Volume 21, Number 1 Bulletin of the General Anthropology Division
Explanation Life in America Class Feedback
From Onntology to Deontology Riding with the GWRRA: The
GAD Distinguished Lecture, 2013 Nature and Functions of an
American Recreational Society
By Bruno Latour
Sciences Po (Fance) By David McCurdy
Macalester College
I
propose to shift slightly the metaphor
I I
of the Occam’s razor. Instead of using it f a couple from rural India were to visit
to shave off any excess entities prolifer- the United States for the first time, they
ating needlessly everywhere, I want to take might be surprised by American social
it rather as a nice stainless cutlery set, a relations, or more accurately, by an apparent
“batterie de cuisine,” like what a good chef lack of them. Missing are the extended fami-
needs to delicately manipulate her veg- lies, caste brotherhoods, close-knit commu-
etables, meats, herbs, and condiments, and nities, and kin-based inter-village networks
especially to dispatch her chickens, as Plato that still organize life in many parts of India.
would advise her to do, without breaking Absent, also, is the commanding value,
their subtle articulations. I will strictly apply learned from childhood in South Asia, on
the importance of social intercourse with and
Deontology continued on page 2 loyalty to kin.
Instead, they are likely to find a world
In This Issue predicated on individualism. Most Ameri-
cans, they discover, grow up in small, nuclear
families where both parents, married or di-
Latour on Page 1 vorced, are likely to work away from home.
Delicate Explanation Children seem “cheeky” and often rude as
they attempt to assert independence. Neigh-
McCurdy on Page 1 borhoods lack social cohesion; families
The function of a US guard their privacy and next door neighbors
Recreation Group may be strangers. Competition, not coop-
eration, seems to rule many aspects of so-
cial life. People often appear lonely and pre-
Aycock on Page 1
occupied.
Classroom dynamics
Paleoanthropology Page 10
Some Americans might agree with this
assessment of their social lives. But others
Update might point out that this picture is incom-
plete, that it obscures a broad range of satis-
Useful Ethnographies Page 12 fying social connections that we Americans
regularly pursue. For example, although we
Film and Video Page 14 might work for large corporations, we often
form networks of friends and allies within
GWRRA continued on page 4
Spring, 2014
Speed tribes! How I used
Twitter to accelerate the pace
of learning
By Alan Aycock
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
n just a few years, Twitter has moved
very rapidly from a marginal form of teen
age chitchat to an icon of social, cul-
tural, and political involvement. Such events
as the 2008 and 2012 American presidential
elections, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy
movement used tweeting as a way of shar-
ing experience, as a signal of continuous en-
gagement in an emerging globalism, and as
a means to foster both celebration and resis-
tance. Since sharing, engagement, and the
development of peer community are core
values of active learning, I have been experi-
menting with the use of Twitter in my classes.
I first discuss the basics of Twitter, then
move to a simple description of how I intro-
duce tweeting in a smaller, upper-level an-
thropology course. I then describe three dis-
tinct strategies that show how I use Twitter
in my face-to-face classroom—pushing,
backchanneling, and speed tribes—in order
of increasing complexity.
What is Twitter?
T witter is a free online service that allows
users to create accounts and to post
very short messages limited to 140 charac-
ters each. Including a hashtag (#) plus a few
additional characters in a message organizes
postings around a particular topic (e.g.,
#uwmanthro543 in a message identifies my
course on the Anthropology of Religion).
Twitter continued on page 7
Deontology continued from page 1
the principle of parsimony by proposing to
use precisely as many cutting tools as nec-
essary to delineate as exactly as possible
what should not be disarticulated. Not one
more, I agree, but not one less either.
Such a shift in connotations of the ra-
zor will allow me to nudge the notion of “on-
tology” away from its excessively grandi-
ose pedigree. Even though “ontology” has
been defined as the science of “Being as
Being,” I take it as a relational and highly
practical term. Ontology is what you engage
whenever you wish not to shock those you
are encountering by granting the wrong type
of reality to the agencies that keep them
moving. In that sense, ontology is close to a
General
Anthropology
Editors
David McCurdy
Patricia C. Rice
Conrad Kottak
Column Editors
Constance P. deRoche
Lene Pedersen
General Anthropology ISSN 1537-1727 is pub-
lished semiannually by the Gerneral Anthropol-
ogy Division of the American Anthropological
Association. © 2014 by the American Anthro-
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goal of General Anthropology is to provide use-
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Correspondence should be sent to David
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Page 2 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All Rights reserved.
form of diplomacy.
As every ethnographer knows, in addi-
tion to the many blunders every one of us
commits in the course of our fieldwork, there
exist also graver mistakes when we sense a
mistaken regime of reality granted to an en-
tity. It is at those moments, usually the most
revealing in the course of our inquiries, when
we try to repair broken relations by some
innovative move to define the status of the
contrasting realities that have been open to
misinterpretation. I lived through this my-
self when I first noticed, forty years ago, that
there was absolutely no way that I could
capture laboratory life with the pincer of “re-
alism” versus “social constructivism.” Ev-
ery use of this crude tool created such an
uproar that I have had to work ever since to
sketch the status of artificially produced
objective facts.
It is through such innovative moves
that we practice ontology: first when we re-
alize that we had entered an interaction with
too limited a set of templates to account for
the realities mentioned by our informants;
second when we realize that it might be why
they reacted with shock; finally, when we
attempt to repair the relation with them by
negotiating a plausible account that enlarges
the number of templates we are collectively
able to entertain and with which we may re-
sume future relations.
So, ontology emerges over the course
of encounters where the inquirer feels him-
or herself corseted by too narrow a set of
legitimate agencies, and when he or she must
bend backward to find a better way of refas-
tening broken relations by recognizing an-
other legitimate way of being. In that sense,
the exact etymology of such a practice
should not be ontology but rather deontol-
ogy, provided you accept defining its ety-
mology in the following way: the exquisite
science (or rather the delicate art) of being
respectful of those with whom we deal by
being entangled within a set of beings whose
status has been fully recognized.
No sooner had ontology been declared
dead than it began to proliferate anew. What
has been called the “ontological turn” is not
a fresh idea but there is some novelty to the
realization that the traditional questions tack-
led by anthropology had been repressed too
quickly by the one-nature-multiple-cultures
format. Apparently, deep deontological blun-
ders had been made that rendered vacuous
not only the description of “cultures” but of
“nature” as well, thus reopening the front
line between biological and cultural anthro-
pology. It should not even be called a “turn”
but rather a return to this deontology that
forms the philosophical as well as the politi-
cal heart of a discipline that has never been
at ease with the confusion of the scientific
ethos with the “scientistic worldview” any-
way. Diplomacy and deontology have al-
ways accompanied anthropology. But this
has nothing to do with abandoning the quest
for truth—quite the opposite: with deontol-
ogy the requirements for speaking truthfully
about the others are increased, because they
now have to apply symmetrically to all those
who are attempting to compose the common
world. For such an encounter neither the
universality of nature nor the multiplicity of
cultures could do the job.
There are multiple reasons for this re-
turn of ontological scruples: postcolonial
ethnography, the development of gender
studies, and also the impact of anthropol-
ogy of science (my own field), and of course,
more efficaciously, the dissemination and
thus the dissolution of the various modern-
izing fronts. There are today so many ways
of being modernized that it has become im-
possible to make the distinction between
moderns and non-moderns. Above all, the
irruption of ecological mutations has made a
mockery of the idea that the list of agencies
could be closed. Suddenly, this idea seemed
ludicrous—just as ludicrous as the preten-
tion that we could address all those agen-
cies in the right tone without shocking those
they push into action. Any convenient dis-
tribution between what is universal and what
is multiple is now up for grabs. When
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro began to speak
of “multinaturalism,” (Viveiros de Castro:
1998) the Earth began to tremble—or rather,
he began to speak of multinaturalism while
the Earth, in parallel, trembled! Such is the
situation that we now inherit: with those trem-
ors, older questions have reemerged. Actu-
ally, it would be astounding if at the time of
the Anthropocene (that most unstable con-
cept), anthropology could emerge unscathed
inside its older disciplinary boundaries.
Whatever the reasons for this return
from the dead, it has become simultaneously
impossible to close the list of entities mak-
General Anthropology
ing up the common world and to find shared
ways to establish this list. This is why I’d
like to present a specific set up where the
question raised by such a list could be re-
opened. I call it an Inquiry into Modes of
Existence (AIME for short) (Latour:2013).
The idea is to offer a larger dose of ontologi-
cal pluralism—or, to take up my earlier meta-
phor, to transform Occam’s razor into a richly-
crafted cutlery set.
The main limitation of the old settlement
—what could be called the Object-Subject
Operating System, OS for short—was to
submit any agency to the same trial by ask-
ing whether it is an object or a subject; this
is a question that, in effect, meant asking
“are you real, that is objective, or simply
subjective or symbolic?” Not surprisingly,
each entity thus addressed appears skewed,
clumsy, lame, uncertain of its status—in a
word, embarrassed.
The whole anthropological literature is
a long protestation against such a trial and a
defense of agency-bearers against such an
ill-adjusted template. To take two recent ex-
amples, when Eduardo Kohn tries to recon-
struct how “Forests Think,” (Kohn: 2013) or
when Tanya Lurhmann follows what hap-
pens when “God Talks Back,” (Lurhmann:
2012) they have to make sure that neither
forest nor God are drawn into such a court
room. This is especially true because they
are interested by how agencies relate to one
another, a move that is absolutely forbid-
den as long as you run the OS operating
system.
From the beginning of the program I call
an “anthropology of the Moderns,” how-
ever, I have been struck by the other calami-
tous consequence of presenting every en-
tity with the same instrument of torture. Not
only do we risk missing everything that is
interesting in the beings encountered by
what is strangely called “cultural” or “so-
cial” anthropology, but we also risk not do-
ing justice to what is even more strangely
called “materiality” and that has been made
the “other side” with which biological an-
thropology is supposed to be concerned.
To continue with the same forest ex-
ample, Eduardo Kohn is able to multiply on-
tological templates by fighting to establish
interagency connections without marking
the obligatory stops at the station of the in-
Spring 2014 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All Rights reserved.
tentional human. These templates are of
great use in also understanding how forest
engineers, for instance, at the INPA in
Manaus establish connections with their
agencies—worms, clouds, canopies, and
bacteria included. As I said earlier, what trig-
gered my interest in the anthropology of
science and technology was not how hu-
man, social, or political they could be, but,
on the contrary, how little of their odd types
of agencies we could describe by framing
them either as material object or as symbolic
elaboration. The celebrated OS operating
system that was supposed to offer, accord-
ing to most descriptions, the base line, the
default position, the yardstick by contrast
with which the rich diversity of cultural ways
could be defined, does not do justice to the
famous or infamous “Westernized” science,
technology, and economies either.
That’s what it means to “never have
been modern.” The base line that was sup-
posed to be so clear-cut that it was used to
mark the border, in most universities, between
departments of biological anthropology and
their cultural counterparts, renders materi-
ality incomprehensible. I would even argue
that “materiality” is even less well treated
than the “symbolic” because we benefit from
plenty of magnificent ethnographic ac-
counts of rituals, for instance, but so little
description of what it is to be a computer, a
termite, an ecosystem, a river catchment, a
technical project, or a corporation. Those
“colonial objects” have not been as
decolonized as the “colonial subjects.”
While it is a breach of etiquette to frame
the question about the Runa’s forest think-
ing according to the OS operating system, it
is just as much a deontological mistake to
believe that the science of forestry and soil
science would fit nicely into such a frame. In
both cases, we would no longer call the frame
“premodern” and “modern”—that is, beings
and meanings could now be seen as con-
tinuous without having to be broken down
through the intervention of a speaking in-
tentional human.
Hence the necessity of modifying the
base line, the default position, from which
we still tend to evaluate and gauge all other
entities. In the same way that the trope of an
object facing a subject has disappeared, so
too has the idea that the science of anthro-
pology was facing its subject matter. All col-
lectives have been thrown into the same pot,
striving to decide how to survive with or
against one another. This is not the moment
to drastically limit the number of legitimate
agencies, since the chances of diplomacy
depend on new configurations among those
agencies.
And that is where things become really
interesting. If humans are pushed gently off
stage, it is not because they have been
“reified,” “objectified,” or “naturalized,” it is
simply that they are traversed by agencies
that don’t have them as their only target and
that don’t have them as their origin point.
That is where the crucial new insight lies. It
is not that ethnographers have moved “be-
yond” object and subject (or beyond nature
and culture).1 There is no “beyond.” But
there are lots of “before,” “beneath,” “else-
where,” “up,” “down,” “in,” and a lot of
“away” and “within.” In spite of its etymol-
ogy, there is no reason why anthropology
should be anthropocentric. It simply means
that the discipline is especially interested in
some of the meeting points between those
agencies and some of the varying historical
figures called “humanity.” That those fig-
ures vary, we have today a good illustration
when, because of a new twist in geostory,
former humans, or rather Terrians, have to
learn to present themselves as a geological
force. (See Chakrabarty: 2009) Quite a new
guise that you cannot register as nature, nor
as culture, nor as any combination of both!
What I propose to do instead through
the AIME project (modesofexistence.org) is
to document the protestations by many dif-
ferent people that a skewed template is be-
ing used to account for the agencies that are
most attached to them. The great advantage
of “never having been modern” is that the
occasions for meeting those protestations
are not rare events; on the contrary, they are
visible at every turn, every time the OS oper-
ating system is shown to be wanting.
Those protestations are especially sa-
lient when category mistakes are made. For
instance, when scientists are asked by poli-
ticians to reach a consensus that runs
against the felicity conditions of what they
call science; when politicians are summoned
to tell the truth according to a yardstick of
transparency and honesty that would make
them, in effect, lie according to their own
truth conditions; when psychiatrists are re-
Page 3
quested to choose whether a drug acts “bio-
logically” or “psychologically,” whereas they
feel that the MindBody template is totally
ill-adjusted to the task; when pilgrims in
Lourdes are asked whether they really “be-
lieve” that Bernadette Soubirous has been
visited in Lourdes by the real Virgin Mary,
and when they shudder and stutter because
they want to use the adverb “really” but they
feel the meaning implied by the interrogator
is not subtle enough to account for the pres-
ence of Saint Bernadette in their life; when
judges, once the case is settled, are plain-
tively requested to say whether this is “ob-
jectively” the case and when they are forced
to say, equally plaintively, “yes” and “no”
because they are at a loss to calibrate what it
means to say “it’s legally true;” when engi-
neers are requested to state that they “mas-
ter” their project completely, when they know
full well that the project will be realized only
if an entire ecosystem surrounds the origi-
nal plan, an ecosystem that has no room in
their plan... And so on and so forth.
If you record those protestations for a
quarter of a century, step-by-step, you will
end up recognizing trajectories—the modes
—that play the role of alternative templates
for the recognition of agencies that had
never been at ease in the OS operating sys-
tem. Then you may begin to say “well, I think
I have found an alternative to Occam’s ra-
zor.” In the daily life of Westerners, at least,
there is a local ontological repertoire that
requires a good dozen yardsticks instead of
one. You might recognize in such an enter-
prise something that is indeed anthropology
—a diplomatic and deontological form of
anthropology.
References
Chakrabarty, Dipesh
2009 The Climate of History: Four The-
ses. Critical Enquiry 35.Winter (2009): 197-
222.
Kohn, Eduardo
2013 How Forests Think: Toward an
Anthropology Beyond the Human Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013.
Latour, Bruno
2013 An Inquiry into Modes of Exist-
ence. An Anthropology of the Moderns
(Translated by Catherine Porter). Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, and the
Page 4 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All Rights reserved.
associated platform on modesofexis- Honda Gold Wing.
tence.org.
The Honda Gold Wing
Luhrmann, Tanya M.
2012 When God Talks Back: Under-
standing the American Evangelical Rela-
tionship with God. New York: Vintage Books. M otorcycles first appeared in the United
States shortly before the turn of the
last century. Used mainly for transportation,
they were an alternative to more expensive
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo.
automobiles. By the early 1920s, however,
1998 Les Pronoms Cosmologiques Et
their popularity declined as cars became
Le Perspect-ivisme Amé rindien. Gille
cheaper, more comfortable, and more reliable.
Deleuze. Une Vie Philosophique, Ed. Alliez,
By 1953 only one US Company, Harley
Eric. Paris: Les Empê cheurs de penser en
Davidson, made motorcycles and then only
rond., 429-62.
for a small number of American consumers.
Notes
(A few European brands also found their way
to market at that time, however.) The motor-
1 In spite of the title given to Descola, cycle scene changed dramatically in the late
Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture 50s when the Honda Motorcycle Company
(Translated by Janet Lloyd with a Foreword increased motorcycle popularity by launch-
by Marshall Sahlins). Chicago: Chicago Uni- ing a public relations drive to counter what
versity Press, 2013. (5) they perceived as motorcycling’s outlaw
image. Tens of thousands of average Ameri-
cans responded to the “You Meet the Nic-
GWRRA continued from page 1 est People on a Honda” ad campaign by
these larger organizations. We also discover buying the company’s small, reliable, and in-
expensive machines. Once the fun of riding
friends in other settings, such as neighbor-
caught on, the demand for larger, faster ma-
hoods, local taverns, ours or spouse’s work
chines grew, and subsequently, millions of
organizations, and civic groups. Such links
Japanese and European motorcycles found
draw Americans into wide-ranging personal
their way into American homes and millions
networks and increasingly cell phones and
of Americans discovered that they enjoyed
computers help keep them there.
riding them.
Although personal networks are not
In 1975 Honda introduced a relatively
formally organized groups, they may be all
powerful motorcycle called the Gold Wing,
that many of us require to meet our social
which was designed for speed to appeal to
needs. But organized groups that satisfy
sports-minded riders. To make it stand out
personal social needs do exist. Some are
against competitors, engineers decided on a
voluntary associations organized around
flat four (cylinder) 1000cc (“boxer”) engine
such factors as business, social status, and
design. (Subaru and all the air-cooled VW
civic endeavors. Others, however, form
around peoples’ special interests, such as engines use or used this configuration.) In
music, collecting, and sports.
For years I have believed that interest
groups such as these are a significant fea-
ture of American society. They give their
members a comfortable feeling of shared in-
terest. Participation in them provides a sense
of achievement and self-worth not available
to them in other aspects of their lives. Such
groups also represent a flexible arena that
allows members to vary their participation
as circumstances permit. To illustrate these Restored 1976 Honda Gold Wing
points, let’s take one example, the Gold Wing
the opposed four arrangement, cylinders lie
Road Riders Association (GWRRA or GW
on their sides, two on one side and two on
for short), which formed around the owner-
the other with the crank shaft in the center.
ship of a Japanese touring motorcycle, the
General Anthropology