Secularism and Religion
One of the Social Science Research Council’s blogs on religion, secularism and politics. People like Saba Mahmood and Hirschkind write there.
Orientalism outside of the Orient: the Mediterranean ‘Other’
Imagination is odd.
Northern Italy is opposed to Southern Italy. Italy is opposed to Germany. The ‘Mediterranean’ (which often excludes North Africa) is opposed to Northern Europe (which tends to include Germany, Britain and Scandinavia but not Russia, Latvia or Estonia). The East, of course, always opposes West.
This is merely a short account of how we tend to draw up the world and yet it says a great deal not just about our imaginative geography but a great deal about what we think about these nations and their respective inhabitants.
The question of ‘Mediterraneanism’ is a big one in Mediterranean anthropology. (For anyone not familiar but would like to familiarise themselves I recommend looking at Herzfeld, who had a lot to say about the subject, especially ‘The Mediterraneanist dilemma’ or Purcell’s ‘The Corrupting Sea’) There are questions as to whether one can even speak of Mediterranean anthropology; why not anthropology of the Mediterranean? There are questions as to whether one can speak of the Mediterranean as a homogeneous culture area; are all Mediterraneans fundamentally the same? And finally there are questions about corruption, amorality, patronage and the implicit bias that North is better than South.
I’m writing this blog in the wake of an article about depictions on Maltese hunters on German television. This is a blog, not a scholarly article so I’m allowed to say how utterly disgusted I am. Not at the mindlessness of the hunters (such idiots are everywhere) but at the fact that this program purported to show how Maltese hunters truly are and by extension, what the Maltese population allow to happen. Cue poo-pooing and EU condescension.
Why is it that hunting is ‘ecological’ in N.Europe but in Malta it stems from ignorance? Why is the statistic that we have the highest number of hunters per square mile as self-evident proof of barbarism? Is that really fair considering Malta is one of the most over-populous countries in the world?
The ‘Southern Question’ is, I think, becoming increasingly relevant due to the EU crisis. You really don’t have to look very far to see how Southern Europeans or ‘Mediterraneans’ as we are sometimes called are seen.
This, for example, was a genuine question posed in a serious interview on La Monde Diplomatique:
Let’s turn to the Eurozone debt problem. The dominant view is that Greeks and Italians are corrupt, inefficient and lazy, and that is why they find themselves in this mess. What is your view of what is going on?
And though the interviewee thankfully dismisses this as a canard spread by N. European politicians, the fact that such a question can be asked without outright dismissal show just how deeply entrenched Southern stereotypes really are.
I think the anthropologist Maurizio Albahari expressed it perfectly:
“In Italy, and in Italian studies, the ‘Southern Question’ evokes a powerful image of the provinces south of Rome as different from the rest of the peninsula, above all for their historic poverty and economic underdevelopment, their engagement in a clientelistic style of politics, and their cultural support for patriarchal gender relations and for various manifestations of organized crime. This tenacious catalogue of stereotypes includes, as well, the notion that southerners, by dint of their very essence, or at least their age-old culture and traditions, possess character traits that are opposite to the traits of northerners. Passionate, undisciplined, rebellious, intensely competitive, and incapable of generating group solidarity or engaging in collective action, they were and are – as the cliché would have it – unable to build the rational, orderly, civic cultures that, in the North, underwrote the emergence of industrial capitalist society.”
If you want a fair and honest account of Maltese hunting, I suggest that you look at this article written by Maltese anthropologist Mark-Anthony Falzon. Besides making hunting understandable to middle-class people who never touched a shotgun in their lives, it also helps to portray hunters as rational human beings. Too many human actions are written off as ignorant, irrational and stupid when the reality is more complex. For anyone doing European and Mediterranean anthropology, this is bound to be of interest.
You know you’re an anthropologist when…
- You see a ‘hau’ numberplate and think “The guy must really love Mauss”
or
- Friend: Hey! Costa coffee is coming to Malta; I heard they serve good coffee
Me: Yeah, Indian bourgeois go to Costa coffee all the time and engage in particular body practices of their class..
Friend: You never heard of Costa before reading it in an ethnography, have you?
Me: It’s just not part of my cultural capital. *Stupid grin*
Friend: …
I should really watch it because I’m becoming ridiculously boring…
The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles
Another fantastic article from a class of mine. The hegemonic view that science is purely objective and free of cultural bias is challenged by the famous anthropologist/feminist Emily Martin, who argues that the way science describes the natural world/language science uses reinforces stereotypes of masculinity and femininity that are central to western culture.
If you are a feminist/interested in feminism, you should definitely read this. Or even if you’re not, it’s still a really insightful piece on how culture can influence the way we perceive the natural world.
(via timothyfaddenanthro)
Economic Anthropology: Marx and Weber
More from my notes from the economic anthropology course last year:
How do Marx and Weber differ with regard to the connections between ‘economy’ and ‘culture’?
Marx:
Legal relations and political development cannot be understood by the consciousness of society or its development. They originate in what Marx calls ’ the material conditions of life’.
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but social existence that determines their consciousness. “
It is impossible to understand culture without understanding first how people produce: on an individual level, a person’s production, his economic position (in relation to that of others) is what forms the person’s self. On a mass scale, it determines how society sees itself.
If the economic foundation conflicts within itself, conflict will inevitably arise within the ideas, perspectives and symbolics of a society. In short, an overhaul of the economy is an overhaul of society’s identity of itself; its culture.
When Marx uses the economic structure to explain the prevailing forms of social consciousness, it seems that he is saying more than ‘economy determines culture’. To be conscious is to be aware of oneself, social consciousness is the awareness of yourself in relation with others- it includes the ideas about yourself, others and how these two connect. It’s also a way of seeing the world. So Marx seems to be saying that economy shapes views and sets forth ideas. So here, even ideas that seem distant from economic matters become naturally intertwined with your material life. I think here is saying that even something seemingly distant from materiality like spirituality and metaphysical claims that pervade society inevitably spring out of the substructure.
Marx says here that you cannot judge a man by what he thinks of himself- though probably Marx would judge a man depending on his relations to the economy.
Weber:
Immediately it’s quite obvious he will go in a different direction than Marx. Here culture determines economy, however his position is not any simpler than Marx’s.
Religion for Marx would be part of the superstructure emerging from the substructure; religion is in a way an expression of material life. In Weber, ascetic Protestantism is still linked with material life, except the outlook emerges from religion onto material life.
Both however emphasise the connection between the two.
How ascetic Protestantism (puritanism) helps set forth the principles of capitalism:
- An inherent dislike of any work without pragmatic utility, a dislike of all ‘useless’ knowledge. Everything must have market value.
- Work only for one’s profit, for one’s maximum profit.
- People were encouraged to invest their capital in order to gain more capital.
- Industriousness; very little space for leisure time
- The eradication of any possibility of enjoying one’s wealth was the factor that helped sanction the acquisition of goods. Protestantism was not a struggle against acquisition but against the irrational use of wealth. This promoted investment and the increase of capital. (Although it does away with the possibility of consuming (today) as much as capitalism would require)
- Faithful labour even at low wages for those with no opportunities; the idea that handyman and craftsmen pleased God most when they were poor. (Marx would here agree that this element of the superstructure helped maintain the continuity of the substructure) This type of work is not only considered a calling but the means to attain salvation! Added to this, the employer’s role as exploitative is also sanctioned by the doctrine of being instituted by God.
Conc: Weber argues that ascetic Protestantism gave birth the spirit of modern capitalism, however he does not want to come up with a one-sided causal argument.
Material life affects my social consciousness ( Marx) My social consciousness changes the way I approach material life. Culture may embody a spirit of a type of economic life though if strong enough, economic forces may strip away the cultural basis and stand on its own. (Weber)
Economic Anthropology: Formalist/Substantivist debate
Some more notes from my economic anthropology course:
Formalists -The form of economic decision making
Formalists argue that the decrease of marginal value is a fact of life and effects all economic decisions taken in different types of economy. Economic action thus becomes a product of rational choice- a weighing of costs, effects, time and energy put into work as opposed to the benefit reaped from the action. Formalists used terminology normally used to describe capitalist economic action.
Critique: The formalist paradigm lacked embeddedness and assumed that economy could be studied separately. It also took little account of different types of exchange that could exist apart from market exchange-such as reciprocal and redistributive exchange.
Substantivists-The substance of cultural contexts
Emerged as critics to the formalist point of view. Substantivists’ distaste for over-generalisation led them to argue for greater embeddedness. They took into account different types of exchange and believed that scarcity of resources was not a universal human condition. They redefined scarcity as scarcity of wealth-only brought about by the recent penetration of Western capitalism. They attacked the use of capitalist terminology for other forms of economy and argued for production for use rather than production for exchange in agrarian and peasant societies.
Critique: ay have ignored general facts about human being’s relation to the world that can form a general theory for the explanation of economic action. While formalist emphasis on rationalist balancing may have been exaggerated, there is no need to discount it entirely. People do think about how best to spend their time about what they valorise most.
