Author: Etienne RP

Book reviewer.

The Cultural Anthropology of Asia-Pacific Modernity

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A review of Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Aihwa Ong, Duke University Press, 1999.

Flexible CitizenshipIn Flexible Citizenship, Aihwa Ong describes how industrializing states in Southeast Asia and border-crossing citizens of Chinese descent respond differently to the challenge of globalization. Borrowing from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, she uses the term “regime” to refer to knowledge/power schemes that seek to normalize power relations. The three regimes that are considered are the regime of Chinese kinship and family, the regime of the nation-state, and the regime of the marketplace. These regimes and their associated logics of subject-making, of governmentality, and of capital accumulation, are characterized by the twin forces of flexibility and transnationality. The book explores the phenomena that are shaped by these two forces: mobile capital, business networks, migrations, media publics, zones of graduated sovereignty, and triumphant Asian discourses.

Flexibility and transnationality in the Chinese diaspora

According to Benedict Anderson, rephrasing a basic tenet of Foucaldian studies, “the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than those of nation.” Not so in China: the embrace of the authoritarian Asian model of modernity, the crucial role of overseas Chinese in China’s development, and the encounter with global capitalism have reinvigorated racial consciousness and its implications for the integrity of the national territory. The resurgence of Chinese racial consciousness overseas, stimulated by the reemergence of China on the world stage and by the economic activities of diasporean Chinese, cannot be dissociated from the racial pride that feeds China’s imaginary community. Meanwhile, it is important that the term “Chinese” not be invoked in such ways as to become automatically and at all times the equivalent of the People’s Republic. There is an ever growing pluralization of Chinese identities, as illustrated by the figures of transnational subjects that form the focus of this study: the multiple-passport holder; the multicultural professional who is able to convert his social capital across borders; the business executive who can live anywhere in the world, provided it is near an airport; the “parachute kids” who are dropped in Southern California to acquire an American college education that is almost a requisite for global mobility.

These international managers and professionals adopt a market-driven view of citizenship: they seek legal residence and citizenship not necessarily in the states where they conduct their business but in places where their families can pursue their dreams. The art of flexibility, which is constrained by political and cultural boundaries, includes sending families and business abroad, as well as acquiring dual citizenship, second homes, overseas bank accounts, and new habits. Among overseas Chinese, cultural norms dictate the formation of translocal business networks, putting men in charge of mobility while women and children are the disciplinary subjects of familial regimes. These norms that generally valorize mobile masculinity and localized feminity shape strategies of flexible citizenship, gender division of labour, and relocation in different sites.

Sites of graduated sovereignty

Despite frequent assertions about the demise of the state, the issue of state action remains central when it comes to the rearrangements of global spaces and the restructuring of social and political relations. In Southeast Asia, governments seeking to accommodate corporate strategies of location have become flexible in their management of sovereignty, so that different production sites often become institutional domains that vary in their mix of legal protections, controls, and disciplinary regimes. As Asian postdevelopmental states seek to maintain their competitiveness and political stability, they are no longer interested in securing uniform regulatory authority over all their citizens. The low-wage export-processing zones, the illegal labour market, the aboriginal periphery, the refugee camp, the cyber corridor, and the growth triangle are the new sites of graduated sovereignty, whereby citizens in zones that are differently articulated to global production and financial circuits are subjected to different kinds of surveillance and in practice enjoy different sets of civil, political, and economic rights.

Aihwa Ong’s essay is historically dated: her narrative takes place between China’s repression of the Tiananmen mass protests of 1989 and the turbulence of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. It encompasses political milestones such as Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty and the demise of the Soeharto regime in Indonesia; cultural phenomena like the rise of Star TV and other pan-Asian medias or the birth of Asian studies in the curriculum of American universities; economic developments such as the burgeoning production networks of multinational firms in Southeast Asia or the increased visibility of Asian presence in California; and ideological debates such as Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations or the promotion of Asian values as an alternative to the West’s hegemony. The emergence of China as an economic superpower provides the background to all these trends.

But the book doesn’t take into account other developments that have transformed the region’s cultural and political fabric since its date of publication. The economic centre of gravity of East Asia has moved further from Southeast Asia to the Chinese mainland. China now complements its economic power with a new political assertiveness. Nationalist claims have been given a new virulence through the development of internet discussion forums. Issues of transnationality and border crossing have taken a new salience since September 11: once valorized as the emergence of a cosmopolitan class, they now tend to be associated with risk and threats to national security. And the politics of race in the USA has been transformed and redefined by the election of a president who claims roots on three continents.

Fault lines in a multi-sited ethnography

Against this background, we can now detect some fault line in Aihwa Ong’s analysis. History is left out of the picture, and the snapshots captured by her analysis are situated into a kind of undefined present. Because she considers that most historians entertain the “grand orientalist legacy,” she rejects the historical method of building truth claims through a patient investigation of archival materials. Instead, she builds her ethnographic analysis on the most transient of sources: articles in popular magazines, casual conversations with random informants, TV images watched in hotel rooms, and media coverage of political debates.

She rejects the notion of fieldwork that, until recently, formed the hallmark of anthropology as a discipline, and substitutes to it the standard approach of cultural studies: a blind reverence to Foucault and his concept of power; a fixation with issues of race, class, and gender; and a romantic denunciation of capitalism that comes plastered with the label of political economy. Compared to the sophistication of her theoretical apparatus, her ethnographic knowledge base is rather thin, and her descriptive narrative uses the clichés found in the popular literature. Judge by the following quote: “On a palm-fringed hillock stands the Kuala Lumpur Hilton, where attendants in white suits and batik sarongs rush forward to greet well-groomed Malay executives wielding cellular phones as they step out of limousines. Women in silk baju kurong (the loose Malay tunic and sarong), dripping jewelry from their ears and necks, saunter in on their way to fancy receptions.”

Anthropology is a constantly evolving social science. While I acknowledge the positive aspects brought by new theoretical perspectives and innovative notions of what counts as ethnographic material, I don’t fully subscribe to the new directions that the discipline has taken, as exemplified by this book.

The Master Narrative of the New Korean Cinema

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A review of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, Kyung Hyun Kim, Duke University Press, 2004.

RemasculinizationThe thesis of this book is quite simple. Korea in the 1980s and the 1990s was a post-traumatic society. The figure of the father had been shattered by its authoritarian leaders, who ended in a grotesque finale (see The President’s Last Bang, 2005, about the assassination of Park Chung-hee) or, in the case of Chun Doo-hwan, lacked hair (The President’s Barber, 2004). The double trauma of colonization by Japan and fratricide murder during the Korean War had deprived the Korean people of its identity. The sins of the fathers were visited upon the sons, and the Memories of Murder (2003) still lingered. The ritual murder of the father could not unite the community of brothers as they stood divided between North and South (Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War, 2004), between sons of patriots and sons of collaborationists (Thomas Ahn Jung-geun, 2004). The films quoted above, all produced in the 2000s, could resolve the tensions and dilemma of overcoming trauma by representing them on screen. By contrast, films produced in the 1980s and 1990s could only repress the representation of the primal scene, generating frustration and anger. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the difference between “working through”, the positive engagement with trauma that can lead to its ultimate resolution, and “acting out” or compulsively repeating the past.

Working through or acting out past trauma

Failure to come to terms with the representation of trauma transformed men into hysteric subjects. Simply put, men were deprived of their manhood. They were constantly alienated and emasculated by the political and economic forces of the day. In order to recover their potency, they resorted to violence: hence the brutality and violent acts ubiquitous in many Korean films. Here the author of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema sees a sharp distinction between films produced in the 1980s and in the following decade. If the 1980s was a period of male masochism for Korean cinema, by the 1990s men freed themselves from anxiety and trauma by resorting to sadism. The two forms of violence must be clearly distinguished. Both the masochist and the sadist find pleasure in pain—pain of the self, pain of the other. But the sadist aims at subverting the law; the masochist wants to emphasize its extreme severity. The common thread that unites them is their misogynistic tendency towards women: very often, the victim of men’s effort to regain their manhood is the woman. The films from the period were solely centered on male characters. They were depicted as pathetic losers or as dumb brutes, and the movies acted out their masculinity crisis without any regard for the opposite sex. Women only functioned as passive objects oscillating between the twin images of the mother and the whore. What is absent in these movies from these two decades is a positive female character, let alone a feminist plot.

The thesis of remasculinization as a way to recover from trauma is not new. It has been advanced by American cultural critics in the context of the post-Vietnam war. The trauma of defeat, changing gender roles, and economic uncertainties generated a masculinity crisis that led to alienation, retrenchment, and gynophobia. In America, the renegotiation of masculinity took the form of the lone warrior culture, illustrated in blockbuster films of the 1980s such as Rambo, Die Hard, or Dirty Harry. What is specific about South Korea’s post trauma recovery is the political and economic context. It must be remembered that the end of authoritarian dictatorship and the inception of democracy in Korea occurred only in 1987. Before that date, films still had to deal with heavy censorship, and protest against the military government was disallowed. Unlike General Park Chung-hee however, General Chun Doo-hwan, his successor, recognized the importance of leisure and consumer spending as a way to assuage the masses and compensate the dispossession of their voting rights. He authorized the production of a wave of sleazy movies that found their way into theaters, while political expressions were strictly censored. The hope was that consumerism and pornography would make people forget about democracy and postpone their hope for a more representative government.

Korea bumped into modernity at full speed

But economic development wasn’t enough to ease the pain: in fact, it generated more ailments and frustrations. That Korea’s compressed economic development was traumatic is often overlooked. The “miracle of the Han river” left aside many victims and outcasts. Korea bumped into modernity at full speed, and without security belts or social safety nets. Urban alienation and economic marginalization is the theme from many Korean films from the 1980s and 1990s. In Chilsu and Mansu (1988), two billboard painters living on day jobs climb to a high-rise building in downtown Seoul to privately demonstrate their pent-up frustration. The public from the street below mistakes their aimless private rant for a public demonstration, and the police intervenes to arrest them. In Whale Hunting (1984), the disheartened protagonist, rejected by his college girlfriend, wanders the streets where he befriends a beggar and hangs out with a mute prostitute looking for a home. His sexual anxiety is displayed through farcical situations as in the opening scene where he dreams he is standing naked before a laughing public, or when he hugs the bare breasts of a naked statue in a museum gallery. In all the movies covered in the book, the wanderings of the male character invoke the traumatic losses of pastoral communities (urban dramas), homes (road movies), faithful wives and asexual mothers (sex scenes), and memory and sanity (social problem films).

Some artist moviemakers attempted to allude to the political by way of the sexual. One chapter is dedicated to Jang Sun-woo’s movies (The Age of Success, To You From Me, Bad Movie) which have generated far more controversy than works of any other director of the New Korea Cinema. Jang Sun-woo’s characters are self-loathing, pathetic men described as sexually frustrated, impotent, and castrated. Crude sex scenes are ubiquitous and are meant to disturb and to unsettle more than to titillate or sexually arouse. For Jang, these frail masculinities are reflective of the unresolved social crisis in South Korea that began with the elimination of the political dictatorship, when he longtime president was abruptly assassinated in 1979, and the ensuing period of political unrest. The sexual and the political are closely intertwined: in To You, From Me, Jang Sun-woo portrays an underground enterprise that releases pornographic books under the disguise of subversive North Korean communist manifestos—both are banned materials and therefore fetishized. But his anarchist, nihilistic streak is perhaps best exemplified by Bad Movie, described as “one of the most daring and experimental feature films produced in Korea,” shot without set direction, script, or production plan. The movie shows raw, crude images of sex and violence, loosely motivated by a chronicle of young runaway teenagers engaging in street motorcycle races, extortion, rape, and murder. As Kyung Hyun Kim comments, “it is as close to the real as it can get, disorienting and discomforting even the contemporary art-film viewers who are familiar with violence aestheticized in cinemas of Wong Kar-wai, Quentin Tarantino, and Kitano Takeshi.”

Men turn to violence and to sadism to reclaim their masculinity

Other directors were more overtly political. Films about the Korean War (Chang Kil-su’s Silver Stallion, Yi Kwang-mo’s Spring is My Hometown, and Im Kwon-Taek’s The Taebaek Mountains) present a different way of remembering the war, one that doesn’t rest on the diabolization of the North Korean enemy but rather insists on cracks within the South-Korean-American alliance: partisan guerrilla in the Cholla Province, yanggongju prostitutes serving US soldiers, internal conflicts within a community or a family, absent fathers and raped women. Here again attention focuses on men who have lost their virility and authority during the war, and who turn to violence and to sadism—especially against women—to reclaim their masculinity. Other episodes of Korea’s postwar political history are also revisited. A Single Spark concerns the life and death of labor union martyr Chon T’ae-il, while A Petal depicts the 1980 Kwangju uprising. These are sites that resist both remembrance and representation, components of a post-traumatic identity that can only act out what is still too painful to work through. It is also noticeable that these two movies targeted primarily foreign audiences at international film festivals. Their directors, Park Kwang-su and Jang Sun-woo, could take political and financial risks because they had already built international reputations. The years the two films were released, 1995 and 1996, also had democracy firmly entrenched since the transition of the end-1980s and the election of the first civilian president in 30 years in 1992.

The reception of Korean movies was also conditioned by their conditions of production and distribution. Most movies covered in The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema are low-budget films directed by authors who aimed at a limited audience and assembled production teams based on personal acquaintances and on-the-job training. But they are also films that have stimulated local commercial interest in a country that valued cinephile club screening and intellectual consumption of movies that would have been commercially unviable in the West. It should also be noted that the renaissance of Korean cinema in the 1980s and 1990s occurred not because of, but rather in spite of the role of the government. Import quota restrictions diminished during the 1980s, and Korean filmmakers had to aim for the creation of art cinema without the aid of state subsidies. Not only were public funds denied for Korean films, but also were bank loans, forcing filmmakers to seek alternative financial resources and credit. No Korean filmmaker could therefore neglect the box office. For some of them, the international circuit of international film festivals and arthouse movie theaters provided a source of legitimacy and revenue. Despite adverse conditions, Korea is the only nation during recent history that has regained its domestic audience after losing them to Hollywood products. Art movies from the 1980s and 1990s paved the way to the Korean blockbusters of the end-1990s and 2000s that attracted massive domestic audiences and conquered foreign markets. They also made it sure that a market space for independent movies continued to exist in Korea, as evidenced by the career of director Kim Ki-duk whose productions closely complement the movies reviewed in the book.

Korea has yet to produce a movie with a female plot, let alone a feminist one

Kyung Hyun Kim mobilizes the categories of national cinema as a genre and of the director as auteur to develop his film criticism. He focuses on a segment of Korea’s filmic production in the 1980s and 1990s that was sometimes touted as the New Korean Cinema by film critics. This is in accordance with the conventions of cinema studies, which treats national cinemas as discrete entities and delineates periods or currents characterized by a particular style or narrative. The master narrative of the New Korean Cinema is the masculine recovery from trauma, a movement that Kyung Hyun Kim sees as problematic because it is based on the exclusion of women. As he argues, Korean cinema has yet to produce a movie with a female plot, let alone a feminist one. The representation of woman is still caught between the mother and the whore. Another characteristic of the New Korean Cinema is that it had to strictly play within the commercial rules of an open marketplace, which meant competing with Hollywood films distributed freely across the nation, and could not completely abandon the conventions of popular filmmaking. The author sees this commercial exposure both as a factor in the success of the New Korean Cinema and the reason of its demise: once aligned with Hollywood standards, Korean cinema lost its shine and became just a niche cultivating subgenres in a global marketplace.

The Anatomy of Akogare

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A review of Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams, Karen Kelsky, Duke University Press, 2001.

FKaren Kelskyorty years ago, Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi wrote The Anatomy of Dependence (or Amae no Kôzô, literally: “The Structure of Amae“). In this book, as in everyday Japanese language, amae refers to the feelings that all infants at the breast harbor for their mother–dependence, the desire to be passively loved, the unwillingness to be separated from the object of desire and cast into a world of “objective” reality. Takeo Doi’s basic premise was that Japanese men nurture these feelings well into their adult life, much more so than men raised in the West. For him, the concept of amae goes a long way in explaining the basic mentality of individuals and the organization of society in Japan.

What Takeo Doi did for amae, Karen Kelsky achieves it for akogare

What Takeo Doi did for amae, Karen Kelsky achieves it for another distinctly Japanese concept: the notion of akogare, translated variously as longing, desire, attraction, or idealization, in the context of Japanese women’s feelings toward the West. The approach is different: it is grounded in social anthropology, not popular psychology or essayism. Whereas Takeo Doi espoused the then dominant approach of nihonjinron, or theories of Japaneseness, Kelsky takes a critical perspective on broad categories such as “the Japanese.” Theoretically, Doi drew his inspiration from Freudian psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex (as interpreted by American psychologists), whereas Kelsky builds upon the notion of Lacan’s desire that arises from a fundamental lack and finds expression in a partial object or fetish. Kelsky’s book is therefore more attuned to postmodern sensibilities and critical perspectives that today dominate cultural studies in academic departments. More fundamentally, whereas amae was centered on Japanese men and their relation to their mother, akogare revolves around Japanese women and their sentimental or sexual attraction toward white men.

This makes Women on the Verge a profoundly disturbing book. Kelsky means to upset and to unsettle, as she herself was put off balance in the course of her research project: “I was told, more than once, that this was not an appropriate topic of academic enquiry”. An early research paper on the topic of promiscuous young office ladies traveling abroad, and the wave of indignation they caused when the offending term designating them  (“yellow cabs”) was popularized by the tabloid press, particularly came back to haunt her, with American men tracking her on the internet to confess pathetic details of their own sexual experience. But what makes the book even more disturbing is that it addresses issues every Western foreigner in Japan has encountered in a way or another. Business executives have all been exposed to assertions about Japan’s egregious “sexism” that “forces talented women abroad.” The media and the advertising industry reinforce stereotypes about idealized mixed couples–invariably, a white man and a Japanese woman–whereas the other combination–Japanese men marrying Western women–has much less social visibility and even faces negative prejudices–or at least that is what the author surmises, based on her own experience.

The Japanese Woman and the Western gaze

What keeps this book from stereotype, and the reader from voyeurism, is the rich theoretical apparatus, itself backed by a firm feminist perspective. Desire, Karen Kelsky underscores, is always an expression of power. And power itself is unevenly distributed along gender, racial, and sexual lines. Focusing on figures such as Tsuda Umeko (founder of Tsuda College), Sugimoto Etsu (author of A Daughter of the Samurai) and Katô Shizue (a pioneer in the birth control movement and a strong supporter of labor reform), the author tracks the emergence of a women’s discourse about the West/United States as a site of salvation from what they characterized as a feudalistic and oppressive patriarchal Japanese family system. Therein dates the idea, still fervently accepted by some women today, that Japanese women’s independence and advancement lie in the command of the English language, and the image of America as home of women’s emancipation. But the fetishization of the figure of the other crystallized during what Kelsky calls the “sexual nexus of the occupation”: Japanese women were desired by American men, while Japanese men were rebuffed by both American men and Japanese (and American) women. As she notes, “Women were not only desired as exotic Madame Butterfly (although that image, of course, played a role); they were also quickly rehabilitated as the “good” Japanese who, in contrast to duplicitous and violent men, were imagined to be malleable and eager for democratic reform.”

Having covered the historical background, the author turns to fieldwork, and to a new version of women’s narrative of Western akogare. As she notes, “the turn to the West only emerged as a widespread and popular option for middle-class women with the growth of the Japanese bubble economy in the 1980.” Using the money generated by the Japanese economy to embark on a program of intensive consumption of foreign goods, food, and travel, young single women soon emerged as the most thoroughly “cosmopolitan” population in Japan. There was a broad and deep shift of allegiance (the author uses the word: “defection”) from what women described as insular and outdated Japanese values to what they characterized as an expansive, liberating, international space of free and unfettered self-expression, personal discovery, and romantic freedom. Language courses, studies abroad, work abroad, and employment at international organizations such as the United Nations or in foreign-affiliate (gaishikei) firms gave these new internationalist women a new set of options to resist the conventional tracks of the gendered economy and to enter into alternative systems of thought and value. But as Kelsky notes, this turn to the foreign occurred “within an overarching logic of capital”: women’s akogare is “anticipated and recuperated by commodity logic, a logic that operates in increasingly subtle registers.”

A profoundly disturbing essay

In a way, commodity logic, and the dialectics between desire and its object, can even affect the reception of a book such as Women on the Verge. The same happened to Takeo Doi’s Anatomy of Amae: rendered into popular discourse, it continues to feed the clichés that were served to the author by some of her informants (“Japanese men have their mothers take care of them and they expect their wives to do the same.”) There is a thin line between academic scholarship, with its conditions of production and reception, and popular consumption of cultural products, which responds to another logic. In writing about women’s akogare, Karen Kelsky has taken a great risk: her book could as well fall prey to the same shortcuts, and reinforce the very stereotypes she means to undermine. Maybe the advice the author received at the outset of her research was right after all: an anthropologist should not hang around in pickup bars and ask questions nobody wants to answer, let alone listen to…

A Failed Anthropology Project

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Review of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Christopher M. Kelty, Duke University Press, 2008.

Two BitsTwo Bits is a failed anthropology project. It does not make it a bad book: it is well-written and informative, and I learned a lot about Free Software and Open Source by reading it. But it does not meet academic standards that one is to expect from a book published in an anthropology series. These standards, as I see them, pertain to the position of the anthropologist; the importance of fieldwork; the role of theory; the interpretation of facts; and the style of ethnographic writing. Let me elaborate on these five points.

Many definitions have been proposed of the “participant observer.” Anthropologists who claim this position for themselves see it as a way to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment, usually over an extended period of time. It is different from “going native”: the participant observer usually remains an outside figure, who can provide support and hold various functions in the group but who makes it clear, at least to himself, that the locus of his engagement lies in the rendition he will make from his experience, not in the services or tasks he will have completed for the group during fieldwork. A key element in this research strategy is therefore to gain access to the group but also, perhaps equally important, the exit strategy that will allow the ethnographer to leave the field and return to a more distant point of observation.

“I am a geek”

Christopher Kelty does not make explicit his own definition of participant observation, but he nonetheless fancies a self-image: “I am a geek.” Becoming a geek is an integral part of his research project, and most ethnographic notes or vignettes are devoted to that process. For him, understanding how Free Software works is not just an academic pursuit but an experience that transforms the lives and work of participants involved: “something like religion.” The stories he tells about geeks, stories that geeks tell about themselves, are meant to “evangelize and advocate,” and to convert people to the cause.

His engagement with and exploration of Free Software got him involved in another project called Connexions, an “open content repository of educational materials” or a provider of Open Source textbooks. Connexions textbooks look different from conventional textbooks in that they consist of digital documents or “modules” that are strung together and made available through the Web under a Creative Commons license that allows for free use, reuse, and modification. Kelty would like his role in the Connexions project to be akin to an academic consultant, an anthropologist-in-residence that could provide advice and guidance based on his “expertise in social theory, philosophy, history, and ethnographic research.” But that is not how it turns out: “The fiction that I had first adopted–that I was bringing scholarly knowledge to the table–became harder and harder to maintain the more I realized that it was my understanding of Free Software, gained through ongoing years of ethnographic apprenticeship, that was driving my involvement.” He cannot fit into the anthropologist’s shoes because there is no need for one at Connexions. And so he ends up providing legal advice (which, strictly speaking, he is not qualified to do) and doing intermediary work with Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that promotes copyright-free licenses.

Fieldwork is what anthropologists do. But what do anthropologists do when they do fieldwork? The definition has evolved over time. An anthropologist used to hang around in a remote place for a while, getting acquainted with the people, pressing informants with questions, and taking ethnographic notes. In our age of globalization, there is more emphasis on multiple sites, nomadic fieldwork, and de-centered ethnography. People move constantly from one location to the next, so why should the ethnographer be the only one to stay at the same place? Besides, in our interconnected world, something that happens in one place is often caused or explained by another phenomenon occurring in a distant place, and following the object under consideration is like pulling a thread from a ball of yarn. But fieldwork remains a central tenet of the anthropologist’s identity, what distinguishes him or her from scholars in other disciplines who “don’t do fieldwork.”

Hanging around with local hackers in Bangalore

Kelty insists that his account of the Free Software movement is based on ethnographic fieldwork. He gives a few vignettes of his engagement in the “field”: meeting two healthcare entrepreneurs at a Starbuck in Boston, cruising the night scene in Berlin, hanging around with local hackers in Bangalore, and, in the end, getting a position in the anthropology department at Rice University in Houston, where the Connexions project is based. But there is little purpose to these mentions of various locations, apart to demonstrate the coolness of the author and his persistence in becoming a geek akin to the ones he associates with. When it comes to substance, his real source of information is online. As he notes, nearly everything about the Internet’s history is archived. He is even able to track back newsgroup discussions dating back to the 1980s and chronicling the birth of open systems. As a result, the brunt of Kelty’s research presented in Two Bits is either archival work into the history of computer science or consulting work for the Connexions project, not ethnographic fieldwork in the strict sense of the word.

Anthropologists writing PhD dissertations are requested to demonstrate skills in manipulating theory. The canon of works to be mastered is rather limited: a grounding in Marx, a heavy dose of Foucault, some exposure to Freud or Lacan, add a pinch of feminist theory or media studies for those so inclined, and the PhD student is all set. Even by that light standard, Kelty must have flunked his theory exam. He introduces Foucault mainly for the record, but all he draws from the famous article “What Is Enlightenment?” is a quote stating that modernity should be seen as an attitude rather than a period of history. In other words, geeks are modern because they are cool. In another passage, he mentions that the notion of recursive public that he proposes should be understood from the perspective of works by Jürgen Habermas, Michael Warner, Charles Taylor, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt. Then he stops. Besides the obvious point that eighteenth century’s coffee shops are different from today’s Internet forums, there is no further elaboration on these authors.

GNU (“GNU is Not UNIX”)

Another aspect of theory is the elaboration of concepts. Here, Kelty fares better, but I would still give him only a passing grade. His notion of a “recursive public” is indeed a working concept, or a middle-range theory as social scientists are wont to propose. Kelty defines it as “a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public.” Recursivity is to be understood in the way computer programmers define procedures or name applications in terms of themselves. Popular examples include GNU (“GNU is Not UNIX”), but also EINE (“EINE Is Not EMACS”) ou ZWEI (“ZWEI Was EINE Initially”). It is, to use another image, Escher’s hand drawing itself. But the author does not try to sell his concept too hard: as mentioned, he does not explore the interplay with Habermas’ notion of a public sphere, and he downplays its importance for future scholarship (“I intend neither for actors nor really for many scholars to find it generally applicable.”) One would be at a loss to find other original concepts in the book. The expression “usable pasts” he uses to introduce his geek stories is just another name for modern myths. The notion of “singularity,” a point in time when the speed of autonomous technological development outstrips the human capacity to control it, is only a piece of geek folklore. Visibly, Kelty is more interested in telling stories than building theory.

Some authors define anthropology as the interpretation of cultures. In his book’s title, Kelty insists on the cultural significance of Free Software. Yet interpretation is lacking. By this, I mean that the anthropologist should be in search of meaning, not just facts or fictions. Kelty presents an orderly narrative of the origins and development of Free Software, organized around five basic functions: sharing code source, conceptualizing open systems, writing licenses, coordinating collaborative projects, and fomenting movements. He illustrates each chronological step with various stories, evolving around the development of the UNIX operating system and the standardization of Internet communications through TCP/IP. The result is informative if somewhat lengthy, but the cultural significance of the whole is not really addressed. Instead of wrapping up the lessons of this history, the last part of the book moves to a completely different topic by asking what is happening to Free Software as it spreads beyond the word of hackers and software and into online textbook publishing.

“Berlin. November 1999. I am in a very hip club in Mitte”

Anthropologists are authors, and their writing skills matter enormously in the reception and impact of their works. The style of Two Bits is more attuned to a journalistic account than to a piece of scholarship. This shows especially in the vignettes placing the author in various situations and locations, which create a “reality effect” but do not really add anything to the comprehension of the subject. Lines like “Berlin. November 1999. I am in a very hip club in Mitte” or “Bangalore, March 2000. I am at another bar, this time on one of Bangalore’s trendiest street” may be proper for nonfiction travelogues or media coverage, but they should not find their ways into anthropology books.

Taking On the Anthropologist At His Own Game

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A review of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, Brian T. Edwards, Duke University Press, 2005.

MoroccoThere are two types of anthropologists: those who have done fieldwork and those who haven’t. Only the former can fully bear the title of anthropologist. They have been ordained through the same rites of passage: they have been there, seen places, and have come back with the field notes and observations they can subsequently transform into a book. This marks their full entry into the profession: they will no longer have to return to the field for extended periods, as they can revisit the same material from a distance or through occasional visits. Bearing the talisman of their ordination, they can bar entry to the profession to those who haven’t been through the same ordeal. It doesn’t matter that these outsiders may have acquired an extensive knowledge of the anthropology literature or mastered the ropes and codes of the discipline: they are kept outside the tent, and forced to find other disciplinary affiliations. Many find refuge in literature departments, or under the broad canvas of cultural studies. There they may pursue their work in relatively unhindered ways, developing a critical dialogue with other, more patrolled disciplines in the social sciences. They may borrow from the toolbox and writing techniques of anthropologists to develop a view from afar, which they often turn to their own environment and surroundings in a kind of reflexive engagement. For all practical purposes, they are anthropologists in all but name.

An anthropologist in all but name

Such is the case with the author of the book under review. At the time of its publication, Brian T. Edwards was Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He defines himself as an Americanist–not in the anthropological sense of the word, which designates an ethnographer who specializes in Indian-American societies–, but as a contributor to American studies, a broad discipline encompassing both American literature and cinema as well as the wider historical context of US society and politics. The author contributes to this discipline by discussing American cultural productions, and by illustrating the pregnancy of central tenets of American identity: the notion of the frontier, the issue of race, the ambivalent attitude towards colonization, and the peculiar way America engages with the world at large. His discussion is bound in space and time: it focusses on Morocco from World War II’s North African campaign to the hippies taking the “Marrakech Express” to escape conscription during the Vietnam war. It examines a variety of texts and media: novels, poetry, but also Hollywood movies, musical recordings, anthropology texts, and diplomatic archives.

The choice of the book’s title is a testimony to the author’s cultural deftness. In fact, he borrows it from a Bing Crosby comedy, in which the theme song, “We’re Morocco Bound,” puns on the two dictionary meanings of the word “Morocco”: the name of the country in northwest Africa and, with a small m, a fine leather used in bookbinding. “Like a set of Shakespeare, we’re Morocco bound”, sings Crosby. As the author comments, to be “Morocco bound”, that is, to be on one’s way to Morocco as an American, “suggests that Morocco itself is bound in webs of representations.” The subtitle, “Disorienting America’s Maghreb,” points towards Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, defined as “a long Western tradition of literary and scholarly representations of a region named (by the West) ‘the Orient’ that corresponds with Western political domination of the land to the South and East of the Mediterranean.” “Dis-orienting” America’s perception of the Maghreb means blurring the boundaries and unsetting the ethnocentrism at work in American perceptions of the Orient. It also means giving a twist or a sense of queerness to American identity by suggesting other forms of belonging not necessarily linked to the nation-state.

Unsetting the ethnocentrism at work in American perceptions of the Orient

As Edward Said pointed out, with global ascendency in World War II, the United States assumed the European mantle of thinking about the world. With a new sense of responsibility in world’s affairs, cultural and political discourse overlapped to project a worldview shaped by historical experience (the myth of the frontier, American Indians, the American century, racial discrimination) and Hollywood scripts. In the 1930s, a spate of popular movies, with titles like The Sheik, Prisoner of the Desert, Beau Geste, or Princesse Tam-Tam, portrayed the Maghreb as the Oriental other. Disembarking on Moroccan shores in November 1942, General Patton described Casablanca as “a city which combines Hollywood and the Bible”. Casablanca was of course the setting of the Warner Bros movie featuring Humphrey Bogart, which concluded with “the beginning of a beautiful friendship” between the United States and French colonialism. For Americans, the background presence of the French was an integral part of the foreignness of North Africa, as French language and viewpoints framed their perceptions of the Maghreb.

Edward Said also noted that American popular attention to regions of the world works in “spurts”–“great masses of rhetoric and huge resources, followed by virtual silence”. Before 1973, when American attention turned more decidedly toward the Middle East, representations of the Maghreb played a leading role in the formation of popular American ideas about the Arabs. Morocco occupied a peculiar place in this setting: with its openness to the foreign and political stability, it had long been a place of fascination and fantasy, attracting American tourists or Hollywood cinema crews. During the postwar period, it offered shelter to successive waves of cultural misfits and eccentrics, from artists in exile or Harlem Renaissance figures to hippies and beatniks.

A place of fascination and fantasy

But the Orient was not only a passive screen for American projections. It modified America’s self-perception–African-American soldiers came back emboldened with a new taste for freedom after World War II campaigns. Representations of the foreign played a special role in rethinking the meaning of American national identity. In particular, Tangier, which remained until 1960 a free port and a tax haven with its internationally administered zone and extraterritorial status, posed a challenge to the hegemony of the national(ist) vision. Hence its reputation of queerness among American journalists and critics. That such a location would be tolerant of homosexuality and the open use of cannabis added to the threat toward the dominant national narrative of the period. Edwards’s reading of William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, written in 1959 while the poet was in residence in the city, emphasizes the sense of subversive potentiality in the international formations of Tangier. Rereading Naked Lunch in its Tangier context highlights its sense of immediacy and political potentiality.

Edwards’s ambition is to “imagine alternative possibilities for an American encounter with the world.” By following American representations of the Maghreb into Maghrebi cultural productions, and in examining moments of actual collaboration between Americans and Moroccans, he operates a rare gesture in American studies by performing the detour through the other. He is not only looking at us looking at them: he also looks at them looking back. Oriental actors are by no way passive subjects: they critically reinterpret American cultural productions, and “talk back” by returning to the sender the postcards and clichés projected on the North African screen. Edwards tracks the debates among Moroccan intellectuals triggered by American cultural productions. He attends to Moroccan recreations of the film Casablanca in touristic waterholes or local artsy movies; he comments the obituaries published in Arabic at the time of Paul Bowles’s death; and he gives voice to local reactions towards Clifford Geertz’s interpretation of cultures. He also describes precious occurrences of transcultural collaboration: Ornette Coleman’s project with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Paul Bowles’s joint works of fiction with the illiterate Moroccan artist Mohammed Mrabet, or the traces of the informant’s voice in the anthropologist’s discourse.

An anthropological playground

Morocco also occupies a key role in the development of U.S. cultural anthropology. The figure of the anthropologist was a common sight in the Moroccan landscape. He features as a character in several novels by Paul Bowles or his wife Jane. Mrabet, Bowles’s long time collaborator, had been an anthropologist’s informant, and the joint books published based on taped recordings of their conversations are close to ethnographic field notes. Morocco was firmly put on the map of American anthropology when Clifford Geertz set shop in Sefrou in the beginning of the sixties. This, too, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship: Geertz not only revisited the place regularly, he sent there scores of graduate students, who recorded their passage in photographs, books, and articles. In academia, the work of Geertz’s group influenced American anthropology and cultural studies deeply. Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco became mandatory reading in PhD programs, and his theorization of the comprehension of the self via the detour of comprehension of the other became a central tenet in comparative studies.

In the book’s last chapter, “Hippie Orientalism: The Interpretation of Countercultures”, Edwards takes on the anthropologist at his own game. He draws a parallel between the group of anthropologists working around Sefrou and the hippies who took the “Marrakech Express” and praised Morocco as “a hashhead’s delight.” Of course, Geertz and Rabinow are not quite Orientalists in the Saidian sense, nor did they indulge in the vagabond lifestyle of hippie drifters. But while living independently of each other, both communities’ interpretation of Moroccan culture was “a direction of energies away from another more troubling Orient, that of Southeast Asia.” Despite their avowed radicalism, both groups were blind to the riots and student strikes which hit Moroccan cities in 1965-66 and were harshly repressed by the Moroccan police state, with several hundreds of students killed. The impulse, shared by the hippie and the anthropologist, to gravitate toward the “traditional,” the rural, and the fragmented because it was somehow more “real” or “authentic” than urban Morocco must therefore be seen in the context of domestic political strife and U.S. engagement in Vietnam.

Catching the anthropologist with his pants down

Taking the anthropologist at his word, and through close readings of texts, Edwards even detects hints of ethnocentrism and racial prejudice in Rabinow’s and Geertz’s essays. The detachment of the participant observer is a turn away from more pressing concerns, and the idea that culture is a text that needs to be interpreted rests on the premise that this text first be made stable and detached from political realities. Geertz’s taste for literary references makes him blind to the inherited preconceptions and tainted Orientalism of the authors he quotes in abundance. And he is caught with his pants down in some descriptive paragraphs where he compares the Moroccan landscape to Hollywood movie sceneries and American frontier images. Anthropology, too, needs to be dis-oriented and decentered from the natural tendency toward ethnocentrism.

Anthologies, Literary Prizes, and the Production of Literary Value

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A review of Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value, Edward Mack, Duke University Press, 2010.

mackThere was a change in the perception of literature’s social role in Japan between the Taishô and the Shôwa periods. According to Maruyama Masao, Japan’s foremost postwar critic, the average parent and teacher at the end of the Taishô era thought that “a middle school student who spent all his time reading novels was doing one of two things: avoiding his studies or corrupting his morals.” Progressively however, reading literature became a more respectable cultural pursuit, tolerated and even encouraged by schools and families. The social status of writers and the novel improved markedly: they became embodiments of the national spirit, and symbols of Japan’s entry into modernity. The possession of a national literature became a point of pride for citizens who wanted to see Japan ranked among the greatest nations of the world. A mass market for literary productions turned writing from an insecure occupation into a potential source of wealth, and transformed select authors into celebrities.

Bringing modern Japanese literature to the home of ordinary Japanese

Although many factors influenced the shift in the general public’s perception of literature’s value, one cause had a disproportionate influence: the publication, between 1926 and 1931, of the Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature (gendai nihon bungaku zenshû). The series marked a watershed in the production, reception, dissemination, and preservation of modern Japanese literature. Thanks to its reasonably low price–only one yen per volume–, the series reached a much wider audience than the traditional readership of modern literary texts, clustered around Tokyo’s literary circles and coterie magazines. For many readers, the series was the first access they had to actual literary texts assembled systematically into a cultural entity known as modern Japanese literature. In many ways, the series created and defined the very entity it purported to describe. The anthology brought Japanese modern literature to the home of ordinary Japanese: it became a familiar presence, and the bookcase offered to customers who completed the entire series was used as a decorative piece of furniture in many living rooms.

Maruyama Masao describes the impact that the publication of this series, as well as other “one-yen book” anthologies, had on young students of his generation: “Whenever the latest volume of the series arrived, everyone was talking about it, even during recess at school (…) That might have been the case only because it was a middle school in a large city. Still, it was the case for everyone–not just students–that, whether you had read them or not, you had to at least know the names of famous Japanese and world authors and their works.” Many writers from the early Shôwa period confessed the central role the collection played in their early literary education. One publishing historian wrote: “literary anthologies were the fundamental materials through which world and national literatures–centered on the novel–were systematically absorbed in Japan.” As an example, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables was published in the first volumes of the Anthology of World Literature, and became widely known through the translation by Toyoshima Yoshio under the title “aa mujô” (Ah, No Mercy).

A commercial enterprise

Advertising was central to this commercial enterprise. In addition to posters, leaflets and banners, the publisher sponsored nationwide lecture tours in which prominent writers were mobilized. Akutagawa Ryûnosuke was quoted as complaining that he “had been made to stand before the audiences in place of a billboard.” The exhaustion from his tour may well have hastened his mental and emotional collapse that led him to commit suicide in 1925. Akutagawa’s reputation, bolstered by his inclusion in the anthology, was strengthened further when a critic established in 1935 the Akutagawa Prize in recognition of a major work of literature published during the year by a Japanese novelist.

The promoters of the series were also interested in the “noise” (zawameki) of the period, not just by a narrow band of highly polished literary productions. Their anthology included minor genres such as juvenile literature or travel essays, as well as texts not usually classified as literature, such as newspaper columns or “domestic fiction”. But by the finite nature of the list of published authors, the anthology created a “static canon”, a closed shop of consecrated authors and works. The act of creating such a series demanded a ranking of writers, a banzuke as in a sumo tournament, even when the head editors were consciously trying to create as inclusive a collection as possible. Minor authors were consecrated, and prominent ones were left out. The choice of published material often had more to do with the ease of negotiating copyright or other extraliterary factors than the simple consideration of their literary value. Even when literary considerations came into play, they were more often inspired by whim and fashion, or by personal likings and dislikes, than by objective factors and rational arguments.

The influence of the Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature was not limited to the Japanese territory. Immigrants to Brazil or to the US took the volumes with them so as to keep a connexion with the homeland’s national culture. The one-yen book series also sold well in the colonies and in the territories under Japanese influence. Uchiyama Shoten, a Japanese bookstore in Shanghai that opened in 1920, was a popular spot not only for Japanese expatriates but also for Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun, who had lived in Japan as a foreign student before becoming a figure of the May Fourth Movement. The poet Kaneko Mitsuharu, who lived in Shanghai in 1928 before moving to France, wrote that Uchiyama Shoten was the “teat from which Chinese received their intellectual nourishment.” In Korea, even before the Japanese imposed a strict policy of forced assimilation, some Korean intellectuals were drawn to the model of expression offered by modern Japanese literature, and chose to write in Japanese instead of in their national language.

Pure literature vs. popular literature

The history of Japan’s most popular prewar anthology forms only one chapter of Edward Mack’s Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature. Other chapters include the consequences of Tokyo’s 1923 earthquake over the publishing industry; the literary debates by which Tokyo intellectuals struggled to define the nature of literary value; the creation of the Akutagawa Prize for pure literature and the Naoki Prize for mass literature; and theoretical discussions on the history and sociology of literature. Edward Mack’s basic idea is that “the ascriptions of value that attend works are neither natural nor inevitable because they do not emanate in any simple way from the texts themselves.” In the anthologies, in the Akutagawa Prize selection process, or in the literary debates about the “I-novel” as a specifically Japanese form of literature, a variety of both literary and extraliterary factors were at play in deciding which works would enjoy consecration and which would not. A few individuals, such as the critic Kikuchi Kan, possessed a disproportionate amount of influence on the course of literary production. Of particular importance in the formation of literary value was the rhetorical opposition between “tsûzoku“(vulgar, mundane) novels and “junbungaku” or pure literature. What was considered pure or vulgar changed over time and was a matter of personal appreciation, but the binary opposition structured the forces at play in the literary field.

Although reading this book does not require previous knowledge of modern Japanese literature or of literary theory, it is an extremely rewarding experience on both counts. The text begins with the most mundane–the material conditions of literary production such as printing presses, movable fonts, paper sheets–and ends with the most speculative–deconstructing the categories of “modern,” of “Japanese,” and of “literature.” Prominent figures of Japanese literature are featured, such as Akutagawa Ryûnosuke or Kawabata Yasunari, along with minor authors and critics. Mack exhibits a mastery of Japanese texts and of epistemological tools that is rarely found with such balance in a Western scholar. The author borrows from Pierre Bourdieu the notions of symbolic capital (resources stemming from talent, prestige, or recognition) and of the literary field (defined as “the constellation of competitive relationships among literary producers and consumers who struggle for various forms of capital”). Mack draws inspiration from cultural studies and post-colonialism by questioning the link between literature and the nation-state, and by placing Taishô democracy in the context of the Japanese empire. He avoids the trap–conspicuous in the writings of Harry Harootunian, the editor of the series in which this book is published–of pure speculation that loses sight of empirical material. Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature opens avenues for future research–some suggested, some implicit–, and should be read by all readers interested by Japanese literature or by literary criticism.

Rewriting Marx’s Theory of Capital for the Twenty-First Century

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A review of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Duke University Press, 2006

biocapitalBiopolitics is a notion propounded by Michel Foucault whereby “life becomes the explicit center of political calculation.” The increasing use of this notion in the social sciences underscores a fundamental evolution. In the twenty-first century, as anticipated by Foucault, power over the biological lives of individuals and peoples has become a decisive component of political power, and control over one’s biology is becoming a central focus for political action. Used by the late Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France, biopolitics and its associated concept, governmentality (“the conduct of conducts”), are now in the phase of constituting a whole new paradigm, a way to define what we are and what we do. Biopolitics and governmentality are now declined by many scholars who have proposed associated notions: “bare life” and the “state of exception” (Giorgio Agamben), “multitude” and “empire” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), “biological citizenship” and “the politics of life itself” (Nikolas Rose), “biopolitical assemblages” and “graduated sovereignty” (Aihwa Ong), “cyborg” and “posthumanities” (Donna Haraway), etc. This flowering of conceptualizations is often associated with a critique of neoliberalism as the dominant form of globalized governmentality, and to a renewal of Marxist studies that revisit classical notions (surplus value, commodity fetishism, alienation of labor…) in light of new developments.

From Foucault to Marx

By adding the notions of “biocapital” and “postgenomic life” to the list of new concepts, Kaushik Sunder Rajan positions himself in this twin tradition of Marxist and Foucaultian studies. As he states in the introduction, “this book is an explicit attempt to bring together Foucault’s theorization of the political with a Marxian attention to political economy.” As mentioned, the paradigm of biopolitics and governmentality has changed the traditional ways of thinking about politics, and has led to a new understanding of basic notions such as sovereignty and citizenship. But Foucault was mostly interested in deconstructing political philosophy, and failed to acknowledge that biopolitics is essentially a political economy of life. This is where the reference to Marx comes handy. As Sunder Rajan underscores, one doesn’t need to adhere to Marx’s political agenda in order to interpret his writings (“I believe that Marx himself is often read too simply as heralding inevitable communist revolution”). Instead, he uses Marx as “a methodologist from whom one can learn to analyze rapidly emergent political economic and epistemic structures.” His ambition is to rewrite Marx’s theory of capital for the twenty-first century, and to situate in emergent political economic terrains by using the tools of the ethnographer.

For Sunder Rajan, biocapital is the result of the combination of capitalism and life sciences under conditions of globalization. The evolution from capital to biocapital is symptomatic of the turn from an industrial economy to a bioeconomy in which surplus value is directly extracted from human and nonhuman biological life rather than from labor power. The extraction of surplus value from biological life requires that life be turned into a commodity, tradable on a market and convertible into industrial patents and intellectual property rights. Life sciences transforms life into a commodity by turning the biological into bits of data and information that is then traded, patented, or stored in databases. Research in genomics and bioinformatics translates the DNA into a string of numbers, and develops methods for storing, retrieving, organizing and analyzing biological data. As a consequence, life sciences become undistinguishable from information sciences. Biocapital determines the conversion rate between biological molecules, biological information and, ultimately, money. It then organizes the circulation of these three forms of currencies–life, data, capital–along routes and circuits that are increasingly global.

Turning life itself into a business plan

But Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life is not only a theoretical intervention in the field of Marxian and Foucaultian studies. It is, as defined on the book cover, “a multi-sited ethnography of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India.” The constitution of new subjects of individualized therapy and the genetic mapping of populations are obvious terrains for the application of Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentally. Similarly, Marx’s analysis of surplus production and surplus value can be brought to bear in ethnographic descriptions of Silicon Valley start-ups living on vision and hype, and turning life into a business plan. As Sunder Rajan writes, “ethnography has always prided itself on deriving its analytic and empirical power from its ability to localize, and make specific, what might otherwise be left to the vague generalizations of theory.” In addition, multi-sited ethnography allows the anthropologist to follow the globalized routes of life resources, biological data, and monetary capital, that cannot be grasped and conceptualized in a single location.

The author’s initial ambition was to observe biotechnological research within laboratories and to put them in their larger social and cultural context. His interest in the relation between biotech companies and pharmaceutical corporations led him to approach various business ventures and present requests for interviews and participant observation. But as he recalls, “trying to get into the belly of the corporate beast” was a frustrating experience. Getting access to companies and laboratories was made difficult by the value associated with intellectual property rights in the biotech industry. As the author notes, “many of these people live in worlds where information is guarded with almost paranoid zeal.” The secretive aspect of corporate activity was compounded by the wish of corporations to strictly monitor what gets said about them. Research proposals for participant observation were vetted by teams of lawyers and were usually rejected. In India, corporations and research centers had a more open attitude to the ethnographer, who could fit into the more fluid environment and leverage his ethnic identity; but the bureaucratic state imposed additional hurdles through paperwork and red tape.

“We must get ourselves a bioethicist!”

Paradoxically, the fact that genome sequencing had already been the topic of a book by a famous anthropologist facilitated first contacts and self-presentations: “I’ve read Paul Rabinow, so I know exactly what you want to do,” was how the head of the GenBank database greeted the young PhD student sent to the field by his teacher adviser. Corporate executive and research managers tried to fit the ethnographer into known categories. “We must get ourselves a bioethicist!” concluded the CEO of an Iceland-based genome company after a short interview. A public relations official at Celera Genomics wondered whether his visitor needed to be offered the “investor tour” or the “media tour”, these being the only two categories of PR communication. The author finally gained access to GeneEd, an e-learning software company co-founded by two Indians in San Francisco that sells life science courses to corporate clients. During his job interview, he provided an overview of his own field of science studies and cultural anthropology, eliciting questions about marketing strategies and employee motivation. The two CEOs agreed to have an in-house anthropologist, and let him wander around while using his skills as a marketer.

Despite the obvious limitations of his terrain, being more than one step removed from the biotech startups and big pharma industries that are at the core of biocapital, the author was able to conduct an interesting case study of corporate life that is presented in the last chapter of the book. As GenEd’s client base shifted from small biotech to big pharmaceutical companies, the status of graphic designers declined to one of mere executioners, while software programmers became the key resource of the company. By participating in industry conferences, meeting with people, and simply being there, Sunder Rajan was also able to accumulate valuable observations on biotech startups and research labs in the Silicon Valley. In particular, conferences and business events are “key sites at which unfolding dynamics and emergent networks of technocapitalism can be traced.” They have their rituals, like speeches and parties, their messianic symbolism of “going for life,” and their underlying infrastructure of competition for capital and recognition.

The biocapital ethics and the spirit of start-up capitalism

High tech startups that depend on venture capital funding have developed what the author describes as the art of vision and hype: making investors and the public at large believe in unlimited growth and massive future profits, even they don’t have a product on the market. Hype and vision form the “discursive apparatus of biocapital”: this discourse declined in “promissory articulations”, “forward-looking statements”, and the initial public offerings of “story stocks”, as these ventures are known on Wall Street. The excitement generated by endeavors like the Human Genome Project has increased the enthusiasm of state funders and private investors for anything related to the genome, even as the pragmatic applications of genetics research seem distant if not unachievable. “At some fundamental level, it doesn’t matter whether the promissory visions of a biotech company are true or not, as long as they are credible,” notes the author. Promissory articulations are performative statements: they create the conditions of possibility for the existence of the company in the present. As a result, the spirit of start-up capitalism is very different from the protestant ethic as described by Max Weber. It is “an ethos marked by an apparent irrationality, excess, gambling.” It is also, at least in the US, a neo-evangelical ethics of born-again Protestantism that promises an afterlife in one’s own lifetime: a future of health and hope, of personalized medicine and vastly increased life prospects–at least, for those who can afford it.

This is where India comes as a useful counterpoint. India entertains different dreams and visions. In 1982, Indira Gandhi addressed the World Health Assembly with the following words: “The idea of a better-ordered world is one in which medical discoveries will be free of patents and there will be no profiteering from life and death.” Since then, the world has moved into the opposite direction, and India has positioned itself as a key player in the “business of life”. Medical records and DNA samples are collected in Indian public hospitals for commercial purposes, and the nation-state itself operates as a quasi-corporate entity. India in the 1990s has emerged as a major contract research site for Western corporations, which outsource medical trials at a significantly cheaper cost. The challenge for the young entrepreneurs and government officials interviewed by Sunder Rajan is to move beyond a dependence on contract work for revenue generation, and toward a culture of indigenous knowledge generation through patenting and intellectual property appropriation. It is also an ethical challenge: in the course of his research, Sunder Rajan visited a research hospital in Mumbai that recruits as experimental subjects former millworkers who have lost their jobs as a result of market reforms. The “human capital” that forms the basis of these clinical trials experiments is very different from the often vaunted software engineers and biotech specialists who have become the hallmark of “India Shining”: it is constituted of life itself, of life as surplus, and therefore blurs the classic division between capital and labor that Marx locates at the origin of surplus value.

Fieldwork in a multi-sited ethnography

Like many anthropologists, Sunder Rajan is at his best when he connects particular reporting on field sites and informants with theoretical discussions on Marx and Foucault. The objects of his study are inseparable from the larger epistemological and political economic contexts within which they are situated. In line with other scholars in the field of STS studies, he insists on the mutual constitution of the life sciences and the socio-economic regimes in which they are embedded. There is no neatly divided partitions or clear distinctions between “the scientific”, “the economic” and “the social”; rather, these categories enter in complex relationships of coproduction and coevolution. However, Sunder Rajan’s theoretical arguments do no always receive ethnographic support, and his empirical base is spread rather thin. Multi-sited ethnography as a different way of thinking about the field runs the risk of turning into reportage or graduate school’s tourism; and it is not sure that fieldwork, once defined as hanging around, can easily be substituted by wandering about.

Do You Speak Te reo Ma’ori?

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A review of Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body, Tony Ballantyne, Duke University Press, 2014.

ballantyneCultures from the South Pacific have provided anthropologists with a rich array of words and concepts: “mana” (power, charisma), “hau” (life’s energy), “tapu” (taboo) and its antonym “noa”, “hara” (a violation of tapu) and “wairua” (spirit) all originate in the languages of Polynesian cultures. These terms first came to the attention of western anthropologists through the reports of missionaries in the Pacific islands. Armchair theorists like James Frazer or Marcel Mauss used the observations of the first ethnographers to lay the foundation of their discipline. Their theories were built on the idea that it is possible to isolate cultural traits from their social context and bundle them together to draw comparisons and infer anthropological laws. Surveying the practice of gift-giving, Marcel Mauss famously came to the conclusion that it involved belief in a force binding the receiver and giver, which he labeled “hau” after the word used by the Māori. Such concepts derive their theoretical potential precisely from the lack of equivalence in common language. But as Claude Levi-Strauss later argued, the indiscriminate use of indigenous categories hampers the analysis of symbolic systems, which he proposed to process through the description of unconscious structures. Anthropological words have nonetheless entered common language, from totem to taboo and to tattoo, while anthropologists still use words like mana and hau as specialized vocabulary in their profession.

Māori loan words in New Zealand English

More recently, many Māori words or phrases that describe Māori culture have become part of New Zealand English, and have even entered global English. “Tā moko”, or tattooing, has become a globalized symbol of Māori’s cultural reach, with rock stars and football players exhibiting intricate design patterns on their legs and shoulders. So has the rite of the haka, the war song and dance popularized by the All Blacks rugby team. Young New Zealanders learn to “show their pūkana in the haka” by rolling their eyes and sticking out their tongue, or to practice “hongi” by pressing together their noses as a greeting. “Kia ora” (literally “be healthy”) is a Māori term of greeting that is often used in Aotearoa (New Zealand). According to Kiwitanga (“Kiwi” culture), we can all claim Te Ao Maori (the Maori world) as part of our identity, regardless of the color of our skin, where we were born or what our passport says. As long as we walk the talk and speak the language (Te reo Māori).

According to Tony Ballantyne, the incorporation of native words into everyday vocabulary has become a hallmark of New Zealand’s state ideology of biculturalism. So has the narrative of the first encounter between natives and missionary settlers in the Bay of Islands. The early activities of the mission stations provide a kind of national prehistory of Māori and Pākehā (European) coming together. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, has acquired the status of the nation’s founding document, and marks the start of its official history. There is a black legend and a rosy version to this period’s history. The dark narrative postulates that missionaries were the “advanced party of cultural invasion” and that they committed nothing short of an ethnocide by undermining Māori communities and their cultural traditions. The white fairy tale is framed in terms of “first encounter”, “inter-cultural exchange” and the birth of “biculturalism”. This version postulates two homogeneous groups coming into contact and adding their “differences” to form a distinctive whole. New Zealanders have even found their Pocahontas in the figure of Hongi Hika, a local chief or rangatira who travelled to England and met with King George IV and who later assisted the missionaries in developing a written form of the Māori language.

First encounters between Māori and Pākehā

Tony Ballantyne takes issue with both versions of the national narrative. Both produce the cultural difference that seem to separate the evangelized from the evangelizers, the natives from the settlers, the colony from the empire. Both versions too readily conflate missionary work with the project of empire-building and also offer misleading assessments of the sources, directions, and consequences of cultural change. Both use the colony to illuminate European history, either as the cradle of genocidal imperialism or as the crucible of multicultural Enlightenment. The colonized counts as little in these narratives: they are reduced to the receiving end of imperial projection, or to the role of the spectator (the native’s “gaze”) of a destiny on which they have no hold. According to Ballantyne, much of the recent work on encounters between Māori and Europeans in the late eighteenth century and earlier nineteenth has seen these cross-cultural engagements as anticipating the bicultural social formations that have become central to state policy and national identity in New Zealand. This conventional image of New Zealand’s past has been cultivated by the state through agencies such as the Waitangi Tribunal (aimed at national reconciliation between Māori and Pākehā) and Te Papa Tongarewa (the national museum).

To the tropes of “contact”, “meeting”, “collision” or “exchange” between “two worlds”, Ballantyne prefers to develop the metaphor of “entanglement”, showing that Protestant missionaries and Māori tribes were enmeshed in “webs of empire”. He portraits the British empire as “a dynamic, web-like formation, a complex and shifting assemblage of connections that ran directly between colonies.” The words “web” or “entanglement” refer to something that is complex, intricate, involved, interlaced, with each part connected with the rest and dependent on it. Webs or threads entangled in a fabric have long been a metaphor of history. Think about Penelope in the Odyssey, untangling the webs she spun during the day to delay the time she would have to give in to her suitors. Think of the Bayeux tapestry, an embroidered cloth nearly 70 meters long which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England, and which hasn’t revealed all its mysteries. Similarly, spiders make webs which are nearly invisible until the dew fall on them. They are made with threads stronger than steel and take their shape from the surrounding circumstances and from the spider herself. History is not made by stable and discrete cultural formations coming together in a “clash of civilizations” or a bicultural exchange: it is composed of forever shifting realities, composite cultural patterns, and identities in flux. History is an accumulation of threads, pathways and contingencies that embed human action over time. It doesn’t have any ultimate directionality; it is simply the sum of a long series of inventions, actions, interventions, and accidents over decades or centuries.

Protestant missionaries and Māori tribes were enmeshed in “webs of empire”

From the beginnings of the mission on the ground in the Bay of Islands in December 1814, missionaries and Māori were linked by complex, shifting, and often unpredictable forms of connection. Europeans visiting or living in the Bay of Islands entered a world that remained governed by Māori ritenga (customs, practices) and tikanga (rules, protocol). The missionaries were not only dependent on the ability of the people and chiefs of the northern alliance to furnish them with basic foodstuffs, but also dependent on them for labor. They were unable to undercut the authority of leading rangatira, such as the great warrior-chief Hongi Hika, or to effectively challenge local customs such as polygamy or the centrality of slavery in Maori social formations. The great rangatira were able to administer justice though traditional methods, make war, trade with European vessels for weapons, procure, and if they wished, kill slaves in open defiance of the missionaries. At the same time, they enjoyed the benefits of close association with Europeans, gaining access to new skills (like reading and writing), as well as tools, seeds, livestock, and weapons. They adopted some of the missionaries’ beliefs and practices, turning them into domestic institutions by blending them with native concepts. For instance, Sunday became known as “ra tapu”—the day that is set apart or the sacred day—and working on the Sabbath was seen as a “hara”, a violation of tapu, or in the language of the missionaries, a “sin.”

The “threads of association” between the British Empire and its South Pacific outposts were also webs of texts and documents. Textual production and circulation helped lay the foundation for the making of empire itself. It was the dense body of information collated on James Cook’s first and second voyage that fed the imaginations of imperial visionaries. They were excited by the potential role that New Zealand might play within the empire in the future—whether as a site for refitting and resupplying, a source of “naval stores”, a site of colonization, a destination for convicts or even a purveyor of tea. Later on, the missionaries’ writings, maps, sketches, engravings, and reports emphasized the commercial acuity of Maori, as well as the potential of the islands of New Zealand for imperial activity and future colonization. In their celebration of mission stations, both missionary propaganda and the narratives of European travelers in the 1830s offered very partial readings of the development of missionary work. These narratives tended to underplay the uneven progress of missionary settlements and marginalized the role of Māori in the genesis of mission stations. Mission archives were also littered with gossip, rumors, innuendo, allegations, and outraged reports of wrongdoing. In one chapter, Ballantyne recaptures the story leading to the dismissal of William Yate in 1836, from his arrival when his coreligionists “were sorry to learn that there was no Mrs. Yate” to his spectacular accusation with “the crime alluded to in Romans I.27.”

Like a mosquito caught in a spider’s web, the incorporation of peripheral territories into empires had vast consequences. Once communities were connected to these webs of interdependence, it was often hard for them to assert control over the direction and consequences of the cultural traffic that moved through these meshes of connections. While Māori still typically exercised control over such encounters on the ground in Te Ika a Maui, their ability to ultimately direct the long-term consequences of these relationships was heavily constrained by British commercial power and military capacity and the sheer scale of British society (when measured against te ao Maori. The narratives, handwritten reports, journals, letters, maps, and sketches that laced Maori and New Zealand into the empire created knots that could not be undone. Metropolitan publications tended to produce the cultural differences that were seen to separate the evangelized from the evangelizers. Social practices such as slavery, whakamomori (suicide), the execution of slaves, the taking of head as trophies, war-making, and cannibalism were read as emblematic of the moral corruption of “natural man” and evidence of Satan’s hold on Maori. In the 1830s, humanitarian campaigns painted an alarming picture of social crisis and population decline among the natives, produced by the combination of alcohol, tobacco, venereal disease, prostitution, and infanticide. This image of an indigenous society in a state of crisis induced through contact with Europeans was pivotal in prompting British intervention in 1840.

Reading the archives against the grain

By reading the archives against the grain, Ballantyne is able to convey the anxieties, uncertainties, and even fear that were an integral part of empire-building. There were profound limits to the missionaries’ ability to remake Māori beliefs and practices, or even to recreate European conditions of living in their settlements. Missionaries not only found that it was hard to get Maori to follow new modes of thinking, but that it was difficult for their own families to maintain many of the practices that they understood as routine parts of “civilized” life. For instance, burial practices on the mission stations diverged from practices in Britain. Christians were buried in close proximity to missionary homes, a practice that reversed British trends where there was a growing separation between the worlds of the living and the dead. It was often those Māori attached to missions—as workers, converts, or even chiefly patrons—who were the most potent critics of the old gods and old ways of doing things, a dynamic entirely glossed over by arguments that attribute cultural change to the “cultural imperialism” of missionary work. Although the presence of missionaries precipitated cultural change, Māori were primary agents in the actual spread of Christianity. These “entanglements of Empire” show the complexity of the early history that modern New Zealand obfuscates by peppering its modern culture with Māori words and cultural traits. Neither a melting pot nor a salad bowl, the British empire as experienced from its Pacific edge was a spaghetti plate.

Letter to a Young Muslim Fashionista

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A review of Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, Reina Lewis, Duke University Press, 2015.

muslim-fashionSo you’ve picked up this book because you think Muslim fashion is the next new thing. You’ve made a good choice: this book is totally made for you. It is a book that will teach you things, give you ideas, and make you think. Don’t expect tips on what to wear and how to wear it, though: this you will have to decide for yourself. If who you are is what you wear, then you cannot delegate this task to a third party. But reading Muslim Fashion will help you make your own choices and dress on your own terms. Maybe you won’t feel the same after reading it. Maybe your image will look different into the mirror. This is what they call a transformative book: it will make you see things differently. This is the good thing about reading books in general: you can turn them to your own use. So if this book helps you dress smarter, so be it. But it may also help you think about what you wear and why you wear it. If your style of dress makes a statement, be sure it includes the word fashion in it.

If your style of dress makes a statement, be sure it includes the word fashion in it.

To be frank with you, you may find Muslim Fashion a bit hard to read. But relax: this book review is here to help you through the reading. It will give you tips that will make understand things a lot easier. So don’t freak out if you see long sentences and difficult words. This is how people working as university professors make a living. Sentences are like skirts: you can wear them long or short according to your likes and dislikes. Trust me: I will use short sentences to describe long hijabs and ample robes. Or at least I’ll try. As a full disclosure, I don’t work in the fashion industry, and I am not involved in any way with Muslim fashion. I just like to read difficult books and try to make them simpler to read by writing book reviews. I wrote this one especially for you. If you find it helpful, you may provide feedback by clicking on the ‘helpful’ button or by writing a comment. But please understand: I am not a specialist in Muslim or modest fashion, or in any women’s fashion for that respect. So take my writing with a pinch of salt: if you disagree with what you read, blame the author of the book, not me.

I am starting from the premise that you are already familiar with basic vocabulary. So you can tell a niqab from an abaya, a jilbab from a hijab, or a shayla from a turban. You may also be familiar with ethnic clothing: burqa cover from Afghanistan, kebaya dress from South-East Asia, chador cloak from Iran, tesettür veil from Turkey, salwar kameez outfit from South Asia. I am also assuming that you know what pious fashion, or modest fashion, is about. So you may be interested to learn where it came from, or how it varies in time and place. The important point to make is that modest fashion is not only about To Veil or Not To Veil. And even if you do, there are many different styles to veiling. Indeed, you may wish to design your own style, based on examples and references glimpsed in magazines or on the street. There are also a lot of tutorials available on Youtube. This is not pure exhibition: people choose what to show and what to hide. All people do.

You can be both pious and fashionable at the same time

Some islamic clothing are clearly outside the purview of fashion. This is clearly the case with burqa, niqab, or abaya—although you may be interested to learn that some embroidered abaya sell for thousands of dollars in Gulf states. Indeed, some people challenge the idea that you can be both pious and fashionable at the same time. For them, a modest outlook is the antithesis of fashion: modesty is to break free from the tyranny of appearance, to contest the idolatry of the body. And indeed, the fashion world has accustomed us with habits that are far from restrained or modest. Exposed nudity, promiscuity between models and their admirers, rumors of drug consumption and tales of anorexia make the catwalk sound like a freak show. No wonder some customers and clothes designers want to break free from this model. But that’s the thing about fashion: no fashion is still fashion, especially when it becomes fashionable. This is what is happening with Muslim fashion; and this is the story that the author Reina Lewis recollects in her book.

On a first look, no industry could be farther from fashion than the tesettür producers in Turkey, This is a country that brands itself secular and where the wearing of headscarves is frowned upon by the state, with an outright ban in schools and colleges or in the national parliament. Women wearing the local headscarf or tesettür have other concerns than fashion. Since Atatürk promoted western clothing and western mores, wearing the veil has always been coded as old-fashioned, rural or excessively religious in secular Turkey. But think again: tesettür companies have gained market share at home and abroad, and are now competing on brand image and seasonal collections. Today’s veiling-fashion producers market colorful and constantly changing styles, from bold and close-fitting to more conservative ones. Istanbul is now developing itself as a fashion city with a critical mass of consumers and fashion specialists, and Muslim fashion is definitely part of the show. For many young Islamic women, wearing a headscarf marks them off as different from their mothers who are going out bareheaded. This is precisely the point: who would like to look exactly like her mother? And as fashion catalogues and lifestyle magazines will show you, there are many ways to wear the tesettür.

People have the right to wear the hijab if they choose to do so.

Doing research for her book, Reina Lewis interviewed several shop workers wearing the hijab in fashion stores or malls located in several British cities. The interviews were conducted between 2005 and 2010, and I am sure many things have changed since then. But maybe some things haven’t. UK law promotes employment equality regardless of religion or belief, and so sales persons have the right to wear the hijab if they choose to do so. Shop rules may define how workers dress and present themselves, but only up to a point. Discrimination on grounds of religion can bring an employer to court. Of course, how sales assistants dress is important for their boss and for their clients. They are the brand’s ambassadors, and their style and advice will help match the product and the consumer. In this context, familiarity with modest or pious style can be an asset, especially in neighborhoods populated by Muslim families. Take the case of Y.S. for instance. She didn’t have to apply for a job: she was recruited while shopping in a branch of Dorothy Perkins because the store manager thought she looked cool. She wore her hijab with style and personality, and being modest and trendy was exactly the image the store wanted to project.

Here I may introduce a few concepts proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist. For Bourdieu, style is a form of symbolic capital: it is something that you can cultivate and that can be converted into forms of economic capital, like finding a job in a lifestyle magazine or a fashion store. Style is also a component of habitus, a social property of individuals that orients human behavior without strictly determining it. In a book called La Distinction, Bourdieu described the rise of a new class of cultural intermediaries working in service activities: sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration, and so on. Upwardly mobile, these middle class individuals used their symbolic capital and were driven by their habitus to give legitimacy to new forms of cultural activities: minor arts such as photography or jazz music, self-presentation through fashion and lifestyle, and mass consumption of goods and appliances designed to make life easier. The young fashionistas described in Muslim Fashion are the heirs of these trendsetters. They do not act in isolation, but in a field (another important concept from Bourdieu) composed of many players and sources of authority. Only this field is not much cultural as it is religious. As surprising as it may seem, women participating in Muslim fashion are also religious intermediaries.

Fashion is usually regarded outside of the mainstream of religious concerns. Except for Islam: in this case many people—Muslim and non-Muslim—have an opinion on what Islamic women should and shouldn’t wear. As Reina Lewis describes it in another chapter, Muslim lifestyle magazines and fashion catalogues are faced with a conundrum. How to represent women’s bodies? Some magazines such as Azizah have a policy of always putting a model with a headscarf on their cover. Others, such as the American quarterly Muslim Girl, do exactly the opposite: their idea is to represent as many different girls as possible and all their different approaches to faith. Still others avoid photographs of the human form, or take pictures of women viewed from behind so as not to show their face. Emel, another lifestyle magazine, takes straight-up photos of real people wearing street fashion but avoids professional models. The representation of female bodies raises even more controversies online, where readers and commentators are prompt to express their views in reaction to blog posts or social media pictures. Reina Lewis describes how the rise of online brands selling modest apparel was accompanied by the development of a lively blogosphere and social media devoted to modest style.

Modest fashion is coming to a store near you

A new category of “modest fashion” has therefore emerged and become legitimized on the Internet. Women can now find products designed with modesty in mind, consult style guides and join in fashion discussions about how to style modesty. These discussions are not necessarily faith-based and inspired by Islam: they can be inter-faith—as some Christian groups or Jewish believers have similar modesty needs—or based on no faith at all. They are increasingly cosmopolitan: see for example the new fashion line designed by Hana Tajima, an English woman based in Malaysia, which was launched in Singapore by Uniqlo, a Japanese apparel company. I have to confess I learned more from browsing the web using the “modest fashion” keyword than from reading long articles about secularity and attitudes considered as ostentatiously religious in my own country—which is France. Speaking of France, if I have a minor quibble with Reina Lewis’ book, it is when she alludes to a supposedly outright ban of Islamic dress in France, whereas the limitations introduced by French law are only limited to certain types of dress—the face-veil—or to certain locations, such as schools. And even these laws may evolve, along with the changing attitudes among the French public. Paris has long been the capital of fashion: my personal wish is that it will also become a magnet for the creation and expression of Muslim fashion.

Ghost in the Shell

Etienne RP1 Comment

A review of The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story, Ian Condry, Duke University Press, 2013.

the-soul-of-animeIn my opinion, The Soul of Anime should be read in business schools. It provides a wonderful case study of a particular industry, and it can teach management practitioners many things about globalization, creative industries, and flexible labor. Unlike what is stated in the book’s subtitle however, the story of Japanese anime is not a success story. As Ian Condry states in the introduction, “in terms of economic success, anime seems more of a cautionary tale than a model of entrepreneurial innovation.” Judged from a management perspective, the anime industry is in many ways a case of failure: a failure to globalize, a failure to create value on a sustained basis, and a failure on the side of market participants to reap profits and secure employment. But management can learn from failures as much than it can learn from success stories. What’s more, the anthropological perspective adopted by the author points towards a different theory of value creation: for cultural content industries, value is not synonymous with profits, and the relation between producers and consumers cannot be reduced to monetary transactions and economic self-interest. This is the intuition that the founders of anthropology developed when they analyzed trading relations among primitive tribes in terms of gift-giving and reciprocity; and this is the conclusion that this modern anthropology book reaches when it describes the popular success of this particular case of industrial failure.

A failed success story

Why didn’t anime transform itself into a profit-making machine for Japanese media groups? Why didn’t studio Ghibli—the producers of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away—develop into a franchise akin to Walt Disney’s? Why didn’t stories based on manga series—the main source of inspiration for Japanese anime—give birth to blockbuster movies the way that Marvel Comics did? For all its popular success and—in the case of Ghibli production—critical acclaim, Japanese anime production remains in many ways a cottage industry. The studios in which the author of The Soul of Anime did his fieldwork, with names such as Gonzo, Aniplex, and Madhouse, are small-scale operations that continuously stake the house on their next production. Even the biggest players such as Studio Ghibli, Production I.G. and Toei Animation are limited in size and do not generate extraordinary profits. As Ian Condry describes it, a studio can employ anywhere from fifteen to a few hundred people, and relies heavily on local freelance animators as well as offshore production houses located in South Korea, China, and the Philippines. Like other segments of the Japanese industry, the anime sector has been “hollowed out”: by some estimates, 90 percent of the frames used in Japanese animation are drawn overseas.

The work that remains in Japan is not very well-paid and is precariously flexible. Long hours are the norm, and many animators work freelance, moving from project to project, often without benefits. Visiting a studio is more like entering the den of a manga production house, with papers piling up everywhere and people working frantically on deadlines, than witnessing the cool working environment of a high-tech start-up. Indeed, manga stories provide most of the content later developed in anime movies, and the two worlds are closely interconnected. Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy otherwise known as the “god of manga,” used to quip that manga was his wife, while animation was his mistress. Like manga, anime now attracts a cult followership across the globe, and fans are present on every continent. They often start to watch anime from a very young age: by some estimates, 60 percent of the world’s TV broadcasts of cartoons are Japanese in origin. Despite its global reach, the anime industry failed to give rise to corporate giants that could have become global actors. Even Studio Ghibli’s biggest overseas success, Spirited Away, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, scored much less on the international box office than U.S animated productions of much lower quality. Mamoru Oshii’s cult film Ghost in the Shell reached number one in DVD sales in the United States in 1996, but failed to generate profitable spin-offs and lucrative sequels. Toei Animation’s original ambition to become the “Disney of the East” has failed egregiously.

The Galapagos syndrome

In a way, the failure of anime to globalize is just another case of the Galapagos syndrome: many globally available products take a local form in Japan, a variant that is sometimes more advanced and attuned to the local ecosystem, but which diverges from global trends. This isolation from the global market acts as a form of protectionism, allowing species to develop in unique ways, but leaves Japanese companies ill-prepared for global competition. Although cultural content industries such as manga, anime, video games, music, and films are being promoted by Japanese authorities for their ability to attract foreign audiences, the fact is that creators, drawers and scenarists mostly have a domestic audience in mind when they design their stories. The scorecards that manga readers send to weekly magazines to rate their favorite episodes is a case in point: it makes manga scenarios highly receptive to the reactions of the public, as unpopular series are discontinued and only the most popular manga stories survive and evolve according to their readership’s taste. But the system also makes manga series dependent on the whim of a group of core fans or otaku that do not necessarily reflect the national public, let alone global audiences. Copyright and intellectual property rights may also be an issue: Japanese companies reap hefty profits on the domestic market where IPR protection is strong, but are pilfered in neighboring countries through copycats, illegal downloading, and video streaming. Yet another argument that explains anime’s parochialism is that the global slot of blockbusters and megahits is already occupied by American productions, leaving only the niche markets of national cinema and sub-culture.

There are many reasons anime didn’t go global the way Walt Disney did. But perhaps we are using the wrong yardstick. Perhaps the value that anime generates belongs to a different class that is more diffuse and evanescent. As Ian Condry notes, “so much of what makes media meaningful lies beyond the measures of retail sales, top-ten lists, and box-office figures.” Anime cannot be gauged solely by examining what happens onscreen or by how it is marketed by studios. Instead of analyzing the cultural content of particular series or the business strategies of anime producers, Condry looks at the role of fans, the circulation of anime series and the dynamics between niche and mass market. He shows how the unexpected turnaround from failure to success for the Gundam franchise was linked to the energy of amateur builders of giant “mecha” robots and fans forming “research groups” into “Minovsky Physics”, an invention from the sci-fi series. He follows hard-core fans in sci-fi conventions, cosplay contests, and other fairs where amateurs distribute home-made manga and otaku videos. He focuses on fansubbing, the translation and dissemination of anime online by fans, which is governed by complex rules that are not always hostile to copyright protection. He considers how people can express strong affection or “moe” for virtual 2D characters with and sees it as “pure love” with no hope for a reciprocal emotional payback. This is a multi-sited ethnography, based on participant observation or “learning by watching” (kengaku), in which the author attempts to assess how value arises through the social circulation of media objects.

Follow the soul

Economists follow the money; anthropologists follow the soul, the energy, the mana. In his classic study of the Kula trade among the Trobriand islanders, Bronislaw Malinowski described the complex rules by which shell necklaces and trinkets circulated around a vast ring of island communities to enhance the social status and prestige of leaders. Kula valuables never remain for long in the hands of the recipients; rather, they must be passed on to other partners within a certain amount of time, thus constantly circling around the ring. French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, author of The Gift, reconceptualized this analysis of the Kula trade to ask: ”What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” His answer was that Kula objects were invested with a certain property, a force binding the receiver and giver that he called the ‘hau’ or life-force. Another Polynesian notion that Marcel Mauss used was the ‘mana’: a form of a spiritual energy or charisma which can exist in places, objects and persons. Applying these notions to the Japanese context, we can say it is the ‘hau’ of anime that makes fans devote some of their time to give back to the community of anime lovers through writing subtitles or designing cosplay costumes. By summoning the ‘soul’ of anime, Ian Condry reconnects with some basic concepts of the discipline, and renews the inspiration of two of the great founders of anthropology. Both Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss tried to build theories of exchange and the economy that went beyond monetary transactions and the economic interest of rational individuals. We find that same attention on how energy flows, reputations accumulate, and people collaborate in the production and circulation of anime.

Management scholars can also learn a lot from reading this modern anthropology book. The concept of ‘co-creation’ used by management scholars and sociologists is close to the ‘collaborative creativity’ used by Ian Condry to describe emergent structures of creative action in which both anime studios and fans play an important role. Similarly, “platforms” are a hot topic in management studies. Business scholars see platform industries as embodied in technologies that allow open collaboration and value creation on an unprecedented scale. Economists see platforms as multi-sided markets having distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. Rather than viewing technologies or markets as the platform, the anthropologist draws our attention on the circulation of emotions and meanings that define and organize our cultural space. Observing script meetings for a particular children TV series, Condry describes how a logic evolving around ‘characters’ and ‘worlds’ form the basis on which anime scripts are constructed and evaluated. Characters and worlds are trans-media concepts: they make a particular design or atmosphere move across media and circulate among people. They attract and connect, without being tied to any particular story or media. A well-known example is Hello Kitty, a character which exists independently from any storytelling and which has become an icon of a world of cuteness or ‘kawaii’. But characters are ubiquitous in Japan: they advertise anything from government agencies to city wards, and ‘character designer’ is a popular profession among the young generation.

From niche to mass market

Anime is often considered as the land of otaku, the realm of geeks, the kingdom of nerds. It is segmented into different categories or sub-genres, and a series’ appeal is generally limited to one single age group, as even the biggest successes very seldom straddles generations. It is, in essence, a niche market. Very seldom can it hope to reach a mass audience. But as Condry argues, the path from niche to mass may first involve jumps from niche to niche. Indeed, this might be the key to a more accurate definition of mass: to see it as network of niches acting in unison. The notion of “media success” often hinges on a movement from something small-scale that expands to become large-scale, yet niche has a chance in the context of global popular culture, free downloads, and viral videos. This is a new world after all, a world where the music video of an obscure rap singer from South Korea can be viewed over 2.5 billion times on YouTube, or where a gore movie such as The Machine Girl, whose schoolgirl heroin has a machine gun grafted to her amputated arm, can feature among the most often downloaded films on some media sharing platforms. Management should better pay heed to the otaku out there—or, in Steve Jobs’ words, “to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Ian Condry also redefines what we mean by social media. As he remarks, “today, media forms are more than something we simply watch, listen to, or consume; media is something we do.” Social network services like Facebook or Twitter have demonstrated that media could be a platform for participation as much as an object of consumption. What makes “social media” new is not the technology as much as the idea that media is not something to consume from a Network (like ABC) but something we participate in through our (small “n”) networks. Social network services or SNS make real what is virtual by making virtual what is real. In other words, Facebook-like platforms project onto the virtual world structures of relations between people and objects that form the basis of our day-to-day interactions; and by doing so, SNS show the materiality of the invisible bonds that connect components of the real world. Social media has helped put back the social into the media; but as the story of anime illustrates it, the social has been there all along. Anime’s success as a media form relies on the feedback loops between producers and audience. This brings us back to the energy around anime, which arises through its circulation and the combined efforts of large number of people. We might think of this collective energy as a kind of soul. The social in the media is what the anthropologist calls the soul. It is like a ghost in the shell: it animates real and virtual bodies, it moves across media platform and licensed goods, it makes energy flow from producers to consumers and back again. Anthropology is a very useful means of capturing these dimensions of our social reality that are ghost-like and often spirited away, because fieldworkers can gain access to that which is most meaningful to people through persistent engagement and critical questioning. This is why, in my opinion, anthropology should be taught in business schools.