Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice
496
Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice
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Overview
A vigorous advocate of the anthropological voice and method, Fischer emphasizes the ethical dimension of cultural anthropology. Ethnography, he suggests, is uniquely situated to gather and convey observations fundamental to the creation of new social institutions for an evolving civil society. In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice Fischer considers a dazzling array of subjects—among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and genomic biotechnologies—and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world. He lays the groundwork for a renewed and powerful twenty-first-century anthropology characterized by a continued insistence on empirical fieldwork, engagements with other disciplines, and dialogue with interlocutors around the globe.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822384953 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/10/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Michael M. J. Fischer is Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution and coauthor of Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition and Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences.
Read an Excerpt
Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice
By Michael M. J. Fischer
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2003 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8495-3
CHAPTER 1
Deep Play and Social Responsibility in Vienna
I was going to start (pause), and I will (pause), by saying "l'shanah tova!" (happy new year!). We meet on the eve of the first new year (rosh hashanah) of a new century by the common era or Gregorian calendar count, the twenty-first century, but the year 5761 by the Jewish count (1379 by the Persian solar or shamsi calendar, 1421 Hijri by the Islamic lunar calendar; in a few days will be Mehregan, the fall new year of the Zoroastrian seasonal or fasli calendar used as the vernacular calendar in Iran).
What happens in a few days, according to Jewish liturgy, is a very old ritual of social responsibility. We ask forgiveness from those we have wronged. God cannot forgive us for wrongs we have done to others; only those we have wronged can do so. We perform this act of sociality, of mutual recognition, before the Book is closed inscribing who shall live and who shall die.
L'shanah tova! May all of you and your loved ones be inscribed in the book of life.
Double Consciousness, Multiple Perspectives
Now, I was telling a member of the Jewish community of Vienna that in addition to the politics of coming to this conference in Vienna after the inclusion of the right-wing FPÖ (Freiheits Partei Österreich, the Freedom Party of Austria) in the government, coming to express solidarity with the University of Vienna (which has issued fine statements on tolerance and minority rights, and on freedom of research and expression), with the many demonstrators against the FPÖ (who have continued their demonstrations every Thursday evening now for eight months), and with the many Austrian intellectuals who have spoken and written against the FPÖ; that in addition to that politics, I also wanted—underscoring the Rosh Hashanah scheduling of a conference whose theme is social responsibility and whose venue, of all places, is Vienna — to take my grandfather's seat in the synagogue in which my parents were married, the only synagogue the Nazis did not destroy. He laughed and said that the scheduling of conferences on the high holidays has become not so unusual, the last was the dentists, that it is like a business: the Jewish community gets to sell a few tickets. A reminder, perhaps, that even memories, not to mention sentimentalities, can be commodified; and that life goes on and did not stop in 1939 even for the Jewish community in Vienna. But history is important, and experiences do affect subsequent choices.
Building Transnational Civil Societies
I understand the rationale and goal of this plenary to be to take note of our venue, of where and when we are meeting, and to underscore the themes of the conference: the role of technosciences in transnational social change, issues of equity and distribution regarding the knowledge and power that science and technology provide, the building of new social institutions for the more complex civil society of the twenty-first century, the ethics and politics of research, and thinking about who the audiences are for our research.
I savor the opportunity, and I thank Sheila Jasanoff, president of the Society for the Social Study of Sciences, and the other organizers, to speak in these halls of the University of Vienna where my father listened to Max Weber when he visited here for a term, where my mother studied with Moritz Schlick and Hans Hahn and others of the Vienna Circle, where an important foundation of socially committed ethnography began with the Marienthal study by Marie Jahoda (one of my mother's best friends in school), Paul Lazarsfeld, and Ernst Zeisel. All of these remain touchstones in my own intellectual formation.
Three Sites of Deep Play on the Ethical Plateaus of the Twenty-first Century
In my few remaining minutes I want to evoke three sites of "deep play" on what I have come to call "ethical plateaus." "Deep play," of course, is a nod to the essay by Clifford Geertz and to Jeremy Bentham; ethical plateaus are what I have come to call the strategic terrains on which multiple technologies interact, creating a complex topology for perception and decision making. The first of these deep plays is that of the politics of the FPÖ in Austria and more broadly in Europe, which was the original reason for this panel and poses questions about the building of transnational institutions for civil society, a first experimental effort for a Europe-wide construction of consensus on rights for minorities, refugees, and immigrants. The second deep play is that of the biosciences, which so many of the papers at this conference are about, which directly pose questions of who shall live and who shall die; implicate both of the other two deep plays; and exert pressure toward new institutions of reflexive modernization or deliberative democracy in some of the most difficult areas of human experimental trials, informed consent, privacy and surveillance, patents and ownership of biological information, and the power of huge amounts of investments, not just of money and power but also of ideology and fantasy (see further chapter 5). The example I will invoke here is xenotransplantation. The third deep play is a brief acknowledgment or alert — acknowledgment for many of you who have been part of its dissemination across the Internet, and alert for others — about the furor over new allegations regarding the studies of the Yanomami by the American geneticist James Neel and the American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, a furor breaking over my own discipline of anthropology, which will include other fields, and threatens to reopen the science wars and the sociobiology debates, but may potentially also affect the oversight demanded by institutional review boards and other regulatory bodies on the research that we all do (see also chapter 10).
"Deep play" refers to cultural sites where multiple levels of structure, explanation, and meaning intersect and condense, including the cultural phantasmagoria that ground and structure the terrain on which reason, will, and language operate but cannot contain.
Deep Play in Europe: Local, Regional, and Global Coalitions in Wars of Position
First, then, regarding the Austrian deep play. I want mainly to reaffirm our purpose in this panel, still now, even in the aftermath of the report of the "three Wise Men" (led by Marti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, with Jochen Fowein and Marcelina Oreja), which ended the mild sanctions on Austria by the member states of the European Union (Ahtisaari, Fowein, and Oreja 2000). I wish that I had been here enough ahead of time to get and to be able to show slides of the wicked cartoons by the Austrian artist Manfred Deix, which are still on display at the Wiener Kunst Haus, on Oberer Weisgerberstrasse, across the street from my grandfather's house. In several of the cartoons, he takes on election slogans of the FPÖ such as Überfremdung (overrun by foreigners), and his caricatures work by exaggerating the anxieties of certain parts of the Austrian population (Deix 2000). In one cartoon, he depicts an American Indian in war paint, an African, and a Chinese person all in lederhosen. In another he draws a Turk in red fez and harem pants skiing down the Alps, in charge of a skiing school while unemployed Austrians hold up signs asking for jobs. The best, perhaps, is a cartoon of a "Right Wing Extremist Opinion Poll," which has a series of questions and boxes to check asking about one's attitudes toward Jews, the Kriegesgeneration (the generation of World War II, "ordinary folks who did nothing wrong"), immigrants, and patriotism. The cartoons are an effective format for getting at displacements, denials, and the behind-the-scenes anxieties, complex psychological and ethical plateaus.
I want to pay tribute here to the many Austrian analysts who have done superb dissections of the rhetoric and tactics of the FPÖ and of Jorg Haider: the linguist Ruth Wodak and her colleagues (Wodak et al. 1990,1993,1995), the political scientist Johnny Bunzl (1997, 2000), the anthropologist Andre Gingrich (2000), the political theorist Hakkan Gurses (2000), the social psychologist Klaus Ottomeyer (2000), the political economist Otto Ötsch (2000), and many others. The tactics of the FPÖ remain — even now after the dropping of the sanctions — a serious political issue, but also a fascinating cultural site of deep play not only for Austria but for Europe and the global stage.
The report of the "three Wise Ones" (the ironic New Testament resonance would be in English unfortunately gendered; the pluralized German avoids this) says that the Austrian government has lived up to its legal commitments to protect the rights of minorities, refugees, and immigrants. Indeed, as the report acknowledges, Austria has accepted more immigrants than most European countries. But the report also takes as its mandate to evaluate the political evolution of the FPÖ, and here it says that although the FPÖ may yet evolve into a responsible democratic party, to date it remains (in the words of the report) "a right wing populist party with radical elements" that requires monitoring. The report cites the language of Haider calling extermination camps Straflager (punishment camps), as if those condemned were being punished for things they had done; and his tactics such as using libel actions to silence opponents, including the case of Professor Anton Pelinka, about which the protest letter to the president of Austria, being circulated at this meeting for signatures, appeals. (The European Union office for monitoring the rights of immigrants, refugees, and minorities is in fact located in Vienna.)
It is a deep play because it is at the same time psychodrama and politics, and it is also about the neoliberal or neoconservative restructuring of the economy that is happening not only in Austria but throughout Europe and across the globe, involving serious dislocations. Indeed, on hearing of the report of the three Wise Ones and the dropping of sanctions, members of the FPÖ renewed their call for the launching of a Europe-wide Freedom Party. The Hungarian philosopher G. M. Tamas has described the FPÖ as part of a much wider movement of postfascism, a series of policies, practices, and ideologies that have little to do, except in Central Europe, with the legacies of Nazism. In Central Europe, he says, familiar phrases have different echoes, and vigilance is needed, "since, historically speaking, innocence cannot be presumed" (Tamas 2000).
The report of the three Wise Ones, and the long series of treaties and legal conventions and commitments cited in it to which Austria continues to adhere, are part of an effort to build transnational codes and institutions. In this case, at least for now, it is working.
Deep Play in the Life Sciences™: Markets versus Deliberative Democracy
The second deep play, regarding biotechnologies, has to do with fantasies of abolishing disease and immortalizing life, sometimes at the expense of human rights, informed consent, equity, and access. The American physicists went ahead with the bomb for Nagasaki, as Oppenheimer memorably put it, because it was "technically sweet." So too today physicians and patients often go ahead with heroic experimental trials because they are caught up in what Mary-Jo Good calls the biotechnical embrace, doing what technically can be done under the Hippocratic formulation of preserving and extending life, because it can be done, sometimes at the expense of the good death. Again Manfred Deix captures some of the fantasies, as in his cartoon of a genetically engineered pig, altered to be already a huge sausage, or his cartoons of various monsters — think post-Chernobyl fantasies of mutants — but monsters who have voting rights.
Xenotransplantation is one site among the new biotechnologies, where, because the science is so hard, there is some time to experiment with some creative thinking toward new institutions and new ways of bringing into being an informed citizenry on a global scale that can provide civil society oversight, accountability, and decision making. I have been watching in particular the efforts of Dr. Fritz Bach, the Lewis Thomas Professor of Medicine at Harvard, who incidentally is also Viennese born — his grandfather and mine, I'm sure, knew each other, both being prominent Viennese rabbis — and has directed genetics and immunology research labs in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Boston, but also for five years here in Vienna, and has called for a moratorium on clinical trials in xenotransplantation. Xenotransplantation, like toxic waste, is a transnational issue. Old institutions of medical ethics are insufficient. The threat of xenosis that could unleash a pandemic like HIV/AIDS, however small the risk, is not something that can be dealt with in medical ethics models of doctor-patient relations, or hospital ethics committees, or even national-level regulatory institutions. Older methods of self-regulation by scientists in the Asilomar style of dealing with the fears about recombinant DNA in the 1970s seem no longer possible or adequate, and the recent experience of Monsanto with the "terminator seed" in the controversies over genetically engineered crops shows that the refusal to engage in public consultation can lead at minimum to public relations fiascoes. Dr. Bach has been experimenting not only with education modules at the high school, church, and grassroots levels, and with national committee structures at the political level in several countries in both the First and Third World, but also with new modes of global Web-based public consultation seeded with a network of opinion leaders in various countries. It will be interesting to watch this and other experiments in new institution and public critical knowledge building, especially in an environment in which calls for even limited moratoriums draw the ire of those who find it harder to raise research money and venture capital to push the science further.
Deep Play in South America: Media, Science, and the Politics of Representation
Finally, a brief word about the Yanomami, and the forthcoming publication of Darkness in El Dorado, by the investigative journalist Patrick Tierney (Norton, 2000). We have known for a long time that Napoleon Chagnon's accounts of warfare and its sociobiological basis in the linkage of male aggression to reproductive success was contested by many other ethnographers of the Yanomami. We have known for a long time that the documentary films of Tim Asch, if not exactly staged, were done on occasions and settings that Chagnon and Asch helped to set up. And we have known for a long time that James Neel's work with the Yanomami was funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission; that he was interested in Amazonian populations as models for population, genetic, and disease studies; that he had earlier led the American investigations on the effects of radiation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan; and that the United States conducted a number of investigations on low-level radiation accumulation in human populations in the Marshall and Aleutian Islands, through radiation experimental releases over Midwestern populations, and other radiation experiments in hospitals, including ones that Neel did for the Manhattan Project in Rochester. The new allegations are first that the Yanomami may have been used as an experimental population in ways different from, but reminiscent of, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment; that Neel inoculated the Yanomami with live attenuated Edmonton B measles vaccine, a vaccine being phased out in the United States, donated by two pharmaceutical companies (an issue, still very much alive today, of pharmaceutical companies taking philanthropic tax benefits for donations of medicines being phased out or near expiry to Third World populations) and known to be dangerous and counterindicated for previously unexposed populations; that whether or not the inoculations unintentionally helped exacerbate a measles outbreak into the 1968 epidemic, the medical care he and his team provided was too little; and that (not in itself reprehensible) he opportunistically seized the occasion to observe the natural course of an epidemic among a previously unexposed population, among other reasons to test hypotheses about the immunological superiority of headmen over others in small populations by looking for their reproductive success. Second, in more sustained fashion, the allegations are that Chagnon's intervention into the local political dynamics with trade goods, and bringing together feuding groups for purposes of filming rituals, led to much of the violence that he portrayed as natural or primordial, and had unintended but further political fallout, including helping mining interests and the military interests in Brazil resist giving to the Yanomami constitutionally promised land rights and territorial demarcation.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixPrologue: The Third Spaces of Anthropology 1
Emergent Forms of Life
1 Deep Play and Social Responsibility in Vienna 29
2 Emergent Forms of Life: Anthropologies of Late or Post Modernities 37
Critique within Technoscientific Worlds
3 Filmic Judgment and Cultural Critique: Iranian Cinema in a Teletechnological World 61
4 Cultural Critique with a Hammer, Gouge, and Woodblock: Art and Medicine in the Age of Social Retraumatization 90
5 Ethnographic Critique and Technoscientific Narratives: The Old Mole, Ethical Plateaus, and the Governance of Emergent Biosocial Polities 145
Subjectivities in an Age of Global Connectivity
6 Autobiograhpical Voices (1,2,3) and Mosaic Memory: Ethnicity, Religion, Science (An Inquiry into the Nature of Autobiographical Genres and Their Uses in Extending Social Theory) 179
7 Post-Avant-Garde Tasks of Polish Film: Ethnographic Odklamane 225
New Pedagogies and Ethics
8 Worlding Cyperspace: Toward a Critical Ethnography in Space, Time, and Theory 261
9 Calling the Future(s): Delay Call Forwarding 305
I. Las Meninas and Robotic-Virtual Surgical systems: the Visual Thread/Fiber-Optic Carrier 309
II. Modules for a Science, Technology, and Society Curriculum: STS@theTurn_[ ]ooo.mit.edu 333
10 In the Science Zone: The Yanomami and the Fight for Representation 370
Epilogue: On Distinguishing Good and Evil in Emergent Forms of Life (Woodblock Print to Newspaper Illustration) 393
Notes 397
Bibliography 427
Index 463