of knowledge or a closed set of rules of thumb. And, from the objectivist standpoint of social science, Kantian common sense appears as, once more, radically relative. There is no need to assume that we may be able to map one individual’s ‘common sense’ onto another’s even though, subjectively, common sense strives toward universal validity. Common sense judgement may arrive at a moment of objectifiable decisiveness (a box ticked or not, for example) but it has of itself no measurable properties only qualities: our understanding of common sense must take account of the ‘very great difference of minds’ as Kant puts it (2006:124). Nonetheless, as Arendt argues:

The validity of my judgements will ‘reach as far as the community of which my common sense makes me a member – Kant who thought of himself as a citizen of the world, hoped it would reach to the community of mankind (Arendt 2003:140)

The exercise of common sense is, furthermore, reflexive. In his Anthropology, Kant encourages us first, to ‘think for oneself’; second, to think oneself ‘in the place of every other person’ with whom one is communicating; third, to think ‘consistently with oneself’ (Kant 2006:124,Wardle 2000:130). ‘Every other person’ surely means here not every person with whom I could communicate in some concrete setting according to some acknowledged standard of measurement, but rather every other person whose personal standpoint I can imaginatively ‘bear in mind’ in such and such a regard. Hence, Kant construes a triadic process of reflexive refinement which consists in (1) knowing my own mind (2) considering fully (enough) the standpoints of the others (3) bringing this diversity into a kind of judicious consistency (back to 1). Here is Arendt’s gloss: ‘while I take into account others when judging, this does not mean that I conform in my judgment to theirs. I still speak with my own voice and I do not count noses in order to arrive at what I think is right.’ (2003:140-141)

This refinement of common sense is, as Simmel would say, a progressus ad infinitum: newer, more highly differentiated, diversely informed judgements constantly come to mind even while others are forgotten or perhaps remain only half cognized (1978:118). There is no point at which I am able to say ‘I now possess as much common sense as I need’. Arendt’s argument is that ethics requires the constant intellectual traversing of the community to which I imagine myself to belong. The scope of common sense is a function of the narrowness or broadness of association that I am capable of organizing in this way and the judgements that result. She posits a situation in which someone cites Bluebeard as their moral exemplar – such a person we can try to avoid. The far more dangerous individual is, instead, the one for whom ‘any company would be good enough’, who is incapable of considering others in the moral-aesthetic frame of judgement. In conclusion, reiterating the well-known phrase, Arendt comments how in ‘the unwillingness or inability to relate to others through judgement… lies the banality of evil’ (2003:146).

Note how Stirner’s ethical egoism observes stages (1) and (2) of the Kantian progressus, but disables him from engaging in (3). Kant saw beyond the predicament that Stirner finds himself in. Stirner conflates thinking for oneself (as a correlate of individualization) with the idea that in my judgments I can only have myself in mind: on the contrary, Kant suggests, I constantly displace myself in favour of the others in order to judge in ways that have the potential to be generally true, not merely true for myself. What Stirner sees as a monstrous relinquishing of the self to fetishes and ghosts, Kant recognizes as a necessary moment in the process of arriving at a moment of judgement – so long as I am indeed thinking individually. It seems unlikely, though, that Kant would have guessed the degree of significance that all-or-nothing decision-making would later take for the existentialists whereby every choice is a test of the self’s faith in itself.

How does this subjective picturing of common sense help us to consider the disputed vision of cosmopolitanism versus cosmopolitics? There is already, of course, a historical trajectory in which Kant’s subjective sense of community meets and is transformed, on the one side into Weber’s ‘subjectively believed’ ethnic belonging (1978b: 391) and, on the other, into Simmel’s subjectively organized ‘web of group-affiliations’ (1955). The mid-Twentieth century interactionists with their emphasis on subjective choice between cultural-symbolic options are also inheritors of Kant, but they echo only rather distantly the qualities of Kant’s original description. Their attempts to find a systematics as rationally convincing as Durkheim’s took them further and further away from the aesthetic and imaginative dimensions of the Third Critique. But if the systematism of Durkheimian society is now redundant, then this also throws doubt on the interactionists’ answer: interactionism as originally conceived will always be on the look out for social systems to critique in terms of rational subjective choice. Intersystems theory, which starts with a similar problematic, relies, likewise, on a ‘system’ that is then, so to speak, crossed out (Palmie 2006:441).

A considerate cosmopolitics?

For the task in hand, instead of extending our historical survey further (a useful mission), we need to put some Latourian tests to Kant’s common sense. In particular, we need to ask how incorporative can Kantian common sense be of the kinds of non-human subjectivities Latour demands that we include? However, once we have pursued that question, it seems fair to turn the tables and ask in return; how capable are these non-human subjectivities of making common sense judgements? What capacities for moral aesthetic ‘consideration’ can we expect of these other subjects? Let us remind ourselves of Latour’s generous definition of subjectivity. Agents and actants are characterized by their ‘subjectivity’; the big issue is that there are many more of these subjects in heaven and earth than were dreamt of by Twentieth Century sociology. Subjectivity is acquired by becoming a gathering point in a network and by demonstrating the further ability to ‘recruit others’: many, many actants can apply and become qualified on this basis (2005:218). And, whatever subjectivity is, it is certainly not given a priori; on the contrary, as Latour puts it, ‘[y]ou need to subscribe to a lot of subjectifiers to become a subject, and you need to download a lot of individualizers to become an individual’ (2005:216).

As Latour observes, non-human agents have always held centre stage in the ethnographic worlds of anthropologists; whether as baloma spirits, patrilineal ancestors, yams or cassowaries. And as Strathern shows, accounting for the relations making up these persons, and the relationships between them, has been integral to social anthropology as a project (1990). In ethnographic accounts, non-human persons quite openly participate in the day to day lives of the humans around them: Tallensi ancestors punish recalcitrant entrepreneurs (Fortes 1959); yams decide to roam across the Dobuan gardens during the night thus threatening the matrilineage (Fortune 1963:108); or, in a case I am more directly familiar with, Saints instruct city dwelling Jamaicans to go out and warn of impending destruction (Wardle 2007). In many respects, as anthropologists, we can agree with Latour that ‘humans have always counted less than the vast population of divinities and lesser transcendental entities that give us life’ (2004:456). But the question in response might be ‘counted’ for whom? ‘counted’ by whom?

First let us consider again some of the ethical dimensions. What Latour is asking of Western cosmology is a repersonalisation of the invisible agents – machines, pandemic diseases, state practices which, while officially inert, act de facto as subjects. Would it help our understanding of liberal ethics if we came to recognise how Israel or Iran act not merely as a ‘symbols’ or even as determining systems, but as subjects instigating and authorising reactions? The anthropomorphism might at least be more honest. None of this is in fact ruled out by how Kant describes the aesthetics of common sense: we consider the examples and exemplars who partake in the community of our imagination and we make our judgements ‘without counting noses’. The dilemma derives not from this direction – my human subjectivity – but from the other side: can I expect ‘consideration’ from these non-human agents; will they consider me as part of their community, a community of humans and non-humans? What kind of ethical behaviour may I expect – the unbending Tallensi ancestor? The humorous and unreliable Jamaican Saint? Certainly if we able to recognize their field of associations as Arendt recognizes Bluebeard, we can at least make some relevant judgements.

However there are anthropological problems too, and they take us back to where we began. Any anthropologist who works closely with Amerindianists must surely view as problematic the amount of weight a strikingly reified Amazonian Indian ‘cosmology’ bears in Latour’s account. Let us consider the five century long process that the term ‘Amerindian’ represents, that is to say the process by which people recognized as ‘Indians’ became American Indians. Viveiros de Castro would have us believe that this process has reached a point where Amerindians have ‘no difficulty’ in integrating ‘us’ into ‘their’ cosmology (Latour 2004:457,fn13). Not for ‘them’, then, the ‘self-reflexivity of divergent entangled cosmopolitan Modernities’ as Beck puts it (Beck 2004:36). In this vista, the Amerindians exist outside the constant mediations, the typical interchange of personnel, the repeated ‘overtaking’ that characterizes the actor-network in Paris (Latour 2005). Perhaps more pertinently, the Brazilian nation as an actant, for example, is as utterly invisible in this Amazonian Indian cosmology as is the cosmology’s role as an actant in South American national mythology. Does Latour’s pluriverse necessitate a purified self-organising cosmology for which Amerindians are the outstanding metonym? These are, surely, ways of thinking that anthropologists have learnt to treat with extreme suspicion. Is it possible then that Latour’s pluriverse is insufficiently plural? More consideration seems needed.

Conversing at the edge of time: an ethnographic example by way of conclusion

It is March 2004. I am standing on the edge of the road with Lazarus watching the early morning traffic running into Kingston, Jamaica. Lazarus is an elderly Blue Mountain coffee farmer of Middle Eastern extraction: his parents fled Southern Lebanon to the West Indies in 1948. He owns about 25 acres of hillside crop and, every Friday, brings his workers down to drink white rum in the local bars here. Lazarus and I are talking about the war in Iraq that we have been watching via CNN news broadcasts over the last few days. Our conversation begins with apparently shared common sense assumptions and judgements. We both agree that the invasion was illegal according to international law, it will probably spark a civil war and is certain to breed more violence. When I speak, I draw on the catalogue of ideas and rhetorics that I have gleaned from the news media and hearsay, shaped through previous discussions with those around me. Lazarus concurs with what I say, but his field of examples and exemplars includes a range of distinct elements and his narrative moves toward a quite different, and in effect absolute, endpoint.

You see, Britain is the lost tribe of Israel: that is why it ever run things in the world. But now America take over. You know about the stone of Scone that was under the throne of England in time past? It hold the power. That stone send to America with the Mayflower. Now America take over. You see the British must control the Black because once Hannibal have control over the British them. And Black rule hard, man: them make the people bend over and fuck him in the arse; fuck him, man. So that is why the British must ever control the Black. But now that power pass to America. Book of Revelations – America, man, are the lamblike beast come to rule the world in the last days.

For me to understand Lazarus’ way of framing these issues requires a complicated exchange of standpoints. For the moment, I am interested primarily in the form or morphology of his discussion rather than its meaning. When I, so to speak, step into my own shoes as a white middle class European I am used to seeing the world perspectivally. In a perspectival image the vista recedes towards an actual-imaginative vanishing point. Things nearer to me are larger, more sharply focused: objects further toward the horizon are decreasingly distinguishable, less fully meaningful and smaller. This is the ordering principle carried into our conversation both by the CNN broadcasts that are its focus and by my own ways of thinking and talking – the assumption of a certain kind of relation between centre and horizon. What, however, if my personhood were defined by being one of those ‘distant’ subjects/objects nearer the horizon? It is not that Lazarus disagrees with my presentation. His response, though, suggests a transformation of my perspectival ordering somewhat along these lines: to take up his standpoint (more like a dream compared to my initial version of reality) is to occupy a position bizarrely close to the vanishing point. Looking outwards from where Lazarus stands, I am confronted by actors who become monstrously larger the further away they are; their activities have no horizon, but their overwhelming centrality makes inevitable my disappearance.

In Lazarus’ account, mental objects familiar enough to me from my childhood education – the Mayflower, the stone of Scone – have taken on radically distinct dimensions, activities and relationships to their place in the kinds of nationalist configurations I am familiar with. Hannibal, the threat to civilisation of my school days, figures for Lazarus as a violent and sexually unruly African who, briefly jumping out of the correct ordering of space-time, is quickly returned to the horizon once more. America, a titanic entity, has come to hasten the end of my fellow indistinguishable others – ‘the black’. Social causality is certainly not here the measured rippling outwards of benefits toward the periphery posited by the perspectival politics of diffusion or modernisation: we might picture it instead as a kind of implosion of forces as smaller actors are sucked towards the larger body: an event that marks the end of all causal relationships and all time, the End of All Things.

We are faced, then, with the Arendtian task of trying to understand the common sense of others by getting to grips with our own. A fundamental subjective work I engage in with regard to my available knowledge is surely that of folding cultural discordances back into my common sense by way of the coherent judgements I make about the present (the narratorial centre of which is inevitably myself). This entails being able to map my subjective experiences cosmologically; to gives these elements universal, cosmic validity. There is a constant traversing between my pragmatic subjective engagements with others and a referencing and legitimating of these engagements by reference to a cosmos (whatever examples and exemplars are available to me). That process provokes special difficulties and resulting stratagems in a place like Kingston. Jamaicans including Lazarus recognise themselves as thoroughly modern. Fundamentally, they accept the all-importance of the individual as both a claimer of rights and as a maker of contracts with others. Tradition and habit are, by contrast, contingent and subject to the transformative power of free will (Wardle 2000). But within what cosmological or metaphysical ordering can Lazarus legitimately make these contracts and claim these rights?

His response is both cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical – if we take the key elements of Beck’s and Latour’s analyses. In a Beckian sense, he does not ask to be freed from a world that holds the potential of being sharable. In his worldview the process of making meaning is thoroughly subjectivized, thoroughly individualized and this certainly seems the aspect that corresponds most to my way of seeing also. At the same time there is a cosmopolitics here also which transfigures the fundamental spatial and temporal matrix of the ‘nature’ involved. There is, for instance, no deferring of moral judgement historically in his nature because it is about to come to an end. We both recognize, at least in broad brush, the same actants – Britain, the United States; constitutional symbols, but what we might call their cosmological distribution, size and efficacy is quite distinctly staged. When compared with Lazarus’ sharply delineated view, my imagining of these entities becomes a little confused and vague – historical time and a certain kind of perspectival presentiment mediate it, but I am now less able to grasp entirely how. Here we can echo Latour’s approving citation of Viveiros de Castro: Lazarus’ common sense is already global: it is simply that in his cosmic politics I do not have the place I would have predicted for myself. But we have to employ this rhetoric with a proviso: the refinement of pristine indigenous cosmologies – elaborately articulated symmetric fictions – that provide the foil to a critique of ‘Western’ society is unsustainable.

Concluding remarks

‘Fetishism’, remarks Gilsenan (paraphrasing J.S. Khan), ‘infects us all, or rather it affects others, because we always seem to escape it’ (2000: 603). Beck and Latour combined present the challenge of an anthropology that is simultaneously cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical. Latour’s cosmopolitical challenge to Beck involves disavowing cultural code as a neutral medium exchangeable between individual cosmopolitan actors. Cultural code becomes instead an actant in the world of sociologists in the same way as spirits are actants in the world of spiritualists, or Charles Darwin is an actant in the world of socio-biologists. In Latour’s view, scientific modernity involves constantly, in Gellner’s words, ‘invoking the processes of nature to underwrite social arrangements,… allocate responsibilities, and settle disputes’ (Gellner 1964:76). The resultant multiplication of natures returns us ever closer to non-modern animism. The anthropologist’s task becomes one of demonstrating the moments or nexuses where this underwriting takes place. The Beckian challenge to Latour may consist, by contrast, in recognizing that the ‘others’, in their generality, will no longer serve as stable points of cosmological reference vis-à-vis ‘our’ unstable cosmology. ‘They’ also evidence internalized cosmopolitanism; the rhetorical claim that ‘their’ cosmological forms evolve in ‘their’ terms is wearing thin. A comparative anthropology that depends on building ever more rigid geometries around the ideas that certain ‘peoples’ represent is itself moribund.

If the systems of society and culture have gone then what is left would seem to be divergent histories and a conversation about the present and the future. Here we surely have to agree with Beck that anthropological dialogue can only be pursued on the commonsensical basis that elements of cosmologies can be shared between individual human subjects: human subjects remain the only agents capable of the kind of mutual consideration required. The danger here is the reinvention of what Gellner sarcastically terms the ‘Pure Visitor’ – an unmediated human ego whose role is to ‘quarantine’ and arbitrate social truths from a position outside the social (1964:108). At the same time, it is no use reinventing pristine ontologies to serve the same quarantining function. Without resort to either of these implausible guests we are left with an overcrowded universe lacking the geometric simplicities of ‘our’ versus ‘their’ cosmologies. If culture is gone, then we need not continue to be spooked by cultural fragmentation: anthropologists will surely still employ diverse heuristics of cosmology and social relationship, but their ethnographies need to be imaginatively open to previously unrecognized, or perhaps politically incorrect, types of agent as well as to new fields and forms of interaction and exchange. Code made the lives of anthropologists easy: ‘code presupposes content to be somehow ready-made and presupposes the realization of a choice among various given codes’ (Bakhtin 1986:130). Now, by contrast, we find ourselves ‘in it together’ but with competing definitions of ‘we’, ‘it’ and ‘together’. How to understand subjectivity comes to the front at this juncture as the crucial object of reflection.

References

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The setting of the seminar is the OAC main discussion forum. The format is as follows:

• Day 1 – chair opens the seminar and invites discussant to post his/her comments
• Day 1 – discussant posts his/her comments
• Day 1 – chair invites the presenter to respond
• Day 2 – presenter responds
• Day 2 – chair then opens session to the floor for comments and questions (i.e. to all users of the main discussion forum)
• Day 3-13 – the seminar unfolds at a leisurely pace, as and when participants (including the presenter) find the time to post.
• Day 14 – chair thanks presenter, discussant and participant, announces next session and closes the seminar.

To submit work for consideration, please contact Keith Hart or Justin Shaffner at oacpress@openanthcoop.net.