Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Technology

Visual anthropology

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 17:16:08 +0000

University of Southern California

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

Abstract:

Visual anthropology encompasses two parallel aims: the production of anthropological media (including ethnographic film, video, photography, drawing, interactive media, etc.) as well as the anthropological analyses of media (including films, videos, photography, drawings, etc.). Conceptually, visual anthropology draws on theoretical and methodological connections between human perception and imagination, the use and production of audiovisual media, and ethnography. This entry explores how the work of visual anthropologists has contested, expanded, and transformed the discipline of anthropology. It also illustrates how the methods and debates in visual anthropology raise critically important questions about authorship, power, and the representation of culture that bear on the work of artists, filmmakers, photographers, curators, and journalists, among many others. The production of audiovisual materials in anthropological research is often overlooked. Yet technological advances in film and audio recording in the mid-twentieth century afforded anthropologists and filmmakers increasing opportunities to incorporate filmmaking into ethnographic and cross-cultural research. Since the 1980s, the establishment of visual anthropology programs within some academic departments, combined with the increased accessibility of video and digital media technologies globally, prompted important critiques of anthropological image-making and image use. It also helped develop new approaches to understanding visual experiences as a cultural practice. Four central concerns of visual anthropology at present are ethnographic filmmaking and theory, Indigenous and activist media, the study of visual culture, and multimodal anthropology. Taken together, this entry shows how visual anthropology has contested, expanded, and transformed understandings of power, authority, and meaning in media-making practices.

Introduction

Visual anthropology includes both producing anthropological media, such as ethnographic films, exhibitions, and photography, as well as analysing existing media as part of anthropological enquiry. Conceptually, visual anthropology lies at the intersection of the study of human perception and imagination, audiovisual media, and ethnography.^[1] The production of ethnographic films, loosely defined as films based upon ethnographic fieldwork, has been the most well-studied aspect of the subfield, although the research and scholarship of visual anthropologists extend well beyond filmmaking.^[2] This entry primarily explores how the work of visual anthropologists has contested, expanded, and transformed the discipline of anthropology. However, it also illustrates how the methods and debates in visual anthropology raise essential questions about authorship, power, and the representation of culture, making the subfield relevant for the work of artists, filmmakers, photographers, curators, and journalists, among many others.

Four themes and areas comprise the central concerns of visual anthropology in the present moment: ethnographic filmmaking and theory, Indigenous and activist media, visual culture, and multimodal anthropology. Even with the wide scope of contemporary visual anthropology that ranges from ethnographic media-making to ethnographies of media, a few common denominators within the subfield exist. First, and most significantly, scholars in this field emphasise that audiovisual recordings and/or visual practices are tools of analysis, rather than merely illustrating text-based analyses. Instead of considering photographs, sound recordings, drawings, or video as supplementary to writing, many visual anthropologists emphasise the complementarity of text and image, where each in turn amplifies the other. For example, some visual anthropologists argue that text need not be the primary mode of communicating ethnographic knowledge for a given project, as is the case for the anthropological biography films of Anna Grimshaw that are focused on the lives of select individuals in a small fishing town in Maine (Grimshaw 2013, 2016). Others show how text and media can work together to amplify anthropological analysis, as in Descending with angels (Suhr 2019) which consists of an ethnographic film as well as a written monograph on Islamic exorscim and psychiatry in Denmark.

A second shared approach defining visual anthropological scholarship is a concern with ethnographic methods and reflexivity; or, in other words, how attention to visual materials and visual practices can make for a more insightful, and more ethical, ethnography. This includes efforts to ‘give back the camera’ and create collaborative modes of filmmaking (see Elder 1995, Moore 1996, Turner 1992, Weiner 1997; also discussed further in the section on Indigenous and activist media) and projects that return historical and fieldwork photographs and films to research communities (see, for example, Strathern 2018 and the film Some Na ceremonies 2015). In these cases, the visual in visual anthropology has afforded anthropologists the opportunity and the responsibility to share research materials and acknowledge the cultural conditions of visual experience. Image-making has also been added to the ethnographer’s toolkit not just for research purposes, but also as a means of giving back to the individuals and communities whose lives and experiences constitute the ‘data’ that makes anthropology possible (Jackson 2004, Lozada 2006). Since anthropological research takes place within global hierarchies of knowledge production, such efforts attempt to ‘question hegemonic Euro/American-centric anthropological and audio-visual aesthetics and epistemologies’ (Flores & Torresan 2018).

Finally, visual anthropology has called into question the limitations of visual representation. The materiality of photographs, the sounds and audioscapes of film and video, the immersive environments of exhibitions, and the interactive possibilities of online platforms push visual anthropologists to look beyond what is obviously visible. Behind this is the recognition that the field of visual anthropology has always included other senses and experiences and that different anthropological questions and different ethnographic contexts may demand, or at least benefit from, different modes of engagement and production. Sensations such as sound and hearing, taste, feel (tactility/hapticity), as well as emotion and affect are all integral to the ways in which human life is experienced, made meaningful, and represented. In 2017, the journal American Anthropologist renamed its long-running ‘Visual Anthropology’ section as ‘Multimodal Anthropologies’ in order to reflect the mixed practices and modes which anthropological scholarship might take. In turn, there have also been numerous initiatives and efforts to change established scholarly practices. Increasing numbers of anthropology programs now accept non-text-based scholarship as part of degree requirements, and more and more discussions have emerged on the evaluation of non-textual scholarship within the discipline (Chio 2017a).

These current concerns about visual analysis, an ethical ethnographic practice, and mixed modes of anthropological knowledge production, are not new. The history of visual anthropology, discussed below, illustrates how technologies and strategies of visual representation are deeply intertwined with the discipline, its theoretical foundations, and its methodological innovations.

Anthropology has always been visual

The history of visual anthropology, and in particular the development of ethnographic filmmaking, is well-studied and illuminates one fundamental truth: anthropology, as a discipline that documents and studies socio-cultural life, has always been invested in the visual (e.g. Banks & Ruby 2011, Grimshaw 2001, El Guindi 2004, Jacknis 2016, Loizos 1995, Ruby 2000).^[3] The production of visual material as a part of anthropological research has occurred since the beginning of the discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Arguably, the relationship between visual representation and what became known as anthropology emerged with advances in photography from the mid-1800s onwards. Photography was employed extensively in studies of ‘racial types’ within the nascent fields of physical anthropology, which studied the biological evolution and variabilities of humans, and eugenics, a racist pseudo-science that advocated for the selective breeding of human populations. Colonial governments and administrations, in particular, were deeply invested in using photography to classify and categorise colonised populations by racial and ethnic ‘types’ based upon visible, physical characteristics as a means of asserting their authority to rule, govern, and control populations deemed less ‘developed’ than white Anglo-Europeans (Edwards 1994, Pinney 2011). Indeed, state-sponsored practices of using photographs as evidence of racialised differences lasted well into the twentieth century, with grave and violent consequences (see Morris-Reich 2016).

Early anthropologists such as A.C. Haddon, Franz Boas, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard recognised the scholarly significance of audiovisual documentation as a part of ethnographic fieldwork both as a memory aid but also as means of amplifying their research findings. They produced audio recordings, drawings, and photographs during their field research and also included numerous images in their publications (see also Bunn-Marcuse forthcoming, Joseph 2015). A few decades later, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson experimented with the possibilities of film and photography as a means of anthropological analysis as a part of their fieldwork in Bali (Bateson & Mead 1942, Jacknis 1988). For Mead and Bateson, film and photography allowed for the repeat, more systematic study of human non-verbal behavior and bodily movement through the use of photographic sequences and edited short films, featuring voice-over commentary and analysis.

Technological advances in film and audio recording in the mid-twentieth century afforded anthropologists and filmmakers increasing opportunities for film and photography to play a more central role in ethnographic and cross-cultural research because the actual recording technology was lighter, cheaper, and easier to learn than its predecessors (see Hockings 2003, Collier & Collier 1967). This is exemplified in films like The hunters (1957) and Dead birds (1964) which were produced as part of research expeditions sponsored by Harvard University/Peabody Museum, the films of the Turkana conversations trilogy of David and Judith MacDougall and the Yanomami series of Timothy Asch, as well as the collaborative, shared anthropological films of Jean Rouch, such as Jaguar (1967) and Moi, un Noir (1958) (see also Rouch 2003). Despite the proliferation of ethnographic film during this period, or perhaps precisely because of it, the capacity of film and visual images to communicate anthropological knowledge (or ‘facts’ more generally) emerged as a point of suspicion and anxiety within the discipline. The ‘iconophobia’ of mainstream anthropologists resulted in the marginalisation of the subfield (Taylor 1996; Mead 2003). Whereas text was capable of theory and analysis, the meaning of images was considered less easily controlled and thus more likely to be misunderstood or misinterpreted (MacDougall 1999).

Nevertheless, alongside the rise in global commercial travel and the introduction of more affordable video recording technologies in the 1970s, visual anthropology programs, labs, and centres have been established within a number of academic anthropology departments (see Ruby 2000, 2001). These programs offer more formal research and training opportunities in ethnographic film production, media analysis, and the anthropology of visual culture, although visual anthropology classes are also widely taught in departments without such institutionalised programs. Combined with the ‘writing culture’ debates around power imbalances and representational authority in ethnographic description and analysis, scholarship in visual anthropology has prompted important critiques of anthropological image-making and image use, as well as new anthropological approaches to understanding visual experience as a cultural practice.

Nowadays, it is nearly impossible to imagine conducting ethnographic fieldwork without a camera of some kind, and digital technologies make it possible for nearly every camera to operate in a still or video mode. The global reach of media technologies has also expanded the horizons of visual anthropology, which increasingly overlaps with the subfields of digital anthropology, media anthropology, and sensory anthropology. Furthermore, while the number of visual anthropology degree programs has continued to grow, many more university departments and institutions have laboratory spaces or research groups dedicated to exploring new and re-newed theoretical and methodological potentials of visual and/or media-based scholarship in anthropology. This growth reflects the continued relevance and appeal of visual and other non-text based forms of anthropological work. The revival of interest in the photo-essay, and more broadly the critical use of photographs in anthropological scholarship, is one such recent development in visual anthropology.^[4] Nonetheless, ethnographic film continues to be the most recognisable ‘product’ of the field.

Ethnographic film in practice and as theory

The prominence of ethnographic film in the history of visual anthropology cannot be overstated, despite the fact that photography and sound recordings were also fundamental parts of early ethnographic fieldwork. The history and development of ethnographic film over the twentieth century has also been extensively studied (see, for example, Henley 2020, Loizos 1993), including the connections between ethnographic film and early cinema (especially travelogues) (see Griffiths 2002, Groo 2019), and the parallel development of ethnographic film and documentary film practices and theory (see Grimshaw & Ravetz 2009, Rony 1996). Films made by anthropologists or as part of ethnographic research projects quite literally make visible and more accessible the work of anthropology, from the process of fieldwork to the analysis of cultural values, beliefs, and behaviours. Moreover, with its combination of sound and moving image, the film medium can be regarded as more akin to lived experience, more immediately apprehensible, and more capable of communicating anthropological insights to a broader public.

Comprehensive accounts by and analyses of various influential ethnographic filmmakers have been published (Grimshaw 2001, MacDonald 2013, MacDougall 1999 and 2006, Rouch 2003, Ruby 2000). Among the many oft-cited ethnographic filmmakers includes Margaret Mead, who sought to harness the pedagogical, scientific, and public-facing possibilities of the film medium. For Mead, film was a way to show and analyze human cultural lives in ways that text could not, although her films relied heavily upon intertitles and didactic voice-overs to interpret the filmed materials for viewers (see Trance and dance in Bali [1952]). Later, Jean Rouch, working in France and postcolonial West Africa, upended the expectation that an ethnographic film necessarily had to record ‘real life’ in front of the camera in favor of what he called a ‘shared anthropology’ (Rouch 2003). In films such as Jaguar (1967) and Moi, un Noir (1958) which explored migrant youth experiences and masculinity, Rouch worked collaboratively with long-term friends and interlocutors, producing ‘ethno-fictional’ films composed of pre-planned scenes coupled with voice-over narrations added during post-production. The resulting films are both fictional, in that they are not direct recordings of an event or experience, and ethnographic, in that they explore and reflect socio-cultural lives, belief systems, and values.

Other key figures in ethnographic film history include John Marshall for his films on the lives and experiences of Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa (present-day Namibia), beginning with The hunters (1957) and up to the five-part A Kalahari family series (2002). Marshall’s many films on Ju/’hoansi began as part of research programs intended to ‘document’ a hunter-gatherer society that was presumed to be ‘disappearing’ in the modern era, and led to his continued advocacy with Ju/’hoansi and !Kung for the next half-century (see Anderson & Benson 1993). The films of Robert Gardner, whose early work was also conducted as part of research expeditions, reflect and challenge the capacity of film to communicate anthropological arguments (Gardner 2008). Dead birds (1964) utilised many formal elements associated with anthropological filmmaking at the time (explanatory voice-over and a focus on a so-called ‘primitive’ society), although the film addressed the more universal subject of human warfare and violence. However, by the time Gardner made Forest of bliss in 1986, he plunged viewers into the Indian city of Benares and local patterns of worship and religious experience without any explanatory text or narration, thus leaving the ‘meaning’ of the film ostensibly open to viewer interpretation (though of course the film was deliberately and carefully edited).

The stylistic and formal differences between Gardner’s Dead birds and Forest of bliss represent a broader formal development in ethnographic film in the second half of the twentieth century. While many ethnographic films from the 1950s through to the 1970s tended to rely upon voice-over narration to explain or describe film sequences, an observational mode of ethnographic filmmaking gradually came to dominate the aesthetic and formal style of ethnographic film today (see Grimshaw & Ravetz 2009, Henley 2020). Known as ‘observational cinema’, it reflects a perspective on social and cultural lives, emphasising an ‘unprivileged camera style’ (MacDougall 1982), where the filmmaker and the camera’s presence are a part of (but not dominant in) the filmed encounter. What is presented should, to the best extent possible, reflect what one could actually experience in a particular socio-cultural context.^[5]Formally, this meant eschewing voice-over narrations and montage editing, and relying on long takes that reflect the pace of life and conversation as it unfolds. David and Judith MacDougall were among the first ethnographic filmmakers to utilise subtitles in their films and thus ‘give voice’ directly to the film’s characters (see MacDougall 1995); their Turkana conversations trilogy films from the 1970s are widely regarded as embodying the concept and practice of observational cinema.

The approach and aesthetic of observational cinema continues to largely define ethnographic filmmaking at present, albeit with slight differences in styles and techniques. This formal ‘style’ of ethnographic film, the ways in which ethnographic observation can be represented in and through film, and the power dynamics alternately revealed and obscured by formal choices in filmmaking continue to constitute central issues in ethnographic film theory (MacDougall 1999, Grimshaw 2001 and 2009, Suhr & Willerslev 2012). Since the early 2000s, some of the most widely discussed films within and beyond anthropology have been produced by scholars and students affiliated with the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University.^[6] An attention to sound (spoken and ambient), sequence and temporality (especially the long take), and image composition characterise these films (see Nakamura 2013, Lee 2019). Films such as Leviathan (2012), Manakamana (2014), and Demolition/Chaiqian (2008) have prompted much-needed discussions within anthropology on the question of aesthetics, ethics, and representations of other lives (human and non-human) (on Leviathan, see the special issue of Visual Anthropology Review 31(1); also Spray 2020 and Sniadecki 2014). Taken together, what can be called the contemporary ‘observational-sensory’ convention of ethnographic film-making reveals an unease with the limits and possibilities of ethnographic film to both convey cultural experiences and to respect (and reflect) cultural differences (Chio 2020).

Even more important for the future of visual anthropology, increasing numbers of anthropologists now engage in filmmaking as a means of presenting knowledge to broader publics, including to research communities. They push the possibilities of film as a mode of ethnographic inquiry while also offering a much-needed expansion and diversification of the ethnographic film ‘canon’. Anthropologist-filmmakers such as Harjant Gill, Anna Grimshaw, Lina Fruzzetti and Ákös Öster, Hu Tai-Li, Karen Nakamura, and Deborah Thomas and John Jackson, Jr., among many others, have produced ethnographic films that formally range from the more ‘purely’ observational (Seed and earth [1995], At low tide [2016]) to more interview-driven (Mardistan [2014], Bad friday [2011]). One commonality across many recent ethnographic films is the self-conscious filmmaker, whose presence or absence is posited as a deliberate and meaningful choice to yield the cinematic space to the film’s subjects and their experiences/expertise (see Grimshaw’s four-part series, Mr. Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine woods [2013]) or to emphasise the role of the anthropologist in unraveling and motivating the encounters thusly filmed (see Death by myth [2002], the final film in Marshall’s A Kalahari family series; Coffee futures [2009]). Frequently, the anthropologist-filmmaker is positioned somewhere in between these poles – acknowledging her/his place within the film through carefully chosen moments of direct address (see 农家乐 Peasant family happiness [2013]).

In addition to internal debates over ethnography and the use-value of film, advances in relatively more affordable video technologies and a growing interest from mainstream media networks in cross-cultural issues and documentary film (see Grimshaw 2001, Henley 2020) mean that the ethics, power dynamics, and reception of ethnographic films have been increasingly questioned. Experimental filmmakers such as Chick Strand, Maya Deren, and Trinh T. Minh-ha revisited documentary assumptions, ethnographic film aesthetics, and anthropological authority in their works. Their films pose searing critiques of cross-cultural representation and the ways in which documentary filmmaking has reinforced oppressive hierarchies of power and knowledge (see Ramey 2011, Rony 1996, Russell 1999, and Suhr & Willerslev 2013). Another key factor that has shaped visual anthropology since the 1980s has been the widespread movement to engage in more collaborative research and analysis. As discussed in the following section, the rise and recognition of Indigenous and activist media productions around the globe have prompted new research directions and new forms of critique, collaboration, and reflexivity.

The parallax effect: Indigenous and activist media

Concerns between ethnographic film and media practices by Indigenous, minoritised, and other cultural activist communities tend to converge, though not necessarily in agreement, around questions of power, cultural identity, and colonial/post-colonial conditions. This has been succinctly described by Faye Ginsburg (1995) in her influential concept of the ‘parallax effect’. For Ginsburg, the parallax effect suggests that while both ethnographic film and Indigenous media are cinematic representations of culture, Indigenous media offers ‘slightly different angles of vision’. Namely, while the ostensible subject of the films may be the same (Indigenous or other non-majority cultural lives), the perspectives offered diverge, often dramatically, between what can be simplified as an ‘outside’ (or etic) approach by ethnographers and an ‘inside’ (emic) view from the community or an individual within the community thusly represented. When considered together, Ginsburg argues, the effect can be a ‘fuller comprehension of the complexity of the social phenomenon we call culture and those media representations that self-consciously engage with it’ (1995: 65). The concept of a ‘parallax effect’ is grounded in earlier debates on the ‘crisis of representation’ in anthropology broadly, as well as calls for ethnographic film and filmmakers to acknowledge and yield authorial power to the voices of those who are more typically the subjects of film, rather than the creators (see Chen 1992, Ginsburg 1994, Nichols 1994, Weinberger 1994, Weiner 1997).

Indigenous media in particular has pushed scholarship in visual anthropology to confront the imbalance of power between the filmmaker and the ‘filmed’ and to concede some authorial control over the creation and content of media. It includes any and all ‘forms of media expression conceptualized, produced, and circulated by Indigenous peoples around the globe as vehicles for communication’ (Wilson, Hearn, Córdova & Thorner 2014). Projects to ‘give the camera back,’ including Through Navajo eyes (Worth & Adair 1972), Video nas Aldeias (Carelli 1988), and the Kayapo video project (Turner 1992), provide equipment and basic training to Indigenous individuals without delineating a particular product or goal beyond what participants themselves deem important or significant. Such earlier efforts were subject to critique, however, because regardless of good intentions, questions of power, authority, and control permeate throughout any media-making endeavor, beginning with the provision of resources (cameras, editing suites, microphones, and time to participate in training) to the distribution of the productions (networking with television stations and film festivals, storage requirements, and so on) (see Moore 1996).^[7]

Nowadays, Indigenous media ranges from national television broadcast programs to radio, experimental arts, documentaries, and narrative film. They are united by a commitment to representing the experiences, perspectives, and values of Indigenous communities from their points of view, rather than from that of dominant, mainstream society. Assertions of political self-determination, sovereignty, and cultural preservation tend to be at the forefront of much Indigenous media (e.g. Angry Inuk [2016]), although these are by no means prescriptive or absolute limits on the possible diversity of themes and topics that they can and do address (Aufderheide 2008, Ginsburg 2016, Wilson & Stewart 2008). Visual anthropologists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have been involved and engaged with Indigenous media ethnographically by studying Indigenous media productions, from visual arts (Mithlo 2009, Myers 2002, Hennessy, Smith & Hogue 2018) to radio (Fisher & Bessire 2012) to film (Dowell 2017), but also professionally, for example as consultants for television programming (Deger 2006, Michaels 1991 and 1993) and as curators (see, for example, Mithlo's curatorial work at the Venice Biennale). Recent collaborations between anthropologists and Indigenous media makers, such as Miyarrka Media (2019), the Karrabing Film Collective (Lea & Povinelli 2018), and a forthcoming digital publication that reassesses Kwakiutl films and audio recordings made with Franz Boas (Bunn-Marcuse), emphasise a more equal foundation for media-making in an increasingly media-saturated world.

Activist media by minoritised, oppressed, and marginalised communities have further amplified the need to confront the often unquestioned, or under-addressed, ‘authority’ of mainstream media practioners, scholars, artists, and global political elites to depict and represent ‘other’ cultural lives. Scholarship on activist media, in turn, offers a much-needed challenge to reconsider and reshape media practice by confronting, head on, how media representations are a means of political control and potential resistance (see Osman 2019 on the interpellation of African Americans, Muslims, and Muslim Americans in US media in the post-9/11 era). Autoethnography, which adopts a deliberately self-concious and personal perspective on social conditions, has been an especially powerful mode of activist media-making (for example, see Russell 1999 on autoethnographic queer films and queer filmmaker networks in the United States). Autoethnographic films by anthropologists, such as Postcards from Tora Bora (Dolak & Osman 2007) about a young Afghan-American woman’s return to her childhood home two decades after fleeing Afghanistan with her family, and In my mother’s house (Fruzzetti & Östör 2017), tracing a personal journey through a matrix of Eritrean, Italian, and American colonial and post-colonial kin relations, further demonstrate the possibilities of a self-reflexively active, if not explicitly activist, approach. Taken together, Indigenous and activist media have freed visual anthropology, and ethnographic film in particular, from the confines of representing a fixed, or observable, cultural ‘reality’ in favor of exploring the possibilities of film and media practice for understanding and questioning social, cultural, and political conditions.

An anthropology of the visual

The analytical approaches taken by visual anthropologists towards Indigenous and activist media make clear the doubled ambitions of the subfield: to communicate anthropological knowledge through visual and other non-textual media as well as to engage in anthropological analyses of the visual world, including bodily gestures, visual practices, and different forms of media (for example, see Banks & Morphy 1997). The anthropology of the visual shares broad concerns with the emergence of visual culture studies and the ‘visual turn’ in the humanities (Jay 2002, Mitchell 2005). These emphasise how visual practices and visual media circulate and create meaning within culturally specific contexts.

As noted earlier, the deeply intertwined relationship between photography and the development of anthropology from the late 1800s to the present has been one of the most significant ‘cultural contexts’ studied. The history of photography in anthropology illuminates the critical theoretical work of visual anthropologists in understanding photography, and how the specific qualities of the photographic medium as still images with a specific materiality, and distinct photographic genres such as portraiture, convey meaning. At the same time, photographs have shaped the discipline and its core assumptions and concepts (Edwards 1994 and 2001, Pinney 2011). They have served as evidence of anthropological insights and concepts, as in Mead and Bateson’s Balinese character (1942) discussed earlier; likewise, photography functioned as a medium of power and a means of questioning power relations in anthropology (Edwards 2011). Both photo-elicitation and participatory photography are methodological interventions that have been adopted by visual anthropologists in order to address historical and existing power dynamics within the ethnographic encounter and also to explore the processes through which individuals make meaning out of and from visual representations (see Bowles 2017, Fattal 2020).

Ethnographies of photography situate photographs within specific histories and conditions of image production and circulation. Significant, for visual anthropology, is the close attention to the visual image as a material object in the world that leads to specific material practices. Insofar as photographs exist on paper, on hand-held screens, or otherwise they are not just as ‘representations of’ an assumedly more real reality elsewhere (Pinney 2011, Pinney & Peterson 2003, Wright 2013). Methodologically, the ethnography of photography requires the work of ‘visual detection’ (Gürsel 2018) and a practical as well as theoretical perspective on how particular kinds of photographs are made. For example, Brent Luvaas (2016 and 2019) ethnographically analyzes the production, aesthetisation, and creation of ‘street style’ fashion photography both on the ground as a photographic practice and online as genre of (commercially valuable) social media. Zeynep Gürsel, exploring how editorial newsrooms select news photographs, has called this process ‘formative fictions’ because the editorial process itself is where social meaning is created and communicated (2016). Similarly, Rebecca Carter (2019) analyzed the news circulation of a photograph of her family’s home as it was burning in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Studies of studio portraiture especially have revealed how photography has been valued and productively deployed in imagining social status and belonging (see Banfill 2020, Sprague 1978a and 1978b). Portraiture, whether photographic or painted, commissioned or literally taken in the case of early anthropometric photography, provides a wide arena for reconsidering representation and the power of the image in assertions of agency (see Buggenhagen 2017 on post-colonial portraits by Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop).

Although photography occupies a significant place within the anthropology of the visual, visual images as they exist and are seen in the world today surpass it. Focusing on these images in general addresses the image-saturated condition of the contemporary moment and the nature of ‘image-events’ (Strassler 2020). As a political process, Karen Strassler posits, image-events acknowledge how images can become central to political and social contestations in public and across different publics. Images of all kinds are active agents in shaping society and social expectations, as Arlene Dávila (2012 and 2020) has shown in her studies of Latinx marketing, media, and art. This focus on visuality, or taking the visual as an analytic, allows for an anthropology of the visual that can look beyond the making of representations and towards the ways in which representations in turn shape lived experiences (see, for example, Chio 2014 and 2017b on the visual expediencies of rural ethnic tourism in China).

The theoretical and thematic overlaps between scholarship in the anthropology of the visual, media anthropology, and visual culture are indicative of how multi-layered visual media really are. Any single image, whether a photograph, a drawing, a film still, or a digital rendering, can now be relatively easily printed, stored, digitised, animated, shared, and so on, making it ever more difficult and important to critically examine disciplinary assumptions about what images mean and whether and how the medium itself may be the message (following McLuhan 1994 [1964]). The anthropology of the visual also underpins and buttresses calls within visual anthropology to take medium specificity more seriously and to consider the wide array of possible media for the communication of anthropological and ethnographic knowledge.

From visual to multimodal?

In recent years, the term ‘multimodal anthropology’ has emerged alongside the term visual anthropology. The argument for ‘multimodal anthropology’ is to reflect changes in the media ecology and to acknowledge the diversity of media long employed by anthropologists (Collins, Durington & Gill 2017: 142). One central impetus for the wider adoption of ‘multimodal’ to describe non-text scholarship by anthropologists is the fact that ‘visual’ as a term is limiting and not entirely accurate when describing the vast scope of genres and media utilised by anthropologists. Films and videos, most obviously, incorporate careful and deliberate soundtracks, whether spoken, musical, or ambient; photographs are images and material objects; sound and sonic experiences themselves constitute particular ways of encountering and understanding (see Feld 2012, Phillips & Vidali 2017); performance, from dance to theatre to improvisational, have all been utilised and theorised by anthropologists as a scholarly form of knowledge communication (Kondo 2018). The term ‘sensory ethnography’ has also been used to capture some of these dynamics, whether through film and sound work (as in the Sensory Ethnography Lab) or through ethnographies of sensory experience (Howes 2019, Pink 2015). Multimodal anthropology, more broadly, asserts the possibility to reinvent anthropology itself, by foregrounding the ‘multiple ways of doing anthropology that create different ways of knowing and learning together’ (Dattatreyan & Marrero-Guillamón 2019: 220).

This recent attention to multimodality in anthropology can, in part, be traced to the ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art practice (Foster 1995, Grimshaw & Ravetz 2015, Rutten, van Diederen & Soetaert 2013, Takaragawa & Halloran 2017). In fact, artists share many of the concerns of anthropologists over the politics, ethics, and poetics involved in multiple media. For example, Ethnographic Terminalia, a curatorial collective that organised annual exhibition programs alongside the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association from 2009-2019, staged installations that deliberately combined works from anthropologists and artists to interrogate key conceptual and theoretical intersections. Annual themes included communities of practice (2011), memory and the archive (2014), and the past and future of the photo-essay (2016). WakandaAAA University, a project aiming to build ‘an ethno-future space beyond whiteness that challenges anthropology from the ground up’, appeared for the second time in 2019 as a part of the final Ethnographic Terminalia. Featuring open spaces and scheduled events, including a 'cyborg sandbox', a virtual reality gallery, and a silent rave, the project advocated for, in its own words, ‘Down with heroes and their narratives. Up with genre-busting and serious play’.^[8]

The effect of the move towards multimodal anthropology has not only been the acknowledgement and creation of different forms of anthropological scholarship. More importantly, anthropologists are challenged to imagine a multitude of possible anthropologies, to experiment with the methods and practice of ethnography, and to look beyond other anthropologists for inspiration and direction.^[9]Of course, this is not to say that multimodal anthropology, as a concept, is without its own blinders and assumptions. Just as visual anthropology has often been equated with the production of ethnographic film, multimodal anthropology is frequently associated with the use of digital media as a supposedly more accessible and democratic mode of engagement. But ‘[t]here is nothing inherently liberatory about multimodal approaches in anthropology’ (Takaragawa et al. 2019: 517). After all, earlier research showed clearly that ethnographic films often reinforced stereotypes among audiences, instead of challenging or dismantling them (Martinez 1995). Likewise, the uptake of digital or multimedia technologies is not, in itself, transformative. Rather, as Stephanie Takaragawa et al. argue:

as our discipline(s) increasingly advocates for the multimodal in the service of anthropology, there is a need for deep engagement with the multimodal’s position as an expression of technoscientific praxis, which is complicit in the reproduction of power hierarchies in the context of global capitalism, 'capital accumulation' (Collins, Durington & Gill 2017: 144), and other forms of oppression (2019: 517).

The conversation around multimodal anthropology has continued to press anthropology, writ large, to take account of and interrogate its own structures of status, hierarchy, and privilege in what ‘counts’ as scholarship. More importantly and more widely, multimodal anthropology has the potential to expand the tools and theories at hand for engaging in cross-cultural research, analysis, and representational projects. This discussion is rooted in the very nature of the work of visual anthropology, which from its very beginnings has been committed to the search for more compelling means of communicating the insights of ethnography.

Conclusion: visual experiences and visual experiments

In a way, visual anthropology as a separate subfield is arguably no longer needed. The number of ethnographic film festivals globally continues to increase, not decrease. Related subfields of media anthropology, digital anthropology, and multimodal anthropology seem to encompass much of what used to be considered the analytical terrain of the visual. If anything, however, these developments underpin the ongoing influence and importance of visual anthropology. From early efforts in ethnographic filmmaking to the self-critique brought about by Indigenous media to the desire to work differently embodied in the calls for multimodality, visual anthropology has always been concerned with the ethics and epistemology of ethnography and theory building.

The proliferation of image-making and image-sharing technologies in the world today thus circles back to a fundamental question: how might all of these different ways of doing research and analysis make for better anthropology? And who gets to decide what is better, or what needs improving, in the first place? Clearly there are no firm or final answers to these broad questions, which by necessity should return time and time again. What visual anthropology has done and must continue to do is to carve out space for scholars, artists, and activists to learn from the visual experiences of others and to open themselves to visual experiments of their own.

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Films and Videos Cited

Archei, O., T. Blumenfield & R. Duoji 2015. Some Na ceremonies. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 31 minutes, digital video.

Arnaquq-Baril, A. 2016. Angry Inuk. National Film Board of Canada, 85 minutes, digital video.

Asch, T. 1968-1976. Yanomami series (22 films). Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 428 minutes, film.

Castaing-Taylor, L. & V. Páravel 2013. Leviathan. New York: Cinema Guild, 87 minutes, digital video.

Chio, J. 2013. 农家乐 Peasant family happiness. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 71 minutes, digital video.

Dolak, K. & W. Osman 2007. Postcards from Tora Bora. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Education Resources, 82 minutes, digital video.

Fattal, A. 2009. Trees Tropiques. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 30 minutes, digital video.

Fruzzetti, L. & Á. Öster 1995. Seed and earth. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 36 minutes, film.

——— 2016. In my mother’s house: tracing a family history from Italy to Eritrea. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Education Resources. 82 minutes, digital video.

Gardner, R. 1986. Forest of bliss. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 90 minutes, film.

——— 1964. Dead birds. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 83 minutes, film.

Gill, H. 2014. Mardistan (Macholand). Washington D.C.: Tilotama Productions, 30 minutes, digital video. (available online: https://vimeo.com/120182667, accessed 31 August 2020).

Grimshaw, A. 2016. George’s place: the cellar. 83 minutes, digital video.

——— 2016. At low tide. London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 63 minutes, digital video.

——— 2013. Mr Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine Woods (including Spring in Dickinson’s Reach [83 mins), A summer task [47 mins], Autumn’s work [47 mins]; Winter days [59 mins]). Berkeley: Berkeley Media and London: Royal Anthropological Institute, digital video.

Gürsel, Z.D. 2009. Coffee futures. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 22 minutes, digital video.

MacDougall, D. & J. MacDougall. Turkana conversations trilogy (including Lorang’s way [1980, 70 minutes], The wedding camels [1980, 108 minutes], and A wife among wives [1982, 72 minutes]). Berkeley: Berkeley Media, film.

Marshall, J. (dir.) 1957. The hunters. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 72 minutes, film.

——— 2002. A Kalahari family (!Kung series). Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 360 minutes, film and video.

Mead, M. (dir.) 1952. Trance and dance in Bali. Library of Congress, 22 minutes, film (available on-line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8YC0dnj4Jw). Accessed 31 August 2020.

Rouch, J. 1958. Moi, un Noir. New York: Icarus Films, 70 minutes, film.

——— 1967. Jaguar. New York: Icarus Films, 88 minutes, film.

Sniadecki, J.P. 2008. Demolition/Chaiqian. New York: Cinema Guild, 62 minutes, digital video.

Spray, S. & P. Velez 2014. Manakamana. New York: Cinema Guild, 118 minutes, film.

Thomas, D., J. Jackson Jr. & J.G. Wedderburn 2011. Bad friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. New York: Third World Newsreel, 63 minutes, video.

Note on contributor

Jenny Chio is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. Her ethnographic film, 农家乐Peasant family happiness (2013), examines ethnic tourism in rural China. She has served as co-editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review and co-director of the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival.

Jenny Chio, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, 3501 Trousdale Pkwy, Taper Hall 356, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA 90089-0357. jchio@usc.edu

Image credit

Nuosu college students pose in vintage clothing, creating a retro aesthetic. Chengdu, China. See also Banfill 2020. Photo by Kaitlin Banfill, 2018. Used with permission.

[1] Visual anthropology encompasses more than just the visual, as this entry will elaborate, and when referring to films and video it is more precise to use the term ‘audiovisual’. For consistency, in this entry I mostly use the more widely employed moniker of 'visual anthropology'.

[2] ‘Ethnographic film’ as a genre has been notoriously difficult to define because it has been used to describe both films by anthropologists and ethnographers as well as films about topics and concepts central to anthropology; see Chio 2020, Durrington 2013, Friedman 2017, Vannini 2020, Crawford & Turton 1993, Barbash & Taylor 1996.

[3] Anthropological research and writing has also depended upon other senses, especially listening/hearing. However, visual representations, in the form of photographs or museum exhibitions/object displays, have been more widely discussed and theorised.

[4] Publishing initiatives, such as The Page in Visual Anthropology Review and Writing with Light in Cultural Anthropology, aimed to foster contemporary critical conversations around the photo-essay as a mode of anthropological inquiry.

[5] The phrase ‘observational cinema’ is attributed to the filmmaker Colin Young, who established the Ethnographic Film Unit at the University of California Los Angeles in the 1960s and trained a generation of anthropological filmmakers, including David and Judith MacDougall whose films and publications are widely considered exemplars of this mode of filmmaking (see Henley 2018).

[6] Many other well-known programs train students in ethnographic filmmaking, including the long-running Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California, the Culture + Media program at New York University, and the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

[7] David MacDougall offered his reflections on a participatory media project he was a part of in Aboriginal Australia, stating ‘... in a sense it was a kind of idealisation, perhaps, of a notion of solidarity between Aboriginal people and sympathetic Whites. My view of it now is that it was a kind of film-making that rather confused the issues. In those films one never really knows quite who’s speaking for whom, and whose interests are being expressed. It is not clear what in the film is coming from us and what is coming from them ... it’s a slightly uncomfortable marriage of interests that masks a lot of issues’ (quoted in Grimshaw & Papastergiadis 1995: 44-5).

[8] WakandaAAA University (available online: https://wakandaaaa.home.blog/, accessed 29 August 2020).

[9] See, for example, the research, teaching, and events of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sharia

Rebecca Tishler — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 18:13:03 +0000

Morgan Clarke

University of Oxford

Initially published 29 Nov 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20sharia

Abstract:

Sharia is a key concept in Islam and our contemporary world. Often translated into English as ‘Islamic law’, it includes financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce. But it also covers ritual practice, dietary prohibitions, and personal and interpersonal ethics. Indeed, the rules of sharia could, in theory, encompass all of life. Sharia thus comprises both a legal system and a rule-based approach to the challenges of living a good life more generally. Sharia ideas and discourses have been hugely important historically across the parts of the world touched by Islam. Despite their marginalization under colonial modernization projects, they remain intensely vibrant and relevant today. In the wake of the widespread failings of postcolonial secular states, sharia has become widely seen as an alternative and challenge to civil law and the liberal tradition. The violence of some of the most extreme contemporary Islamist movements has, however, contributed to an intensely negative stereotyping of sharia in the West.

Such extreme instances need to be placed in the context not only of recent and deeper history, but also the immense diversity of approaches to Islam and sharia that the world’s nearly two billion Muslims adopt today. Anthropology has made an invaluable contribution to such efforts. One key topic has been gender, and the place of sharia norms in family law. The relationship between sharia and other sets of norms has been a central case of legal pluralism within legal anthropology. Medical and economic anthropology have explored sharia’s role in responses to the challenges of new global technologies such as assisted reproduction and novel financial instruments. More broadly, as part of the wider anthropology of Islam, anthropologists have helped document the various ways in which sharia norms form part of the texture of Muslim life across the world.

Introduction

Sharia is a key concept within Islam and our contemporary world more generally. Originally an Arabic word (sharī‘a) from a root which could refer to both law and ‘a way’, it has often been translated into English as ‘Islamic law’. The sharia tradition does indeed include rules and processes dealing with financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce, for example. But it also covers ritual practice, dietary prohibitions, and personal and interpersonal ethics. Indeed, the rules of sharia could in theory encompass all of life, laying down right, and wrong, ways of doing almost everything. One will then be judged as to one’s actions by God on Judgment Day, according to the standards He has prescribed, in the Quran and through the example of the Prophet. Sharia thus comprises both a legal system and a rule-based approach to the challenges of living a good life, in ways analogous to its Abrahamic relatives the Jewish halakha and Catholic moral theology.

Sharia ideas and discourses have been hugely important historically across the parts of the world touched by Islam, even if the extent of their practical application (which has varied) has never been as comprehensive as theory might allow. They also remain intensely vibrant and relevant today – both to questions of personal conduct, and those as to the nature of society and how it should be governed. In most of the Muslim world, colonial and postcolonial modernity brought a restriction of sharia’s role in the life of the state and its replacement by European-style civil law (or English common law). In the wake of the widespread failings of postcolonial secular states and an ‘Islamic revival’ in response, the call to restore the sharia, as a crucial part of an ‘Islamic state’ even, has become common. Sharia has come to be seen widely as an oppositional force, a challenge to secular law, and thus also a challenge to the particular system of rights and freedoms associated with the liberal tradition. The violence of the most extreme contemporary Islamist movements, such as ISIS or Boko Haram, has contributed to an already intensely negative stereotyping of sharia, focused on harsh criminal punishments and patriarchal gender norms. In a continuation of Orientalist ideas, sharia has been widely depicted by its critics as antithetical to modernity.

Such extreme instances need to be placed properly in the context not only of recent and deeper history, but also the immense diversity of approaches to Islam and sharia that the world’s nearly two billion Muslims adopt today. Unhelpful and unrealistic stereotypes about sharia need to be challenged. What sharia actually means to Muslims in practice needs to be documented. Anthropology has made an invaluable contribution to such efforts. One key topic has been gender, and the place of sharia norms in family law. The relationship between sharia and other sets of norms, in Muslim-majority and minority contexts, has been a central case of legal pluralism within legal anthropology. And medical and economic anthropology have explored sharia’s role in responses to the challenges of new global technologies such as assisted reproduction and novel financial instruments. More broadly, as part of the wider anthropology of Islam, anthropologists have helped document the various ways in which sharia norms form part of the texture of Muslim life across the world.

Sharia discourse is a complex and rich tradition. Given the sheer breadth and sophistication of this body of intellectual history, let alone the linguistic and other skills required to grapple with it, Islamic legal studies can be a forbiddingly technical discipline. But, fortunately, non-specialists can draw on widely available and accessible guides, such as Wael Hallaq’s (2009a) very substantial account, Shari‘a: theory, practice, transformations (also available in abridged form, An introduction to Islamic law [2009b]). Earlier generations of anthropologists might have left such issues to the specialists. But Talal Asad’s (1986) emphatic assertion that Islam is a discursive tradition helped inaugurate a new focus on the place of Islamic discourse, including sharia discourse, in Muslim practice – ‘a new anthropology of Islam’ (Bowen 2012). Some have worried about the dangers of going too far in this regard. That would include over-emphasising the place of religious rules in what it means to be Muslim. Even if sharia currently looms large in both Muslim and non-Muslim imaginaries of Islam, we must not forget the breadth and richness of the Islamic tradition beyond it (Ahmed 2016: 113-29).^[1]

Sharia discourse and history

Some rules are explicitly stated in the Quran, the holy text of God’s word dictated to the Prophet Muhammad in seventh century (CE) Arabia. One verse (5:6), for example, tells Muslims how they should wash before prayers: ‘You who are faithful, when you stand up for prayers, wash your faces and hands to the elbows, and wipe your heads and your feet to the ankles.’ There is room for varying interpretation even here – which direction should you wash or wipe, for example? In deciding how correctly to interpret such verses, and how to formulate rules for conduct where they are not so explicitly stated, Muslims can draw on a wider range of sources: the Quran as a whole; the Sunna – the example of the Prophet, as transmitted in the Hadith, or the accounts of what he said and did (and for the Shia, also the example of the divinely guided Imams who came after him); the consensus of the Muslim community; and forms of human reasoning. This is a complex undertaking, a human science in its own right, called fiqh, which has resulted in much debate and controversy, and a vast body of legal literature and theory. Those discussions are carried on in all the languages of Islam, even if many of their shared terms (like fiqh) are originally Arabic.

Sharia and fiqh are tightly linked concepts. But while the word sharia points to God’s divine law, fiqh – which attempts to discover that law – is a human undertaking, whose content has changed and developed over time. After the Prophet’s death (in 632 CE), religious knowledge became gradually more organised, a domain of expertise on the part of increasingly professional scholars (‘ulamā’, sing. ‘alim). From around the ninth century CE, ‘schools of law’ (madhāhib, sing. madhhab) emerged around the thought and teaching of famous predecessors. Four Sunni schools have survived: Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Shafi‘i. Some are more associated with some parts of the world than others (the Maliki tradition is especially prevalent in North Africa, for instance). The Twelver Shi‘i tradition can be considered a parallel such school.

Scholarly expertise in the sharia is in part an act of religious devotion. But it also has a practical role to play. A jurist (i.e., an Islamic legal scholar) can provide guidance to non-experts, in formal terms as a non-binding legal opinion (fatwā). In this case the scholar would be acting as a muftī (one who gives fatwas) (see Masud et al. 1996). Or, they could arbitrate in disputes, working towards an authoritative and binding resolution or judgement, as a judge (qādī, hākim) (Masud et al. 2005). This could be as an independent scholar, or it could be in the service or with the backing of the state.

The relationship between the scholarly class and the state has varied across time and space. Sharia has often been characterised as a ‘jurist’s law’, in the sense that it is the scholarly class who define the law rather than the state, even if the ruler is in theory bound by God’s law, too. Despite a hackneyed – and historically inaccurate – notion that, unlike Christianity, Islam admits no separation between religion and state, the ulama have very often worked independently of it (Lapidus 1996). Recent scholarship has, however, argued for closer attention to the transformations wrought by the Mongol invasions of the Near East in the thirteenth century. In particular, the Ottoman dynasty adopted the Hanafi school of law as its official one – coexisting with, but privileged over, others (Burak 2013). This led to a closer entangling of sharia and its scholars with state administration over the vast sweep of the Ottoman Empire, alongside other forms of secular and customary law.

Academic studies of sharia’s history have concentrated on the Near East. But sharia concepts and ideas have spread far wider, throughout the worlds touched by Islam – indeed they have arguably been vital to the formation of this wider Muslim ecumene. That did not necessarily take the form of domination. People living under modernity have become so used to the idea of law as the instrument of power and social control that they tend to forget that legal forms are also enabling. Financial instruments have been crucial to the history of global trade – and sharia has in this form played an important role in world history (e.g. Lydon 2009 on trans-Saharan trade and Bishara 2017 on the Indian Ocean). Sharia norms underpinned a vision of civilised life that spanned the world and inspired at its frontiers (Scheele 2012). They also constituted a widespread framework of property relations and social reproduction (Goody 1990: 361-82; Mundy 2013).

The encounter with European colonialism and ideas of modernity brought a dramatic rupture in this history (Hallaq 2009: 396-442). In the Near East, even before colonial occupation, ideas and institutions of education and law began to change in response to the challenges of rising European power. Technical sciences became increasingly prestigious. By the nineteenth century, sharia was more and more replaced in the administrative life of the Ottoman state by European-style civil law. Sharia discourse itself was subject to new forms of rationalization, such as codification. Similar changes occurred elsewhere, often as a colonial imposition, such as in the Dutch East Indies or British-ruled India. Generally, sharia’s purview has become heavily limited in terms of jurisdiction, often restricted to personal status, i.e. family law. As Asad (2003) has said, this would be best seen not as due to this part of sharia being especially sacred, but rather as integral to the project of secular modernity to restrict ‘religion’ to the private sphere. It has further been argued that, in the process, sharia has been not just restricted but fundamentally transformed, into a sort of ersatz ‘Islamic law’ (e.g. Hussin 2016 on British interventions in Malaya, Egypt, and India). Where sharia had been bound up in an organic, society-wide complex of education, moral exhortation, dispute resolution, and administration, the ties that unified that world of discourse have now been largely broken.

Sharia ethnography and modernity

This transition from pre-modernization sharia to state-centred law has been captured in an enduring classic of sharia ethnography, Brinkley Messick’s The calligraphic state (1992). Messick had the good ethnographic fortune that highland Yemen, at the edges of the Ottoman Empire and not subject to European colonialism, had gone through this process of legal modernization within living memory. His fieldwork in the 1970s-80s took place at ‘the end of an era of reed pens and personal seals, of handwritten books and professional copyists, of lesson circles in mosques and knowledge recited from memory, of court judgments on lengthy scrolls and scribes toiling behind slant-topped desks’ (Messick 1992: 1). This ‘calligraphic’ culture constituted a distinct form of textual domination, a political economy of knowledge rooted in a tradition of learning, which began with memorization of the Quran and depended on personalised forms of authority. Sharia discourse had an open texture, which state codification foreclosed – symbolised, following Messick’s central metaphor, by impersonal print.

In keeping with the more holistic scope of pre-modernization sharia, Messick gives an account of the knowledge economy that not only covers the work of Islamic religious professionals as both muftis and judges, but also the traditional forms of Islamic education within which they were formed (see also Mottahedeh’s [1985] evocative book on Iran, and Eickelman 1985 on Morocco). He also attends closely to the textual forms that they produced. This combination of textual analysis and ethnographic insight, taken still further in a second, resolutely historical ethnography of sharia in Yemen, has won the appreciation of Islamic studies specialists, even if ‘the anthropologist as reader’ remains a somewhat unfamiliar figure, as Messick laments (2018: 33). This level of dialogue between anthropology and Islamic legal studies is, however, hard to reproduce, and not just because of the exceptional standards Messick’s work has set. Ethnography of contemporary sharia has to wrestle with the obvious ruptures that modernity has wrought. Although many governments (and would-be governments) across the world now claim not just to be ‘Islamic’ but to be restoring the sharia to its proper place, arguably the tradition they lay claim to is an invented one (Eickelman & Piscatori 2004: 22-45). Pre-modern sharia depended on modes of authority, power, and governmentality that are not those of the modern state. An authentically Islamic state in the modern mode may thus be ‘impossible’, in Hallaq’s (2012) widely cited, if polemical, terms. Contemporary state institutions that claim some tie to the sharia – as many family law systems across the Muslim world do, for instance – are actually fundamentally different from their predecessors.

Anthropologists would wish neither to dismiss contemporary Muslim claims to authenticity, nor to espouse naively essentialist notions of Islam. They have instead documented the ways in which such claims to authenticity can be constructed in conjunction with, as well as in opposition to, the rhetoric of modernity (Deeb 2006), and the new forms of authority that mass literacy, mass higher education and mass media entail (Eickelman & Anderson 2003; Eickelman & Piscatori 2004). There are contemporary Islamic states and Islamization projects and one can conduct ethnographies of them (e.g. Feener 2013; Salomon 2016). Conversely, something of the openness and personalised authority of the pre-modern tradition still endures, even in new digital forms (Clarke 2010). Nevertheless, despite the importance of a grounding in the discursive tradition for understanding the ways in which sharia is invoked today, there is a clear danger in simply mapping the terms and concerns of classical sharia onto contemporary forms of post-modernisation ‘Islamic law’, arguably very different as we have seen (Dupret 2007).

Islamic family law and legal pluralism

One of the earliest legal anthropological studies of a Muslim court, Lawrence Rosen’s (1989) study of a provincial court in Morocco, perhaps overreached in this regard. Rosen sees law as a window onto culture, and presents the work of a judge in a low-level family law court implementing a reformed codification of Islamic legal norms as representative of Islamic legal culture generally (see Mundy’s [1991] still-instructive review). The problems with such cultural generalization notwithstanding, this helped pave the way for others to show the diversity and complexity of contemporary Islamic family law, in ways that problematise any ready essentialization.

Family law is obviously gendered, and Islamic family law – as generally understood at least – is clearly patriarchal (for global and historical surveys, see An-Na‘im 2002; Tucker 2008). According to Islamic family law, marriage is, among things, a contract granting rights to sex and fertility in exchange for a dower, or bridal gift (mahr), and maintenance (nafaqa) from the husband to the wife. A man can in theory have up to four wives where a woman can only be married to one man. A husband has an absolute right to divorce, effected by his simply pronouncing it (talaq, often translated ‘repudiation’). A wife’s right is limited: she must either persuade her husband to divorce her, even in return for a consideration (khul‘), or persuade a judge that an annulment or judicial separation be effected. Women generally receive a smaller portion of an inheritance than men.

These rules vary in their details between the different Sunni and Shi‘i schools of law, and are, like any aspect of sharia, much debated within them. The case can be made for more gender-equal visions of God’s intentions. Modernising governments in the twentieth century reformed family laws by stitching together more progressive rulings from different schools, trying to rule out polygamy or make judicial divorce against a husband’s wishes easier, for instance – although bringing women and ‘the family’ under state law arguably hardened patriarchy in other ways (Hallaq 2009: 443-99). This process of reform continues (Welchman 2007). Feminist scholarship and activism has argued that it needs to go still further, critiquing the largely male body of scholarship that has dominated the interpretation of the sharia to date (Mir-Hosseini 1999, 2006).

Anthropologists have contributed extensively to the understanding of how such systems work in practice. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an anthropologist and activist, has provided pioneering ethnographic studies, and also made a compelling film with Kim Longinotto, Divorce Iranian style (1998), which remains one of the best ways into the subject. Her book Marriage on trial (1993) compares 1980s Shi‘i Iran, where family law had been re-Islamised after the Islamic Revolution, with Morocco, which had a more secular, reformed family legal system, based on the rules of Maliki fiqh. Although both family legal systems were nominally inspired by Islamic law, marriage dynamics play out within their constraints in very different ways, reflecting differences between Shi‘i and Maliki fiqh, aspects of local culture, and differences in the local economies – the relative access of men and women to paid labour, for example. Although post-revolutionary Iran’s system was nominally more ‘Islamic’, that did not translate into women having a necessarily worse position. In both cases, women are adept at using the resources that the system does allow them to pursue their claims.

Mir-Hosseini’s work has been joined by many others, with hundreds of articles and books across various disciplines and a number of full-length ethnographies by anthropologists of similar courts and tribunals in, for example, Kenya (Hirsch 1998), Malaysia (Peletz 2002, 2020; Daniels 2017), Indonesia (Bowen 2003), Zanzibar (Stiles 2009), Israel (Shahar 2015), Lebanon (Clarke 2018) and India (Lemons 2019), as well as less formal ‘sharia councils’ in the West (Bowen 2016 on the UK). These studies problematise simplistic stereotypes by revealing the sheer diversity in sharia discourse, as well as the shared principles that unite it, and the complexities of putting sharia into action as law (see e.g. Sonneveld & Stiles 2019 on how a single form of Islamic legal divorce, khul‘, has been interpreted very differently in different contexts). Sharia never exists in a vacuum; its social life is always shaped by a dialectic with other cultural, linguistic, and normative forms. A shared concern, however – one which Rosen (1989) picked out – is the emphasis placed on trying to repair damaged social relations, over and above pronouncing judgement. Away from the ideal of law, these studies illustrate the pragmatic strategies of the actors within the courts: wives, husbands, lawyers, court officials, and judges.

Those varied ethnographies are of settings with very different legal systems and political concerns, where sharia discourse, whether honoured or stigmatised, recognised by the state or ignored, is only one of a number of competing legal and normative systems – a key example of legal pluralism (Shahar 2008; see also Erie 2016 on China). Negotiating between such different normative systems is an important part of the legal process for litigants and defendants. But it can also be part of a wider conversation about the nature of a polity. Michael Peletz (2002) has shown how Malaysia’s sharia courts are bound up in projects of a distinctive Malaysian Islamic modernity. John Bowen (2003) has framed discussions about the relations between customary law (adat), sharia, and state law in Indonesia as an ‘anthropology of public reasoning’, to be compared with discussions of value pluralism elsewhere – as in his subsequent study of the place of Islam and sharia norms in France (Bowen 2011). There, and elsewhere, sharia can be a foil for thinking about what it means for a state to be secular as much as religious (Asad 2003; Agrama 2012; Lemons 2019). It is also a key frame of reference for notions of civility and citizenship, not just the relation between citizens and state, but also between different communities, Muslim and non-Muslim, in Muslim-majority and minority settings (Hefner 2000; Modood et al. 2006; Modood 2010; Hefner & Bagir 2021).

Global assemblages

Peletz (2013) has characterised Malaysia’s contemporary sharia courts as an eclectic ‘global assemblage’, where sharia discourse is joined with the discourses of civil and common law, corporate ‘e-governance’ and Japanese management and auditing practices. Sharia is itself globally distributed through networks of scholarship, funding, and training, with important nodes in the Middle East – not least the Arabian Peninsula and Iran – South and South-East Asia, and the West. The notion of sharia as a mobile global form that is localised in combination with others is a fertile one more broadly. Rights discourse, for instance, has become a globally recognised way of demanding recognition – one that has parallel forms in the sharia tradition, but is now invoked alongside and in contrast with it, linked to Western notions of human rights and individualism (Osanloo 2006). Sharia norms of food sourcing and preparation – ‘halal’ – have become part of global capitalist enterprise, where religious rules intersect with those of food hygiene and new notions of risk (Fischer 2011; Tayob 2016). An entire Islamic banking sector has arisen catering for new markets for religiously sanctioned versions of contemporary financial instruments (Maurer 2002; Rudnyckyj 2019).

‘Islamic bioethics’ is another such contemporary assemblage of sharia and other forms of knowledge-power, which speaks to the ways in which sharia discourse has managed to keep up with the present pace of technological and social change (Clarke et al. 2015). Islamic legal scholars have been challenged on the rights and wrongs of biomedical innovations such as assisted reproduction and organ transplantation, in ways that bring together medical and Islamic legal knowledge in novel constellations. Sherine Hamdy (2012) has shown in exemplary detail how fatwas on the end of life and organ transplantation are produced in a dialectic with medical authority in the context of a public health and ecological disaster in Egypt. Simultaneously, the same scholars are also having to define the creation of life in response to the globalization of assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation, as Marcia Inhorn (e.g. 2003) has tirelessly documented. Sharia discourse has thus seen its own complicated debates about the ‘new kinship’ relations that result. Is it religiously permitted to use donor gametes, for instance? Does the possibility of having more than one wife diminish fears that the use of donor eggs resembles adultery? Who then should be considered the mother: the provider of genetic material or the woman who bears the foetus? What are the consequences for family life given sharia norms on gendered modesty except with close relatives? (See, for example, Clarke 2009; Naef 2017)

In these cases, Islamic legal opinions are often not as restrictive as common stereotypes about religious rules being ‘strict’ might suggest. On the contrary, sharia discourse can also be enabling, by allowing someone to undertake a course of action with religious sanction, as well as a source of comfort and help to those faced with crucial life decisions and crises. Sharia can be the inspiration for state regulation in these morally challenging domains. But it can also be a resource for personal ethical life. Indeed its personal ethical role has arguably increased under modernity, given the restriction of the place of sharia in state law (see Messick 1996 on shifting patterns in the types of questions put to muftis).

Sharia and the anthropology of ethics

Islamic examples have thus unsurprisingly been central to the burgeoning new anthropology of ethics, which has emphasised not just socially imposed obligation, but also the ways in which people actively try to make themselves good and virtuous.^[2] Sharia norms can form part of such projects of the virtuous self. Saba Mahmood’s (2005) well-known discussion of Muslim piety among women in Cairo turns on, among other things, the way in which the fulfilment of religious obligations such as prayer or wearing a headscarf is seen to help cultivate desired virtues such as steadfastness and modesty (see also e.g. Deeb 2006). This reimagining of religious duties as a means to religious and moral fulfilment, rather than solely as constraint, has transformed the possibilities for understanding and representing what obligations like wearing modest dress might actually mean to Muslims. The insights of this new anthropology of virtue have also been helpful in revisiting some of the classic themes of Islamic legal studies. Hussein Agrama (2010) has shown how the mufti’s role can be seen not just as Islamic legal interpretation, but as a pedagogical intervention in the ethical lives of those consulting him (or, more rarely, her). Islamic scholars who work as judges in sharia courts can find themselves caught between this ethos of pedagogy and their duty to apply the impersonal rules of legal bureaucracy (Clarke 2012). Ideas of virtue and its cultivation also inflect the processes of Islamic legal scholarship and interpretation, where it is thought that a virtuous scholar is more able to interpret God’s law correctly than a less virtuous one (Nakissa 2014).

Despite the salience of sharia rules in everyday religious life for many Muslims, influential voices in the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of Islam (Schielke 2009; Lambek 2010) have nevertheless warned against over-emphasising religious rules. One concern is ethnographic, that not all Muslims live such coherent and observant religious lives. Another is theoretical, perhaps even aesthetic, that rules per se are too flat and restrictive an ethical form to be allowed to dominate our moral imaginations. The image of the rule-obsessed ‘Salafi’ Muslim has become an archetype (among many Muslims as well as non-Muslims) of unrealistic and oppressive sharia-mindedness, although the reality of Salafi practice would bear much closer ethnographic examination (Fadil & Fernando 2015; see e.g. Inge 2016). My own position is that rule-following is an indispensable technology of the virtuous self, as well as of social coordination, but one with its own characteristic possibilities, complexities, and limitations. The use of rules would thus benefit from more nuanced analysis than it has been given in the anthropology of ethics so far (Clarke 2015). Sharia would seem an excellent place to start, as an almost-paradigmatic example of a rule-focused approach to living well, but one that can and should be seen in comparative perspective – alongside Jewish halakha, Christian casuistry, Hindu law, or secular codes of civility, for example (Clarke & Corran 2021).

Conclusion

Sharia is a prominent theme in today’s global public sphere, a source of norms that structure people’s lives in various ways across the world and an important part of religious practice for many (but not all) Muslims. Anthropologists have contributed much to challenging the lazy and often damaging stereotypes that surround it, in terms of documenting and analysing the very different ways in which sharia can be understood, invoked and practiced. Sharia also has much to offer as a topic for anthropological thought more widely, as an important legal tradition that challenges state-centric notions of law and as a quintessentially legalistic way of approaching moral and religious righteousness. Sharia indeed problematises and fractures the modern liberal distinction between law and ethics in ways that open up fundamental questions for social theory, as indeed for the world at large (Asad 2003; Hefner 2016).

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Note on contributor

Morgan Clarke is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Islam and new kinship: reproductive technology and the shariah in Lebanon (Berghahn, 2009) and Islam and law in Lebanon: sharia within and without the state (Cambridge, 2018).

School of Anthropology, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford. OX2 6PE morgan.clarke@anthro.ox.ac.uk

[1] See also Schielke, S. 2018. Islam. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/islam).

[2] See Laidlaw, J. 2017. Ethics/morality. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ethics-morality).

Money

Felix Stein — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:31:52 +0000

Allison Truitt

Tulane University

Initially published 27 Mar 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20money

Abstract:

Money is a formidable subject — an intimate object in our everyday lives, a claim over resources, and a topic of academic inquiry. Textbooks define money by its various functions, e.g., as a medium of exchange, a means of payment, a unit of account, and a store of value. While anthropologists also reckon with these functions, they are equally concerned with money as a social process, a material object, and a political token, concerns that lead them to emphasise money’s diversity and instability over its universality and coherence. This entry highlights four areas of inquiry in the anthropological literature on money: (1) debates over what counts as money; (2) investigations into money’s role in maintaining and overturning social boundaries; (3) studies of monetary pluralism in light of the failure of state-centric monopoly currencies; and (4) approaches that engage the role of technology in creating new platforms and networks for creating and distributing money. By way of concluding, the essay addresses how anthropologists reflect on the future of money.

Introduction

Most definitions of money begin with its functions. While varying in their elaboration, these functions usually include a medium of exchange, a means of payment, a unit of account, and a store of value. Upon closer inspection, we see how these functions are just starting points that open up additional questions, including how price or value is constructed; who or what authorises money; how people use different units to express hierarchies, solidarities, and identities; and even how money as a store of value or asset is protected. Because anthropologists confront a great diversity of objects that channel value, they are less concerned with identifying a universal conception of money, turning instead to wonder at the ‘breathtakingly ambitious project that [anthropologists] set out, simply by defining Melanesian and African currencies, the greenback and the “Euro” as part of the same domain’ (Guyer 1999: 245). Even archaeologists no longer assume coinage is a familiar medium to be studied in isolation from other contextual evidence—coins described in an archaeological context tell a different story than when any coin find is assumed to represent commercial value or exchange (Haselgrove & Krmnicek 2012). Challenges arise not simply because of the range of money objects or the diversity of their uses but because of how money travels beyond the horizon, along pathways not always visible to its participants (Hart & Ortiz 2014: 475). Given these dilemmas, scholars now argue money may be better understood as a process, ‘inextricably social, inherently dynamic, complex, and contradictory’ (Dodd 2016: 88), and one usefully approached through the material and political systems that create and govern money, whether payment systems (Maurer 2015), central banks (Holmes 2014; Riles 2019), or even mining for bitcoin (Ferry 2016; Zimmer 2017).

This entry considers debates about what counts as money, and then addresses how money mediates social relations and identities. It next examines what happens when people manage multiple currencies, particularly when state-centric monopoly currencies unravel and monetary pluralism is on the rise. Finally, the entry highlights those platforms and infrastructures that channel value, exposing the stubborn materiality of money.

What counts as money?

When we begin with the function of money as a means of exchange in the marketplace, we privilege utilitarian need over other values (Guyer 1999: 242). This starting point is reinforced by the popular view that money emerged out of barter, a resolution to the problem of the ‘double-coincidence of wants’, in which each participant fails to possess what the other wants and so requires a third medium to initiate and complete an exchange (Menger 1892). Anthropologists argue this story is better understood as a myth for several reasons. First, evidence for this claim is built not on the historical record but from examples conjured up by scholars themselves (Graeber 2011: 37). Second, archaeological records suggest that the idea of money preceded the object, a ‘virtual currency’ that encoded information in accounting systems, such as the knotted strings made by the Inca, or Mesopotamian clay tablets. Only later did money circulate as physical objects such as tokens (Graeber 2011: 40), a point made by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, who highlighted the role of the state in creating a unit of account to express value (e.g., a token) over money as a commodity (Hart 2005: 168). Finally, and most importantly, insofar as myths do political work, the claim that money originates in barter reinforces the dominant values of capitalism, including the sanctity of private property over inalienable possessions and the emphasis on exchanging equivalent rather than asymmetrical values (Graeber 2011; Hart 2005: 161; Guyer 2004). It also mystifies the role of the state or political authority in conjuring money. Anthropologists, as we shall see, have different stories to tell about money.

In the early twentieth century, anthropologists promoted empirical fieldwork as a method to avoid researchers’ biases and prejudices. They were concerned with documenting trade relations and other sorts of exchanges, such as ceremonial exchanges and life-cycle rituals. When confronted with the immense range of objects that people used in exchange, from shells to axe blades to cattle, anthropologists questioned whether such objects counted as money. Bronislaw Malinowski (1921: 14) famously declared that axe blades, shell necklaces and arm shells, and pigs—highly valued among the Trobriand Islanders—were not money. Nor were those objects likely to become money because, according to him, the islanders did not need a ‘common measure of value’. Instead, in the Pacific, shell necklaces and arm shells projected the reputation of men, demonstrating how their value was irreducible to a common standard. Elsewhere, however, shells did convey value over long distances. In Africa and Asia, cowrie shells served as a convenient currency—easily recognisable by their colour and shape, difficult though not impossible to counterfeit, and highly transportable (Şaul 2004). Malinowski’s contemporary, Marcel Mauss, cautioned that defining money in terms more relevant for European metropoles than Pacific Islands would only foreclose the possibility of focusing on its social significance in extending and even repairing relations (1990: Note 29, 100-2).

This debate set the stage for how anthropologists conceptualised non-state and non-standard objects that fulfilled some but not all of the functions of money taken for granted today. Such objects came to be called ‘primitive money’, in opposition to ‘modern money’ issued by a single issuing authority like a state bank (Dalton 1965). Other terms came into play, including ‘special-purpose money’ to denote objects restricted to certain kinds of people and types of relationships, in contrast to ‘general-purpose money’. Could, then, any object in circulation serve as ‘primitive’ money? Mary Douglas (1958) posed this question about cloth woven from the raffia palm. Among the Lele, a group in what was then the Belgian Congo, people wore the cloth, and while it quickly wore out, it could not be purchased; instead, people exchanged the material as peace offerings, gifts upon the delivery of a child, and even as a mortuary gift. These conventions ensured that older men received or wove the cloth, while younger men borrowed it, thus remaining indebted to their seniors. Raffia cloth, Douglas argued, had not evolved into a form of money because it circulated but without buying and selling; again, a claim that rested on an a priori definition of money as mediating market transactions, not social payments. Raffia cloth also raises the question of whether the physical stuff of money matters. If money represents exchange value (Menger 1892) or indexes social relationships of credit and debt (Graeber 2011), then the medium is either neutral or a ‘veil’ that conceals those underlying relationships. Yet the patterning of exchange relations, such as bridewealth, point to the specificity of relations and political processes that support money’s materiality. In societies where bridewealth involves paying respect to elders, even money and other goods are displayed so they are ‘seen by all, measured against one another, and displayed to function as memory devices about those prior obligations’ (Maurer 2018: 13).

These so-called ‘primitive currencies’—pigs raised by kin, raffia cloth woven by elderly men—circulated against the backdrop of an ever-widening set of state-issued currencies and expanding markets (Wolf 2010). Anthropologists analysing their difference initially drew on evolutionary paradigms, arguing that ‘primitive currencies’ would evolve into, or be displaced by, ‘modern’ ones. A well-known case is the model of co-existing ‘spheres of exchange’, in which Paul Bohannan (1955) described how members of the Tiv ethnic group in western Nigeria organised their transactions into three hierarchically-ranked spheres, each one defined by the object(s) that circulated as currency. The lowest sphere of exchange was concerned with subsistence. Here people exchanged foodstuffs and everyday utensils. The middle sphere mediated prestige through transactions with cattle and metal bars, and the highest sphere designated rights over dependent women and children. While these spheres were distinct, they were also permeable. People occasionally traded iron rods downward for foodstuffs or upward as social payments for marriage. In the nineteenth century, however, colonial administrators viewed metal rods as money and established a rate of exchange with the new coinage, which then circulated as an ‘all-purpose currency’, eventually collapsing the spheres, and, by extension, the social relations and cultural values held by the Tiv. Frustrated elders cursed money as bride payments increased and foodstuffs were trucked away to larger markets (1955: 69).

This story of money dissolving customary arrangements and social bonds has proven to be remarkably enduring among anthropologists, a myth that opposes culture and money (for a critique, see Maurer 2006). Like barter, Bohannan’s model also has significant limitations. For example, he does not account for how people came to possess metal rods in the first place. These objects did not just circulate in contained spheres; rather, some rods originated in Europe and then moved across Atlantic Africa as people converted them into assets with greater longevity and security than other currencies or objects (Guyer 2004: 30). Consequently, anthropologists now emphasise asymmetrical values, stressing how the value of objects shifts across different social and political landscapes (Appadurai 1986). People seek to realise gains in their conversions, propelled by competition, war, and conquest as much as by trade.

By the mid-twentieth century, as money proper coalesced into a paradigmatic form of state-issued national currencies, so did the story of money’s evolution from commodity-money to coins and paper notes backed by precious metals to state-issued currencies. Today, however, anthropologists recognise how debates over ‘primitive money’ staged other dichotomies between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the assumed ‘savage’ and self-declared ‘civilized’, allowing standard monetary objects to signal the arrival of the ‘modern’—impersonal, objective, and impervious to the particularities of historical and cultural difference (Nelms & Maurer 2014: 45). Once we accord non-standard variants the status of money, we can address questions such as when something is money, where something is money, and for whom something is money (Agha 2017: 300). What comes into view in asking these question is ‘moneyness’ as a relational property between objects and subjects (Zickgraf 2017). It is not that alternative forms of money express solidarities, hierarchies, and differences, and modern money does not; instead, we may want to conceptualise not just what money is but also when and how things and ideas work as money (Maurer 2006; Nelms & Maurer 2014: 39).

Money at the threshold of persons and relations

Anthropological interest in money has engaged concepts of neoclassical economics as well as those of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century European philosophers, who reflected on money through the provocations of industrialization (Marx 1977 [1867]) and the seduction of urban metropoles (Simmel 1990). For anthropologists, the question was whether money gave rise to a particular worldview, or whether it reflected specific historical and social circumstances. In the book Money and the morality of exchange, Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry argued that money had no intrinsic meaning; instead, it was an existing worldview that gave rise to ‘particular ways of representing money’ (Bloch & Parry 1989: 19). They also emphasised broader patterns, noting how across different societies, people evaluated the morality of transactions in relation to different temporal orders. In short-term activities, such as bargaining in the marketplace or spending a windfall from gambling, people tended to express values of competition and acquisitiveness. Over the long-term, however, they evaluated monetary transactions in relation to moral and even cosmological orders. Farmers in Kenya, for example, referred to the gains from the selling of land holdings that did not benefit them in the long-run as ‘bitter money’ (Shipton 1989), while young men in northern Madagascar working in sapphire mines spent their earnings or ‘hot money’ in daring ways, signalling their rejection of their place on the social landscape (Walsh 2003).

Through earning, spending, saving, and even investing, money mediates personhood in multiple ways, as we saw above with young men in Madagascar. In the post-Civil War United States (from the 1870s to 1930s), as household incomes increased and consumer goods became more widely available, the meanings associated with wages for men and women diverged (Zelizer 2017). Men were considered to earn a ‘family wage’, sufficient enough to support spouses and children, whereas women received ‘pin money’, even as wages, intended for incidental expenditures (Zelizer 2017: 27). In Southeast Asia, where scholars long associated women with markets and money, anthropologists found the wives of Malay fishermen and Javanese batik makers handled money, not because they had more power or status than their husbands, but because they were seen to domesticate money by channelling it for household expenses (Brenner 1998; Carsten 1989). Such gendered conceptions of money have spurred microfinance organisations to promote their activities as empowering women. Yet joint-collateral loans made to groups of women, in which all borrowers are equally responsible for repaying the loan, can heighten the vulnerability of female borrowers. Loan collectors in Bangladesh, for example, relied on social codes of honour and shame to recover loans, which has led to some women being ostracised from community life (Karim 2011). In Paraguay, microfinance organisations instrumentalised women’s social ties via group-based loans, whereas men were seen as autonomous subjects and so responsible for only their individual share (Schuster 2014).

The many ways in which money relates to worldviews and personhood shows that how we assign meanings to transactions matters. For example, measurements of the GNP (gross national product) exclude those activities that are said not to produce economic value such as government transfers, charitable donations, family gifts, and bequests, even though they involve money (Gibson-Graham 2006). Yet money is promiscuous, often crossing the interpretive boundaries that people seek to maintain (Akin & Robbins 1999: 7). In capitalist societies, people tend to oppose commodities and gifts for ideological reasons, an opposition that reasserts money’s proper place in the market (Bloch & Parry 1989: 9) and highlights gifts as subjectively constituted (Weiner 1992; Strathern 1988). However, money can be a powerful gift itself, evident in the energy that people expend to disguise the economic nature of transactions (Bourdieu 1977), or invoke the ‘perfect gift’, to resolve the contradiction between commodities in the marketplace and gifts in the family domain (Carrier 1990). For migrants, money now constitutes the ‘internal essence of the transnational family today’ (Gregory 2012: 392), evident in how remittances are intended to secure a place for the migrant, supplementing their absence (Cliggett 2005). This role of money is so powerful that in some countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, the overall economic value of remittances surpasses that of major exports in the home country.

Yet the meaning of money as gift is highly unstable. It may spur recipients to imagine idealised capitalist landscapes (Small 2019) or even to re-arrange social relationships. Young Thai women who migrated from rural farming communities to cities seeking work in factories are a case in point. They have been shown to try to reconcile their family obligations and roles as dutiful daughters who remit their earning to their parents with their desires to spend these earnings on expressing themselves as modern women (Mills 1999). Consumption practices enable them to constitute social selves, but they may bring about new forms of indebtedness. The expansion of shopping malls in Latin America and post-apartheid South Africa, for example, has contributed to growing consumer debt. Salaried individuals now enjoy new possibilities of enrichment as they become eligible for consumer loans that they, in turn, lend to others, creating a ‘money-go-round’ aimed at aspirational consumption (James 2014). In the face of the pleasures associated with the expanding consumer goods market, combined with a volatile banking sector, people come up with new strategies to improve their lives. For example, in Nepal, urban residents participate in dhukuti, whereby a group contributes a specific monthly sum to engage in consumption, much like rotating savings and credit associations yet redirected to allow members to participate in consumer markets (Bajracharya 2018: 94). Thereby, money extends sociality, even though its physical form is neither fixed nor constant (Dodd 2016; Yuran 2014). Its flows erode some relations but expand and extend others, potentially creating a ‘human economy’ (Hart 2017: 5).

Money mediates cosmological worlds as well. In China, people used different replicas of money as offerings to gods, ancestors, and ghosts, their hierarchy secured by specific material objects (Wolf 1974; Feuchtwang 2001: 19). In Vietnam, where a similar relationship to money prevails, people contend with a post-war landscape where they offer replica US hundred dollar bills to both gods and ghosts, materialising the changing relations with the dead in which the hierarchy of gods and ghosts no longer pertains (Kwon 2007). Likewise, in Cuba where political legitimacy rests upon the revolution, practitioners of Ifá, a divination cult, offer money to the orichas, deity-figures presumed to exert divine influence over people’s everyday life (Holbraad 2005). In the lowlands of South America, peasants forced to work on expanding sugar plantations sought to increase their earnings by drawing on the logic of capital—the power of money to beget more money. During baptismal rites conducted by Catholic priests, godparents-to-be would ask that peso notes be baptised instead of the child, a ritual that exposed the metaphysics of capitalism, where making money was elevated above human life (Taussig 1977: 137). In a princely polity of Madagascar, the ritual use of coins served a different purpose—to channel sacred ancestral power (Lambek 2001). The coins placed in the mouth of the deceased were not those issued by the contemporary state but ones that predated colonialism and mercantile trade, notably the slave trade, exposing how royal power ‘is derived ultimately from violence . . . a life for a life’ (Lambek 2001: 754). The use of money for metaphysical ends—appeasing ghosts, blessing coins, and conveying ancestral power—encodes not just cosmologies but also legacies of economic and political upheaval. No wonder, then, that people engage in gambling, an activity that reimagines money by decoupling value from labour, investment, and return (Pickles 2019).

Monetary pluralism

How people and institutions manage money’s various functions is a vital concern, especially in the Global South, where monetary pluralism has long prevailed. Monetary pluralism refers to how people juggle not one but many currencies. In postcolonial settings, state-issued currencies have never entirely displaced indigenous media. In Papua New Guinea, for example, shell valuables are still used in exchange, especially in contexts where young men have more access to cash than older men (Foster 1999: 221). Even the foundation of ‘hard currencies’, so called because they serve as storing and protecting wealth in money, can be unmade and remade. In 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the US dollar-gold convertibility, a move that engendered new sources of insecurity and profit (Gregory 1997) and eventually ushered in a new regime of central banking based on inflation targeting and price stability (Holmes 2014).

Why, despite the multiple forms of money, do conceptions of it remain so stubbornly state-centric (Guyer 2012)? One answer may lie in that state currencies reinforce the idea of national markets and the nation as a collective body (Helleiner 2003). That said, national currencies have never been coterminous with the boundaries of modern states, some mediating trans-border exchanges, while others, like the US dollar and the euro, traverse state borders and challenge national sovereignty. In socialist and post-socialist states, the appearance of the US dollar signalled the ascendance of the market (Lemon 1998; Truitt 2013). However, in Haiti, people uphold the fictional ‘Haitian dollar’ (alongside the national currency known as Haitian gourdes) as a placeholder for national sovereignty, especially valued among those people not subject to international humanitarian efforts denominated in US dollars (Neiburg 2016).

Producing a standard measure of value, or unit of account, involves political work (Desan 2010). Just as individual households use strategies of enclosure, taboos, and concealment to protect their assets, states do as well, using central banks to maintaining reserves that bolster their credibility and confidence (Peebles 2008: 236). In Argentina, the 2001-2002 forced conversion of U.S. dollar-based accounts into pesos led residents to look for alternative assets for storing value, exposing the national currency as a failed state project (Muir 2011). If national currencies circulate as instruments of state power and symbols of popular sovereignty, they are also materials through which people assess the authority of the state and the legitimacy of markets. In the former Soviet Union, people attributed the reliability of the US dollar to the material qualities of the currency (Lemon 1998), while in Indonesia, citizens used the national currency in other representational forms such as advertisements and billboards, thus remediating it as a means of political communication (Strassler 2009). In Mongolia, state-issued currency is not standardised but valued within specific transactions; shopkeepers viewed the cash held by small-scale gold miners as ‘polluted’ (High 2013), underscoring how they assigned value through the status of its possessor. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, people likewise rejected the state’s authority to guarantee the value of its currency by relying instead on the material qualities of cash (Walker 2017). In Cuba, the state issued two different currencies: a domestic peso to represent collective labour, and a convertible peso for use by tourists; however, in everyday exchanges, people often handled the domestic Cuban peso in pursuit of profits (Tankha 2018). In such instances, money reveals its performative dimension, seen in how even indices that purported to simply measure money’s fluctuating values are used to adjust actual prices and wages (Neiburg 2006).

Monetary pluralism is a strategy by which people sidestep formal financial institutions, even though they are still ‘saving, loaning, hedging risk, and investing’ (Maurer, Musaraj & Small 2018: 2). These practices of so-called ‘low finance’ can be unexpectedly transnational. Somalis in Kenya draw on informal hawala money-transfer systems for remitting money and financing new businesses as well as meeting basic social needs. Hawala channels value over long distances through a network of brokers, and today it exists alongside formal banking systems, allowing people to remit money often more quickly and without the fees of formal financial institutions. Through this system, Somalis mobilise financial capital through their continued investment in family relationships that stretch from Africa to Europe and North America. It enables people to cultivate social capital that has been at the root of their business success in spite of the collapse of the Somali state (Omeje & Githigaro 2018).

Monetary pluralism challenges normative assumptions of the social foundations of money, namely trust and confidence. While textbooks may insist all monetary systems are equal, alternative voices such as Positive Money in the United Kingdom argue for new models that recognize that how money is created and governed is central to our collective life (Di Muzio & Robbins 2017). In Macedonia, for example, the authoritarian regime tightened its grip on power as vendors accepted in-kind payments—unfinished apartments or cars—that lost value over time (Mattioli 2018). At the same time, Wall Street stockbrokers, driven by a belief in maximising shareholder value, justify business practices that destabilised markets, companies, and jobs (Ho 2009). Anthropologists have consequently turned to investigating the material and political processes that create, regulate, and circulate money.

Networks, platforms and open questions

As people bypass financial institutions and state-issued currencies, they create new forms of money. Airtime, or prepaid cell phone minutes, is one of the most celebrated instances of how people’s strategies of channelling value became formalised as mobile money (Maurer 2012). In Kenya, people purchased airtime cards and sent the verification code to a recipient who would either use the airtime or sell those minutes to a vendor at a discount for cash, effectively bypassing formal financial institutions and their transaction fees. Alternative monetary forms and money-like objects now abound, uncanny descendants of the 'primitive monies' once described by anthropologists.

New money platforms and networks are successful only insofar as they draw on existing behaviours, moral frameworks, and socialities, a point that has been made about bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that first appeared as a critique of the 2008 financial crisis (Nelms & Maurer 2014). Unlike national currency issued by a centralised state, transactions with bitcoin are authenticated by a distributed bookkeeping function known as blockchain. Maintained on a far-flung network of computers, the blockchain logs and verifies transactions. People let the blockchain do this work from their computers because it enables them to receive bitcoin in return (a process known as ‘mining’). The blockchain as a platform provides an alternative to the power traditionally conferred on centralised record-keepers. Users, however, invoke familiar practices and moral discourses, or ‘digital metallism’, by attributing the value of bitcoin to its scarcity, much like gold (Maurer, Nelms & Swartz 2013). They also attribute their trust to the distributed network of the blockchain, thus conflating the object and the system that enabled it, exposing the importance of networks in materialising transactional activity, including the coin itself.

The rise of digital and mobile monies foregrounds the infrastructures through which value flows, especially the ‘currency interface’ or conversion of value across different platforms (Guyer 1994). Such infrastructures include a vast apparatus of objects and recording devices such as payment cards, mobile phones, networks of wire, and electronic point-of-sale terminals. The assemblages of transactional objects and ideas that make the transfer of value possible are often ‘forgotten, ignored, or operate in the background’ (Maurer & Swartz 2017) yet they operate as the ‘rails’ that carry value from one location to another. By noticing these payment systems, we can ask questions such as who owns the rails, who or what authenticates payments, and who bears the cost of supporting and maintaining the infrastructure. Today, for example, data breaches take on a ritual form. Corporations publicise the number, often in the millions, and then pledge greater surveillance of the vast amounts of data that still leave individuals exposed to data breaches.

Despite the growing importance of electronic and digital payments, cash persists as a vital part of monetary ecologies, especially in the Global South. One of the most spectacular examples of how cash operates was the demonetization campaign in India, in which the Reserve Bank withdrew high denomination rupee notes from circulation (Dharia & Trisal 2017). While the campaign was promoted as an effort to eradicate ‘black money’, or untaxed cash transactions, the withdrawal of cash had differential effects across India. Recipients of microloans, for example, could not repay or receive loans unless they participated in digital payments (Kar 2017). The campaign also exposed other inequities: people who hoarded cash hired those who were cash-poor to wait in line to deposit money, exposing how the scheme to reduce illegal practices and tax avoidance relied on the labour of already-marginalised citizens (Dharia 2017). Even while scholars agree that money is a ‘token’, more a concept than a thing, people still handle paper notes as though they were inherently valuable, a dilemma that asks how money as a social object relates to money as a physical object (Vasantkumar 2019: 318) and returns to the preoccupations of anthropologists over defining what counts as money (Maurer 2018).

Anthropologists have long highlighted the political and economic systems in which money circulates, from families that seek to maintain their kinship ties across space and time, to the performances of legitimacy among state actors like central bankers. They are thus well-positioned to investigate future monies, by asking how objects travel, generate prestige, and introduce new forms of inequalities. Anthropologists also continue to examine the role of beliefs that accrue to some monetary objects but not others. If money rests on a social foundation backed by its institutional authority, do the specific material properties bolster people’s confidence in money and its issuing authority? What is the difference between money and valuables or assets? Do asset-classes like houses and securities, for example, have attributes like valued shells when they serve as stores of wealth? By posing questions around the material practices of stockpiling and accounting and the means of channelling value across space and time, anthropologists will continue to ask questions that challenge our received wisdom about money.

Conclusion

Confronted with a range of objects that have money-like features, anthropologists have highlighted the multiple practices and beliefs animating the idea of money. Just describing the meanings people assign, however, is not enough to understand what money is. As the recent financial crisis has made clear, the nature of money is sometimes not even visible to or understood by its users and governing technocrats like central bankers. Today, it is imperative to recognize money’s malleability—its new objects, relations, and even platforms—that expose how it is continually being unmade and remade. If we acknowledge that money is ‘not bestowed upon us by nature or some god, and if it can be shown that the present monetary system is undemocratic, unfair and unstable’ (Di Muzio & Robbins 2017: 39), then what are the possibilities of remaking money? Anthropologists work with designers, engineers, and religious scholars who are also invested in creating alternatives to our present monetary systems (Rudnyckyj 2018). Their efforts to represent money in ever new ways parallel those of the ethnographer (Maurer 2005). The challenge is therefore not just to define what money is, but also to understand how the institutional and collective efforts to make, unmake, and remake money are on-going projects of human sociality.

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Note on contributor

Allison Truitt is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the author of Dreaming of money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Money: ethnographic encounters (Bloomsbury, 2007).

Dr. Allison Truitt, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University, 6823 Saint Charles Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana, 70118 US. atruitt@tulane.edu.

Sport

Felix Stein — Tue, 14 May 2019 12:33:54 +0000

Niko Besnier Susan Brownell

University of Amsterdam and University of Missouri-St. Louis

Initially published 14 May 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19sport

Abstract:

Activities that one can retrospectively label as ‘sport’ have probably been part of human beings’ repertoire for millennia, but sports as we know them today are the product of a modernity that arose from the late eighteenth century at the juncture of civil society, industrial capitalism, muscular Christianity, and the colonial expansion of North Atlantic states. Today, it is deeply intertwined with neoliberal capital, media technology, and neocolonial relations between the Global South and the Global North, as well as structures of inequality within nation-states in the Global North. Despite its neglect as an anthropological subject, sport under all its guises, from its effect on individual bodies to its spectacular manifestations in the rituals of mega-events, is a perfect object for an anthropological analysis inspired by ritual theory, exchange theory, feminist anthropology, and ethnographic approaches to globalization.

Sport in anthropology

All humans have probably engaged in sport-like activities since time immemorial, and today’s sports events and massive infrastructures are simply the latest permutation of a relationship amongst sport, spectacle, and political power that harks back to antiquity in the Greek Olympic Games, Roman gladiator games and chariot races, and Mesoamerican ball court games. Throughout the world and across the centuries, humans have engaged in rule-governed activities that exhibit certain features, the relative importance of which varies considerably across societies and contexts. These features include skill, physical exertion, sociality, pleasure, chance, theatricality, and competition. The task of surveying sport cross-culturally is hampered by the problem that the term ‘sport’ describes a category of activities that only coalesced in the West in the nineteenth century and was then carried around the globe by Western colonialism and imperialism and later globalization (Guttmann 1994). Many languages did not have a term with an equivalent semantic value until they borrowed it from a European language (Besnier, Brownell & Carter 2017: 3).

Today, the category is highly contested because being defined as a sport makes an activity eligible for official recognition by powerful international sports organizations; these organizations, in turn, defend the borders of their membership by constantly revising their definition of sport. The two international sports organizations with the broadest multi-sport representation and greatest global influence, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the General Association of International Sport Federations (SportAccord), emphasise that sport should be characterised first and foremost by competition, reflecting contemporary popular understandings in the West. For heuristic purposes, we follow this dominant usage here, while acknowledging that thinking of competition as central to sport may impose a Western view on activities that their local practitioners may understand differently.

Understanding competition as central to sport implies that sport is typically enacted in public events underpinned by complex social organization, with the events being the most visible part of the total phenomenon. Behind the scenes, however, there may be a great deal of sport-like non-competitive physical activity, such as athletes’ daily practice routines. In other contexts, such as the fitness practices that have become widespread throughout the world since the 1980s, competition may not be central to most practitioners, although these practices can potentially be codified into sports such as competitive aerobics. Moreover, even the concept of competition is not straightforward, since in some societies competitions are ‘fixed’ to conform to their social organizations. For example, ritualised footraces, archery, and wrestling reinforced the authority of kings among the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, and Hittites (Scanlon 2012). In the 1950s, the Gahuku-Gama of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea played a sport loosely based on rugby to settle disputes, and the game ended in a draw when elders, watching from the sidelines, deemed the dispute solved (Read 1965: 190). In Afghanistan in the 1970s, khans (leaders) hosted buzkashi, a horseback game in which riders compete to seize the carcass of a dead goat and carry it to a goal; the scores were decided by debate, and often the most powerful khan won the debate (Azoy 2011). In games of cricket in the Trobriand Islands in the 1970s, the home team always won (Leach 1976).

Late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeologists had embraced sports as a hallmark feature of ‘Western civilization’ because of the prominent place that Greek games in ancient Olympia and Roman gladiator games in the Coliseum occupied in the archaeological record. But the attempt to arrive at a definition of sport is an anachronism influenced by the fact that the global reach of activities labelled as ‘sport’ today means that what counts or doesn’t count as such is laden with social, cultural, political, and economic repercussions that did not exist in previous epochs. Rather than seeking to establish an all-encompassing definition, anthropological approaches are attentive to the questions of when a particular activity qualifies or not as a sport, for whom, and to what end.

A heated debate amongst historians has centred on whether the keeping of records is found in any other historical or cultural contexts, or whether it defined modern sport (Guttmann 2004). Indeed, the use of the English term ‘sport’ to denote an athletic activity governed by rules of competition first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1860s, almost simultaneously with the concept of the sports record (Mandell 1976). But the definition of ‘record’ has also proven to be problematic: there are multiple examples of individuals being ranked by their number of victories in such diverse cultural contexts as the ancient pan-Hellenic Games and weightlifting in nineteenth-century Edo Japan. In societies without standardised measurements or timekeeping, it was difficult or impossible to measure sports records in ways we take for granted today. Efforts at record-keeping and quantification for purposes of comparison may not be modern, but what is decidedly modern is the keeping of local, national, world, and other such records that reflect the bureaucratic structure of modern society since the nineteenth century.

Until recently, sport was a much more common topic of enquiry in history and sociology than in anthropology. In 1985, Kendall Blanchard and Alyce Cheska made the first attempt to define an anthropological approach to sport in The anthropology of sport: an introduction. They took a multiple subfield approach and ran through a list of archaeological, biological, and cultural theories and concepts that could be applied to sports. The cultural approach was functionalist, i.e. seeking to explain the existence of a feature in terms of the need it is supposed to meet, and did not have the benefit of the feminist, postmodern, and critical cultural studies that were then getting underway in the discipline, so the ideas presented in the book were quickly considered outdated. A pioneer sport ethnographer was Alan Klein, who documented baseball in the Dominican Republic (1991, 2014) and the U.S.–Mexico border (1997) as well as bodybuilding in Los Angeles (1993). By the twenty-first century, the number of ethnographically informed works on sport had increased significantly (for example, Carter 2011; Dyck 2012; Joo 2012; Kelly 2018; Laviolette 2011; Starn 2011; Thangaraj 2015).

One reason for the increase was that, more than ever before, sport plays an important role in people’s everyday lives as well as in economics and politics. Another was that sport operates on multiple scales, from intimate aspects of people’s lives to mega-events that bring together the entire world, such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup. Sport is therefore a particularly attractive field to ask how people’s local lives are intertwined with global processes, a question that stands at the centre of anthropology in the twenty-first century. It is also a productive lens through which anthropologists have studied other important questions about the nature of contemporary society and culture, such as the role of nationalism, changing norms of gender and sexuality, and the growing role that particular forms of capitalism play in our everyday activities.

The emergence of modern sport

In nineteenth-century Europe, many forms of sport-like activities preceded the emergence of modern sport. They had unwritten, locally specific rules and particular versions bore only a loose resemblance to others. In the 1840s, standardised ballgames emerged, primarily in elite British public schools, but for several decades their rules were unstable and they coexisted with the localised games of the working classes (Kitching 2015). By the 1880s, national sport associations had codified the rules of most sports as we know them today and two institutions – clubs and schools – quickly began carrying them around the world along with colonialism and imperialism. School sports became part and parcel of industrial capitalism as schools in Britain and Switzerland used them to attract the sons of the British old rank-based and new money-based elites. Club sports followed as the now-grown sons established them wherever they settled as they expanded their global industrial footprint (Lanfranchi & Taylor 2001).

Local sports were incorporated into local, national, regional, and international systems that imitated the layers of the political structures emerging at the same time. Modern sports took shape alongside the rise of the nation-state, incorporating rites of nationalism such as flag raising, anthem singing, and parades, as is still evident at many sporting events. National athletic unions that oversaw multiple sports appeared in the last third of the nineteenth century. Although the events they organised were new, they were legitimated by grounding them in a romanticised past, a process that Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) call the ‘invention of tradition’. This was the case of the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, which was fuelled by the idealization of classical Greece that had accompanied the rise of modern democracy.

Nationalism existed in an uneasy relationship with ethnicity. Folk sports that were standardised and incorporated into the emerging national structures – such as the national school system, the club or professional sport system – held a higher status and were carried abroad along with colonial and imperial projects. Non-Western sports and the sports of ethnic minorities in the West were at a disadvantage. In 1964 judo was the first sport of non-Western origin to enter the Olympic Games (it did not become an official sport until 1972): often hailed as a ‘traditional oriental’ sport, it was actually invented in the 1880s by combining principles of Western physical education with Japanese martial arts (Niehaus 2006). The Chinese martial art of wushu was not accepted onto the program for the Beijing 2008 Olympics despite the heavy pressure that the Chinese government exerted on the IOC (Brownell 2012a). For many ethnic sports, the price of exclusion from the international sport system is a concomitant exclusion from their national sport system, resulting in lack of funding, exclusion from school physical education, and the declining interest of younger generations. A few ethnically marked sports such as judo, wushu and Thai kickboxing (Muay Thai) have managed to thrive and spread internationally; others, such as traditional wrestling in Senegal and India, or kabaddi in India, have maintained a national fan base on account of their intense identification with national and ethnic identities (Hann 2018; Alter 1992, 2000). Generally, however, Western cultural imperialism has replaced local sports with sports of Western origin throughout the world.

The disseminators of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and North American sports were fervent adherents of muscular Christianity, a form of Protestantism that idealised athleticism, virility, and discipline. They also firmly believed in their own superiority as white men, and used sport to justify masculinism, nationalism, and colonialism (Mangan 1981). In the US sphere of influence, particularly East Asia, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), offered sports to young men (and to a lesser extent women) to convert them to Christianity (Gems 2006). Arguably, their more lasting contribution to world history was not the diffusion of Christianity but the diffusion of British and North American sports, particularly rugby, football, and cricket (spread by the British), and baseball and basketball (spread by North Americans).

Well into the twentieth century, sport was deeply entangled with European colonialism and American imperialism. The racist ideology that undergirded colonialism and slavery extended into sport and generated the enduring stereotype of the ‘natural athlete’ who possesses physical prowess adapted to his ‘savage’ existence, although this stereotype had its opponents among those who believed in the physical superiority of the ‘civilized’ white man (Brownell 2008). Anthropologists have long rejected that race is a biological category and demonstrated that race is a subjective interpretation of people’s superficial appearance, and these interpretations shape the reality of individuals being judged. Individuals may be naturally predisposed to certain forms of physical activity, but to say that entire groups are is nonsensical, because sports skills are the product of individual life histories shaped by social opportunities (Marks 2008: 395).

In schools, the military, and the police, colonisers taught sports to the colonised so as to instil in them what they considered civilised values. Later, however, sport became a conduit for decolonization as the colonised appropriated sport toward their own ends. In some cases, the desire of colonised people to beat the coloniser at their own game led to a national passion for a sport. In the Caribbean, cricket games became the stage for anti-colonial resistance against their British masters, as famously documented by Afro-Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James (2013). In other cases, the colonised adapted sports to their own social and cultural contexts. Such was the case with cricket in the Trobriand Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea, made famous in Trobriand Cricket (Leach 1976), a documentary that has delighted many anthropology undergraduates worldwide over the decades with its scenes of several dozen players dancing in military formation to songs loaded with sexual innuendos.

Sport under capitalism and socialism

In the colonial metropoles, sport replicated the class hierarchies on which industrial capitalism was based. In Britain, public-school-educated elites were anxious to distinguish their sporting activities from the rough-and-tumble and morally suspect working-class ballgames. By the 1870s, the government had regulated the punishing industrial work schedules and workers could finally enjoy some free time, and blue-collar boys and men enthusiastically took up the newly codified sports, particularly football, encouraged by factory owners who saw an opportunity to distract them away from social unrest and improve their work ethics (Munting 2003). As football became popular among workers, public schools gradually abandoned it in favour of rugby.

Elites used arguments based on moral imperatives to justify the role of sport in maintaining the social divide: the amateur ideal maintained that athletes should be motivated by fair play and honour and not by material interests and was alleged (incorrectly) to have been inherited from ancient Greece (Young 1984). Amateur rules excluded members of the working classes, whose participation in sport often depended on skipping work. Late nineteenth-century Britain saw the eruption of conflict over ‘broken time’, namely compensation for time away from work to engage in sport. The IOC, which has regulated the Olympic Games from their revival in 1896, forbade Olympic athletes from openly receiving payment for competing until the late 1980s (Llewellyn & Gleaves 2016). Continental European and North American IOC members sometimes chafed at the rigidity of British members on this point.

In the twentieth century, as elite-level sport became increasingly commodified, social classes became polarised in a different way. In many professional sports, athletes now were largely of working-class or ethnic and racial minority (and later migrant) background, while team owners, managers, and other technocrats were overwhelmingly members of the elite classes. The class structure of sport thus reproduced that of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, with athletes selling their labour for wages and capitalists owning the labourers, controlling contracts and setting wages. Only recently have court challenges and collective bargaining granted professional athletes greater control over their labour power. In the United States, most elite-level athletes have benefited from athletic scholarships to universities, where they are unremunerated despite generating huge revenues for the institutions (Gilbert 2016).

Even at the non-professional level, sport is deeply entangled in social-class politics. We owe the most systematic analysis of these dynamics to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984), who observed that members of the same social strata tend to gravitate towards the same kinds of sport and have little enthusiasm for (and sometimes despise) the sporting activities associated with other social classes, a process that he labelled ‘distinction’. Football in Britain and France, for example, appeals largely to the lower-middle and working classes, while elites prefer golf, tennis, and skiing. In some cases, these distinctions can be attributed to the resources required (e.g., for most people, skiing assumes the ability to travel, take time off work, and purchase expensive equipment), but in other cases material explanations are insufficient. Sport ‘choices’ thus have the effect of inscribing persons into a particular position in hierarchies of social class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and age.

In reaction to the class, gender, and ethnic distinctions that were already so deeply ingrained in ‘bourgeois’ sport in the early twentieth century, the Soviet Union, after its founding in 1917, attempted to develop an alternative socialist model of sport. Sport in the USSR was originally financed by industries and, after the 1950s, increasingly by the state, as the country began seeking sporting victories to demonstrate the superiority of socialism. State-supported athletes were derogatorily called ‘state shamateurs’ in the capitalist West for violating amateur rules, while socialist countries maintained that they were remunerated as soldiers, workers, or students. The West acquiesced in this fiction because international sports fields were one of the few meeting places where citizens of the communist and capitalist worlds could come together.

Socialist nations further demonstrated their commitment to equality in sport by organising sporting events that showcased ethnic minorities. The USSR organised the first Central Asian Games in 1920, which inspired China’s National Games of Minority Nationalities, held quadrennially from 1953 to the present, featuring sports associated with the 55 officially recognised non-Han nationalities. The relationship between sport and ethnic identity was a legacy of the continental European traditions of folklore and ethnology that predominated in Russia and China: traditional sports counted amongst the local customs (along with dances, rituals, and other practices) that scholars used to classify people into ethnic groups. However, these events clearly serve the assimilationist goals of the state (Liebold 2010).

In multicultural capitalist countries, indigenous minorities started using sports events as an identity-affirming political strategy in the 1970s. Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States organised the first Arctic Winter Games in 1970 and the North American Indigenous Games in 1990. These competitions include both indigenous and global sports (Paraschak & Morgan 1997).

The neoliberal restructuring of sport

In the late twentieth century, the expanding global economy wiped out the socialist experiment (except for China, North Korea, and Cuba) and the inexorable increase of commercialization and professionalism compelled international sport organizations to eliminate the amateur rules. In many parts of the world, neoliberal economic policies privatised television channels, which found in the most popular sports a readily available and at-first inexpensive content with which to fill airtime. Corporate advertisers soon flocked to the new media platform, fuelling the escalation of television broadcasting rights fees. With it came an exponential rise in the wealth of elite clubs, sport federations, and top-level athletes and the dramatically uneven distribution of this wealth, as only a few sports are regularly televised and very few athletes earn enormous salaries. Corporate sponsorship of teams and events attracted multinational sources of capital into sports. Meanwhile, satellite television became commercial in 1982, bringing images of sporting glory to viewers in the Global South.

The wealth that today revolves around the most popular sports, such as football, rugby union, and basketball, has mobilised the yearning of ethnically and racially marginalised young men in the destitute urban settings of the Global North. In the inner cities of North America or the underprivileged suburbs of Western Europe, a career in sport was a way out of poverty. Very few actually made it, but ethnic and racial minorities came to numerically dominate some professional sports, such as basketball and American football in the United States, although the corporate structure of the sports continued to be dominated by wealthy white men.

More than a century has passed since racist evolutionary theories were abandoned in anthropology, yet in popular culture the hyper-visibility of non-white athletes continues to provoke searches for biological factors that supposedly explain sports skills in terms of race. Sometimes the biological argument about an innate athletic gift is twisted to argue that people of European descent are still superior in the ways that count. For example, Pacific Island and Māori male rugby players are said to be extremely successful players thanks to their ‘natural’ talent, but they are widely branded as undisciplined, unreliable, and unteachable (Hokowhitu 2004; Besnier 2015). Race-based arguments erase the fact that athletic prowess is the result of extraordinary personal efforts, and that young women and men of colour may be disproportionately represented in sports because other paths to mobility are closed to them.

Since the 1980s, clubs and teams of the most popular sports like football and basketball, now corporate entities, have been embroiled in a cutthroat competition for economic survival. They have recruited increasing numbers of players in the Global South. Concurrently, many economies in the former colonial world have collapsed as a result of the world’s turn to neoliberal economic policies, and entire countries have become emigrating societies. In this context, many young men, who have been particularly affected by shrinking labour markets, dedicate themselves to sport with the dream of signing a contract with the top teams they watch on satellite television (Besnier et al. 2018).

The transnational mobility of athletes has reconfigured the relationship between national identity and citizenship, as increasing numbers of athletes representing cities and nations are immigrants or children of immigrants. Some countries fast-track migrant athletes to citizenship, most blatantly oil-rich countries in the Persian Gulf, which have sometimes mounted teams consisting mostly of newly-minted citizens from the Global South while at the same time barring access to citizenship to low-level migrant workers who had toiled there for decades (Besnier, Brownell & Carter 2017: 219-22).

Sports have become a battleground of racial conflicts, in which some athletes have used their hyper-visibility to protest discrimination, as illustrated in the protests in the United States since 2017 by African-American football players who ‘took a knee’ during the national anthem to protest racial oppression. The decision of team owners in the National Football League to ban the practice as ‘unpatriotic’ served as a reminder that the world of professional and international sport is a system that reproduces racial and other hierarchies extant in society. Although athlete protests have stimulated public debate about race in the United States, there is little evidence that longstanding power structures have been reformed in response.

Sport, gender, and sex

In the West, most modern sports were a ‘male preserve’ at their inception and continued to be a last bastion of traditional masculinity (Dunning 1986). In the early modern Olympic Games, women competed in sports that did not challenge Western ideals of femininity, such as figure skating and archery, but it was not until 1928 that a few running events were added for women, and not until 1964 that the first team sport, volleyball, was added. In the United States, gender inequality was not addressed until the US Congress enacted in 1972 sweeping legislation known as ‘Title IX’, whose effect on sport was the requirement that women’s sports in schools and universities be allocated the same funding as men’s sports. In contrast, sport in China after the 1949 Revolution quickly became a path to upward mobility for peasant women and never was a male preserve (Brownell 1995).

Gender segregation is woven into the very fabric of modern sport. The common argument is that it ensures ‘fair’ competition, since men are thought to be stronger than women. However, there are sports in which women compete successfully with men, such as equestrian events, yet women were only allowed in an equestrian event at the 1952 Olympics. Men and women do not have to be separated by gender, as is evident in mixed-sex sports such as doubles in tennis or mixed-sex running relays. Women might also be competitive with men in some sports if they were divided by weight-class divisions rather than gender (Healy et al. 2014).

That the gender line is not just about fairness for female athletes is demonstrated by the fact that the world of sports has been a bastion of heterosexuality, characterised by strong homophobia, from the nineteenth century up to the present. It is ironic, because the Western all-male institutions meant to turn boys into men, such as public schools in Britain and the YMCA in the United States, tacitly encouraged surreptitious same-sex attractions that were forbidden in mainstream society (Gustav-Wrathall 1998). Still today, male professional sports and the international sports system display a homophobia that is in many ways more profound than that of mainstream society. Very few professional athletes have ‘come out’ of their own accord. This has prompted gay, lesbian, and transgender people to form their own associations and events, most prominently the Gay Games held every four years since 1982 (Symons 2010). Moreover, the clampdown on homosexuality has persisted even while rampant sexual abuse of both boys and girls has been endemic in sports and has been covered up by coaches and administrators, a reality that is only now undergoing widespread public examination. The most egregious example is the case of USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar of Michigan State University, who was brought to justice in 2017–8 for assaulting hundreds of young female athletes over many years while the institutions turned a blind eye (Carr 2019). Taken as a whole, the history of sex, gender, and sexuality in modern sports reveals sport’s role in defending the gendered structures underpinning industrial capitalist society of the past century and a half, including a fundamental division between male and female, and compulsory heterosexuality.

The ongoing controversies over sex testing reveal the centrality of the gender paradigm in international sports up to the present. Sex testing dates back to the Cold War, when the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the IOC instituted a visual exam and later a chromosome test for women on account of the suspicion that the communist block was fielding men masquerading as women in order to win medals. Political tensions were expressed in a gender idiom: questioning the sex of socialist women neutralised the political challenge posed by the gender equality in sport under socialism at a time when Western women were oppressed by the postwar cult of domesticity (Besnier, Brownell & Carter 2017: 129-34).

Sex testing has never exposed a man competing as a woman, but it has identified, often in the worst possible way, a small number of athletes who are intersex; that is, who exhibit non-normative combinations of biological markers of sex (e.g., chromosomes, hormones, genitalia). Most are individuals with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which heightens their testosterone level, although this has never been shown to confer an athletic advantage. Those who are targeted are frequently athletes from the Global South, the best-known case being Caster Semenya, a South African runner who had won world and Olympic championships. The historical realignment of suspicion from the Soviet block to the Global South suggests that global geopolitics plays a role in sex testing in sport despite its appearance as neutral science (Jordan-Young & Karkazis 2019).

Sport as cultural performance

Sports take on the role of defending fundamental structures of power by putting those structures on public display in embodied form. Such public events are typically organised by elites, who try to control what is put on display so that their social status remains unchallenged. Contextualised in the classic anthropological theory of the gift, sports events take on another dimension (Brownell & Besnier 2016). It is well-known that humans will go into deep debt to fund rituals and ceremonies. While this doesn’t make sense according to market economy logics, it is unproblematic in the context of a gift economy in which elites increase their prestige and strengthen alliances by organising extravagant events.

For example, buzkashi in Afghanistan was deeply embedded in a gendered world of men and their competition for reputation through extravagant displays of generosity in grand gatherings during which buzkashi was played (Azoy 2011). Because the gatherings required considerable volunteer labour, only a khan with a large network of kin and non-kin who owed him labour could pull off a buzkashi tournament. Similarly, summer Olympic Games would not be possible without the armies of volunteers who provide basic labour. More heads of state, CEOs of major corporations, billionaires, and celebrities attend Olympic Games than any other world event. There they lavishly entertain guests, display their influence, create relationships with new allies and partners, and seal deals with old ones. The dynamics of buzkashi festivals are found in the Olympics, but on a much grander scale, and critiques of the Olympics that only analyze them through market economic principles may be missing the point.

Sports events enthral audiences because they are cultural performances, namely condensed moments when participants consciously represent and evaluate values, roles, and societal institutions (Singer 1959; Turner 1982, 1988). The most widely-read example of such a cultural performance is Clifford Geertz’s (1972) interpretation of cockfighting in Bali in the late 50s, as ‘a story the Balinese tell themselves about themselves’. The metaphors he employed to illuminate the Balinese enthusiasm for cockfights are frequently applied to sports events: they are a mirror for society, an expression of a culture as a whole, and a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Three important theorists of cultural performances, Max and Mary Gluckman and Victor Turner, debated whether a sports event could qualify as a secular ritual, a ritual-like behaviour not clearly associated with religious beliefs. They all concluded that sports do not qualify as rituals because they do not possess mystical or liminal qualities. However, subsequent scholars who conducted more research specifically on sports have found it enlightening to apply ritual theories to sports. In particular, they have emphasised that sports events may induce a sense of communitas, a sentiment of solidarity and shared humanity. Scholars have asserted that the World Cup and Olympics create an ‘upsurge of fellow feeling, an epidemic of communitas’ (Dayan & Katz 1992: 196) and ‘an enhanced consciousness of humankind’ (Giulianotti & Robertson 2004: 558; see also Roche 2000; Rothenbuhler 1988).

However, these scholars were based in sociology and media studies, while anthropologists were not part of this trend because, since the end of the 1980s, many have become critical of communitas as an overly optimistic concept that fails to recognise that not every participant and spectator is equally vested in the event. Who produces the performance and controls the symbols, whose agenda is served, and who is disadvantaged? Are common people being duped by the elites who organise big events? These questions would best be answered through ethnographic research, but to date there has been little ethnographic work on major sports events that has sought to understand the power relations between elite organisers, spectators, and athletes and their networks. Perhaps predictably, such work has tended to show that the on-the-ground reality is not a simple divide between exploiter and exploited, because major events involve a large number of social groups, the relationships between them are complex and under constant negotiation. Disadvantaged groups can benefit from the media spotlight by drawing public attention to their causes in a way that is not possible under normal circumstances (Klausen 1999; Brownell 2012b; Lindsay 2014).

The competition in sports means that the results are unpredictable, and so athletes worldwide deploy a wide range of practices designed to deal with uncertainty and fate, some derived from local cultural contexts, others derived from global flows, blurring the distinction amongst religion, magic, morality, gender, and bodily technique. Their practices include local magical practices (Gmelch 1978), revivalist religions such as Pentecostalism, which is increasingly popular amongst athletes from the Global South (Rial 2012; Guinness 2018; Kovač 2018), as well as sports techniques and training, the ideology of scientific professionalism, and sport psychology. In the national sport of wrestling in Senegal, wrestlers employ the services of marabouts, magico-religious specialists who prescribe potions, amulets, and rituals that merge Islamic and local cosmologies; but they combine the services of the marabouts with the hard training of an individualistic self and commercial sponsorship in the neoliberal mode (Hann 2018). Even when they emigrate to other countries to play professionally, indigenous New Zealand Māori rugby players call upon mana, the supernatural power that draws from their connection to kinship, spirits, and land (Calabrò 2014). Young men from upper-middle and upper-class families in exclusive rugby clubs in Buenos Aires participate in a Christian spiritual movement with the logo of a cross inside a rugby ball. Outside the door of some clubs stands a statuette brought back from the Our Lady of Rugby chapel in southwest France (Fuentes 2018).

Body enhancement and its limits

Sport has increasingly given us a glimpse into bodies of the future. The records for wheelchair athletes competing in track and road races are faster than those for runners on legs, but the clear separation between human and machine has enabled their segregation into their own divisions, such as the Paralympic Games. In 2015, the IAAF banned South African runner Oscar Pistorius, a lower-limb double amputee, from competing with the argument that the properties of the carbon-fiber prosthetic legs he wears gave him an unfair advantage, but he successfully sued and made it to the 400-metres semi-finals in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. His case opened up entirely new ethical dilemmas, but since no other Paralympian has achieved his level of success, Pistorius must be credited with a great deal of talent, whatever advantage his prostheses might have given him.

However, new technologies may soon allow even average athletes to compete with top natural-limbed athletes. Gene doping, the non-therapeutic use of genetic enhancement to improve sports performance, does not yet exist, but genetic manipulation has produced ‘super-mice’ with superior strength and endurance. So far as we know this has not yet been tried on humans, but it was banned in 2003 as a preemptive strike by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Clearly, the future holds novel technologies that will bring along increasingly complicated ethical dilemmas extending beyond the world of sports. Are we heading toward ‘transhuman athletes’ who have exceeded the bounds of normal human capabilities (Miah 2010)? All elite athletes exceed the bounds of normal capabilities—whether because they are taller or shorter than average, have large lung capacity, or any number of other physical traits. In the future, maybe it will become common practice for average humans to seek genetic and prosthetic enhancement in order to succeed in sports, careers, and life. Should this be prohibited? If defending class and gender lines occupied the greater part of the attention of administrators of international sport in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it may be that defending the line between what is ‘human’ and what is not will occupy them in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion: sport and scale

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the wealth that revolved around sport, particularly the major international sports, had become so huge and its presence in popular culture so powerful that the longstanding tendency amongst academics, journalists, and many politicians to dismiss it as inconsequential began to change. Critics of sport mega-events, particularly the FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games, became increasingly vocal, countering rhetoric about the potential of sport to contribute to a better world by publicising violations of human rights common in the context of mega-events, such as mass evictions for construction, the silencing of dissidents, the exploitation of migrant workers, and the corruption by government officials and the leaders of sport organizations. ‘Social responsibility’ in sport became a keyword taken up by sport organizations in response to the critics.

Sport is somewhat unique in the repertoire of human activities in that it connects the intimacy of bodies, emotions, and personal projects to a global system of capital, world politics, and mega-spectacles. These connections operate on multiple fronts. For example, the collapse of economies in the Global South under pressure from neoliberal policies has destroyed labour markets, while the glamour of sport broadcast on satellite television fuel impossible dreams of sporting success among disenfranchised youth in these countries. Anthropologists are concerned to make sense of all the entanglements of the world in which we live, and sport distils them into clearer structures that can help us comprehend the complex whole.

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Notes

Some of Niko Besnier’s research discussed in this article received funding from the European Research Council under Grant Agreement 295769 for a project titled ‘Globalization, sport and the precarity of masculinity’ (www.global-sport.eu). Susan Brownell received funding for some of the research discussed here from International Studies and Programs and the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Note on contributors

Niko Besnier is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His books include On the edge of the global: modern anxieties in a Pacific island nation (2011) and Gossip and the everyday production of politics (2009). He is co-editor of Gender on the edge: transgender, gay, and other Pacific Islanders (2014) and Crisis, value, and hope: rethinking the economy (2014). In 2014–9, he was editor-in-chief of American Ethnologist.

Niko Besnier, Afdeling Antropologie, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Postbus 15509, 1001 NA Amsterdam, The Netherlands. n.besnier@uva.nl.

Susan Brownell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is the author of Training the body for China: sports in the moral order of the People’s Republic (1995) and Beijing’s games: what the Olympics mean to China (2008), and is the editor of The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: sport, race, and American imperialism (2008).

Susan Brownell, Department of Anthropology & Archaeology, 507 Clark Hall, One University Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63121-4400, United States. sbrownell@umsl.edu.

Games

Felix Stein — Tue, 07 May 2019 15:54:36 +0000

Max Watson

Independent scholar

Initially published 7 May 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19games

Abstract:

Though there is no universally accepted definition for what constitutes a ‘game’, games are typically defined as goal-oriented, rules-based activities closely associated with the notion of ‘play’. In anthropology, though seldom the primary focus of a monograph, games can serve as a window into the broader lives and valuations of their players. More practically, they can also be excellent vehicles for conducting participant-observation and building rapport with interlocutors. The three sections of this entry seek to provide a general overview of anthropological insights into the world of games. The first section covers attempts to define games as a concept. The second section asks what makes games meaningful. The third section examines anthropological approaches to the most recent major development in the world of games: the rise of digital games.

Games as a concept

The arenas that mark archaeological sites—like The Great Ballcourt of Chichen Itza or the Colosseum of Rome—and board games whose lineage can be traced back thousands of years—like Senet, Go, Mancala, and backgammon—are testaments to games’ longstanding place in human history. Games can also have strong geographic linkages. Global spectacles like the Olympic Games and World Cup draw participants and billions of spectators from most of the world’s nations. Some games, like cricket throughout much of the British Commonwealth, can make manifest linkages between distant nations. Other games, like the Sri Lankan board game Carrom or the Finnish ball game Pesäpallo, are played primarily within the borders of particular nation-states. Games are played by people of different ages and walks of life: from hopscotch in the schoolyard to bridge in retirement homes, and from improvised football to exclusive polo.

Although games are widespread and familiar to many of the world’s peoples, providing a compelling, overarching definition for what constitutes ‘a game’ has proved difficult. Rules are widely seen as an important component of games (e.g. Huizinga 1949; Caillois 1961; Suits 1967; Avedon & Sutton-Smith 1981; Meier 1995; Suits 1995; Salen & Zimmerman 2003). But of course, rules govern many aspects of human life and are not restricted to games alone. What ostensibly sets the rules of a game apart from other rules-based activities is not just the special reasons for which these rules are constructed, but also the players’ attitude toward those rules. As Bernard Suits, who spent much of his career working on a universal definition of games, put it:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude] (2005: 54-5).

Suits connects his definition of games to a particular way of playing them (i.e. ‘the lusory attitude’). He does not, for example, consider those who cheat to be adopting a lusory attitude and thus does not consider them to be playing the game (2005: 25). Yet, as Angela Schneider points out, games seldom play out so neatly in practice: some players might play by the rules, but others will not; some players will be invested in the game, but others might not be (2001). Nonetheless, for Schneider, a game like rugby is still a game even if the motivations for playing and adherence to the rules differ from player to player. When it comes to adhering to a game’s rules, Schneider contends ‘[e]thically we should of course, but logically we needn’t’ (2001: 158). As we shall see in more detail throughout this entry, the diverse reasons people have for playing games and the different ways in which they go about negotiating a game’s rules are where games can take on their most important meaning.

Anthropologists have offered many insightful analyses of the extent of the relationships between games and play. For example, David Graeber has theorised that play is unpredictable, whereas games are clearly defined by rules (Graeber 2015). For Graeber, what is special about a game’s rules vis-à-vis the rules of propriety in regular life is that the rules of a game are easily discernible at any given moment, and thus present a ‘utopia of rules’. Thomas Malaby, one of the most prominent anthropologists writing on the subject of games and play, has posited his own definition of games—‘[a] game is a semibounded and socially legitimate domain of contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes’ (2007: 96)—and has praised efforts to

decouple playful experience from a determinate relationship with games, just as scholars of ritual (many of them anthropologists) have recognized ritual as a cultural form irrespective of whether it brings about religious experience (2009a: 212).

Malaby’s ‘decoupling’ stance is not intended as an outright separation of games and play, but rather, akin to the point made by Schneider, is meant to point out that the two concepts need not necessarily go hand in hand. The strength of Malaby’s approach is that it leaves the door open for interchange between anthropological work on games and anthropological work on play—such as that of Gregory Bateson (1987)—without fusing them into the same category.

Indeed, anthropological work on games and play, respectively, has greatly helped to refine understandings of games. For example, Roger Caillois, one of the twentieth century’s best-known theorists of games and play, emphasised the role of games as playful activities largely outside the sphere of economic productivity. As he put it, ‘[a]t the end of the game, all can and must start over at the same point. Nothing has been harvested or manufactured, no masterpiece has been created, no capital has accrued’ (1961: 5). However, subsequent anthropological work on play, like that of David Lancy amongst the Kpelle—who, Lancy found, see work and play not as mutually exclusive but as components of all human endeavours—has compellingly questioned a hard work/play binary (1980). Meanwhile, ethnographic work on certain games, like T.L. Taylor’s account of professional digital games players (2012), shows that there are most definitely games in which capital is accrued and all does not start over at the same point. It is in no small part because of these anthropological efforts that hard divisions like Caillois’ between games and work have now largely been abandoned by theorists of games and play. As Jesper Juul, a leading scholar within the relatively new field of games studies, explains, ‘both are clearly not perfect boundaries, but rather fuzzy areas under constant negotiation’ (2003: 4).

Anthropologists have compellingly argued that games and play are distinct, if often related, concepts. However, many who read about games in the English language will likely find this position discordant with the existence of games and play as interrelated words. As Johan Huizinga—a scholar to whose seminal work Homo ludens nearly all subsequent theorists of games and play make reference—noted, this connection seems inexorable: one plays a game (1949: 37). How might we reconcile these two facts? While Huizinga claims that ‘you do not “do” a game as you “do” or “go” fishing, or hunting […] you “play” it’ (1949: 37), it might actually be useful to think of the English term ‘to play a game’ in the sense of how one does a game (just as one sings a song or drives a car) in order to better distinguish between various ways in which people approach games. Thus one might play a game playfully—or angrily, or reluctantly—just as one might drive a car playfully, or angrily, or reluctantly.

Similarly, it can at times be useful to take a step back from efforts to precisely define games, and instead use a broader conceptualization of what games are. One prominent example of such a move comes from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said of the various types of games:

…we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way—And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family (1986: 31-2).

Wittgenstein by no means had the last word on games, a fact to which the subsequent accounts of Caillois, Suits, and others is testament. However, his description accords well with the implicit approach of most anthropologists to games, whose preoccupation—like when handling most subjects—is less with providing a universally tenable definition of games, and more with discerning what is meaningful about the particular games in which their interlocutors partake.

Indeed, some of the most insightful discussions of games within anthropology emerge when particular games are described in contradistinction to related themes. For example, Arjun Appadurai has examined the enduring popularity of cricket in postcolonial India as an example of decolonization being a ‘dialogue with the colonial past’ rather than a ‘dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life’ (Appadurai 1995). Roberte Hamayon, Harry Walker, and Ted Leyenaar have all shown how games can both impact and reflect relations between Indigenous peoples and the state (Leyenaar 1992; Walker 2013; Hamayon 2016). Leyenaar, for example, studied the ancient Mesoamerican ball game Ulama in contemporary Mexico and found that, like many of the Indigenous peoples who created and developed the game, Ulama had been pushed to the margins of the Mexican state. Victor Turner and others have made productive comparisons between ritual and games—for Turner, for example, both are notable for how they place their participants (and potential observers) in a transitional state that falls outside normal life (Turner 1982; Seligman et al. 2008). Ellen Oxfeld has studied Mahjong amongst Chinese entrepreneurs in Calcutta and found the nature of the game, with its risks and rewards, similar to the nature of her interlocutors’ business endeavours (Oxfeld 1993). Loïc Wacquant has discussed boxing and race in Chicago’s Southside neighbourhood, where for his interlocutors the order of a boxer’s regimen stood as a counterpart to the disorder many experienced in their lives outside the gym (Wacquant 2004). And Robertson Allen, T.J. Cornell, and T.B. Allen have examined the relationships between war and games – including those specifically made to acclimatise citizens to the military (Cornell & Allen 2002; Allen 2017).

This is not to say that in such accounts games are relegated to mere foils for understanding more important concepts; just as games can help to hone our understandings of other phenomena, these phenomena can help to hone our understanding of games. Such a fact has been famously displayed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his comparison of games and ritual:

[a]ll games are defined by a set of rules which in practice allow the playing of any number of matches. Ritual, which is also ‘played’, is on the other hand, like a favoured instance of a game, remembered from among the possible ones because it is the only one which results in a particular type of equilibrium between the two sides. The transposition is readily seen in the case of the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea who have learnt football but who will play, several days running, as many matches as are necessary for both sides to reach the same score (1962: 20).

What makes games meaningful?

Both the games an anthropologist chooses to focus on and what she or he reads into them can have significant implications. It goes without saying that not all games are equally meaningful, and one of the tasks facing anthropologists and others interested in analyzing games is figuring out how to parse the myriad varieties of games often on display. For example, Huizinga contended that ‘[s]olitary play is productive of culture only in a limited degree’ (1949: 47) and that it is the ‘play-community’ formed between players that gives games their social importance (1949: 17-8). Though much of Huizinga’s work has been critiqued by subsequent scholars of games, almost all of them focus on multiplayer games as sources for meaningful play—a point which takes on new importance with the rise of digital games, as we shall see in the next section. Monetary stakes are another way in which games can be meaningful to their players. Indeed, much of the anthropological literature on games focuses on those in which money is at stake (see, for example, the entry on gambling in this encyclopedia). Nonetheless, anthropologists have compellingly argued that money alone is seldom what makes games meaningful.

Likely the most famous such example, and perhaps the best-known account of a game within anthropology, comes from Clifford Geertz’s account of the Balinese cockfight. In Geertz’s analysis, the cockfight is not a mere spectacle upon which the Balinese wager vast sums of money, but a process through which ‘the Balinese forms and discovers his temperament and his society’s temper at the same time’ (1973: 451). Framed as such, the cockfight is meaningful for how it perpetuates the traditions and valuations of the past. Moreover, Geertz’s presence at one particular unsanctioned cockfight meant that he was also present for the police action which broke it up: by fleeing with the rest of the participants and hiding out alongside some of them, he finally established a convivial rapport with his interlocutors (1973: 415-6). While the fame of Geertz’s rendition of the cockfight might make it seem like it was the only game in town, Geertz’s own account shows otherwise. As he notes, in his field site there was a ‘sociomoral hierarchy’ of players and games:

At most cockfights there are, around the very edges of the cockfight area, a large number of mindless, sheer-chance type gambling games (roulette, dice throw, coin-spin, pea-under-the shell) operated by concessionaires. Only women, children, adolescents, and various other sorts of people who do not (or not yet) fight cocks—the extremely poor, the socially despised, the personally idiosyncratic—play at these games, at, of course, penny ante levels. Cockfighting men would be ashamed to go anywhere near them (1973: 435).

Geertz’s decision to focus on the cockfight gave us an arresting view into his field site. But one must wonder whether these other games were as meaningless as he made them out to be, or whether a closer look at them might have revealed a different type of ethnography more sensitive to the daily lives and valuations of Balinese who were not elite men. Indeed, children’s games have featured as a specific point of focus in other ethnographic accounts, from Stewart Culin’s writings about cat’s cradle amongst North American indigenous peoples (1907: 761-80), to Mizuko Ito’s work on digital games amongst Japanese and American schoolchildren (2009).

Newer anthropological accounts of games tend to criticise approaches like Geertz’s. Malaby, for example, critiques Geertz’s analysis of the cockfight because

[t]his treatment of a game…trades one kind of reductionism for another. In his zeal to trump whatever material stakes were in play with the different stakes of meaning-making, Geertz eliminated from consideration any consequence beyond the affirmation of meaning. On his view, games become static appraisals of an unchanging social order; and thereby one element that is vital for any understanding of the experience of play is lost. That element is the indeterminacy of games, and the way in which, by being indeterminate in their outcomes, they encapsulate (albeit in a contrived fashion) the open-endedness of everyday life (2009a: 207, 208)

The structure of Malaby’s argument is reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between ritual and games. In this case, Geertz appears to have inverted game and ritual by interpreting the cockfight ‘like a favoured instance of a game’ (i.e. Lévi-Strauss’ ritual) rather than as an actual game which might have different outcomes from one instance to the next. This, however, begs the question of whether the Balinese cockfight is really best considered a game, a ritual, or some combination of the two.

It is worth noting the work of Anthony Pickles for how it manages to highlight both the perpetuation of tradition found in accounts like Geertz’s, and the potential for changes to social order found in accounts like Malaby’s. Pickles offers a fascinating account of two card-based gambling games in Goroka, Papua New Guinea. One game, called kwin (queen), is strategic and slow-paced, slow to adopt changes in rules, and popular amongst older players, while the other game, called bom (bomb), is faster-paced, part of a quickly changing genre of games, and popular amongst younger players (Pickles 2014). Pickles’ dual focus allows us to see in kwin one game that is akin to Geertz’s interpretation of the cockfight, and in bom another which has more in common with newer anthropological interest in the negotiability of games. Crucially, meaning here is found not just in these respective games and what they stand for, but in the tension between them and their respective players—a point worth bearing in mind for anthropologists who encounter several distinct, prominent games in one field site.

Pickles’ account of bom shows us how new rules and new games can be created in a relatively short period of time. But it is also worth remembering Schneider’s aforementioned point that, while games may have a set of rules, these are not always universally and perfectly adhered to. Rather, rules are constantly susceptible to being undermined or renegotiated by their players, either inadvertently, as in a new player making an error out of ignorance, or purposefully, as in cases of cheating (Consalvo 2005, 2007, 2009). This process is not the corruption of games so much as it is an essential and important part of them. In other words, games are not just meaningful for the potential actions that their rules dictate, but for how players choose to go about adjudicating disputes about those rules. For example, Linda Hughes, studying American schoolgirls who play the ball game foursquare, finds that the game serves not simply as a playful pastime for the children, but also helps them to learn lifelong skills like problem solving and teamwork (1991, 1999). Indeed, in many games, adjudication of the rules is handled by the players themselves; think, for example, of playing a board game with friends.

When the financial or physical stakes of a game rise (and especially when both happen at once), very often adjudication shifts from the players themselves to a third party responsible for ensuring both safety and fairness. Think of the referees in many games typically referred to as ‘sports’, such as football or boxing, or the presence of dealers in casinos. As Geertz notes, the cockfight too has its ‘umpire (saja komong; djuru kembar)…[whose] authority is absolute’ (1973: 423, 424). The presence of a third-party adjudicator does not necessarily mean that a game is more meaningful than a game adjudicated by its players, but it can have important implications. For example, compare two different instances of the game football: one is a professional match with a referee, the other is a pickup match played in a public park. In professional football, the practice of ‘simulation’ or ‘diving’ is commonplace. It involves players exaggerating or outright feigning the effects of physical contact from opposing players in the hopes that the referee will be fooled and call a foul against the opposing team. In pickup football, where players determine fouls communally, this practice is far less prevalent. Both instances are technically the same game, sharing football’s rules and objectives, but nonetheless operate quite differently in practice.

As we can see from the works discussed in this section, determining what makes games meaningful is a tricky endeavour contingent upon many factors. One must consider what constitutes the particular game being discussed, how that game relates (or does not relate) to other games played within a particular field site, and the different ways in which players go about negotiating particular instances of gameplay.

New frontiers: the rise of digital games

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed one of the most significant changes in the history of games: the rise of digital games, colloquially referred to as ‘video games’. Unlike their analogue counterparts, digital games are written in code, played on computers or consoles, and viewed on monitors or television screens. Their rise to prominence—concomitant with the profusion of ever more affordable, portable, and powerful home electronics—has brought with it numerous different types of digital games. These run the gamut from digital forms of games like chess and billiards, to ‘Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games’ (MMORPGs), which consist of vast spaces in which thousands of players simultaneously navigate their respective avatars. This profusion of new games has rejuvenated an interest in efforts to define ‘games’ (Juul 2003), and has given rise to the new discipline of games studies (Aarseth 2001; Jenkins 2004; Boellstorff 2006). Perhaps predictably, many analyses of digital games bemoan the potential influence of their violent or sexual content (Grossman & DeGaetano 1999; Anderson & Dill 2000; Breyer 2011)—in so doing repeating the same concern that faces nearly all new and popular entertainment media (McLuhan 1964: 314; Galloway 2006: xii).

That being said, the rise of digital technology represents a potentially fundamental shift in the world of games. Namely, one of the most important characteristics of digital games vis-à-vis their analogue counterparts is how they change spatial relations. While some analogue games are carried out by distance—such as correspondence chess—the vast majority are conducted with the participants in close proximity. Conversely, while some digital games are played with one’s teammates and/or opponents nearby—such as playing ‘splitscreen’ (multiple people playing a digital game on the same television or computer monitor) at home or in a group at an internet café—most multiplayer digital games involve people playing alone from their homes while sharing digital space with their peers.

This fact problematises distinctions like Huizinga’s between solitary and communal games, for players might be in one sense solitary—playing a game alone in their rooms—but at the same time be connected to other players through the Internet and in the game itself. This fact can perhaps help to explain some anthropologists’ findings on digital games. For example, Nicholas Long notes that the players and producers of the digital game Ultima Online often make note of amazing ‘community’ within the game, but that Long himself found the relations between players to be far more ephemeral and individualistic (Long 2012). Conversely, Celia Pearce notes how players of one particular game stuck together as a social group even after the game itself had been discontinued (Pearce 2006, 2007, 2010).

Another key facet of digital games is their role as goods. They are a multibillion dollar industry, and anthropologists have turned their attention to not just their players but their producers (Malaby 2009b). The role of gender can loom particularly large, as some digital games are primarily marketed to and played by men, whereas others are primarily marketed to and played by women (Mason 2013). Real-world gender inequities can manifest in digital games. For example, Julian Dibbell found that players whose avatars were women were often subjected to sexual harassment, whereas the same was not true for players whose avatars were men (Dibbell 1993). Race can play a similar role to gender in terms of both marketability and gameplay, as some have shown in games where racial stereotypes are part of a game’s content (Leonard 2003), and others have highlighted in games where players themselves use real-world racial slurs (Shanahan 2004).

The structure of digital games also raises questions about how best to approach them methodologically. There have been two primary ways in which anthropologists have gone about doing so. The first method conceptualises these games as ‘virtual worlds’ (Pearce 2006; Nardi & Harris 2006; Taylor 2006; Pearce 2007; Boellstorff 2008; Pearce 2010; Nardi 2010; Long 2012). Treating the space within these games in a similar way to a physical field site, these scholars conduct long-term participant-observation within them by registering accounts, creating avatars, and interacting with other players in the virtual world. In this vein, the title of Boellstorff’s book Coming of age in Second Life—Second Life being the virtual world in which he conducted his fieldwork—is purposefully designed to emphasise a similarity with Margaret Meade’s classic Coming of age in Samoa (1928). This approach gives us an in-depth view of what playing these games looks like in action and the type of interrelationships that it involves—though it is worth noting that, perhaps because of this approach’s emphasis on virtual worlds as a ‘space’, some who adopt it question these games’ status as ‘games’ at all (Boellstorff 2008: 22).

The second approach more pointedly engages with digital games from the vantage of the physical world, in so doing taking a page from the book of anthropologists who emphasise the local importance of various forms of media, such as television (Abu-Lughod 2005), radio (Englund 2011), and blogs (Doostdar 2004). Daniel Miller has studied Facebook use amongst Trinidadians, and he includes in his book a chapter on the Facebook game FarmVille. Articulating his methodological approach toward one interlocutor, Miller notes that he would spend ‘hours looking over his shoulder as he does Facebook’ for a view into this person’s online life (Miller 2011: 78). Similarly, Florence Chee has examined Korean gamer culture from within internet cafes (2005), and Mizuko Ito has studied the use of educational games by Japanese and American children in classroom and home settings (2009). Alex Golub has used his own experience with the MMORPG World of Warcraft to explicitly critique virtual worlds scholars for underemphasising important extra-game spaces, such as online message boards and real-world gatherings (Golub 2010).

While proponents of each respective approach can sometimes clash, both methods have their strengths when applied to specific genres of digital games. For example, it is unsurprising that the majority of virtual worlds work is conducted within MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. These games most closely resemble the physical world in the sense that players control an avatar within a broader game world, and often contain robust economies where significant amounts of real money changes hands (Castronova 2001). Meanwhile, many other digital games, such as those that require no Internet connection, single-player games, those in which players are disembodied manipulators of many variables (such as Real-time Strategy Games), or those where players are under the finite time constraints of individual matches, are often only practically observable from a physically in-situ vantage. Nor are the approaches inherently mutually exclusive. For example, virtual worlds scholars have more recently and explicitly acknowledged the need to at least be open to physical aspects of games when they arise (Boellstorff et al. 2012: 33, 34).

A final point to make about digital games has to do with adjudication and negotiability. The previous section noted the distinction between games that are adjudicated by their players and those games which are adjudicated by a third party referee. Many digital games present a third form of adjudication: the code itself. For example, the previous section took the example of football, and noted the difference between ‘diving’ in a match adjudicated by players and a match adjudicated by a referee. In a digital game where football is depicted, such as Electronic Arts’ popular FIFA series, diving is simply not an option coded into the game. Even if it were, unless the game also added human referees, it would involve trying to press the ‘dive’ button at the right time and hoping that the computer code would confirm it, rather than the process of tricking a human referee or negotiating with human teammates and opponents. When the ball goes out of bounds in FIFA, there is no arguing with the linesman or quibbling with teammates: the code simply confirms it. The implications of this third type of adjudication found within digital games are still not fully understood, but it may help to explain the ephemerality of social relations some anthropologists have found characteristic of certain digital games (see Watson 2015).

Conclusion

This entry has provided an overview of anthropological work on games. It has underscored key themes and developments in the world of games, from varying conceptualizations of what a game is, to how games are meaningful to their players, to the rise of digital games.

Games will continue to be important sources of anthropological theorization not just because new games are being crafted every day, as the advent of digital games makes clear, nor just because instances of games have unpredictable outcomes, as Malaby’s work reminds us, but also because new connections between games and other important phenomena can always be uncovered. As is often the case with ethnographic work, people engaging in a seemingly innocuous activity like a casual game can offer unexpected vantages onto significant issues. Like with most interesting themes, this means that a discussion about games will never be complete. Readers are therefore encouraged to take a closer look at games in both their own field sites and daily lives. Who knows just what you might find…

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Note on contributor

Max Watson holds Ph.D. and M.Phil. degrees in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in Middle East Studies with a minor in Economics from McGill University. He currently works in the field of communications for the Government of Canada.

Dr. Max O. A. Watson. max.watson@mail.mcgill.ca.

Disability

Felix Stein — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 16:21:51 +0000

Clara Devlieger

London School of Economics and Political Science

Initially published 14 Jun 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18disab

Abstract:

Disability is a form of difference that is created when the social participation of someone with an impairment is ‘dis-abled’ by normative expectations and material conditions. This entry reviews some of the key contributions anthropologists have made to studying disability as a socially constructed category. Disability is at once central and marginal to the anthropological canon. Grounded in fine-grained, long-term ethnographic fieldwork, anthropological studies of disability have drawn attention to the relational nature of disability as a category that is variable despite its quality as a universal human experience. This entry starts by explaining the difference between ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ before reviewing the trajectory of anthropological studies of disability – in mostly Western industrialised contexts – from a ‘medical’ to a ‘social’ framework of understanding. It then turns to consider some of the theoretical orientations this has produced and examines a more recent shift to studying the lived experience of disability beyond the Euro-American west. It concludes by reviewing some of the developments in studying disability in recent years, in which scholars focus on social organization, technology, and personal, embodied experiences.

Introduction: disability and difference, disability and impairment

The experience of disability is both unique and universal. The embodied limitations of impairment are something all humans experience in either the very early or late stages of life (Davis 2006: 4; Kittay 1999). Disability is a form of otherness marked by such limitations: disabled people are often labelled as different from people who are able-bodied in one way or another. Unlike social categories such as gender, race, or generation, however, disability is a form of alterity that anyone can enter at any time, although disadvantaged groups have a higher chance of becoming disabled (Eide & Ingstad 2011; Puar 2017). Because all human bodies are vulnerable, researchers argue for anthropological attention to disability as essential to understanding human nature and diversity (Fineman 2008).

What is considered to be a disability in different sociocultural settings, however, is highly inconsistent. ‘Disability is a profoundly relational category, always created as a distinction from cultural ideas of normality, shaped by conditions that exclude full participation in society of those considered atypical’, Faye Ginsburg and Rayana Rapp assert, pointing to anthropology’s key contribution to the study of disability as a form of alterity that is ‘not simply lodged in the body, but created by the social and material conditions that “dis-able” the full participation of a variety of minds and bodies’ (2013: 54). This observation has led anthropologists, and disability scholars more widely, to establish disability as a category that is fundamentally socially constructed. It is not an impairment that creates a disability, but rather the incompatibility of impaired bodies with social norms and material environments that are determined by the able-bodied majority, and the discrimination that frequently follows.

While scholars differ in the terminology they use, they nonetheless agree that we cannot take terms and concepts such as ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ for granted. Russell Shuttleworth and Devva Kasnitz, for example, choose to make an explicit distinction by defining impairment as ‘a negatively construed, cultural perception of a bodily, cognitive, or behavioural anomaly in terms of function or some other ethnopsychological or ethnophysiological status’, and disability as a negative social response to a perceived functional limitation (2004: 141). By using the hyphenated term ‘impairment-disability’ they seek ‘to problematize anthropologists’ use of these term and to highlight their relationship and the need for their analytical separation’. Ginsburg and Rapp similarly choose to draw attention to the complex and enduring ‘relation between embodied limitations and social discrimination’, by using ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’ interchangeably (2013: 54); I follow this model in this encyclopedia entry.

This entry aims to serve as a brief introduction to some of the historical highlights of anthropological engagement with disability as a fundamentally relational category.^[1]Anthropology is a latecomer to studying disability, but the discipline has made significant contributions to the wider field of disability studies rooted in the discipline's core methodology of long-term, fine-grained ethnographic fieldwork. The empirical ethnographic approach provides nuanced, penetrating ethnographies of the lived, embodied experience of disability and the social lifeworlds of disabled people. By considering personal views of what is disabling, anthropologists have thus contributed to deconstructing assumptions about normality and abnormality in cross-cultural settings.

From a medical to a social model

The earliest studies of disability by anthropologists were focussed on specific impairments from within a medical anthropology framework, while disability increasingly became part of mainstream social and cultural anthropology (Kasnitz & Shuttleworth 2001). Prior to the 1960s, for example, Ruth Benedict (1934) analyzed cross-cultural understandings of epilepsy, pointing out that a condition may be considered abnormal and undesirable in one sociocultural setting but a highly desirable characteristic of psychic manifestation elsewhere. Jane and Lucien Hanks (1948) similarly took an early cross-cultural perspective in their study of how a similar physical characteristic such as a scar has a different effect on status in a variety of settings.

Attention to disability in anthropology, however, became more prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, as the disability rights movement and Independent Living Model brought it into the public eye, particularly in North America. Robert Edgerton (1967) was the first anthropologist to make disability a focus of study with his work with people with what was then called ‘mental retardation’ or intellectual disabilities in the 1960s. His monograph, The cloak of competence (1967), drew attention to the historical changes in American institutional public life, as the inhabitants of asylums were moved to communities as part of an international movement dedicated to closing asylums. As people adapted to living in mainstream society after a life in long-term institutionalization, Edgerton highlighted the strategies they developed to counteract the stigma in their lives and learn to 'pass' as normal.

It was in the 1970s and 1980s, however, that medical anthropology started to provide a fertile space for ethnographic work on impairment-disability. Louise Duval (1986) initiated the Disability and culture newsletter and founded the first Disability Research Interest Group as part of the Society for Medical Anthropology, providing a forum for social science studies of disability and a presence at the yearly American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings (Kasnitz & Shuttleworth 2001). Gelya Frank brought a pioneering phenomenological perspective in her book, Venus on wheels (2000 [1982]). Frank provided a personal perspective – rare for its time – of the life of an American woman named Diane DeVries, who was a ‘congenital amputee’, a woman born without arms or legs. Where previous studies had focused on symbolic descriptions of disability by outside observers, Frank’s portrayal of DeVries’s personal perspective was part of a wider shift in anthropology from objectified representations of the body to subjective experiences of living through the body. This approach highlighted the lived experience of disability: Frank questioned common perceptions of DeVries as someone who was missing arms and legs and considered instead DeVries’s personal experience of ‘normalcy’. Frank also reflexively explored the development of her long-term relationship with DeVries, where research transformed into friendship and care, involving a deeper level of personal involvement and self-disclosure than was customary for the time.

Several of these anthropologists started to provide a critique of medicalization from within medical anthropology itself. 'Medicalization' refers to treating disability as a technical, medical problem. In this framework, the individual impaired body was central, and medical conceptions of disease and healing were used to explain disability, thus directing focus towards cause and cure, or therapeutic transformation. Such a biomedical model of disability became criticised as carrying an assumption that disability is a negative problem of individuals. Disability scholars, consequentially, became people with a ‘mandate’ to make disabled people ‘normal’ (Shuttleworth & Kasnitz 2004: 142). An alternative framework that considers instead the cultural and social factors that underlie understandings of disability has been glossed as the ‘social model’ in anthropology and wider disability studies (Shakespeare 2013), a refinement that draws attention to how social and material conditions shape impairment into disability.^[2]

Nora Groce and Joan Ablon, among others, were part of this paradigm shift from ‘the clinic to the community’ (Whyte & Ingstad 1995: 4). Groce (1985) chose to highlight community creation and communicative practices in her study of deafness on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.^[3] In this insular community, hereditary deafness was so common that deafness was not considered unusual and the hearing population learned sign language. Because all inhabitants were able to participate in public life, being deaf was thus not considered to be disabling. The title of her book, Everyone here spoke sign language, highlights how normality is defined socially, as sign language was a part of local public culture for deaf people as much as for the hearing population.

Medical anthropologist Joan Ablon (1984; 1988; 1999; 2010; for a comprehensive review of her work see Shuttleworth & Kasnitz 2004) influenced generations of anthropologists interested in disability with her work on the lives of stigmatised groups of people with genetic differences, such as the ‘little people’ of America (1984). Her ethnographic approach focused on their support networks and strategies of normalization, privileging the lived experiences and voices of her research participants. Her work has been considered pioneering for shifting the focus from individual bodily difference as a source of disability to the social reactions of the community as disabling. Her ethnographic focus contributed to broadening the scope of disability studies beyond the therapeutic interests of medical anthropology for the study of disability and behavioural, cognitive, or physical difference.

Studies such as those by Groce and Ablon reframed disability more in terms of identity and difference than in terms of ill health. While dynamics of illness and disease are clearly relevant to disability studies, as Staples and Mehortra (2016: 39) point out, ‘bodily states that, in certain contexts, underpin disability do not necessarily define individuals as ill or as suffering, but sometimes as different in ways that may be valued in their own right.’ In his History of disability, Henri-Jacques Stiker (1999), for example, argued that societies reveal themselves in how they manage difference. He gave a Foucauldian genealogy of how disability emerged as a category of difference in western societies that was not initially distinguished from other types of poverty, but developed into a category of bodily abnormality. In communities of people with disabilities, shared experiences can form the basis of a subculture or culture, such as Deaf culture (see, e.g., Breivik 2013; Groce 1985; Friedner 2015a; Green 2014; Nakamura 2006). Cultural identification with deafness is represented by capitalising ‘Deaf’ where the lower case spelling ‘deaf’ refers to the audiological condition (see e.g. Baynton 2015); referring to both simultaneously is written as ‘d/Deaf’ or ‘D/deaf’. People who identify as d/Deaf sometimes reject labels of disability in favour of being viewed as a linguistic or cultural minority (e.g. Fjord 1996; Haualand 2007). While the idea of Deaf culture that crosses other boundaries is mainstream, researchers also warn of the dangers of imposing a single minority group identity onto a very diverse group of people (e.g. Mugeere, Atekyereza, Kirumira, & Hojer 2015; Susman 1994; Zola 1993).

Stigma, liminality, and reconciling the exceptional with the ordinary

The studies above have been influenced by theoretical approaches that emphasise difference.^[4] Analytical orientations around stigma and liminality have been particularly influential in interpreting ethnographic data. The sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) famously described stigma as the result of deviance. If we understand deviance as ‘deviation from prevalent or valued norms’, stigma is then ‘the evocation of negative responses’ (Susman 1994: 15, 16) or, in Goffman’s words, having a ‘spoiled identity’ due to an ‘attribute that is deeply discrediting’ (1963: 13). Because disabled bodies stray from the norm and are often socially devalued as a result, a host of anthropologists have used the concept of stigma to theorise their experience.^[5]

Other disability scholars have preferred to analyze difference in terms of liminality (e.g. Barrett 1998; Stiker 1999). In developing the concept, Victor Turner referred to the context of ritual to describe liminal entities as ‘neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (1969: 95). The disabled anthropologist Robert Murphy (1987) considered the concept of ‘liminality’ more suitable than stigma to describe the implicit and subtle discrimination he encountered during his own process of becoming gradually paralyzed in the United States due to a spinal tumour, an experience that is the subject of his influential book, The body silent. He connected a lack of acceptance to the status of long-term, physically disabled people as ‘undefined, ambiguous people’ (1995: 154). They were in-between dominant American understandings of normality: ‘neither sick nor well, neither dead nor fully alive, neither out of society nor wholly in it’ (1995: 153-4).

Goffman’s approach to stigma in particular continues to be highly influential, but simplified accounts of stigma that focus on individual bodily differences alone to the detriment of wider contextualising factors such as politics, gender, or age have been widely criticised in favour of more nuanced ones (e.g. Shuttleworth 2004; Murphy 1987; 1995; Staples 2011b). Michele Friedner (2015), for example, draws on her fieldwork with deaf multilevel marketing employees in India to argue for a rethinking of stigma. Such businesses produce a space where deafness can function as a valued condition, allowing deaf people to work almost exclusively with other deaf people and transform social networks into financial capital. Stigma, she argues, can thus be a source of inclusion as much as exclusion. Bearing such critiques in mind, Friedner and others (see, e.g., Devlieger, Rusch, & Pfeiffer 2003; Staples 2011b) argue for an approach that reconciles the exceptional and ordinary aspects of the lives of disabled people. While discrimination may play an important role in their lives, they pursue the same goals as other people.

Beyond the Euro-American west

The roots of most scholarship on disability are in the civil rights movements of the 1960s, particularly in the disabling contexts of industrialization and the rise of capitalism in the Euro-American west. The vast majority of disabled people, however, live elsewhere, and anthropologists interested in disability have increasingly turned their attention to how cross-cultural understandings of disability may challenge dominant assumptions based on theorising in Euro-American environments.

Disability was explicitly put onto the worldwide public agenda in the 1980s, when the United Nations declared 1981 as the International Year of Disabled Persons, followed in 1983 by the beginning of the United Nations’ Decade for Disabled Persons. Scholars working beyond Europe and America thus frequently draw attention to the connections between the global and the local to avoid assumptions of isolated social worlds, while simultaneously underlining the danger of imposing western models on diverse sociocultural contexts (Ingstad & Whyte 2007). Inhorn and Bharadwaj (2007), for example, draw attention to the local effects of new reproductive technologies in Egypt and India, as wider access to IVF treatment puts the problem of infertility in the public eye. In these pro-natal countries, infertility is considered to be an impairment of personhood with deeply disabling consequences, whereas it is not explicitly understood as a disability in the Euro-American contexts.

Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Whyte (1995) highlighted diverse examples from Nicaragua, Borneo, and various African countries in a pioneering volume to underline that the concept of disability itself cannot be taken for granted (see also Grech & Soldatic 2016). Outside the influence sphere of the liberal identity politics of the Euro-American west, ‘disability’ as a unified umbrella term either does not exist or is a very recent category applied to people: ‘there are blind people and lame people and “slow” people, but “the disabled” as a general term does not translate easily into many languages’ (Ingstad & Whyte 1995: 7). The volume focussed on cultural and social circumstances to underline that conceptualizations of impairment and disability need to be considered within specific local worlds.

Some anthropologists thus find more value in using vernacular classifications over the English umbrella term ‘disability’ (e.g. Kohrman 2005; Geurts 2003; Livingston 2006), and several have documented how ‘disability’ comes into being and develops as a category in parallel with changing social attitudes. Following the changes in terminology and language is one way of drawing attention to these developments (see e.g. Stiker 1999; Zola 1993). For example, in his monograph, Bodies of difference, Matthew Kohrman (2005) described how disability emerged as a category of persons in China in the late twentieth century when gathering statistics became one of the state’s techniques of creating a ‘biobureaucracy’ of welfare. The term canji developed from a rarely-used term into a common umbrella designation like the English ‘disability’ when people labelled as such became able to make claims on the emerging welfare state. While canji was non-existent in rural areas, in urban areas it became enmeshed in many locals' daily lexicon and their mode of apprehending existence. Kohrman’s analysis also demonstrated how disability was embraced as an object of policy as a result of the interventions of the China Disabled Person’s Federation, founded by the charismatic disabled son of a prominent Communist leader. Advocating for disabled people brought them into visibility on a national level while also helping China gain recognition on the world stage. While disability can become a category through top-down initiatives, as in Kohrman’s case study (cf. e.g. Petryna 2002; Phillips 2010), other examples demonstrate how disability can evolve into a collective identity thanks to communities that form around treatment institutions of particular afflictions, such as leprosy (Silla 1998; Staples 2007), and/or around economic niches dominated by people with disabilities (e.g. Friedner 2015; Devlieger 2018).

Different notions of personhood have been central to analyzing how people with impairments live in local social worlds (Ingstad & Whyte 1995; Jenkins 1998). Considering conceptualizations of the self, anthropologists studying disability apply wider observations that in many societies, being a person is defined more in terms of a ‘sociocentric’ value of being connected to other people than it is in contexts where personhood runs parallel with individualism. One theme that is consistently relevant in this respect is how the cultural values of equality and (in)dependence define personhood in different settings and consequently affect understandings of disability. The negative effects of stigma in western societies, for example, are often tied to a negative conception of dependency in societies that assume the primacy of individuality and the subsequent difficulties in engaging in wage labor.^[6] During Murphy’s (1987) process of becoming paralyzed, for example, he found that he was resented and stripped of status and identity because his very existence subverted an ‘egocentric’ American dream of self-reliance and personal autonomy.

In descriptions of disability in many other societies, by contrast, the more ‘sociocentric’ value of being a member of a community or a family may outweigh individual ability as a value, and have consequences for perceptions of disability (see, e.g., Ingstad & Whyte 1995: 11). In Julie Livingston’s (2005; 2006) analysis of ‘debility’ in Botswana, for example, Tswana notions of kinship and personhood stress the permeability of the body: bitter, angry, or jealous feelings have the potential to harm, while love and sympathy can help to sustain and strengthen.^[7]Because people are interconnected, the disruption of a person’s mental or physical competences are viewed as the consequence of the negative actions of others. This sociocultural conception of dependent personhood does not free Tswana people from disability stigma but places the emphasis elsewhere: the bulk of the stigma may be directed towards the mother of a disabled child, if her child is considered as living proof of her deviant sexual behaviour (Livingston 2006: 122). Scholarship on disability has thus pointed out that values that are often taken for granted in western settings such as individuality, equality, and independence may clash with notions and aspirations of interdependency in other settings. When these values are promoted in universal (human) rights-based ideas such as those of the Independent Living Movement, they may be irrelevant or even harmful (Staples & Mehrotra 2016).

At the same time, anthropologists interested in disability are quick to caution against constructing false dichotomies between ‘individualistic’ Northerners and ‘communitarian’ Southerners. ‘The real challenge’, Ingstad and Whyte argued, rather ‘lies in understanding the way particular characteristics, be they impairments or gifts, inhibit or facilitate individual achievements and relational integration in a given cultural world’ (1995: 11). In negotiating opportunities, different sets of values can be called into play and may change according to sociocultural context and historical transformation. Livingston (2005), for example, traces a historic increase in cases of chronic illness and debilitating accidents in Botswana that disrupt expectations about health, ‘debility’, and care over the course of the twentieth century. ‘Sociocentric’ expectations of intergenerational caretaking are disrupted as young men and women increasingly leave the rural agricultural economy to engage in wage labour. As social value shifts from an emphasis on experience towards the ability to sell able-bodied labour, society changes from one where a practice of family ‘care’ is central, to one where care for the debilitated is increasingly seen as the responsibility of the state. Issues such as stigma or personhood thus must be seen in interaction in actual social contexts, where attitudes towards and perceptions of disability are shaped by wider dynamics.^[8] Nuanced contextual material is essential for cross-cultural comparisons to go beyond superficial similarities and differences, and to go further than simply modifying western models to other settings.

Recent developments

Citizenship and belonging

In recent years, disability scholarship has turned to concentrate on sociopolitical organization and embodied experiences. In 2007, Ingstad and Whyte published a second influential edited volume, Disability in local and global worlds. The case studies therein focused on connections between the local and the global, considering the ‘uneven processes of change that can be traced as ideas and technologies spread’ (Ingstad & Whyte 2007: 3). Under this rubric they trace the spread of the international disability rights movement, noting that for most disabled people, political awareness may be spreading more rapidly than the conditions to improve their lives. Their volume included topics such as human rights, citizenship, eugenics, progressive politics, and social movements. As Ginsburg and Rapp (2013: 58) sum up, these themes characterise emerging work on disability in recent years, not only in anthropology but also in disability studies in general.

Several researchers have demonstrated how disabled people and their families perform belonging in local environments marked by kinship and ethnicity. Veena Das and Renu Addlakha (2001) use examples from Delhi to demonstrate how citizenship can be enacted in the domestic sphere as much as in civil society associations, where different kinds of publics are created in relation to families with disabled family members. Rapp and Ginsburg (2001) use ethnography from the United States to demonstrate that disability entails a rewriting of kinship: disability can create a sense of relatedness across embodied difference. Dossa (2006; 2009) weaves together life histories of disabled Canadian Muslim immigrant women who claim their humanity by affirming identities as women and mothers where they are stigmatised as racialised disabled women. In Nakamura’s (2006) case study of Japanese d/Deaf people, her interlocutors prefer to be referred to as a linguistic minority due to negative associations with Japanese minority ethnicities.

Other studies consider how citizens assert belonging outside the familial sphere to interact with neoliberal businesses (e.g. Friedner 2015), religious organizations (e.g. Goldstone 2017), and state workers (e.g. Kohrman 2005), among others, in negotiating access to welfare resources. Elizabeth Davis (2012) considers the effects of psychiatric reform in Greece, where the modern liberal state invests in a ‘rights’-oriented biopolitical project that requires patients to be responsible and cultivate autonomy. Adriana Petryna (2002) and Sarah Phillips (2010) focus their attention on the struggle for disability pensions in post-socialist Ukraine, where people affected by the aftermath of Chernobyl fashion themselves as ‘biological’ citizens (Petryna), and people with spinal cord injuries use creative strategies to assert claims to a ‘mobile’ citizenship (Phillips). In both cases, disabled people find themselves performing a ‘balancing act’ (Phillips 2010: 7) between Soviet and post-Soviet models of disability, as state-based support is scaled back for citizens who were previously considered entitled. Disability is equally contested in Gabrielle Kelly’s (2017) case study in South Africa, where doctor-patient encounters are sites of negotiation over who counts as disabled in allocating rights to welfare and health resources.

On the more global/international level, the recent 2008 United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD) has been central to many local struggles for recognition (Meekosha & Soldatic 2011). Several disability activists have embraced the UNCRPD as a toolkit with which to challenge citizenship status and practices, but the Convention is often nationally ratified but not fully implemented. Ethnographic case studies demonstrate that access to (inter)national disability rights often intersects with local models of patronage (Grischow 2015), racial politics (Puar 2017), and corporate social responsibility (Friedner 2015). Sometimes, rights activism may have unintended consequences. In Friedner and Osborne’s case study in India, ‘disability activists derive moral authority and position themselves as participating in imagined universal disability communities while professional access auditors position themselves as technical experts alone possessing “real” knowledge’ (2013: 58). A policy instrument that renders disability into a universal category needs to be studied in considering how disability is perceived within local models of intersecting corporeity (Meekosha & Soldatic 2011).

The effects of technology

Changing access and desires for rights are often affected by technology (Whyte & Ingstad 2007: 18-21). Nuanced ethnographies point out the potentially double-edged consequences of technologies that are not (only) intended for disabled people (such as communication technologies and the media) as well as technologies that are meant to enhance their quality of life (such as sign languages, mobility aids, hearing aids, or braille). Cassandra Hartblay (2017), for example, considers how talk about wheelchair ramps in Russia is embedded in moral obligations between citizens and the state. When such infrastructure is more aesthetic than accessible, the failed design draws attention to how the idea of access circulates as a teleology of progress without necessarily meeting users’ needs. Ideas about progress equally play a role in Kohrman’s (1999b) analysis of cycle technologies in China. Urban men who struggle to walk can adopt hand-crank tricycles and motorcycles thanks to the initiatives of a state-run federation, but while their physical mobility may increase, the technology draws attention to the fact that they have difficulty walking, thus paradoxically increasing their negative associations with immobility. The virtual world can both augment the sense of agency of disabled people and have disabling effects, as Boellstorff (2015) finds in his ethnography of the online world Second Life. Paul Antze (2010) also underlines this point, demonstrating how people diagnosed with autism use social media to simultaneously embrace and reject the label of disability. Social media provides a mode of communication and a forum for the neurodiversity movement, but a talent for expression may undermine one’s credibility as being autistic.

Medical technology in particular increases the capacity to diagnose and define impairments. Improvements in prenatal screening and eugenic technology, for example, make it increasingly possible to choose whether or not to have an impaired child (Landsman 2008). Anthropologists describe the experiences of parents who have access to such technologies and find themselves before weighty moral dilemmas, unwittingly becoming, in Rayna Rapp’s words, ‘moral pioneers’ when choosing for disability (Rapp 2000; see also Gammeltoft 2013). Choosing to change (dis)abilities is equally controversial: the use of cochlear implants for deaf children, for example, has led to worries about the eradication of Deaf culture (Blume 2009): such devices are implanted surgically, and provide sound through an electromagnetic interface. The increased capacity to diagnose has also prompted the creation of new categories such as genetic ‘abnormalities’ (Berghs 2016: 27) and an upsurge in awareness of conditions such as mental illness, emotional disabilities, and learning disabilities. Petryna (2002), for example, describes how science becomes a key resource for negotiating ‘biological citizenship’ for the rapidly-growing population claiming radiation exposure as a new category of impairment in order to access government-sponsored healthcare after the Ukrainian Chernobyl disaster. Anthropologists have also considered the effects of the contemporary rise of autism awareness (see Solomon 2010). Antze (2010) describes the tension between the medical and the social where people diagnosed with autism underline the diversity of autism, but must credibly embody the condition they represent to be taken seriously. In the words of Whyte and Ingstad, sensitive ethnographies often demonstrate a tension between the capacity of technology to break the silence and the risk to medicalise disability ‘by defining it as a disease that can be treated (at private clinics!) rather than a difference that can be accepted and lived with’ (2007: 20).

Reflexivity, narrative, and embodiment

Personal experiences of what is disabling has long been a central part of ethnographic descriptions of disability. As Ginsburg and Rapp set out (2013: 56-7), a significant literature of reflexivity and autoethnography by disabled anthropologists and those in their environments as well as a focus on narrative approaches have been essential to situating disability in a broader terrain.^[9] Cheryl Mattingly (2010), for example, draws on long-term research with low-income African-American families to consider the role of narrative in illuminating links between meaning making and experience. Her most recent ethnography (2014) considers the everyday ‘moral laboratories’ in the lives of African-American families with children with chronic medical conditions to foreground their struggle for a good life as affected by constant uncertainty. Mattingly refers to ‘moral laboratories’ as a metaphorical realm in everyday spaces like soccer fields or clinic waiting rooms where people experiment in action and in narrative, which ultimately changes the way they view their children and their environment.

These orientations have been related to exploring the paradigm of embodiment and phenomenological approaches, sometimes presented as alternatives to the ‘medical’ or ‘social’ model (e.g. Gammeltoft 2008; Berghs 2016: 31-2). Such approaches help to ‘bring the visceral, experiencing body back into the picture’ (Staples & Mehrotra 2016: 42), while exploring how the subjective experience of disability intersects with political, medical, and religious forms of subjectivity.^[10] Exploring the subjective experience of mental illness in contemporary Indonesia, for example, Byron Good and his colleagues (2007) find that the intimate experience of acute psychosis is related to different forms of subjectivity. In an environment with growing access to the expanding global pharmaceutical industry, medical and religious subjectivities come into conflict in the case of a patient who rejects medication in favour of prayer, thus rejecting a biomedical subject position for a spiritual one. Good and colleagues furthermore demonstrate how experiences of psychosis are entangled with Indonesia’s postcolonial history: the madness of the psychotic is discursively related to the madness of violent crowds. In her work with Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in south-eastern Ghana, Kathryn Geurts (2003) finds that experiences of disability are intimately connected to a sensorium where balance is a sense, and upright posture and balancing are essential components of being human. She finds that a western five-sense model has little relevance in Anlo culture, and much perception, including a sixth-sense notion of intuition, falls into the polysemous notion of seselelame, ‘feeling in the body, flesh or skin’ (2003: 10). Descriptions of how one moves, and how people think about this, represent a way of being-in-the-world that is socially reproduced and even imbued with moral meaning.

Conclusion

Anthropological studies of disability are late in coming, but they point out that while disabling experiences are universal, they are simultaneously shaped by a wide configuration of specific circumstances. Such contributions have a foundation in the discipline’s core methodology of long-term ethnographic fieldwork, giving solid evidence that disability as a category is fundamentally relational, a form of alterity created by sociocultural ‘disabling’ conditions, and one that is entangled within complex webs of other identities and social dynamics such as generation, gender, or ethnicity. The long-term engagement that comes with anthropological fieldwork makes it possible to pick up on these complexities, bringing nuance to the study of liminality or stigma, while deconstructing assumptions about ‘normalcy’. The studies thus demonstrate how people live in a balance between experiences of marginalization and the possibilities within such constraints.

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Kusters, A. 2010. Deaf utopias? Reviewing the sociocultural literature on the world’s ‘Martha’s Vineyard situations’. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 15(1), 3-16.

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Livingston, J. 2005. Debility and the moral imagination of Botswana. Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

——— 2006. Insights from an African history of disability. Radical History Review 94,111-26.

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Mattingly, C. 2010. The paradox of hope: journeys through a clinical borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2014. Moral laboratories: family peril and the struggle for a good life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Michalko, R. 2002. The difference that disability makes. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Mugeere, A., P. R. Atekyereza, E. K. Kirumira & S. Hojer 2015. Deaf identities in a multicultural setting: the Ugandan context. African Journal of Disability 4(1), 1-9.

Murphy, R. F. 1987. The body silent. New York: Holt.

Nakamura, K. 2006. Deaf in Japan: signing and the politics of identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

——— 2013. A disability of the soul: an ethnography of schizophrenia and mental illness in contemporary Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Petryna, A. 2002. Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: University Press.

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Puar, J. K. 2017. The right to maim. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Rapp, R. 2000. Testing women, testing the fetus: the social impact of amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge.

——— & F. Ginsburg 2001. Enabling disability: rewriting kinship, reimagining citizenship. Public Culture 13(3), 533-56.

Reid-Cunningham, A. R. 2009. Anthropological theories of disability. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 19(1), 99-111.

Renne, E. 2010. The politics of polio in northern Nigeria. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

Shakespeare, T. 2013. The social model of disability. In The disability studies reader (ed.) L. J. Davis, 214-21. New York: Routledge.

Shuttleworth, R. 2004. Disability/difference. In Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology (eds) C. Ember & M. Ember, 360-73. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

——— & D. Kasnitz 2004. Stigma, community, ethnography: Joan Ablon’s contribution to the anthropology of impairment-disability. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 18(2), 139-61.

Silla, E. 1998. People are not the same: leprosy and identity in twentieth-century Mali. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.

Solomon, O. 2010. Sense and the senses: Anthropology and the study of autism. Annual Review of Anthropology 39(1), 241-59.

Staples, J. 2007. Peculiar people, amazing lives: leprosy, social exclusion and community making in south India. New Delhi: Orient Longman.

——— 2011. Nuancing ‘leprosy stigma’ through ethnographic biography in south India. Leprosy Review 82(2), 109.

——— & N. Mehrotra 2016. Disability studies: developments in anthropology. In Disability in the Global South (eds) S. Grech & K. Soldatic, 35-49. Basel: Springer International Publishing.

Stiker, H.-J. 1999. A history of disability (ed. & trans. W. Sayers). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Susman, J. 1994. Disability, stigma and deviance. Social Science & Medicine 38(1), 15-22.

Turner, V. 1969. The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

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Note on contributor

Clara Devlieger is a research fellow in social anthropology and African studies at Cambridge University. Her research focusses on disability and values in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Dr Clara Devlieger, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. cmjd3@cam.ac.uk

[1] For comprehensive reviews of anthropological literature on disability, see: Kasnitz & Shuttleworth 1999; Kasnitz & Shuttleworth 2001; Shuttleworth 2004; Whyte & Ingstad 1995; Whyte & Ingstad 2007; Reid-Cunningham 2009; Ginsburg & Rapp 2013; Staples & Mehrotra 2016; Berghs 2016: 26-43.

[2] Many of those who adhere to the social model explicitly use the term ‘disabled people’ to emphasize disability as something that is imposed on people with impairments (Shakespeare 2013). Those who prefer the term ‘people with disabilities’, in turn, adhere to a people-first approach, choosing to emphasize personhood first and disability as a secondary identity (Michalko 2002: 10-1). The controversy about preferable terminology has been particularly salient in the United States (Albrecht, Seelman, & Bury 2001: 3). While some anthropologists make their choice of terminology explicit, others use both interchangeably. ‘Disabled people’ is more common in the United Kingdom, while ‘people with disabilities’ tends to be more mainstream in the United States and elsewhere.

[3] See Becker 1980; Kisch 2008; Kusters 2010; see also Gwaltney 1970; and Deshen 1992 for community creation between people with impaired sight.

[4] Theoretical approaches to difference include considering deviance (e.g. Susman 1994), labelling (e.g. Zola 1993), anomaly (e.g. Shuttleworth 2004), stigma (Goffman 1963), or liminality (e.g. Murphy 1987).

[5] See, for example, Ablon 1984; 1988; Becker 1980; Edgerton 1967; Friedner 2015; Shuttleworth 2004; Stiker 1999.

[6] See, e.g., Fraser & Gordon 1994; Fineman 2004; Kittay 1999; Davis 2012; Frank 2000.

[7] Livingston prefers the term ‘debility’ over ‘disability’ in order to broadly encompass ‘both the frailties associated with chronic illness and aging and … the impairments underlying the word disability’ (2005: 6; see also critique by Ingstad 2007). Jasbir Puar (2017) similarly adopts the term ‘debility’ over ‘disability’ with a different purpose: to highlight the interaction between bodily injury and social exclusion, foregrounding ‘the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled’ (2017: xiv).

[8] These dynamics including kinship structures (Das & Addlakha 2001; Kohrman 1999a; Livingston 2006), gender norms (Kohrman 1999a; Murphy 1987), national politics (Kohrman 2005; Renne 2010), economic opportunities (Devlieger 2018; Friedner 2015; Staples 2007), ethnicity (Mugeere, Atekyereza, Kirumira & Hojer 2015; Nakamura 2006), religion (Gammeltoft 2008; Mugeere, Atekyereza, Kirumira & Hojer 2015), and/or migration (Dossa 2009).

[9] For examples of reflexivity and autoethnography see, e.g., Murphy 1987; Landsman 2008; Grinker 2008; Martin 2007. For examples of narrative approaches, see, e.g., Breivik 2013; Frank 2000; Phillips 2010; Nakamura 2013; Dossa 2009; Rapp & Ginsburg 2001.

[10] See, for example, Frank 2000; Kohrman 1999a.

Gambling

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Anthony Pickles

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16gambling

Abstract:

Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a rate agreed before the final stake is committed. The practice is or was not present everywhere and is often marginal in a given society, and some gambling variations escape the boundaries of this definition. Some include financial speculation within the phenomenon of gambling, but I do not cover that literature here. Anthropology has made valuable but often overlooked contributions to the study of gambling based on both comparative examples drawn from small-scale societies and marginalised peoples and by engaging critically with the gambling industry and concepts drawn from policy-oriented disciplines such as psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics, statistics, and the health sciences. In this entry four pioneering anthropological studies of gambling are summarised and compared. I then review current regional and thematic trends in the anthropology of gambling. Thereafter I review the anthropology of the gambling industry itself and the relationship of both to other disciplinary perspectives on gambling. I delineate some causes for the two-decade-long surge in the anthropology of gambling, and lastly suggest that the field has become rich enough to support new and original syntheses that would significantly enhance ‘gambling studies’.

Introduction

Gambling is not a universal human activity. Betting is restricted to a subsection of any given population, and there are some areas of the world, most notably the Pacific Islands and Inuit communities, where gambling was once unknown. Many intentional communities, religious orders, and nation states ban gambling or discourage it, and most states impose variously effective regulations and prescriptions on the legitimate forms of gambling, the contexts where it is permitted, who may play, the odds that may be offered and the proportion of revenue to be appropriated by states, independent bodies, and charities. The dominant discussions in the study of gambling are therefore who gambles and on what, why they gamble, and why some people (ethnic and/or cultural groups, genders, income brackets, etc.) gamble more frequently and/or with higher stakes. Ancillary debates centre on the relationship between games and gambling, the perceived causes of wins and losses, the correlation of gambling to other activities perceived as ‘risky’, and the role of gambling in redistributing valuables within and across societies. Anthropology has played a key role in moving beyond a problem-oriented approach to gambling by virtue of its attention to the context and symbolism of gambling within cultures. Oftentimes the ethnography itself challenges broadly held assumptions such as the idea that gambling addiction is to be understood as an individual failing, and the notion that humans calculate risk like (not very proficient) economists. As the anthropology of the Global North has matured, and the gambling industry has become more corporate than mob-run, there is now a growing body of literature that tackles gambling ‘at home’ ethnographically. These have generated excellent ethnographic insight into the mutual construction of gamblers as ‘addicted’ or ‘compulsive’.

Pioneering anthropological studies

Studies by three twentieth-century anthropologists loom large over contemporary anthropological studies of gambling. These are Clifford Geertz (1973), James Woodburn (1982), and Gregory Bateson (1973). The first two are primarily ethnographic accounts in which gambling plays an illustrative role in demonstrating and enacting broader social dynamics, while Bateson provides a theoretical framework for the study of play as a field that encompasses gambling. Another, almost completely forgotten antecedent which is of at least equal value, is Alexander Lesser’s pioneering account of Pawnee (Native American) hand games (1969 [1933]).

Geertz analyses cockfighting in Bali and the two forms of gambling that surround it. Once two cocks have been matched as evenly as possible, in the centre a large even bet is assembled by two coalitions built around the two cocks. These people appear subdued. In contrast, small individual bets are then made around the periphery at odds that are shouted boisterously across the arena. Drawing on the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Geertz argues that the stakes are so high among the central group that the benefit of winning (marginal utility) is less than the cost of losing (marginal disutility), which can be devastating, and that therefore gambling is a display of fixed status performed through a deliberately even playing field that instead of benefitting any one party simply excludes those who lack the wealth to participate. Peripheral, low-status gamblers are the itinerant class. The fixed status of people in Bali is therefore reinforced, and the game plays out their rigid hierarchy as ‘a story they tell themselves about themselves’ (Geerts 1973: 448). The fame of Geertz’s account is such that most later literature cites it simply to refer to the fact that gambling practices can be a microcosm for cultures as a whole, whatever form the later argument takes.

Woodburn is concerned with the maintenance of egalitarian societies in Africa, and how gambling on a low-skill game can have redistributive effects that even out accumulations of wealth. The Hadza are nomadic hunter-gatherers. Woodburn observed that Hadza men spend most of their time in camp gambling with valuables such as metal-headed arrows whose origins are geographically restricted. By tossing bark discs against a tree and reading which way up they fall, men circulate a range of items that are unevenly distributed. By a combination of keeping the items one wins and wants and staking what one doesn’t, and by pressuring winners into playing again until they lose, desirable items slowly become distributed evenly. Woodburn’s research has had a lasting influence on anthropological studies of small-scale societies that gamble; it has become emblematic of gambling as a mechanism for enforcing egalitarianism.

Bateson’s theory is of a different order. From observing monkeys playing, he derives that play is bounded up by ‘metacommunicative’ signals. Each player communicates to other players that what is happening when they play does not have the same consequences that it would were they not playing. Threat is another example of ‘metacommunicative’ action: the person doing the threatening implies that their threat might become reality if the threatened does not comply. For Bateson, gambling is to be understood as a combination of threat and play (1973: 154). The point is unelaborated, but we may take it to mean that when stakes are introduced to forms of play in which there are winners and losers, the imperative to pay up after a loss is backed by an implicit threat of violence. Despite its un-anthropological origins and level of abstraction, Bateson’s theory is often invoked in a manner similar to Geertz’s, to suggest that gambling is a site of special ‘meta-’significance. An advantage of Bateson’s formulation over Woodburn’s and Geertz’s is that it preserves the thrill of the game, which, after all, is why people say they play, and why gambling appears preferable to more sober forms of ritual or redistribution. As a form of play/threat, gambling is set apart from everyday life, thereby introducing a theoretical space in which one can comprehend the excitement of gambling.

Alexander Lesser, a student of Franz Boas, made a truly remarkable (but very much overlooked) longitudinal study of an indigenous gambling game among the Pawnee of the Great Plains (1969 [1933]). Pawnee ‘hand games’ were complicated games of chance revolving around teams of players who hid counters in their hands and actively deceived opponents who tried to guess which hands contained the counters. What sets Lesser’s account apart from the simple descriptions of games that often appear in early anthropology is his attention to the historical transformation, or ‘temporal career’, of this particular cultural trait over forty years (1969 [1933]: 334). Hand games before 1890 were used by Pawnee for recreational gambling, but through a tumultuous period of US domination, the games fell into disuse only to be resuscitated as an integral part of the Pawnee version of the revivalist Ghost Dance religion^[1] that swept through Native American communities in the subsequent years. The hand games were, in the process, transformed from gambling game to ritual performance. Then, when the Ghost Dance religion gave way to Christianity, the hand games became mundane Pawnee equivalents of the domestic card games favoured by whites in the US. Lesser’s book offers the first and still the most comprehensive account of how the games that support gambling shift roles and forms in order to adapt to contemporary concerns.^[2]

Contemporary regional foci

A surge in anthropological accounts of gambling in the last two decades has forged new ground by highlighting the sheer variety of games in their myriad social contexts. Because the field was initially narrow, many anthropologists studying gambling address themselves more to regional cultural concerns than the topic of gambling per se. Inevitably, therefore, the problematics are to some extent a product of the regions where they conduct fieldwork. I have picked three regions as examples: the Mediterranean, East Asia, and Oceania, but what follows is by no means a comprehensive overview.

Mediterranean-based anthropological studies of gambling are few but influential. The main examples stem from Greece (Herzfeld 1991; Malaby 2003; Papataxiarchis 1999), and all situate gambling as a form of valorised resistance. For Herzfeld, aggressive masculinity is demonstrated through nonchalantly submitting one’s wealth to mocking chance at illegal coffeehouse gambling. Players boast of their losses rather than their wins. They walk a knife edge between a devil-may-care attitude towards money and perceived irresponsibility to one’s wife and family. If they lose too badly or too often, men experience a collapse in male status as they are forced to surrender financial power to the woman of the house. Papataxiarchis similarly foregrounds bravado in his description of gambling on the island of Lesbos, but locates it instead in the antagonism between local society and encompassing orders that are embodied in people’s dependence on state-issued currency. Gambling allows for disinterested sharing and the public renunciation of money as a symbol of external state domination. Malaby’s book-length ethnographic monograph on Cretan gambling continues this masculine tenor. He describes the local repertoire of gambling games (backgammon, dice, poker, and lotteries) and the way these games situate gamblers, non-gamblers, and the state in relation to each other, and how gambling allows people to construct the self around a stance to the various manifestations of contingency. A recent contribution by Scott (2013) complicates the issue of valorising resistance through her research on Cyprus, a contested island divided between Greece and Turkey. Scott evaluates the role of casino gambling in Turkish-controlled territory as a space where Greek and Turkish Cypriots construct stereotypes of each other. The stereotypes are literally played out through the kinds of choices each group is thought to make during hands of blackjack in what appears a relational elaboration on the idea of gambling as resistance.

Gambling in Asia is a vast, temporally deep, and socially salient topic. History reveals attempts to ban gambling in China as early as the fourth century B.C., and gambling is mentioned in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. There is some evidence that cards were brought to Europe from China. What comes across from contemporary literature on East Asia is a diverse and thriving gambling scene which I cannot do justice to here, and which requires much more research. East Asia boasts a lively and localised repertoire of card games used for both high and low stakes gambling, together with a range of legal and illegal lotteries and casino and horse race gambling meccas in Hong Kong, Singapore and especially Macau, which has taken over from Las Vegas the designation as the global centre of gambling. Bosco, Liu, and West review the rural and peri-urban phenomenon of an illegal lottery that became wildly popular in China during the late 1990s, and has links to neighbouring Taiwan (2009). Employing accepted social-scientific reasoning, they cast lottery gambling as a form of symbolic resistance to economic paternalism. Again based in rural China, Steinmüller writes against this narrative, claiming that (among other games) zha Jinhua, a game similar to poker, connects to the widespread equation of social exuberance with ‘heat’, foregrounding a mid-level, regional preoccupation with hotness and coolness (2011). By situating his analysis at this scale, Steinmüller gains greater explanatory purchase than an appeal to abstract terms like ‘resistance’ in China, where it seems not to hold anything like the same cultural cachet as in the Mediterranean.

Overseas Chinese communities figure prominently in anthropological accounts of the way gambling contributes to minority communities’ collective self-definition. This is perhaps unsurprising given their fame as gamblers, their role as migrant labourers and traders in various colonial regimes, and the prevalence of Chinatowns in metropolitan centres (Basu 1991; Loussouarn 2010; Papineau 2005). Loussouarn is emblematic of the wider literature in challenging the consensus that because (in her case, Chinese) minorities gamble more they are irrational, instead providing a cultural analysis of peoples who value confrontations with contingency in a context of risky migration choices and minority status.

For all these specifics, Mahjong remains the most famous and probably the most played of East Asian gambling games, both at home and abroad, though it has not received proportional attention (Festa 2006). Four players use a set of 144 tiles and each player attempts to gain a winning set of four melds and a pair. The discourse emerging from China centres on the transition from socialism to capitalism and the transmogrification of traditional attitudes to hospitality and efficacy through gambling practice. The explosion in popularity of the mechanical game pachinko in Japan after the Second World War also cries out for anthropological treatment (Schwartz 2006); superficially the game resembles pinball but with potentially hundreds of balls in play at any one time. The aim is to get as many small metal balls as possible, which may be exchanged for prizes.

To the indigenous peoples of Oceania (including New Zealand and the best part of Australia), gambling was a novel practice; in Australia it arrived 300 years ago, but in parts of Papua New Guinea people learnt of gambling as late as the 1960s. As such, gambling had to be placed within a repertoire of imports such as Christianity, money, wage labour, and a swathe of new technologies and commodities. Initial guiding concerns for anthropologists were the role of gambling in integrating new practices, especially as modes of redistribution, and the association of gambling with young men who were rebelling against patriarchal control (Zimmer 1987). Given the novelty of gambling, the Pacific literature also contains a trove of freshly invented and constantly transforming games and a fresh exploration of gambling’s possibilities (see Laycock 1966; Pickles 2014a). Elsewhere I have described how in Highland Papua New Guinea, the games that were initially introduced bifurcated into two streams of card games, one fast and one slow, and have since been supplemented by slot machines and betting on Australian horse racing at a bookies (Pickles 2013; 2014a). These latter forms of gambling have introduced a ‘house edge’, meaning the house always wins in the long run, a feature that was otherwise absent in games that didn’t have a ‘house’. Given that a proportion of house revenues are given to the state through taxation, it is worth noting that it is only these games that are legal. Recent studies concentrate on the capacity of unseen forces and the gambling games in which they operate as ways in which Pacific people explore a wide range of ideas about efficacy (Mosko 2014; Pickles 2014b). In a context where gifting and demand sharing play a pivotal role in social life, gambling has also served as a means to explore the potential of state-issued currency, another introduction (Pickles forthcoming).

Gamblers playing a card game called bom in Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea

The gambling industry and the wider field

Anthropological studies of the gambling industry represent an area of proven analytic potency and considerable growth. They are not restricted to one region, but they are conceptually united because they deal with: (1) technologies and mathematics that are often very similar or the same; (2) international consortia; (3) shared legal frameworks; and (4) parallel interest from other academic disciplines that can be glossed under ‘gambling studies’.^[3]

As a commercial industry that relies heavily on permissive state regulation, the gambling industry funds a significant amount of social science research, exercising soft power over the theoretical paradigms within which academics operate. Tied as they are to evidence-based policy, the gambling field is consequently dominated by psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics, and the health sciences. With some commendable exceptions (Cassidy 2014a; Schüll 2012), anthropological writings and the works they reference sometimes choose to circumvent this literature, pointing out the historically and geographically contingent development of the concepts involved (Hacking 1990; Reith 1999). One of the most valuable attributes of anthropological studies of the gambling industry is the ethnographic necessity for critical engagement with the same concepts that are used by the industry, by related academic fields, and in the lives of gamblers themselves (e.g. ‘leisure’, ‘addiction’, ‘responsible gambling’, ‘problem gambling’, ‘compulsive gambling’, and ‘pathological gambling’).^[4] Critical appraisals of social science approaches to gambling stemming from anthropology and sociology represent a potent counter narrative, but these accounts are rarely taken seriously in the more instrumental, policy-oriented ‘gambling studies’ literature (McGowan 2004).

The most prominent case of socio-cultural anthropology actively resisting industry-promoted concepts and trends is Natasha Dow Schüll’s outstanding Addiction by design (2012), an ethnography of the machine gambling (slot machine) industry in Las Vegas. Schüll uncovers the thin margin between gambling machine and person, riffing on the interstitial space that constitutes them both as models for each other within a machine-formatted head-space that is known as ‘the zone’. Schüll follows the affective link from players to machines and through to the architects of escape, those who make the machines, process the data, and engineer the casino floors. And it is escape that is offered; not something for nothing, but nothing as something. Schüll’s informant-players are beyond the desire for a win; they wish to kindle a space where ‘you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with’ (2012: 2). There is no escape, for addiction and its treatments are shown to be couched in the same language of actuarial self-management as gambling. Schüll refuses to shy away from exposing industry-affiliated research; she reveals the means by which the gambling industry manipulates opportunities for funding so that research is forced to concentrate on individuals’ propensities to addiction and to steer clear of the interplay of machine and person. She argues that the lack of an obvious intra-bodily aspect in this ‘behavioural’ kind of addiction has either led or enabled researchers to put their focus on the biological make-up of individuals, and drawn attention away from the substantive manipulation of people by gambling machines. What results from the analysis is a nuanced theorization of a society-wide cognitive dissonance between self-regulation and addiction.

A flourishing subdiscipline

From sluggish beginnings, the anthropological literature on gambling is surging. Part of this phenomenon must be put down to the expansion and maturation of anthropology as a discipline, but a more important factor is the increasing visibility and public acceptance of gambling within the Global North, where the vast majority of anthropologists receive their training. Set against this background, anthropology’s response to a global gambling phenomenon appears belated, and the centre ground of gambling analysis has been effectively co-opted by problem-oriented disciplines that generate quickly digestible instrumental outcomes. The flourish of anthropological publications in the last two decades has its roots in ethnographic particularism and regional concerns, but the result has been a wealth of cases that, if harnessed, speak to a single identifiable phenomenon. Of this they are on the cusp. It remains to be seen whether anthropologists will be able to make good on their unrivalled breadth of experience and produce the paradigm-changing analyses that are required in order to account for the diversity in gambling practices and perceptions seen across the world.

As things stand, anthropologists tend to produce qualitative analyses centred on the gambling experience and the relationship of gambling to the broader socio-cultural context, emphasising that what we know about gambling is irreducibly tied to how we come to know about it (see Cassidy, Pisac & Loussouarn 2013). These contributions are important but undervalued. Ethnographic particulars have yielded excellent data that has been used to plot the presence of gambling against other social phenomena, the best cross-cultural correlation for gambling being presence of state-issued currency and high levels of inequality (see Binde 2005; Pryor 1977). This data is intriguing, but insufficient. Above all, anthropological studies of gambling have shown that the local meanings, uses, strategies, efficacies, symbolism, and effects of gambling can be so manipulated and transformed as to destabilise consensus on what gambling represents as a sociological phenomenon. What emerges instead is gambling as a space of socio-cultural introspection, an underdetermined ritual which privileges form in order to interrogate possibility. It is above all this insight which must figure in broader syntheses. By beginning from an anthropological perspective, broad statistical correlations offer just the merest (but nevertheless profoundly enticing) glimpse into the real boundaries of cultural difference.

References

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——— forthcoming. The other face of money: gambling, transfers and the economic frontier, Papua New Guinea. Unpublished book manuscript.

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Pisac, A. 2013. Croupiers’ sleight of mind. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 59-73. London: Routledge.

Pryor, F.L. 1977. The origins of the economy: a comparative study of distribution in primitive and peasant economies. New York: Academic Press.

Reith, G. 1999. The age of chance: gambling and western culture. New York: Routledge.

Rizzo, J. 2004. Compulsive gambling, diagrammatic reasoning, and spacing out. Public Culture 16, 265-88.

Sallaz, J. 2009. The labor of luck: casino capitalism in the United States and South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schüll, N.D. 2012. Addiction by design: machine gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: University Press.

Schwartz, D.G. 2006. Roll the bones: the history of gambling. New York: Gotham Books.

Scott, J. 2013. ‘Playing properly’: casinos, blackjack and cultural intimacy. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 125-39. London: Routledge.

Simmel, G. 2006 [1911]. The adventurer: 1911. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) J.F. Cosgrave, 215-42. New York: Routledge.

Steinmüller, H. 2011. The moving boundaries of social heat: gambling in rural China. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, 263-80.

Veblen, T. 2007. The theory of the leisure class. Oxford: University Press.

Woodburn, J. 1982. Egalitarian societies. Man 17, 431-51.

Van Wyk, I. 2012. ‘Tata ma chance’: on contingency and the lottery in post-apartheid South Africa. Africa 82, 41-68.

Zimmer, L.J. 1987. Gambling with cards in Melanesia and Australia: an introduction. Oceania 58, 1-5.

Note on contributor

Anthony J. Pickles is a social anthropologist and Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. His forthcoming monograph is entitled The other face of money: gambling in Papua New Guinea. Other publications include a special issue of Oceania on gambling in Melanesia (2014).

Dr Anthony J. Pickles, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. ajp225@cam.ac.uk

[1] In dire times, the Ghost Dance movement synthesised new religious strictures with existing beliefs and above all emphasised the power of formal dances (long considered socially efficacious) to bring about a utopic transformation of Native American circumstances, generating prosperity and unity across Native American communities and release from colonial oppression.

[2] Other important influences include the following: anthropologists were late on the scene when it came to gambling, and often therefore trace their intellectual heritage from the philosophers Walter Benjamin (2006), Johan Huizinga (1970 [1949]) and Georg Simmel (2006 [1911]), the works of sociologists and cultural theorists such as Thorstein Veblen (2007) and Roger Caillois (1961), as well as Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The gambler (1996 [1866]). With the exception of Roger Caillois, these thinkers were concerned with the development of European and American gambling under the capitalist system or the proclivities towards gambling of a universal human subject modelled on European cosmologies. They therefore figure more prominently in anthropological studies of gambling in the context of capitalism and in the Global North.

The sociologist Erving Goffman is that discipline’s first point of reference on gambling, and his influence has been important to anthropology as well (2006 [1969]). Based on research in the US, he generalises about gamblers everywhere. Goffman begins by distinguishing between the objective mathematical risk of a given bet and the subjective risk experienced by players, and as a sociologist he is primarily concerned with the latter. Unlike anthropological accounts of gambling, which would by and large dismiss the relevance of statistical risk at this point, Goffman retains this mathematical framing for the problem of subjectively understood risk. His primary insight stems from this combination of statistical probability and perception. For Goffman, the ‘expected utility’ of a pot (i.e. the usefulness accorded to the money one might win by a player weighted by the probability of their winning it) is shot through with other subjective factors. These include the excitement of gambling and the ability of a pot to make a consequential difference to the player’s life after the game is concluded. Goffman defines the thrill of risk as ‘action’, and describes sociological reasons why people are attracted to ‘action’ in whatever form it can be found. The approach is a natural ally to Bateson’s in that the thrill of gambling is seen as a necessary, nigh fundamental part of the analysis of gambling.

Roger Caillois was an anthropologically informed French intellectual and critic, and a colleague of Marcel Mauss. Unlike Goffman, who begins with the assumption of conceptual hegemony during cognitive processes that are on the surface perceived differently by different actors, Caillois takes human diversity and divergent cultural history as the starting point for the development of approaches to games. His open-ended approach in making a global typology of games in Man, play, and games (1961) is in some respects still innovative today. For Caillois, all human play begins with paidia, which he defined as ‘spontaneous manifestations of the play instinct’ (1961: 28), from the Greek, but this is the extent of human similitude. Paidia is disciplined to various extents by a concept from Latin, ludus, the ‘pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed’ (Caillois 1961: 29). The resultant game takes a form that lies within a matrix of four tropes: directed contest, chance, mimesis, and disorientation. Caillois was also at pains to point out that ludus is not the only conceivable metamorphosis of paidia into social forms of prescription, and he takes the closest Chinese-language equivalent to paidia, wan, as his example. Wan is ‘oriented not toward process, calculation, or triumph over difficulties [as ludus is] but toward calm, patience, and idle speculation’ (1961: 33). For Caillois this was evidence of how China wisely worked out a contrasting philosophical destiny for itself, and that cultures’ destinies could be read from their games. Though dated, Man, play, and games remains the most ambitious attempt yet to model games across all cultures.

[3] Quantitative and instrumental accounts of gambling have a functional policy role backed by state and industry funding in wealthy nations of the Global North. It has been left largely to anthropologists to study small-scale societies’ gambling practices within their own social contexts, as well as gambling in nations which do not have the financial resources to support their own research. There are three notable points of intersection between these poles, the first being the wholesale adoption of gambling policy designed in the Global North by nations in the Global South (Cassidy 2014b). These are often driven by commercial interests and good-governance drives, and are a field ripe for anthropological study. The second is the development of gambling enclaves that attempt to entice gamblers from wealthy states to spend money offshore (Pina-Cabral 2002). Thirdly, the study of minority communities in settler states (particularly in the United States and Australia) are often tackled using quantitative and instrumental techniques, but have also been the subject of anthropological analyses (Altman 1985; Goodale 1987), and the results often represent stark and problematic contrasts (e.g. Brady 2004).

[4] Exemplars of such studies include horse racing in the UK (Cassidy 2002), croupiers in a Slovenian casino (Pisac 2013), casino gambling in the United States and South Africa (Rizzo 2004; Sallaz 2009), and participation in the South African lottery (Van Wyk 2012). The emerging field of online gambling is as yet somewhat of a blind spot (but see Gariban, Kingma & Zhorowska 2013).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Technology

Visual anthropology

Introduction

Anthropology has always been visual

Ethnographic film in practice and as theory

The parallax effect: Indigenous and activist media

An anthropology of the visual

From visual to multimodal?

Conclusion: visual experiences and visual experiments

References

Note on contributor

Image credit

Sharia

Introduction

Sharia discourse and history

Sharia ethnography and modernity

Islamic family law and legal pluralism

Global assemblages

Sharia and the anthropology of ethics

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Money

Introduction

What counts as money?

Money at the threshold of persons and relations

Monetary pluralism

Networks, platforms and open questions

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Sport

Sport in anthropology

The emergence of modern sport

Sport under capitalism and socialism

The neoliberal restructuring of sport

Sport, gender, and sex

Sport as cultural performance

Body enhancement and its limits

Conclusion: sport and scale

Further reading

References

Notes

Note on contributors

Games

Games as a concept

What makes games meaningful?

New frontiers: the rise of digital games

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Disability

Introduction: disability and difference, disability and impairment

From a medical to a social model

Stigma, liminality, and reconciling the exceptional with the ordinary

Beyond the Euro-American west

Recent developments

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Gambling

​Introduction

Pioneering anthropological studies

Contemporary regional foci

The gambling industry and the wider field

A flourishing subdiscipline

References

Note on contributor

Introduction