Social Analysis

On 4 July 2003, a one-day “Cultural Research and Refugee Studies” workshop was held in Sydney. Greg Gow and Amanda Wise organized the workshop, a cooperative venture between the cultural research centers of the University of Western Sydney and the Australian National University. It brought together a large group of researchers, practitioners, and community representatives to exchange ideas about cultural research among refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. The three articles that follow, by Gow, Wise, and Glazebrook, present a particular perspective on the methodology of studying and analyzing refugee behavior in Cultural Studies, stressing the significance of considering the emotive and affective aspects of their status and position. Wise’s material considers East Timorese refugees, many of whom now have residence in Australia, while Gow and Glazebrook examine more recent refugees and asylum seekers from Iraq and Central Afghanistan, respectively, many of whom still have uncertain futures. Comments from a panel discussion by Khalid Koser, Pnina Werbner, and Ien Ang complete this thematic section.

This article brings together theoretical debates about transnationalism and the role of the imagination, and grounds these in a discussion of Iraqi-born Assyrian refugees who have recently settled in Sydney. The analysis is tied to the 2003 war and the ongoing U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. It provides rich ethnographic illustrations of the many and varied mediations through which Assyrians are relating to the conflict. Of special concern is the ‘imagination’ as an affective social dynamic. Tied to this is the idea of ‘transnational imaginaries’ that are produced through the intersection of specific embodied practices, implicit self-understandings, national frameworks, global flows, and transnational alliances.

Some of the more interesting and useful work on diasporic and transnational identities has emanated from scholars working in cultural studies and contemporary anthropology. However, with a few notable exceptions, little attention has been paid to the specific experiences of refugee diasporas, and in particular, to the role of trauma and embodiment in the creation of these ‘moral communities.’ Based on research with the East Timorese diaspora in Australia, this article looks at the performative dimensions (protests, church rituals, singing, and dancing) of the diaspora’s political campaign for East Timor’s independence. I consider how the bodily dimensions of this protest movement contributed to certain formations of identity, belonging, and exile, within the Timorese community. In particular, I explore how these performative strategies have created a context for ‘retraumatizing’ bodies and memories, channeling them into a political ‘community of suffering,’ in turn contributing to a heightened sense of the morality of an exilic identity among many Timorese.

Restrictive conditions of temporary protection have required refugees to be resourceful and tactful in managing their own ‘resettlement’ in Australia. Ethnographic research among Hazara refugees from Central Afghanistan living on temporary protection visas, reveals the mobile phone to be fundamental to restoring their lives after detention. Hazara have made use of their mobile phones to establish a point of contact, get their bearings, and reposition themselves at the locus of their own new social networks. This article explores the affect of mobile phone use in a situation of temporary protection, in terms of a rubric of resilience.

Khalid Koser: I will focus particularly on the notion of future research directions … from a refugee studies perspective. I think what today’s workshop has confirmed to me, yet again, is the strength of anthropology in this whole area of refugee studies. There is no doubt that anthropology is one of the leading disciplines in the study of refugees … Anthropology and law have got refugee studies wrapped up, while other disciplines have not really made enough of a contribution to this area.

Self-identification as a kanaka is a common rhetorical ploy in highlands Papua New Guinea, used to emphasize both a sense of economic and political marginalization, and a continued identification with tradition. However, I argue that the figure of the kanaka is not simply that of the villager, but of that terminated project of education, the ‘school leaver.’ I juxtapose the reflections of one such ‘school leaver’ on his exclusion from the educational trajectory with the celebrations and rhetoric surrounding the opening of a new village school. This throws into relief a village perspective on education, and what it means to be a citizen of the nation-state of Papua New Guinea. Bhabha’s (1987) analysis of colonial ‘mimicry’ informs my identification of the contradictory quality of this perspective. As a critique of the legacy of postwar education policy from the perspective of a contemporary generation of village leaders, the article is also intended as a response to Pels’s (1997: 178) call for “more ethnographies of decolonization.”

In a major transformation of our times, governmental organizations are increasingly turning to faith-based groups to provide basic public services, including education. Faith-government partnering derives its power symbolically from a higher order than the secular state; the secular world of technical education is metaphorically encircled and uplifted by sacrilized forces. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Tanzania and in the United States, and on analysis of education policy documents and reports, this article argues that faith-based governmental programs operate by a logic of hierarchical encompassment, a logic by which state education discourses of accountability, efficiency, and standards first supercede and transform the ideal of religious-moral education, defining all citizens as equally protected before the law, and then reinstate religious- moral instruction as a higher order value that, in turn, encompasses technically trained citizens through an ethic that values religion, spirituality, and faith in one God.

The events and sites of a national holiday (17 May in Bergen, Norway) are the grounds from which to draw out meanings of nationalism and tradition, and analyze ideologies of egalitarianism and individualism in a social democratic welfare state. My project has two aims: to open up and deconstruct aspects of the material and symbolic life of the city, and to engage an examination of patterns of local and national community life in relation to shifting evaluations of localism and nationalism within the a changing state formation. Bergen can be thought of as a case study of social order and control, with women, children, and reverence for home life, highlighted in the town’s celebrations. The symbolism of the day discovers community and state in a difficult relation between domestic communities and nationalist ideology in the maintenance of governmentality, a relation mediated by the city itself.

This article considers the significance of the incorporation of blood donation as a widespread feature of commemorative political rituals in India. It places the rituals in the context of the current campaign in India to replace paid with non-remunerated donation, and explains how this campaign has led to the circulation of a store of ethical capital that the ritual organizers endeavor—through these blood-shedding commemorations—to capture for political ends. It is argued that there is nothing purely political about memorial blood donation—that its performance relies upon certain established religious themes in order to achieve political efficacy, and that this works both ways. The article highlights the role of blood donation in facilitating bodily transactions across and between different temporal locations, and finishes with a case study that demonstrates the risk involved in these rituals of remembrance.

The argument I present here is that the ‘retreat’ in the social sciences from concepts of the social and society (and their reformulation in other terms) is intimately connected to an intensification of reductionist thought and practice. But this, as I will explain, is not merely a feature of the social sciences (where reductionist argument appears to play an increasing role). It could almost be described as a movement (a social movement?) extending well beyond the human and social sciences where the public at large, as it were, is not only being more exposed to non-social even anti-social arguments of a reductionist kind, but appears to be actively accepting and desirous of them. The idea of the social as integral to understanding is being bypassed or, if it is maintained as a key point of reference, emptied of much of the import it once had. The social has become a vacated category. Thus, there is often a shift away from a concern with social relational and interactive structures, as well as institutional and organizational formations. The complexities of their internal dynamics, their structurating processes, and the forces of their effects on human action within and beyond them have increasingly been neglected in the social sciences.

This is an age of regression, the amplification of class relations and their polarization, the withdrawal of the new political classes into luxurious lives along with other dominant classes, while the declining lower end of the social world recedes into poverty and chaos. Overstated as a description, perhaps, but it does, I suggest, situate current trends.

Over the past four decades, politicians and government officials of the so-called advanced industrial countries have scaled back state-sponsored programs in education, healthcare, welfare to the poor, and housing subsidies. In conjunction, international economic organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have imposed fiscal policies upon developing nations, which disadvantage the poor by retrenching public services. These broad level shifts in the global political economy have been legitimized through a planetary newspeak that centers on such buzzwords as ‘globalization’ positing a ‘new economy,’ which require ‘flexible’ and ‘multicultural identities’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001). In this way, free trade advocates naturalize these political processes with reductive biological models of society that often assume an autonomous individual, as Kapferer discusses in his contribution to this forum (see also Taussig, Rapp, and Heath 2003).

If anthropology is in need of a lesson against reductionism, it would appear that no longer is it in need of one against reification, for this is more often the logical flaw that contemporary anthropologists strive hardest and most consciously to avoid. Yet for all the merits of the critique against reification, it has its downside: it renders us less sensitive to the dangers of reductionism. Quite frequently today the charge of reification is leveled against what was once the discipline’s core concept, the concept of culture, which we are told is overly deterministic, excessively totalizing, and insufficiently sensitive to issues of multivocality and hermeneutic multiplicity. Cultural theorists are accused of investing the concept with too much causal weight and of sheltering it from the tides of history and contingency. Mere museum curators rather than observers of the dynamic human condition, cultural theorists are said to place ‘cultures’ under bell jars and then to claim that culture determines everything.

Having for nearly a century lived a shadowy existence on the margins of mainstream ethnography, summoned forth only to play bit parts in some exemplary anecdote or illustrative vignette, over the last two decades the individual has emerged to take anthropological center stage. And not just the particular individual (the individual individual, so to speak)—the Nisa or the Tuhami (Crapanzano 1980; Shostak 1981)—but also the generic individual. Of course, the ethnographic foregrounding of individual individuals cannot be decoupled from a theoretical reconsideration of the generic individual, but it is the prominence granted the latter that marks a fairly decisive shift in current explanatory and interpretative paradigms (or at least rhetoric), so that nowadays it is commonplace to remind readers that the individual members of any society discussed are all “agents” actively engaged in “contesting,” “disputing,” “negotiating,” if not “creating” the social or cultural rules and norms to which they remain subject only in so far as those rules and norms may be incorporated into their own strategic pursuits.

Reducing human character, characteristics, and behavior to biological conditions of people or specific categories of them has long been an aspect of science, and emerges from The Enlightenment. It is in some senses a part of an heroic attempt to find the cause and effect explanations of everything—to provide consistent explanation of everything from falling stones to the determinates of ‘intelligence’ and criminal minds. These explanations are based in materiality. Gould (1981) provides a good summary of much of this.

It has been claimed that anthropology is in a terminal decline. If so, according to my interpretation, part of this is self-generated. The intellectual suicide of the discipline is closely connected to the decline of serious ethnographic research. The classic backbone of the discipline has been called ‘salvage-ethnography.’ This critical concept implies that ethnography has interest only in the past or faraway places, and this kind of ethnography does not form the basis of the discipline’s current theoretical body. This kind of reductionism—reducing the distance between the anthropologist and the object—not only has led to the deletion of time and miles, but also has had the extreme result of focusing on individual experiences. With growing demands of reflectivity, self has become the object, and thus the empirical content of anthropology has been reduced to Western experiences of the world. Theoretically significant difference has been wiped out in the process. On the other hand, we witness a proliferation of ethnographies done by everybody else but anthropologists. In the following, I look at the recent anthropological practices that unintentionally promote the discipline’s own death and connect them to the shifts in the position of anthropological theory and its nature.

The figure of Dumont continues to loom large in the anthropology of South Asia, notwithstanding the fact that arguably the last thing he published on India was the preface to the 1980 edition of his masterpiece Homo Hierarchicus. 2 Yet what Dumont shows in that preface is that he has loomed large while and perhaps because other anthropologists have pointed accusatory fingers at him, especially those from Britain and within the tradition of British social anthropology and social science. So what was it that so ruffled the feathers of the British bulldog? Was it Dumont’s attack on the atomistic individualism of British social theory? Was it that he appeared to reduce every aspect of Indian caste to the structural dyad of pure and impure? Was it his argument (more fully developed in Dumont 1977) that the ideological notion of the economic as a distinct social category is the product of a historical juncture, and that historical materialist or Marxian analysis is as much an ideology as it is a theory of ideology? Or was it simply Dumont’s insistence that India is seen in its own terms, and not from the (ideological) position that stressed the fundamental inequalities and injustices of the Indian social system as something in need of change? Was Dumont, in short, a conservative apologist for caste writing in an era in which the social was regarded as something that could be changed?

In anthropology, as well as in the other disciplines that constitute social science, it becomes increasingly clear that the notions of society and of the social, such as developed by the inventors of sociology, are gradually marginalized or, if I can use a term drawn from psychology, repressed. Consequently, the space that formerly constituted a fertile object of research has been fragmented. This situation is worrying, especially for the survival of an independent social analysis and critique. If the notion of sociality is no longer acceptable, then as Derrida puts it: “Each time, no matter how faithful one wants to be, one betrays the singularity of the other one addressed” (2004: 12).1 Then, finally, as the other has become to a large extend unreachable, each time one considers a social question, the next minute, it falls into pieces and returns to dust like an “uneducable ghost who has never learned to live” (ibid.).

Statistical patterns can be found in nature and society. Their distribution may conform to mathematical models. Thus, if two unbiased dice are rolled a thousand times, the number seven will occur with six times the frequency of two or twelve. The resulting histogram will be symmetrical with one peak where the mean, median and mode coincide. Or take a large sample of adult human beings and measure their height. Most cases will fall between five and six feet with very few less than four or more than seven feet. Because this is a continuous variable, the results can be plotted on a graph to which a curve may be fitted. It too will have a single peak with fantails on the high and low ends. We call this the ‘normal’ distribution or popularly the ‘bell curve.’ For more than a century, statistical inference has largely been based on this curve with its parameters of mean and standard deviation.

Notes on Contributors