VIRTUAL ISSUE: COSMOPOLITANISM
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
By Aalok Khandekar and Timothy Murphy
Cultural Anthropology is excited to present six essays that it has published in recent years as part of its third virtual issue for 2010 on the theme of Cosmopolitanism. From belly-dancing in contemporary Istanbul to blood donation among Gujaratis in Houston; from the “Ghost Worlds” of Bollywood to the creation and maintenance of “Recursive Publics” by internet geeks; from indigenous struggles in the Andes to the rise of the “Green Wave” in Iranian politics – these essays present an array of geographically dispersed, empirically dense, theoretically inflected, and methodologically innovative accounts of ways in which people are conceiving of - and indeed performing - themselves and the worlds that they inhabit. Together, these essays push us to ask: What are the politics and ethics of being and belonging under contemporary conditions of globalization? How do people make sense of the ever-shifting grounds that they tread on? What are the technologies of self-making available to them?
The politics and ethics of worldly belonging and recognition is an obvious theme that connects the essays presented here. Juxtaposing different frameworks in which blood is transacted – from human bodies to vials to scientific laboratories – Deepa Reddy describes how “bioethics” comes to make sense on different registers – as a set of constraints under which scientists operate, but equally as narratives about good gifts, good science, and good commodities. The deployment of abstract narratives of idealized goods (“the good of humanity”), Reddy argues, is what greases these frames and brings them into temporary alignment with minimal friction. While Reddy directs our attention to the politics of recognition, Marisol de la Cadena prompts us to “slow down reasoning,” and reconsider - indeed unlearn - a singular ontology of politics that takes the world as a given and simply excludes entities and beliefs that cannot be translated into familiar terms. Through her engagements with indigenous peoples, Cadena argues that recent developments in Andean politics - marked by the visibility of other-than-humans - call for a pluriversal politics; they call for the transformation of the very concept of politics from “one that conceives politics as power disputes within a singular world to another one that includes the possibility of adversarial relations among worlds” [added emphasis].
Cultural performances constitute another register on which these essays resonate. David Novak, for example, traces the complex - and often contradictory – transnational trajectories that media forms such as Bollywood song-and-dance clips follow. Building on Bolter & Grusin’s notion of “remediation,” Novak argues for thinking about cosmopolitanism not just as a form of identification, but also as a form of mediation that not only represents, but also produces, cosmopolitan subjects. Using belly-dancing praxis as an ethnochoreographic lens, Potuoğlu-Cook traces how ideas of space, female honor, gender, class, and religion are negotiated on an everyday basis as Istanbul gets increasingly incorporated into the global economy - she argues for a performance-sensitive critique of political-economy. Michael Fischer also concerns himself with aesthetics - of Iranian politics and ways in which they play upon available means of expression and recognition in Iranian civil society. As Elif Babul succinctly summarizes on our supplemental page, "Fischer illustrates how the Green Wave made active use of existing repertoires such as the Shiite paradigm of struggle for social justice, ritual cycles of the Islamic calendar, slogans of the 1979 Islamic revolution, as well as the technical infrastructure of the Iranian civil society and public sphere to articulate its demands for political change. Fischer's account illuminates how "repetition with difference" of political formations opens a way for the next movement - such as the Green Wave - and how these "rhythmic beats" of revolutionary demands in Iran are an utmost challenge to the state's monopoly control over interpretation of Islamic terms and symbols."
Importantly, the essays draw out the social, technical, and politico-legal infrastructures that enable and constrain articulations of cosmopolitanism. Michael Fischer highlights the key role played by cell phones and new media in Iran’s democratic movements. The capacity to instantly circulate information through networked technologies, Fischer argues, has rendered struggles over means of communication as key sites of contestation in Iranian politics. The stakes of developing and maintaining infrastructures of open communication are starkly visible in Fischer’s essay. It is in this vein, that Chris Kelty reads the Internet as a contest “whose outcome will structure the very meaning and instantiation of old and new values.” “Structures of communication,” he argues, “are not inevitable, given, or neutral.” For any public to be viable in a highly technically mediated society, Kelty argues that it must be recursive – i.e. it must be actively invested in maintaining the infrastructures that make its existence possible. The issue of creating and maintaining appropriate infrastructures, of course, assumes particular salience in light of ongoing discussions that bring to fore our own predicaments over the future of scholarly publishing and its implications for anthropology.
In a world rife with rhetorics of tolerance, but with realities of violence against difference, the essays presented here highlight the stakes in reinvigorating discussions over cosmopolitanism, indeed over cosmopolitics – in spaces, both real and virtual. At stake are civic imaginaries of the “greater good;” at stake are the aesthetic imaginaries of globalization and cultural difference; at stake are the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in a neoliberal world order; at stake are rights of indigenous peoples and their struggles to be taken seriously in/on their own terms; at stake are the means of our communication and association; at stake is the world itself. Indeed, taken together, these essays impress upon us not just the awesome multiplicity of peoples and their practices, but also of the very worlds that they inhabit.
***LINK TO DISCUSSION WITH AUTHORS***
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Indigenous Cosmopilitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond 'Politics'
Marisol de la Cadena
Cultural Anthropology, May 2010, Vol. 25, No. 2:334-370.
Supplemental Material
In Latin America indigenous politics has been branded as “ethnic politics.” Its activism is interpreted as a quest to make cultural rights prevail. Yet, what if “culture” is insufficient, even an inadequate notion, to think the challenge that indigenous politics represents? Drawing inspiration from recent political events in Peru—and to a lesser extent in Ecuador and Bolivia—where the indigenous–popular movement has conjured sentient entities (mountains, water, and soil—what we call “nature”) into the public political arena, the argument in this essay is threefold. First, indigeneity, as a historical formation, exceeds the notion of politics as usual, that is, an arena populated by rational human beings disputing the power to represent others vis-à-vis the state. Second, indigeneity's current political emergence—in oppositional antimining movements in Peru and Ecuador, but also in celebratory events in Bolivia—challenges the separation of nature and culture that underpins the prevalent notion of politics and its according social contract. Third, beyond “ethnic politics” current indigenous movements, propose a different political practice, plural not because of its enactment by bodies marked by gender, race, ethnicity or sexuality (as multiculturalism would have it), but because they conjure nonhumans as actors in the political arena.
The Rhythmic Beat of Revolution in Iran
Michael M. J. Fischer
Cultural Anthropology, Aug 2010, Vol 25, No. 3: 497-543.
Supplemental Material
This essay investigates three methods for reading topical events, in this case events in Iran in 2009. Timing, as in music, is part of the trick of Iranian (as also other) politics, In Part I, breaking news is read in terms of historically and structurally informed social theory, with an eye to how civil society and public spheres are structured. There is an aesthetics to these spheres, not simply a calculus of interests or a space where rational debate can be abstracted from the civil society into a political public sphere. The (dis)harmonics of the Karbala Paradigm and the Islamic and pre-Islamic reference system of the 1979 revolution have been rescored in the aftermath of the June 2009 elections. Part II draws out the technical infrastructure, both low tech and hi tech, within which social and cultural action happens and civil society is restructured. It calls attention to the way in which the Green Wave was a confluence of civil society movements of women, labor, students, and journalists, among others. Iran is seen as a key test bed for struggles over the control of the Internet, as state control becomes more flexible, targeted, and pervasive. Part III plays with a futuring method—like the scenario methods used in industry and the simulation techniques used in the sciences—to plan for and evaluate alternative social logics that can play out in uncertain and underdetermined futures. The scenario method, to be used iteratively with several axes, helps clarify where there is need for better mapping of the networks of the players and their “small worlds” (“six or two degrees of difference”) cross-faction relationships.
Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
Christopher Kelty
Cultural Anthropology, May 2005, Vol. 20, No. 2: 185-214.
Supplemental Material
This article investigates the social, technical, and legal affiliations among "geeks" (hackers, lawyers, activists, and IT entrepreneurs) on the Internet. The mode of association specific to this group is that of a "recursive public sphere" constituted by a shared imaginary of the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in the United States, Europe, and India, I argue that geeks imagine their social existence and relations as much through technical practices (hacking, networking, and code writing) as through discursive argument (rights, identities, and relations). In addition, they consider a "right to tinker" a form of free speech that takes the form of creating, implementing, modifying, or using specific kinds of software (especially Free Software) rather than verbal discourse.
Cosmopolitanism, Remediation, and the Ghost World of Bollywood
David Novak
Cultural Anthropology, Feb. 2010, Vol. 25, No. 1: 40-72.
Supplemental Material
This essay considers the process of remediation in two North American reproductions of the song-and-dance sequence Jaan Pehechaan Ho from the 1965 “Bollywood” film Gumnaam. The song was used in the opening sequence of the 2001 U.S. independent film Ghost World as a familiar-but-strange object of ironic bewilderment and fantasy for its alienated teenage protagonist Enid. But a decade before Ghost World's release, Jaan Pehechaan Ho had already become the lynchpin of a complex debate about cultural appropriation and multicultural identity for an “alternative” audience in the United States. I illustrate this through an ethnographic analysis of a 1994 videotape of the Heavenly Ten Stems, an experimental rock band in San Francisco, whose performance of the song was disrupted by a group of activists who perceived their reproduction as a mockery. How is Bollywood film song, often itself a kitschy send-up of American popular culture, remediated differently for different projects of reception? How do these cycles of appropriation create overlapping conditions for new identities—whether national, diasporic, or “alternative”—within the context of transcultural media consumption? In drawing out the “ghost world” of Bollywood's juxtapositions, I argue that the process of remediation produces more than just new forms and meanings of media, but is constitutive of the cosmopolitan subjects formed in its global circulations.
Beyond the Glitter: Belly Dance and Neoliberal Gentrification in Istanbul
Öykü Potuoğlu-Cook
Cultural Anthropology, Nov. 2006, Vol. 21, No. 4: 633-660.
Supplemental Material
With manifold projects of historic preservation, gentrification, and urban renewal, Istanbul has transformed over the last two decades into a preeminent metropolis and tourist destination against the backdrop of an increasingly neoliberalized and moderately Islamic, yet secular, E.U.-aspirant Turkey. In this article, I examine through an embodied lens the complex interplay among shifting practices of belly dance, new Islamic veiling, and urban space in contemporary Istanbul. In an analysis grounded in a series of ethnographic sites that include an elite concert hall, a tourist restaurant, a dance class, a local nightclub, and a retail store, I argue for a performance-centered and gender-sensitive examination of urban gentrification that is often missed in recent political economic analyses.
Good Gifts for the Common Good: Blood and Bioethics in the Market of Genetic Research
Deepa S. Reddy
Cultural Anthropology, Aug. 2007, Vol. 22, No. 3: 429-472.
Supplemental Material
This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Indian community in Houston, as part of a NIH–NHGRI-sponsored ethics study and sample collection initiative entitled “Indian and Hindu Perspectives on Genetic Variation Research.” At the heart of this research is one central exchange—blood samples donated for genetic research—that draws both the Indian community and a community of researchers into an encounter with bioethics. I consider the meanings that come to be associated with blood donation as it passes through various hands, agendas, and associated ethical filters on its way to the lab bench: how and why blood is solicited, how the giving and taking of blood is rationalized, how blood as material substance is alienated, processed, documented, and made available for the promised ends of basic science research. Examining corporeal substances and asking what sorts of gifts and problems these represent, I argue, sheds some light on two imbricated tensions expressed by a community of Indians, on the one hand, and of geneticists and basic science researchers, on the other hand: that gifts ought to be free (but are not), and that science ought to be pure (but is not). In this article, I explore how experiences of bioethics are variously shaped by the histories and habits of Indic giving, prior sample collection controversies, commitments to “good science” and the common “good of humanity,” and negotiations of the sites where research findings circulate.
Image Credits
http://www.landscapeperu.com/modules/news/index.php?storytopic=25&storynum=5
http://ladies-goldwatches.com/newpg.php?doc=bolivia-map-world
http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/BUGL/immune.htm
http://www.moh.gov.ae/admincp/assetsmanager/Images/Blood%20Bank/
http://www.geekyard.com/os/top-5-unique-technoglogy-wallpapers/
http://radiobastet.libsyn.com/2008/05
http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/Ghost%20World.htm
